ImpSec

ImpSec is Barrayar’s security organization, built around a powerful command hierarchy and a network of departments, records systems, and specialized expertise. When Chief Simon Illyan’s sudden breakdown makes the agency responsible for investigating its own failure, an Imperial Audit puts that hierarchy under external scrutiny. The inquiry exposes not only deliberate sabotage but also the organizational risks of missed warning signs, compromised information, and authority concentrated in the hands of the people being investigated.

Mandate and Command Structure

ImpSec’s command culture is visible in its weekly briefings, where department heads present précis reports and identify red-flag issues for other departments to monitor. Chief Simon Illyan ordinarily directs this process and assigns work across the organization. When Miles Vorkosigan returns to Illyan’s office as an Imperial Auditor, the room’s familiar arrangement acquires a different meaning: once the center of Miles’s working life, it is now a place where he must oversee the agency that used to command him. General Haroche occupies Illyan’s chair, while Miles and Ivan Vorpatril sit opposite him. The reversal makes clear that the audit is not simply another internal briefing.

The Imperial Auditor’s position lies outside ImpSec’s ordinary rank structure. Miles reminds himself that he is neither above nor below the colonels and senior officers assembled to brief him, but outside their hierarchy altogether. ImpSec has encountered audits before, but its last one, almost five years earlier, had been chiefly financial in scope. That earlier investigation had carried political sensitivities, and Illyan had shielded Miles from them. The present inquiry, by contrast, concerns the organization’s handling of its own chief and the possibility that its internal systems have been manipulated.

Warning Signs and Medical Response

The breakdown does not begin as a single, unmistakable emergency. Galeni reports four odd incidents involving Illyan over three days. In the first, Illyan requests a digest Galeni has already prepared and delivered. The office log confirms the delivery, and Illyan then finds the code card on his desk and apologizes. The duplicate request initially seems like a small lapse rather than proof of a larger crisis.

At the weekly briefing, however, the signs become impossible to dismiss. Illyan is unusually restless and fiddles with objects on the table until he snaps a data card. When he tries to assign the usual tasks, his sentences remain grammatically coherent but cease to connect into a meaningful sequence. He appears not to recognize the problem until he notices the department heads staring at him, then leaves. Haroche urges him to seek medical evaluation, despite Illyan’s angry denial that he is ill. His fluctuating expression and shaking make the episode visible to the room, but only after the briefing has already begun to fail.

Miles demands to see Illyan and to review every scrap of case data, medical or otherwise. Gregor grants him an audit after concluding that ImpSec’s progress is unsatisfactory, and Miles asks for an assistant; Gregor assigns Ivan. At the clinic, Miles requires a meeting with the full medical staff before deciding what further steps the inquiry needs. The team includes neurologist Dr. Ruibal, biocyberneticist Admiral Avakli, and Avakli’s technical assistants. Avakli’s expertise matters because his medical group works on neural implants for Imperial Service jumpship pilots, a technology with some resemblance to Illyan’s eidetic chip.

Investigation and Vulnerable Systems

The audit combines ImpSec’s investigative resources with Miles’s close review of its work. Haroche agrees to alert Galactic Affairs to investigate possible sources of the biological material beyond Barrayar, including Jackson’s Whole and Escobar. He also orders a review of Illyan’s movements during a period stretching from sixteen to five weeks before the inquiry. Miles spends the rest of the day checking the agency’s actions and orders, then reads the detailed log of Illyan’s movements for the previous three months. The galactic inquiries will take weeks; in the meantime, Jackson’s Whole is the investigation’s principal physical lead, and Miles’s familiarity with its Houses shapes his attention to that trail.

A discrepancy in ImpSec’s access records gives the investigation a more immediate direction. A comconsole lists Miles as having visited the ImpSec Evidence Rooms twelve weeks earlier, shortly after he reported to and left Illyan’s office on the day of his return from a Dendarii mission. The apparent visit is significant because Miles had not made it. The same screen preserves a long history of his visits and of materials carried in and out, including a safely lobotomized zvegan smart bomb and Cetagandan genetic samples. The false entry is designed to implicate him through the organization’s own records.

Miles recognizes that the forgery has been planted in the wrong order. Had investigators first found the relevant material in Bin Twenty-Seven and only then checked the entry logs, the record could have made him look like a recently cashiered officer with no reason to be in the Evidence Rooms. Instead, the access record itself draws attention to the frame. Miles summons ImpSec Forensics, calls Vaughn Weddell, and has the scientist brought in when his home console does not respond. At Weapons Room IV, Miles separates custody of the material: Forensics will examine the box, Ivan will accompany it, and Weddell must analyze a sample to determine whether it matches the material flushed from Illyan’s chip. The remaining units are returned to a new box under the Auditor’s seal.

Internal Compromise and Exposure

The inquiry reveals that the agency’s records have been attacked through more than one route. ImpSec’s team finds that the Evidence Room comconsole record was altered by a mole program inserted through its read-slot, a physically isolated machine. Miles cautions against treating that mechanism as proof that Galeni personally did it. A separate investigation finds that the building’s admittance log was altered remotely through data links to other ImpSec systems, not at the site where the log was kept. The alteration can be traced through access controls and section-level overrides, which authorized senior personnel—including Haroche and other department heads—to bypass the system’s ordinary restrictions. The contrast between a physically inserted program and a remote alteration makes a single, premature attribution especially dangerous.

The decisive clue comes from the office where Illyan was apparently dosed. Miles reasons that the prokaryote delivery capsules must have been caught in the return-air filters. The team inspects the low grille and its fiber filter, designed to catch ordinary particles; the prokaryotes could pass through the barrier after leaving their capsules. Weddell applies an atomizer while the investigators watch. Under black light, a red fluorescence appears, revealing the otherwise invisible residue. The air filter turns an inference about the delivery route into evidence at the scene.

Miles then makes Guy Allegre acting chief of ImpSec, pending Gregor’s approval, and orders him to arrest his predecessor, General Haroche, on the capital charge of treason. Haroche denies treason, but the investigation has established that he was not merely supervising a flawed response: he was the person who had dosed Illyan. The case against him becomes concrete when the team catches him trying to switch the filter in his former office. Miles’s short account to Gregor overturns the assumption that Galeni was the source of the conspiracy: Haroche himself had been the provisional chief at its center.

Authority, Loyalty, and Institutional Consequences

ImpSec’s vulnerability is both technical and institutional. Its systems can preserve years of entry records and track the movement of sensitive materials, yet those same records can be falsified. Its layered authorization rules provide security barriers, but senior personnel can override them, and an insider can exploit that access. The investigation also shows the value of cross-checking: the false record does not stand alone, and a separate examination of the data links exposes a different path of tampering. Miles’s insistence on raw information and controlled evidence handling counters the danger that the organization will accept an internal account before testing it.

The inquiry strains relationships within the agency and among those bound to it. Haroche had asked Gregor not to discuss possible deliberate sabotage with Miles, a request that heightens Miles’s concern about secrecy and judgment. Miles distinguishes those concerns from loyalty: he doubts Haroche’s judgment without initially claiming certainty about malice. His own past with ImpSec complicates the audit. He knows Illyan’s office as a former subordinate and understands the isolation that can accompany losing one’s sense of self; he therefore argues that, even if Haroche’s failures stem from inexperience and nerves rather than sabotage, the chief’s treatment of Illyan requires correction.

The discovery also changes ImpSec’s leadership and the futures attached to it. After Haroche’s arrest, Miles explains that Illyan is no longer chief and that Allegre has taken over provisionally. Haroche offers Miles a return to the Dendarii on terms resembling his former work for Illyan, with a captaincy added. Miles does not conceal that offer when the subject arises before Gregor and Illyan. Later, he tells Elli Quinn that Allegre, ImpSec, and Barrayar will offer her the admiralcy of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, working for Allegre in the capacity Miles once held under Illyan. ImpSec’s crisis thus reaches beyond its own command offices: its changed leadership reshapes the service arrangements of the people once connected to Illyan’s command.