“Meteorology Office. Where?” Miles called in the door.
“Two.” The lieutenant pointed upward without turning around, crouched more tightly, and resumed swearing. Miles tiptoed away without disturbing him further.
He found it at last on the second floor, a closed door labeled in faded letters. He paused outside, set down his duffle, and folded his parka atop it. He checked himself over. Fourteen hours’ travel had rumpled his initial crispness. Still, he’d managed to keep his green undress uniform and half-boots free of food stains, mud, and other unbecoming accretions. He flattened his cap and positioned it precisely in his belt. He’d crossed half a planet, half a lifetime, to achieve this moment. Three years training to a fever pitch of readiness lay behind him. Yet the Academy years had always had a faint air of pretense, We-are-only-practicing; now, at last, he was face-to-face with the real thing, his first real commanding officer. First impressions could be vital, especially in his case. He took a breath and knocked.
A gravelly muffled voice came through the door, words unrecognizable. Invitation? Miles opened it and strode in.
He had a glimpse of computer interfaces and vid displays gleaming and glowing along one wall. He rocked back at the heat that hit his face. The air within was blood-temperature. Except for the vid displays, the room was dim. At a movement to his left, Miles turned and saluted. “Ensign Miles Vorkosigan, reporting for duty as ordered, sir,” he snapped out, looked up, and saw no one.
The movement had come from lower down. An unshaven man of about forty dressed only in his skivvies sat on the floor, his back against the comconsole desk. He smiled up at Miles, raised a bottle half-full of amber liquid, mumbled, “Salu’, boy. Love ya,” and fell slowly over.
Miles gazed down on him for a long, long, thoughtful moment.
The man began to snore.
After turning down the heat, shedding his tunic, and tossing a blanket over Lieutenant Ahn (for such he was), Miles took a contemplative half hour and thoroughly examined his new domain. There was no doubt, he was going to require instruction in the office’s operations. Besides the satellite real-time images, automated data seemed to be coming in from a dozen micro-climate survey rigs spotted around the island. If procedural manuals had ever existed, they weren’t around now, not even on the computers. After an honorable hesitation, bemusedly studying the snoring, twitching form on the floor, Miles also took the opportunity to go through Ahn’s desk and comconsole files.
Discovery of a few pertinent facts helped put the human spectacle before Miles into a more understandable perspective. Lieutenant Ahn, it seemed, was a twenty-year man within weeks of retirement. It had been a very, very long time since his last promotion. It had been an even longer time since his last transfer; he’d been Kyril Island’s only weather officer for the last fifteen years.
This poor sod has been stuck on this iceberg since I was six years old, Miles calculated, and shuddered inwardly. Hard to tell, at this late date, if Ahn’s drinking problem was cause or effect. Well, if he sobered up enough within the next day to show Miles how to go on, well and good. If he didn’t, Miles could think of half a dozen ways, ranging from the cruel to the unusual, to bring him around whether he wanted to be conscious or not. If Ahn could just be made to disgorge a technical orientation, he could return to his coma till they came to roll him onto outgoing transport, for all Miles cared.
Ahn’s fate decided, Miles donned his tunic, stowed his gear behind the desk, and went exploring. Somewhere in the chain of command there must be a conscious, sober and sane human being who was actually doing his job, or the place couldn’t even function on this level. Or maybe it was run by corporals, who knew? In that case, Miles supposed, his next task must be to find and take control of the most effective corporal available.
In the downstairs foyer a human form approached Miles, silhouetted at first against the light from the front doors. Jogging in precise double time, the shape resolved into a tall, hard-bodied man in sweat pants, T-shirt, and running shoes. He had clearly just come in off some condition-maintaining five-kilometer run, with maybe a few hundred push-ups thrown in for dessert. Iron-gray hair, iron-hard eyes; he might have been a particularly dyspeptic drill sergeant. He stopped short to stare down at Miles, his startled look compressing to a thin-lipped frown.
Miles stood with his legs slightly apart, threw back his head, and stared up with equal force. The man seemed totally oblivious to Miles’s collar tabs. Exasperated, Miles snapped, “Are all the keepers on vacation, or is anybody actually running this bloody zoo?”
The man’s eyes sparked, as if their iron had struck flint; they ignited a little warning light in Miles’s brain, one mouthy moment too late. Hi, there, sir! cried the hysterical commenter in the back of Miles’s mind, with a skip, bow, and flourish. I’m your newest exhibit! Miles suppressed the voice ruthlessly. There wasn’t a trace of humor in any line of that seamed countenance looming over him.
With a cold flare of his carved nostril, the Base Commander glared down at Miles and growled, “I run it, Ensign.”
Dense fog was rolling in off the distant, muttering sea by the time Miles finally found his way to his new quarters. The officers’ barracks and all around it were plunged into a gray, frost-scummed obscurity. Miles decided it was an omen.
Oh, God, it’s going to be a long winter.
Rather to Miles’s surprise, when he arrived at Ahn’s office next morning at an hour he guessed might represent beginning-of-shift, he found the lieutenant awake, sober, and in uniform. Not that the man looked precisely well; pasty-faced, breathing stertorously, he sat huddled, staring slit-eyed at a computer-colorized weather vid. The holo zoomed and shifted dizzyingly at signals from the remote controller he clutched in one damp and trembling palm.
“Good morning, sir.” Miles softened his voice out of mercy, and closed the door behind himself without slamming it.
“Ha?” Ahn looked up, and returned his salute automatically. “What the devil are you, ah . . . Ensign?”
“I’m your replacement, sir. Didn’t anyone tell you I was coming?”
“Oh, yes!” Ahn brightened right up. “Very good, come in.” Miles, already in, smiled briefly instead. “I meant to meet you on the shuttlepad,” Ahn went on. “You’re early. But you seem to have found your way all right.”
“I came in yesterday, sir.”
“Oh. You should have reported in.”
“I did, sir.”
“Oh.” Ahn squinted at Miles in worry. “You did?”
“You promised you’d give me a complete technical orientation to the office this morning, sir,” Miles added, seizing the opportunity.
“Oh.” Ahn blinked. “Good.” The worried look faded slightly. “Well, ah . . .” Ahn rubbed his face, looking around. He confined his reaction to Miles’s physical appearance to one covert glance, and, perhaps deciding they must have got the social duties of introduction out of the way yesterday, plunged at once into a description of the equipment lining the wall, in order from left to right.
Literally an introduction; all the computers had women’s names. Except for a tendency to talk about his machines as though they were human, Ahn seemed coherent enough as he detailed his job, only drifting into randomness, then hungover silence, when he accidentally strayed from the topic. Miles steered him gently back to weather with pertinent questions, and took notes. After a bewildered Brownian trip around the room Ahn rediscovered his office procedural disks at last, stuck to the undersides of their respective pieces of equipment. He made fresh coffee on a non-regulation brewer—named “Georgette”—parked discreetly in a corner cupboard, then took Miles up to the roof of the building to show him the data-collection center there.