The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [57]
The Earth-side cell of Komarran terrorists gives Miles his first experience of being interrogated with fast-penta and he provides results unique to his warped biochemistry.
The action dissolves to a game of kill the clone in the dikes of London's Thames River. The dikes provide an unpopulated site for a game of stunner tag—though some of the players are cheating by using nerve disruptors. Moving up and down, inside and outside of the enormous structure, Miles puts to good use a powered rappelling harness with the ability to lift two or three people.
The best exploration of technology in Mirror Dance comes from the death of Miles and his re-"birth." But, before Miles can die, there's the fighting.
Mark impersonates Miles and steals the Ariel. Then he takes Bel Thorne and the Green Squad of commandos, led by Taura, down to the surface of Jackson's Whole to raid House Bharaputra's clone-raising facility.
The technologies in the fight aren't new or surprising to the series. The drop team wears half-armor as is common in normal temperatures and atmospheric pressures—space armor isn't needed. The half-armor starts with a full body and head cloth-suit containing nerve-disruptor shield net. Next comes torso armor that would stop anything from deadly needler-spines up to small hand-missiles. Over that goes a combat fabric uniform, with equipment belts and weapons. The backpack contains a one-man-sized plasma arc mirror field. Topping it off is the combat helmet, and since Mark is able to wear Admiral Naismith's equipment, he has plenty of command and control electronics.
Mark, Bel, and the team get delayed and surrounded, then trapped on the ground when their only drop shuttle is destroyed by a thermal grenade in the cockpit. All they can do is huddle with the valuable clone children around them.
Miles to the rescue! Wearing as much borrowed equipment as he can get that came close to fitting, Miles leads another drop team to the rescue.
A Bharaputran guard shoots Miles in the chest with a needle grenade. Since Miles's borrowed equipment doesn't include the torso armor, the fatal shot blows out his heart, lungs, and organs.
In this case, the future combat medics come with a portable cryo-chamber. Miles's throat is cut, his blood is drained and replaced with cryo-fluid, and he's put in the float cryo-chamber and frozen. Then, as the combat worsens, a medic takes Miles's portable cryo-chamber to the fully automated shipping department and ships him to an address on Jackson's Whole where he should be safe. Miles makes it to a cryo-revival facility, where they grow new organs for him and rebuild him.
A risk of returning to Jackson's Whole is that on their last visit, Miles and Taura destroyed Ryoval's tissue bank, used to construct genetic monsters as treats in his depraved bordello's dungeons.
When Baron Ryoval captures Mark, he is ready to spend years torturing him, thinking he's Miles, or using him for practice if he's actually the clone. Ryoval uses beatings, force feedings, and humiliation using violent aphrodisiacs and degradation—photographed from all angles by hovering (anti-gravity) holovid cameras.
Ryoval also skins Mark alive, not with knives but with a chemical spray that melts his skin off, leaving his raw tissues and pain nerve endings exposed to any touch—he can't sit, he can't lie down, he just stands, shifting from foot to foot till his legs give way.
The final item of technology is Ryoval's key to all his doors, archives, files, and his entire empire—in (what could be better?) a secret decoder ring.
At the beginning of Memory, Miles has been mustered out of the Imperial Service due to a case of seizures he picked up in the process of his death and cryo-revival.
The technology explored in the plot is Simon Illyan's eidetic memory chip, which has helped him be such an effective administrator and a terror to subordinates, whose errors are never forgotten.