This is a novella, not a novel. I don't always bother to review these (mostly concentrating on books), but this one is "interesting," and sadly not in a good way. It came to me as part of the omnibus volume Miles, Mutants & Microbes which I'd ordered so I could read Diplomatic Immunity, another Miles Vorkosigan novel that's part of the collection (along with Falling Free which I'd already read).

Miles - this story is early enough in his life that he's still "Admiral Naismith" - and his Dendarii Mercenaries have come to Jackson's Whole to extract a scientist. It looks fairly simple, but becomes complicated when the person to be extracted demands they retrieve something else or he won't go. Unfortunately, the thing he wants is tissue samples from a (still alive) modified human who is also the prize possession of a baron on this lawless world. They make a plan, it goes badly. Miles ends up locked in a large basement with a very large and aggresive super-soldier prototype.

What follows are kind-of spoilers, so you might be wise to opt out if you're considering reading the story. I have issues with this story, one logical and one moral. First, Taura was locked up for three days, without food or water. Miles gave her a "rat bar," a military ration that would last a normal human 24 hours. She's almost fainting from hunger three hours later, as Bujold establishes that Taura's metabolism runs about three times that of a regular person. Logically - three days without food and water, she'd have been dead - in fact, long dead.

The other issue is Miles having sex with someone literally half his age (he's 31, she's 16). That's dubious. But she was also an experimental subject, and much of her life had consisted of what amounted to torture under the name of "tests" - she was never really treated as human. Having sex with someone in that mental state is a spectacularly problematic thing to do.

The story was mildly amusing, but the above-mentioned problems made it - for me - one of Bujold's weakest efforts.