"Correct," says Miles. "I did hand in the bunch of flawless tests first. But then I let myself get rattled and did something stupid and broke both my legs in the first minute, and then I went home and admitted my shame to Grandda, and the next morning he was dead."

He remembers waking up in confusion to one of the servants calling him Lord Vorkosigan, what had until that moment always been his father's title, and wondering if the man was new, and then realizing the truth.

"Old age. It had been coming for a while. But the timing... I took it very badly. It felt like I had personally killed him, by being too much of a disappointment for him to bear."

"You really should have met my father," he murmurs. 

"I regret that I couldn't," he says. "It sounds like we'd have a lot to talk about."

Nearly everything he's heard about Fëanor has been extremely relatable.

"Anyway, I proceeded to do a few more stupid things, and ended up on a ship back to Beta Colony with Elena. She wanted to get away and see the galaxy and maybe find out who her mother was, since her father wasn't telling; I wanted to get away and distract myself from my grief and try to at least bring happiness to someone. We decided Elena's parents had probably met during the failed invasion of Escobar, which Bothari did participate in, and that perhaps we should be looking for her among Escobaran war memorials; but we didn't turn anything up, and Bothari wasn't at all suspicious of why we were looking at Escobaran war memorials, so we abandoned that line of inquiry and continued on to Beta Colony as planned. Elena was wonderfully excited about Beta Colony; she'd never been anywhere like it."

"It strikes me that many problems could have been averted should it have been possible to send the most ambitious of my relatives off to a Beta Colony to have harmless adventures."

...Miles breaks into helpless giggles.

"Findekáno would have been very popular there. Irissë would have been infinitely happier. Findaráto might have grown more swiftly into the person he desires to be, and Artanis would have been less lonely. It doesn't sound like a place I'd seek out particularly."

"I'm not sure how much Irissë would like Beta Colony. It doesn't have much of an outdoors," he explains, broadcasting memories of the corridors and concourses and his few glimpses of the hot dry desert with its ever-raging winds. "But they do have plenty of positive attributes. Their society works very well for the sort of person it's meant to accomodate. It's not perfect, though. For example, the day we arrived, I happened to overhear a bit of a disaster in progress. A jump pilot was about to lose his ship over unpaid debts, and rather than go quietly he was threatening to blow himself up in orbit and rain debris across the planetary approach lines."

His mental images of what these varyingly unfamiliar concepts represent are crystal-clear.

"He sounded so - despairing. I wanted to help. So I talked my way past the creditors and got up to his ship and tried to figure out what I could do to help, and what I landed on was swearing him as my vassal, which seemed likely to entangle the attempt to repossess the ship in interplanetary legal disputes long enough for me to think of a better solution. It was also going to make me personally responsible for his debts, but I didn't mind, that was a problem for my future self. He agreed, although I wasn't able to clearly explain the rights and responsibilities involved. I did try, but he was - very Betan. 'A sworn Armsman is legally considered a part of my own body' didn't really get through to him. Oaths among humans are mere voluntary agreements, though, and I wasn't about to chase after him and demand his service if he broke his, so I went through with it. His creditors were... disconcerted."

Seventeen-year-old Miles was a master of the invisible stage. He put on a glorious show, bewildered them completely, and then negotiated the disposal of the debt while they were still trying to figure out what this oath business had been all about.

"Unfortunately not disconcerted enough to drop it completely. So I had to mortgage my inheritance - Grandda, for reasons known to no one but himself, left me Vorkosigan Vashnoi personally and in particular out of all his holdings on his death." Mental image of blasted wasteland, the very same one he kept thinking of when describing atomic weapons earlier. "Former capital of the Vorkosigan District, destroyed in the Cetagandan Wars. The Betans, who didn't care for anyone's history but their own, asked me about location and climate and so on - all of which were very favourable - but didn't think to check whether the land I was offering as collateral was uninhabitably radioactive. It was a cheap trick and I'd be very reluctant to repeat it, but it worked like a charm. They agreed to let me settle the debt on what seemed to me like an acceptable schedule. Unfortunately, never having owned a cargo ship before, I mis-estimated how fast I'd be able to earn enough to pay them."

"...my."

"Oh, the trouble is only just beginning. So! Here we were on Beta Colony, famed across the galaxy for its weapons technology, searching for lucrative cargo-hauling jobs. We found one, in a man who advertised a desire to move some farming equipment from local space to the far side of a military blockade on his war-torn home planet. I figured he had to be smuggling weapons, but if he paid what he said he would, my new Armsman's debt would be cleared in less than half the allotted time. So I arranged a meeting, let him think I was older than I was, let him think I'd ever done this before, and when he proved particularly imaginative I also went along with his assumption that I was a professional soldier in a mercenary army. At the time it seemed a harmless fiction, since I wasn't planning to get caught smuggling weapons, and my fictional fighting abilities could be backed up by Bothari's very real ones if things went south. The man happily accepted the credentials he imagined me to have, and formally hired me to haul his quote-unquote farming equipment."

"..."

"I was not very good at thinking ahead, as a child and late adolescent. But I was very, very good at improvising. I pulled together every resource at my disposal and got us outfitted for the trip, including hiding the weapons using a clever device recently invented on Beta Colony that the blockaders couldn't possibly know about, and... then while I was in the middle of my preparations, I happened to run across a Barrayaran deserter who was living in a junk heap. Now, the penalty for desertion in the heat of battle, which was in fact his crime, is death. And I don't think about it much, but in those days I was watched by Barrayaran Imperial Security nearly all of my life, so just from happening to run into me, this guy was in big trouble. I therefore offered him a ride on my cargo ship, since I happened to have one and it happened to be leaving the planet very shortly and the all-seeing eye of ImpSec would not be coming along on the trip. He accepted. Off we flew to Tau Verde, me and Major Daum and Sergeant Bothari and Elena and Arde and Baz."

It's so nice to be able to just name people and let his thoughts link name to identity. Daum the bearer of farming equipment, Arde the pilot, Baz the disgraced military engineer.

"We arrived in good order. The blockaders had cleverly arranged to maintain control of local space by taking the pilots of incoming ships hostage, because it's genuinely impossible to fly a jumpship through a wormhole without a jump pilot. Arde wasn't delighted by the idea, but he was willing to put up with it. And our concealment devices worked like a charm. How nice! How lovely! All according to plan! Nothing could go wrong!"

"We went to parlay with the Enemy. I thought we were sneaky, bringing more than the agreed-on numbers."

"The disaster that ensued here was not quite to that scale," says Miles. "It was pretty unpleasant at the time, though. See, the ship that met us at the blockade was from a real, genuine mercenary army, and they'd been working that blockade for a long time with very little activity of any kind, and they were very bored. They suspected me of hiding something but couldn't tell what it was, which didn't endear our party to them very much. So just as we were about to hand over Arde and be on our way, their captain said he'd changed his mind, he wanted Elena instead. And the way he looked at her... did not imply that she would have a pleasant stay."

He remembers the moment, the complicated tangle of emotion he felt as he considered the implications of Captain Auson's leering and the potential range of outcomes from uncomfortable to unacceptable. Protectiveness of his friend, anticipation of a fight, excitement and dread at the prospect of fighting.

"Elena looked to me for protection. And that was that. It's a Vor thing. She was my liegewoman. There are people who'll abandon their vassals when it's convenient, but I am not one of those people. So we fought them. We'd been so meek up to that point, and we hardly gave the impression of being an elite fighting force, because we weren't one, and the blockaders had been lax about their discipline - we won. Of course, then we had the problem of how the hell the six of us were going to manage to storm their ship."

The seemingly impossible tactical situation is very clear in his memory. Here, Arde's freighter; there, the Ariel; the distance between them, the RG's lack of any weapons to speak of, the Ariel's presumable population of mercenaries exceeding their half-dozen quasi-combatants by an order of magnitude. Near-certain death if they tried to flee, near-certain death if they tried to board a better-armed and more maneuverable ship without its cooperation.

"Bothari... suggested that he could extract the blockaders' access codes from one of our prisoners, given a free hand. I judged it the only solid chance we had of surviving the situation. I gave the order." He remembers the look on Bothari's face, the light in his eyes, the single scream of the captured pilot. "That decision stands among the biggest regrets of my life. Realistically, we'd all be dead if I'd chosen otherwise. Doesn't matter. I still shouldn't have done it."

"An interesting perspective on your obligations to your people, and how far they extend," he says, very neutrally. "Or are you tailoring the story to your audience?"

"...I'm not sure what you mean," he says. His thoughts back up this assertion. "If I were tailoring my story to my audience I'd have left out the part where I had someone tortured. But - I can't claim I'm giving you the best evidence I can about the state of the world and then lie to make myself look good."

"Did it work?"

"Yes. Perfectly. We took the ship with no other casualties. That prisoner died of his injuries, and I let his people think he'd been killed in battle."

"Interesting."

He has no idea what Maitimo is thinking, but that's fair. It's not like he has any particular right to ask, although he does wish he knew what was up with the comment about obligations to one's people. Anyway.

"Then we had a new problem, which was that we had six people with which to control more than sixty prisoners, which we couldn't possibly hope to do for long enough to get our cargo to its destination. I, problem-solver that I am, devised a solution. The crew of the Ariel didn't want to believe they were a bunch of losers who'd just been soundly defeated by a smaller, luckier bunch of losers. So I lied to them, and said we had been trying to smuggle something past the blockade: military advisors. Then I graciously offered to let them all join my imaginary army. They were delighted to accept. It gave them everything they'd been missing. It was exciting, attention-occupying, soothing to their sense of self-worth. There was just the slight problem of what the hell I was going to do with them a week later when we reached the dropoff point and I could no longer feasibly pretend I wasn't smuggling weapons to their enemies. But that, like many things, was a problem for Future Miles."

"Is honesty not among the traits Barrayar particularly values?"

"It's a lesser virtue. One which I value more highly now than I used to. You may have noticed that I am extremely committed to being honest with the people I've met in this world, for example." He hasn't even asked how he might learn to stop broadcasting his every thought to the telepathic elves. He learned how to turn it on deliberately, but not how to turn it off. That suits him. He can't help them without a foundation of trust. (Perhaps he should've thought of that before explaining that he had someone tortured to death when he was seventeen.) (Too late now, and anyway, it's hardly honesty if he leaves out all the parts he's ashamed of.)

He nearly smiles at that. "I think people here are considering 'seventeen' more of an extenuating circumstance than you personally consider it. It is very good that no one obeyed my orders when I was seventeen."

"Lucky me, then. Barrayar does, actually, have a thing about a particular subtype of honesty, and I'm a little surprised I managed to get this far without detailing it explicitly - to break one's sworn word is considered the height of dishonour. More so the more solemnly given, and it's worse if you're Vor because Vor are - more relied on, and therefore must by necessity be especially reliable."

"But if someone already thinks you're a mercenary smuggler, may as well be a mercenary army trainer?"

"Yes. Anyway, none of them knew I was Vor, not that that matters in my personal accounting of honour."

(His father's voice: "Reputation is what other people know about you. Honour is what you know about yourself.")

"But I had this semi-imaginary army under my semi-farcical command, and we approached the dropoff point... only to find that it had been captured. Much to my surprise, my new recruits reacted to this situation as though I was actually a mercenary admiral and actually their legitimate commander. So I had them recapture it for me, from their former comrades. It worked beautifully. We got the station and the ship that had been guarding it on behalf of the occupying force. A much bigger and fiercer ship than the Ariel. I gave command of the Triumph to the Ariel's former captain, and command of the Ariel to his former second-in-command."

Good old Thorne. Oh, has he not explained hermaphrodites? How the hell did he get through his schooling on Beta Colony without explaining hermaphrodites? He's making such a mess of this.