"It's just that if she's offering to use her magical powers to help me with my space pirate problem - are you, or was that hypothetical?"

"That was Aleko. I would need to know considerably more about the problem to know whether and in what way I might be willing to help."

"I see. When Mark and I volunteer each other for things it can generally be assumed that the volunteered party is on board," says Miles. "What exactly do you want to know about the space pirates?"

"Well, for instance, in what way do they differ from ordinary pirates, and can your problem be solved without killing them or my getting very far away from the door?"

"They operate in space rather than on a planet or through some more abstract medium, and no, probably not."

"...Space being...? This would probably be a lot easier if someone who knew the terminology cared to sit in range, not that I'm going to require it."

Mark steps into Kiri's range and delivers a very basic and condensed lesson on astrophysics and space travel.

"There are more of them than you could reach from the door, first of all, and for another thing—"

Mark shrugs slightly to signal to Miles that he has caught the thread, and provides Kiri with an expanded and clarified version of what Miles was about to say: personal weaponry (stunners, nerve disruptors, plasma arcs, needlers) has ranges. They are about like so. (He has a very accurate sense of how far each type of weapon can fire on average, plus degrees of variance accounting for things like the age and quality of the piece and how much the wielder cares about accuracy.) If Kiri's range is shorter than any of those, she lacks a strong enough advantage to be sure they won't have to hurt anybody to avoid getting hurt.

Miles makes a subtle facial expression.

Also, it seems there is more than one ship in this pirate fleet, and ship-mounted weaponry operates on an entirely different scale.

"Thank you anyway," says Mark, because Miles was about to but Mark is faster.

"What exactly is it weird that we can do?" wonders Miles.

"It's weird that he can tell what you're thinking and then - suffice to put it into practice, at least well enough that you don't object aloud, I don't know if there are discrepancies below the surface because you're too far away but I suspect they're very few. Aleko and I are pretty good at modeling each other but not that good, and I can literally read his mind."

"How accurate are we, I wonder."

"Do you want me to let the magical mind-reading woman read my mind to satisfy your curiosity," sighs Miles.

"Yes," says Mark, entirely confident that Miles will agree to it.

Mark receives this message with perfect clarity down to exact inflection of mental tone of voice. He shrugs slightly and smirks. Yes, but not just anyone would have been this good at it, aren't you proud of your little brother?

Miles receives Mark's message with much lower fidelity, but he gets the highlights. "Naturally," he says aloud. We Vorkosigans have got to stick together, there aren't that many of us left. Although at the rate people keep cloning me we may be just about set to take over the galaxy in a few decades.

...Mark cracks the fuck up, because oh my God, Miles, you actually managed to forget Naismith was not a separate individual while you were still wearing his bloody pajamas, are you quite sure you're not insane?

"You shut up!"

Kiri laughs. "This is the funniest thing I have ever seen. You've got six personalities between you, even if some of them are duplicates!"