It was sleeting.
They found him hours later, curled around the dimming heat-tube, crammed into an eviscerated equipment bay in the automated weather station. His eye sockets were hollow in his black-streaked face, his toes and ears white. His numb purple fingers jerked two wires across each other in a steady, hypnotic tattoo, the Service emergency code. To be read out in bursts of static in the barometric pressure meter in base’s weather room. If and when anybody bothered to look at the suddenly defective reading from this station, or noticed the pattern in the white noise.
His fingers kept twitching in this rhythm for minutes after they pulled him free of his little box. Ice cracked off the back of his uniform jacket as they tried to straighten his body. For a long time they could get no words from him at all, only a shivering hiss. Only his eyes burned.
Floating in the heat tank in the base infirmary, Miles considered crucifixion for the two saboteurs from the motor pool from several angles. Such as upside down. Dangling over the sea at low altitude from an antigrav sled. Better still, staked out faceup in a bog in a blizzard. . . . But by the time his body had warmed up, and the corpsman had pulled him out of the tank to dry, be reexamined, and eat a supervised meal, his head had cooled.
It hadn’t been an assassination attempt. And therefore, not a matter he was compelled to turn over to Simon Illyan, dread Chief of Imperial Security and Miles’s father’s left-hand man. The vision of the sinister officers from ImpSec coming to take those two jokers away, far away, was lovely, but impractical, like shooting mice with a maser cannon. Anyway, where could ImpSec possibly send them that was worse than here?
They’d meant his scat-cat to bog, to be sure, while he serviced the weather station, and for Miles to have the embarrassment of calling the base for heavy equipment to pull it out. Embarrassing, not lethal. They could not have—no one could have—foreseen Miles’s inspired safety-conscious precaution with the chain, which was in the final analysis what had almost killed him. At most it was a matter for Service Security, bad enough, or for normal discipline.
He dangled his toes over the side of his bed, one of a row in the empty infirmary, and pushed the last of his food around on his tray. The corpsman wandered in and glanced at the remains.
“You feeling all right now, sir?”
“Fine,” said Miles morosely.
“You, uh, didn’t finish your tray.”
“I often don’t. They always give me too much.”
“Yeah, I guess you are pretty, um . . .” The corpsman made a note on his report panel, leaned over to examine Miles’s ears, and bent to inspect his toes, rolling them between practiced fingers. “It doesn’t look like you’re going to lose any pieces, here. Lucky.”
“Do you treat a lot of frostbite?” Or am I the only idiot? Present evidence would suggest it.
“Oh, once the grubs arrive, this place’ll be crammed. Frostbite, pneumonia, broken bones, contusions, concussions . . . gets real lively, come winter. Wall-to-wall moro—unlucky trainees. And a few unlucky instructors, that they take down with ’em.” The corpsman stood, tapping a few more entries on his panel. “I’m afraid I have to mark you as recovered now, sir.”
“Afraid?” Miles raised his brows in inquiry.
The corpsman straightened, in the unconscious posture of a man transmitting official bad news. That old they-told-me-to-say-this-it’s-not-my-fault look. “You are ordered to report to the base commander’s office as soon as I release you, sir.”
Miles considered an immediate relapse. No. Better to get the messy parts over with. “Tell me, corpsman, has anyone else ever sunk a scat-cat?”
“Oh, sure. The grubs lose about five or six a season. Plus minor bog-downs. The engineers get real pissed about it. The commandant promised them next time he’d . . . ahem!” The corpsman lost his voice.
Wonderful, thought Miles. Just great. He could see it coming. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t see it coming.
Miles dashed back to his quarters for a quick change of clothing, guessing a hospital robe might be inappropriate for the coming interview. He immediately found he had a minor quandary. His black fatigues seemed too relaxed, his dress greens too formal for office wear anywhere outside Imperial HQ at Vorbarr Sultana. His undress greens’ trousers and half-boots were still at the bottom of the bog. He had only brought one of each uniform style with him; his spares, supposedly in transit, had not yet arrived.
He was hardly in a position to borrow from a neighbor. His uniforms were privately made to his own fit, at approximately four times the cost of Imperial issue. Part of that cost was for the effort of making them indistinguishable on the surface from the machine cut, while at the same time partially masking the oddities of his body through subtleties of hand-tailoring. He cursed under his breath and shucked on his dress greens, complete with mirror-polished boots to the knees. At least the boots obviated the need for leg braces.
General Stanis Metzov, read the sign on the door, Base Commander. Miles had been assiduously avoiding the base commander ever since their first unfortunate encounter. This had not been hard to do in Ahn’s company, despite the pared population of Kyril Island this month; Ahn avoided everybody. Miles now wished he’d tried harder to strike up conversations with brother officers in mess. Permitting himself to stay isolated, even to concentrate on his new tasks, had been a mistake. In five days of even the most random conversation, someone must surely have mentioned Kyril Island’s voracious killer mud.
A corporal manning the comconsole in an antechamber ushered Miles through to the inner office. He must now try to work himself back around to Metzov’s good side, assuming the general had one. Miles needed allies. General Metzov looked across his desk unsmiling as Miles saluted and stood waiting.
Today, the general was aggressively dressed in black fatigues. At Metzov’s altitude in the hierarchy, this stylistic choice usually indicated a deliberate identification with The Fighting Man. The only concession to his rank was their pressed neatness. His decorations were stripped down to a mere modest three, all high combat commendations. Pseudo-modest; pruned of the surrounding foliage, they leapt to the eye. Mentally, Miles applauded, even envied, the effect. Metzov looked his part, the combat commander, absolutely, unconsciously natural.
A fifty-fifty chance with the uniform, and I had to guess wrong, Miles fumed as Metzov’s eye traveled sarcastically down, and back up, the subdued glitter of his dress greens. All right, so Metzov’s eyebrows signaled, Miles now looked like some kind of Vorish headquarters twit. Not that such wasn’t another familiar type. Miles decided to decline the roasting and cut Metzov’s inspection short by forcing the opening. “Yes, sir?”
Metzov leaned back in his chair, lips twisting. “I see you found some pants, Ensign Vorkosigan. And, ah . . . riding boots, too. You know, there are no horses on this island.”
None at Imperial Headquarters, either, Miles thought irritably. I didn’t design the damned boots. His father had once suggested that his staff officers must need them for riding hobbyhorses, high horses, and nightmares. Unable to think of a useful reply to the general’s sally, Miles stood in dignified silence, chin lifted, parade rest. “Sir.”
Metzov leaned forward, clasping his hands, abandoning his heavy humor, eyes gone hard again. “You lost a valuable, fully equipped scat-cat as a result of leaving it parked in an area clearly marked as a Permafrost Inversion Zone. Don’t they teach map-reading at the Imperial Academy anymore, or is it to be all diplomacy in the New Service—how to drink tea with the ladies?”