Elena smiled derisively, then sighed seriously. "I was just thinking—I've never put flowers on my mother's grave."
He brightened at the prospect of a project. "Do you want to? We could slip out the back—load up a cart or two—nobody'd notice …"
"Certainly not!" she said indignantly. "This is quite bad enough of you." She turned the flowers in the light from the window, silvered from the chill autumn cloudiness. "Anyway, I don't know where it is."
"Oh? How strange. As fixated as the Sergeant is on your mother, I'd have thought he'd be just the pilgrimmage type. Maybe he doesn't like to think about her death, though."
"You're right about that. I asked him about it once, to go and see where she's buried and so on, and it was like talking to a wall. You know how he can be."
"Yes, very like a wall. Particularly when it falls on someone." A theorizing gleam lit Miles's eye. "Maybe it's guilt. Maybe she was one of those rare women who die in childbirth—she did die about the time you were born, didn't she?"
"He said it was a flyer accident."
"Oh."
"But another time he said she'd drowned."
"Hm?" The gleam deepened to a persistent smoulder. "If she'd ditched her flyer in a river or something, they could both be true. Or if he ditched it …"
Elena shivered. Miles caught it, and castigated himself inwardly for being an insensitive clod. "Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to—I'm in a gruesome mood today, I'm afraid," he apologized. "It's all this blasted black." He flapped his elbows in imitation of a carrion bird.
He lapsed into introspective quiet for a time, meditating on the ceremonies of death. Elena fell in with his silence, gazing wistfully down on the darkly glittering throng of Barrayar's upper class, passing in and out four floors below her window.
"We could find out," he said suddenly, startling her from her reverie.
"What?"
"Where your mother's buried. And we wouldn't even have to ask anyone."
"How?"
He grinned, swinging to his feet. "I'm not going to say. You'd go all wobbly on me, like that time we went spelunking down at Vorkosigan Surleau and found the old guerilla weapons cache. You'll never get another chance in your life to drive one of those old tanks, you know."
She made doubtful noises. Apparently her memory of the incident was vivid and awful, even though she had avoided being caught in the landslide. But she followed.
They entered the darkened downstairs library cautiously. Miles paused to brace the duty guard outside it with an off-color smirk, lowering his voice confidentially. "Suppose you could sort of rattle the door if anyone comes, Corporal? We'd, ah—rather not have any surprise interruptions."
The duty guard's return smirk was knowing. "Of course, Lord Mi—Lord Vorkosigan." He eyed Elena with fresh speculation, one eyebrow quirking.
"Miles," Elena whispered furiously as the door swung closed, cutting off the steady murmur of voices, clink of glass and silver, soft tread of feet from Piotr Vorkosigan's wake that penetrated from nearby rooms. "Do you realize what he's going to think?"
"Evil to him who evil thinks," he flung gaily over his shoulder. "Just so he doesn't think of this …" He palmed the lock to the comconsole, with its double-scrambled links to military headquarters and the Imperial Residence, that sat incongruously before the carved marble fireplace. Elena's mouth fell open in astonishment as its force screen parted. A few passes of his hands brought the holovid plates to life.
"I thought that was top security!" she gasped.
"'Tis. But Captain Koudelka was giving me a little tutoring on the side, before, when I was—" a bitter smile, a jerk of the wrist, "studying. He used to tap into the battle computers—the real ones, at headquarters—and run simulations for me. I thought he might not have remembered to unkey me …" he was half-absorbed, entering a tattoo of complex directions.
"What are you doing? " she asked nervously.
"Entering Captain Koudelka's access code. To get military records."
"Ye gods, Miles!"
"Don't worry about it." He patted her hand. "We're in here necking, remember? Nobody's likely to come in here tonight but Captain Koudelka, and he won't mind that. We can't miss. Thought I'd start with your father's Service record. Ah, here …" The holovid plate threw up a flat screen and began displaying written records. "There's bound to be something about your mother on it, that we can use to unravel," he paused, sitting back puzzled, "the mystery .. ." He flipped through several screens.
"What?" Elena agitated.
"Thought I'd peek into near the time you were born—I thought he'd quit the Service just before, right?"
"Right."
"Did he ever say he was involuntarily medically discharged?"
"No …" She peered over his shoulder. "That's funny. It doesn't say why."
"Tell you what's funnier. His entire record for most of the preceding year is sealed. Your time. And the code on it—very hot. I can't crack it without triggering a doublecheck, which would end—yes, that's Captain Illyan's personal mark. I definitely don't want to talk to him." He quailed at the thought of accidentally summoning the attention of Barrayar's Chief of Imperial Security.
"Definitely," croaked Elena, staring at him in fascination.
"Well, let's do some time-travelling," Miles pattered on. "Back, back … Your father doesn't seem to have gotten along too well with this Commodore Vorrutyer fellow."
Elena perked with interest. "Was that the same as the Admiral Vorrutyer who was killed at Escobar?"
"Um … Yes, Ges Vorrutyer. Hm." Bothari had been the commodore's batman, it appeared, for several years. Miles was surprised. He'd had the vague impression that Bothari had served under his father as a ground combat soldier since the beginning of time. Bothari's service with Vorrutyer ended in a constellation of reprimands, black marks, discipline parades, and sealed medical reports. Miles, conscious of Elena staring over his shoulder, whipped past these quickly. Oddly inconsistent. Some, bizarrely petty, were marked with ferocious punishments. Others, astonishingly serious—had Bothari really held an engineering tech at plasma-arc-point in a lavatory for sixteen hours? and for God's sake, why?—disappeared into the medical reports and resulted in no discipline at all.
Going farther into the past, the record steadied. A lot of combat in his twenties. Commendations, citations for being wounded, more commendations. Excellent marks in basic training. Recruiting records. "Recruiting was a lot simpler in those days," Miles said enviously.
"Oh! Are my grandparents on that?" asked Elena eagerly. "He never talks about them, either. I gather his mother died when he was rather young. He's never even told me her name."
"Marusia," Miles sounded out, peering. "Fuzzy photostat."
"That's pretty," said Elena, sounding pleased. "And his father's?"
Whoops, thought Miles. The recopied photostat was not so fuzzy that he couldn't make out the blunt, uncapitalized "unknown" printed in some forgotten clerk's hand. Miles swallowed, realizing at last why a certain insulting epithet seemed to get under Bothari's skin when all others were allowed to roll off, patiently disdained.
"Maybe I can make it out," Elena offered, misinterpreting his delay.
The screen went blank at a twitch of his hand. "Konstantine," Miles declared firmly, without hesitation. "Same as his. But both his parents were dead by the time he joined the Service."
"Konstantine Bothari junior," Elena mused. "Hm."
Miles stared into the blank screen, and suppressed an urge to scream with frustration. Another damned artificial social wedge driven between himself and Elena. A father who was a bastard was about as far from being "right and proper" for a young Barrayaran virgin as anything he could think of. And it was obviously no secret—his father must know, and God knew how many hundreds of other people besides. Equally obviously, Elena did not. She was rightfully proud of her father, his elite service, his position of high trust. Miles knew how painfully hard she struggled sometimes for some expression of approval from the old stone carving. How strange to realize that pain might cut both ways—did Bothari then dread the loss of that scarcely-acknowledged admiration? Well, the Sergeant's semi-secret was safe with him.