Labyrinth

This novella is a quick heist-adjacent novel; the setup is that what should be a quick extraction of a scientist from Jackson's Whole (the black market anything goes planet) turns into a raid on Baron Ryoval's complex. This stretch of books in the series (from Cetaganda through Brothers in Arms, in my opinion) give the breadth of worldbuilding by exposing the reader to a new place that they've heard of before, but haven't seen directly. This story is mostly worldbuilding and action, and especially juxtaposed against The Borders of Infinity that comes up next, I think it feels like a much weaker book.

One thing I like about both this novella and the following one is that they're both complete stories on their own, but then build a lot of context for the two novels that follow. They're also not directly shoehorned into those novels, like The Weatherman was into The Vor Game.

(We also get a lot more Bel Thorne here too, even though I think Bel gets short shrift in the whole series.)

Not so long ago, Sally Strange pointed out to me Bujold's fascination with age gaps, and there is definitely some of that here. Taura is the monster at the heart of this titular Labyrinth, but is also a sixteen year old girl who has been modified to be a monstrous super soldier. I think this brief romance creates parallels for Taura to learn from Miles about being herself and not needing to be airquotes normal; however, this psychological road has already been walked by Miles before, and it doesn't feel like this relationship creates any growth for him. (And, honestly in the future, Miles thinks a lot more about Beatrice than we ever see him think about Taura.)