"Not hardly," he says, grinning.

"Tung and Elena explained how Oser had managed to get control of the fleet. Fairly straightforward as betrayals go. They'd all trusted him to handle the administrative details while they each concentrated on their areas of particular talent, and he'd taken advantage of their trust to reorganize the fleet so that he had effective control of everything. Then Tung asked me to help him take back the fleet. But Elena and I agreed that Gregor was the priority, and there was no way we could risk him on a comparatively pointless scuffle over the control of a smallish mercenary fleet when Barrayar was poised to descend into civil war if the public noticed he'd gone missing. Tung was baffled, since we refused to break security and tell him what was so important about this sad young man we were lugging around, but Elena and Arde backed me - Elena because she knew, Arde out of personal loyalty - so we came up with a plan to get Gregor safely on his way home."

Ha ha.

"We couldn't hang around Aslund's commercial or military stations because they were both crawling with Oser's people out for my blood. We couldn't go back to Pol Station or the Jacksonian station because they both had warrants out for my arrest, which would complicate matters tremendously, especially after I escaped from the Jacksonians the first time. So we had to go on to Vervain Station, me and Gregor. Leaving the fleet to sort themselves out. I didn't feel great about that, but I was low on options and had an overriding priority. I extracted a strategic analysis of Vervain's situation from Elena, and found out that they'd also hired a mercenary army, under the command of a mysterious figure called Cavilo. The same person who'd paid the Jacksonians to arrest me. This puzzled and worried me, but I figured we could lay low for the hour or two it would take us to show up on the station, locate the Barrayaran Consulate there, and get Gregor safely into their hands. Logical given that I'd just spent a week successfully dodging Jacksonian prison guards. Ultimately false, but logical."

He smiles wryly, remembering.

"So they smuggled us there, with the help of a friendly freighter captain who was used to sneaking Aslunder spies into Vervain Station. Only when we arrived, it turned out the friendly freighter captain was a double agent, and he handed us straight over to the local authorities, in the form of Commander Cavilo. Who turned out to be the same woman I'd run away from on Pol Station. We were approximately equally surprised to see one another. And then her second-in-command showed up, and turned out to be Stanis bloody Metzov, and things really started to go downhill."

The look in Metzov's eyes when he spotted Miles was... an arresting sight. So to speak. Fucking terrifying, not to put too fine a point on it.

"Metzov nearly had a meltdown, and that's before he recognized Gregor. He was absolutely consumed with his desire for vengeance upon me. Then he noticed I had his Emperor in tow, and he couldn't quite decide whether or not he wanted to commit treason. It made for a really weird interrogation. Gregor was brilliant, though. He played Metzov better than I did. But his best improvisations were not sufficient to save me. Gregor got a luxury cabin with the door guarded, and I got a prison cell."

"Couldn't decide if he wanted to commit treason? Hadn't he already?"

"Hm?"

"He tried to kill you, he tortured a prisoner and covered it up, and then he ran away and joined a foreign army. What do you people consider treason?"

"Torture is illegal, murder is also illegal, but neither of those things is treason. Running away and joining a foreign army would've been treason if we hadn't kicked him out of ours first, but we did. Anyway, Metzov thought of himself as a loyal subject of the Barrayaran Imperium, and Gregor was happy to encourage that perception in him since it made him really reluctant to threaten or imprison his Emperor. Cavilo, unfortunately, had no such qualms. She was..."

He trails off, searching for words, for a snippet of experience that concisely imparts the dangers of Cavilo.

"...After she had Gregor sent off to be cozily detained, I happened to be in the room while she dealt with that freighter captain. She was keeping the man's family imprisoned and threatening to kill them if he didn't keep pretending to smuggle people onto Vervain Station and then turning them over to her like he did with us. She showed him a video recording of his family, pretending it was fresh, and I suggested to him that he should demand to see them in person, and she pulled out a nerve disruptor and shot him right there, with this look on her face of, of the purest imaginable joy, just for an instant. Then she scolded me for making him useless to her. I nearly fainted. I'd seen people killed before but I'd never seen their killers that happy about it."

"Ah," he says. "Yes. I am not sure how I feel about the thought there are Men like that."

"There are a lot of kinds of Men," says Miles. "Anyway. Metzov came by my cell later to have a chat, and he threatened me a little and expressed disappointment that fast-penta exists so he didn't need to torture me for information, but honestly both of those things were an enormous relief compared to what I was expecting him to do to me. I think he was homesick. And feeling left out because Cavilo was off having dinner with Gregor and he hadn't been invited."

That was a weird conversation.

"After that, he left me alone with my thoughts, and I spent a while going over what I knew about the situation and trying to figure out why it wasn't adding up. Metzov was nearly useless to a space-based mercenary outfit like the one Cavilo was running; he'd always been a ground combat commander, the skillset has less overlap than you might think. And I'd been to all four of the stations in the Hegen Hub and nowhere could I detect the source of all the trouble. The flaw in my reasoning was my assumption that Cavilo had any interest at all in using her mercenary army to serve the interests of the people who hired her, but I didn't catch on to that until a while later. For the time being, I stayed in my cell, paced, went increasingly crazy from boredom and lack of social stimulation, and worried about whether Cavilo was successfully seducing Gregor."

"...but if she were, why would that matter, they still wouldn't be married..."

"He was going through a pretty difficult time in his life, and she was a... very compelling person. I was afraid she might be encouraging feelings of fondness towards her so she could use those feelings to manipulate him into cooperating with her agenda, whatever it was."

"And at the time you still had no clear idea."

"Yeah. Anyway, after I'd had a little time to stew, Cavilo came by. She wanted me to confirm that she could become Empress of Barrayar if she married Gregor. That's technically the case, but... she would've gone the way of Yuri if she tried it. I left that part out of my analysis. If she'd found a use for Gregor, it seemed imprudent to be too discouraging. I thought we were all set to survive this latest disaster - oh, I forgot, when Metzov came to talk to me he admitted outright that he was planning to kill Cavilo and take her army, and then when she came to talk to me she indicated that she'd overheard him, and I didn't see any more of him during my stay. But then, just as I was getting my hopes up, she brought someone by my cell who'd been there at Tau Verde and had him identify me to her as Admiral Naismith, presumably to verify information she'd received through some other channel."

He still remembers her perplexed expression as she asked, "How many people are you?"

"That made me pretty nervous. For good reason, it turned out, because after leaving me to stew for a little while longer, the next thing she did was drag me out again and tell me that she'd been told I could retake the Dendarii using my wits alone, she thought that would make an entertaining show, and she was going to send me to Aslund Station with no resources but the clothes I was wearing and see what came out of it."

And that was the conversation where she wore the perfume he was allergic to. Damned awful stuff. He was streaming tears and wheezing helplessly for half an hour after they spoke.

"She gave me a piece of advice which I've always thought lent a fascinating insight into her way of thinking: 'The key of strategy is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to victory.' She said this, mind, when I was openly wondering whether she preferred me to succeed in retaking my army or to die in the attempt. Apparently I could serve her interests either way. And on that note, she packed me off to Aslund Station exactly as I was. Wouldn't even give me a pair of boots."

He's smiling now. "And?"

"I'll let you know right now: all paths did not lead to her victory," says Miles, grinning.

"So there I was, in my slippers, on a ship belonging to Cavilo's mercenaries, waiting while they argued about how best to deliver me, when what did I hear over the comm but the dulcet tones of Bel Thorne, captain of the Ariel. One of my most loyal Dendarii. Coincidentally assigned to inspect my ride on its way into the station."

God, he misses Bel.

"I immediately resolved to arrange that they hand me over to that ship, as quickly as possible, rather than hang onto me for longer and potentially deliver me into less friendly hands. But I couldn't just politely ask for it. So I pretended to be terrified of the Oserans - true as far as it went - and pretended, in my arms dealer cover identity, that my terror was because I'd sold them defective plasma arcs that overloaded and blew the wielder's hand off. As mercenaries themselves, the people transporting me were very sympathetic to these hypothetical Oserans maimed by my poor safety standards. They stuffed me into the most primitive available lifeboat, essentially just a bag of air to float through space in, and literally threw me at the Ariel. Where I came to rest happily in Bel's arms. Literally. The first thing Bel did when I climbed out of the bag was walk up and hug me." He pauses. "Huh, I've just realized there's no convention in Quenya for referring to individuals of a gender other than male or female."

"...there is not. Is that a thing Men - experience?"

"Yes. I remember kicking myself for not explaining hermaphrodites when I explained Beta Colony, but I guess this never translated into actually going on to explain hermaphrodites. Well, Betans can get a bit weird, and one of the weird things they've done was create a third sex that embodies the physical characteristics of both the original two."

A clearer mental image of Bel Thorne, as an example.

"Betans don't emigrate much, so there isn't really an established population of herms anywhere else, but Bel's an adventurous sort. I guess if I wanted to translate the English convention directly I could say 'it', but does that sound weird to the native ear?"

"Our linguistic guild is probably as we speak developing a better option."

"I'll leave them to it and use Bel's name with awkward frequency for now. So, I explained the situation in... nearly complete detail, omitting Gregor's identity and my other connections with Barrayar, because Bel wasn't authorized to know about Lord Vorkosigan. Bel caught me up on the strategic situation in the Hub, which was continuing to steadily deteriorate, and the internal situation with the fleet, which was deteriorating pretty rapidly. Apparently, after Gregor and I went on our way, Oser had Tung arrested but didn't complete the power play by openly going after the rest of my friends, so everyone was just waiting around for someone else to take the final step toward open conflict. It began to be clear to me that Cavilo's ultimate plan in sending me to Aslund Station was to stir up trouble, and as such, I immediately resolved to do something she couldn't possibly have planned for: cooperate with Oser."

He grins.

"I had Bel contact him by secure tightbeam," a brief mental explanation of the concept of sending recorded patterns of light and sound from one place to another very quickly, "and since he couldn't interrupt the conversation by having me thrown out an airlock, we talked. I explained that my analysis of the situation conclusively showed that anything we did other than cooperate with one another would be playing directly into Cavilo's hands."

("You're insane," Oser told him.

"No, just in a tearing hurry. Admiral, there's nothing irrevocable gone wrong between us. You attacked me, and now you expect me to attack you back. But I'm not on holiday, and I don't have time to waste on personal amusements like revenge.")

"I suggested that he hire me, or I could hire him, I didn't much care which. With Gregor still in Cavilo's hands I was of course highly confident in my ability to make promises that ImpSec would have to fulfill for me later, such as hiring a mercenary army, as long as they were aimed at rescuing him or at preventing war from breaking out around him before he could get safely home. Whatever worked, as long as it left Oser and I on the same side and the army intact. He was... reluctant, but persuadable. I persuaded him. And then - Cavilo had gotten me to agree not to contact Barrayar, on pain of something happening to Gregor; but I didn't need to contact Barrayar in order to arrange for their spies to notice me existing, so the first thing I did was have Oser take me on a tour of the station so everyone could get a nice long look at the two of us being all cooperative."

He pauses; his cheerful expression dims.

"At which point, after we'd been parading around for a while, someone took a shot at me with a nerve disruptor. Several shots. At least five. The first one caught one of Bel's subordinates, and I spent the next several minutes huddled under the body for cover while other people went after the assassin."

It was worse than the shock-stick beating from earlier. The slightest graze from a nerve disruptor bolt is agony, and there were plenty of nerve disruptor bolts to be had. He's lucky he got away without any permanent nerve damage - if he'd been grazed a little harder, he could've lost all feeling in the affected area. Terrifying weapons, nerve disruptors. They don't kill you any deader than a plasma arc, but they're more specific about it - targeting the brain, which is surely the only part of Miles that's worth anything. He may be gradually coming to reconsider that assessment of his worth, but it definitely weighed on his thoughts at the time, cowering under the corpse of the man who saved his life.

"The assassin, when they caught him, turned out to be Metzov. I passed this off to Oser as the secret goal of our little parade, delivering him Cavilo's second-in-command for interrogation. Oser couldn't quite decide whether it was the smartest or the stupidest thing he'd ever seen."

"...was it? Did you anticipate an attempt on your life?"

"Nope. Pure accident. If I'd anticipated an attempt on my life I... all right, I might've thought of doing exactly what I did, but I'm not sure I'd have had the nerve to go through with it."

Although he does remember Tung's comment that Miles's accidents have a way of working out in his favour more often and more spectacularly than they have any right to. Maybe he was making that calculation on some level and it simply never reached his conscious thoughts.

"Did Cavilo intend him to succeed?"

"I'm sure she would've been delighted if he had. Cavilo being Cavilo, I'm also sure she had at least one plan for how to take advantage of his failure. We hauled him to a private room, me and Oser and Elena - I had to argue pretty hard for that private room - and gave him fast-penta and asked him some questions."

Fast-penta interviews aren't any more fun when it's one of your direst enemies smiling foolishly at you.

"And he said that the reason Cavilo wanted him, the ground-based target he was supposed to attack, was Vervain. Cavilo's plan was to raid her own employers, make off with a bunch of their art and items of historical interest and other valuable goods, and sell it in Jackson's Whole on her way out of the Hub. And when we asked Metzov what was supposed to prevent the Vervani from coming after Cavilo for this offense, he said 'oh, the Cetagandan invasion fleet'. At which point it all became perfectly clear..."

He shakes his head slightly, still impressed with the sheer audacity of the plan.

"Metzov was supposed to command the raid on Vervain, and then Cavilo was going to throw him to the Vervani and run, and the Cetagandans were going to show up all, 'look what this evil Barrayaran did to you, you need us to protect you', and they'd have a nice easy time conquering the planet on their way into the Hub. Very tidy. Completely morally bankrupt on Cavilo's part, but that's hardly a surprise. Of course, since she'd let Metzov loose to tell us all this, she obviously couldn't still be counting on it. Instead, she had to be aiming to marry Gregor, become Empress of Barrayar, and thereby remain safe from what would otherwise be inevitable Cetagandan retribution. Double-crossing the Cetagandans is deeply unwise. Doable if you have an empire at your back, though."

And then, of course...

"I explained all this to Oser, leaving out Gregor again but indicating that Cavilo's new betrayal had a solid endgame. I told him that his best shot at serving the interests of his employers would be to capture Cavilo and hold the Hub-Vervain jump against the Cetagandans until reinforcements arrived from Pol or Barrayar. Aslund was a cul-de-sac, the Hub their only connection to the wider galaxy; if the Cetagandans took the Hub, Aslund was fucked. He... agreed with my tactical analysis, but didn't want to put his five-thousand-man army in the way of a planetary invasion force, understandably enough. He proposed to spare my life and sit out of it. I wasn't ready to accept that course of action, given how much else was riding on preventing that invasion, but I lacked further arguments. And then Elena got him with the fast-penta hypospray."

Wasn't that a sight.

"We steered Oser back to his cabin, somehow managing not to make anyone suspicious, and then settled in to have a very fast council of war. I brought in every captain in the fleet, one at a time, Tung first, and coaxed, cajoled, promised, persuaded, and in one case threatened until they were all lined up in support of my goals. Tung was... impressed with me, I think. Although, heh, after we'd all gotten together and hashed out our strategy and gone our separate ways, he found the time to complain about my lack of boots. As though I'd had any time for boots since I arrived."

There's a moment of silence.

"I think I'd like to see you with your army sometime," he says.

"Few things would make me happier, honestly." Since Maitimo getting to see Miles with his army would imply Miles getting any contact at all with his home universe while his army still exists and considers themselves to answer to him.

"But anyway. I spent a while fretting, tried to convince myself to get some sleep, very much failed at that, and then my senior operative finally showed up, urgently requesting a private conversation with Admiral Naismith. I granted him this privilege - I was delighted to see him, actually, totally ready to hand over control of and responsibility for this whole situation on the spot. He, uh, felt differently. Actually he felt the need to literally pick me up and yell in my face about how upset he was with my decisionmaking. Apparently he'd been fruitlessly chasing me around the Hub this whole time. I'm very sympathetic to the stress he must have been under, but he wouldn't listen to my explanations, he insisted that I stop doing things and wait quietly for Simon's people to show up and take charge of me, and that just wasn't feasible under the circumstances. So when he tried to physically overpower me, I had my men arrest him for laying hands on their Admiral."

It was a bit of a farce, honestly, being chased around the room, although it was certainly upsetting at the time.

"At which point Elena observed that I had now collected three of my commanding officers into adjacent cells - Metzov, Oser, and now the ImpSec man. I didn't have a good plan for what to do when the time came to let them out, but that seemed like a safe thing to leave in the hands of Future Miles, since Present Miles had a Cetagandan invasion to forestall first."

He tries to call up the progression of events in his memory. It's all getting a little tangled now.

"We kicked off from Aslund Station, to the dismay of the Aslunders, and the dismay of the Aslunders brought the military fleet of the Aslunders chasing after us. This was perfectly in line with my goals, since I assumed that once the Cetagandan invasion fleet showed up they'd be happy to get in line behind me to fight it. Of course, if the Cetagandan invasion fleet didn't show up I'd be pretty thoroughly fucked, but I'd have stopped a war without a shot being fired and I expected to find this thought nicely consoling while all the major powers in the vicinity argued over who got to nail me to a wall. Then, let me see... ah yes. I sent a message to Cavilo, reporting that I had accomplished the task she assigned me and reminding her of the reward she had promised. I sent this message through Vervani channels, meaning that her employers would hear it before she did, and she'd have to start fielding some pointed questions about what task and what reward I could possibly be talking about."

That kicked the hornet's nest nicely; there followed a wait while Miles's ship drew within realtime comm range of Vervain Station, and then...

"Cavilo came out on one of her mercenary ships to talk to me. We chatted over the comms. She told me she was rescuing my Emperor, then threatened to kill him if I didn't let her pass. I told her I didn't mind if she did, since I'm second in line for the Imperium if Gregor dies without a named heir. She accused me of bluffing; I reminded her that if she killed Gregor she could get nothing out of Barrayar except, perhaps, through me. I think I managed to throw in an implication that I might assassinate my own father alongside an implication that if she tried her usual seduction strategy on him she'd find him immune to women. I was really on a roll. It was magnificent. And she bought it. Anyway, I told her at last that I would take no orders from her except via Gregor, and she went to get Gregor, and played him a recording of all the craziest and most incriminating things I'd said, and Gregor didn't even blink, just patted her arm and told her that I'm always muttering about some evil plot or other and he's long since stopped paying any mind. I love Gregor. He really came into his own on this trip."

He's speechless, again. 

Miles grins.

"We have now arrived at my favourite part of this story. So we arranged, Cavilo and Gregor and I, for Cavilo and Gregor to transfer to my ship, which was faster than hers. Obviously Cavilo was going to betray me at the first opportunity and threaten to kill Gregor to gain my cooperation, and obviously I didn't have a good response to that because I'm not actually Richard III in the flesh, so I decided the only solution to the hostage problem was to make it her problem by threatening to kill Gregor first. Since neither of us could afford to lose him, each of us had to worry that the other one might just be crazy enough to do it, and I'd just unloaded a whole lot of crazy on her."

He pictures the scene. Cavilo and her escort of five space-armoured soldiers arriving through the flex tube into an utterly empty corridor, Gregor accompanying them armoured in nothing but his dignity and a set of borrowed clothes. Miles and Elena waiting behind the blast door at one end of the short corridor, with a large and intimidating plasma cannon perched on the floor between them and six Dendarii troopers as backup. That cannon could make short work of not only a fully armoured soldier but also whatever part of the ship they happened to be standing in front of, which was one of the two reasons it wasn't actually charged, the other being an unwillingness to risk accidentally making good on his threats. The squad with live weapons waited behind the corridor's other door, in case of the worst.

"When she stepped onto my ship, I blew up the flex tube to cut off her line of retreat, waited a few seconds for her people to calm down, opened the blast door between us, and yelled that if she didn't drop her weapons and surrender immediately I'd blow the Emperor away. She froze up and snapped at Gregor that he'd said I was safe, what did he think safe meant, and Gregor said 'oh, he's got to be bluffing, look, I'll prove it', and walked right up to my plasma cannon. It was an absolutely riveting piece of theatre. I nearly forgot to close the door. Have I mentioned I love Gregor? During the cleanup, when we were explaining the parameters of Cavilo's new situation to her, I remember him saying, 'Both my parents died violently in political intrigue before I was six years old. Did you think you were dealing with an amateur?' He was magnificent. And I only had to get a little sarcastic with him before he agreed to hop onto Vervain Station and start doing some serious diplomacy instead of pulling rank to get himself included in the exciting parts."

Miles shrugs.

"After that, it was pretty much a purely military operation. Gregor retrieved my senior operative from his cell and got him off my back by commandeering him as a bodyguard. We got Cavilo to hand command of her army over to someone with a dependable interest in defending Vervain from the Cetagandans, and then our armies joined forces to hold the jump point until help arrived. Oser broke out of lockup and tried to escape in the middle of the battle, which would've been a disaster and might have lost us the war, except that he tried to escape in the middle of battle despite my urgent warnings, and his stolen shuttle got blown away by the Cetagandans."

He remembers Ky Tung's face when the Prince Serg came through the wormhole to the Vervani side.

"Have I mentioned Tung was an avid student of military history and considered my father one of his personal heroes? Da came out of retirement to command the rescue fleet, aboard Barrayar's newest shiniest warship. He got the Polians in on it too, but Barrayar fielded the greater part of the force and Barrayar, jointly embodied in my father and Gregor, got to command it."

Oh, yes, and there was one other thing.

"We won, of course. And then I retired to the admiral's cabin aboard the Triumph and found out where Metzov and Cavilo had ended up when Oser emptied the cells."

Metzov, red-faced demonic specter of vengeance, dropping his nerve disruptor to pick Miles up by the neck and strangle him. Cavilo, bruises ringing her throat, retrieving the abandoned weapon and shooting Metzov in the head. Her parting words just before she pulled the trigger, a quote that seemed to answer the question of how they had occupied themselves waiting for Miles's return - 'Open your legs to me, bitch, or I'll blow your brains out.' God, what a mess. And then, having finally got the measure of Miles, she let go of the weapon and placed her trust in his personal word that her life would be spared if she surrendered. Also, apparently for nothing more than her personal entertainment, she kissed him just as his security team was belatedly coming to the rescue.

"That was a terrifying couple of minutes, all right. But I survived it. Tung got a tour of the Barrayaran flagship and lunch with Da. I got a medal. As Admiral Naismith, naturally, couldn't break cover, it made lunch with Da rather interesting. Cavilo, hilariously, also got a medal. And got to leave the Hub, although under close watch by Simon's people. Last I heard, she'd retired to the pleasure domes of Mars."