Young Miles - Lois McMaster Bujold [220]
Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan vented an unladylike snort. "You are in limbo, kiddo." Her flat Betan accent fell warmly on Miles's ears, despite her sardonic tone. She tossed her head—she wore her red-roan hair pinned back from her face and waving loose down her back today, gleaming against a rich autumn brown jacket picked out with silver embroidery, and the swinging skirts of a Vor-class woman. Grey-eyed, striking, her pale face seemed so alive with flickering thought one scarcely noticed she was not beautiful. For twenty-one years she'd passed as a Vor matron in the wake of her Great Man, yet still seemed as unimpressed by Barrayaran hierarchies as ever—though not, Miles thought, unmoved by Barrayaran wounds.
So why do I never think of my ambition as ship command like my mother before me? Captain Cordelia Naismith, Betan Astronomical Survey, had been in the risky business of expanding the wormhole nexus jump by blind jump, for humanity, for pure knowledge, for Beta Colony's economic advancement, for—what had driven her? She'd commanded a sixty-person survey vessel, far from home and help—there were certain enviable aspects to her former career, to be sure. Chain-of-command, for example, would have been a legal fiction out in the farbeyond, the wishes of Betan HQ a matter for speculation and side bets.
She moved now so wavelessly through Barrayaran society, only her most intimate observers realized how detached she was from it, fearing no one, not even the dread Illyan, controlled by no one, not even the Admiral himself. It was the casual fearlessness, Miles decided, that made his mother so unsettling. The Admiral's Captain. Following in her footsteps would be like firewalking.
"What's going on out there?" Miles asked. "This place is almost as much fun as solitary confinement, y'know? Have they decided I'm a mutineer after all?"
"I don't think so," said the Countess. "They're discharging the others—your Lieutenant Bonn and the rest—not precisely dishonorably, but without benefits or pensions or that Imperial Liegeman status that seems to mean so much to Barrayaran men—"
"Think of it as a funny sort of Reservist," Miles advised. "What about Metzov and the grubs?"
"He's being discharged the same way. He lost the most, I think."
"They're just turning him loose?" Miles frowned.
Countess Vorkosigan shrugged. "Because there were no deaths, Aral was persuaded he couldn't make a court-martial with any harsher punishment stick. They decided not to involve the trainees with any charges."
"Hm. I'm glad, I think. And, ah . . . me?"
"You remain officially listed as detained by Imperial Security. Indefinitely."
"Limbo is supposed to be an indefinite sort of place." His hand picked at his sheet. His knuckles were still swollen. "How long?"
"However long it takes to have its calculated psychological effect."
"What, to drive me crazy? Another three days ought to do it."
Her lip quirked. "Long enough to convince the Barrayaran militarists that you are being properly punished for your, uh, crime. As long as you are confined in this rather sinister building, they can be encouraged to imagine you undergoing—whatever they imagine goes on in here. If you're allowed to run around town partying, it will be much harder to maintain the illusion that you've been hung upside down on the basement wall."
"It all seems so . . . unreal." He hunched back into his pillow. "I only wanted to serve."
A brief smile flicked her wide mouth up, and vanished. "Ready to reconsider another line of work, love?"
"Being Vor is more than just a job."
"Yes, it's a pathology. Obsessional delusion. It's a big galaxy out there, Miles. There are other ways to serve, larger . . . constituencies."
"So why do you stay here?" he shot back.
"Ah." She smiled bleakly at the touché. "Some people's needs are more compelling than guns."
"Speaking of Dad, is he coming back?"
"Hm. No. I'm to tell you, he's going to distance himself for a time. So as not to give