"Huh. 

Okay.

We'll share across the lake but on our terms, we're not going to immediately hand over all our notes. You going to run everything back to them?"

"I have been letting Miles bring you all of my electrical engineering notes and I think it would be a little unreasonable not to let me share what I learn on this project, but if you ask me not to then I will not," she says.

"not until we decide otherwise,"" he says, "which we probably will but we are not defaulting to sending every work we do across the lake."

"Okay."

And there are no further objections to engineering help.

Ténië is extremely helpful; she was right that the project would be going much much slower without her. And her initial nervousness quickly fades, replaced by immense delight in her work.

Miles sticks around to help out some more rather than immediately going to talk to Maitimo.

They are definitely making progress. Everyone's encouraged at the prospect. 

Good! That is exactly the result he was most hoping to see!

When he's confident that Ténië will be fine, around midafternoon, he leaves off engineering and stops in at the library.

He's sitting up. "Hello."

"Hello. How're you doing?"

"I have, once or twice, been worse."

"I'll bet. So where was I? The calm stretch between Cetaganda and Jackson's Whole, I think."

"That sounds right."

"Jackson's Whole is much less appealing than Eta Ceta on nearly every conceivable level. Well, I guess the aesthetics of the uninhabited parts aren't bad."

He remembers the initial approach. A planet orbited by a veritable flock of stations, its surface ringed with the lights of civilization in a narrow mountainous band, endless frozen wastes stretching out to either side.

"It was settled originally by a semi-cooperative group of criminals who wanted a base of operations outside the reach of galactic law enforcement. They have achieved some civilization despite themselves, but their culture still flows from the same dubious source. Jacksonians can mostly be counted on not to break the specified terms of any deals they make, unless they would accrue some especially tempting gains in so doing, but apart from that they're rather infamously void of ethics. Almost opposed to them in principle. They organize themselves into Houses each led by a Baron, specializing in particular trades. House Fell does weapons; House Bharaputra does biologicals, assorted. My cover mission was a resupply with House Fell, a pretty reasonable if slightly unwise move for a mercenary company. My secret mission was to retrieve a geneticist who worked for House Bharaputra and did not wish to continue working for House Bharaputra. Jacksonian employment contract terms are usually predatory and the penalties for skipping out on one are usually lethal or worse."

"Fascinating. And I don't find frozen wastelands pretty, not really."

"I didn't really pay enough attention to do it justice in my memory, I think. But I would've felt unfair not mentioning that Jackson's Whole has at least one positive attribute that Eta Ceta doesn't, even if that positive attribute is 'limited natural beauty visible from orbit'. Anyway. Bel kept flirting with me on the way in..."

Which was awkward and, more importantly, dangerous to his cover. Admiral Naismith is supposed to be Betan, and therefore lacks any excuse for Miles's complicated Barrayaran hangups about Bel's sex. Bel even called him on it. A real Betan might reject Bel's advances, but wouldn't flinch from its touch. The instinctive aversion is something he could only have picked up if he was raised elsewhere. He trusted Bel to be discreet about its conclusions, though, and his trust has been validated so far.

"...Until we went to a party on Fell Station and Bel found someone else to flirt with." A flustered Bel Thorne is an amazing sight. He remembers the look on its face very clearly, and then the reason for the look: the woman with two extra arms in place of legs, floating in her zero-gee bubble, playing the double-sided hammer dulcimer with exquisite grace and talent. "A quaddie musician named Nicol. Quaddies are another experimental variant of humanity created hundreds of years ago - some common ground between them, there. Bel was instantly smitten. Nicol was a little more reserved. Stuck in one of those predatory Jacksonian employment contracts with Fell - she'd signed on originally under the impression that it would be a temporary arrangement, but hadn't realized how hard it would be to earn her way out when her employer did not want to let her go."

"On Beta it's considered unacceptable to be averse to advances from people of the same gender?"

"Well, not quite. For one thing, Bel isn't the same gender as me. Part of that flinch reaction was unfamiliarity, and part was Barrayaran ideas about genetic engineering, and part was Barrayaran ideas about sexuality. A real Betan facing an oncoming Bel would be influenced by none of those three things. They might have other hangups, but... their cultural context usually doesn't give rise to hangups of that particular kind. Most Betans will hear out an advance from anybody and accept or reject it as they see fit."

"Interesting."

Miles suspects that if he wonders why that's so interesting he's going to run into more theology and possibly more things he's too Betan for. As fascinating as that would be, he thinks he'd rather not go there just now.

"Where was I? Right, the party. We exchanged a few words with Baron Fell, largely inconsequential, and then we ran into Baron Ryoval. House Ryoval does... ah, specialized biologicals."

He doesn't know how to translate the concept of custom-built sex slaves accessibly into Quenya and he doesn't really feel like trying.

"Baron Ryoval wanted to harass Baron Fell out of personal enmity, and his chosen angle of the moment was pressuring Fell to sell him Nicol as raw material, either the musician herself or a tissue sample with which to create duplicates and derivatives. Bel and I... both got very galactic about that. Slavery and theft of gene samples are both illegal in the kind of civilized jurisdictions we were used to. On Jackson's Whole there is effectively no law at all, only custom and precedent and predictable patterns of personal retaliation. Ryoval had a good laugh over our offended sensibilities."

"In the interests of full disclosure, once we find a way to your galaxy I think I am going to destroy this place."

"What, Jackson's Whole? Physically or politically?"

Maitimo wouldn't be the first to fantasize about scouring that system of life, not by a long shot, but Miles doesn't actually expect him to make his first act on the galactic stage be a genocide. As for the latter option... despite himself, Miles is already planning for it.

You'd need a multi-pronged approach. By that point they'll probably have enough raw destructive power available to conquer the planet if they so choose, but that'll be messy as hell, better left as a threat than pursued as a primary strategy; it wouldn't take long at all to amass vast wealth, vast enough to buy out all the major Houses, but without the threat of conquest some of them won't be willing to sell; and for the holdouts, you'd have to target their economic power base, starve them of income by selling whatever they're selling at higher quality for a lower price. Under what Miles thinks are pretty reasonable assumptions about the resources respectively available to Jackson's Whole and the Noldor when the Noldor reach the wormhole nexus, it will practically be another Komarr in its theoretical simplicity. Of course, Komarr didn't exactly turn out as planned either. A lot will depend on when they make contact and whether Miles is still alive at the time. He might have to shuffle some of his priorities around, postpone some of the wilder risks until after they find his galaxy again.

"Politically. I've had rather enough of kinslaying. And that sounds about right, and doesn't even demand any particular talent on our part beyond what's necessary to reach the stars."

"I hate to point this out, but Jacksonians aren't by any stretch of the imagination your kin," says Miles. "Anyway, yes, I'm fully on board with a combined economic and military conquest of Jackson's Whole."