Miles Vorkosigan’s Departure from ImpSec is the moment when a long record of service fails to shield Miles Vorkosigan from the consequences of a serious breach of trust. Simon Illyan offers him a quiet medical discharge rather than a public scandal, but the proposed exit makes the end of Miles’s career at ImpSec concrete: he must formally resign and surrender the silver eyes associated with his service. His brief loss of consciousness interrupts that process without preventing it. Later, as Miles investigates Illyan’s collapse, he encounters evidence that gives the departure a wider resonance: leaving the agency does not end his concern for its people or its failures.

Judgment and the Offer

Simon Illyan’s central charge is institutional as well as personal. He says Miles’s conduct betrayed the subordinates who depended on him and the superiors who trusted him, and that the harm to Lieutenant Vorberg made the betrayal demonstrable. The account frames the decision not as a dispute over Miles’s past achievements but as a judgment about whether those achievements can excuse this specific breach.

Miles answers by invoking nine years of service, more than thirty missions, and the lives he had risked on behalf of the service. He points to the missions that succeeded and insists that his record should still count. Illyan does not dismiss that record; he says it counts greatly, and presents it as part of the reason he is offering a medical discharge without prejudice if Miles resigns. The distinction is consequential: Miles’s service is acknowledged, but it cannot cancel the breach or preserve his post.

Illyan says he has considered the decision from every angle and has been thinking about it for weeks. He also reveals that he spent the morning discussing the matter with Miles’s father, Aral Vorkosigan. Yet Aral does not know the decision has been made. Illyan leaves the task of informing him to Miles, describing it as one last report he does not want to make. Miles reads this as an appeal to his father’s influence; Illyan instead insists that the quiet mercy rests on Miles’s own record and that, without that record, even Aral could not have obtained it.

The Meaning of Leaving

The proposed discharge is not simply an administrative convenience. Illyan presents it as a way to protect Miles and the Vorkosigan name from a public scandal, while also making clear that he will neither erase the incident nor grant Miles a clean continuation in ImpSec. The phrase without prejudice marks a limit to the punishment, not a reversal of the decision: Miles can leave without a public disgrace, but the relationship between officer and institution is ending.

The ceremony strips that separation down to its practical details. Illyan’s records are ready for Miles to sign out by palm-print and retinal scan. Miles’s uniforms do not come from military stores, so they need not be returned; keeping his insignia is traditional. The silver eyes, however, must be handed in. That last requirement changes the encounter from a discussion of status into a physical and administrative threshold. The objects Miles can keep distinguish what remains his from the service marker that ImpSec requires back.

Interruption and Resignation

When Illyan asks for the silver eyes, Miles begins to reach toward his collar, then loses consciousness. He comes around on Illyan’s carpet, with a light-pen from the desk in his mouth. His collar has been opened, but the silver eyes remain in place. The episode lasts about four minutes. Its immediate consequence is to halt the handover, not to undo the decision: after a short interval, Miles returns to the records and completes the required palm-print, retinal scan, and formal resignation.

Illyan allows Miles time to compose himself and wash his face before opening the office door. Miles does so, then sits while Illyan administers the remaining steps. He is still shaking when he asks to leave, and acknowledges that the shaking will continue for a while. The exchange ends without reconciliation or a second argument over the judgment. Miles’s departure is enacted in a restrained sequence of signatures, scans, and permission to go, even as his condition makes clear how far the decision has unsettled him.

What the Departure Does Not End

Later evidence places this separation beside the decline that Miles comes to fear for Illyan. In recounting the preceding days, a colleague describes four odd incidents in three days; one involved Illyan requesting a digest a second time after it had already been delivered. At a weekly briefing, Illyan snaps a data card, then gives instructions whose sentences are grammatically complete but do not cohere with one another. He appears not to recognize the confusion until the department heads react, and he resists the suggestion that he seek medical evaluation.

Miles later argues that Illyan’s condition could be profoundly isolating, comparing the possibility of losing oneself inside one’s own mind with his own experience of cryo-amnesia. He does not claim certainty about what is happening. Instead, he distinguishes possible mismanagement by General Haroche from the more troubling possibility of deliberate sabotage, and insists that even incompetence could cause serious harm. This concern gives the earlier departure a sharp contrast: Miles was forced out of Illyan’s organization, yet he remains alert to Illyan’s vulnerability and to the responsibilities surrounding his care.

His subsequent investigation also turns up a discrepancy in ImpSec’s records. A readout lists Miles as having visited the evidence room twelve weeks earlier, on the day he returned from his last mission with the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, although the recorded time falls when he believes he was walking home. The date and time make the entry suspicious to him; the record itself does not establish who altered it. Later, he directs attention to the return-air duct and asks for the top filter to be examined, as part of an inquiry into how the prokaryotes might pass through the ventilation system. These later discoveries do not change the terms of his resignation, but they show the plot carrying him back into ImpSec’s failures as an investigator rather than as one of its officers.