"Yeah. Well, I was seventeen, and on a visit to Beta Colony, shortly after my grandfather passed away. It all started... let me see... with Arde Mayhew's RG freighter, right. Arde's a pilot. He had a debt problem. They were going to repossess his ship, or something, and he'd rigged himself a deadman switch of some kind so that if anyone attempted to separate him from the ship, he and it would both be reduced to a rain of highly inconvenient glowing debris scattered across Beta Colony's high-traffic orbits and approach vectors. I stumbled on this scene and managed to convince someone in charge that it would be a good idea to send me up there to negotiate with him, or at least that it would be worth trying. I can't remember why I decided to do this; probably it just occurred to me that I could and I went from there. Anyway, up I went, and there he was drinking this amazing green goop - ethanol plus a stimulant, tastes like it was made from mint and the fires of hell, I haven't had any since but I still remember the flavour quite distinctly - and under the influence of this substance I concocted a plan to weasel Arde out of his situation by swearing him to me as an Armsman. And then convincing his creditors to accept my recently inherited lands - you know, Vorkosigan Vashnoi - as collateral when I bought out his debt, figuring to make a few cargo runs with the ship and come up with the balance of the price that way. Happily, nobody knew enough Barrayaran history to bother checking the radioactivity plats. Unhappily, I had vastly overestimated how fast it would be possible to raise cash by making simple cargo runs with a junky old freighter."