Roic smiled ruefully, and shrugged. “I'm afraid you should've brought Jankowski, sir.”
“What, because he's shorter?”
“No, m'lord!” Roic looked faintly indignant. “Because he's a real veteran.”
A Count of Barrayar was limited by law to a bodyguard of a score of sworn men; the Vorkosigans had by tradition recruited most of their armsmen from retiring twenty-year veterans of the Imperial Service. By political need, in the last decades they'd mostly been former ImpSec men. They were a keen but graying bunch. Roic was an interesting new exception.
“When did that become a concern?” Miles's father's cadre of armsmen treated Roic as a junior because he was, but if they were treating him as a second-class citizen . . .
“Eh . . .” Roic waved somewhat inarticulately around the courier ship, by which Miles construed that the problem lay in more recent encounters.
Miles, about to lead off down the short corridor, instead leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Look, Roic—there's scarcely a man in the Imperial Service your age or younger who's faced as much live fire in the Emperor's employ as you have in the Hassadar Municipal Guard. Don't let the damned green uniforms spook you. It's empty swagger. Half of 'em would fall over in a faint if they were asked to take down someone like that murderous lunatic who shot up Hassadar Square.”
“I was already halfway across the plaza, m'lord. It would've been like swimming halfway across a river, deciding you couldn't make it, and turning around to swim back. It was safer to jump him than to turn and run. He'd 'a had the same amount of time to take aim at me either way.”
“But not the time to take out another dozen or so bystanders. Auto-needler's a filthy weapon.” Miles brooded briefly.
“That it is, m'lord.”
For all his height, Roic tended to shyness when he felt himself to be socially outclassed, which unfortunately seemed to be much of the time in the Vorkosigans' service. Since the shyness showed on his surface mainly as a sort of dull stolidity, it tended to get overlooked.