Did he hate the cold at his alternate's age? He thinks so; he'd had Kyril Island under his belt by then, if not the level of revulsion caused by his cryorevival. This ... still seems a little stronger. Exacerbated by something he himself didn't experience. What a thought that is - having to ask himself what happened.
"Still this cold," he says unhappily. Whoever's next to him isn't using his bedroll right now, so he swipes their blanket and passes it over. "It's like it knew how much we hate it. Made it especially miserable instead." Now he glances over at himself appraisingly. "I don't remember hating it quite as much as you do, though."
Miles gladly takes the proffered blanket, drawing it tightly around himself. He glances over at the question. Well, better line of conversation than where he's spent the last two months or...however. It hasn't been that long for him.
Still not a fun topic, though.
"Ah...right." He rubs at his forehead with a blanketed hand. At least his teeth have stopped chattering. "We spent a month on the Moira without proper heat. The ship got hit with some kind of electrical damage that screwed with the life support systems. It was about this cold." He shrugs a shoulder at the miserable world around them. Sure, sure, the other Miles has been dealing with it for two months, but whatever.
"It was bad. I had to cuddle up with Gregor and Ivan for warmth." He grimaces. Well, at least the cuddling with Bel hadn't been so bad. Or it wouldn't have been, if he wasn't still panicking about it at the time. "It was even worse in the morgue."
He can tell he's touching a sore spot. How strange it is to see his own expressions and know pretty much exactly what he's thinking. Even having had this hallucination once before, it's still ridiculously strange.
"A month on a spaceship with no heat," he repeats. That sounds horrifying too. Even worse than just winter for him - closer to being frozen. Cuddling with Ivan, though. "Poor Gregor and Ivan. I think you got the better end of that deal." If only for sheer size differential. "What the hell were you doing in the morgue?"
"Yeah, you spend six hours with Ivan snoring directly into your ear and see how you feel after that."
Miles flashes him a grim smile. "What do you think I was doing in the morgue?" A beat. "I wasn't being a corpse."
Just in case that needed clarifying. Since he did, you know, tell his older self about how he'd died. He rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. "I was investigating. They had the morgue completely locked off, with Captain Cúrre's -- the medbay captain -- authorization only. I asked Thán about it, but he was irritatingly cagey about it as usual, so I decided to have a look for myself."
Translation: somebody told Miles he wasn't allowed to do something so he went and did it anyway. Business as usual.
"You know, if he wasn't so damned self-effacing, I'd mistake Thán for a haut. I've never known anyone else to be so frigging cryptic. I think he was allergic to being straightforward."
He was just about to ask if it had anything to do with his alternate self dying. It's certainly what came to mind first. But illicit snooping around, ah ... that's downright normal for them. Ask questions first and permission never.
"Did you find anything then? Some reason he wasn't being honest?" Because surely there's something interesting here or his alternate wouldn't have twigged onto it.
Honestly, the consequences for getting into trouble on the Moira were so mild, it barely even counted. Handy, sure, but almost disappointing in a way. Then again, Thán's trust and faith in Miles had gotten...truly unnerving.
He frowns in thought, his expression turning inward. "Sort of. We found a body. I mean -- one we weren't expecting, anyway. Captain Típota's." He presses his lips together, looking not entirely pleased. "She was always very...elusive. We hardly ever saw her. But her body looked like it had had some kind of electrical damage. I thought it must've been connected to what happened to the ship, but...God, it was impossible to get answers out of Thán. I wanted to know why she hadn't resurged like the rest of us, why she was in the morgue and why was it locked..."
Miles makes a frustrated little noise and a wringing gesture with his hands, a pantomime, perhaps, of how much he'd like to wring Thán's neck every time he dodged around answers. "I never did get a satisfactory answer out of that one. One of many mysteries on that frigging ship. If I hadn't fallen into the Ingress when I did..." He lets out a harsh sigh. Is he actually missing the Moira? He shouldn't, but then -- it was his home for a year, and there were so many people he left behind. Or who left him behind. He waves a hand. "Every answer I ever got just raised more questions, or wasn't much of an answer at all. And after three days in that morgue, I was pissed about it."
It's making Miles want to wring this guy's neck in sympathy. Turnabout is fair play, he supposes; how many times had he kept people in the dark? A lot. A hell of a lot.
And Miles would really rather be on a mysterious ship than - well. Here. And now. He's a little bit jealous, even. "So what did you do? Break down doors? Dig up bodies?" Metaphorically speaking, anyway.
Miles chews absently on the side of his thumb. "I sure as hell tried. I managed to get in another few places. Never felt like I was getting far. Got some weird experiences and a whole host of new questions, but no answers. And then it was like there was another goddamned emergency every month, and Personnel Officer wasn't exactly a slow job, and then there was the bar, and..."
And then there was his utter breakdown and dissociation, after which he'd endured a frankly ridiculous two-week quarantine by Ivan and Gregor. Miles shakes his head.
"Not too long ago, a new captain showed up. The original captain, apparently. And Thán and the rest just neatly stepped aside. Which -- to be fair, they were all terrible at it. But it was a terrible I was comfortable with." He vents out a sigh and rubs his cheek. "The only real answer I ever got was about Thán's connection to the Ingress. And trying to investigate the Ingress is how I...fell out in the first place."
In other words, a properly Milesian adventure, surprising Miles not at all. He shakes his head slightly, somewhat disappointed by the anticlimax as well. "Had to be something else going on," he murmurs, mostly to himself. (Entirely to himself). But something else has caught his attention. A little more important, a lot more relevant to his own situation.
"The Ingress?" he asks, sitting up. Suddenly more attentive. "Is that the device that pulled you in to begin with?"
"Yeah, that's the one," Miles says absently, momentarily distracted by the futile attempt at warming his hands by rubbing them together. Friction his ass. He frowns. "Didn't I tell you about it last time? The whole giant broken portal in the middle of the ship?"
"You did," Miles says, though he'd forgotten until just now. This whole hallucination business is playing merry havoc with his memories. "But it sounded like science fiction. Until now, anyway." Because he deeply suspects the reason why they're all here is due to wormhole tech, and this sounds like ... "Would you recognize it? If you saw it again?"
Miles lets out a choked snort at it sounds like science fiction, because after spending a year on a ship with broken wormhole portals and aliens and talking skeletons, science fiction has become startlingly relative.
"Until now?" He raises an eyebrow, but then shrugs and nods, shivering a little. "Well, yeah. They're kind of impossible to miss. Big, glowy, maybe three or four meters tall. But the one on the ship was broken." And...he hadn't exactly come from the Moira this time, either, a fact which he is neatly stepping around for now.
Something Miles will seize upon when he finds out, but - for now he's thoroughly distracted. He gets up to pace, his boots scuffling against the other bedrolls in their tent. "Byerly would have seen it if the Cetagandans had it anywhere obvious," he says, thinking out loud to himself. Literally. "Unless it's so broken it's not glowing at all." He stops there to pierce his alternate with his sharp gaze. "Did yours glow?"
Miles doesn't flinch at that sharp gaze -- at least he's spent enough time around Mark to get used to seeing his own face -- but he does blink.
"Yes, it glowed. It was broken, but functioning. Aren't you starting to feel a little déjà vu?" He rubs his forehead and sighs. "The Cetagandans don't have an Ingress. The only place I've actually seen them was in -- that universe, on the Moira and all the worlds we visited. Besides, even if the Cetagandans did manage to get their hands on one -- how, I don't know -- I don't think they'd actually be able to get it working."
Look, it's been a long couple of months. And Miles' memory isn't quite what it used to be, curse that damn cryorevival. He stops pacing long enough to make a face. "Bad news for all of us in that case." He glances down at himself. "Shame I can't get you into the base to take a look."
Miles no. That's a bad idea on so many levels, and he knows it. There's no guarantee the Cetagandans even have anything worth looking at.
Miles's mouth opens a moment, then closes. The worst part about talking to himself, he thinks, is that he can see the beginnings of a subtle manipulation -- he'd like to think of it more as a psychological nudge, but right now he's on the other side of that fence, and it's not a good look. That and the cold still has him in a bitter mood.
"The hell it is," he says, scowling, just short of snapping. "I'm not going into that base, and I'm telling you, the Cetagandans don't have one, or else that's where we'd all be coming out from." He closes his teeth on a breath. "Besides, even if they did have a broken Ingress, it'd be useless anyway."
Miles turns to start pacing again. He'd shown up in the camp, it's true. But does that mean Barrayar has their own version? It seems impossible. If the tech is anywhere it's with Cetaganda ...
But even he won't walk his twin into certain death. With a sigh, he settles back down. "I'll ask Byerly on the next blind drop. He should have seen something."
"Are you listening to me?" Miles demands, looking irritated, but he's too frigging cold to move. "I don't there's an Ingress anywhere on this planet. If you're going through a door, even a one-way door, you have to -- wait, Byerly?" This time when he blinks it's in legitimate bafflement. "Is he...spying on the Cetagandans?"
With Miles helping, which is even worse. "Of course," he says, as if Byerly being a spy is the most natural thing in the world. Nevermind he'd been surprised as hell to find that out the first time. "He's a double agent for Piotr. And I'm his handler."
He's going to get about the reaction expected from Miles -- an incredulous stare with a running undertone of are you frigging stupid? Byerly Vorrutyer, a spy on the Cetagandans. God, you might as well have just sent Ivan into an astrophysics lab.
"Byerly Vorrutyer," he repeats. "You sent Byerly Vorrutyer into Cetagandan territory to spy on them? What is wrong with you?" His brow furrows, and he manages to stare somehow a little harder. "And Grandfather approved this?"
Ha. It's kind of fun watching his younger self be so absolutely, quantifiably wrong about something. Even if Miles had, by definition, also been wrong about the same subject.
"Byerly Vorrutyer, yes," he drawls sarcastically. "Given he's an ImpSec agent, I felt it appropriate."
"ImpSec?" Miles just about squawks, looking incredulously at his older self. God, nothing about his future sounds good. He has to change that -- if he ever gets back to it. He shivers again, missing the warmth of Bel's body. "Byerly is ImpSec? Since when?"
"Years," quips Miles airily. Which just just a sarcastic way of saying he has no idea. But given how smooth Byerly is, it has to have been a while, right? "The fact that neither of us suspected is a testament to his skill, I'd say."
Or he could be pulling his younger self's leg, but. Well. As entertained as he is by the other man's mild discomfort, he's really no kidding here.
Miles looks almost comically disgusted at the idea. The idea that Byerly's been a spy all this time and Miles hadn't even noticed is practically offensive. He looks at his older self, lips thinning.
"Are you sure Grandfather didn't just send him over there to get rid of him?"
"Both could be true," Miles admits. He wouldn't it past the old man, after all. "But it doesn't make him any less a spy." And because he can guess pretty well at what he's thinking - having thought it himself - he continues: "Just because we didn't realize doesn't mean it's impossible, you know."
"I'm not arguing with that," Miles mutters, rubbing his arm. "I just find the idea offensive. Byerly Vorrutyer. God."
He shakes his head, getting back to the topic at hand. He really doubts there's an Ingress on the Cetagandan base, but there's something pulling them here. He'd very much like to be pulled back, thanks. "Has he found anything interesting?"
Ah. That sets a light in his eyes. For all that this is a shitty situation, this mission has at least been interesting to carry out. Miles almost likes being a spymaster.
"The Handmaiden herself is coming here to oversee what's going on," he says. "However this is happening, Cetaganda is interested."
Miles looks truly startled, and then just plain baffled. "The sent the Handmaiden off planet? And -- what the does the Star Crèche want with a -- whatever it is?"
"Nothing good," Miles says grimly, though he's still fascinated too. "At best, a whole range of genetics they don't normally have access to. At worst, a whole set of universes to expand into."
And perhaps their own would be left alone in that case, but - Miles doesn't like those odds at all.
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"Still this cold," he says unhappily. Whoever's next to him isn't using his bedroll right now, so he swipes their blanket and passes it over. "It's like it knew how much we hate it. Made it especially miserable instead." Now he glances over at himself appraisingly. "I don't remember hating it quite as much as you do, though."
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Still not a fun topic, though.
"Ah...right." He rubs at his forehead with a blanketed hand. At least his teeth have stopped chattering. "We spent a month on the Moira without proper heat. The ship got hit with some kind of electrical damage that screwed with the life support systems. It was about this cold." He shrugs a shoulder at the miserable world around them. Sure, sure, the other Miles has been dealing with it for two months, but whatever.
"It was bad. I had to cuddle up with Gregor and Ivan for warmth." He grimaces. Well, at least the cuddling with Bel hadn't been so bad. Or it wouldn't have been, if he wasn't still panicking about it at the time. "It was even worse in the morgue."
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"A month on a spaceship with no heat," he repeats. That sounds horrifying too. Even worse than just winter for him - closer to being frozen. Cuddling with Ivan, though. "Poor Gregor and Ivan. I think you got the better end of that deal." If only for sheer size differential. "What the hell were you doing in the morgue?"
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Miles flashes him a grim smile. "What do you think I was doing in the morgue?" A beat. "I wasn't being a corpse."
Just in case that needed clarifying. Since he did, you know, tell his older self about how he'd died. He rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. "I was investigating. They had the morgue completely locked off, with Captain Cúrre's -- the medbay captain -- authorization only. I asked Thán about it, but he was irritatingly cagey about it as usual, so I decided to have a look for myself."
Translation: somebody told Miles he wasn't allowed to do something so he went and did it anyway. Business as usual.
"You know, if he wasn't so damned self-effacing, I'd mistake Thán for a haut. I've never known anyone else to be so frigging cryptic. I think he was allergic to being straightforward."
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"Did you find anything then? Some reason he wasn't being honest?" Because surely there's something interesting here or his alternate wouldn't have twigged onto it.
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He frowns in thought, his expression turning inward. "Sort of. We found a body. I mean -- one we weren't expecting, anyway. Captain Típota's." He presses his lips together, looking not entirely pleased. "She was always very...elusive. We hardly ever saw her. But her body looked like it had had some kind of electrical damage. I thought it must've been connected to what happened to the ship, but...God, it was impossible to get answers out of Thán. I wanted to know why she hadn't resurged like the rest of us, why she was in the morgue and why was it locked..."
Miles makes a frustrated little noise and a wringing gesture with his hands, a pantomime, perhaps, of how much he'd like to wring Thán's neck every time he dodged around answers. "I never did get a satisfactory answer out of that one. One of many mysteries on that frigging ship. If I hadn't fallen into the Ingress when I did..." He lets out a harsh sigh. Is he actually missing the Moira? He shouldn't, but then -- it was his home for a year, and there were so many people he left behind. Or who left him behind. He waves a hand. "Every answer I ever got just raised more questions, or wasn't much of an answer at all. And after three days in that morgue, I was pissed about it."
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And Miles would really rather be on a mysterious ship than - well. Here. And now. He's a little bit jealous, even. "So what did you do? Break down doors? Dig up bodies?" Metaphorically speaking, anyway.
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And then there was his utter breakdown and dissociation, after which he'd endured a frankly ridiculous two-week quarantine by Ivan and Gregor. Miles shakes his head.
"Not too long ago, a new captain showed up. The original captain, apparently. And Thán and the rest just neatly stepped aside. Which -- to be fair, they were all terrible at it. But it was a terrible I was comfortable with." He vents out a sigh and rubs his cheek. "The only real answer I ever got was about Thán's connection to the Ingress. And trying to investigate the Ingress is how I...fell out in the first place."
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"The Ingress?" he asks, sitting up. Suddenly more attentive. "Is that the device that pulled you in to begin with?"
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"Until now?" He raises an eyebrow, but then shrugs and nods, shivering a little. "Well, yeah. They're kind of impossible to miss. Big, glowy, maybe three or four meters tall. But the one on the ship was broken." And...he hadn't exactly come from the Moira this time, either, a fact which he is neatly stepping around for now.
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"Yes, it glowed. It was broken, but functioning. Aren't you starting to feel a little déjà vu?" He rubs his forehead and sighs. "The Cetagandans don't have an Ingress. The only place I've actually seen them was in -- that universe, on the Moira and all the worlds we visited. Besides, even if the Cetagandans did manage to get their hands on one -- how, I don't know -- I don't think they'd actually be able to get it working."
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Miles no. That's a bad idea on so many levels, and he knows it. There's no guarantee the Cetagandans even have anything worth looking at.
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"The hell it is," he says, scowling, just short of snapping. "I'm not going into that base, and I'm telling you, the Cetagandans don't have one, or else that's where we'd all be coming out from." He closes his teeth on a breath. "Besides, even if they did have a broken Ingress, it'd be useless anyway."
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But even he won't walk his twin into certain death. With a sigh, he settles back down. "I'll ask Byerly on the next blind drop. He should have seen something."
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God help them all.
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"Byerly Vorrutyer," he repeats. "You sent Byerly Vorrutyer into Cetagandan territory to spy on them? What is wrong with you?" His brow furrows, and he manages to stare somehow a little harder. "And Grandfather approved this?"
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"Byerly Vorrutyer, yes," he drawls sarcastically. "Given he's an ImpSec agent, I felt it appropriate."
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Or he could be pulling his younger self's leg, but. Well. As entertained as he is by the other man's mild discomfort, he's really no kidding here.
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"Are you sure Grandfather didn't just send him over there to get rid of him?"
Seriously, this sounds like total horseshit.
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He shakes his head, getting back to the topic at hand. He really doubts there's an Ingress on the Cetagandan base, but there's something pulling them here. He'd very much like to be pulled back, thanks. "Has he found anything interesting?"
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"The Handmaiden herself is coming here to oversee what's going on," he says. "However this is happening, Cetaganda is interested."
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And perhaps their own would be left alone in that case, but - Miles doesn't like those odds at all.