Gregor smiled slightly. "That's what I thought you'd say, actually."
"What is this, then, some sort of spiritual exercise?" I think I've had all of those I want for a while, thanks. His heart still seemed to ache, the way an overstrained muscle twinged when one put weight on it. Like muscle strain, it would pass with a little rest, he suspected.
"No," said Gregor. "Just a courtesy. I wanted to give you first refusal."
He did not ask again, which saved Miles the embarrassment of refusing him again. Instead he leaned forward, and put down the gold chain and played with it a moment, arranging the links in a smooth oval pattern. Then he asked, "Would you like some coffee? Tea? Breakfast?"
"No, thanks."
"Something stronger?"
"No. Thanks. I have a spot of brain surgery scheduled for this afternoon. Dr. Chenko is ready to install his controlled-seizure chip. It looks like it's going to work. I'm not supposed to eat anything beforehand."
"Ah, good. It's about time."
"Yes. I can hardly wait to get back in my lightflyer."
"Will you miss the egregious Martin?"
"A little, I think. He grew on me."
Gregor glanced again at his office door. Was he waiting for something? Now was a good time for Miles's request. "Gregor, I wanted to ask you—"
The door to Gregor's office slid aside, and the majordomo entered. At Gregor's nod, he turned back to the corridor and said, "If you will, my lords." He stepped back respectfully.
Four men entered Gregor's office. Miles recognized them at once; he was Barrayaran enough that his first thought was a conscience-stricken, My God, what have I done wrong? Good sense reasserted itself; his feats of evil would have had to have been downright heroic to rate the attention of four Imperial Auditors at one time. Still, it was unusual, as well as unnerving, to see so many Auditors in one room. Miles cleared his throat, and sat up straighter, and exchanged polite Vorish greetings with them as Gregor's majordomo hurried to arrange seats for them all around Gregor's desk.
Lord Vorhovis was back from Komarr, it appeared. In his early sixties, he was the youngest of the crowd, but with a formidable career behind him nonetheless; soldier first, then diplomat, planetary ambassador, and onetime assistant minister of finance. He might be a model for Duv Galeni to emulate. He was a cool, lean, sophisticated man, very much in the modern style of Vor lord—Miles wondered if he shared Gregor's tailor—and he carried Miles's data card case in his hand.
Dr. Vorthys was one of the two recent appointees of Gregor's who was not in the military mold. He was a professor emeritus of engineering failure analysis from Vorbarr Sultana University, and had written the text on his subject. Several of them, in fact. He looked a professor, stout, white-haired, smiling, rumpled, with a noble nose and big ears. Late in his career he had become philosophically interested in the connections between sociopolitical and engineering integrity; his addition to Gregor's array of Auditors had brought in some welcome technical expertise, not that the Auditors exactly worked as a team.
Lord Vann Vorgustafson, chatting amiably with him, was the other civilian, a retired industrialist and noted philanthropist. He was short, and stouter than Vorthys, with a bristling gray beard and pink choleric face that alarmed observers about the state of his cardiovascular system. Surely the most financially unbribable of Gregor's Auditors, he routinely gave away money in lumps larger than the average man saw in his lifetime. One wouldn't guess his wealth to look at him, for he dressed like a workman, if there were any workmen so lacking in color-sense.
Admiral Vorkalloner was an Auditor of the more traditional type, retired from the Service after a long and impeccable career. He seemed socially bland, and was notably unaffiliated with any political party, conservative or progressive, as far as Miles had heard. Tall and thick, he seemed to take up a lot of space.
He nodded cordially to Miles, before taking a chair. "Good morning. So, you're Aral Vorkosigan's boy."
"Yes, sir," Miles sighed.
"Haven't seen you around much in the last ten years. Now I know why."
Miles tried to work out whether that was a positive or negative statement. Seeing so many of them together, Miles gained a renewed sense of what an odd lot the Auditors were. All were experienced, accomplished, wealthy in their own right. In other ways they were downright eccentric, outside or perhaps above the norms. More than fireproof, they were Gregor's firemen.
Vorhovis seated himself on the Emperor's left.
"So," Gregor said to him, "what do you gentlemen think?"
"This"—Vorhovis leaned forward, and laid the data case containing Miles's Auditor's report on the comconsole—"is an extraordinary document, Gregor."
"Yes," seconded Vorthys. "Concise, coherent, and complete. Do you know how rare that is? I congratulate you on it, young man."
Do I get a good grade, professor? "Simon Illyan trained me. He didn't have much tolerance for slop. If he didn't like my field reports, he'd fire them back to me for additions. It got to be something of a hobby with him, I think. I could always tell when ImpSec HQ was having a really slow week, because my report would come back shot full of little query boxes with these dryly worded corrections for grammar and style. Ten years of that, and you learn to do it right the first time."
Vorkalloner smiled. "Old Vorsmythe," he noted, "used to turn in handwritten plastic flimsys. Never more than two pages. He insisted anything important could always be said in two pages."
"Illegibly handwritten," muttered Gregor.
"We used to have to go and squeeze the footnotes out of him in person. It became somewhat irritating," added Vorkalloner.
Vorhovis, with a gesture at the data case, went on to Miles, "You appear to have left the military prosecutor with very little to do."
"Nothing, in fact," said Gregor. "Allegre reported to me last night that Haroche has given up and is going to plead guilty, trying to reduce his sentence through cooperation. Well, he could hardly have confessed to Us and then turned around and tried to pretend innocence to a Service judge."
"I wouldn't have bet on that. He did have nerve," said Miles. "But I'm glad to hear it's not going to be dragged out."
"It was a truly bizarre case," Vorhovis went on. "I'd been worried something might be very wrong when I first heard that Illyan had gone down. But I could not have unraveled the events as you did, Lord Vorkosigan."
"I'm sure you would have unraveled them in your own way, sir," said Miles.
"No," said Vorhovis. He tapped the data case. "By my analysis, the critical juncture was when you brought in that galactic biochemist, Dr. Weddell. It was from that point that Haroche's plans began to go irretrievably wrong. I would not have known of Weddell's existence, and would have left the selection of the chip autopsy team entirely to Admiral Avakli."
"Avakli was good," Miles said, uncertain if this was a criticism. The biocyberneticist had done his best, certainly.
"We"—a circular wave of Vorhovis's finger indicated the Auditors there assembled—"do not often work directly together. But we do consult with one another. 'What resources do you know of that I don't, that might have a bearing on this problem?' It increases our access to odd knowledge fivefold."
"Five-fold? I thought there were seven of you."
Vorthys smiled faintly. "We think of General Vorparadijs as a sort of Auditor Emeritus. Respected, but we don't make him come to meetings anymore."
"In fact," muttered Vorgustafson under his breath, "we don't even mention them to him."
"And Admiral Valentine has been too frail for some years to actively participate," Vorhovis added. "I would have urged him to resign, but as long as the gap left by the death of General Vorsmythe was still unfilled, there seemed no need to beg his space."
Miles had been dimly aware of the loss two years ago of the eighth Auditor, the elderly Vorsmythe. The position of ninth Auditor, which Miles had lately held, was by tradition always left open for acting Auditors, men with particular expertise cal
led up at the Imperium's need, and released again when their task was done.
"So we four here," Vorhovis went on, "constitute a quorum of sorts. Vorlaisner couldn't be here, he's tied up on South Continent, but I've kept him apprised."
"That being so, my lords," said Gregor, "how do you advise Us?"
Vorhovis glanced around at his colleagues, who gave him nods, and pursed his lips judiciously. "He'll do, Gregor."
"Thank you." Gregor turned to Miles. "We were discussing job openings, a bit ago. It happens I also have a place this week for the position of eighth Auditor. Do you want it?"
Miles swallowed shock. "That's . . . a permanent post, Gregor. Auditors are appointed for life. Are you sure . . . ?"
"Not necessarily for life. They can resign, be fired, or impeached, as well as be assassinated or just drop dead."
"Aren't I a little young?" And he'd just been feeling so old. . . .
"If you take it," said Vorhovis, "you'll be the youngest Imperial Auditor in post Time-of-Isolation history. I looked it up."
"General Vorparadijs . . . will surely disapprove. As will like-minded men." Hell, Vorparadijs thinks I'm a mutant.
"General Vorparadijs," said Vorhovis, "thought I was too young for the job, and I was fifty-eight when I was appointed. Now he can switch his disapproval to you. I shall not miss it. And along with ten years of quite unique ImpSec training, you have more galactic experience than any three out of four of us in this room right now. Rather odd experience, but very wide-ranging. It will add a great deal of scope to our mutual data store."
"Have you, ah, read my personnel files?"
"General Allegre was kind enough to lend us complete copies, a few days ago." Vorhovis's glance swept Miles's chest, and the commendations there. Fortunately for the hang of his tunic, the Imperial Service did not also give out material symbols for one's demerits.
"Then you know . . . there was a little problem with my last ImpSec field report. A major problem," he corrected himself. He seached Vorhovis's face for whatever judgment lurked there. Vorhovis's expression was grave, but free of censure. Didn't he know? Miles looked around at all of them. "I almost killed one of our courier officers, while I was having one of my seizures. Illyan discharged me for lying about it." There. That was as bald and flat and true as he could make it.
"Yes. We and Gregor spent several hours yesterday afternoon, discussing that. Chief Illyan sat in." Vorhovis's eyes narrowed, and he regarded Miles with the utmost seriousness. "Given your falsification of that field report, what kept you from also taking Haroche's extraordinary bribe? I can almost guarantee no one would ever have figured it out."
"Haroche would have known. Galeni would have known. And I would have known. Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead. Not three."
"You would certainly have outlived Captain Galeni, and you might have outlived Haroche. What then?"
Miles blew out his breath, and answered slowly. "Someone might have survived, with my name, in my body. It wouldn't have been me, anymore. It would have been a man I didn't much . . . like."
"You value yourself, do you, Lord Vorkosigan?"
"I've learned to," he admitted wryly.
"Then so, perhaps, shall we." Vorhovis sat back, an oddly satisfied smile playing about his lips.
"Note," said Gregor, "as the most junior member of this rather eclectic group, you will almost certainly be awarded the worst jobs."
"So true," murmured Vorhovis, a light in his eye. "It will be nice to pass that position off to someone more, ah, active."
"Every assignment," Gregor went on, "may be totally unrelated to any other. Unpredictable. You'll be tossed in to sink or swim."
"Not entirely unsupported," objected Vorthys. "The rest of us will be willing to call advice from shore, now and then."
For some reason Miles had a mental flash of the whole lot of them sitting in beach chairs holding drinks with fruit on little sticks, awarding him judiciously discussed points for style as he went under, frantically gulping and splashing, the water filling his nose.
"This . . . wasn't the reward I'd been planning to ask for, when I came in," Miles admitted, feeling horribly confused. People never followed your scripts, never.
"What reward was that?" asked Gregor patiently.
"I wanted . . . I know this is going to sound idiotic. I wanted to be retired retroactively from the Imperial Service as a captain, not a lieutenant. I know those post-career promotions are sometimes done as a special reward, usually with an eye to boosting some loyal officer's half-pay grade during retirement. I don't want the money. I just want the title." Right, he'd said it. It did sound idiotic. But it was all true. "It's been an itch I couldn't scratch." He'd always wanted his captaincy to come freely offered, and unarguably earned, not something begged as a favor. He'd made a career out of scorning favor. But he didn't want to go through the rest of his life introduced in military reminiscence as Lieutenant, either.
Belatedly, it occurred to Miles that Gregor's job offer wasn't another first-refusal courtesy. Gregor and these serious men had been conferring for nearly a week. Not a snap decision this time, but something argued and studied and weighed. They really want me. All of them do, not just Gregor. How strange. But it meant that he had a bargaining chip.
"Most other Auditors are p—" his tongue barely cut the accustomed adjective portly "—retired senior officers, admirals or generals."
"You are a retired admiral, Miles," Gregor pointed out cheerfully. "Admiral Naismith."
"Oh." He hadn't thought of it like that; it stopped him cold for a full beat. "But . . . but not publicly, not on Barrayar. The dignity of an Auditor's office . . . really needs at least a captaincy to support it, don't you think?"
"Persistent," murmured Vorhovis, "isn't he?"
"Relentlessly," Gregor agreed. "Just as advertised. Very well, Miles. Allow me to cure you of this distraction." His magic Imperial finger—index, not middle, thank you Gregor—flipped down to point at Miles. "Congratulations. You're a captain. My secretary will see that your records are updated. Does that satisfy you?"
"Entirely, Sire." Miles suppressed a grin. So, it was a touch anticlimactic, compared to the thousand ways he'd dreamed this promotion over the years. He was not moved to complain. "I want nothing more."
"But I do," said Gregor firmly. "My Auditors' tasks are, almost by definition, never routine. I only send them in when routine solutions have fallen short, when the rules are not working or have never been devised. They handle the unanticipated."
"The complex," added Vorthys.
"The disturbing ones that no one else has the nerve to touch," said Vorhovis.
"The really bizarre," sighed Vorgustafson.
"And sometimes," said Gregor, "as with the Auditor who proved General Haroche's strange treason, they solve crises absolutely critical to the future of the Imperium. Will you accept the office of eighth Auditor, my Lord Vorkosigan?"
Later, there would be formal public oaths, and ceremonies, but the moment of truth, and for truth, was now.
Miles took a deep breath. "Yes," he said.
The surgery to install the internal portion of the controlled-seizure device was neither as lengthy nor as frightening as Miles had expected; for one thing, Chenko, who was getting used to his star patient's slightly paranoid world-view, let him stay awake and watch it all on a monitor, carefully positioned above his head-clamp. Chenko allowed him to get up and go home the next morning.
Two afternoons later, they met again in Chenko's ImpMil neurology laboratory for the smoke-test.
"Do you wish to do the honors yourself, my lord?" Dr. Chenko asked Miles.
"Yes, please. I might have to."
"I don't recommend doing this by yourself as your routine. Particularly at first, you ought to have a spotter by you."
Dr. Chenko handed Miles his new mouth guard, and the activation unit; the device fit neatly in the palm of Miles's hand. Miles lay back on the examination table, checked the setting
s on the activator one last time, pressed it to his right temple, and keyed it on.
Colored confetti.
Darkness.
Miles popped open his eyes. "Pfeg," he said. He wriggled his jaw, and spat out his mouth-guard.
Dr. Chenko, hovering happily, retrieved it, and pressed a hand to Miles's chest to keep him from sitting up. The activation unit now sat on top of a monitor beside him; Miles wondered if he'd caught it on the fly. "Not yet, please, Lord Vorkosigan. We've a few more measurements." Chenko and his techs busied themselves around their equipment. Chenko was humming, off-key. Miles took it for a good sign.
"Now . . . now you did encode the activation signals, as I asked you, Chenko? I don't want this damned thing being set off by accident when I walk through a security scan, or something."
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