Well . . . there was always his grandfather General Count Piotr Vorkosigan, dead these thirteen years. Miles's eye fell on his grandfather's ceremonial dagger in its elaborate sheath, sitting in a place of honor, or at least uncluttered by other detritus, on its own shelf across the room. Miles had actually insisted on carrying it around with him at all times, earlier in his career. Proving . . . what? To whom? Nothing to no one, now.

He rose, walked over to the shelf, and lifted the weapon, drawing the fine blade from its sheath and watching the light play over the textured steel. It was still a fabulous antique, but it lacked . . . some former geas it had once held upon him; the magic was gone, or at least, the curse was lifted. It was just a knife. He slid it back into its sheath, opened his hand, and let it fall back to its place.

He felt out of balance. He had felt that way increasingly, when at home, but this trip the sensation was acute. The strange absence of the Count and Countess was like a preview of their deaths. This was a taste of what it would be like to be Count Miles Vorkosigan, all day long. He wasn't sure he liked the flavor.

I need . . . Naismith. This eviscerated Vor life unnerved him. But Naismith was an expensive hobby. To get ImpSec to pay for Naismith required a reason, literally a mission in life. What have you done to justify your existence today? was a question to which Admiral Naismith had better be able to supply a daily answer, or risk being snuffed out. ImpSec's accountants were as dangerous to his continuation as enemy fire. Well . . . almost. His hand traced the spray of scars on his chest, under his shirt.

There was something wrong with his new heart. It pumped blood all right, all the ventricles and valves were in order … it was supposed to have been grown from his own tissues, but it seemed a stranger's mismatch. . . . You're going looney, all alone in this empty house.

A mission. A mission was what he needed. Then everything would be all right again. It wasn't that he wished harm on anyone, but he longed for a hijacking, a blockade, a small colonial war . . . better still, a rescue. Free the prisoners, yeah.

You've done all that. If that's what you wanted, why aren't you happy?

The taste for adrenaline, it appeared, was an appetite that grew by what it fed upon. Naismith was an addiction, a craving that required ever-stronger and more toxic doses for the same level of satisfaction.

He'd tried a few dangerous sports, by way of experiment, to soothe that hunger. He wasn't all that good at them, lacking, among other things, the time to acquire true expertise. And besides . . . that extra edge was missing. It wasn't very interesting to risk only himself.

And a trophy seemed a tawdry bit of junk, when he'd played for and won ten thousand human lives in a single round.

I want my frigging mission. Call me, Illyan!

The call, when it came at last, literally caught him napping. The chime brought him abruptly out of an exhausted afternoon doze, after a night of almost no sleep at all, racked with circular patterns of worry and useless speculation. He had practiced in his mind, Miles estimated, about three hundred versions of his upcoming interview with Illyan. The only certainty he held was that the three hundred and first would be something totally different.

The face of Illyan s secretary formed over the vid plate. "Now?" Miles said, before the man could get his first word out. He rubbed his hand through sleep-bent hair, and over his slightly numb face.

The secretary blinked, cleared his throat, and started in with his own practiced sentences. "Good afternoon, Lieutenant Vorkosigan. Chief Illyan requests that you report to his office in one hour."

"I could make it quicker."

"One hour," the secretary repeated. "HQ will send a car for you."

"Oh. Thanks." Useless to ask for more information over a comconsole; Miles's machine was more secured than a commercial model, but not that much more.

The secretary cut the com. Well, it would give him time to take another cold shower, and dress properly. After his second bath of the day he pulled a set of fresh-pressed undress greens out of his closet, and set about transferring his ImpSec silver eyes to their place on the collar, in front of the—ahem!—battered red lieutenant's tabs he'd been wearing for eight bleeding years. The rank tabs were duplicates, but the eye-of-Horus pins, built up in molecular layers of tarnish-proof silver in a hidden pattern, were issued one set (right-and left-facing) to a soldier. Name and serial number were engraved on the back, and woe to the man who lost his. ImpSec eyes were as hard to counterfeit as money, and as powerful. When Miles was finished, his appearance was as neat as for any interview with the Emperor. Neater. Gregor had less immediate control over his destiny than Illyan did.

It was all sympathetic magic. When you couldn't do something truly useful, you tended to vent the pent-up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing. Still he was downstairs and waiting ten minutes before the ImpSec groundcar showed up at the front portico.

When he arrived this time at Illyan's office, the door to the inner chamber was open. The secretary waved him through.

Illyan looked up from his own oversized, overworked comconsole desk, and nodded in return to Miles's slightly-sharper-than-analyst's salute. He reached for a control, and the door to the outer office slid closed, and secure-locked itself. The locking was an unusual gesture, and Miles quelled a rising hope that it meant that this time, something bloody big was in the works, something really challenging.

There was a chair waiting, good. Illyan had been known, when particularly furious, to keep one standing till the yelling part was done. Not that Illyan ever raised his voice; he tended to the devastatingly well-chosen word to convey his emotions, a style Miles admired and hoped to emulate. But there was a peculiar tension in the ImpSec chief today. Grim, much more so than normal. Miles seated himself, and gave Illyan a short nod, signifying his commander had all his attention: I'm ready. Let's go.

Illyan leaned not forward, but back, studying Miles across the wide black surface of the desk. "You told my secretary you had something you wanted to add to your last report?"

Shit. Now or never. But the confession of his little medical problem would be certain to totally derail whatever mission assignment was coming up. Never it is, then. I'll fix it myself, later. As soon as possible. "Nothing important now. What's up?"

Illyan sighed, and drummed his fingers once, introspectively, on the black glass before him. "I received a disturbing report from Jackson's Whole."

Miles's breath drew in. I died there once. "Admiral Naismith is notably unwelcome in those parts, but I'm ready for a rematch. What have the bastards done now?"

"This is not a new mission, nor a new report. This is in relation to your last … I can hardly call it a mission, since I never ordered it. Your last adventure there." Illyan looked up at him.

"Oh?" said Miles cautiously.

"Complete copies of your cryo-revival surgeon's medical records finally surfaced. It took some time, due to the confusion of the Durona Group s hurried departure from Jackson's Whole, with their records scattered between Escobar and House Fell. House Fell, needless to say, was not forthcoming with extra data. It took even more time for the records to be received and processed by my analysis section, and to finally be read in detail by someone who realized their significance and implications. Some months, in fact."

Miles's belly went abruptly very cold, as if in memory of his freezing death. He had a sudden insight as to the exact state of mind of a person who fell/jumped/was pushed from the top of a very tall building, in that subjectively stretched eternity it took for them to reach the pavement below. We have just made a major mistake. Oh, yes.