"Ha," he says, pleased by this assessment.

(Maitimo reminds him so much of Gregor sometimes... they both have the rare distinction of being someone whose authority Miles feels he could trust, insofar as Miles ever trusts anyone's authority, and recognizing the talent in his apparent luck is part of that. Also, there's something similar about the pride he feels in being admired by someone admirable, some strangely specific emotional tone that he couldn't hope to analyze or articulate but can recognize perfectly well.)

Miles has a probably-romantic-in-nature desire for Gregor's admiration, and Bel's, and at this point possibly Maitjmo's. Miles is not wholly aware of this. He's not going to point this out, not his problem, and Miles doesn't seem to actually have the Betan sensibilities he keeps mentioning anyway.

It's possible that Miles catches some faint thread of this reaction, but not enough to guess what Maitimo is actually thinking.

"Anyway. That was Jackson's Whole. I apologize for how horrifying this part of my story was, and I hope to make it up to you by helping you dismantle the place as soon as we reach my galaxy again."

"That'd more than make it up. Dare I imagine that's the last adventure you encountered in your short 24 years?"

"Nope. I had a few minor scuffles here and there, defused a hostage crisis or two, and then earlier this year I was sent on a rescue mission that, uh, escalated rapidly beyond initial parameters. But I should maybe save that one for tomorrow."

"Yes, good idea." He shakes his head wonderingly.

"Is that a 'how can that many things possibly have happened to one person in twenty-four years' headshake?" he guesses.

"I was thinking more 'how to occupy him for the next twenty-four'."

"I'd imagined I was going to be pretty well occupied helping you win your war," he says. "Although if you have specific suggestions, I will be happy to hear them."

"That's the goal, the means I'm still working on."

"I look forward to hearing whatever you come up with."

"Perhaps by the time you've reached the end of your adventures I'll have thoughts on how best to continue them."

"I hope so!" he says cheerfully. "Better think fast, though, there won't be another one after Dagoola unless you ask me to go back and fill in some of the parts I skipped over. Who'd've thought telling my entire life story in order would be so difficult?"

"It's mobility, more than time, that's constraining me." He shakes his head. "Go take a deserved break, tell me about Dagoola tomorrow."

"Sure. See you," he says, and goes off to check on the sound recorder project.

Which is coming along! They need a lot of instruments more precise than the ones they have, so they're working on those. They mostly pepper Miles with questions about materials they don't have and what might substitute for those.

Miles has some thoughts, and knows what can plausibly be looked up in the Survey Handbook, and what can plausibly be located using his scans of the area, that's how they found the magnetic rocks, and all in all he's a pretty big help in the materials department; plus in a few cases he happens to know that instrments of the requisite precision can be tracked down from that pile of stuff he left here when he went off to level Angband.

Also, he's very happy to see that Ténië has been doing well. She's so anxious when she's unsure of herself and so glorious when she's in her element, and the sound recorder project is very clearly her element.

It is not looking like inventing plastics is tractable, and that's going to be a setback, but everything else can proceed at full speed.

Plastics aren't strictly necessary. They do make everything much more convenient, but there are alternatives for nearly all of their uses, and ways around the trickier applications too. Miles helps. Miles delights in helping. Miles delights in Ténië's delight in the work.

When he goes back across the lake to sleep in his shuttle, he leaves Ténië still happily working.

Elves don't sleep much when a project this exciting lands in their laps. 

Yes, that is evident.

He goes to sleep and wakes up and comes back and checks on the project again and gets drawn into another materials-related discussion and escapes to the library around midmorning.

It's a different brother of Maitimo's attending to him this morning. He does not introduce himself. Maitimo sighs and sits up a bit and does the introduction for him. "Miles, my brother Morifinwe Carnistir. Moryo, you've definitely had your ears open enough to catch some of this, right?"

"Wasn't particularly attending to it."

"Pleased to meet you, Morifinwë Carnistir," says Miles. "Wow, coming in on my life story at Dagoola is going to be interesting. I'll try to keep all the necessary background information in mind; feel free to prompt me for explanations if you get lost and would prefer to be less lost."

He's already settling into the storytelling mindset, which for Miles means both broadcasting his every thought and focusing his thoughts on the subject at hand with remarkable grace and precision.

"This one starts with Marilac. They're a planet that borders the Cetagandan Empire," he illustratively envisions the Marilac and Xi Ceta star systems and the chain of wormholes between, "and their embassy was the one where I had that embarrassing accident on Eta Ceta," he calls up the memory, lingering on the beauty of the art installation and only lightly touching on the agony and humiliation of the microwaved leg braces.

He has an attentive audience. Carnistir might not have been attending earlier but he is today.

"The latest in Cetagandan expansionism involved the restless ghem of Xi Ceta launching an invasion of Marilac. It went pretty well for them at the start; Cetagandan invasions often do. It was in Barrayar's interest for Cetaganda to continue being caught up in that conflict rather than rolling over them in a decisive victory, so Simon sent me and my army to even the odds a little. The Cetagandans had recently captured a particularly effective Marilacan officer, and I was supposed to infiltrate the detention facility where they were keeping him, then extract him and offer him all reasonable aid in re-forming the Marilacan resistance, with the ultimate goal of the Marilacans exhausting a lot of Cetagandan time and attention and money and then eventually winning. When I got there..."

He remembers light. Glaring white light, harsh and unceasing. It is not a comfortable memory.

"There are galactic standards for the treatment of prisoners, and this place technically complied with all of them. Food and water and sanitation facilities, clothing, basic hygiene... they kept us all under one big force dome, issued each prisoner a cup and a set of clothes on entry, fed us twice a day by shoving a big pile of standard ration bars into the dome, had water faucets and latrines spaced out inside the dome. The rules technically specify only that prisoners must have access to medical personnel, not medical equipment, so they just put the captured medtechs in with everybody else. The rules forbid solitary confinement - no danger of that; there were ten thousand prisoners under that dome, and no privacy to be had. The rules forbid keeping someone in constant darkness - they used constant light instead. Nothing about beds, so they had us sleeping on the bare ground."

His mind paints the picture, and it is a bleak one. Humans are not as aesthetically driven as Elves, but the unrelenting ugliness of this place would make anyone unhappy.

"I didn't go in thinking the Cetagandans would be nice to their prisoners, but this was on a whole different level from what I expected. It was... unsettling, especially since I had six weeks until my scheduled pickup. And then I managed to locate the guy I was supposed to rescue, and he was catatonic. Completely unresponsive to the outside world. A friend of his was getting food and water into him, but didn't expect to be able to keep him alive much longer. Also, early on in my stay a gang of roving opportunists caught me and stole my cup and clothes and beat me up a little. Lucky for me they weren't trying very hard, or they'd have broken some bones for sure, and my stay on Dagoola IV would have been even less comfortable."