Miles Vorkosigan leaves the Imperial Academy top of his class in everything that matters and is promptly posted to Lazkowski Base, an Arctic infantry training camp of legendary awfulness, where his superiors hope five months of weather observation will teach him to obey orders. It does not go well. Within weeks he has collided with a brutal and unstable base commander, and the resulting incident ends his career on Barrayar before it has properly begun. Reassigned to Imperial Security and sent offplanet where he can do less damage, Miles finds himself among mercenaries, arms dealers and the tangled politics of a strategically vital wormhole junction, and then discovers that Emperor Gregor has gone missing from a diplomatic reception and turned up in circumstances that could destroy the Imperium if anyone learns of them. Rescuing him will require the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, an organisation Miles is supposed to have stopped commanding. Bujold sends her hero through farce, imprisonment, fleet battle and blackmail at considerable speed, but the book's serious business is the question its title asks: what a Vor lord owes, and to whom, when the chain of command breaks.
