Young Miles by Lois McMaster Bujold Read Free Book Online

years. Miles was surprised. He'd had the vague impression that Bothari had served under his father as a ground combat soldier since the beginning of time. Bothari's service with Vorrutyer ended in a constellation of reprimands, black marks, discipline parades, and sealed medical reports. Miles, conscious of Elena staring over his shoulder, whipped past these quickly. Oddly inconsistent. Some, bizarrely petty, were marked with ferocious punishments. Others, astonishingly serious—had Bothari really held an engineering tech at plasma-arc-point in a lavatory for sixteen hours? and for God's sake, why?—disappeared into the medical reports and resulted in no discipline at all.
    Going farther into the past, the record steadied. A lot of combat in his twenties. Commendations, citations for being wounded, more commendations. Excellent marks in basic training. Recruiting records. "Recruiting was a lot simpler in those days," Miles said enviously.
    "Oh! Are my grandparents on that?" asked Elena eagerly. "He never talks about them, either. I gather his mother died when he was rather young. He's never even told me her name."
    "Marusia," Miles sounded out, peering. "Fuzzy photostat."
    "That's pretty," said Elena, sounding pleased. "And his father's?"
    Whoops, thought Miles. The recopied photostat was not so fuzzy that he couldn't make out the blunt, uncapitalized "unknown" printed in some forgotten clerk's hand. Miles swallowed, realizing at last why a certain insulting epithet seemed to get under Bothari's skin when all others were allowed to roll off, patiently disdained.
    "Maybe I can make it out," Elena offered, misinterpreting his delay.
    The screen went blank at a twitch of his hand. "Konstantine," Miles declared firmly, without hesitation. "Same as his. But both his parents were dead by the time he joined the Service."
    "Konstantine Bothari junior," Elena mused. "Hm."
    Miles stared into the blank screen, and suppressed an urge to scream with frustration. Another damned artificial social wedge driven between himself and Elena. A father who was a bastard was about as far from being "right and proper" for a young Barrayaran virgin as anything he could think of. And it was obviously no secret—his father must know, and God knew how many hundreds of other people besides. Equally obviously, Elena did not. She was rightfully proud of her father, his elite service, his position of high trust. Miles knew how painfully hard she struggled sometimes for some expression of approval from the old stone carving. How strange to realize that pain might cut both ways—did Bothari then dread the loss of that scarcely acknowledged admiration? Well, the Sergeant's semi-secret was safe with him.
    He flipped, fast-forward, through the years of Bothari's life. "Still no sign of your mother," he said to Elena. "She must be under that seal. Damn, and I thought this was going to be easy." He stared thoughtfully into space. "Try hospital records. Deaths, births—you sure you were born here in Vorbarr Sultana?"
    "As far as I know."
    Several minutes of tedious search produced records on a fair number of Botharis, none related to the Sergeant or Elena in any way. "Ah ha!" Miles broke out suddenly. "I know what I haven't tried. Imp Mil!"
    "They don't have an obstetrics department," Elena said doubtfully.
    "But if an accident—soldier's wife and all that—maybe she was rushed to the nearest facility, and the Imperial Military Hospital was it . . ." He crooned over the machine. "Searching, searching . . . huh!"
    "Did you find me?" she asked excitedly.
    "No—I found me." He flipped over screen after screen of documentation. "What a scramble it must have been, making military research clean up after its own product. Lucky for me they'd imported those uterine replicators—yes, there they are—they could never have tried some of those treatments in vivo, they'd have killed Mother. There's good old Dr. Vaagen—ah ha! So he was in military research,