Miles grinned, secretly relieved at not being taken more strictly to task for his "Dendarii Mercenaries" outbreak. Well, the brief moment of fantasy was probably harmless enough.

The three of them found Elena stalking back and forth across Mrs.

Naismith's living room. Two bright spots of color burned in her

cheeks, her nostrils flared, and she was muttering under her breath.

She transfixed Miles with an angry glare as he entered. "Betans!" she bit out in a voice of loathing.

This only let him half off the hook. "What's the matter?" he inquired cautiously.

She took another turn around the room, stiff-legged, as if

trampling bodies underfoot. "That awful holovid," she glowered.

"How can they—oh, I can't even describe it."

Ah ha, she found one of the pornography channels, thought Miles.

Well, it had to happen eventually. "Holovid?" he said brightly.

"How could they permit such horrible slanders on Admiral

Vorkosigan, and Prince Serg, and our forces? I think the producer

should be taken out and shot! And the actors—and the scriptwriter—

we would at home, by God . . ."

Not the pornography channel, evidently. "Uh, Elena—just what

have you been looking at?"

His grandmother was seated, with a fixed nervous smile, in her

float chair. "I tried to explain that it's fictionalized—you know, to make the history more dramatic . . ."

Elena gave vent to an ominous rattling hiss; Miles gave his

grandmother a pleading look.

" The Thin Blue Line, " Mrs. Naismith explained cryptically.

"Oh, I've seen that one," said Mayhew. "It's a rerun."

Miles recalled the docudrama vividly himself; it had first been

released two years ago, and had contributed its mite to making his

school visit to Beta Colony the sometimes surreal experience it had been. Miles's father, then-Commodore Vorkosigan, had begun the

aborted Barrayaran invasion of Beta Colony's ally Escobar nineteen

years ago as a Staff officer. He had ended, upon the catastrophic

deaths of the co-commanders Admiral Vorrutyer and Crown Prince

Serg Vorbarra, as commander of the armada. His brilliant retreat was still cited as exemplary, in the military annals of Barrayar. The Betans naturally took a different view of the affair. The blue in the title of the docudrama referred to the color of the uniform worn by the Betan

Expeditionary Force, of which Captain Cordelia Naismith had been a

part.

"It's—it's . . ." Elena turned to Miles. "There isn't any truth in it—is there?"

"Well," said Miles, equable from years of practice in coming to

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terms with the Betan version of history, "some. But my mother says they never wore the blue uniforms until the war was practically over.

And she swears up and down, privately, that she didn't murder

Admiral Vorrutyer, but she won't say who did. Protests too much, I