Lois Bujold - Weatherman

They’d meant his scat-cat to bog, to be sure, while he serviced the weather station, and for Miles to have the embarrassment of calling the base for heavy equipment to pull it out. Embarrassing, not lethal. They could not have—no one could have—foreseen Miles’s inspired safety-conscious precaution with the chain, which was in the final analysis what had almost killed him. At most it was a matter for Service Security, bad enough, or for normal discipline.

He dangled his toes over the side of his bed, one of a row in the empty infirmary, and pushed the last of his food around on his tray. The corpsman wandered in and glanced at the remains.

“You feeling all right now, sir?”

“Fine,” said Miles morosely.

“You, uh, didn’t finish your tray.”

“I often don’t. They always give me too much.”

“Yeah, I guess you are pretty, um . . .” The corpsman made a note on his report panel, leaned over to examine Miles’s ears, and bent to inspect his toes, rolling them between practiced fingers. “It doesn’t look like you’re going to lose any pieces, here. Lucky.”

“Do you treat a lot of frostbite?” Or am I the only idiot? Present evidence would suggest it.

“Oh, once the grubs arrive, this place’ll be crammed. Frostbite, pneumonia, broken bones, contusions, concussions . . . gets real lively, come winter. Wall-to-wall moro—unlucky trainees. And a few unlucky instructors, that they take down with ’em.” The corpsman stood, tapping a few more entries on his panel. “I’m afraid I have to mark you as recovered now, sir.”

“Afraid?” Miles raised his brows in inquiry.

The corpsman straightened, in the unconscious posture of a man transmitting official bad news. That old they-told-me-to-say-this-it’s-not-my-fault look. “You are ordered to report to the base commander’s office as soon as I release you, sir.”

Miles considered an immediate relapse. No. Better to get the messy parts over with. “Tell me, corpsman, has anyone else ever sunk a scat-cat?”

“Oh, sure. The grubs lose about five or six a season. Plus minor bog-downs. The engineers get real pissed about it. The commandant promised them next time he’d . . . ahem!” The corpsman lost his voice.

Wonderful , thought Miles. Just great . He could see it coming. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t see it coming.

Miles dashed back to his quarters for a quick change of clothing, guessing a hospital robe might be inappropriate for the coming interview. He immediately found he had a minor quandary. His black fatigues seemed too relaxed, his dress greens too formal for office wear anywhere outside Imperial HQ at Vorbarr Sultana. His undress greens’ trousers and half-boots were still at the bottom of the bog. He had only brought one of each uniform style with him; his spares, supposedly in transit, had not yet arrived.

He was hardly in a position to borrow from a neighbor. His uniforms were privately made to his own fit, at approximately four times the cost of Imperial issue. Part of that cost was for the effort of making them indistinguishable on the surface from the machine cut, while at the same time partially masking the oddities of his body through subtleties of hand-tailoring. He cursed under his breath and shucked on his dress greens, complete with mirror-polished boots to the knees. At least the boots obviated the need for leg braces.

General Stanis Metzov, read the sign on the door, Base Commander. Miles had been assiduously avoiding the base commander ever since their first unfortunate encounter. This had not been hard to do in Ahn’s company, despite the pared population of Kyril Island this month; Ahn avoided everybody. Miles now wished he’d tried harder to strike up conversations with brother officers in mess. Permitting himself to stay isolated, even to concentrate on his new tasks, had been a mistake. In five days of even the most random conversation, someone must surely have mentioned Kyril Island’s voracious killer mud.

A corporal manning the comconsole in an antechamber ushered Miles through to the inner office. He must now try to work himself back around to Metzov’s good side, assuming the general had one. Miles needed allies. General Metzov looked across his desk unsmiling as Miles saluted and stood waiting.

Today, the general was aggressively dressed in black fatigues. At Metzov’s altitude in the hierarchy, this stylistic choice usually indicated a deliberate identification with The Fighting Man. The only concession to his rank was their pressed neatness. His decorations were stripped down to a mere modest three, all high combat commendations. Pseudo-modest; pruned of the surrounding foliage, they leapt to the eye. Mentally, Miles applauded, even envied, the effect. Metzov looked his part, the combat commander, absolutely, unconsciously natural.

A fifty-fifty chance with the uniform, and I had to guess wrong, Miles fumed as Metzov’s eye traveled sarcastically down, and back up, the subdued glitter of his dress greens. All right, so Metzov’s eyebrows signaled, Miles now looked like some kind of Vorish headquarters twit. Not that such wasn’t another familiar type. Miles decided to decline the roasting and cut Metzov’s inspection short by forcing the opening. “Yes, sir?”

Metzov leaned back in his chair, lips twisting. “I see you found some pants, Ensign Vorkosigan. And, ah . . . riding boots, too. You know, there are no horses on this island.”

None at Imperial Headquarters, either, Miles thought irritably. I didn’t design the damned boots. His father had once suggested that his staff officers must need them for riding hobbyhorses, high horses, and nightmares. Unable to think of a useful reply to the general’s sally, Miles stood in dignified silence, chin lifted, parade rest. “Sir.”

Metzov leaned forward, clasping his hands, abandoning his heavy humor, eyes gone hard again. “You lost a valuable, fully equipped scat-cat as a result of leaving it parked in an area clearly marked as a Permafrost Inversion Zone. Don’t they teach map-reading at the Imperial Academy anymore, or is it to be all diplomacy in the New Service—how to drink tea with the ladies?”

Miles called up the map in his mind. He could see it clearly. “The blue areas were labelled P.I.Z. Those initials were not defined. Not in the key or anywhere.”

“Then I take it you also failed to read your manual.”

He’d been buried in manuals ever since he’d arrived. Weather office procedural, equipment tech-specs . . . “Which one, sir?”

“Lazkowski Base Regulations.”

Miles tried frantically to remember if he’d ever seen such a disk. “I . . . think Lieutenant Ahn may have given me a copy . . . night before last.” Ahn had in fact dumped an entire carton of disks out on Miles’s bed in officers’ quarters. He was doing some preliminary packing, he’d said, and was willing Miles his library. Miles had read two weather disks before going to sleep that night. Ahn, clearly, had returned to his own cubicle to do a little preliminary celebrating. The next morning Miles had taken the scat-cat out. . . .

“And you haven’t read it yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

I was set up, Miles’s thought wailed. He could feel the highly interested presence of Metzov’s clerk, undismissed, standing witness by the door behind him. Making this a public, not a private, dressing-down. And if only he’d read the damned manual, would those two bastards from the motor pool even have been able to set him up? Will or nill, he was going to get down-checked for this one. “No excuse, sir.”

“Well, Ensign, in Chapter Three of Lazkowski Base Regulations you will find a complete description of all the permafrost zones, together with the rules for avoiding them. You might look into it, when you can spare a little leisure from . . . drinking tea.”