"Perhaps we need to burn the Cetagandan empire to the ground after all."

"It's an incentives problem. Lisbet is working on it. I don't know her exact approach, but what really needs to happen is a shift in cultural context so the male ghem aren't pushed toward thinking of conquest as their most promising avenue to wealth and status - in general, they need more socially validated things to do with their time and energy that aren't war or related to war. Trying to impose that sort of thing from the outside... generally doesn't go well. Jackson's Whole will be vastly more tractable."

"My first concern when it comes to war crimes is not whether the torturers had socially validated avenues other than torture for their ambitions."

"The people who thought up Dagoola in particular have already been dealt with and will not be causing any more trouble," he says. The undertone of his thoughts suggests that the resolution to this one is even more satisfying than what he did to Ryoval's gene banks, in a broadly similar way. "I am very interested in causing the Cetagandans to stop committing war crimes, but from where I stand I think the best angle I have on the situation is to leave Lisbet to it and meanwhile continue doing my part to make conquest an unprofitable enterprise."

"Do tell me how they were dealt with."

"When I arrived the prisoners were... a real mess. The resources at my disposal were my own mind and body, the fact that I knew my Dendarii had infiltrated the Cetagandan surveillance of the prison camp to watch me, and a fellow prisoner-outcast who nobody else would talk to because he'd gone a little crazy and kept annoying people by talking about his religious revelation. The Cetagandan surveillance of the prison camp was known to be good enough that I had to assume anything I did or said was being monitored - good and bad, because their surveillance was also my only avenue of communication with my army."

He pauses; reflects on the parameters of the situation, the bleak despair he felt after locating the catatonic colonel; smiles slightly.

"So of course I resolved to rescue all ten thousand prisoners," he says.

"Good."

"Have I mentioned that rescue missions are my favourite? Rescue missions are my very favourite," says Miles.

From bleak despair, his remembered emotional state transitions to energetic determination.

"I got Suegar - my new friend with the religious revelation - to explain his prophecy to me. It was just a scrap of paper he'd torn out of a book and stuffed in his shoe to stop it making an annoying clicking noise, before he got captured. Essentially random. I think deep down he knew there was no real meaning to be found there, but it was the best I had to go on, so I resolved to make the meaning. The exact words were, let me see if I can get them right—"

He calls them to mind and provides a mental translation as he recites the original English. "For those that shall be the heirs of salvation. Thus they went along toward the gate. Now you must note that the city stood upon a mighty hill, but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them by the arms; so they had left their mortal garments behind them in the river, for though they went in with them, they came out without them. They therefore went up here with much agility and speed, through the foundation upon which the city was framed higher than the clouds. They therefore went up through the regions of the air..."

"Suegar was interested in me in the first place because I was wandering around naked, having had my clothes stolen, and he thought I might be the second of the two men, himself obviously being the first. I went with it. Straight over to the women's section of the camp - they were the biggest organized group under the dome by far, united by external pressure." The pressure in question being the threat of rape, which was not uncommon before they self-organized. "I introduced myself to a border patrol. They picked me up and threw me away from their territory. I went back and tried again. And again and again. Told them about my fragile bones, in the interests of making the whole process more efficient."

The logic there goes something like: he can't try to approach people in their situation from a position of strength. It has to be vulnerability. So if the border guards demonstrate an interest in beating him up, that's an opportunity to be more vulnerable. Luckily, they weren't interested enough to test his assertion.

"My approach worked. They agreed to let me speak with their leader, a woman named Tris. Tris wanted to know what I wanted and what I thought I could offer her in return. I told her I was offering her command of the camp, in exchange for her assistance in securing command of the camp, and maybe some clothes if she had any to spare. Dropped a couple of hints indicating that I might have access to outside help, but framed everything in terms of the religious angle. She caught on and agreed to my plan, and then me and Suegar went around to everyone we could coax, cajole, or coerce into joining up, and made our pitch. Got two hundred more people behind Tris's borders before she started to get nervous and cut us off. It was enough. Next chow call, we had enough people to take the pile."

An illustrative memory of the chaos that descended during his first chow call under the dome, before he implemented this plan. People scrambling toward or away from the inward bulge in the dome - the appearance of the food pile - the melee that followed. He was told, at the time, that it had started out very orderly, everyone politely taking their one ration bar from the supply as it was delivered; and then one day, either someone had taken more than their share or the pile had been deliberately shorted by a bar or two... in those conditions, it didn't take much to create the kind of instability that grew and grew until every food delivery became violent chaos.

"Normally chow call was a free-for-all, a stampede - you ran for the pile if it was close enough, grabbed as many ration bars as you could carry, and hoped you could run away again before somebody decided to take them away from you. Some of them always ended up fighting it out. People got trampled or beaten to death. It was nasty. But when Tris's group took the pile, we kept order and handed the bars out fairly, one to a customer, no one left out and no one given double. It was... it's hard to articulate just how much of a change that was. The Cetagandans had been breaking these people down, turning them against each other, and we took a huge, very public step toward restoring order and civilization and cooperation."

 Miles is in obvious pain and the Cetagandans need to be burned to the ground and perhaps Angband is skewing his sensibilities or perhaps it is in fact worth melting eight planets if they contain the sort of people who could do this sort of thing.

Not very helpful commentary, that.

And it's not as if he's going to trade stories on psychological warfare.

He doesn't think Elves would react that way - start building something tolerably pretty in the dirt, more likely - but it'd be rude to say so. "That was clever."

"Thank you," says Miles.

"It wasn't that simple, of course, but it was almost that simple. I had to get ten thousand people united in the common cause of egalitarian food distribution, and - there weren't quite factional divides, but there were feuds, there were people who had done objectively evil things and yet still deserved to eat, there were people who had previously been able to hoard food and push people around and now couldn't do that and were upset about it and made trouble for me trying to collapse my orderly regime. And while this was all going on I also had to drop enough hints that my Dendarii could figure out what I wanted from them, without alerting the Cetagandans that I expected an outside rescue. I insisted that we divide the food pile into fourteen parts, claimed it was a theologically significant number, drilled them and drilled them on the fourteen-line chow call - the biggest ship in my fleet has fourteen shuttles."

He's skipping over most of the internal experience of those six weeks. They were by turns boring and exhilarating, and honestly he should probably be analyzing them for lessons he can apply to the project of reuniting the Noldor, but - he flinches from the memory of light. Straight on to the moment when the force dome vanished.

"I managed it. And when rescue did arrive, I yelled 'chow call' and got them in their fourteen orderly lines. It was - beautiful." Emotionally if not aesthetically, seeing everyone realize what he'd done, the first dazed looks of hope and wonder as they stood under the wide open sky for the first time in weeks or months. Rescue missions are his favourite. Rescue missions are so much his favourite. "We lost two shuttles in the battle, one with two hundred rescuees aboard, but we got everyone off the ground. All ten thousand of them. Ky says it's the third biggest prisoner-of-war escape in human history."

And he is fiercely, ecstatically proud. This is what he lives for. In the very foundations of his being, before anything else, before Barrayar, before his family, before his honour, what Miles fundamentally is is a solver of problems. The sort of person who walks into Hell and immediately begins organizing a mass breakout. If people had dictionary definitions, his would be 'one who accomplishes the impossible in service of the well-being of others'.

And he is very clearly not okay. Gleeful, but not okay. "That is my favorite of the stories, I think. Congratulations."

"Thank you," he says again, fairly glowing with pride. "And then we set up our rescuees with the resources to keep themselves going, and then we spent about half a year fleeing Cetagandan retaliation, and then I vanished inexplicably and showed up here, and I think you know the rest."

"Half a year? How far were they following you?"

"Across multiple star systems." He traces the route in his mind, jump to jump to jump. It's a long and tangled way. "We were just coming up on Earth, which would've been my first chance to check in with a Barrayaran embassy and report home since we pulled off the mission. It's going to be a bit of a mess without me, but I think they'll be all right."

"Sorry about snatching you away, not that I think we did it."

"All things considered, I'd rather be here than there," he says.

"So. That was my story. Anything you want gone over again in more detail? I know I ended up skipping a lot more than I meant to."

He stands by what he said to Macalaurë. Even if Maitimo has already decided what he thinks of reality, Miles made a commitment and he is going to see it through.

"Nothing comes to mind. Alright." He sits up. "We tried throwing ourselves straight at the Enemy when we arrived and it was a bad idea. We are obviously much stronger now but maybe shouldn't err in that direction again. I think the best approach is to learn how to make the weapons of your world, from your books, and then use them to level Angband. If we move fast enough I think we'll be ahead of him. There is a distracting succession crisis which is going to slow down progress and I need to speak to Nolofinwe about it, but I don't know if he'll assent to come here and I don't know if I can walk."

"Would going across the lake on a grav stretcher harm your cause?"

"Depends very much on what my cause is, I think. It's obvious that the King should be whoever will leverage your world's knowledge most effectively and that would easily be my father if he were alive. Since he's dead - 

- I would have said we can't do much better than keeping the hosts far enough away from each other that conflict isn't constantly arising and keeping the leadership on nominally friendly terms. But maybe with all these exciting new options there's a better one, something that leaves us united."

"I'm in favour of unity," says Miles. "I'm not sure how to achieve it, but maybe we can think of something."

"Going across the lake on a stretcher might help with that, if what my cousins want to establish is that we did not profit off our betrayal, or hurt if what's in question is my capacity to lead."

"...My instinct is that it'll do more good on the former front than harm on the latter, but I also don't know how quickly you're going to recover the ability to walk..."

"I haven't been focusing on that, I have all this maladaptive instincts that anyone who touches me is holding me down and if I can't move it's because I'm chained in some way I've failed to recognize - and revulsion at food and drink, and my body tends to freeze up - and I've been directing all my energy towards suppressing those. I might be able to walk in a few days if it was my focus."

It would be impractical to fly into a rage on Maitimo's behalf, so Miles doesn't.

Instead he takes a moment to compose himself and then says: "In that case I think going across on a stretcher is a viable option if Nolofinwë won't come to you, or potentially even as a first move. You're the local expert, of course, that's just the feeling I'm having."

"You're the provider of stretchers. I suppose the war's going to be fought less with swords than we thought, and demand less swordsmanship from its leaders accordingly. Will you accompany me? I don't think I'd get assent to bring my brothers and you will have some insights as to the strategic demands of the situation, knowing your technology better than we do."