Young Miles Read Online Free Page A

hiding in its hole. "Elena! I gather you came up from Vorkosigan Surleau with Mother last night. Come on in."
    She perched near him on the arm of another chair. "Yes, she knows what a treat it is for me to come to the capital. I almost feel like she's my mother, sometimes."
    "Tell her that. It would please her."
    "Do you really think so?" she asked shyly.
    "Absolutely." He shook himself into alertness. Perhaps not a totally empty future . . .
    She chewed gently on her lower lip, large eyes drinking in his face. "You look absolutely smashed."
    He would not bleed on Elena. He banished his blackness in self-mockery, leaning back expansively and grinning. "Literally. Too true. I'll get over it. You, ah—heard all about it, I suppose."
    "Yes. Did, um, it go all right with my lord Count?"
    "Oh, sure. I'm the only grandson he's got, after all. Puts me in an excellent position—I can get away with anything."
    "Did he ask you about changing your name?"
    He stared. "What?"
    "To the usual patronymic. He'd been talking about, when you—oh." She cut herself off, but Miles caught the full import of her half revelation.
    "Oh, ho—when I became an officer, was he finally planning to break down and allow me my heir's names? Sweet of him—seventeen years after the fact." He stifled a sick anger beneath an ironic grin.
    "I never understood what that was all about."
    "What, my name—Miles Naismith, after my mother's father, instead of Piotr Miles, after both? It all goes back to that uproar when I was born. Apparently, after my parents had recovered from the soltoxin gas and they found out what the fetal damage was going to be—I'm not supposed to know this, by the way—Grandfather was all for an abortion. Got in a big fight with my parents—well, with Mother, I suppose, and Father caught in the middle—and when my father backed her up and faced him down, he got huffy and asked his name not be given me. He calmed down later, when he found I wasn't a total disaster." He smirked, and drummed his fingers on the chair arm. "So he was thinking of swallowing his words, was he? Perhaps it's just as well I washed out. He might have choked." He closed his teeth on further bitterness, and wished he could call back his last speech. No point in being more ugly in front of Elena than he already was.
    "I know how hard you studied for it. I—I'm sorry."
    He feigned a surface humor. "Not half as sorry as I am. I wish you could have taken my physicals. Between us we'd make a hell of an officer."
    Something of the old frankness they had shared as children escaped her lips suddenly. "Yes, but by Barrayaran standards I'm more handicapped than you—I'm female. I wouldn't even be permitted to petition to take the tests."
    His eyebrows lifted in wry agreement. "I know. Absurd. With what your father's taught you, all you'd need is a course in heavy weapons and you could roll right over nine-tenths of the fellows I saw out there. Think of it—Sergeant Elena Bothari."
    She chilled. "Now you're teasing."
    "Just speaking as one civilian to another," he half-apologized.
    She nodded dark agreement, then brightened with remembered purpose. "Oh. Your mother sent me to get you for lunch."
    "Ah." He pushed himself to his feet with a sibilant grunt. "There's an officer no one disobeys. The Admiral's Captain."
    Elena smiled at the image. "Yes. Now, she was an officer for the Betans, and no one thinks she's strange, or criticizes her for wanting to break the rules."
    "On the contrary. She's so strange nobody even thinks of trying to include her in the rules. She just goes on doing things her own way."
    "I wish I were Betan," said Elena glumly.
    "Oh, make no mistake—she's strange by Betan standards, too. Although I think you would like Beta Colony, parts of it," he mused.
    "I'll never get off planet."
    He eyed her sapiently. "What's got you down?"
    She shrugged. "Oh, well, you know my father. He's such a conservative. He ought to have been born two hundred years