Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance is a science fiction novel by the American writer Lois McMaster Bujold, part of the Vorkosigan Saga. The action centres on Miles Vorkosigan's cousin Ivan Vorpatril, now a captain, and a refugee from the planet Jackson's Whole named Tej.

During a stay on Komarr, Ivan is recruited by Byerly Vorrutyer, an undercover agent of Imperial Security, to establish who a young woman called Tej really is; Byerly believes she may be in danger and she is connected to something he is investigating. Ivan visits her workplace, flirts with her and is refused a date, then follows her home and is ambushed by her companion, a genetically modified woman called Rish, who leaves him tied to a chair in their apartment while the two of them decide what to do with him. When armed men break in he manages to warn them, and after they have dealt with the intruders he offers his own flat as somewhere safer for them to stay. By internal chronology the book sits about a year after Diplomatic Immunity and some four years before Cryoburn.

Bujold alternates between the Vorkosigan books that belong to Miles and those given to the people around him, and this one belongs to Ivan, a character who has spent the series being underestimated by his own family.