"It sounds like you'd dug yourself an interesting hole, to be certain. Sometimes obligations do that. So now you came back."

"Yeah. They had me temporarily disguised as a Betan arms dealer - I wasn't supposed to make contact with the Dendarii until we knew more. I wandered around pretending to sell nerve disruptor shield-nets while the senior operative in command of me did all the useful and interesting work. Then... I'm probably going to get this a bit out of order; out of all the convoluted messes I've gotten myself into over the years, this one may have been the most convoluted. I remember I was spotted by one of my Dendarii - he came up to me in a public area and said 'Admiral Naismith!' very loudly and I about jumped out of my skin. Told him he'd been mistaken, but the way I look is pretty distinctive and I don't think he bought it for a second. He insisted on coming around to talk to me privately later. I allowed this."

He calls the details of that conversation to mind, although the memory has faded somewhat with time.

"He explained that the fleet's chain of command had recently been restructured. Admiral Oser put himself back in charge, somehow, and demoted my personal friends and allies to positions of reduced power and prestige. There was a divide between the people who were loyal to me or Tung, and the people who were loyal to Oser. He wanted to warn me in case I returned to the fleet." He sighs. "And then as soon as my senior operative got back from his information-gathering, he told me off for activating the Admiral Naismith identity without permission. I'm sure it seemed logical to him. I think... my Barrayaran superiors had difficulty with the concept of Admiral Naismith. It's not normal for a thing to be false and real at the same time. Confuses the hell out of everyone. A fictional admiral with real subordinates is too easy to round off to just the first part."

"It sounds, to be honest, as if you were really bad at making people who had more interests in common than most people one has to work with feel like they could predict you and therefore trust you."

"Yes, for some reason the approximate ordering of the difficulty curve in getting people to trust me has always tended to go 'friends, strangers, enemies, superior officers'."

"Perhaps because that's the only kind of trust that demands predictability instead of just non-hostility?"

"I do have something of a predictability problem," he admits. "And at the time I had no grand successes I could point to and say 'see? Just give me a clear goal and a free hand and I'll succeed beyond your wildest dreams'. These days, that's more or less how Simon treats me and it works very well for him."

"I am eager to hear what grand successes enabled that."

"Then you're going to like this story," he says.

Right, what happened next? ...Ah. Livia Nu. Livia Nu is what happened next. Well, this is going to be embarrassing. He tries to wall off the memory of that horrible jungle-like perfume setting off his allergies; that came later.

"I had a meeting with one of the people I was pretending to sell weapons to. Only when I showed up, the man I'd been speaking with wasn't there. It was this woman, instead. I'd seen her around before, in passing. Previously she'd given the impression of being mainly decorative in purpose; at this meeting, she admitted to being the other fellow's supervisor, although the way she talked to me left me with the strong impression that she was additionally some sort of spy. Half the people on that jump point station seemed to be spying on the other half; it was a bit ridiculous."

His memory of her is exceptionally vivid, even compared to his very vivid baseline. A woman of about his height, with a slight build, pale skin, blue eyes, and short blonde hair. Intimidatingly attractive, at the time, although that recollection is now coloured with several layers of irony. She wore red to that meeting. There are wild stories about the sort of things spies get up to, seducing one another for information, and Miles had been told that these stories were universally false, and this woman seemed determined to validate them all.

"She asked after my imaginary cargo, and we talked business for a bit, and then she... indicated that she might like to get to know me better... and I, uh, panicked and fled the room." He blushes at the memory - his hand in her hair, her hand on his neck, his ongoing anxiety spiking into outright panic at a perceived threat that was in fact just more flirtation. Smooth going there, Past Miles. "I blurted some silly excuse on my way out, and she laughed at me. I went to sleep feeling like an idiot, and woke up in the middle of my sleep cycle to my senior operative asking me what the fuck I'd done, because shortly after my meeting, the man I'd intended to meet had been found dead in the room where I was supposed to meet him, and now there was an arrest warrant out for my arms dealer identity and we had to flee the station right away."

(He remembers his indignant declaration, "If I'd done any such thing, I'd have reported it to you immediately, sir!", and reflects that perhaps Maitimo is onto something with the predictability analysis. A more normal subordinate might have confined themselves to denying that they killed the man.)

"I feel like I'm missing a few things about Men and their romantic norms."

"Yeah, I've neglected that subject a little in my retelling. I suspect it's because I don't know quite where I should start explaining."

"Seducing someone for information would be a very odd and double-edged tactic, among our people."

"Hm?"

"Well, ah, if you succeed you're married, which under the right conditions could be a diplomatic coup but would usually just be kind of a mess for everyone involved, and you can certainly only try it once."

"That's... not a concern among Men, or at least not a universal concern." A few scattered thoughts surface regarding the marriage customs of assorted human cultures.

"Interesting. So you ran screaming from the pretty enemy because -?"

"Because I didn't really have any positive romantic experience to speak of," the memory of being fifteen and suicidal touches his thoughts, "and I was separately uncertain of a lot of other things about the situation, like who she was even spying for and why she was in the room when I'd been expecting the other fellow."

He wonders if she actually genuinely was trying to seduce him for fun. A chilling thought, in retrospect.

"So I got nervous and freaked out and ran away."

"Wisely, I suppose, as it gave your superior slightly less to reprimand you for."

"Ha. There is that. Yeah, this would've been a very different story if I'd allowed myself to be seduced. Possibly a much shorter one."

"And you wouldn't be here exploding things for us," he says. "Do continue."

"So, we had to get out fast and head for a part of the Hub that didn't have an extradition treaty with Pol. That meant the stations for Aslund or Jackson's Whole, and Aslund Station is where my army was, and the senior operative didn't want me going anywhere near my army, so we went for the Jacksonian station instead. I kept suggesting ways we could use the situation to our advantage to try to gain more information, but he was having none of it. Then when we got to the Jacksonian station, he received a message from home that sent him into a panic. He wouldn't tell me what the message said; he just booked me a ticket on a commercial jumpship to Escobar and then left on a different ship without saying a word about where he was going. Needless to say, I was consumed by curiosity."

He smiles wryly at the memory.

"But I never made it to the ship. The Jacksonians arrested me; apparently somebody calling themselves Cavilo had paid for an arrest warrant on my cover identity. I tried to run and all I gained in the attempt was a surcharge for resisting arrest."

(The surcharge came in two parts, one monetary, one violent. He's lucky they had shock-sticks; he can't imagine how he could've gotten through the rest of this fiasco with multiple broken bones, which is the near-guaranteed result anytime someone physically beats him up. It did not, of course, feel very lucky at the time.)

"But I'd mentioned I might have money, enough to buy my way out, so they were nice enough to put me in with the well-behaved prisoners instead of the rowdy ones, and it's there that I learned what had lit such a fire under my superior."

He remembers the welcome sight of Gregor's face, through vision blurred by the aftermath of that surcharge, and then the belated realization that his fucking Emperor was sitting by his side in a Jacksonian prison cell.

"Gregor explained to me that he'd been on an official visit to Komarr, he'd had a melancholy moment late at night after a bottle of wine, contemplated suicide, then realized that he could just as easily run away as kill himself and running away was more appealing. So he did that, on pure impulse. Vanished from a guarded room, on Komarr of all places. I called him an idiot and asked why he hadn't turned right around the minute he sobered up. He said that by the time he stopped wanting to escape his life he'd been abandoned on the Jacksonian jump point station and was being arrested for vagrancy. I called him an idiot a couple more times. Then the Jacksonians came to collect his group - he'd gotten in with some prisoners who were being offered a chance to buy themselves out with some light technical work. Well, offered, forced, somewhere in that range. I was still pretty out of it from when I'd been arrested - in a lot of pain, not thinking clearly - so I panicked. Gregor helped me subdue one of the other prisoners in his group and steal their clothes and ID card so I could get taken away with the rest of them."

Not his finest moment, as he'd explained to Gregor shortly afterward. If he'd kept his head he could've just bought them both out as soon as the Jacksonians let him access his credit account, and thereby saved everyone a lot of trouble.

"I reconsidered as soon as I had a minute to breathe, but by that point we were already on a ship to Aslund Station, where we were supposed to be doing our work. In Aslund's rush to upgrade their defenses, they'd gotten behind schedule and resorted to hiring Jacksonian press gangs to help build their new station."

"My."

The story merits more than that, of course, but disapproval of Miles' emperor will make Miles defensive and perhaps the emperor really did have no one to hand the job off to and was not able to do it justly. 

Miles snorts. "I did warn you this was going to be a convoluted one. So, there I was, in a Jacksonian press gang with my idiot Emperor. This situation overrode all of my other duties and obligations without question, as a Barrayaran subject and an Imperial Security officer. ImpSec has no higher obligation than the Emperor's safety. It did actually turn out that he had a plan that could've gotten him home safely if nothing went wrong, but that didn't mean I could just leave him."

Actually, if he remembers right, Gregor asked what would happen if his Imperial self ordered Miles to bugger off into Aslund Station and forget they ever saw each other, and Miles replied that he has a well-known insubordination problem, ask anyone else who's ever commanded him.

"But even if I'd wanted to abandon my semi-suicidal depressed Emperor, I didn't have much of an opportunity. The military station we were working on was unconnected to the commercial station where we might have found passage home, populated exclusively by people involved in the construction effort and members of my army, or what had once been my army. I hid in walls and under floors and made use of my convenient disguise as a press-ganged tech until I could contact the fellow who'd run into me on Pol Station and ask him to send Elena my way. ...And then instead of Elena, a squad of Oserans showed up and dragged me and Gregor to their admiral, who was not pleased to see me."

Tangle-fields are uncomfortable. Like being wrapped up in a mild electric shock. Not Miles's favourite way to conduct an interview.

"I went Naismith on him. Did my best to get him to see how our interests might align. But he was having none of it; in fact I think he was frightened by how easily I began to convince him that I was in the area on business unrelated to control of the fleet and would be happy to cooperate with him to our mutual advantage. He told his loyal troops to haul the pair of us away and throw us out an airlock." A concise yet vivid mental picture of what happens to a person who is thrown out an airlock. "Said if I tried to talk they should cut out my tongue. When I went for the 'you're throwing away a fortune in ransom' angle, they tried it, and Gregor and I just barely held them off. We were having a pretty bad time before my contact showed up to rescue us."

The sight of the approaching knife... no, let's not. Miles puts the memory firmly out of his mind and focuses on what came next.

"It... wasn't the reunion I'd imagined. But my contact brought Elena, and Elena got us onto a shuttle with her, Tung, and Arde for a private conversation. Just like old times. Gregor was, uh, a little thrown by seeing me play Admiral Naismith, I think. It's... different, from the person I am at home. More - energetic?"

He tries to clarify the distinction in his thoughts. As Lord Vorkosigan, he holds back more, dares less, makes fewer smart remarks - not none, but fewer. As Admiral Naismith he pulls out all the stops. Admiral Naismith is Miles with maximum energy. Not until this unexpected exile with the elves has Miles ever had a chance to unify the two identities for an extended period, and he rather thinks he likes the result. His two selves work well together.

"I cannot imagine how one experiences that many changes of situation that quickly and remains chipper."

"I have a gift," he jokes, contemplating his manic-depressive tendencies with some amusement. "Anyway, you haven't heard the half of it yet."

"...I haven't?"