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fled.

     

CHAPTER TWO

    Miles sat before the secured comconsole in his cabin aboard the flagship Peregrine , composing what seemed like his thousandth classified field report to the Chief of Barrayaran Imperial Security, Simon Illyan. Well, it wasn't the thousandth, that was absurd. He couldn't have averaged more than three or four missions a year, and he'd been at it less than a decade, really, since the Vervain invasion adventure had made it all official. Less than forty assignments. But he could no longer name the actual number offhand without stopping to think, and add them all up, and it wasn't an effect of lingering cryo-amnesia, either.

    Keep organizing, boy . His personal synopsis needed to be no more than a brief guide to the appendices of raw data, drawn from the Dendarii Fleet's own files. Illyan's intelligence analysts liked having lots of raw data to chew upon. It kept them occupied, down in their little cubicles in the bowels of ImpSec headquarters at Vorbarr Sultana. And entertained too, Miles sometimes feared.

    The Peregrine , the Ariel , and the rest of "Admiral Naismith's" select battle group now orbited the planet of Zoave Twilight. His fleet accountant had turned in a busy couple of days, settling up with the insurance company who finally had their freighter and crew back, applying for salvage fees for the hijacker's captured ships, and filing the official claims for bounty to the Vega Station Embassy. Miles entered the costs/returns spreadsheets in full into his report, as Appendix A .

    The prisoners had been dumped downside, for the Vegan and Zoavan governments to divide between them—preferably in the same sense as poor Vorberg had been. The ex-hijackers were a vile crew. Miles was almost sorry the pinnace had surrendered. Appendix B was copies of the Dendarii recordings of the prisoner interrogations. The downside governments would get an edited version of these, with most of the Barrayar-specific queries and answers deleted. Lots of criminal testimony, of little direct interest to ImpSec, though the Vegans ought to be pretty excited about it.

    The important thing from Illyan's point of view was that no evidence had been extracted which would indicate that the kidnapping of the Barrayaran courier was anything but an accidental side effect of the hijacking. Unless—Miles made sure to note this in his synopsis—that information had been known only to those hijackers who had been killed. Since that number included both their so-called captain and two of the higher-ranking officers, there were enough possibilities in this direction to keep Illyan's analysts earning their pay. But that lead must now be traced from the other end, through the House Hargraves representatives who had been trying to handle the sale or ransom of the courier for the hijackers. Miles hoped cordially that ImpSec would focus its best negative attentions upon the Jacksonian semicriminal Great House. Though House Hargraves's agents had been extremely, if unwittingly, useful in helping the Dendarii set up their raid.

    Illyan ought to like the accountant's report. The Dendarii had not only succeeded in keeping their costs under budget this time— for a change —they had made a truly amazing profit. Illyan, who had been willing to spend Imperial marks like water on the principle of the thing, had got his courier officer retrieved effectively for free. Are we good, yes?

    So—when was the so-efficient ImpSec Lieutenant Lord Miles Vorkosigan finally going to get that longed-for promotion to captain? Odd, how Miles's Barrayaran rank still seemed more real to him than his Dendarii one. True, he had proclaimed himself an admiral first and then earned it later, instead of the more normal other way around, but at this late date no one could say he had not really become what he had once pretended to be. From the galactic point of view, Admiral Naismith was solid all the way through. Everything he advertised himself as being, he really