“How come they promoted you before me? Who the hell have you been sleeping with?” boiled off of Miles’s lips before he could bite it back down. He hadn’t meant his tone of voice to come out quite that harsh.
Ivan shrugged, smirking. “I do my job. And I do it without going around bending all the rules into artistic little origami, shapes, either.”

"Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?"

"What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.

“Security, Lieutenant,” Miles said blandly. “I can’t discuss it even with you.”
“Security,” she sniffed, “doesn’t hide as much from Accounting as they think they do.”

“What would you do? If you discovered or suspected such a horror?”
His lips twisted. “That’s a tough one. A higher honor must underlie ours, the count says. We can’t ever obey unthinkingly.”
“Huh. That’s what Miles says, too. Is that where he got it, from his father?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised. M’lord’s brother Mark says integrity is a disease, and you can only catch it from someone who has it.”

Miles was no musician, but even he could sense an intensity of passion in the playing that went beyond talent, reaching for genius.

“It’s a brute-force approach,” Miles said apologetically. “And not, alas, quite as simple as a data match.”
“That,” murmured Gibbs, “is why enlisted men were invented.”

Vorreedi, Miles reminded himself, was Intelligence, not Counter-intelligence; curiosity, not paranoia, was his driving force.

[On his early history as a hacker] Every hack was a trophy. I had a big feeling of power because I was running the most important worldwide mailbox exchanging hacking information and I knew what was really going on.

Miles had sworn his officer's oath to the Emperor less than two weeks ago, puffed with pride at his achievement. In his secret mind he had imagined himself keeping that oath through blazing battle, enemy torture, what-have-you, even while sharing cynical cracks afterwards with Ivan about archaic dress swords and the sort of people who insisted on wearing them.

But in the dark of subtler temptations, those that hurt without heroism for consolation, he foresaw, the Emperor would no longer be the symbol of Barrayar in his heart.

Peace to you, small lady, he thought to Raina. You've won a twisted poor modern knight, to wear your favor on his sleeve. But it's a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation. At least I won't just tilt at windmills for you. I'll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers, and blast them into the sky....

He knew who he served now. And why he could not quit. And why he must not fail.

“I made up a lot of instant barbarian folklore—I told ’em a Vor prides himself on self-control, that it’s not considered polite on Barrayar for a man to, you know, before his lady has. Three times. It was considered insulting to her. I stroked, I rubbed, I scratched, I recited poetry, I nuzzled and nibbled and—cripes, my fingers are cramped.” His speech was a bit slurred, too, Miles noticed. “I thought they’d never fall asleep.” Ivan paused; a slow smirk displaced the snarl on his face. “But they were smiling, when they finally did.”

I wish people knew the Miles Davis that I knew. Really. Because you can walk into a bookstore and you see reams of books about Miles Davis. And few people who wrote those books know him. The Miles Davis that I know and knew is not the Miles Davis that you'll read about in those books. I had the good fortune to be close enough to him to have him reveal himself to me the first moment we met. It is the Miles Davis that kept me with him as long as it did. Not only was he brilliantly talented, he was brilliantly sensitive. And that is the Miles Davis that people ... don't know that he was trying to protect.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

I mean, look, I just broke into your private files. If I were you, I'd be more than a little upset."
Pen crinkled. "I'm not. It shows initiative.

Not only was Ivan an idiot, but he generated a telepathic damping field that turned people nearby into idiots, too. He would point this out to Barrayaran Intelligence, who would make of his cousin the newest weapon in their arsenal — if