"Yeah," says Miles. "And you recovered about five times faster than normal, that's definitely interesting. How's the hangover?"

"Dosed, fading, I am afraid I'm not gonna be your source on clean data about how long it'd take to go away by itself."

"I've had my share of stunner hangovers. Believe me, I understand."

"Your painkiller of choice isn't bad," Cam adds.

"Oh good."

"So if you ever get a rogue daeva threatening to do nefarious things just stun 'em. Every few minutes till they can be dismissed."

"Yep. Good plan. And as a last resort if dismissing them doesn't work, somebody can always take them on - aheh - a wormhole jump to hell."

"Yeah. Although just like I'd want to check if I can make a wormhole, an angel might be able to redirect one, and it's possible a fairy could just go straight through one bypassing the usual business with the jump equipment, if they were sufficiently void of other things to do with their time. I wouldn't want to try installing my own jump-related brain piercings, but if I were stranded and displeased about it..."

"My thinking is more that, if a daeva managed to survive a deliberately screwed jump, there's no guarantee that they'd be able to emerge into normal space at all. And if they did, it could easily be hundreds of light-years away from the nearest human habitation, and they certainly wouldn't be accompanied by any objects whatsoever. Which means no way to detect wormholes, let alone interact with them, unless you've been holding out on me about what your magic powers can do. I mean, you have a reasonable understanding of what a wormhole is, but I don't think you've talked to many five-space engineers - could you find your way back to Barrayar in less than a human lifetime if you were stranded naked at an effectively random point in space somewhere nearish this galaxy?"

"...I may have missed the idiom 'wormhole jump to hell'. That and been confused by the fact that Hell is in fact an unadorned vacuum in all locations where demons haven't been making things. I was imagining one of those untrafficked routes to nowhere in particular with a stunned daeva being chucked into the vacuum and the pilot scurrying away, not a suicide mission for said pilot. But I mean - it wouldn't take me an entire human lifetime to duplicate all the non-human contents of the entire planet of Barrayar and all its orbital debris, and I would need considerably fewer things than that to figure out where I was and how to operate a wormhole-detecting widget and make a ship and start flying around."

"Yeah, sorry, I was using the phrase with a more specific intended meaning than it usually gets. All right, so it wouldn't work on a demon unless it turns out that demons can't make themselves into jump pilots. Or if that particular demon happened to be very bad at piloting - it does take some skill, I'm told. What about angels and fairies? Is magical telekinesis limited by the speed of light the same as everything else...? Would an angel be able to recreate Barrayar if they found a planet of sufficient size?"

"I haven't heard of a fairy breaking the lightspeed barrier, but that is not something I encouraged any to test back when I summoned them. Angels can't directly copy things just based on being able to sort of conceptually point at them, so an angel can't recreate Barrayar like I could. Angels and fairies compared to demons are much hampered in getting ahold of information they don't already have."

"So probably effective for either of those. And a demon would at least be removed from inhabited space for however long it took them to build a planet and teach themselves how to pilot a jumpship. But keeping the demon stunned indefinitely would ultimately be a safer bet. Keeping them stunned indefinitely at the end of a long trail of obscure and poorly documented jumps with big normal-space gaps in between might be safer still, except I think I'd pity the skeleton crew of that station even more than I'd pity the self-sacrificing pilot from Plan B."

"I assume you could rotate them out periodically and let them have books. Or staff the place with more demons."

"Yeah, potentially. I'm just reluctant to give this hypothetical demon any more potential victims than... hmm, what about dumping them into the star of an uninhabited system? Wouldn't even need to sacrifice the pilot for that, it would hardly require the kind of navigation that strains autopilot."

"Well, this would be noticeably more uncomfortable for the demon than being stunned, as suns are quite warm and massive. And they could slurp up the sun into a black hole, which would be less warm but still kind of hard to get away from, but black holes evaporate eventually. I have a plan for what I'd do if I ever fell into my little black hole at home but it's much smaller than a star and it'd still take a while."

"Black holes don't evaporate that fast, though, do they? I admit I'm not an expert. The goal here is to get the daeva safely away from any humans they could murder, threaten, or otherwise harass for a long enough time that their summoner is likely to die of old age before they are in a position to wreak any more havoc. I suppose if their summoner dying doesn't dismiss them either then a more genuinely permanent solution is required."

"They don't evaporate that fast, but - okay, if I fell into a black hole or other inconveniently massive object, what I'd do is this. I'm indestructible, and I can add stuff to what counts as part of me, like the wings and the tail. There is nothing stopping me from growing a large something that counts as part of my body for indestructibility purposes until the parts of my body I actually need and care about are well away from the black hole, then detaching myself in about the same way I'd get rid of the wings when I was done with them and flying away in a spaceship while the detached whatever collapsed into the black hole. I made this up independently and haven't spotted other demons talking about it, so maybe they wouldn't think of it, but it didn't take me that long to come up with the idea."

"I was actually envisioning keratin, like if I'd decided to grow horns or spines only more so. And with Swiss-cheese holes in it to cut the mass, because the idea is to get distance while contributing as little to the gravity problem as possible. And I could pretty freely shape it. Think tower, not sphere - as long as it can't significantly deform without violating the indestructibility clause it will not bend or break. It wouldn't be significant next to a black hole, I think."

"Okay, enormous keratin spike. Hmm. I'm having a sort of darkly comical mental image of you growing yourself a horn-tower and having the other end lose its footing on the black hole, sending you whanging around until the center of mass of you-plus-giant-horn was settled as close to the black hole as possible... but it would probably still work eventually even if it might take some experimentation to get right."

"I think so. So yeah. A creative demon is probably not going to be inconvenienced on a scale of, say, years, by being dumped into a sun or black hole. Probably you just definitely shouldn't summon any more daeva until you're sure dismissal works, and be exquisitely careful about bindings especially until some natural experiment or other demonstrates the further feasibility of dismissal-through-death."

"Or just not summon any more demons, since the one we have is working out so well."

"If you like. I can't be multiple places at once, though."

"What a shocking flaw."