This book won a Hugo Award for best novel.

Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Barrayaran Military Academy with high expectations of ship command but is disappointed with an assignment as meteorologist to an arctic training camp. His tenure in the windy, snow-covered north is cut short when Miles narrowly averts a massacre between the trigger-happy base commander and mutinous recruits. Miles is reassigned to investigate a suspicious military buildup near a wormhole nexus. Reviving his undercover persona as mercenary Admiral Miles Naismith, he expands his routine information-gathering duty to a rescue mission when the Emperor of Barrayar disappears. Miles must use his skill at negotiating to avoid a showdown between competing powers for control of the wormhole, to find the Emperor, and to watch his back for the arctic base commander seeking bloody vengeance.