"You've mentioned."

(It's his planet and they are his people and he acknowledges their many flaws, does he ever, but he will never give up on them no matter how many times they disappoint him. They're getting so much better, all the time.)

I feel similarly about mine. "Go on."

A flicker of a smile, and the memory of the unspoken epilogue of the story of Harra Csurik - buying her village a comm unit with the money he'd been saving for a new lightflyer, and sending her to Hassadar Teacher's College on scholarship, so she could start a school for the previously illiterate and uneducated village children.

Then he returns to Kyril Island in his thoughts.

"I was indeed punished for the loss of the vehicle, and for the minor damage I did to the weather station to accomplish my distress signal. I protested the latter, because I still hadn't learned my lesson apparently, and General Metzov increased my punishment in response. A bunch of chore duty, basically. Hauling the sunk vehicle out of the mud, cleaning and repairing it, then doing maintenance on all the pipes and drains in the base, six hours a day for a week on top of all my other duties. I think he said four hours originally, but then I had to open my stupid mouth."

"It sounds like you did need the lesson they assigned you there to teach."

"I won't deny that Kyril Island was a highly educational experience," he says. There's some irony there, but the details aren't coming clear just yet.

"Anyway, drain cleaning was less humiliating than I imagine General Metzov meant it to be. I learned more about plumbing than I did about the consequences of insubordination. Things settled down after that. Lieutenant Ahn finally left, and on his way out he warned me not to mess with Metzov, which I felt had come a little late, but I attempted to put it out of my mind. By which I mean I read his publicly available service record, then called Ivan at his assignment in the capital and got him to exploit a data security loophole to show me all the dirt that wasn't for public consumption, after which Ivan told me never to call him at work again and all I had to show for it was the knowledge that one time during the Komarran revolts General Metzov killed an escaped prisoner and when called upon to produce the body for examination coughed up a jar of ashes and an apology."

The implication being that General Metzov had done things to this escaped prisoner that needed to be concealed by cremation. Illegal torture, most likely.

"But after that, lacking any further way to learn more and distracted by the arrival of the year's batch of arctic survival trainees, I actually did succeed in dropping the subject. Kept myself the hell out of Metzov's way to the fullest extent possible, and wrote up my weather reports."

His face is very carefully expressionless.

Yeah, that's... yeah.

"It gets less fun from here. I mentioned earlier that there were weapons in storage on Kyril Island. Some of them were just sonic grenades and whatever, but some of them were real everything-the-Enemy-told-you-of-Men stuff. Including a specifically Barrayaran terror weapon, a substance called fetaine that specifically targets the reproductive system so if you survive all the other nasty effects of exposure you're guaranteed to have mutie children. Well, a little while after the trainees arrived, there was a fetaine spill in one of the storage bunkers. Scared the hell out of everyone, particularly the two idiots who caused it by goofing off near the wrong stack of barrels. One of the more sensible local officers went to see what was going on, I tagged along, and when we'd heard the story we figured out a plan to destroy the entire contents of the bunker using slow-release plasma mines, since fetaine can be safely destroyed by heat and there weren't any explosives in there with it that might be set off and blow the bunker open and rain everyone's worst nightmare all across the island."

He remembers the looks on everyone's faces, the uneasiness in his own heart.

"General Metzov decided it wasn't good enough to destroy it all, that every effort must be made to preserve whatever could be salvaged of the bunker's contents. He told Lieutenant Bonn from Engineering, the sensible officer I mentioned, to order his people to get into their best protective gear and go clean up the spill by hand. They refused. General Metzov suggested that Bonn shoot one and see if the rest fell in line. I... tried my best to shut my stupid mouth, with mixed success. Bonn didn't favour that approach, needless to say - I think we all hoped Metzov had been joking."

Metzov had not been joking.

"But he called us all out, me and Bonn and Bonn's recalcitrant subordinates, for a discipline parade. Stood those fifteen techs out in the road, in the cold and the wind, and had a bunch of the damn trainees aim nerve disruptors at them, and ordered them to strip down and stand there in their underwear until they either froze to death or decided to start obeying orders."

"...I see."

"It was stupid and cruel and nearly unjustifiable. The guys who pulled that prank that nearly got me killed were among the people under threat, them and the greekies who were making fun of me when I showed up. None of those trainees had probably touched a nerve disruptor more than twice before in their lives. We were all lucky they didn't shoot anyone by accident. The thing is, though - it was the sort of disciplinary behaviour that wouldn't be out of place in a battlefield situation. You generally wouldn't be able to get that elaborate under fire, but he'd have been within his rights. And if they'd been civilians, and not soldiers under his authority, it would've been blatantly wrong. The actual situation... it wasn't quite wrong enough for the trainees to clue in that they were being misused. So there we all were. The techs were too stunned to think, at first, and then they were more afraid of the fetaine than the cold, and then nobody wanted to be the first one to break... and then Bonn decided to strip down and join them, as a protest. Damn fool stunt. It's for sure none of them was going to break after that, not with their own lieutenant's support, but Metzov wasn't about to back down, either. He wasn't the backing-down type."

Standing there, in the cold, watching those people freeze... the solution was clear.

"So of course I did the same exact thing. Privilege of rank. It's just barely possible that Metzov could've covered up the deaths of all fifteen techs and Lieutenant Bonn on top, but if I died out there under whatever circumstances, Imperial Security was going to show up and fast-penta everyone in sight. I explained this logic to Metzov. He wasn't budging. I went on to explain that if, on the other hand, he backed down from forcing us all to freeze ourselves to death, he could have me up on a very clear-cut insubordination charge, and the rest of them along with, and gain his victory at much less cost to himself. That line he found more persuasive. He had us all arrested on the spot, but importantly, this involved getting dressed and going indoors and being treated for frostbite."

He pauses, reflecting on that memory, and concludes, "I fucking hate the cold to this day."

"That move I could see myself making, actually. Nicely done."

"Thank you," he says, fairly glowing. It's good to have one's proudest accomplishments acknowledged.

"So then you were charged with insubordination?"

"Yeah. It was clear that I'd done the right thing in a moral sense, but equally clear that if I'd been sent to Kyril Island to learn to stop treating superior officers like interesting problem-solving constraints, that lesson had abjectly failed. And for political reasons they couldn't just let me off, I had to be publicly chastised or it'd look like I had the magical power to get high command to condone any mutiny as long as I was in the middle of it. So I spent a while holed up in ImpSec Headquarters, the most magnificently ugly building you ever saw, sort-of-not-really under arrest, bored right out of my mind."

He provides a mental image of the building in question. It's truly atrocious. A squat, windowless block of concrete, decorated-if-you-can-call-it-that with queasily-proportioned relief sculptures.

"I did get Father to drop the mutiny charges against the techs. It... wouldn't have been right, for me to slither free while they stayed caught. In a weird backward sense, it's like they were my men. I wasn't about to save them once and then abandon them the second time."

He remembers that conversation.

"Father was incandescent over Metzov. Well - no." It wasn't a red rage but a dark one, all grim frown and shadowed eyes. "He was as angry as I've seen him, though. For pulling that vicious stunt in the first place, and for making the trainees into the instruments of what would've been a mass torture-murder. What ended up happening... Bonn and the techs were discharged without benefits but also without disgrace. They cut Metzov loose the same way - couldn't have gotten any harsher punishment to stick, since in the end there were not actually any deaths. The trainees were left out of it completely, nothing to show for it except whatever lesson they may have learned. Father made a public show of being angry with me. And I was reassigned to ImpSec. After Kyril Island, no sane commanding officer could've been cajoled into taking me; they'd have lived in dread of the moment when I'd take issue with some decision of theirs and blow up their career on the spot. Simon was the only man Father felt comfortable asking. He was in on all the decisions, had all the information, he knew I wasn't nearly as poisonous as I looked."

"The disadvantages of having 'spend a century picking up a new skill in the far south of the continent while it all blows over' unavailable to your people is becoming apparent."

"Hmm?"

"This is the sort of problem I'd personally just solve by taking a very very long vacation. That works better for me than you because I won't be dead at the end of it even if whatever occurred will take a long time to heal."

"Ah. Yeah. On the other hand, consider what happened the last time I took a vacation."

"Your planet needs some uninhabited vacation spots."

"That would arguably be even worse than being bored out of my skull in Cockroach Central!"

"One doesn't generally go alone."

"Well, fair. But at that point I'd feel like I was just punishing someone else for my mistakes. I don't think I'd be suited to taking a century off even if I was immortal. I am not sure I know how to take time off that isn't spent in bed hibernating like a bear. And I have long since accepted that I am literally, factually incapable of staying out of trouble."

"I see. So you threw yourself immediately back into the thick of things."

"Yeah. Well, no, first I spent several months holed up in ImpSec Headquarters going out of my mind with boredom. They threw me a temporary posting as an administrative assistant after I got out of the infirmary, which kept me tolerably occupied for the first week and intolerably unoccupied after that. But once the public consciousness had moved on and it was politically permissible to let me see the light of day again, Simon handed me an assignment."

He lights up a mental map of the Hegen Hub, simplified down to a diamond shape trailing assorted wormhole routes from its four corners. At one end, a link to the Pol system, which links back in turn to Komarr and through it to Barrayar; at the other end, a link to Vervain, and through it to the Cetagandan Empire; then a link to the Aslund cul-de-sac from the third point, and a link to Jackson's Whole on the fourth.

"In summary: A crossroads of jump routes called the Hegen Hub was experiencing a sudden and inexplicable arms race. War is bad for business and a quarter of our trade comes through the Hub via Pol. On top of that, Aslund was tearing their hair out because conflict in the Hub threatens their only route to the wormhole nexus at large, and they hired a mercenary army to guard their jump station. My army, only for some reason they'd gone back to calling themselves the Oserans. Into this mess Simon expected me to step lightly, gather as much information as I could, and then whisk back home without getting in any further trouble, all under the supervision of a more experienced ImpSec operative. In retrospect, I have a hard time imagining what he can possibly have been thinking."

"The mercenary army you'd left with no explanation four years earlier? Am I right in thinking mortals don't tend to ignore their responsibilities for that long?"

"Correct. I mean, I'd left Baz and Elena in charge and I think they both understood that the question of whether I'd be coming back was a little up in the air, but - yeah, I should've taken better care of them. Somehow. I admit I'm at a loss as to how I could've managed it without betraying Barrayar by running away from home."