fermata

[isthisart]

Linya sees Dr. Cheung onto a ship other than the Ariel, which agrees to tote him to Komarr very, very slowly, knocking him out for each jump and having someone look after him when he comes around green in the gills. It's not going to be a fun trip for him, but it's better than trying to collaborate with a multi-week conversational turnaround time. It's pricey - the ship has nonperishable cargo with no deadline at its destination and already employs a medtech, but still - but she thinks it's worth it.

Her business on Earth concluded, she examines the list of tourist attractions she didn't get around to, determines that none of them are worth sticking around for, and gets on a much faster vessel and goes all the way home. The first thing she does when there is go looking for whichever of the Count or Countess is easiest to find.

Comments

[isthisart]

"It has occurred to me to wonder. A version of the persona whose design were - carefully overseen - would probably have a different name for himself and his mercenaries both."

[thisvorlunatic]

"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."

[isthisart]

"Oh dear. And then where did the rest of the fleet and its crew come in?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"The RG isn't actually a member of the fleet as such, but I'll get there. Right, so the only cargo I could find that would make us our money fast enough was a rather suspicious-looking delivery of 'farming equipment' to the other side of a wormhole blockade. I deduced that it was probably the blockaded side looking to get a shipment of Betan weapons past the blockaders, managed to convince the customer that I was a mercenary of unspecified rank detached from my outfit and looking to pass the time by smuggling his cargo - you'll find I spend a significant fraction of this story managing to convince people of things - and got it all loaded into the RG behind some state-of-the-art Betan mass detector jammers, which had only barely hit the market at the time. Then we headed for the Tau Verde system to deliver it. Which, of course, necessitated first getting past the blockade."

[isthisart]

"And did you convince the blockaders of things?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Did I ever," he affirms, grinning reminiscently.

"Going into the system, it was me; Sergeant Bothari, my bodyguard; Elena Bothari, his daughter and my friend; Arde, the pilot; Major Daum, the man with the cargo; and Baz Jesek, a Barrayaran deserter I picked up while we were planetside on Beta Colony. I had to take him along, y'see, because once I met him in the first place ImpSec was bound to catch up to him, and desertion in the heat is a capital crime. All I could do was try to ferry him out of their reach."

He tilts his head from side to side in a sort of armless shrug.

"Anyway. The ship that met us on the other side of the jump to Tau Verde was the Ariel, commanded in those days by Captain Auson, who was kind of an ass. He had many redeeming qualities which he presented to me later, but he was definitely still kind of an ass. The warning buoy said that all incoming vessels were to turn over their jump pilots during their stay in Tau Verde space - brilliant idea, really. Except that when Auson was done searching our ship with his squad of lazy goons, he got a look at Elena and decided he'd rather take her hostage. There was... some ambiguity as to what her stay on the Ariel would be like, if we gave her up. So we declined to give her up. There was a fight; my side won. Then we stormed the Ariel, for lack of any better ideas. And then we were presented with a shipful of humiliated mercenaries, over whom we could not possibly hope to keep control by main force, not with five and a half of us to a full crew of them."

Here he pauses, grinning.

"So I convinced them that we had been smuggling, not military equipment, but military personnel, highly intelligent and valuable personnel. They ate it right up. It turned them from a pack of buffoons so sloppy that they could be overwhelmed by six smugglers of whom only half had completed any legitimate military training, into an ordinary bunch that had been nobly defeated by an elite team. And because I sure wasn't getting past that blockade any other way... I recruited them to my imaginary fleet, and kept them so busy proving themselves to me that none of them stopped to wonder why they were bothering. The first time I called myself Mr. Naismith of the Dendarii Mercenaries was to Major Daum before we left Beta Colony, but it was on the Ariel that I started making it true. I can't remember now exactly when they started calling me Admiral, but it would've been around then. I kept that scam going so well for so long that my new Dendarii helped me capture a mining installation from what had previously been their own fleet."

[isthisart]

Linya giggles. "I can just barely picture this, and it's amazing."

[thisvorlunatic]

"It gets better," he assures her cheerfully. "See, it would all have fallen apart eventually... except that Admiral Oser, the commander of the Oseran Mercenaries to which the Ariel had previously belonged, turned out to be an even bigger ass than Auson. When we captured that mining installation, we captured an Oseran ship called the Triumph with it, commanded by one Ky Tung. Amazing man. He escaped us and bolted back to Oser. According to the terms of Tung's contract, Oser owed him a new ship if his previous one was captured. Oser did not deliver on this promise. Tung was sufficiently offended that he turned around, came back, and offered to join the Dendarii. I happily accepted. And with a little more convincing and some clever strategy and a nice big helping of luck, we won the war. At which point Oser and the rest of his fleet also offered to join the Dendarii."

[isthisart]

"Oh my goodness. I should have waited on this story until you were safely scoopable, this is fantastic."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles giggles.

"I will consider myself scooped in spirit," he says. "Anyway. Then I had to come home because I was being accused of treason, which is a much less entertaining story, and I left Elena and Baz in charge of the fleet. And Elli Quinn got her face blown off in combat and I bought her a new one and left her with my grandmother on Beta Colony to recuperate - that's how she knows my identity. And, uh - Bothari died. During the war, but not in combat. Of... my stupidity, more or less." He sighs, good mood abruptly vanished.

[isthisart]

Linya pets his hair.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I can explain that, too, if you want."

[isthisart]

"I'd like to know, but I don't have to know now."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Now or later, it's all the same to me. See... growing up, Elena didn't know who her mother was. Bothari wouldn't talk about it. And when we were recruiting in Tau Verde local space, we happened to come across this woman, Elena Visconti, who looked just like my Elena. I imagined some story of - estrangement, perhaps, in any case of romance. The reality... well. I arranged an 'accidental' meeting, naively expecting some form of happiness to ensue, and Ms. Visconti happened to be armed at the time, and she walked into the room and shot Bothari in the chest with a needler. It was pretty ghastly. I'd known Bothari was a troubled soul, but not quite the full extent of the trouble. I still don't know exactly what he'd done, to provoke such an extreme reaction so many years later, but certainly his daughter was not the product of a romance."

[isthisart]

"Oh dear. What happened to Ms. Visconti after? I know from Simon that Elena Bothari-Jesek is still with the Dendarii..."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Left. Went back to Escobar, and as far as I know is still there."

[isthisart]

"How did Bothari wind up with custody of their daughter...?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Oh... after the attempted Barrayaran invasion of Escobar, a bunch of uterine replicators with fetuses in them were sent from them to us. Probably all of unromantic origin. Seventeen, I think is the number. Mother later reused one of those very replicators to keep gestating me after they had to scoop me out."

[isthisart]

"What an unlovely chapter of history... but I'm glad there was a place to put you when you had to relocate."

[thisvorlunatic]

"So'm I."

[isthisart]

"Replicators are easier to get now, right? I was thinking of looking after Little Aral Adri myself for fine-tuned environmental monitoring, at least unless I find it unexpectedly necessary to make more business trips in spite of having delegated pen-sprinkling. It will probably be harder to get one to take home if there are only a handful on the entire planet."

[thisvorlunatic]

"In case you haven't noticed, my love, you are very, very rich. You could have your favourite model shipped here from Beta Colony if you felt like it. But yes, there are more replicators on Barrayar now than there were then."

[isthisart]

"I actually don't know much about standard-issue models. I should look into that in case it interacts with my previous education on incubation in some way and pick one out."

[thisvorlunatic]

"There you go, then. And then I suppose we decide when we want to start him... I confess I'm still nervous about the parenting aspect of this operation."

[isthisart]

"He'll be precocious; I don't know if that helps or does the very opposite."