One of those benefits is that I can tell your intent isn't bad, precisely. Is there more to the story you wanted to tell me?

"There is! I got out of the Service Academy at twenty, there's four more years to go."

"Congratulations."

It's kind of hard to get a read on Maitimo, reasonably enough under the circumstances. Miles isn't quite sure whether he's supposed to be laughing. But, well - Maitimo seems like the sort of person where, in general, if they say something and you laugh, you should assume they meant for that to happen. Particularly when you've been spending the last two days telling them everything there is to know about who you are and what makes you tick.

(Is this an unstrategic thing to be doing? ...Nah. Miles stands by his decision. This is the best tool at his disposal for righting the wrong of Maitimo being put in a position where he can't trust his reality; and, more generally, Miles's goals are best served if everyone knows exactly what sort of person he is. Let there be no doubt that he is here to solve problems until there are no more problems in front of him. Sure, in a sense this makes him vulnerable, but it's not a kind of vulnerability he minds.)

Anyway, the story. Speaking of things that are important to know about Miles. Before Kyril Island, there was Raina Csurik.

"So, after I graduated but before I got my first assignment, I went out to the lake house to make a death-offering to Grandda. A complete copy of my academy records. I got a bit emotional over it."

He piled all the papers into a brazier by the General's grave and lit them on fire and watched them burn, and started out quietly asking if he was good enough now, and ended screaming ARE YOU SATISFIED?! with voice-destroying force and then being very embarrassed when one of his father's Armsmen turned out to be listening. He smiles wryly at the memory; his smile fades over the course of the next sentence.

"Afterward I went back to the house and saw a woman there, come to petition my father to prosecute a crime - her name was Harra Csurik, and her baby had been killed."

The child had a mild deformity, not even genetic, easily corrected with surgery and not even all that dangerous to leave alone. But the way they are, in those small towns - it was enough for someone to decide the baby couldn't be allowed to live. At first, Harra thought it must have been her husband who'd done it. She wanted justice.

"Father sent me as Count's Voice to lead the investigation, which was on one level a perfectly straightforward and natural thing to do, and on another level extremely fraught. Me of all people, on an infanticide case? It's like he was saying 'please stop killing muties, your next Count is going to be one and you'd better learn to deal with it'. I was, uh, not universally well received."

The husband was nowhere to be found, but someone kept attempting to do Miles harm. He set up his tent on the village Speaker's front lawn, but slept inside and let the Speaker's children have the tent, since this seemed to lead to more enjoyment all round; then in the night someone tried to set fire to the tent, and it's lucky the thing was fireproof or the kids could've been seriously hurt. The flames were so bright... and after that, someone tried to cut his horse's throat. Unpleasant experiences all.

"That sort of behavior isn't a ...serious crime, on Barrayar?"

"Which, trying to burn down someone's tent with them in it and kill their horse? Well, yes, but so's murder."

"It sounds like the murderer did not believe their crime would be taken seriously. It seems unlikely they deceived themself that trying to kill the Count's son who was investigating was similarly non-serious."

"At the point where the Count's mutie son shows up to investigate an infanticide you committed, I think all hope of your crime not being taken seriously has passed."

"Did you determine who did it?"

"Yeah. It was Harra's mother."

He's getting all out of order again, delivering the result of the fast-penta interview before he explains what fast-penta even is... he organizes the intervening events in his mind. A child's voice, 'that's the man that's here to kill Lem Csurik!' - his correction that he was here to dispense justice, and that with his truth drugs on hand he could not convict an innocent, since anyone he arrested could be made to truthfully answer whether they had committed the crime - the time spent waiting for that news to trickle outward, until Lem Csurik came in to clear his name.

"The father was willing to testify under truth drugs that he hadn't killed his child, but he wanted me to swear first" (Vor lord, do you keep your word?) "that I would not ask him who did. I so swore, conducted the interview, and kept my promise. I was already pretty sure at that point that I knew who'd done it - if it wasn't him, it would've been someone else in the child's family, that's how it goes; the grandmother would've had the next closest access; and cleansing the bloodline has always been a mother's job. So. I sent for her, and got the truth out of her..."

A fast-penta interview is an awful thing to watch, particularly if you're the one giving it. They smile. There is no elemental biological quality of truth: the drug works by taking away your capacity to deceive, strengthening memory and flattening inhibitions and installing feelings of universal goodwill. It beats hell out of the previous standard, of course; that still doesn't make it nice.

"Then I was left with the problem of what to do with her. There's a lot of leeway in that sort of thing, on Barrayar. I pardoned the idiot kid who tried to set fire to my tent - he'd just been trying to scare me off, hadn't thought through the consequences - Mara Mattulich, though, her I could not pardon. And yet I didn't want to kill her. It didn't seem that her death would serve anyone." He sighs. "I went out to the child's grave and sat there with my thoughts for a while, and the best I could come up with was to sentence her to death and then suspend the sentence indefinitely. Under which condition I also decreed she could not own property and must be watched to ensure she never harms another child. And no one was to burn offerings for her after her eventual death. The symbolism seemed to have the intended effect."

"That seems like a just resolution."

"Thank you." He values that assessment highly.

"And then, unless you want me to go back and tell humorous anecdotes from my days in the Service Academy - I've got a few of those tucked away - the next stop in this tale is Kyril Island."

Cold. Bitter freezing cold.

He winces.

"Sorry." He sits on the memory until it behaves itself.

"It doesn't have negative associations for us."

"It's still probably not polite for me to accidentally leak that time I nearly froze to death. Just on general principle."

"Perhaps they'll take it as an expression of camaraderie."

"Fair enough. So. My first assignment after graduation was meteorological officer at Kyril Island, in Barrayar's arctic region. There's not much there. A military base with a bunch of old weapons in storage, some observation platforms, training grounds for when someone needs to be taught how to survive and maneuver in an arctic environment. I was told that the reason for the assignment was that my biggest flaw as an officer was my enormous insubordination problem, and if I could shut up and do as I was told for the duration, that would demonstrate my ability to function under someone else's command. So I went in determined to be the quietest little mouse imaginable."

He makes a skeptical noise.

"An accurate assessment," laughs Miles. "I tried my best! I showed up and didn't make a fuss when the first bunch of people I met said insulting things about me in Greek - it's the least widely spoken language on Barrayar, the greekies are a bit of a persecuted minority, I'm sure they didn't expect me to understand them, so I kindly let them keep that illusion - and I went to meet the previous meteorological officer, to learn the operation of the weather-reading equipment, and he was sitting on the floor of his office drunk to total incapacitation, which was a little disheartening, and then he passed out right in front of me, which disheartened me further, and then I wandered out looking for the first conscious, sober officer I could find, and I met a man walking around out of uniform who glared at me for five full seconds without so much as a hello, and I got fed up and made some stupid comment - I think it was 'who even runs this bloody zoo' - and he said 'I run it', and that was how I met the local Base Commander. Not a promising start, all in all."

"We are not in fact very much alike."

"Yeah, I imagine you would've had more sense than that. So, I settled in. The previous meteorological officer, Lieutenant Ahn, was sober enough the next day to teach me how to use his equipment, except he couldn't teach me how to read the weather as well as he could because he'd been doing it for fifteen years and his intuition was more reliable than the machines. And meteorology is very important on an arctic base. They got high winds that would blow in and erase anything lighter than a medium-sized vehicle that was stupid enough to stay outside untethered in those conditions - sweep it all straight out to sea. It was called the 'wah-wah'."

He smiles wryly, remembering how Ahn's introduction to the concept sounded like a prank, and the subsequent video evidence that convinced him of the legitimacy of the phenomenon.

"I'd been there about a week when I had to go out and do a routine check on some of the remote weather stations by myself, Lieutenant Ahn being indisposed that day. One of those local techs who didn't like me much suggested I park my vehicle in a particular place, out of the wind, while I went about my business. I probably should've clued in when he made the suggestion, but I didn't. I went out with my vehicle and my little cold-weather bubble shelter and assorted emergency supplies, and took a little longer than I expected on the first couple of checks - ended up caught out in the dark, which qualifies as unsafe driving conditions. It was a four-hour night that time of year in that location, though, so I shrugged and set up my shelter to wait it out. Hooked the shelter to the vehicle with a chain to anchor it in case of wah-wah, since the vehicle was well over the minimum size to avoid being launched into the sea but the shelter was rather smaller. I had a book with me, I dozed off... I woke up a few hours later under four feet of mud, vehicle and shelter and all. I would've suffocated if I'd slept another hour, and I nearly didn't make it to the surface even then, and with my comms and all my emergency gear still stuck in the mud, I had to crawl into the weather station and pull a couple of wires from some of the sensor equipment to manually disrupt its datastream in a coded pattern representing 'needs rescue'. I was well on my way to freezing to death before someone noticed the oddity in the incoming meteorological data and came out to pick me up."

This time he manages to blunt the edge of the memory in case of sensitive listeners. It's funny in retrospect, although at the time it was terrifying.

"...as a prank?"

"As I concluded during my recovery from extensive frostbite, there's no way they could've guessed that I'd be out late enough to have to spend the night in my shelter and that I'd chain the shelter to the vehicle and that I'd fall asleep in it. What was supposed to happen was that I'd park the vehicle, head into the station, the ice would crack under the vehicle's weight and it would sink while I watched helplessly, and then I'd have to comm the base for pickup and be punished for the loss of the vehicle and I'd be very embarrassed about the whole thing. Technically still risking my life, since my emergency gear would've been lost with the vehicle in this scenario, but not to nearly so serious a degree."

"Barrayar sounds like everything the Enemy told us of Men."