"Most people go to sleep at this point. . . ." Yawning, she helped him sort through the pile of uniform bits on the floor nearby. The black tee-shirts proved nearly interchangable. Elli's was distinguishable by the faint scent of her body lingering in it—Miles almost didn't want to give it back, but reflected that keeping his girlfriend's underwear to sniff probably wouldn't score him points in the savoir-faire department. The agreement was unspoken but plain: this phase of their relationship must stop discreetly at the bedroom door, if they were to disprove Admiral Naismith's fatuous dictum.

* * *

The initial Dendarii staff conference, at the start of a mission when Miles arrived on fleet station with a new contract in hand, always gave him the sense of seeing double. He was an interface, conscious of both halves, trying to be a one-way mirror between the Dendarii and their true employer the Emperor. This unpleasant sensation usually faded rapidly, as he concentrated his faculties around the mission in question, re-centering his personality; Admiral Naismith came very near to occupying his whole skin then. "Relaxing" wasn't quite the right term for this alpha-state, given Naismith's driving personality; "unconstrained" came closer.

He had been with the Dendarii an unprecedented five months straight, and the sudden re-intrusion of Lieutenant Vorkosigan into his life had been unusually disruptive this time. Of course, it wasn't normally the Barrayaran side of things that was screwed up. He'd always counted on that command structure to be solid, the axiom from which all action flowed, the standard by which subsequent success or failure was measured. Not this time.

This night he stood in the Triumph's briefing room before his hastily called department heads and ship captains, and was seized by a sudden, schizoid paralysis: what was he to say to them? You're on your own, suckers. . . .

"We're on our own for a while," Admiral Naismith began, emerging from whatever cave in Miles's brain he dwelt in, and he was off and running. The news, made public at last, that there was a glitch in their contract payment inspired the expected dismay; more baffling was their apparently serene reassurance when he told them, his voice heavy with menacing emphasis, that he was personally investigating it. Well, at least it accounted from the Dendarii point of view for all the time he'd spent stuffing the computers in the bowels of the Barrayaran embassy. God, I swear I could sell them all radioactive farmland.

But when challenged they unleashed an impressive flurry of ideas for short-term cash creation. Miles was intensely relieved, and left them to it. After all, nobody arrived on the Dendarii general staff by being dense. His own brain seemed drained. He hoped it was because its circuits were subconsciously working on the Barrayaran half of the problem, and not a symptom of premature senile decay.

* * *