Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [16]
The waitress delivered their salads and iced tea, and there was a short break in the conversation while her uncle appreciated the fresh spinach, mangoes and onions, and candied pecans. She'd guessed the candied pecans would please him. The market-garden hydroponics production in Serifosa was among Komarr's best.
She used the break to redirect the conversation toward her greatest current curiosity. "Your colleague Lord Vorkosigan—did he really have a thirteen-year career in Imperial Security?" Or were you just irritated by Tien?
"Three years in the Imperial Military Academy, a decade in ImpSec, to be precise."
"How did he ever get in, past the physicals?"
"Nepotism, I believe. Of a sort. To give him credit, it seems to have been an advantage he used sparingly thereafter. I had the fascinating experience of reading his entire classified military record, when Gregor asked me and my fellow Auditors to review Vorkosigan's candidacy, before he made the appointment."
She subsided in slight disappointment. "Classified. In that case, I suppose you can't tell me anything about it."
"Well," he grinned around a mouthful of salad, "there was the Dagoola IV episode. You must have heard of it, that giant breakout from the Cetagandan prisoner of war camp that the Marilacans made a few years ago?"
She recalled it only dimly. She'd been heads-down in motherhood, about that time, and scarcely paid attention to news, especially any so remote as galactic news. But she nodded encouragement for him to go on.
"It's all old history now. I understand from Vorkosigan that the Marilacans are engaged in producing a holovid drama on the subject. The Greatest Escape, or something like that, they're calling it. They tried to hire him—or actually, his cover identity—to be a technical consultant on the script, an opportunity he has regretfully declined. But for ImpSec to retain security classification upon a series of events that the Marilacans are simultaneously dramatizing planetwide strikes me as a bit rigid, even for ImpSec. In any case, Vorkosigan was the Barrayaran agent behind that breakout."
"I didn't even know we had an agent behind that."
"He was our man on-site."
So that odd joke about snoring Marilacans . . . hadn't been. Quite. "If he was so good, why did he quit?"
"Hm." Her uncle applied himself to mopping up the last of his salad dressing with his multigrain roll, before replying. "I can only give you an edited version of that. He didn't quit voluntarily. He was very badly injured—to the point of requiring cryo-freezing—a couple of years ago. Both the original injury and the cryo-freeze did him a lot of damage, some of it permanent. He was forced to take a medical discharge, which he—hm!—did not handle well. It's not my place to discuss those details."
"If he was injured badly enough to need cryo-freeze, he was dead!" she said, startled.
"Technically, I suppose so. `Alive' and `dead' are not such neat categories as they used to be in the Time of Isolation."
So, her uncle was in possession of just the sort of medical information about Vorkosigan's mutations she most wanted to know, if he had paid any attention to it. Military physicals were thorough.
"So rather than let all that training and experience go to waste," Uncle Vorthys went on, "Gregor found a job for Vorkosigan on the civilian side. Most Auditorial duties are not too physically onerous . . . though I confess, it's been useful to have someone younger and thinner than myself to send out-station for those long inspections in a pressure suit. I'm afraid I've abused his endurance a bit, but he's proved very observant."
"So he really is your assistant?"
"By no means. What fool said that? All Auditors are coequal. Seniority is only