CHAPTER THIRTEEN

   Chief Venn said, “So . . . this Cetagandan bastard Gupta here is raving about, that he says killed three of his friends and maybe your Lieutenant Solian—you really think this is the same as the Betan transient, Dubauer, that you wanted us to pick up last night? So is he a herm, or a man, or what?”
   “Or what,” answered Miles. “My medical people established from a blood sample I accidentally collected yesterday that Dubauer is a Cetagandan ba. The ba are neither male, female, nor hermaphrodite, but a genderless servant . . . caste, I guess is the best word, of the Cetagandan haut lords. More specifically, of the haut ladies who run the Star Crиche, at the core of the Celestial Garden, the Imperial residence on Eta Ceta.” Who almost never left the Celestial Garden, with or without their ba servitors. So what's this ba doing way out here, eh? Miles hesitated, then went on, “This ba appears to be conducting a cargo of a thousand of what I suspect are the latest genetically modified haut fetuses in uterine replicators. I don't know where, I don't know why, and I don't know who for, but if Guppy's telling us the straight story, the ba has killed four people, including our missing security officer, and tried to kill Guppy, to keep its secret and cover its tracks.” At least four people .
   Greenlaw's expression had grown stiff with dismay. Venn regarded Gupta, frowning. “I guess we'd better put out a public arrest call on Dubauer, then, too.”
   “No!” Miles cried in alarm.
   Venn raised his brows at him.
   Miles explained hastily, “We're talking about a possible trained Cetagandan agent who may be carrying sophisticated bioweapons. It's already extremely stressed by the delays into which this dispute with the trade fleet has plunged it. It's just discovered it's made one bad mistake at least, because Guppy here is still alive. I don't care how superhuman it is, it has to be rattled by now. The last thing you want to do is send a bunch of feckless civilians up against it. Nobody should even approach the ba who doesn't know exactly what they're doing and what they're facing.”
   “And your people brought this creature here, onto my station?”
   “Believe me, if any of my people had known what the ba was before this, it would never have made it past Komarr. The trade fleet are dupes, innocent carriers, I'm sure.” Well, he wasn't that sure—checking that airy assertion was going to be a high-priority problem for counterintelligence, back home.
   “Carriers . . .” Greenlaw echoed, looking hard at Guppy. All the quaddies in the room followed her stare. “Could this transient still be carrying that . . . whatever it was, infection?”
   Miles took a breath. “Possibly. But if he is, it's too damned late already. Guppy has been running all over Graf Station for days, now. Hell, if he's infectious, he's just spread a plague along a route through the Nexus touching half a dozen planets.” And me. And my fleet. And maybe Ekaterin too. “I see two points of hope. One, by Guppy's testimony, the ba had to administer the thing by actual touch.”
   The patrollers who'd handled the prisoner looked apprehensively at each other.
   “And secondly,” Miles went on, “if the disease or poison is something bioengineered by the Star Crиche, it's likely to be highly controlled, possibly deliberately self-limiting and self-destructing. The haut ladies don't like to leave their trash lying around for anyone to pick up.”
   “But I got better!” cried the amphibian.
   “Yes,” said Miles. “Why? Obviously, something in your unique genetics or situation either defeated the thing, or held it at bay long enough to keep you alive past its period of activity. Putting you in quarantine is about useless by now, but the next highest priority after nailing the ba has got to be running you through the medical wringer, to see if what you have or did can save anyone else.” Miles drew breath. “May I offer the facilities of the Prince Xav ? Our medical people do have some specific training in Cetagandan bio-threats.”
   Guppy blurted to Venn in panic, “Don't give me to them! They'll dissect me!”
   Venn, who had brightened at this offer, shot the prisoner an exasperated look, but Greenlaw said slowly, “I know something of the ghem and the haut, but I've never heard of these ba, or the Star Crиche.”
   Adjudicator Leutwyn added warily, “Cetagandans of any stripe haven't much come in my way.”
   Greenlaw continued, “What makes you think their work is so safe, so restricted?”
   “Safe, no. Controlled, maybe.” How far did he need to back up his explanation to make the dangers clear to them? It was vital that the quaddies be made to understand, and believe. “The Cetagandans . . . have this two-tiered aristocracy that is the bafflement of non-Cetagandan military observers. At the core are the haut lords, who are, in effect, one giant genetics experiment in producing the post-human race. This work is conducted and controlled by the haut women geneticists of the Star Crиche, the center where all haut embryos are created and modified before being sent back to their haut constellations—clans, parents—on the outlying planets of the empire. Unlike most prior historical versions of this sort of thing, the haut ladies didn't start by assuming they'd reached the perfected end already. They do not, at present, believe themselves to be done tinkering. When they are—well, who knows what will happen? What are the goals and desires going to be of the true post-human? Even the haut ladies don't try to second-guess their great-great-great-whatever grandchildren. I will say, it makes it uncomfortable to have them as neighbors.”
   “Didn't the haut try to conquer you Barrayarans, once?” asked Leutwyn.
   “Not the haut. The ghem-lords. The buffer race, if you will, between the haut and the rest of humanity. I suppose you could think of the ghem as the haut's bastard children, except that they aren't bastards. In that sense, anyway. The haut leak selected genetic lines into the ghem via trophy haut wives—it's a complicated system. But the ghem-lords are the military arm of the empire, always anxious to prove their worth to their haut masters.”
   “The ghem, I've seen,” said Venn. “We get them through here now and then. I though the haut were, well, sort of degenerate. Aristocratic parasites. Afraid to get their hands dirty. They don't work .” He gave a very quaddie sniff of disdain. “Or fight. You have to wonder how long the ghem-soldiers will put up with them.”
   “On the surface, the haut appear to dominate the ghem through pure moral suasion. Overawe by their beauty and intelligence and refinement, and by making themselves the source of all kinds of status rewards, culminating in the haut wives. All this is true. But beneath that . . . it is strongly suspected that the haut hold a biological and biochemical arsenal that even the ghem find terrifying.”
   “I haven't heard of anything like that being used ,” said Venn in a tone of skepticism.
   “Oh, you bet you haven't.”
   “Why didn't they use it on you Barrayarans, back then, if they had it?” said Greenlaw slowly.
   “That is a problem much studied, at certain levels of my government. First, it would have alarmed the neighborhood. Bioweapons aren't the only kind. The Cetagandan Empire apparently wasn't ready to face a posse of people scared enough to combine to burn off their planets and sterilize every living microbe. More importantly, we think it was a question of goals. The ghem-lords wanted the territory and the wealth, the personal aggrandizement that would have followed successful conquest. The haut ladies just weren't that interested. Not enough to waste their resources—not resources of weapons per se, but of reputation, secrecy, of a silent threat of unknown potency. Our intelligence services have amassed maybe half a dozen cases in the past thirty years of suspected use of haut-style bioweapons, and in every instance, it was a Cetagandan internal matter.” He glanced at Greenlaw's intensely disturbed face and added in what he hoped didn't sound like hollow reassurance, “There was no spread or bio-backsplash from those incidents that we know of.”
   Venn looked at Greenlaw. “So do we take this prisoner to a clinic, or to a cell?”
   Greenlaw was silent for a few moments, then said, “Graf Station University clinic. Straight to the infectious isolation unit. I think we want our best experts in on this, and as quickly as possible.”
   Gupta objected, “But I'll be an open target! I was hunting the Cetagandan bastard—now he—it, whatever—will be hunting me!”
   “I agree with this evaluation,” Miles said quickly. “Wherever you take Gupta, the location should be kept absolutely secret. The fact that he's even been taken into custody should be suppressed—dear God, this arrest hasn't gone out on your news services already, has it?” Piping the word of Gupta's location to every nook of the station . . .
   “Not formally,” said Venn uneasily.
   It scarcely mattered, Miles supposed. Dozens of quaddies had seen the web-fingered man brought in, including everybody that Bel's crew of roustabouts had passed on the way. The Docks and Locks quaddies would certainly brag of their catch to everyone they knew. The gossip would be all over.
   “I strongly urge—beg!—you to put out word of his daring escape, then. Complete with follow-up bulletins asking all the citizens to keep an eye out for him again.” The ba had killed four to keep its secret—would it be willing to kill fifty thousand?
   “A disinformation campaign?” Greenlaw's lips pursed in repugnance.
   “The lives of everyone on the station might well depend on it. Secrecy is your best hope of safety. And Gupta's. After that, guards—”
   “My people are already spread to their limit,” Venn protested. He gave Greenlaw a beseeching look.
   Miles opened a hand in acknowledgment. “Not patrollers. Guards who know what they're doing, trained in bio-defense procedures.”
   “We'll have to draw on Union Militia specialists,” said Greenlaw in a decisive tone. “I'll put in the request. But it will take them . . . some time, to get here.”
   “In the meanwhile,” said Miles, “I can loan you some trained personnel.”
   Venn grimaced. “I have a detention block full of your personnel. I'm not much impressed with their training.”
   Miles suppressed a wince. “Not them . Military medical corps.”
   “I will consider your offer,” said Greenlaw neutrally.
   “Some of Vorpatril's senior medical men must have some expertise in this area. If you won't let us take Gupta out to the safety of one of our vessels, please, let them come aboard the station to help you.”
   Greenlaw's eyes narrowed. “All right. We will accept up to four such volunteers. Unarmed. Under the direct supervision and command of our own medical experts.”
   “Agreed,” said Miles instantly.
   It was the best compromise he was likely to get, for the moment. The medical end of this problem, terrifying as it was, would have to be left to the specialists; it was out of Miles's range of expertise. Catching the ba before it could do any more damage, now . . .
   “The haut are not immune to stunner fire. I . . . recommend”—he could not order, he could not demand, most of all, he could not scream—”you quietly inform all of your patrollers that the ba—Dubauer—be stunned on sight. Once it's down, we can sort things out at our leisure.”
   Venn and Greenlaw exchanged looks with the adjudicator. Leutwyn said in a constricted voice, “It would be against regs to so ambush the suspect if it is not in process of a crime, resisting arrest, or fleeing.”
   “Bioweapons?” muttered Venn.
   The adjudicator swallowed. “Make damned sure your patrollers don't miss their first shot.”
   “Your ruling is noted, sir.”
   And if the ba stayed out of sight? Which it had certainly managed to do for most of the past twenty-four hours. . . .
   What did the ba want? Its cargo freed, and Guppy dead before he could talk, presumably. What did the ba know, at this point? Or not know? It didn't know that Miles had identified its cargo . . . did it? Where the hell is Bel?
   “Ambush,” Miles echoed. “There are two places where you could set up an ambush for the ba. Wherever you take Guppy—or better still, wherever the ba believes you've taken Guppy. If you don't want to put it about that he's escaped, then take him to a concealed location, with a second, less secret one set up for bait. Then, another trap at the Idris . If Dubauer calls in requesting permission to go aboard again, which the last time we met, it fully intended to do, you should grant the petition. Then nail it as it enters the loading bay.”
   “That's what I was going to do,” put in Gupta in a resentful voice. “If you people had just let well enough alone, this could have been all over by now.”
   Miles privately agreed, but it would hardly do to say so out loud; someone might point out just who had put on the pressure for Gupta's arrest.
   Greenlaw was looking grimly thoughtful. “I wish to inspect this alleged cargo. It is possible that it violates enough regs to merit impoundment quite separately from the issue of its carrier ship.”
   The adjudicator cleared his throat. “That could grow legally complex, Sealer. More complex. Cargoes not off-loaded for transfer, even if questionable, are normally allowed to pass through without legal comment. They're considered to be the territorial responsibility of the polity of registration of the carrier, unless they are an imminent public danger. A thousand fetuses, if that's what they are, constitute . . . what menace?”
   Impounding them could prove a horrific danger, Miles thought. It would certainly lock Cetagandan attention upon Quaddiespace. Speaking from both historical and personal experience, this was not necessarily a good thing.
   “I want to confirm this for myself, too,” said Venn. “And give my guards their orders in person, and figure out where to place my sharpshooters.”
   “And you need me along, to get into the cargo hold,” Miles pointed out.
   Greenlaw said, “No, just your security codes.”
   Miles smiled blandly at her.
   Her jaw tightened. After a moment, she growled, “Very well. Let's go, Venn. You too, Adjudicator. And,” she sighed briefly, “you, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan.”
   Gupta was wrapped in bio-barriers by the two quaddies who had handled him before—a logical choice, if not much to their liking. They donned wraps and gloves themselves and towed him out without allowing him to touch anything else. The amphibian suffered this without protest. He looked utterly exhausted.
   Garnet Five left with Nicol for Nicol's apartment, where the two quaddie women planned to support each other while awaiting word of Bel. “Call me ,” Nicol pleaded in an under-voice to Miles as they floated out. Miles nodded his promise, and prayed silently that it would not prove to be one of those hard calls.
   His brief vid call out to the Prince Xav and Admiral Vorpatril was hard enough. Vorpatril was almost as white as his hair by the time Miles had finished bringing him up to date. He promised to expedite a selection of medical volunteers at emergency speed.
   The procession to the Idris finally included Venn, Greenlaw, the adjudicator, two quaddie patrollers, Miles, and Roic. The loading bay was as dim and quiet as—had it only been yesterday? One of the two quaddie guards, watched bemusedly by the other, was out of his floater and crouched on the floor. He was evidently playing a game with gravity involving a scattering of tiny bright metal caltrops and a small rubber ball, which seemed to consist of bouncing the ball off the floor, catching it again, and snatching up the little caltrops between bounces. To make it more interesting for himself, he was switching hands with each iteration. At the sight of the visitors, the guard hastily pocketed the game and scrambled back into his floater.
   Venn pretended not to see this, simply inquiring after any events of note during their shift. Not only had no unauthorized persons attempted to get past them, the investigation committee was the first live persons the bored men had seen since relieving the prior shift. Venn lingered with his patrollers to make his arrangements for the stunner ambush of the ba, should it appear, and Miles led Roic, Greenlaw, and the adjudicator aboard the ship.
   The gleaming rows of replicator racks in Dubauer's leased cargo hold appeared unchanged from yesterday. Greenlaw grew tense about the lips, guiding her floater around the hold on an initial overview, then pausing to stare down the aisles. Miles thought he could almost see her doing the multiplication in her head. She and Leutwyn then hovered by Miles's side as he activated a few control panels to demonstrate the replicators' contents.
   It was almost a repeat of yesterday, except . . . a number of the readout indicators showed amber instead of green. Closer examination revealed them as measures of an array of stressor-signals, including adrenaline levels. Was the ba right about the fetuses reaching some sort of biological limit in their containers? Was this the first sign of dangerous overgrowth? As Miles watched, a couple of the light bars dropped back on their own from amber to a more encouraging green. He went on to call up the vid monitor images of the individual fetuses for Greenlaw's and the adjudicator's views. The fourth one he activated showed amniotic fluid cloudy with scarlet blood when the lights came on. Miles caught his breath. How . . . ?
   That surely wasn't normal. The only possible source of blood was the fetus itself. He rechecked the stressor levels—this one showed a lot of amber—then stood on tiptoe and peered more closely at the image. The blood appeared to be leaking from a small, jagged gash on the twitching haut infant's back. The low red lighting, Miles reassured himself uneasily, made it look worse than it was.
   Greenlaw's voice by his ear made him jump. “Is there something wrong with that one?”
   “He appears to have suffered some sort of mechanical injury. That . . . shouldn't be possible, in a sealed replicator.” He thought of Aral Alexander, and Helen Natalia, and his stomach knotted. “If you have any quaddie experts in replicator reproduction, it might not be a bad idea to get them in here to look at these.” He doubted this was a specialty where the military medicos from the Prince Xav were likely to be much help.
   Venn appeared at the door of the hold, and Greenlaw repeated most of Miles's orienting patter for his benefit. Venn's expression was most disturbed as he regarded the replicators. “That frog fellow wasn't lying. This is very strange.”
   Venn's wrist com buzzed, and he excused himself to float to the side of the room and engage in some low-voiced conversation with whatever subordinate was reporting in. At least, it began as low-voiced, until Venn bellowed, “What? When? ”
   Miles abandoned his worried study of the injured haut infant and edged over to Venn.
   “About 0200, sir,” a distressed voice responded from the wrist com.
   “This wasn't authorized!”
   “Yes, it was, Crew Chief, duly. Portmaster Thorne authorized it. Since it was the same passenger it had brought on board yesterday, the one who had that live cargo to tend, we didn't think anything was odd.”
   “What time did they leave ?” Venn asked. His face was a mask of dismay.
   “Not on our shift, sir. I don't know what happened after that. I went straight home and went to bed. I didn't see the search bulletin for Portmaster Thorne on the news stream till I got up for breakfast just a few minutes ago.”
   “Why didn't you pass this on in your end-of-shift report?”
   “Portmaster Thorne said not to.” The voice hesitated. “At least . . . the passenger suggested we might want to leave this off the record, so that we wouldn't have to deal with all the other passengers demanding access too if they heard about it, and Portmaster Thorne nodded and said Yes .”
   Venn winced, and took a deep breath. “It can't be helped, Patroller. You reported as soon as you knew. I'm glad you at least picked up the news right away. We'll take it from here. Thank you.” Venn cut the channel.
   “What was that all about?” asked Miles. Roic had strolled up to loom over his shoulder.
   Venn clutched his head with his upper hands, and groaned, “My night-shift guard on the Idris just woke up and saw the news bulletin about Thorne being missing. He says Thorne came here last night about oh-two-hundred and passed Dubauer through the guards.”
   “Where did Thorne go after that?”
   “Escorted Dubauer aboard, apparently. Neither of them came off while my night-shift crew was watching. Excuse me. I need to go talk to my people.” Venn grabbed his floater control and swung hastily out of the cargo hold.
   Miles stood stunned. How could Bel have gone from an uncomfortable, but relatively safe, nap in a recycling bin to this action in little more than an hour? Garnet Five had taken six or seven hours to wake up. His high confidence in his judgment of Gupta's account was suddenly shaken.
   Roic, eyes narrowing, asked, “Could your herm friend have gone renegade, m'lord? Or been bribed?”
   Adjudicator Leutwyn looked to Greenlaw, who looked sick with uncertainty.
   “I would sooner doubt . . . myself,” said Miles. And that was slandering Bel. “Although the portmaster might have been bribed with a nerve disruptor muzzle pressed to its spine, or something equivalent.” He wasn't sure he wanted to even try to imagine the ba's bioweapon equivalent. “Bel would play for time.”
   “How could this ba find the portmaster when we couldn't?” asked Leutwyn.
   Miles hesitated. “The ba wasn't hunting Bel. The ba was hunting Guppy. If the ba had been closing in last night when Guppy counterattacked his shadowers . . . the ba might have come along immediately after, or even been a witness. And allowed itself to be diverted, or swapped its priorities, in the face of the unexpected opportunity to gain access to its cargo through Bel.”
   What priorities? What did the ba want? Well, Gupta dead, certainly, doubly so now that the amphibian was witness to both its initial clandestine operation, and to the murders by which the ba had attempted to completely erase its trail. But for the ba to have been so close to its target, and yet veer off, suggested that the other priority was overwhelmingly more important to it.
   The ba had spoken of utterly destroying its purportedly animal cargo; the ba had also spoken of taking tissue samples for freezing. The ba had spoken lie upon lie, but suppose this was the truth? Miles wheeled to stare down the aisle of racks. The image formed itself in his mind: of the ba working all day, with relentless speed and concentration. Loosening the lid of each replicator, stabbing through membrane, fluid, and soft skin with a sampling needle, lining the needles up, row on row, in a freezer unit the size of a small valise. Miniaturizing the essence of its genetic payload to something it could carry away in one hand. At the cost of abandoning their originals? Destroying the evidence?
   Maybe it has, and we just can't see the effects yet. If the ba could make adult-sized bodies steam away their own liquids within hours and turn to viscous puddles, what could it do with such tiny ones?
   The Cetagandan wasn't stupid. Its smuggling scheme might have gone according to plan, but for the slipup with Gupta. Who had followed the ba here, and drawn in Solian—whose disappearance had led to the muddle with Corbeau and Garnet Five, which had led to the bungled raid on the quaddie security post, which had resulted in the impoundment of the fleet, including the ba's precious cargo. Miles knew exactly how it felt to watch a carefully planned mission slide down the toilet in a flush of random mischance. How would the ba respond to that sick, heart-pounding desperation? Miles had almost no sense of the person, despite meeting it twice. The ba was smooth and slick and self-controlled. It could kill with a touch, smiling.
   But if the ba was paring down its payload to a minimum mass, it certainly wouldn't saddle its escape with a prisoner.
   “I think,” said Miles, and had to stop and clear a throat gone dry. Bel would play for time. But suppose time and ingenuity ran out, and no one came, and no one came, and no one came . . . ”I think Bel might still be aboard the Idris . We must search the ship. At once.”
   Roic stared around, looking daunted. “All of it, m'lord?”
   He started to cry Yes! but his laggard brain converted it to, “No. Bel had no access codes beyond quaddie control of the airlock. The ba had codes only for this hold and its own cabin. Anything that was locked before, should still be. For the first pass, check unsecured spaces only.”
   “Shouldn't we wait for Chief Venn's patrollers?” asked Leutwyn uneasily.
   “If anyone even tries to come aboard who hasn't been exposed already, I swear I'll stun them myself before they can get through the airlock. I'm not fooling.” Miles's voice was husky with conviction.
   Leutwyn looked taken aback, but Greenlaw, after a frozen moment, nodded. “I quite see your point, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan. I must agree.”
   They spread out in pairs, the intent-looking Greenlaw followed by the somewhat bewildered adjudicator, Roic determinedly keeping to Miles's shoulder. Miles tried the ba's cabin first, to find it as empty as before. Four other cabins had been left unlocked, three presumably because they had been cleared of possessions, the last apparently through sheer carelessness. The infirmary was sealed, as it had been left after Bel's inspection with the medtechs last evening. Nav and Com was fully secured. On the deck above, the kitchen was open, as were some of the recreation areas, but no cheeky Betan herm or unnaturally decomposed remains were to be found. Greenlaw and Leutwyn passed through, to report that all of the other holds in the huge long cylinder shared by the ba's cargo were still properly sealed. Venn, they discovered, had taken over a comconsole in the passenger lounge; upon being apprised of Miles's new theory, he paled and attached himself to Greenlaw. Five more nacelles to check.
   On the deck below the passengers' zone, most of the utility and engineering areas remained locked. But the door to the department of Small Repairs opened at Miles's touch on its control pad.
   Three adjoining chambers were full of benches, tools, and diagnostic equipment. In the second chamber, Miles came upon a bench holding three deflated bod pods marked with the Idris 's logo and serial numbers. These tough-skinned human-sized balloons were furnished with enough air recycling equipment and power to keep a passenger alive in a pressurization emergency until rescue arrived. One had only to step inside, zip it up, and hit the power-on button. Bod pods required a minimum of instruction, mostly because there wasn't bloody much you could do once you were trapped inside one. Every cabin, hold, and corridor on the ship had them, stored in emergency lockers on the walls.
   On the floor beside the bench, one bod pod stood fully inflated, as if it had been left there in the middle of testing by some tech when the ship had been evacuated by the quaddies.
   Miles stepped up to one of the pod's round plastic ports and peered through.
   Bel sat inside, cross-legged, stark naked. The herm's lips were parted, and its eyes glazed and distant. So still was that form, Miles feared he was looking at death already, but then Bel's chest rose and fell, breasts trembling with the shivers racking its body. On the blank face a fevered flush bloomed and faded.
   No, God, no! Miles lunged for the pod's seal, but his hand stopped and fell back, clenching so hard his nails bit into his palm like knives. No . . .

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

   Step One. Seal the biocontaminated area.
   Had the entry lock been closed behind them when their party entered the Idris ? Yes. Had anyone opened it since?
   Miles raised his wrist com to his lips and spoke Venn's contact code. Roic stepped closer to the bod pod, but stopped at Miles's upflung hand; he ducked his head and peered past Miles's shoulder, and his eyes widened.
   The few seconds of delay while the wrist com's search program located Venn seemed to flow by like cold oil. Finally, the crew chief's edgy voice: “Venn here. What now, Lord Vorkosigan?”
   “We've found Portmaster Thorne. Trapped in a bod pod in the engineering section. The herm appears dazed and very ill. I believe we have an urgent biocontamination emergency here, at least Class Three and possibly as bad as Class Five.” The most extreme level, biowarfare plague. “Where are you all now?”
   “In the Number Two freight nacelle. The sealer and the adjudicator are with me.”
   “No one has attempted to leave or enter the ship since we boarded? You didn't go out for any reason?”
   “No.”
   “You understand the necessity for keeping it that way till we know what the devil we're dealing with?”
   “What, do you think I'd be insane enough to carry some hell-plague back ontomy own station ?”
   Check. “Very good, Crew Chief. I see we are of one mind in this.” Step Two. Alert the medical authority in your district. To each their own. “I'm going to report this to Admiral Vorpatril and request medical assistance. I presume Graf Station has its own emergency protocols.”
   “Just as soon as you get off my com link.”
   “Right. At the earliest feasible moment, I also intend to break the tube seals and move the ship a little way out of its docking cradle, just to be sure. If you or the Sealer would warn station traffic control, plus clear whatever shuttle Vorpatril sends, that would be most helpful. Meanwhile—I strongly urge you seal the locks between your nacelle and this central section until . . . until we know more. Find the nacelle's atmosphere controls and put yourselves on internal circulation, if you can. I haven't . . . quite figured out what to do about this damned bod pod yet. Nai—Vorkosigan out.”
   He cut the com and stared in anguish at the thin wall between him and Bel. How good a biocontamination barrier was a sealed bod pod's skin? Probably quite good, for something not purpose-built for the task. A new and horrible idea of just where to look for Solian, or rather, whatever organic smear of the lieutenant might now remain, presented itself inescapably to Miles's imagination.
   With that jump of deduction came new hope and new terror. Solian had been disposed of weeks ago, probably aboard this very vessel, at a time when passengers and crew had been moving freely between the station and the ship. No plague had broken out yet. If Solian had been dissolved by the same nightmare method Gupta testified had claimed his shipmates, inside a bod pod, which was then folded and set out of the way . . . leaving Bel in the pod with the seals unbroken might make everyone perfectly safe.
   Everyone, of course, except Bel. . . .
   It was unclear if the incubation or latency period of the infection was adjustable, although what Miles was seeing now suggested it was. Six days for Gupta and his friends. Six hours for Bel? But the disease or poison or bio-molecular device, whatever it was, had killed the Jacksonians quickly once it became active, in just a few hours. How long did Bel have until intervention became futile? Before the herm's brains began turning to some bubbling gray slime along with its body . . . ? Hours, minutes, too late already? And what intervention could help?
   Gupta survived this. Therefore, survival is possible. His mind dug into that historical fact like pitons into a rock face. Hang on and climb, boy.
   He held his wrist com to his lips and called up the emergency channel to Admiral Vorpatril.
   Vorpatril responded almost immediately. “Lord Vorkosigan? The medical squad you requested reached the quaddie station a few minutes ago. They should be reporting in to you there momentarily to assist with the examination of your prisoner. Haven't they presented themselves yet?”
   “They may have, but I'm now aboard the Idris , along with Armsman Roic. And, unfortunately, Sealer Greenlaw, Adjudicator Leutwyn, and Chief Venn. We've ordered the ship sealed. We appear to have a biocontamination incident aboard.” He repeated the description of Bel he'd given Venn, with a few more details.
   Vorpatril swore. “Shall I send a personnel pod to take you off, my lord?”
   “Absolutely not. If there's anything contagious loose in here—which, while not certain, is not yet ruled out—it's um . . . already too late.”
   “I'll divert my medical squad to you at once.”
   “Not all of them, dammit. I want some of our people in with the quaddies, working on Gupta. It is of the highest urgency to find out why he survived. Since we may be stuck in here for a while, don't tie up more men than required. But do send me bright ones. In Level Five biotainer suits. You can send any equipment they want aboard with them, but nothing and no one goes back off this ship till this thing is locked down.” Or until the plague took them all . . . Miles had a vision of the Idris towed away from the station and abandoned, the untouchable final tomb of all aboard. A damned expensive sepulchre, there was that consolation. He had faced death before and, once at least, lost, but the lonely ugliness of this one shook him badly. There would be no cheating with cryochambers this time, he suspected. Not for the last victims to go, certainly. “Volunteers only, you understand me, Admiral?”
   “That I do,” said Vorpatril grimly. “I'm on it, my Lord Auditor.”
   “Good. Vorkosigan out.”
   How much time did Bel have? Half an hour? Two hours? How much time would it take Vorpatril to muster his new set of medical volunteers and all their complex cargo? More than half an hour, Miles was fairly certain. And what could they do when they got here?
   Besides his genetic engineering, what had been different from the others about Gupta?
   His tank? Breathing through his gills . . . Bel didn't have gills, no help there. Cooling water, flowing over the froggish body, his fan-like webs, through the blood-filled, feathery gills, chilling his blood . . . could some of this bio-dissolvent's hellish development be heat-sensitive or temperature-triggered?
   An ice-water bath? The vision sprang to his mind's eye, and his lips drew back on a fierce grin. A low-tech, but provably fast, way to lower body temperature, no question about it. He could personally guarantee the effects. Thank you, Ivan.
   “My lord?” said Roic uncertainly to his apparent transfixed paralysis.
   “We run like hell now. You go to the galley and check for ice. If there isn't any, start whatever machine they have full blast. Then meet me in the infirmary.” He had to move fast; he didn't have to be stupid about it. “They may have biotainer gear there.”
   By the expression on Roic's face, he was notably not following any of this, but at least he followed Miles, who boiled out and down the corridor. They rose up the lift tube the two flights to the level that housed galley, infirmary, and recreation areas. More out of breath than he cared to reveal, Miles waved Roic on his way and galloped to the infirmary at the far end of the central nacelle. A frustrating pause while he tapped out the locking code, and he was through into the little sickbay.
   The facilities were scant: two small wards, although both with at least Level Three bio-containment capabilities, plus an examining room equipped for minor surgery that also harbored the pharmacy. Major surgeries and severe injuries were expected to be transported to one of the military escort ship's more seriously equipped sickbays. Yes, one of the ward's bathrooms included a sterilizable treatment tub; Miles pictured unhappy passengers with skin infestations soaking therein. Lockers full of emergency equipment. He jerked them all open. There was the blood synthesizer, there a drawer of mysterious and unnerving objects perhaps designed for female patients, there was a narrow float pallet for patient transport, standing on end in a tall locker with two biotainer suits, yes! One too large for Miles, the other too small for Roic.
   He could wear the too-large suit; it wouldn't be the first time. The other would be impossible. He couldn't justify endangering Roic so . . .
   Roic jogged in. “Found the ice maker, m'lord. Nobody seems to have turned it off when the ship was evacuated. It's packed full.”
   Miles pulled out his stunner and dropped it on the examining table, then began to skin into the smaller biotainer suit.
   “What t'hell do you think you're doing, m'lord?” asked Roic warily.
   “We're going to bring Bel up here. Or at least, I am. It's where the medics will want to do treatments anyway.” If there were any treatments. “I have an idea for some quick-and-dirty first aid. I think Guppy might have survived by the water in his tank keeping his body temperature down. Head for engineering. Try to find a pressure suit that will fit you. If—when you find the suit, let me know, and put it on at once. Then meet me back where Bel is. Move!”
   Roic, face set, moved. Miles used the precious seconds to run to the galley and scoop a plastic waste bin full of ice, and drag it back to the infirmary on the float pallet to dump in the tub. Then a second bin full. Then his wrist com buzzed.
   “Found a suit, m'lord. It'll just fit, I think.” Roic's voice wavered as, presumably, his arm moved about. Some rustling and faint grunting indicated a successful test. “Once I'm in, I won't be able to use my secured wrist com. I'll have to access you over some public channel.”
   “We'll have to live with that. Make contact with Vorpatril on your suit com as soon as you're sealed in; be sure his medics can communicate when they bring their pod to one of the outboard locks. Make sure they don't try to come through the same freight nacelle where the quaddies have taken refuge!”
   “Right, m'lord.”
   “Meet you in Small Repairs.”
   “Right, m'lord. Suiting up now.” The channel went muffled.
   Regretfully, Miles covered his own wrist com with the biotainer suit's left glove. He tucked his stunner into one of the sealable outer pockets on the thigh, then adjusted his oxygen flow with a few taps on the suit's control vambrace on his left arm. The lights in the helmet faceplate display promised him he was now sealed from his environment. The slight positive pressure within the overlarge suit puffed it out plumply. He slopped toward the lift tube in the loose boots, towing the float pallet.
   Roic was just clumping down the corridor as Miles maneuvered the pallet through the door of Small Repairs. The armsman's pressure suit, marked with theIdris 's engineering department's serial numbers, was certainly as much protection as Miles's gear, although its gloves were thicker and more clumsy. Miles motioned Roic to bend toward him, touching his faceplate to Roic's helmet.
   “We're going to reduce the pressure in the bod pod to partially deflate it, roll Bel onto the float pallet, and run it upstairs. I'm not going to unseal the pod till we're in the ward with the molecular barriers activated.”
   “Shouldn't we wait for the Prince Xav 's medics for that, m'lord?” asked Roic nervously. “They'll be here soon enough.”
   “No. Because I don't know how soon too late is. I don't dare vent Bel's pod into the ship's atmosphere, so I'm going to try to rig a line to another pod as a catchment. Help me look for sealing tape, and something to use for an air pipe.”
   Roic gave him a rather frustrated gesture of acknowledgment, and began a survey of benches and drawers.
   Miles peered in the port again. “Bel? Bel!” he shouted through faceplate and bod skin. Muffled, yes, but he should be audible, dammit. “We're going to move you. Hang on in there.”
   Bel sat unchanged, apparently, from a few minutes ago, still glazed and unresponsive. It might not be the infection, Miles tried to encourage himself. How many drugs had the herm been hit with last night, to assure its cooperation? Knocked out by Gupta, stimulated to consciousness by the ba, tanked with hypnotics, presumably, for the walk to the Idris and the scam of the quaddie guards. Maybe fast-penta after that, and some sedatives to keep Bel quiescent while the poison took hold, who knew?
   Miles shook out one of the other pods onto the floor nearby. If the residue of Solian lay therein, well, this wasn't going to make it any more contaminated, now was it? And would Bel's remains have escaped notice for as long as Solian's, if Miles hadn't come along so soon—was that the ba's plan? Murder and dispose of the body in one move. . . .
   He knelt to the side of Bel's bod pod and opened the access panel to the pressurization control unit. Roic handed down a length of plastic tubing and strips of tape. Miles wrapped, prayed, and turned assorted valve controls. The air pump vibrated gently. The pod's round outline softened and slumped. The second pod expanded, after a flaccid, wrinkled fashion. He closed valves, cut lines, sealed, wished for a few liters of disinfectant to splash around. He held the fabric up away from the lump that was Bel's head as Roic lifted the herm onto the pallet.
   The pallet moved at a brisk walking pace; Miles longed to run. They maneuvered the load into the infirmary, into the small ward. As close as possible to the rather cramped bathroom.
   Miles motioned Roic to bend close again.
   “All right. This is as far as you go. We don't both need to be in here for this. I want you to exit the room and turn on the molecular barriers. Then stand ready to assist the medics from the Prince Xav as needed.”
   “M'lord, are you sure you wouldn't rather we do it t'other way around?”
   “I'm sure. Go!”
   Roic exited reluctantly. Miles waited till the lines of blue light indicating that the barriers had been activated sprang into being across the doorway, then bent to unzip the pod and fold it back from Bel's tensed, trembling body. Even through his gloves, Bel's bare skin felt scorching hot.
   Edging both the pallet and himself into the bathroom involved some awkward clambering, but at last he had Bel positioned to shift into the waiting vat of ice and water. Heave, slide, splash. He cursed the pallet and lunged over it to hold Bel's head up. Bel's body jerked in shock; Miles wondered if his shakily theorized palliative would instead give the victim heart failure. He shoved the pallet back out the door, and out of the way, with one foot. Bel was now trying to curl into a fetal position, a more heartening response than the open-eyed coma Miles had observed so far. Miles pulled the bent limbs down one by one and held them under the ice water.
   Miles fingers grew numb with the cold, except where they touched Bel. The herm's body temperature seemed scarcely affected by this brutal treatment. Unnatural indeed. But at least Bel stopped growing hotter. The ice was melting noticeably.
   It had been some years since Miles had last glimpsed Bel nude, in a field shower or donning or divesting space armor in a mercenary warship locker room. Fifty-something wasn't old, for a Betan, but still, gravity was clearly gaining on Bel. On all of us . In their Dendarii days Bel had taken out its unrequited lust for Miles in a series of half-joking passes, half-regretfully declined. Miles repented his younger sexual reticence altogether, now. Profoundly.We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it. And Bel had been beautiful, in its own ironic way, living and moving at ease in a body athletic, healthy, and trim.
   Bel's skin was blotched, mottled red and pale; the herm's flesh, sliding and turning in the ice bath under Miles's anxious hands, had an odd texture, by turns swollen tight or bruised like crushed fruit. Miles called Bel's name, tried his best old Admiral Naismith Commands You voice, told a bad joke, all without penetrating the herm's glazed stupor. It was a bad idea to cry in a biotainer suit, almost as bad as throwing up in a pressure suit. You couldn't blot your eyes, or wipe your snot.
   And when someone touched you unexpectedly on the shoulder, you jumped as though shot, and they looked at you funny, through their faceplate and yours.
   “Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, are you all right?” said the Prince Xav 's biotainer-swaddled surgeon, as he knelt beside him at the vat's edge.
   Miles swallowed for self-control. “I'm fine, so far. This herm's in a very bad way. I don't know what they've told you about all this.”
   “I was told that I might be dealing with a possible Cetagandan-designed bioweapon in hot mode, that had killed three so far with one survivor. The part about there being a survivor made me really wonder about the first assertion.”
   “Ah, you didn't get a chance to see Guppy yet, then.” Miles took a breath and ran through a brief recap of Gupta's tale, or at least the pertinent biological aspects of it. As he spoke, his hands never stopped shoving Bel's arms and legs back down, or ladling watery ice cubes over the herm's burning head and neck. He finished, “I don't know if it was Gupta's amphibian genetics, or something he did, that allowed him to survive this hell-shit when his friends didn't. Guppy said their dead flesh steamed . I don't know what all this heat's coming from, but it can't be just fever. I couldn't duplicate the Jacksonian's bioengineering, but I thought I could at least duplicate the water tank trick. Wild-assed empiricism, but I didn't think there was much time.”
   A gloved hand reached past him to raise Bel's eyelids, touch the herm here and there, press and probe. “I see that.”
   “It's really important ”—Miles took another gulp of air to stabilize his voice—”it's really important that this patient survive. Thorne's not just any stationer. Bel was . . .” He realized he didn't know the surgeon's security clearance. “Having the portmaster die on our watch would be a diplomatic disaster. Another one, that is. And . . . and the herm saved my life yesterday. I owe—Barrayar owes—”
   “My lord, we'll do our best. I have my top squad here; we'll take over now. Please, my Lord Auditor, if you could please step out and let your man decontaminate you?”
   Another suited figure, doctor or medtech, appeared through the bathroom door and held out a tray of instruments to the surgeon. Perforce Miles moved aside, as the first sampling needle plunged past him into Bel's unresponsive flesh. No room left in here even for his shortness, he had to admit. He withdrew.
   The spare ward bunk had been turned into a lab bench. A third biotainer-clad figure was rapidly shifting what looked a promising array of equipment from boxes and bins piled high on a float pallet onto this makeshift surface. The second tech returned from the bathroom and started feeding bits of Bel into the various chemical and molecular analyzers on one end of the bunk even as the third man arranged more devices on the other.
   Roic's tall, pressure-suited figure stood waiting just past the molecular barriers across the ward door. He was holding a high-powered laser-sonic decontaminator, familiar Barrayaran military issue. He raised an inviting hand; Miles returned the acknowledgment.
   Nothing further was to be gained in here by dithering more at the medical squad. He'd just distract them and get in their way. He suppressed his unstrung urge to explain to them Bel's superior right, by old valor and love, to survive. Futile. He might as well rail at the microbes themselves. Even the Cetagandans had not yet devised a weapon that triaged for virtue before slaughtering its victims.
   I promised to call Nicol. God, why did I promise that? Learning Bel's present status would surely be more terrifying for her than knowing nothing. He would wait a little longer, at least till he received the first report from the surgeon. If there was hope by then, he could impart it. If there was none . . .
   He stepped slowly through the buzzing molecular barrier, raising his arms to turn about beneath the even stronger sonic-scrubber/laser-dryer beam from Roic's decontaminator. He had Roic treat every part of him, including palms, fingers, the soles of his feet, and, nervously, the insides of his thighs. The suit protected him from what would otherwise be a nasty scorching, leaving skin pink and hair exploded off. He didn't motion Roic to desist till they'd gone over each square centimeter. Twice.
   Roic pointed to Miles's control vambrace and bellowed through his faceplate, “I have the ship's com link relay up and running now, m'lord. You should be able to hear me through Channel Twelve, if you'll switch over. T'medics are all on Thirteen.”
   Hastily, Miles switched on the suit com. “Can you hear me?”
   Roic's voice sounded now beside his ear. “Yes, m'lord. Much better.”
   “Have we blown the tube seals and pulled away from the docking clamps yet?”
   Roic looked faintly chagrined. “No, m'lord.” At Miles's chin raised in inquiry, he added, “Um . . . you see, there's only me. I've never piloted a jumpship.”
   “Unless you're actually jumping, it's just like a shuttle,” Miles assured him. “Only bigger.”
   “I've never piloted a shuttle, either.”
   “Ah. Well, come on, then. I'll show you how.”
   They threaded their way to Nav and Com; Roic tapped their passage through the code locks. All right, Miles admitted, looking around at the various station chairs and their control banks, so it was a big ship. It was only going to be a ten-meter flight. He was a bit out of practice even on pods and shuttles, but really, given some of the pilots he'd known, how hard could it be?
   Roic watched in earnest admiration while he concealed his hunt for the tube seal controls—ah, there. It took three tries to get in touch with station traffic control, and then with Docks and Locks—if only Bel had been here, he would have instantly delegated this task to . . . He bit his lip, rechecking the all-clear from the loading bay—it would be the cap on this mission's multitude of embarrassments to pull away from the station yanking out the docking clamps, decompressing the loading bay, and killing some unknown number of quaddie patrollers on guard therein. He scooted from the communications station to the pilot's chair, shoving the jump helmet up out of the way and clenching his gloved hands briefly before activating the manual controls. A little gentle pressure from the side verniers, a little patience, and a countering thrust from the opposite side left the vast bulk of the Idris floating in space a neat stone's throw from the side of Graf Station. Not that a stone thrown out there would do anything but keep on going forever . . .
   No bio-plague can cross that gap , he thought with satisfaction, then instantly thought of what the Cetagandans might do with spores. I hope.
   It occurred to him belatedly that if the Prince Xav 's surgeon sounded an all-clear from the biocontamination alert, docking once again was going to be a critically more delicate task. Well, if he clears the ship, we can import a pilot then . He glanced at the time on a wall digital. Barely an hour had passed since they'd found Bel. It seemed a century.
   “You're a pilot, as well?” a surprised, muffled female voice sounded.
   Miles swung around in the pilot's chair to find the three quaddies in their floaters hovering in the control room's doorway. All now wore quaddie-shaped biotainer suits in pale medical green. His eye rapidly sorted them out. Venn was bulkier, Sealer Greenlaw a little shorter. Adjudicator Leutwyn brought up the rear.
   “Only in an emergency,” he admitted. “Where did you get the suits?”
   “My people sent them across from the station in a drone pod,” said Venn. He, too, wore his stunner holstered on the outside of his suit.
   Miles would have preferred to keep the civilians safely locked down in the freight nacelle, but there was clearly no help for that now.
   “Which is still attached to the lock, yes,” Venn overrode Miles's opening mouth.
   “Thank you,” said Miles meekly.
   He wanted desperately to rub his face and scrub his itching eyes, but couldn't. What was next? Had he done all he could to contain this thing? His eye fell on the decontaminator, slung over Roic's shoulder. It would probably be a good idea to take that back down to Engineering and sterilize their tracks.
   “M'lord?' said Roic diffidently.
   “Yes, Armsman?”
   “I been thinking. The night guard saw the portmaster and the ba enter the ship, but nobody reported anybody leaving. We found Thorne. I was wondering how the ba got off the ship.”
   “Thank you, Roic, yes. And how long ago. Good question to pursue next.”
   “Whenever one of the Idris 's hatches opens, its lock vid recorders start up automatically. We should ought to be able to access t'lock records from here, I'd think, same as from Solian's security office.” Roic cast a somewhat desperate eye around the intimidating array of stations. “Somewhere.”
   “We should indeed.” Miles abandoned the pilot's chair for the flight engineer's station. A little poking among the controls, and a short delay while one of Roic's library of override codes pacified the lockdowns, and Miles was able to bring up a duplicate file of the sort of airlock security records they'd found in Solian's office and spent so many bleary-eyed hours studying. He set the search to present the data in reverse order of time.
   The most recent usage was first up on the vid plate, a nice shot of the automated drone pod docking at the outboard personnel lock serving the number two freight nacelle. An anxious-looking Venn scooted into the lock in his floater. He shuttled in and out handing back green suits folded in plastic bags to waiting hands, plus an assortment of other objects: a big box of first aid supplies, a tool kit, a decontaminator somewhat resembling Roic's, and what might be some weapons with rather more authority than stunners. Miles cut the scene short and sent the search back in time.
   Mere minutes before that was the Barrayaran military medical patrol arriving in a small shuttle from the Prince Xav , entering via one of the number four nacelle personnel locks. The three medical officers and Roic were all clearly identifiable, hastily unloading equipment.
   A freight lock in one of the Necklin drive nacelles popped up next, and Miles caught his breath. A figure in a bulky extravehicular-repairs suit marked with serial numbers from the Idris 's engineering section lumbered heavily past the vid pickup, and departed into the vacuum with a brief puff of suit jets. The quaddies bobbing at Miles's shoulder murmured and pointed; Greenlaw muffled an exclamation, and Venn choked on a curse.
   The next record back in time was of themselves—the three quaddies, Miles, and Roic—entering the ship from the loading bay for their inspection, however many hours ago it had been. Miles tapped instantly back to the mystery figure in the engineering suit. What time . . . ?
   Roic exclaimed, “Look, m'lord! He—it—was getting away not twenty minutes before we found t'portmaster! The ba must've still been aboard when we came on!” Even through his faceplate, his face took on a greenish tinge.
   Had Bel's conundrum in the bod pod been a fiendishly engineered delaying tactic? Miles wondered if the knotted feeling in his stomach and tightness in his throat could be the first sign of a bioengineered plague. . . .
   “Is that our suspect?” asked Leutwyn anxiously. “Where did he go?”
   “What is the range on those heavy suits of yours, do you know, Lord Auditor?” asked Venn urgently.
   “Those? Not sure. They're meant to allow men to work outside the ship for hours at a time, so I'd guess, if they were fully topped up with oxygen, propellant, and power . . . damned near the range of a small personnel pod.” The engineering repair suits resembled military space armor, except with an array of built-in tools instead of built-in weapons. Too heavy for even a strong man to walk in, they were fully powered. The ba might have ridden in one around to any point on Graf Station. Worse, the ba might have ridden out to a mid-space pickup by some Cetagandan co-agent, or perhaps by some bribed or simply bamboozled local helper. The ba might be thousands of kilometers away by now, with the gap widening every second. Heading for entry to another quaddie habitat under yet another faked identity, or even for rendezvous with a passing jumpship and escape from Quaddiespace altogether.
   “Station Security is on full emergency alert,” said Venn. “I have all my patrollers and all of the Sealer's militia on duty out looking for the fellow—the person. Dubauer can't have gotten back aboard the station unobserved.” A tremor of doubt in Venn's voice undercut the certainty of this statement.
   “I've ordered the station onto a full biocontamination quarantine,” said Greenlaw. “All incoming ships and vehicles have been waved off or diverted to Union, and none now in dock are cleared to leave. If the fugitive did get back aboard already—it isn't leaving.” Judging by the sealer's congealed expression, she was by no means sure if this was a good thing. Miles sympathized. Fifty thousand potential hostages . . . ”If it's fled somewhere else . . . if our people can't locate this fugitive promptly, I'm going to have to extend the quarantine throughout Quaddiespace.”
   What would be the most important task for the ba, now that the flag had been dropped? It had to realize that the tight secrecy it had relied on for protection thus far was irremediably ruptured. Did it realize how close on its heels its pursuers had come? Would it still wish to murder Gupta to assure the Jacksonian smuggler's silence? Or would it abandon that hunt, cut losses, and run if it could? Which direction was it trying to move, back in, or out?
   Miles's eye fell on the vid image of the work suit, frozen above the plate. Did that suit have the kind of telemetry space armor did? More to the point—did it have the kind of remote control overrides some space armor did?
   “Roic! When you were down in the engineering suit lockers hunting for that pressure suit, did you see an automated command-and-control station for these powered repair units?”
   “I . . . there's a control room down there, yes, m'lord. I passed it. I don't know what all might be in it.”
   “I have an idea. Follow me.”
   He levered himself from the station chair and left Nav and Com at a sloppy jog, his biotainer suit sliding aggravatingly around him. Roic strode after; the curious quaddies followed in their floaters.
   The control room was scarcely more than a booth, but it featured a telemetry station for exterior maintenance and repairs. Miles slid into its station chair, and cursed the tall person who'd fixed it at a height that left his boots dangling in air. On permanent display were several real-time vid shots of critical portions of the ship's outlying anatomy, including directional antenna arrays, the mass shield generator, and the main normal-space thrusters. Miles sorted through a bewildering mess of data from structural safety sensors scattered throughout the ship. Finally, the work suit control program came up.
   Six suits in the array. Miles called up visual telemetry from their helmet vids. Five returned views of blank walls, the insides of their respective storage lockers. The sixth returned a lighter image, but more puzzling, of a curving wall. It remained as static as the vistas from the suits in storage.
   Miles pinged the suit for full telemetry download. The suit was powered up but quiescent. The medical sensors were basic, just heart rate and respiration—and turned off. The life-support readouts claimed the rebreather was fully functional, the interior humidity and temperature were exactly on-spec, but the system appeared to be supporting no load.
   “It can't be very far away,” Miles said over his shoulder to his hovering audience. “There's zero time lag in my com linkup.”
   “That's a relief,” sighed Greenlaw.
   “Is it?” muttered Leutwyn. “Who for?”
   Miles stretched shoulders aching with tension, and bent again to the displays. The powered suit had to have an exterior control override somewhere; it was a common safety feature on these civilian models, in case its occupant should suddenly become injured, ill, or incapacitated . . . ah. There.
   “What are you doing, m'lord?” asked Roic uneasily.
   “I believe I can take control of the suit via the emergency overrides, and bring it back aboard.”
   “Wit' t' ba inside? Is that a good idea?”
   “We'll know in a moment.”
   He gripped the joysticks, slippery under his gloves, gained control of the suit's jets, and tried a gentle puff. The suit slowly began to move, scraping along the wall and then turning away. The puzzling view resolved itself—he was looking at the outside of the Idris itself. The suit had been hidden, tucked in the angle between two nacelles. No one inside the suit fought back at this hijacking. A new and extremely disturbing thought crept up on Miles.
   Carefully, Miles brought the suit back around the outside of the ship to the nearest lock to Engineering, on the outboard side of one of the Necklin rod nacelles, the same lock from which it had exited. Opened the lock, brought the suit inside. Its servos kept it upright. The light reflected from its faceplate, concealing whatever was within. Miles did not open the interior lock door.
   “Now what?” he said to the room at large.
   Venn glanced at Roic. “Your armsman and I have stunners, I believe. If you control the suit, you control the prisoner's movements. Bring it in, and we'll arrest the bastard.”
   “The suit has manual capacities, too. Anyone in it who was . . . alive and conscious should have been able to fight me.” Miles cleared a throat thick with worry. “I was just wondering if Brun's searchers checked inside these suits when they were looking for Solian, that first day he went missing. And, um . . . what he's like—what condition his body might be in by now.”
   Roic made a small noise, and emitted an undervoiced, plaintive protest of M'lord! Miles wasn't sure of the exact interpretation, but he thought it might have something to do with Roic wanting to keep his last meal in his stomach, and not all over the inside of his helmet.
   After a brief, fraught pause, Venn said, “Then we'd better go have a look. Sealer, Adjudicator—wait here.”
   The two senior officials didn't argue.
   “Would you like to stay with 'em, m'lord?” Roic suggested tentatively.
   “We've all been looking for that poor bastard for weeks,” Miles replied firmly. “If this is him, I want to be the first to know.” He did allow Roic and Venn to precede him from engineering through the locks into the Necklin field generator nacelle, though.
   At the lock, Venn drew his stunner and took position. Roic peered through the port on the airlock's inner door. Then his hand swept down to the lock control, the door slid open, and he strode in. He reappeared a moment later, half-dragging the heavy toppling work suit. He laid it faceup on the corridor floor.
   Miles ventured closer and stared down at the faceplate.
   The suit was empty.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

   “Don't open it!” cried Venn in alarm.
   “Wasn't planning to,” Miles replied mildly. Not for any money.
   Venn floated closer, stared down over Miles's shoulder, and swore. “The bastard's got away already! But to the station, or to a ship?” He edged back, tucked his stunner away in a pocket of his green suit, and began to gabble into his helmet com, alerting both Station Security and the quaddie militia to pursue, seize, and search anything—ship, pod, or shuttle—that had so much as shifted its parking zone off the side of the station in the past three hours.
   Miles envisioned the escape. Might the ba have ridden the repairs suit back aboard the station before Greenlaw had called down the quarantine? Yes, maybe. The time window was narrow, but possible. But in that case, how had it returned the suit to the hiding place outside the Idris ? It would make more sense for the ba to have been picked up by a personnel pod—plenty enough of them zipping around out there at all hours—and have prodded the suit back to its concealment with a tractor beam, or had it towed there by someone in another powered suit and tucked out of sight.
   But the Idris , like all the other Barrayaran and Komarran ships, was under surveillance by the quaddie militia. How cursory was that outside guard? Surely not that inattentive. Yet a person, a tall person, sitting in that engineering control booth manipulating the joysticks, might well have walked the suit out this airlock and quickly around the nacelle, popping it away out of sight deftly enough to evade notice by the militia guardians. Then risen from the station chair, and . . . ?
   Miles's palms itched, maddeningly, inside his gloves, and he rubbed them together in a futile attempt to gain relief. He'd have traded blood for the chance to rub his nose. “Roic,” he said slowly. “Do you remember what this,” he prodded the repair suit with his toe, “had in its hand when it went out the airlock?”
   “Um . . . nothing, m'lord.” Roic twisted slightly and shot Miles a puzzled look, through his faceplate.
   “That's what I thought.” Right.
   If Miles was guessing correctly, the ba had turned aside from the imminent murder of Gupta to seize the chance of using Bel to get back aboard the Idris and do—what?—with its cargo. Destroy it? It would surely not have taken the ba this long to inoculate the replicators with some suitable poison. It might even have been able to do them twenty at a time, introducing the contaminant into the support system of each rack. Or—even more simply, if all it had wanted was to kill its charges—it might have just turned off all the support systems, a work of mere minutes. But taking and marking individual cell samples for freezing, yes, that could well have taken all night, and all day too. If the ba had risked everything to do that, would it then leave the ship without its freezer case firmly in hand?
   “The ba's had over two hours to effect an escape. Surely it wouldn't linger . . .” muttered Miles. But his voice lacked conviction. Roic, at least, caught the quaver at once; his helmet turned toward Miles, and he frowned.
   They needed to count pressure suits, and check every lock to see if any of the vid monitors had been manually disabled. No, too slow—that would be a fine evidence-collecting task to delegate if one had the manpower, but Miles felt painfully bereft of minions just now. And in any case, so what if another suit was found to be gone? Pursuing loose suits was a job that the quaddies around the station were already turning to, by Venn's order. But if no other suit was gone . . .
   And Miles himself had just turned the Idris into a trap.
   He gulped. “I was about to say, we need to count suits, but I've a better idea. I believe we should return to Nav and Com, and shut the ship down in sections from there. Collect all the weapons at our disposal, and do a systematic search.”
   Venn jerked around in his float chair. “What, do you think this Cetagandan agent could still be aboard?”
   “M'lord,” said Roic in an uncharacteristically sharp voice, “what t'matter with your gloves ?”
   Miles stared down, turning up his hands. His breath congealed in his chest. The thin, tough fabric of his biotainer gloves was shredding away, hanging loose in strings; beneath the lattice, his palms showed red. Their itching seemed to redouble. His breath let loose again in a snarl of “Shit! ”
   Venn bobbed closer, took in the damage with widening eyes, and recoiled.
   Miles held his hands up, and apart. “Venn. Go collect Greenlaw and Leutwyn and take over Nav and Com. Secure yourselves and the infirmary, in that order. Roic. Go ahead of me to the infirmary. Open the doors for me.” He choked back an unnecessary scream of Run! ; Roic, with an indrawn breath audible over the suit com, was already moving.
   He dodged through the half-dark ship in Roic's long-legged wake, touching nothing, expecting every lumping heartbeat to rupture inside him. Where had he collected this hellish contamination? Was anyone else affected? Everyone else?
   No. It had to have been the power-suit control joysticks. They'd slid greasily under his gloved hands. He had gripped them tighter, intent upon the task of bringing the suit back inboard. He'd taken the bait . . . Now, more than ever, he was certain the ba had walked an empty suit out the airlock. And then set a snare for any smartass who figured it out too soon.
   He plunged through the door to the infirmary, past Roic, who stood aside, and straight on through the blue-lit inner door to the bio-sealed ward. A medtech's suited form jumped in surprise. Miles called up Channel 13 and rapped out, “Someone please . . .” then stopped. He'd meant to cry, Turn on the water for me! and hold his hands under the sluice of a sink, but where did the water then go ? “Help,” he finished in a smaller voice.
   “What is it, my Lord Audi—” the chief surgeon began, stepping from the bathroom; then his glance took in Miles's upraised hands. “What happened? ”
   “I think I hit a booby trap. As soon as you have a free tech, have Armsman Roic take him down to Engineering and collect a sample from the repair suit remote controller there. It appears to have been painted with some powerful corrosive or enzyme and . . . and I don't know what else.”
   “Sonic scrubber,” Captain Clogston snapped over his shoulder to the tech monitoring the makeshift lab bench. The man hastened to rummage among the stacks of supplies. He turned back, powering on the device; Miles held out both his burning hands. The machine roared as the tech ran the directed beam of vibration over the afflicted areas, its powerful vacuum sucking the loosened detritus both macroscopic and microscopic into the sealed collection bag. The surgeon leaned in with a scalpel and tongs, slicing and tearing away the remaining shreds of gloves, which were also sucked into the receptacle.
   The scrubber seemed effective; Miles's hands stopped feeling worse, though they continued to throb. Was his skin breached? He brought his now-bare palms closer to his faceplate, impeding the surgeon, who hissed under his breath. Yes. Red flecks of blood welled in the creases of the swollen tissue. Shit. Shit. Shit. . . .
   Clogston straightened and glanced around, lips drawn back in a grimace. “Your biotainer suit's compromised all to hell, my lord.”
   “There's another pair of gloves on the other suit,” Miles pointed out. “I could cannibalize them.”
   “Not yet.” Clogston hurried to slather Miles's hands with some mystery goo and wrap them in biotainer barriers, sealed to his wrists. It was like wearing mittens over handfuls of snot, but the burning pain eased. Across the room, the tech was scraping fragments of contaminated glove into an analyzer. Was the third man in with Bel? Was Bel still in the ice bath? Still alive?
   Miles took a deep, steadying breath. “Do you have any kind of a diagnosis on Portmaster Thorne yet?”
   “Oh, yes, it came up right away,” said Clogston in a somewhat absent tone, still sealing the second wrist wrap. “The instant we ran the first blood sample through. What the hell we can do about it is not yet obvious, but I have some ideas.” He straightened again, frowning deeply at Miles's hands. “The herm's blood and tissues are crawling with artificial—that is, bioengineered—parasites.” He glanced up. “They appear to have an initial, latent, asymptomatic phase, where they multiply rapidly throughout the body. Then, at some point—possibly triggered by their own concentration—they switch over to producing two chemicals in different vesicles within their own cellular membrane. The vesicles engorge. A rise in the victim's body temperature triggers the bursting of the sacs, and the chemicals in turn undergo a violently exothermic reaction with each other—killing the parasite, damaging the host's surrounding tissues, and stimulating more nearby parasites to go off. Tiny, pin-point bombs all through the body. It's”—his tone went reluctantly admiring—”extremely elegant. In a hideous sort of way.”
   “Did—did my ice-water bath treatment help Thorne, then?”
   “Yes, absolutely. The drop in core temperature stopped the cascade in its tracks, temporarily. The parasites had almost reached critical concentration.”
   Miles's eyes squeezed shut in brief gratitude. And opened again. “Temporarily?”
   “I still haven't figured out how to get rid of the damned things. We're trying to modify a surgical shunt into a blood filter to both mechanically remove the parasites from the patient's bloodstream, and chill the blood to a controlled degree before returning it to the body. I think I can make the parasites respond selectively to an applied electrophoresis gradient across the shunt tube, and pull them right on out of the bloodstream.”
   “Won't that do it, then?”
   Clogston shook his head. “It doesn't get the parasites lodged in other tissues, reservoirs of reinfection. It's not a cure, but it might buy time. I think. The cure must somehow kill every last one of the parasites in the body, or the process will just start up again.” His lips twisted. “Internal vermicides could be tricky. Injecting something to kill already-engorged parasites within the tissues will just release their chemical loads. A very little of that micro-insult will play hell with circulation, overload repair processes, cause intense pain—it's . . . it's tricky.”
   “Destroy brain tissue?” Miles asked, feeling sick.
   “Eventually. They don't seem to cross the blood-brain barrier very readily. I believe the victim would be conscious to a, um, very late phase of the dissolution.”
   “Oh.” Miles tried to decide whether that would be good, or bad.
   “On the bright side,” offered the surgeon, “I may be able to downgrade the biocontamination alarm from Level Five to Level Three. The parasites appear to need direct blood-to-blood contact to effect transference. They don't seem to survive long outside a host.”
   “They can't travel through the air?”
   Clogston hesitated. “Well, maybe not until the host starts coughing blood.”
   Until , not unless . Miles noted the word choice. “I'm afraid talk of a downgrade is premature anyway. A Cetagandan agent armed with unknown bioweapons—well, unknown except for this one, which is getting too damned familiar—is still on the loose out there.” He inhaled, carefully, and forced his voice to calm. “We've found some evidence suggesting that the agent still may be hiding aboard this ship. You need to secure your work zone from a possible intruder.”
   Captain Clogston cursed. “Hear that, boys?” he called to his techs over his suit com.
   “Oh, great,” came a disgusted reply. “Just what we need right now.”
   “Hey, at least it's something we can shoot ,” another voice remarked wistfully.
   Ah, Barrayarans. Miles's heart warmed. “On sight,” he confirmed. These were military medicos; they all bore sidearms, bless them.
   His eye flicked over the ward and the infirmary chamber beyond, summing weak points. Only one entry, but was that weakness or strength? The outer door was definitely the vantage to hold, protecting the ward beyond; Roic had taken up station there quite automatically. Yet traditional attack by stunner, plasma arc, or explosive grenade seemed . . . insufficiently imaginative. The place was still on ship's air circulation and ship's power, but this of all sections had to have its own emergency reservoirs of both.
   The military-grade Level Five biotainer suits the medicos wore also doubled as pressure suits, their air circulation entirely internal. The same was not true of Miles's cheaper suit, even before he'd lost his gloves; his atmosphere pack drew air from the environs, through filters and cookers. In the event of a pressurization loss, his suit would turn into a stiff, unwieldy balloon, perhaps even rupture at a weak point. There were bod pod lockers on the walls, of course. Miles pictured being trapped in a bod pod while the action went on without him.
   Given that he was already exposed to . . . whatever, peeling out of his biotainer suit long enough to get into something tighter couldn't make things any worse, could it? He stared at his hands and wondered why he wasn't dead yet. Could the glop he'd touched have been only a simple corrosive?
   Miles clawed his stunner out of his thigh pocket, awkwardly with his mittened hand, and walked back through the blue bars of light marking the bio-barrier. “Roic. I want you to dash back down to Engineering and grab me the smallest pressure suit you can find. I'll guard this point till you get back.”
   “M'lord,” Roic began in a tone of doubt.
   “Keep your stunner out; watch your back. We're all here, so if you see anything move that isn't quaddie green, shoot first.”
   Roic swallowed manfully. “Yes, well, see that you stay here, m'lord. Don't go haring off on your own without me!”
   “I wouldn't dream of it,” Miles promised.
   Roic departed at the gallop. Miles readjusted his awkward grip on the stunner, made sure it was set to maximum power, and took a stance partly sheltered by the door, staring up the central corridor at his bodyguard's retreating form. Scowling.
   I don't understand this.
   Something didn't add up, and if he could just get ten consecutive minutes not filled with lethal new tactical crises, maybe it would come to him. . . . He tried not to think about his stinging palms, and what ingenious microbial sneak assault might even now be stealing through his body, maybe even making its way into his brain.
   An ordinary imperial servitor ba ought to have died before abandoning a charge like those haut-filled replicators. And even if this one had been trained as some sort of special agent, why spend all that critical time taking samples from the fetuses that it was about to desert or maybe even destroy? Every haut infant ever made had its DNA kept on file back in the central gene banks of the Star Crиche. They could make more, surely. What made this batch so irreplaceable?
   His train of thought derailed itself as he imagined little gengineered parasites multiplying frenetically through his bloodstream, blip-blip-blip-blip .Calm down, dammit. He didn't actually know if he'd even been inoculated with the same evil disease as Bel. Yeah, it might be something even worse . Yet surely some Cetagandan designer neurotoxin—or even some quite ordinary off-the-shelf poison—ought to cut in much faster than this. Although if it's a drug to drive the victim mad with paranoia, it's working really well. Was the ba's repertoire of hell-potions limited? If it had any, why not many? Whatever stimulants or hypnotics it had used on Bel need not have been anything out of the ordinary, by the norms of covert ops. How many other fancy bio-tricks did it have up its sleeve? Was Miles about to personally demonstrate the next one?
   Am I going to live long enough to say good-bye to Ekaterin? A good-bye kiss was right out, unless they pressed their lips to opposite sides of some really thick window of glass. He had so much to say to her; it seemed impossible to find where to start. Even more impossible by voice alone, over an open, unsecured public com link. Take care of the kids. Kiss them for me every night at bedtime, and tell them I loved them even if I never saw them. You won't be alone—my parents will help you. Tell my parents . . . tell them . . .
   Was this damned thing starting up already, or were the hot panic and choking tears in his throat entirely self-induced? An enemy that attacked you from the inside out—you could try to turn yourself inside out to fight it, but you wouldn't succeed—filthy weapon! Open channel or not, I'm calling her now. . . .
   Instead, Venn's voice sounded in his ear. “Lord Vorkosigan, pick up Channel Twelve. Your Admiral Vorpatril wants you. Badly.”
   Miles hissed through his teeth and keyed his helmet com over. “Vorkosigan here.”
   “Vorkosigan, you idiot—!” The admiral's syntax had shed a few honorifics sometime in the past hour. “What the hell is going on over there? Why don't you answer your wrist com?”
   “It's inside my biotainer suit and inaccessible right now. I'm afraid I had to don the suit in a hurry. Be aware, this helmet link is an open access channel and unsecured, sir.” Dammit, where did that sir drop in from? Habit, sheer old bad habit. “You can ask for a brief report from Captain Clogston over his military suit's tight-beam link, but keep it short . He's a very busy man right now, and I don't want him distracted.”
   Vorpatril swore—whether generally or at the Imperial Auditor was left nicely ambiguous—and clicked off.
   Faintly echoing through the ship came the sound Miles had been waiting for—the distant clanks and hisses of airseal doors shutting down, sealing the ship into airtight sections. The quaddies had made it to Nav and Com, good! Except that Roic wasn't back yet. The armsman would have to get in touch with Venn and Greenlaw and get them to unseal and reseal his passage back up to—
   “Vorkosigan.” Venn's voice sounded again in his ear, strained. “Is that you?”
   “Is what me?”
   “Shutting off the compartments.”
   “Isn't it,” Miles tried, and failed, to swallow his voice back down to a more reasonable pitch. “Aren't you in Nav and Com yet ?”
   “No, we circled back to the Number Two nacelle to pick up our equipment. We were just about to leave it.”
   Hope flared in Miles's hammering heart. “Roic,” he called urgently. “Where are you?”
   “Not in Nav and Com, m'lord,” Roic's grim voice returned.
   “But if we're here and he's there, who's doing this ?” came Leutwyn's unhappy voice.
   “Who do you think ?” Greenlaw ripped back. Her breath huffed out in anguish. “Five people, and not one of us thought to see the door locked behind us when we left—dammit!”
   A small, bleak grunt, like a man being hit with an arrow, or a realization, sounded in Miles's ear: Roic.
   Miles said urgently, “Anyone who holds Nav and Com has access to all these ship-linked com channels, or will, shortly. We're going to have to switch off.”
   The quaddies had independent links to the station and Vorpatril through their suits; so did the medicos. Miles and Roic would be the ones plunged into communications limbo.
   Then, abruptly, the sound in his helmet went dead. Ah. Looks like the ba has found the com controls. . . .
   Miles leapt to the environmental control panel for the infirmary to the left of the door, opened it, and hit every manual override in it. With this outer door shut, they could retain air pressure, although circulation would be blocked. The medicos in their suits would be unaffected; Miles and Bel would be at risk. He eyed the bod pod locker on the wall without favor. The bio-sealed ward was already functioning on internal circulation, thank God, and could remain so—as long as the power stayed on. But how could they keep Bel cold if the herm had to retreat to a pod?
   Miles hurried back into the ward. He approached Clogston, and yelled through his faceplate, “We just lost our ship-linked suit coms. Keep to your tight-beam military channels only.”
   “I heard,” Clogston yelled back.
   “How are you coming on that filter-cooler?”
   “Cooler part's done. Still working on the filter. I wish I'd brought more hands, although there's scarcely room in here for more butts.”
   “I've almost got it, I think,” called the tech, crouched over the bench. “Check that, will you, sir?” He waved in the direction of one of the analyzers, a collection of lights on its readout now blinking for attention.
   Clogston dodged around him and bent to the machine in question. After a moment he murmured, “Oh, that's clever.”
   Miles, crowding his shoulder close enough to hear this, did not find it reassuring. “What's clever?”
   Clogston pointed at his analyzer readout, which now displayed incomprehensible strings of letters and numbers in cheery colors. “I didn't see how the parasites could possibly survive in a matrix of that enzyme that ate your biotainer gloves. But they were microencapsulated.”
   “What?”
   “Standard trick for delivering drugs through a hostile environment—like your stomach, or maybe your bloodstream—to the target zone. Only this time, used to deliver a disease. When the microencapsulation passes out of the unfriendly environment into the—chemically speaking—friendly zone, it pops open, releasing its load. No loss, no waste.”
   “Oh. Wonderful. Are you saying I now have the same shit Bel has?”
   “Um.” Clogston glanced up at a chrono on the wall. “How long since you were first exposed, my lord?”
   Miles followed his glance. “Half an hour, maybe?”
   “They might be detectable in your bloodstream by now.”
   “Check it.”
   “We'll have to open your suit to access a vein.”
   “Check it now. Fast .”
   Clogston grabbed a sampler needle; Miles peeled back the biotainer wrap from his left wrist, and gritted his teeth as a biocide swab stung and the needle poked. Clogston was pretty deft for a man wearing biotainer gloves, Miles had to concede. He watched anxiously as the surgeon delicately slipped the needle into the analyzer.
   “How long will this take?”
   “Now that we have the template of the thing, no time at all. If it's positive, that is. If this first sample shows negative, I'd want a recheck every thirty minutes or so to be sure.” Clogston's voice slowed, as he studied his readout. “Well. Um. A recheck won't be necessary.”
   “Right,” Miles snarled. He yanked open his helmet and pushed back his suit sleeve. He bent to his secured wrist com and snapped, “Vorpatril!”
   “Yes!” Vorpatril's voice came back instantly. Riding his com channels—he must be on duty in either the Prince Xav 's own Nav and Com, or maybe, by now, its tactics room. “Wait, what are you doing on this channel? I thought you had no access.”
   “The situation has changed. Never mind that now. What's happening out there?”
   “What's happening in there ?”
   “The medical team, Portmaster Thorne, and I are holed up in the infirmary. For the moment, we're still in control of our environment. I believe Venn, Greenlaw, and Leutwyn are trapped in the Number Two freight nacelle. Roic may be somewhere in Engineering. And the ba, I believe, has seized Nav and Com. Can you confirm that last?”
   “Oh, yes,” groaned Vorpatril. “It's talking to the quaddies on Graf Station right now. Making threats and demands. Boss Watts seems to have inherited their hot seat. I have a strike team scrambling.”
   “Patch it in here. I have to hear this.”
   A few seconds delay, then the ba's voice sounded. The Betan accent was gone; the academic coolness was fraying. “—name does not matter. If you wish to get the Sealer, the Imperial Auditor, and the others back alive, these are my requirements. A jump pilot for this ship, delivered immediately. Free and unimpeded passage from your system. If either you or the Barrayarans attempt to launch a military assault against the Idris , I will either blow up the ship with all aboard, or ram the station.”
   Boss Watts's voice returned, thick with tension, “If you attempt to ram Graf Station, we'll blow you up ourselves .”
   “Either way will do,” the ba's voice returned dryly.
   Did the ba know how to blow up a jumpship? It wasn't exactly easy. Hell, if the Cetagandan was a hundred years old, who know what all it knew how to do? Ramming, now—with a target that big and close, any layman could manage it.
   Greenlaw's stiff voice cut in; her com link presumably was patched through to Watts in the same way that Miles's was to Vorpatril. “Don't do it, Watts. Quaddiespace cannot let a plague-carrier like this pass through to our neighbors. A handful of lives can't justify the risk to thousands.”
   “Indeed,” the ba continued after a slight hesitation, still in that same cool tone. “If you do succeed in killing me, I'm afraid you will win yourselves another dilemma. I have left a small gift aboard the station. The experiences of Gupta and Portmaster Thorne should give you an idea of what sort of package it is. You might find it before it ruptures, although I'd say your odds are poor. Where are your thousands now? Much closer to home.”
   True threat or bluff? Miles wondered frantically. It certainly fit the ba's style as demonstrated so far—Bel in the bod pod, the booby trap with the suit-control joysticks—hideous, lethal puzzles tossed out in the ba's wake to disrupt and distract its pursuers. It sure worked on me, anyway.
   Vorpatril cut in privately on the wrist com, in an unnecessarily lowered, tense tone, overriding the exchange between the ba and Watts. “Do you think the bastard's bluffing, m'lord?”
   “Doesn't matter if it's bluffing or not. I want it alive . Oh, God do I ever want it alive. Take that as a top priority and an order in the Emperor's Voice, Admiral.”
   After a small and, Miles hoped, thoughtful pause, Vorpatril returned, “Understood, my Lord Auditor.”
   “Ready your strike team, yes . . .” Vorpatril's best strike force was locked in quaddie detention. What was the second best one like? Miles's heart quailed. “But hold it. This situation is extremely unstable. I don't have any clear sense yet how it will play out. Put the ba's channel back on.” Miles returned his attention to the negotiation in progress—no—winding up?
   “A jump pilot.” The ba seemed to be reiterating. “Alone, in a personnel pod, to the Number Five B lock. And, ah—naked.” Horribly, there seemed to be a smile in that last word. “For obvious reasons.”
   The ba cut the com.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

   Now what?
   Delays, Miles guessed, while the quaddies on Graf Station either readied a pilot or ran the risks of stalling about delivering one into such a hazard, and suppose none volunteered? While Vorpatril marshaled his strike team, while the three quaddie officials trapped in the freight nacelle—well, didn't sit on their hands, Miles bet—while this infection gains on me , while the ba did—what?
   Delay is not my friend.
   But it was his gift. What time was it, anyway? Late evening—still the same day that had started so early with the news of Bel's disappearance? Yes, though it hardly felt possible. Surely he had entered some time warp. Miles stared at his wrist com, took a deep, terrified breath, and called up Ekaterin's code. Had Vorpatril told her anything of what was happening yet, or had he kept her comfortably ignorant?
   “Miles!” she answered at once.
   “Ekaterin, love. Where, um . . . are you?”
   “The tactics room, with Admiral Vorpatril.”
   Ah. That answered that question. In a way, he was relieved that he didn't have to deliver the whole litany of bad news himself, cold. “You've been following this, then.”
   “More or less. It's been very confusing.”
   “I'll bet. I . . .” He couldn't say it, not so baldly. He dodged, while he mustered courage. “I promised to call Nicol when I had news of Bel, and I haven't had a chance. The news, as you may know, is not good; we found Bel, but the herm has been deliberately infected with a bioengineered Cetagandan parasite that may . . . may prove lethal.”
   “Yes, I understand. I've been hearing it all, here in the tactics room.”
   “Good. The medics are doing their best, but it's a race against time and now there are these other complications. Will you call Nicol and redeem my word for me? There's not no hope, but . . . she needs to know it doesn't look so good right now. Use your judgment how much to soften it.”
   “My judgment is that she should be told plain truth. The whole of Graf Station is in an uproar now, what with the quarantine and biocontamination alert. She needs to know exactly what's going on, and she has a right to know. I'll call her at once.”
   “Oh. Good. Thank you. I, um . . . you know I love you.”
   “Yes. Tell me something I don't know.”
   Miles blinked. This wasn't getting easier; he rushed it in a breath. “Well. There's a chance I may have screwed up pretty badly, here. Like, I may not get out of this one. The situation here is pretty unsettled, and, um . . . I'm afraid my biotainer suit gloves were sabotaged by a nasty little Cetagandan booby trap I triggered. I seem to have got myself infected with the same biohazard that's taken Bel down. The stuff doesn't appear to act very quickly, though.”
   In the background, he could just hear Admiral Vorpatril's voice, cursing in choice barracks language not at all consonant with the respect due to one of His Majesty Gregor Vorbarra's Imperial Auditors. From Ekaterin, silence; he strained to hear her breathing. The sound reproduction on these high-grade com links was so excellent, he could hear when she let her breath out again, through those pursed, exquisite warm lips he could not see or touch.
   He began again. “I'm . . . I'm sorry that . . . I wanted to give you—this wasn't what I—I never wanted to bring you grief—”
   “Miles. Stop that babbling at once.”
   “Oh . . . uh, yes?”
   Her voice sharpened. “If you die on me out here, I will not be grieved, I will be pissed. This is all very fine, love, but may I point out that you don't have time to indulge in angst right now. You're the man who used to rescue hostages for a living. You are not allowed to not get out of this one. So stop worrying about me and start paying attention to what you are doing. Are you listening to me, Miles Vorkosigan? Don't you dare die! I won't have it!”
   That seemed definitive. Despite everything, he grinned. “Yes, dear,” he sang back meekly, heartened. This woman's Vor ancestoresses had defended bastions in war, oh, yes.
   “So stop talking to me and get back to work. Right?”
   She almost kept the shaken sob out of that last word.
   “Hold the fort, love,” he breathed, with all the tenderness he knew.
   “Always.” He could hear her swallow. “Always.”
   She cut her link. He took it as a hint.
   Hostage rescue, eh? If you want something done right, do it yourself . Come to think of it, did this ba have any idea of what Miles's former line of work had been? Or did it assume Miles was just a diplomat, a bureaucrat, another frightened civilian? The ba could not know which of the party had triggered its booby trap on the repair suit remote controls, either. Not that this biotainer suit hadn't been useless for space assault purposes even before it had been buggered all to hell. But what tools were available here in this infirmary that might be put to uses their manufacturers had never envisioned? And what personnel?
   The medical crew had military training, right enough, and discipline. They also were up to their collective elbows in other tasks of the highest priority. Miles's very last desire was to pull them away from their cramped, busy lab bench and critical patient care to go play commando with him. Although it may come to that. Thoughtfully, he began walking about the infirmary's outer chamber, opening drawers and cupboards and staring at their contents. A muddy fatigue was beginning to drag at his edgy, adrenaline-pumped high, and a headache was starting behind his eyes. He studiously ignored the terror of it.
   He glanced through the blue light bars into the ward. The tech hurried from the bench, heading toward the bathroom with something in his hands that trailed looping tubes.
   “Captain Clogston!” Miles called.
   The second suited figure turned. “Yes, my lord?”
   “I'm shutting your inner door. It's supposed to close on its own in the event of a pressure change, but I'm not sure I trust any remote-controlled equipment on this ship at the moment. Are you prepared to move your patient into a bod pod, if necessary?”
   Clogston gave him a sketchy salute of acknowledgment with a gloved hand. “Almost, my lord. We're starting construction on the second blood filter. If the first one works as well as I hope, we should be ready to rig you up very soon, too.”
   Which would tie him down to a bunk in the ward. He wasn't ready to lose mobility yet. Not while he could still move and think on his own. You don't have much time then. Regardless of what the ba does . “Thank you, Captain,” Miles called. “Let me know.” He slid the door shut with the manual override.
   What could the ba know, from Nav and Com? More importantly, what were its blind spots? Miles paced, considering the layout of this central nacelle: a long cylinder divided into three decks. This infirmary lay at the stern on the uppermost deck. Nav and Com was far forward, at the other end of the middle deck. The internal airseal doors of all levels lay at the three evenly spaced intersections to the freight and drive nacelles, dividing each deck longitudinally into quarters.
   Nav and Com had security vid monitors in all the outer airlocks, of course, and safety monitors on all the inner section doors that closed to seal the ship into airtight compartments. Blowing out a monitor would blind the ba, but also give warning that the supposed prisoners were on the move. Blowing out all of them, or all that could be reached, would be more confusing . . . but still left the problem of giving warning. How likely was the ba to carry out its harried, or perhaps insane, threat of ramming the station?
   Dammit, this was so unprofessional . . . Miles halted, arrested by his own thought.
   What were the standard operating procedures for a Cetagandan agent—anyone's agent, really—whose covert mission was going down the toilet? Destroy all the evidence: try to make it to a safe zone, embassy, or neutral territory. If that wasn't possible, destroy the evidence and then sit tight and endure arrest by the locals, whoever the locals might be, and wait for one's own side to either bail or bust one out, depending. For the really, really critical missions, destroy the evidence and commit suicide. This last was seldom ordered, because it was even more seldom carried out. But the Cetagandan ba were so conditioned to loyalty to their haut masters—and mistresses—Miles was forced to consider it a more realistic possibility in the present case.
   But splashy hostage-taking among neutrals or neighbors, blaring the mission all over the news, most of all—most of all, the public use of the Star Crиche's most private arsenal . . . This wasn't the modus operandi of a trained agent. This was goddamned amateur work. And Miles's superiors used to accuse him of being a loose cannon—hah! Not any of his most direly inspired messes had ever been as forlorn as this one was shaping up to be—for both sides, alas. This gratifying deduction did not, unfortunately, make the ba's next action more predictable. Quite the reverse.
   “M'lord?” Roic's voice rose unexpectedly from Miles's wrist com.
   “Roic!” cried Miles joyfully. “Wait. What the hell are you doing on this link? You shouldn't be out of your suit.”
   “I might ask you the same question, m'lord,” Roic returned rather tartly. “If I had time. But I had to get out of t' pressure suit anyway to get into this work suit. I think . . . yes. I can hang the com link in my helmet. There.” A slight chink, as of a faceplate closing. “Can you still hear me?”
   “Oh, yes. I take it you're still in Engineering?”
   “For now. I found you a real nice little pressure suit, m'lord. And a lot of other tools. Question is how to get it to you.”
   “Stay away from all the airseal doors—they're monitored. Have you found any cutting tools, by chance?”
   “I'm, uh . . . pretty sure that's what these are, yes.”
   “Then move as far to the stern as you can get, and cut straight up through the ceiling to the middle deck. Try to avoid damaging the air ducts and grav grid and control and fluid conduits, for now. Or anything else that would make the boards light up in Nav and Com. Then we can place you for the next cut.”
   “Right, m'lord. I was thinking something like that might do.”
   A few minutes ran by, with nothing but the sound of Roic's breathing, broken with a few under-voiced obscenities as, by trial and error, he discovered how to handle the unfamiliar equipment. A grunt, a hiss, a clank abruptly cut off.
   The rough-and-ready procedure was going to play hell with the atmospheric integrity of the sections, but did that necessarily make things any worse, from the hostages' point of view? And a pressure suit, oh bliss! Miles wondered if any of the powered work suits had been sized extra-small. Almost as good as space armor, indeed.
   “All right, m'lord,” came the welcome voice from his wrist com. “I've made it to the middle deck. I'm moving back now . . . I'm not exactly sure how close I am under you.”
   “Can you reach up to tap on the ceiling? Gently. We don't want it to reverberate through the bulkheads all the way to Nav and Com.” Miles threw himself prone, opened his faceplate, tilted his head, and listened. A faint banging, apparently from out in the corridor. “Can you move farther toward the stern?”
   “I'll try, m'lord. It's a question of getting these ceiling panels apart . . .” More heavy breathing. “There. Try now.”
   This time, the rapping seemed to come from nearly under Miles's outstretched hand. “I think that's got it, Roic.”
   “Right, m'lord. Be sure you're not standing where I'm cutting. I think Lady Vorkosigan would be right peeved with me if I accidentally lopped off any of your body parts.”
   “I think so too.” Miles rose, ripped up a section of friction matting, skittered to the side of the infirmary's outer chamber, and held his breath.
   A red glow in the bare deck plate beneath turned yellow, then white. The dot became a line, which grew, wavering in an irregular circle back to its beginning. A thump, as Roic's gloved paw, powered by his suit, punched up through the floor, tearing the weakened circle from its matrix.
   Miles nipped over and stared down, and grinned at Roic's face staring up in worry through the faceplate of another repair suit. The hole was too small for that hulking figure to squeeze through, but not too small for the pressure suit he handed up through it.
   “Good job,” Miles called down. “Hang on. I'll be right with you.”
   “M'lord?”
   Miles tore off the useless biotainer suit and crammed himself into the pressure suit in record time. Inevitably, the plumbing was female, and he left it unattached. One way or another, he didn't think he would be suited up for very long. He was flushed and sweating, one moment too hot, the next too cold, though whether from incipient infection or just plain overdriven nerves he scarcely knew.
   The helmet supplied no place to hang his wrist com, but a bit of medical tape solved that problem in a moment. He lowered the helmet over his head and locked it into place, breathing deeply of air that no one controlled but him. Reluctantly, he set the suit's temperature to chilly.
   Then he slid to the hole and dangled his legs through. “Catch me. Don't squeeze too hard—remember, you're powered.”
   “Right, m'lord.”
   “Lord Auditor Vorkosigan,” came Vorpatril's uneasy voice. “What are you doing?”
   “Reconnoitering.”
   Roic caught his hips, lowering him with exaggerated gentleness to the middle deck. Miles glanced up the corridor, past the larger hole in its floor, to the airseal doors at the far end of this sector. “Solian's security office is in this section. If there's any control board on this bloody ship that can monitor without being monitored in turn, it'll be in there.”
   He tiptoed down the corridor, Roic lumbering in his wake. The deck creaked beneath the armsman's booted feet. Miles tapped out the now-familiar code to the office door; Roic barely squeezed through behind him. Miles slid into the late Lieutenant Solian's station chair and flexed his fingers, contemplating the console. He drew a breath and bent forward.
   Yes, he could siphon off views from the vid monitors of every airlock on the ship—simultaneously, if desired. Yes, he could tap into the safety sensors on the airseal doors. They were designed to take in a good view of anyone near—as in, frantically pounding on—the doors. Nervously, he checked the one for this middle rear section. The vista, if the ba was even looking at it with so much else going on, did not extend as far as Solian's office door. Whew. Could he bring up a view of Nav and Com, perhaps, and spy secretly upon its current occupant?
   Roic said apprehensively, “What are you thinking of doing, m'lord?”
   “I'm thinking that a surprise attack that has to stop to bore through six or seven bulkheads to get to the target isn't going to be surprising enough. Though we may come to that. I'm running out of time.” He blinked, hard, then thought to hell with it and opened his faceplate to rub his eyes. The vid image unblurred in his vision, but still seemed to waver around the edges. Miles didn't think the problem was in the vid plate. His headache, which had started as a stabbing pain between his eyes, seemed to be spreading to his temples, which throbbed. He was shivering. He sighed and closed the faceplate again.
   “That bio-shit—the admiral said you got t' same bio-shit the herm has. The crap that melted Gupta's friends.”
   “When did you talk to Vorpatril?”
   “Just before I talked to you.”
   “Ah.”
   Roic said lowly, “I should've been t' one to run those remote controls. Not you.”
   “It had to be me. I was more familiar with the equipment.”
   “Yes.” Roic's voice went lower. “You should've brought Jankowski, m'lord.”
   “Just a guess—based on long experience, mind you . . .” Miles paused, frowning at the security display. All right, so Solian didn't have a monitor in every cabin, but he had to have private access to Nav and Com if he had anything . . . ”But I suspect there will be enough heroism before this day is done to go around. I don't think we're going to have to ration it, Roic.”
   “ 'S not what I meant,” said Roic, in a dignified tone.
   Miles grinned blackly. “I know. But think of how hard it would have been on Ma Jankowski. And all the not-so-little Jankowskis.”
   A soft snort from the com link taped inside Miles's helmet apprised him that Ekaterin was back, listening in. She would not interrupt, he suspected.
   Vorpatril's voice sounded suddenly, breaking his concentration. The admiral was sputtering. “The spineless scoundrels! The four-armed bastards! My Lord Auditor!” Ah, Miles was promoted again. “The goddamn little mutants are giving this sexless Cetagandan plague-vector a jump pilot!”
   “What?” Miles's stomach knotted. Tighter. “They found a volunteer? Quaddie, or downsider?” There couldn't be that large a pool of possibilities to choose from. The pilots' surgically installed neuro-controllers had to fit the ships they guided through the wormhole jumps. However many jump pilots were currently quartered—or trapped—on Graf Station, chances were that most would be incompatible with the Barrayaran systems. So was it the Idris 's own pilot or relief pilot, or a pilot from one of the Komarran sister ships . . . ?
   “What makes you think he's a volunteer?” snarled Vorpatril. “I can't bloody believe they're just handing . . .”
   “Maybe the quaddies are up to something. What do they say?”
   Vorpatril hesitated, then spat, “Watts cut me out of the loop a few minutes ago. We were having an argument over whose strike team should go in, ours or the quaddie militia's, and when. And under whose orders. Both at once with no coordination struck me as a supremely bad idea.”
   “Indeed. One perceives the potential hazards.” The ba was beginning to seem a trifle outnumbered. But then there were its bio-threats . . . Miles's nascent sympathy died as his vision blurred again. “We are guests in their polity . . . hang on. Something seems to be happening at one of the outer airlocks.”
   Miles enlarged the security vid image from the lock that had suddenly come alive. Docking lights framing the outer door ran through a series of checks and go-aheads. The ba, he reminded himself, was probably looking at this same view. He held his breath. Were the quaddies, under the mask of delivering the demanded jump pilot, about to attempt to insert their own strike force?
   The airlock door slid open, giving a brief glimpse of the inside of a tiny, one-person personnel pod. A naked man, the little silver contact circles of a jump pilot's neural implant gleaming at mid-forehead and temples, stepped through into the lock. The door slid shut again. Tall, dark-haired, handsome but for the thin pink scars running, Miles could now see, all over his body in a winding swathe. Dmitri Corbeau. His face was pale and set.
   “The jump pilot has just arrived,” Miles told Vorpatril.
   “Dammit . Human or quaddie?”
   Vorpatril was really going to have to work on his diplomatic vocabulary. . . . ”Downsider,” Miles answered, in lieu of any more pointed remark. He hesitated, then added, “It's Lieutenant Corbeau.”
   A stunned silence: then Vorpatril hissed, “Son-of-a-bitch . . . !”
   “H'sh. The ba is finally coming on.” Miles adjusted the volume, and opened his faceplate again so that Vorpatril could overhear too. As long as Roic kept his suit sealed, it was . . . no worse than ever. Yeah, and how bad is that, again?
   “Turn toward the security module and open your mouth,” the ba's voice instructed coolly and without preamble over the lock vid monitor. “Closer. Wider.” Miles was treated to a fair view of Corbeau's tonsils. Unless Corbeau harbored a poison-filled tooth, no weapons were concealed therein.
   “Very well . . .” The ba continued with a chill series of directions for Corbeau to go through a humiliating sequence of gyrations which, while not as thorough as a body cavity search, gave at least some assurance that the jump pilot carried nothing there , either. Corbeau obeyed precisely, without hesitation or argument, his expression rigid and blank.
   “Now release the pod from the docking clamps.”
   Corbeau rose from his last squat and stepped through the lock to the personnel hatch entry area. A chink and a clank—the pod, released but unpowered, drifted away from the side of the Idris.
   “Now listen to these instructions. You will walk twenty meters toward the bow, turn left, and wait for the next door to open for you.”
   Corbeau obeyed, still almost expressionless, except for his eyes. His gaze darted about, as if he searched for something, or was trying to memorize his route. He passed out of sight of the lock vids.
   Miles considered the peculiar pattern of old worm scars across Corbeau's body. He must have rolled, or been rolled, across a bad nest. A story seemed written in those fading hieroglyphs. A young colonial boy, perhaps the new boy in camp or town—tricked or dared or maybe just stripped and pushed? To rise again from the ground, crying and frightened, to the jangle of some cruel mockery . . .
   Vorpatril swore, repetitively, under his breath. “Why Corbeau? Why Corbeau ?”
   Miles, who was frantically wondering the same thing, hazarded, “Perhaps he volunteered.”
   “Unless the bloody quaddies bloody sacrificed him. Instead of risking one of their own. Or . . . maybe he's figured out another way to desert.”
   “I . . .” Miles held his words for a long moment of thought, then let them out on a breath, “think that would be doing it the hard way.” It was a sticky suspicion, though. Just whose ally might Corbeau prove?
   Miles caught Corbeau's image again as the ba walked him through the ship toward Nav and Com, briefly opening and closing airseal doors. He passed through the last barrier and out of vid range, straight-backed, silent, bare feet padding quietly on the deck. He looked . . . cold.
   Miles's attention was jerked aside by the flicker of another airlock sensor alarm. Hastily, he called up the image of another lock—just in time to see a quaddie in a green biotainer suit whap the vid monitor mightily with a spanner while beyond, two more green figures sped past. The image shattered and went dark. He could still hear, though—the beep of the lock alarm, the hiss of a lock door opening—but no hiss when it closed. Because it did not close, or because it closed on vacuum? Air, and sound, returned as the lock cycled. The lock, therefore, had opened on vacuum; the quaddies had made their getaway into space around the station.
   That answered his question about their biotainer suits—unlike the Idris 's cheaper issue, they were vacuum-rated. In Quaddiespace, that made all kinds of sense. Half a dozen station locks offered refuge within little more than a few hundred meters; the fleeing quaddies would have their pick, in addition to whatever pods or shuttles hovered nearby able to swoop down on them and take them inboard.
   “Venn and Greenlaw and Leutwyn just escaped out an airlock,” he reported to Vorpatril. “Good timing.” Shrewd timing, to go just when the ba was both distracted by the arrival of its pilot and, with the real possibility of a getaway now in hand, less inclined to carry out the station-ramming threat. It was exactly the right move, to leak hostages from the enemy's grip at every opportunity. Granted, this use of Corbeau's arrival was ruthlessly calculated in the extreme. Miles could not be sorry. “Good. Excellent! Now this ship is entirely cleared of civilians.”
   “Except for you, m'lord,” Roic pointed out, started to say something else, intercepted the dark look Miles cast over his shoulder, and ran down in a mumble.
   “Ha,” muttered Vorpatril. “Maybe this will change Watts's mind.” His voice lowered, as if directed away from his audio pickup, or behind his hand. “What, Lieutenant?” Then murmured, “Excuse me,” Miles was not certain to whom.
   So, only Barrayarans left aboard now. Plus Bel—on the ImpSec payroll, therefore an honorary Barrayaran for all mortal accounting purposes. Miles smiled briefly despite it all as he considered Bel's probable outraged response to such a suggestion. The best time to insert a strike force would be before the ship started to move, rather than to attempt to play catch-up in mid-space. At some point, Vorpatril was probably going to stop waiting for quaddie permission to launch his men. At some point, Miles would agree.
   Miles returned his attention to the problem of spying on Nav and Com. If the ba had knocked out the monitor the way the passing quaddies just had, or even merely thrown a jacket over the vid pickup, Miles would be out of luck . . . ah. Finally. An image of Nav and Com formed over his vid plate. But now he had no sound. Miles gritted his teeth and bent forward.
   The vid pickup was apparently centered over the door, giving a good view over the half dozen empty station chairs and their dark consoles. The ba was there, still dressed in the Betan garb of its discarded alias, jacket and sarong and sandals. Although a pressure suit—one—abstracted from the Idris 's supplies lay nearby, flung over the back of a station chair. Corbeau, still vulnerably naked, was seated in the pilot's chair, but had not yet lowered his headset. The ba held up a hand, said something; Corbeau frowned fiercely, and flinched, as the ba pressed a hypospray briefly against the pilot's upper arm and stepped back with a flash of satisfaction on its strained face.
   Drugs? Surely even the ba was not mad enough to drug a jump pilot upon whose neural function it would shortly be betting its life. Some disease inoculation? The same problem applied, although something latent might do—Cooperate, and later I will let you have the antidote . Or pure bluff, a shot of water, perhaps. The hypospray seemed altogether too crude and obvious as a Cetagandan drug administration method; it hinted at bluff to Miles's mind, though perhaps not to Corbeau's. One had no choice but to turn control over to the pilot when he lowered his headset and plugged the ship into his mind. It made pilots hard to effectively threaten.
   It did rather put paid to Vorpatril's paranoid fear that Corbeau had turned traitor, volunteering for this as a way to get a free ride out of his quaddie detention cell and his dilemmas. Or did it? Regardless of prior or secret agreements, the ba would not simply trust when it could, it would think, guarantee.
   Over his wrist com, muffled as from a distance, Miles heard a sudden, startling bellow from Admiral Vorpatril: “What? That's impossible. Have they gone mad? Not now . . .”
   After a few more moments passed without further enlightenment, he murmured, “Um, Ekaterin? Are you still there?”
   Her breath drew in. “Yes.”
   “What's going on?”
   “Admiral Vorpatril was called away by his communications officer. Some sort of priority message from Sector Five headquarters just arrived. It seems to be something very urgent.”
   On the vid image in front of him, Miles watched as Corbeau began to run through preflight checks, moving from station to station under the hard, watchful eyes of the ba. Corbeau made sure to move with disproportional care; apparently, from the movement of his rather stiff lips, explaining each move before he touched a console. And slowly, Miles noted. Rather more slowly than necessary, if not quite slowly enough to be obvious about it.
   Vorpatril's voice, or rather, Vorpatril's heavy breathing, returned at last. The admiral appeared to have run out of invective. Miles found that considerably more disturbing than his previous naval bellowing.
   “My lord.” Vorpatril hesitated. His voice dropped to a sort of stunned growl. “I have just received Priority One orders from Sector Five HQ to marshal my escort ships, abandon the Komarran fleet, and head for fleet rendezvous off Marilac at maximum possible speed.”
   Not with my wife, you don't , was Miles's first gyrating thought.
   Then he blinked, freezing in his seat.
   The other function of the military escorts Barrayar donated to the Komarran trade fleets was to quietly and unobtrusively maintain an armed force dispersed through the Nexus. A force that could, in the event of a truly dire emergency, be collected rapidly so as to present a convincing military threat at key strategic points. In a crunch it might otherwise be too slow, or even diplomatically or militarily impossible, to get any force from the homeworlds through the wormhole jumps of intervening local space polities to the mustering places where it could do Barrayar some good. But the trade fleets were out there already.
   The planet of Marilac was a Barrayaran ally at the back door of the Cetagandan Empire, from Barrayar's point of view, in the complex web of wormhole jump routes that strung the Nexus together. A second front, as Rho Ceta's immediate neighborly threat to Komarr was considered the first front. Granted, the Cetagandans had the shorter lines of communication and logistics between the two points of contact. But the strategic pincer still beat hell out of the sound of one hand clapping, particularly with the potential addition of Marilacan forces. The Barrayarans would only be marshaling at Marilac in order to offer a threat to Cetaganda.
   Except that, when Miles and Ekaterin had left Barrayar on this belated honeymoon trip, relations between the two empires had been about as—well, cordial was perhaps not quite the right term—about as unstrained as they had been in years. What the hell could have changed that, so profoundly, and so quickly?
   Something has stirred up the Cetagandans around Rho Ceta, Gregor had said.
   A few jumps out from Rho Ceta, Guppy and his smuggler friends had off-loaded a strange live cargo from a Cetagandan government ship, one with lots of fancy markings. A screaming-bird pattern, perhaps? Along with one, and only one person—one survivor? After which the ship had tilted away, on a dangerous in-bound course for the system's suns. What if that trajectory hadn't been a swing around? What if it had been a straight dive, with no return?
   “Sonuvabitch,” breathed Miles.
   “My lord?” said Vorpatril. “If—”
   “Quiet ,” snapped Miles.
   The admiral's silence was shocked, but it held.
   Once a year, the most precious cargoes of the haut race left the Star Crиche on the capital world of Eta Ceta. Eight ships, bound each for one of the planets of the Empire so curiously ruled by the haut. Each carrying that year's cohort of haut embryos, genetically modified and certified results of all the contracts of conception so carefully negotiated, the prior year, between the members of the great constellations, the clans, the carefully cultivated gene-lines of the haut race. Each load of a thousand or so nascent lives conducted by one of the eight most important haut ladies of the Empire, the planetary consorts who were the steering committee of the Star Crиche. All most private, most secret, most never-to-be-discussed with outsiders.
   How was it that a ba agent could not go back for more copies, if it lost such a cargo of future haut lives in transit?
   When it wasn't an agent at all. When it was a renegade .
   “The crime isn't murder,” Miles whispered, his eyes widening. “The crime is kidnapping .”
   The murders had come subsequently, in an increasingly panicked cascade, as the ba, with good reason, attempted to bury its trail. Well, Guppy and his friends had surely been planned to die, as eyewitnesses to the fact that one person had not gone down with the rest on the doomed ship. A ship hijacked, if briefly, before its destruction—all the best hijackings were inside jobs, oh, yes. The Cetagandan government must be going insane over this.
   “My lord, are you all right—?”
   Ekaterin's voice, in a fierce whisper: “No, don't interrupt him. He's thinking. He just makes those funny leaking noises when he's thinking.”
   From the Celestial Garden's point of view, a Star Crиche child-ship had disappeared on what should have been a safe route to Rho Ceta. Every rescue force and intelligence agent the Cetagandan empire owned would have been flung into the case. If it were not for Guppy, the tragedy might have passed as some mysterious malfunction that had sent the ship tumbling, out of control and unable to signal, to its fiery doom. No survivors, no wreckage, no loose ends. But there was Guppy. Leaving a messy trail of wildly suggestive evidence behind him with every flopping footfall.
   How far behind could the Cetagandans be, by now? Too close for the ba's comfort, obviously; it was a wonder, when Guppy had popped up on the hostel railing, that the ba hadn't just died of heart failure without any need for the rivet gun. But the ba's trail, marked by Guppy with blazing flares, led straight through from the scene of the crime to the heart of a sometimes-enemy empire—Barrayar. What were the Cetagandans making of it all?
   Well, we have a clue now, don't we?
   “Right,” breathed Miles, then, more crisply, “Right. You're recording all this, I trust. So my first order in the Emperor's Voice, Admiral, is to countermand your rendezvous orders from Sector Five. That was what you were about to ask for, yes?”
   “Thank you, my Lord Auditor, yes,” said Vorpatril gratefully. “Normally, that would be a call I would rather die than disregard, but . . . given our present situation, they are going to have to wait a little.” Vorpatril wasn't self-dramatizing; this was delivered as a plain statement of fact. “Not too long, I hope.”
   “They are going to have to wait a lot. This is my next order in the Emperor's Voice. Clear copy everything—everything —you have on record here from the past twenty-four hours and squirt it back on an open channel, at the highest priority, to the Imperial Residence, to the Barrayaran high command on Barrayar, to ImpSec HQ, and to ImpSec Galactic Affairs on Komarr. And,” he took a breath, and raised his voice to override Vorpatril's outraged cry of Clear copy! At a time like this? “marked from Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar to the most urgent, personal attention of ghem-General Dag Benin, Chief of Imperial Security, the Celestial Garden, Eta Ceta, personal, urgent, most urgent, by Rian's hair this one's real, Dag. Exactly those words.”
   “What? ” screamed Vorpatril, then hastily lowered his tone to an anguished repeat, “What? A rendezvous at Marilac can only mean imminent war with the Cetagandans! We can't hand them that kind of intelligence on our position and movements—gift-wrapped!”
   “Obtain the complete, unedited Graf Station Security recording of the interrogation of Russo Gupta and send it along too, as soon as you possibly can. Sooner.”
   New terror shook Miles, a vision like a fever dream: the grand faзade of Vorkosigan House, in the Barrayaran capital of Vorbarr Sultana, with plasma fire raining down upon it, its ancient stone melting like butter; two fluid-filled canisters exploding in steam. Or a fog of plague, leaving all the House's protectors dead in heaps in the halls, or fled to die in the streets; two almost ripe replicators running down unattended, stopping, slowly chilling, their tiny occupants dying for lack of oxygen, drowning in their own amniotic fluid. His past and his future, all destroyed together . . . Nikki, too—would he be swept up with the other children in some frantic rescue, or left uncounted, unmissed, fatally alone? Miles had fancied himself growing into a good stepfather to Nikki—that was called into deep question now, eh? Ekaterin, I'm sorry . . .
   It would be hours—days—before the new tight-beam could get back to Barrayar and Cetaganda. Insanely upset people could make fatal mistakes in mere minutes. Seconds . . . ”And if you are a praying man, Vorpatril, pray that no one will do anything stupid before it gets there. And that we will be believed.”
   “Lady Vorkosigan,” Vorpatril whispered urgently. “Could he be hallucinating from the disease?”
   “No, no,” she soothed. “He's just thinking too fast, and leaving out all the intervening steps. He does that. It can be very frustrating. Miles, love, um . . . for the rest of us, would you mind unpacking that a little more?”
   He took a breath—and two or three more—to stop his trembling. “The ba. It's not an agent on a mission. It's a criminal. A renegade. Perhaps insane. I believe it hijacked the annual haut child-ship to Rho Ceta, sent the vessel into the nearest sun with all aboard—probably murdered already—and made off with its cargo. Which trans-shipped through Komarr, and which left the Barrayaran Empire on a trade ship belonging to Empress Laisa personally —and just how incriminating that particular detail is going to look to certain minds inside the Star Crиche, I shrink to imagine. The Cetagandans think we stole their babies, or colluded in the theft, and, dear God, murdered a planetary consort , and so they are about to make war on us bymistake !”
   “Oh,” said Vorpatril blankly.
   “The ba's whole safety lay in perfect secrecy, because once the Cetagandans got on the right trail they would never rest till they tracked this crime down. But the perfect plan cracked when Gupta didn't die on schedule. Gupta's frantic antics drew Solian in, drew you in, drew me in . . .” His voice slowed. “Except, what in the world does the ba want those haut infants for ?”
   Ekaterin offered hesitantly, “Could it be stealing them for someone else?”
   “Yes, but the ba aren't supposed to be subornable.”
   “Well, if not for pay or some bribe, maybe blackmail or threat? Maybe threat to some haut to whom the ba is loyal?”
   “Or maybe some faction in the Star Crиche,” Miles supplied. “Except . . . the ghem-lords do factions. The haut lords do factions. The Star Crиche has always moved as one—even when it was committing arguable treason, a decade ago, the haut ladies took no separate decisions.”
   “The Star Crиche committed treason?” echoed Vorpatril in astonishment. “This certainly didn't get out! Are you sure? I never heard of any mass executions that high in the Empire back then, and I should have.” He paused, and added in a baffled tone, “How could a bunch of haut-lady baby-makers commit treason, anyway?”
   “It didn't quite come off. For various reasons.” Miles cleared his throat.
   “Lord Auditor Vorkosigan. This is your com link, yes? Are you there?” a new voice, and a very welcome one, broke in.
   “Sealer Greenlaw!” Miles cried happily. “Have you made it to safety? All of you?”
   “We are back aboard Graf Station,” replied the Sealer. “It seems premature to call it safety. And you?”
   “Still trapped aboard the Idris . Although not totally without resources. Or ideas.”
   “I urgently need to speak to you. You can override that hothead Vorpatril.”
   “Ah, my com link is sustaining an open audio link with Admiral Vorpatril now, ma'am. You can speak to both of us at once, if you like,” Miles put in hastily, before she could express herself even more freely.
   She hesitated only fractionally. “Good. We absolutely need Vorpatril to hold, repeat, hold any strike force of his. Corbeau confirms the ba does have some sort of a remote control or deadman switch on his person, apparently linked back to the biohazard it has hidden aboard Graf Station. The ba is not bluffing.”
   Miles glanced up in surprise at his silent vid of Nav and Com. Corbeau was seated now in the pilot's station chair, the control headset lowered over his skull, his expressionless face even more absent. “Corbeau confirms! How? He was stark naked—the ba is watching him every second! Subcutaneous com link?”
   “There was no time to find and insert one. He undertook to blink the ship's running lights in a prearranged code.”
   “Whose idea was that?”
   “His.”
   Quick colonial boy. The pilot was on their side. Oh, but that was good to know. . . . Miles's shivering was turning to shudders.
   “Every adult quaddie on Graf Station not on emergency duty is out looking for the bio-bomb now,” Greenlaw continued, “but we have no idea what it looks like, or how big it is, or if it is disguised as something else. Or if there is more than one. We are trying to evacuate as many children as possible into what ships and shuttles we have on hand, and seal them off, but we can't even be sure of them , really. If you people do anything to set this mad creature off—if you launch an unauthorized strike force before this vicious threat is found and safely neutralized—I swear I will give our militia the order to shoot them out of space myself. Do you copy, Admiral? Confirm.”
   “I hear you,” said Vorpatril reluctantly. “But ma'am—the Imperial Auditor himself has been infected with one of the ba's lethal bio-agents. I cannot—I will not—if I have to sit here and do nothing while listening to him die—”
   “There are fifty thousand innocent lives on Graf Station, Admiral—Lord Auditor!” Her voice failed for a second; returned stiffly. “I am sorry, Lord Vorkosigan.”
   “I'm not dead yet,” Miles replied rather primly. A new and most unwelcome sensation struggled with the tight fear grinding in his belly. He added, “I'm going to switch off my com link for just a moment. I'll be right back.”
   Motioning Roic to keep still, Miles opened the door to the security office, stepped into the corridor, opened his faceplate, leaned over, and vomited onto the floor. No help for it. With an angry swipe, he turned his suit temperature back up. He blinked back the green dizziness, wiped his mouth, went back inside, seated himself again, and called his link back on. “Continue.”
   He let Vorpatril's and Greenlaw's arguing voices fade from his attention, and studied his view of Nav and Com more closely. One object had to be there, somewhere . . . ah. There it was, a small, valise-sized cryo-freezer case, set carefully down next to one of the empty station chairs near the door. A standard commercial model, no doubt bought off the shelf from some medical supplier here on Graf Station sometime in the past few days. All of this , this entire diplomatic mess, this extravagant trail of deaths winding across half the Nexus, two empires teetering on the verge of war, came down to that . Miles was reminded of the old Barrayaran folktale, about the evil mutant magician who kept his heart in a box to hide it from his enemies.
   Yes . . .
   “Greenlaw,” Miles broke in. “Do you have any way to signal back to Corbeau?”
   “We designated one of the navigation buoys that broadcasts to the channels of the pilots on cyber-neuro control. We can't get voice communication through it—Corbeau wasn't sure how it would emerge, in his perceptions. We are certain we can get some kind of simple code blink or beep through it.”
   “I have a simple message for him. Urgent. Get it through if you possibly can, however you can. Tell him to open all the inner airseal doors in the middle deck of the central nacelle. Kill the security vids there, too, if he can.”
   “Why?” she asked suspiciously.
   “We have personnel trapped there who are going to die shortly if he doesn't,” Miles replied glibly. Well, it was true.
   “Right,” she rapped back. “I'll see what we can do.”
   He cut his outgoing voice link, turned in his station chair, and made a throat-cutting motion for Roic to do the same. He leaned forward. “Can you hear me?”
   “Yes, m'lord.” Roic's voice was muffled, through the work suit's thicker faceplate, but sufficiently audible; they neither of them had to shout, in this quiet, little space.
   “Greenlaw will never order or permit a strike force to be launched to try to capture the ba. Not hers, not ours. She can't. There are too many quaddie lives up for grabs. Trouble is, I don't think this placating approach will make her station any safer. If this ba really murdered a planetary consort, it'll not even blink at a few thousand quaddies. It'll promise cooperation right up to the last, then hit the release switch on its bio-bomb and jump, just for the off chance that the chaos in its wake will delay or disrupt pursuit an extra day or three. Are you with me so far?”
   “Yes, m'lord.” Roic's eyes were wide.
   “If we can get as close as the door to Nav and Com unseen, I think we have a chance of jumping the ba ourselves. Specifically, you will jump the ba; I will supply a distraction. You'll be all right. Stunner and nerve disruptor fire will pretty much bounce off that work suit. Needler spines wouldn't penetrate immediately either, if it comes to that. And it would take longer than the seconds you'll need to cross that little room for plasma arc fire to burn through it.”
   Roic's lips twisted. “What if he just fires at you? That pressure suit's notthat good.”
   “The ba won't fire at me. That, I promise you. The Cetagandan haut, and their siblings the ba, are physically stronger than anyone but the dedicated heavy-worlders, but they're not stronger than a power suit. Go for his hands. Hold them. If we get that far, well, the rest will follow.”
   “And Corbeau? The poor bastard's starkers. Nothing's gonna stop anything fired at him.”
   “Corbeau,” said Miles, “will be the ba's last choice of targets. Ah!” His eyes widened, and he whirled about in his station chair. At the edge of the vid image, half a dozen tiny images in the array were quietly going dark. “Get to the corridor. Get ready to run. As silently as you can.”
   From his com link, Vorpatril's volume-reduced voice pleaded heartrendingly for the Imperial Auditor to please reopen his outgoing voice contact. He urged Lady Vorkosigan to request the same.
   “Leave him alone,” Ekaterin said firmly. “He knows what he's doing.”
   “What is he doing?” Vorpatril wailed.
   “Something.” Her voice fell to a whisper. Or perhaps it was a prayer. “Good luck, love.”
   Another voice, somewhat offsides, broke in: Captain Clogston. “Admiral? Can you reach Lord Auditor Vorkosigan? We've finished preparing his blood filter and are ready to try it, but he's disappeared out of the infirmary. He was right here a few minutes ago . . .”
   “Do you hear that, Lord Vorkosigan?” Vorpatril tried somewhat desperately. “You are to report to the infirmary. Now.”
   In ten minutes—five—the medics could have their way with him. Miles pushed up from his station chair—he had to use both hands—and followed Roic into the corridor outside Solian's office.
   Up ahead in the dimness, the first airseal door across the corridor hissed quietly aside, revealing the cross-corridor to the other nacelles beyond. On the far side, the next door began to slide.
   Roic started trotting. His steps were unavoidably heavy. Miles half-jogged behind. He tried to think how recently he had used his seizure-stimulator, how much at risk he was right now for falling down in a fit from a combination of bad brain chemistry and terror. Middling risky, he decided. No automatic weapons for him this trip anyway. No weapons at all, but for his wits. They seemed a meager arsenal, just at the moment.
   The second pair of doors opened for them. Then the third. Miles prayed they were not walking into another clever trap. But he didn't think the ba would have any way of tapping, or even guessing, this oblique line of communication. Roic paused briefly, stepping behind the last door edge, and peered ahead. The door to Nav and Com was shut. He gave a short nod and continued forward, Miles in his shadow. As they drew closer, Miles could see that the control panel to the left of the door had been burned out by some cutting tool, cousin, no doubt, to the one Roic had used. The ba had gone shopping in Engineering, too. Miles pointed at it; Roic's face lightened, and a corner of his mouth turned up. Someone hadn't forgotten to lock the door behind them when they'd last left after all, it appeared.
   Roic pointed to himself, to the door; Miles shook his head and motioned him to bend closer. They touched helmets.
   “Me first. Gotta grab that case before the ba can react. 'Sides, I need you to pull back the door.”
   Roic looked around, inhaled, and nodded.
   Miles motioned him back down to touch helmets one more time. “And, Roic? I'm glad I didn't bring Jankowski.”
   Roic smiled. Miles stepped aside.
   Now. Delay was no one's friend.
   Roic bent, splayed his gloved hands across the door, pressed, and pulled. The servos in his suit whined at the load. The door creaked unwillingly aside.
   Miles slipped through. He didn't look back, or up. His world had narrowed to one goal, one object. The freezer case—there, still on the floor beside the absent communication officer's station chair. He pounced, grabbed, lifted it up, clutched it to his chest like a shield, like the hope of his heart.
   The ba was turning, yelling, lips drawn back, eyes wide, its hand snaking for a pocket. Miles's gloved fingers felt for the catches. If locked, toss the case toward the ba. If unlocked . . .
   The case snapped open. Miles yanked it wide, shook it hard, swung it.
   A silver cascade, the better part of a thousand tiny tissue-sampling cryo-storage needles, arced out of the case and bounced randomly across the deck. Some shattered as they struck, making tiny crystalline singing noises like dying insects. Some spun. Some skittered, disappearing behind station chairs and into crevices. Miles grinned fiercely.
   The yell became a scream; the ba's hands shot out toward Miles as if in supplication, in denial, in despair. The Cetagandan began to stumble toward him, gray face working in shock and disbelief.
   Roic's power-suited hands locked down over the ba's wrists and hoisted. Wrist bones crackled and popped; blood spurted between the tightening gloved fingers. The ba's body convulsed as it was lifted up. Wild eyes rolled back. The scream transmuted into a weird wail, trailing away. Sandal-clad feet kicked and drummed uselessly at the heavy shin plating of Roic's work suit; toenails split and bled, without effect. Roic stood stolidly, hands up and apart, racking the ba helplessly in the air.
   Miles let the freezer case fall from his fingers. It hit the deck with a thump. With a whispered word, he called back the outgoing audio in his com link. “We've taken the ba prisoner. Send relief troops. In biotainer suits. They won't need their guns now. I'm afraid the ship's an unholy mess.”
   His knees were buckling. He sank to the deck himself, giggling uncontrollably. Corbeau was rising from his pilot's chair; Miles motioned him away with an urgent gesture. “Stay back, Dmitri! I'm about to . . .”
   He wrenched his faceplate open in time. Barely. The vomiting and spasms that wrung his stomach this time were much worse. It's over. Can I please die now?
   Except that it wasn't over, not nearly. Greenlaw had played for fifty thousand lives. Now it was Miles's turn to play for fifty million.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

   Miles arrived back in the Idris 's infirmary feet first. He was carried by two of the men from Vorpatril's strike force, which had been hastily converted to, mostly, a medical relief team, and as such cleared by the quaddies. His porters almost fell down the unsightly hole Roic had left in the floor. Miles seized back personal control of his locomotion long enough to stand up, under his own power, and lean rather unsteadily against the wall by the door to the bio-isolation ward. Roic followed, carefully holding the ba's remote trigger in a biotainer bag. Corbeau, stiff-faced and pale, brought up the rear dressed in a loose medical tunic and drawstring pants, and shepherded by a medtech with the ba's hypospray in another biotainer sack.
   Captain Clogston came out through the buzzing blue barriers and looked over his new influx of patients and assistants. “Right,” he announced, glowering at the gap in the deck. “This ship is so damned befouled, I'm declaring the whole thing a Level Three Biocontamination Zone. So we may as well spread out and get comfortable, boys.”
   The techs made a human chain to pass the analyzing equipment quickly to the outer chamber. Miles snared the chance for a few brief, urgent words with the two men with medical markings on their suits who stood apart from the rest—the Prince Xav 's military interrogation officers. Not really in disguise, merely discreet—and, Miles had to allow, they were medically trained.
   The second ward was declared a temporary holding cell for their prisoner, the ba, who followed in the procession, bound to a float pallet. Miles scowled as the pallet drifted past, towed on its control lead by a watchful, muscular sergeant. The ba was strapped down tightly, but its head and eyes rolled oddly, and its saliva-flecked lips writhed.
   Above almost anything else, it was essential to keep the ba in Barrayaran hands. Finding where the ba had hidden its filthy bio-bomb on Graf Station was the first priority. The haut race had some genetically engineered immunity to the most common interrogation drugs and their derivatives; if fast-penta didn't work on this one, it would give the quaddies very little in the way of interrogation procedures to fall back upon that would pass Adjudicator Leutwyn's approval. In this emergency, military rules seemed more appropriate than civilian ones. In other words, if they'll just leave us alone we'll pull out the ba's fingernails for them.
   Miles caught Clogston by the elbow. “How is Bel Thorne doing?” he demanded.
   The fleet surgeon shook his head. “Not well, my Lord Auditor. We thought at first the herm was improving, as the filters cut in—it seemed to return to consciousness. But then it became restless. Moaning and trying to talk. Out of its head, I think. It keeps crying for Admiral Vorpatril.”
   Vorpatril? Why? Wait– “Did Bel say Vorpatril?” Miles asked sharply. “Or just, the Admiral ?”
   Clogston shrugged. “Vorpatril's the only admiral around right now, although I suppose the portmaster could be hallucinating altogether. I hate to sedate anyone so physiologically distressed, especially when they've just fought their way out of a drug fog. But if that herm doesn't calm down, we'll have to.”
   Miles frowned and hurried into the isolation ward. Clogston followed. Miles pulled off his helmet, fished his wrist com back out of it, and clutched the vital link safely in his hand. A tech was making up the hastily cleared second bunk, readying it for the infected Lord Auditor, presumably.
   Bel now lay on the first bunk, dried off and dressed in a pale green Barrayaran military-issue patient tunic, which seemed at first heartening progress. But the herm was gray-faced, lips purple-blue, eyelids fluttering. An IV pump, not dependent upon potentially erratic ship's gravity, infused yellow fluid rapidly into Bel's right arm. The left arm was strapped to a board; plastic tubing filled with blood ran from under a bandage and into a hybrid appliance bound around with quantities of plastic tape. A second tube ran back again, its dark surface moist with condensation.
   “ 'S balla,” Bel moaned. “ 'S balla.”
   The fleet surgeon's lips pursed in medical displeasure behind his faceplate. He edged forward to glance at a monitor. “Blood pressure's way up, too. I think it's time to knock the poor bugger back out.”
   “Wait.” Miles elbowed to the edge of Bel's bunk to put himself in Bel's line of sight, staring down at the herm in wild hope. Bel's head jerked. The eyelids flickered up; the eyes widened. The blue lips tried to move again. Bel licked them, took a long inhalation, and tried once more. “Adm'ral! Portent. 'S basti'd hid it in the balla. Tol' me. Sadist'c basti'd.”
   “Still going on about Admiral Vorpatril,” Clogston muttered in dismay.
   “Not Admiral Vorpatril. Me,” breathed Miles. Did that witty mind still exist, in the bunker of its brain? Bel's eyes were open, shifting to try to focus on him, as if Miles's image wavered and blurred in the herm's sight.
   Bel knew a portent. No. Bel was trying to say something important. Bel wrestled death for the possession of its own mouth to try to get the message out. Balla? Ballistic? Balalaika? No—ballet!
   Miles said urgently, “The ba hid its bio-bomb at the ballet—in the Minchenko Auditorium? Is that what you're trying to say, Bel?”
   The straining body sagged in relief. “Yeh. Yeh. Get 's word out. In the lights, I thin'.”
   “Was there only one bomb? Or were there more? Did the ba say, could you tell?”
   “Don' know. 'S homemade, I thin'. Check. Purch'ses . . .”
   “Right, got it! Good work, Captain Thorne.” You always were the best, Bel . Miles turned half away and spoke forcefully into his wrist com, demanding to be patched through to Greenlaw, or Venn, or Watts, or somebody in authority on Graf Station.
   A ragged female voice finally replied, “Yes?”
   “Sealer Greenlaw? Are you there?”
   Her voice steadied. “Yes, Lord Vorkosigan? Do you have something?”
   “Maybe. Bel Thorne reports the ba said that it hid the bio-bomb somewhere in the Minchenko Auditorium. Possibly behind some lights.”
   Her breath drew in. “Good. We'll concentrate our trained searchers in there.”
   “Bel also thinks the bomb was something the ba rigged itself, recently. It may have made purchases on Graf Station in the persona of Ker Dubauer that could give you a clue as to how many it could have devised.”
   “Ah! Right! I'll get Venn's people on it.”
   “Note, Bel's in pretty bad shape. Also, the ba could have been lying. Get back to me when you know something.”
   “Yes. Yes. Thank you.” Hastily, she cut her com. It occurred to Miles to wonder if she was locked down in protective bio-isolation right now too, as he was about to be, trying to shape the critical moment at a similar frustrating remove.
   “Basti'd,” Bel muttered. “Paralyzed me. Put me in s' damn bod pod. Tol' me. Then zipped it up. Left me to die, 'magining . . . Knew . . . it knew about Nicol 'n me. Saw my vid cube. Where's m' vid cube?”
   “Nicol is safe,” Miles assured Bel. Well, as much as any quaddie on Graf Station at the moment—if not safe, at least warned . Vid cube? Oh, the little imager full of Bel's hypothetical children. “Your vid cube is put away safely.” Miles had no idea if this last was true or not—the cube might be still in Bel's pocket, destroyed with the herm's contaminated clothes, or stolen by the ba. But the assertion gave Bel ease. The exhausted herm's eyes closed again, and its breathing steadied.
   In a few hours, I'm going to look like that.
   Then you'd better not waste any time now, eh?
   With a vast distaste, Miles suffered a hovering tech to help him off with his pressure suit and underwear—to be taken away and incinerated, Miles supposed. “If you're tying me down here, I want a comconsole set up by my bunk immediately. No, you can't have that.” Miles fended off the tech, who was now trying to pry loose his com link, then paused to swallow. “And something for nausea. All right, put it around my right arm, then.”
   Horizontal was scarcely better than vertical. Miles smoothed down his own pale green tunic and gave up his left arm to the surgeon, who personally attended to piercing his vein with some medical awl that felt the size of a drinking straw. On the other side a tech pressed a hypospray against his right shoulder—a potion that would kill the dizziness and the cramping in his stomach, he hoped. But he didn't yelp until the first spurt of filtered blood returned to his body. “Crap , that's cold. I hate cold.”
   “Can't be helped, my Lord Auditor,” Clogston murmured soothingly. “We have to lower your body temperature at least three degrees. It will buy time.”
   Miles hunched, uncomfortably reminded that they didn't have a fix for this yet. He stifled a gush of terror, escaping under pressure from the place he'd kept it locked for the past hours. Not for one second would he allow himself to believe that there was no cure to be had, that this bio-shit would drag him under and this time he wouldn't come back up . . . ”Where's Roic?” He raised his right wrist to his lips. “Roic?”
   “I'm in the outer chamber, m'lord. I'm afraid to carry this triggering device through the bio-barrier till we're sure it's disarmed.”
   “Right, good thinking. One of those fellows out there should be the bomb disposal tech I requested. Find him and give it to him. Then ride herd on the interrogation for me, will you?”
   “Yes, m'lord.”
   “Captain Clogston.”
   The doctor glanced down from where he fiddled with the jury-rigged blood filter. “My lord?”
   “The moment you have a medtech—no, a doctor. The moment you have some qualified men free, send them to the cargo hold where the ba has the replicators. I want them to run samples, try to see if the ba has contaminated or poisoned them in any way. Then make sure the equipment's all running all right. It's very important that the haut infants all be kept alive and well.”
   “Yes, Lord Vorkosigan.”
   If the haut babies were inoculated with the same vile parasites presently rioting through his own body, might the replicators' temperature be turned down to chill them all, and slow the disease process? Or would such cold stress the infants, damage them . . . he was borrowing trouble, reasoning in advance of his data. A trained agent, conditioned to the correct disconnect between action and imagination, might have performed such an inoculation, cleaning up every bit of incriminating high-haut DNA before abandoning the scene. But this ba was an amateur. This ba had another sort of conditioning altogether. Yes, but that conditioning must have gone very wrong somehow, or this ba wouldn't have got this far . . .
   Miles added as Clogston turned away, “And give me word on the condition of the pilot, Corbeau, as soon as you have it.” The retreating suited figure raised a hand in acknowledgment.
   In a few minutes, Roic entered the ward; he had doffed the bulky powered work suit, and now wore more comfortable military-issue Level Three biotainer garb.
   “How's it going over there?”
   Roic ducked his head. “Not well, m'lord. T' ba has gone into some sort of strange mental state. Raving, but nothing to the point, and the intelligence fellows say its physiological state is all out of kilter as well. They're trying to stabilize it.”
   “The ba must be kept alive!” Miles struggled half-up, a vision of having himself carried into the next chamber to take charge running through his head. “We have to get it back to Cetaganda. To prove Barrayar is innocent.”
   He sank back and eyed the humming device filtering his blood hung by his left side. Pulling out parasites, yes, but also draining the energy the parasites had stolen from him to create themselves. Siphoning off the mental edge he desperately needed right now.
   He remarshaled his scattering thoughts, and explained to Roic the news Bel had imparted. “Return to the interrogation room and give them the word on this development. See if they can get any cross-confirmation on the hiding place in the Minchenko Auditorium, and especially see if they can get anything that would suggest if there is more than one device. Or not.”
   “Right.” Roic nodded. He glanced over Miles's growing array of medical attachments. “By the way, m'lord. Had you happened to mention your seizure disorder to the surgeon yet?”
   “Not yet. There hasn't been time.”
   “Right.” Roic's lips screwed up thoughtfully, in an editorial fashion that Miles chose to ignore. “I'll see to it then, shall I, m'lord?”
   Miles hunched. “Yeah, yeah.”
   Roic trod out of the ward on both his errands.
   The remote comconsole arrived; a tech swung a tray across Miles's lap, laid the vid plate frame upon it, and helped him sit mostly up, with extra pillows at his back. He was starting to shiver again. All right, good, the device was Barrayaran military issue, not just scavenged from the Idris . He had a securable visual link again now. He entered codes.
   Vorpatril's face was a moment or two coming up; riding herd on all this from the Prince Xav 's tactics room, the admiral no doubt had a few other demands on his attention at the moment. He appeared at last with a, “Yes , my lord!” His eyes searched the image of Miles on his vid display. He apparently was not reassured by the view. His jaw tightened in dismay. “Are you all—” he began, but edited this fatuity on the fly to, “How bad is it?”
   “I can still talk. And while I can still talk, I need to record some orders. While we're waiting on the quaddies' search for the bio-bomb—are you following the latest on that?” Miles brought the admiral up to the moment on Bel's intelligence about the Minchenko Auditorium, and went on. “Meanwhile, I want you to select and prepare the fastest ship in your escort that has a sufficient capacity for the load it's going to be carrying. Which will be me, Portmaster Thorne, a medical team, our prisoner the ba and guards, Guppy the Jacksonian smuggler if I can pry him out of quaddie hands, and a thousand working uterine replicators. With qualified medical attendants.”
   “And me,” put in Ekaterin's voice firmly from offsides. Her face leaned briefly into range of Vorpatril's vid pickup, and she frowned at him. She'd seen her husband looking like death on a plate more than once before, though; perhaps she wouldn't be as disturbed as the admiral clearly was. Having an Imperial Auditor get melted to steaming slime on his watch would be a notable black mark, not that Vorpatril's career wasn't in a shambles over this episode already.
   “My courier ship will travel in convoy, carrying Lady Vorkosigan.” He cut across Ekaterin's beginning objection: “I may well need one spokesperson along who isn't in medical quarantine.”
   She settled back with a dubious “Hm.”
   “But I want to make damned sure we're not impeded by any hassles along the way, Admiral, so have your fleet department start working immediately on our passage clearances in all the local space polities we're going to have to cross. Speed. Speed is of the essence. I want to get away the moment we're sure the ba's devil-device has been cleared from Graf Station. At least with us carrying all these biohazards, no one is going to want to stop and board us for inspections.”
   “To Komarr, my lord? Or Sergyar?”
   “No. Calculate the shortest possible jump route directly to Rho Ceta.”
   Vorpatril's head jerked back in startlement. “If the orders I received from Sector Five HQ mean what we think, you'll hardly get passage there . Reception by plasma fire and fusion shells the moment you pop out of the wormhole, would be what I'd expect.”
   “Unpack , Miles,” Ekaterin's voice drifted in.
   He grinned briefly at the familiar exasperation in her voice. “By the time we arrive there, I will have arranged our clearances with the Cetagandan Empire.” I hope . Or else they were all going to be in more trouble than Miles ever wanted to imagine. “Barrayar is bringing their kidnapped haut babies back to them. On the end of a long stick. I get to be the stick.”
   “Ah,” said Vorpatril, his gray brows rising in speculation.
   “Give a head's-up to my ImpSec courier pilot. I plan to start the moment we have everyone and everything transferred aboard. You can start on the everything part now.”
   “Understood, my lord.” Vorpatril rose and vanished out of vid range. Ekaterin moved back in, and smiled at him.
   “Well, we're making some progress at last,” Miles said to her, with what he hoped seemed good cheer, and not suppressed hysteria.
   Her smile twisted up on one side. Her eyes were warm, though. “Some progress? What do you call an avalanche, I wonder?”
   “No arctic metaphors, please. I'm cold enough. If the medicos get this . . . infestation under control en route, perhaps they'll clear me for visitors. We'll want the courier ship later, anyway.”
   A medtech appeared, drew a blood sample from the outbound tube, added an IV pump to the array, raised the bed rails, then bent and began tying down the left arm board.
   “Hey,” objected Miles. “How am I supposed to unravel all this mess with one hand tied behind my back?”
   “Captain Clogston's orders, m'lord Auditor.” Firmly, the tech finished securing his arm. “Standard procedure for seizure risk.”
   Miles gritted his teeth.
   “Your seizure-stimulator is with the rest of your things aboard the Kestrel ,” Ekaterin observed dispassionately. “I'll find it and send it across as soon as I transfer back aboard.”
   Prudently, Miles limited his response to, “Thank you. Check back with me before you dispatch it—there may be a few other things I'll need. Let me know when you're safely aboard.”
   “Yes, love.” She touched her fingers to her lips and held them up, passing them through his image before her. He returned the gesture. His heart chilled a little as her image winked out. How long before they dared touch flesh to warm flesh again? What if it's never . . . ? Damn, but I'm cold.
   The tech departed. Miles hunched down in his bed. He supposed it would be futile to ask for blankets. He imagined little tiny bio-bombs set to go off all through his body, sparking like a Midsummer fireworks display seen at a distance out over the river in Vorbarr Sultana, cascading to a grand, lethal finale. He imagined his flesh decomposing into corrosive ooze while he yet lived in it. He needed to think about something else.
   Two empires, both alike in indignation, maneuvering for position, massing deadly force behind a dozen wormhole jumps, each jump a point of contact, conflict, catastrophe . . . that was no better.
   A thousand almost-ripe haut fetuses, turning in their little chambers, unaware of the distance and dangers they had passed through, and the hazards still to come—how soon would they have to be decanted? The picture of a thousand squalling infants dropped upon a few harried Barrayaran military medicos was almost enough to make him smile, if only he wasn't so primed to start screaming.
   Bel's breath, in the next bunk, was thick and labored.
   Speed. For every reason, speed. Had he set in motion everyone and everything that he could? He ran down checklists in his aching head, lost his place, tried again. How long had it been since he'd slept? The minutes crawled by with tortuous slowness. He imagined them as snails, hundreds of little snails with Cetagandan clan markings coloring their shells, going past in procession, leaving slime-trails of lethal biocontamination . . . a crawling infant, little Helen Natalia, cooing and reaching for one of the pretty, poisonous creatures, and he was all tied up and pierced with tubes and couldn't get across the room fast enough to stop her . . .
   A bleep from his lap link, thank God, snapped him awake before he could find out where that nightmare was going. He was still pierced with tubes, though. What time was it? He was losing track altogether. His usual mantra—I can sleep when I'm dead —seemed a little too apropos.
   An image formed over the vid plate. “Sealer Greenlaw!” Good news, bad news? Good . Her lined face was radiant with relief.
   “We found it,” she said. “It's been contained.”
   Miles blew out his breath in a long exhalation. “Yes. Excellent. Where?”
   “In Minchenko Auditorium, just as the portmaster said. Attached to the wall in a stage light cell. It did seem to have been put together hastily, but it was deadly clever for all of that. Simple and clever. It was scarcely more than a little sealed plastic balloon, filled with some sort of nutrient solution, my people tell me. And a tiny charge, and the electronic trigger for it. The ba had stuck it to the wall with ordinary packing tape, and sprayed it with a little flat black paint. No one would notice it in the ordinary course of events, not even if they had been working on the lights, unless they put a hand right on it.”
   “Homemade, then. On the spot?”
   “It would seem so. The electronics, which were off-the-shelf items—and the tape, for that matter—are all quaddie-make. They match with the purchases recorded to Dubauer's credit chit the evening after the attack in the hostel lobby. All the parts are accounted for. There seems to have been only the one device.” She ran her upper hands through her silver hair, massaging her scalp wearily, and squeezed shut eyes bounded beneath by little dark half-moons of shadow.
   “That . . . fits with the timetable as I see it,” said Miles. “Right up until Guppy popped up with his rivet gun, the ba evidently thought it had gotten away clean with its stolen cargo. And with Solian's death. Everything calm and perfect. Its plan was to pass through Quaddiespace quietly, without leaving a trace. It would not have had any reason before then to rig such a device. But from that botched murder attempt on, it was running scared, having to improvise rapidly. Curious bit of foresight, though. It can't have planned to be trapped on the Idris the way it was, surely.”
   She shook her head. “It planned something. The explosive charge had two leads to its trigger. One was a receiver for the signal device the ba had in its pocket. The other was a simple sound sensor. Set to a fairly high decibel level. That of an auditorium full of applause, for example.”
   Miles's teeth snapped shut. Oh, yes. “Thus masking the pop of the charge, and blowing out contaminant to the maximum number of people at once.” The vision was instant, and horrifying.
   “So we think. People come in from other stations all over Quaddiespace to see performances of the Minchenko Ballet. The contagion could have spread back out with them through half the system before it became apparent.”
   “Is it the same—no, it can't be what the ba gave to me and Bel. Can it? Was it lethal, or merely something debilitating, or what?”
   “The sample is in the hands of our medical people now. We should know soon.”
   “So the ba set up its bio-bomb . . . after it knew real Cetagandan agents would be following, after it knew it would be compelled to abandon the utterly incriminating replicators and their contents . . . I'll bet it put the bomb together and slapped it out there in a hurry.” Maybe it was revenge. Revenge upon the quaddies for all the forced delays that had so wrecked the ba's perfect plan . . . ? By Bel's report, the ba was not above such motivations; the Cetagandan had displayed a cruel humor, and a taste for bifurcating strategies. If the ba hadn't run into the troubles on the Idris , would it have retrieved the device, or would it simply have quietly left the bomb behind to go off on its own? Well, if Miles's own men couldn't get the whole story out of their prisoner, he damned well knew some people who could.
   “Good,” he breathed. “We can go now.”
   Greenlaw's weary eyes opened. “What?”
   “I mean—with your permission, Madame Sealer.” He adjusted his vid pickup to a wider angle, to take in his sinister medical setting. Too late to adjust the color balance toward a more sickly green. Also, possibly, redundant. Greenlaw's mouth turned down in dismay, looking at him.
   “Admiral Vorpatril has received an extremely alarming military communiquй from home . . .” Swiftly, Miles explained his deduction about the connection of suddenly increased tensions between Barrayar and its dangerous Cetagandan neighbor to the recent events on Graf Station. He talked carefully around the tactical use of trade fleet escorts as rapid-deployment forces, although he doubted the sealer missed the implications.
   “My plan is to get myself, the ba, the replicators, and as much evidence as I can amass of the ba's crimes back to Rho Ceta, to present to the Cetagandan government, to clear Barrayar of whatever accusation of collusion is driving this crisis. As fast as possible. Before some hothead—on either side—does something that, to put it bluntly, makes Admiral Vorpatril's late actions on Graf Station look like a model of restraint and wisdom.”
   That won a snort from her; he forged on. “While the ba and Russo Gupta both committed crimes on Graf, they committed crimes in the Cetagandan and Barrayaran empires first. I submit we have clear prior claim. And worse—their mere continued presence on Graf Station is dangerous, because, I promise you, sooner or later their furious Cetagandan victims will be following them up. I think you've had enough of a taste of their medicine to make the prospect of a swarm of real Cetagandan agents descending upon you unwelcome indeed. Cede us both criminals, and any retribution will chase after us instead.”
   “Hm,” she said. “And your impounded trade fleet? Your fines?”
   “Let . . . on my authority, I am willing to transfer of ownership of the Idris to Graf Station, in lieu of all fines and expenses.” He added prudently, “As is.”
   Her eyes sprang wide. She said indignantly, “The ship's contaminated .”
   “Yes. So we can't take it anywhere anyway. Cleaning it up could be a nice little training exercise for your biocontrol people.” He decided not to mention the holes. “Even with that expense, you'll come out ahead. I'm afraid the passengers' insurance will have to eat the value of any of their cargo that can't be cleared. But I'm really hopeful that most of it will not need to be quarantined. And you can let the rest of the fleet go.”
   “And your men in our detention cells?”
   “You let one of them out. Are you sorry? Can you not allow Lieutenant Corbeau's courage to redeem his comrades? That has to be one of the bravest acts I've ever witnessed, him walking naked and knowing into horror to save Graf Station.”
   “That . . . yes. That was remarkable,” she conceded. “By any people's standards.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “You went in after the ba too.”
   “Mine doesn't count,” Miles said automatically. “I was already . . .” he cut the word, dead. He was not, dammit, dead yet. “I was already infected.”
   Her brows rose in bemused curiosity. “And if you hadn't been, what would you have done?”
   “Well . . . it was the tactical moment. I have a kind of gift for timing, you see.”
   “And for doubletalk.”
   “That, too. But the ba was just my job.”
   “Has anyone ever told you that you are quite mad?”
   “Now and then,” he admitted. Despite everything, a slow smile turned his lips. “Not so much since I was appointed an Imperial Auditor, though. Useful, that.”
   She snorted, very softly. Softening? Miles trotted out the next barrage. “My plea is humanitarian, too. It is my belief—my hope—that the Cetagandan haut ladies will have some treatment up their capacious sleeves for their own product. I propose to take Portmaster Thorne with us—at our expense—to share the cure that I now so desperately seek for myself. It's only justice. The herm was, in a sense, in my service when it took this harm. In my work gang, if you like.”
   “Huh. You Barrayarans do look after your own, at least. One of your few saving graces.”
   Miles opened his hands in an equally ambiguous acknowledgment of this mixed compliment. “Thorne and I both now labor under a deadline that waits on no committee debate, I'm afraid, and no one's permission. The present palliative,” he gestured awkwardly at the blood filter, “buys a little time. As of this moment, no one knows if it will buy enough.”
   She rubbed her brow, as if it ached. “Yes, certainly . . . certainly you must . . . oh, hell.” She took a breath. “All right. Take your prisoners and your evidence and the whole damned lot—and Thorne—and go.”
   “And Vorpatril's men in detention?”
   “Them, too. Take them all away. Your ships can all go, bar the Idris .” Her nose wrinkled in distaste. “But we will discuss the residue of your fines and expenses further, after the ship is evaluated by our inspectors. Later. Your government can send someone for the task. Not you, by preference.”
   “Thank you, Madame Sealer,” Miles sang in relief. He cut the com, and collapsed back on his pillows. The ward seemed to be spinning around his head, very slowly, in short jerks. It wasn't, he decided after a moment, a problem with the room.
   * * *
   Captain Clogston, who had been waiting by the door for the Auditor to complete this high-level negotiation, advanced to glower at his cobbled-together blood filter some more. He then transferred his glower to Miles. “Seizure disorder, eh? I'm glad someone told me.”
   “Yes, well, we wouldn't want you to mistake it for an exotic new Cetagandan symptom. It's pretty routine. If it happens, don't panic. I come up on my own in about five minutes. Usually gives me a sort of hangover, afterwards, not that I'd be able to tell the difference at the moment. Never mind. What can you tell me about Lieutenant Corbeau?”
   “We checked the ba's hypospray. It was filled with water.”
   “Ah! Good! I thought so.” Miles smiled in wolfish satisfaction. “Can you pronounce him clear of bio-horrors, then?”
   “Given that he's been running around this plague-ship bare-ass naked, not until we're sure we have identified all possible hazards that the ba might have released. But nothing came up on the first blood and tissue samples we took.”
   A hopeful—Miles tried not to think, overly optimistic —sign. “Can you send the lieutenant in to me? Is it safe? I want to talk to him.”
   “We now believe that what you and the herm have isn't virulently contagious through ordinary contact. Once we're sure the ship's clear of anything else, we'll all be able to get out of these suits, which will be a relief. Although the parasites might transfer sexually—we'll have to study that.”
   “I don't like Corbeau that much. Send him in, then.”
   Clogston gave Miles an odd look, and moved off. Miles wasn't sure if the captain had missed the feeble joke, or merely considered it too feeble to merit a response. But that transfer sexually theory kicked off a whole new cascade of unpleasant, unwelcome speculation in Miles's mind. What if the medicos found they could keep him alive indefinitely, but not get rid of the damned things? Would he never be able to touch any more of Ekaterin than her holovid image for the rest of his life . . . ? It also suggested a new set of questions to put to Guppy about his recent travels—well, the quaddie doctors were competent, and receiving copies of the Barrayarans' medical downloads; their epidemiologists were doubtless already on it.
   Corbeau pushed through the bio-barriers. He was now somewhat desultorily arrayed in a disposable mask and gloves, in addition to the medical tunic and some patient slippers. Miles sat up, pushed away his tray, and unobtrusively twitched open his own tunic, letting the paling spiderweb of old needle-grenade scars silently suggest whatever they might to Corbeau.
   “You asked for me, my Lord Auditor?” Corbeau ducked his head in a nervous jerk.
   “Yes.” Miles scratched his nose thoughtfully with his one free hand. “Well, hero. That was a very good career move you just made.”
   Corbeau hunched a little, mulishly. “I didn't do it for my career. Or for Barrayar. I did it for Graf Station, and the quaddies, and Garnet Five.”
   “And glad I am of it. Nevertheless, people will doubtless be wanting to pin gold stars on you. Cooperate with me, and I won't make you receive them in the costume you were wearing when you earned them.”
   Corbeau gave him a baffled, wary look.
   What was the matter with all his jokes today, anyway? Flat, flatter, flattest. Maybe he was violating some sort of unwritten Auditor protocol, and messing up everyone else's lines.
   The lieutenant said, in a notably uninviting voice, “What do you want me to do? My lord.”
   “More urgent concerns—to put it mildly—are going to compel me to leave Quaddiespace before my assigned diplomatic mission is quite complete. Nevertheless, with the true cause and course of our recent disasters here finally dragged out into the light, what follows should be easier.” Besides, there's nothing like the threat of imminent death to force one to delegate. “It is very plain that Barrayar is overdue to have a full-time diplomatic consulate officer assigned to the Union of Free Habitats. A bright young man who . . .” is shacked up with a quaddie girl , no, married to , wait, that wasn't what they called it here, is partners with , yes, very likely, but it hadn't happened yet. Although Corbeau was thrice a fool if he didn't grab this opportunity to fix things with Garnet Five for good and all. “Likes quaddies,” Miles continued smoothly, “and has earned both their respect and gratitude by his personal valor, and has no objection to a long assignment away from home—two years, was it? Yes, two years. Such a young man might be particularly well placed to argue effectively for Barrayar's interests in Quaddiespace. In my personal opinion.”
   Miles couldn't tell if Corbeau's mouth was open, behind his medical mask. His eyes had grown rather wide.
   “I can't imagine,” said Miles, “that Admiral Vorpatril would have any objection to releasing you to this detached duty. Or at any rate, to not having to deal with you in his command structure after all these . . . complex events. Not that I'd planned to give him a Betan vote in my Auditorial decrees, mind you.”
   “I . . . I don't know anything about diplomacy. I was trained as a pilot.”
   “If you went through military jump pilot training, you have already shown that you can study hard, learn fast, and make confident, rapid decisions affecting other people's lives. Objection overruled. You will, of course, have a consulate budget to hire expert staff to assist you in specialized problems, in law, in the economics of port fees, in trade matters, whatever. But you'll be expected to learn enough as you go to judge whether their advice is good for the Imperium. And if, at the end of two years, you do decide to muster out and stay here, the experience would give you a major boost into Quaddiespace private-sector employment. If there's any problem with all this from your point of view—or from Garnet Five's, very level-headed woman, by the way, don't let her get away—it's not apparent to me.”
   “I'll”—Corbeau swallowed—”think about it. My lord.”
   “Excellent.” And not readily stampeded, either, good. “Do so.” Miles smiled and waved dismissal; warily, Corbeau withdrew. As soon as he was out of earshot, Miles murmured a code into his wrist com.
   “Ekaterin, love? Where are you?”
   “In my cabin on the Prince Xav . The nice young yeoman is getting ready to help carry my things to the shuttle. Yes, thank you, that too . . .”
   “Right. I've just about cracked us loose from Quaddiespace. Greenlaw was reasonable, or at least, too exhausted to argue any more.”
   “She has all my sympathy. I don't think I have a functional nerve left, right now.”
   “Don't need your nerves, just your usual grace. The moment you can get to a comconsole, call up Garnet Five. I want to appoint that heroic young idiot Corbeau to be Barrayaran consul here, and make him clean up all this mess I have to leave in my wake. It's only fair; he certainly helped create it. Gregordid specifically ask that I assure that Barrayaran ships could dock here again someday. The boy is wobbling, however. So pitch it to Garnet Five, and make sure that she makes sure Corbeau says yes.”
   “Oh! What a splendid idea, love. They would make a good team, I think.”
   “Yep. Her for beauty, and um . . . her for brains.”
   “And him for courage, surely. I think it might work out. I must think what to send them for a wedding present, to convey my personal thanks.”
   “Partnering present? I don't know, ask Nicol. Oh. Speaking of Nicol.” Miles glanced aside at the sheeted figure in the next bunk. Crucial message delivered, Thorne had fallen back into what Miles hoped was sleep and not incipient coma. “I'm thinking that Bel really ought to have someone to ride along and take care of it. Or of things for it. Some kind of support trooper, anyway. I expect the Star Crиche will have a fix for their own weapon—they'd have to, lab accidents, after all.” If we get there in time . “But this looks like something that's going to involve a certain amount of really unpleasant convalescence. I'm not exactly looking forward to it myself.” But consider the alternative . . . ”Ask her if she's willing. She could ride in the Kestrel with you, be some company, anyway.” And if neither he nor Bel got out of this alive, mutual support.
   “Certainly. I'll call her from here.”
   “Call me again when you're safe aboard the Kestrel , love.” Often and often .
   “Of course.” Her voice hesitated. “Love you. Get some rest. You sound like you need it. Your voice has that down-in-a-well sound it gets when . . . There will be time.” Determination flashed through her own audible fatigue.
   “I wouldn't dare die. There's this fierce Vor lady who threatened she'd kill me if I did.” He grinned weakly and cut the com.
   * * *
   He drowsed for a time in dizzy exhaustion, fighting the sleep that tried to overtake him, because he couldn't be sure it wasn't the ba's hell-disease gaining on him, and he might not wake up. He marked a subtle change in the sounds and voices that penetrated from the outer chamber, as the medical team switched over to evacuation-mode. In time, a tech came and took Bel away on a float pallet. In a little more time, the pallet was returned, and Clogston himself and another medtech shifted the Imperial Auditor and all his growing array of life-support trappings aboard.
   One of the intelligence officers reported to Miles, during a brief delay in the outer chamber.
   “We finally found the remains of Lieutenant Solian, my Lord Auditor. What there was of them. A few kilograms of . . . well. Inside a bod pod, folded up and put back in its wall locker in the corridor just outside the cargo hold where the replicators were.”
   “Right. Thank you. Bring it along. As is. For evidence, and for . . . the man died doing his job. Barrayar owes him . . . debt of honor. Military burial. Pension, family . . . figure it all out later . . .”
   His pallet rose again, and the corridor ceilings of the Idris flowed past his blurred gaze for the last time.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

   “Are we there yet?” Miles mumbled muzzily.
   He blinked open eyes that were not, oddly enough, gluey and sore. The ceiling above him didn't waver and bend in his vision as though seen mirage-like through rising desert heat. Breath drawn through his flaring nostrils flowed in coolly and without clogging impediment. No phlegm. No tubes. No tubes?
   The ceiling was unfamiliar. He groped for memory. Fog. Biotainered angels and devils, tormenting him; someone demanding he piss. Medical indignities, mercifully vague now. Trying to talk, to give orders, till some hypospray of darkness had shut him down.
   And before that: near desperation. Sending frantic messages racing ahead of his little convoy. The return stream of days-old accounts of wormholes blockaded, outlanders interned by both sides, assets seized, ships massing, telling its own tale to Miles's mind, worse for the details. He knew too damned much about the details. We can't have a war now, you fools! Don't you know there are children almost present? His left arm jerked, encountering no resistance except for a smooth coverlet beneath his clutching fingers. “ . . . there yet?”
   Ekaterin's lovely face bent over him from the side. Not half-hidden behind biotainer gear. He feared for a moment that this was only a holovid projection, or some hallucination, but the real warm kiss of breath from her mouth, carried on a puff of laughter, reassured him of her present solidity even before his hesitant hand touched her cheek.
   “Where's your mask?” he asked thickly. He heaved up on one elbow, fighting off a wave of dizziness.
   He certainly wasn't in the Barrayaran military ship's crowded, utilitarian sickbay to which he'd been transferred from the Idris . His bed was in a small but elegantly appointed chamber that screamed of Cetagandan aesthetics, from the arrays of live plants through the serene lighting to the view out the window of a soothing seashore. Waves creamed gently up a pale sandy beach seen through strange trees casting delicate fingers of shade. Almost certainly a vid projection, since the subliminals of the atmosphere and sounds of the room also murmured spaceship cabin to him. He wore a loose, silky garment in subdued gray hues, only its odd accessibilities betraying it as a patient gown. Above the head of his bed, a discreet panel displayed medical readouts.
   “Where are we? What's happening? Did we stop the war? Those replicators they found on their end—it's a trick, I know it—”
   The final disaster—his speeding ships intercepting tight-beamed news from Barrayar of diplomatic talks broken off upon the discovery, in a warehouse outside Vorbarr Sultana, of a thousand empty replicators apparently stolen from the Star Crиche, their occupants gone. Supposed occupants? Even Miles hadn't been sure. A baffling nightmare of implications. The Barrayaran government had of course hotly denied any knowledge of how they came to be there, or where their contents were now. And was not believed . . .
   “The ba—Guppy, I promised—all those haut babies—I've got to—”
   “You have got to lie still.” A firm hand to his chest pushed him back down. “All the most urgent matters have been taken care of.”
   “Who by?”
   She colored faintly. “Well . . . me, mostly. Vorpatril's ship captain probably shouldn't have let me override him, technically, but I decided not to point that out to him. You're a bad influence on me, love.”
   What? What? “How?”
   “I just kept repeating your messages, and demanding they be put through to the haut Pel and ghem-General Benin. Benin was brilliant. Once he had your first dispatches, he figured out that the replicators found in Vorbarr Sultana were decoys, smuggled out of the Star Crиche by the ba a few at a time over a year ago in preparation for this.” She frowned. “It was apparently a deliberate sleight of hand by the ba, meant to cause just this sort of trouble. A backup plan, in case anyone figured out that not everyone had died on the child-ship, and traced the trail as far as Komarr. It almost worked. Might have worked, if Benin hadn't been so painstaking and levelheaded. I gather that the internal political circumstances of his investigation were extremely difficult by then. He really put his reputation on the line.”
   Possibly even his life, if Miles read between these simple lines. “All honor unto him, then.”
   “The military forces—theirs and ours—have all gone off alert and are standing down, now. The Cetagandans have declared it an internal, civil matter.”
   He eased back, vastly relieved. “Ah.”
   “I don't think I could have gotten through to them without the haut Pel's name.” She hesitated. “And yours.”
   “Ours.”
   Her lips curved up at that. “Lady Vorkosigan did seem a title to conjure with. It gave both sides pause. That, and yelling the truth over and over. But I couldn't have held it together without the name.”
   “May I suggest that the name couldn't have held it together without you?” His free hand tightened around hers, on the coverlet. Hers tightened back.
   He started up again. “Wait—shouldn't you be in biotainer gear?”
   “Not any more. Lie down , drat it. What's the last thing you remember?”
   “My last clear memory is of being on the Barrayaran ship about four days out from Quaddiespace. Cold.”
   Her smile didn't change, but her eyes grew dark with memory. “Cold is right. The blood filters fell behind, even with four of them running at once. We could see the life just draining out of you; your metabolism couldn't keep up, couldn't replace the resources being siphoned off even with the IVs and nutrient tubes running flat out, and multiple blood transfusions. Captain Clogston couldn't think of any other way to suppress the parasites but to put you, Bel, and them into stasis. A cold hibernation. The next step would have been cryofreeze.”
   “Oh, no. Not again . . . !”
   “It was the ultimate fallback, but it wasn't needed, thank heavens. Once you and Bel were sedated and chilled enough, the parasites stopped multiplying. The captains and crews of our little convoy were very good about rushing us along as fast as was safe, or a little faster. Oh—yes, we're here; we arrived in orbit around Rho Ceta . . . yesterday, I guess it was.”
   Had she slept since then? Not much, Miles suspected. Her face, though cheerful now, was drawn with fatigue. He reached for it again, to lightly touch her lips with two fingers as he habitually did her holovid image.
   “I remember that you wouldn't let me say good-bye to you properly,” he complained.
   “I figured it would give you more motivation to fight your way back to me. If only for the last word.”
   He snorted a laugh, and let his hand fall back to the coverlet. The artificial gravity probably wasn't turned up to two gees in this chamber, despite his arm feeling as though it were hung with lead weights. He had to admit, he didn't feel exactly . . . chipper. “What, then, am I all clear of those hell-parasites?”
   Her smile returned. “All better. Well, that is, that frightening Cetagandan lady doctor the haut Pel brought with her has pronounced you cured. But you're still very debilitated. You're supposed to rest.”
   “Rest, I can't rest! What else is happening? Where's Bel?”
   “Sh, sh. Bel's alive too. You can see Bel soon, and Nicol too. They're in a cabin just down the corridor. Bel took . . .” She frowned hesitantly. “Took more damage from this than you did, but is expected to recover, mostly. In time.”
   Miles didn't quite like the sound of that.
   Ekaterin followed his glance around. “Right now we're aboard the haut Pel's own ship—that is, her Star Crиche ship, that she brought from Eta Ceta. The women from the Star Crиche had you and Bel carried across to treat you here. The haut ladies wouldn't let any of our men aboard to guard you, not even Armsman Roic at first, which caused the most stupid argument; I was ready to slap everybody concerned, till they finally decided that Nicol and I could come with you. Captain Clogston was very upset that he wouldn't be allowed to attend. He wanted to hold back giving them the replicators till they cooperated, but you can bet I put my foot down on that idea.”
   “Good!” And not just because Miles had wanted those little time bombs off Barrayaran hands at the earliest possible instant. He could not imagine a more psychologically repugnant or diplomatically disastrous ploy, at this late hour. “I remember trying to calm down that idiot Guppy, who was hysterical about being carried back to the Cetagandans. Making promises . . . I hope I wasn't lying through my chattering teeth. Was it true he was still harboring a reservoir of parasites? Did they fix him, too? Or . . . not? I swore on my name that if he'd cooperate in testifying, Barrayar would protect him, but I expected to be conscious when we arrived. . . .”
   “Yes, the Cetagandan doctor treated him, too. She claims the latent residue of parasites wouldn't have fired up again, but really, I don't think she was sure. Apparently, no one has ever survived this bioweapon before. I gathered the impression that the Star Crиche wants Guppy for research purposes even more than Cetagandan Imperial Security does for criminal charges, and if they have to arm wrestle for him, the Star Crиche will win. Our men did carry out your order; he's still being held on the Barrayaran ship. Some of the Cetagandans aren't too pleased about that, but I told them they'd have to deal with you on the subject.”
   He hesitated, and cleared his throat. “Um . . . I also seem to remember recording some messages. To my parents. And Mark and Ivan. And to little Aral and Helen. I hope you didn't . . . you didn't send them off already, did you?”
   “I set them aside.”
   “Oh, good. I'm afraid I wasn't very coherent by then.”
   “Perhaps not,” she admitted. “But they were very moving, I thought.”
   “I put it off too long, I guess. You can erase them now.”
   “Never,” she said, quite firmly.
   “But I was babbling.”
   “Nevertheless, I'm going to save them.” She stroked his hair, and her smile twisted. “Perhaps they can be recycled someday. After all . . . next time, you might not have time.”
   The door to the chamber slid aside, and two tall, willowy women entered. Miles recognized the senior of them at once.
   The haut Pel Navarr, Consort of Eta Ceta, was perhaps the number-two woman in the strange secret hierarchy of the Star Crиche, after the Empress, haut Rian Degtiar herself. In appearance, she was unchanged from when Miles had first met her a decade ago, except perhaps for her hairstyle. Her immensely long, honey-blond hair was gathered today into a dozen braids, hanging from a level running around the back of her head from one ear to the other, their decorated ends swinging around her ankles along with her skirt hem and draperies. Miles wondered if the unsettling, faintly Medusa-like effect was intended. Her skin was still pale and perfect, but she could not, even for an instant, be mistaken for young. Too much calm, too much control, too much cool irony . . .
   Outside the innermost sanctuaries of the Celestial Garden, the high haut women normally moved in the privacy and protection of personal force bubbles, screened from unworthy eyes. The fact that she strode here unveiled was alone enough to tell Miles that he now lay in a Star Crиche reserve. The dark-haired woman beside her was old enough to have streaks of silver in the hair looping down her back among her long robes, and skin that, while unblemished, was distinctly softened with age. Chill, deferential, unknown to Miles.
   “Lord Vorkosigan.” The haut Pel gave him a relatively cordial nod. “I am pleased to find you awake. Are you quite yourself again?”
   Why, who was I before? He was afraid he could guess. “I think so.”
   “It was quite a surprise to me that we should meet again this way, although not, under the circumstances, an unwelcome one.”
   Miles cleared his throat. “It was all a surprise to me, too. Your babies in their replicators—you have them back? Are they all right?”
   “My people completed their examinations last night. All seems to be well with them, despite their horrific adventures. I'm sorry that the same was not so for you.”
   She gave a nod to her companion; the woman proved to be a physician, who, with a few brusque murmurs, completed a brief medical examination of their Barrayaran guest. Signing off her work, Miles guessed. His leading questions about the bioengineered parasites met polite evasion, and then Miles wondered if she were physician—or ordnance designer. Or veterinarian, except that most veterinarians he'd met showed signs of actually liking their patients.
   Ekaterin was more determined. “Can you give me any idea of what long-term side-effects we should watch for from this unfortunate exposure, for the Lord Auditor and Portmaster Thorne?”
   The woman motioned for Miles to refasten his garment, and turned to speak over his head. “Your husband ,” she made the term sound utterly alien, in her mouth, “does suffer some muscular and circulatory micro-scarring. Muscle tone should recover gradually over time to near his prior levels. However, added to his earlier cryo-trauma, I would expect greater chance of circulatory mishaps later in his life. Although as short-lived as you people are, perhaps the few decades difference in life expectancy will not seem significant.”
   Quite the reverse, madam . Strokes, thromboses, blood clots, aneurysms, Miles supposed was what this translated to. Oh, joy. Just add them to the list, along with needler guns, sonic grenades, plasma fire, and nerve disruptor beams. And hot rivets and hard vacuum.
   And seizures. So, what interesting synergies might be expected when this circulatory micro-scarring crossed paths with his seizure disorder? Miles decided to save that question for his own physicians, later. They could use a challenge. He was going to be a damned research project, again. Military as well as medical, he realized with a chill.
   The haut woman continued to Ekaterin, “The Betan suffered notably more internal damage. Full recovery of muscle tone may never occur, and the herm will need to be on guard against circulatory stress of all kinds. A low– or zero-gravity environment might be the safest for it during its convalescence. I gathered from its partner, the quaddie female, that this may actually be easy to provide.”
   “Whatever Bel needs will be arranged,” Miles vowed. For such a debilitating injury in the Emperor's service, it shouldn't even take an Imperial Auditor to get ImpSec off Bel's neck, and maybe rustle up a little medical pension in the bargain.
   The haut Pel gave a tiny jerk of her chin. The physician favored the planetary consort with an obeisant bow, and excused herself.
   Pel turned back to Miles. “As soon as you feel sufficiently recovered, Lord Auditor Vorkosigan, ghem-General Benin begs the opportunity to speak with you.”
   “Ah! Dag Benin's here? Good! I want to talk to him, too. Does he have the ba in his custody yet? Has it been made crystal clear that Barrayar was an innocent dupe in your ba's illicit travels?”
   Pel replied, “The ba was of the Star Crиche; the ba has been returned to the Star Crиche. It is an internal matter, although we are, of course, grateful to ghem-General Benin for his assistance dealing with any persons outside our purview who may have aided the ba in its . . . mad flight.”
   So, the haut ladies had their stray back. Miles suppressed a slight twinge of pity for the ba. Pel's quelling tone of voice did not invite further questions from outlander barbarians. Tough. Pel was the most venturesome of the planetary consorts, but his likelihood of ever getting her alone, face-to-face, after this moment was slight, and her likelihood of discussing the matter frankly in front of anyone else even slighter.
   He forged on. “I finally deduced the ba must be a renegade, and not, as I'd first thought, an agent of the Star Crиche. I'm most curious about the mechanics of this bizarre kidnapping. Guppy—the Jacksonian smuggler, Russo Gupta—could only give me an exterior view of events, and that only from his first point of contact, when the ba off-loaded the replicators from what I assume was the annual child-ship to Rho Ceta, yes?”
   Pel inhaled, but conceded stiffly, “Yes. The crime was long planned and prepared, it now appears. The ba slew the Consort of Rho Ceta, her handmaidens, and the crew of the ship by poison just after their last jump. They were all dead by the time of the rendezvous. It set the ship's auto-navigation to take the vessel into the sun of the system thereafter. To the ba's credit, this was intended as a befitting pyre, of sorts,” she conceded grudgingly.
   Given his prior exposure to the arcana of haut funeral practices, Miles could almost follow this evident point in the prisoner's favor without his brain cramping. Almost. But Pel spoke of the ba's intention as fact, not conjecture; therefore, the haut ladies had already had more luck in their interrogation of the deranged ba in one night than Miles's security people had gained on their whole voyage here. Luck, I suspect, has nothing to do with it . “I thought the ba should have been carrying a greater variety of bioweapons, if it had any time to loot the child-ship before the vessel was abandoned and destroyed.”
   Pel was normally rather sunny, as haut planetary consorts went, but this elicited a freezing frown. “These matters are altogether not for discussion outside the Star Crиche.”
   “Ideally, no. But unfortunately, your . . . private items managed to travel quite a way outside the Star Crиche indeed. As I can personally testify. They became a source of very public concern for us, when apprehending the ba on Graf Station. At the time I left there, no one was certain if we'd identified and neutralized every contagion, or not. “
   Reluctantly, Pel admitted, “The ba had planned to steal the complete array. But the haut lady in charge of the consort's . . . supplies, although dying, managed to destroy them before her death. As was her duty.” Pel's eyes narrowed. “She will be remembered among us.”
   The dark-haired woman's opposite number, perhaps? Did the chilly physician guard a similar arsenal on Pel's behalf, perhaps aboard this very ship? Complete array , eh. Miles filed that tacit admission silently away, for later sharing with ImpSec's highest echelons, and swiftly redirected the conversation.
   “But what was the ba actually trying to do? Was it acting alone? If it was, how did it defeat its loyalty programming?”
   “That is an internal matter, too,” she repeated darkly.
   “Well, I'll tell you my guesses,” Miles burbled on, before she could turn away and end the exchange. “I believe this ba to be very closely related to Emperor Fletchir Giaja, and therefore, to his late mother. I'm guessing this ba was one of the old Dowager Empress Lisbet's close confidants during her reign. Her bio-treason, her plan to split the haut into competing subgroups, was defeated after her death—”
   “Not treason ,” haut Pel objected faintly. “As such.”
   “Unsanctioned unilateral redesign, then. For some reason, this ba was not purged with the others of her inner cadre after her death—or maybe it was, I don't know. Demoted, perhaps? But anyway, I'm guessing this whole escapade was some sort of misguided effort to complete its dead mistress's—or mother's—vision. Am I close?”
   The haut Pel eyed him with extreme distaste. “Close enough. It is truly done now, in any case. The emperor will be pleased with you—again. Some token of his gratitude may well be forthcoming at the child-ship landing ceremonies tomorrow, to which you and your lady-wife are invited. The first outlanders—ever—to be so honored.”
   Miles waved aside this little distraction. “I'd trade all the honors for some scrap of understanding.”
   Pel snorted. “You haven't changed, have you? Still insatiably curious. To a fault,” she added pointedly.
   Ekaterin smiled dryly.
   Miles ignored Pel's hint. “Bear with me. I don't think I've quite got it, yet. I suspect the haut—and the ba—are not so post-human yet as to be beyond self-deception, all the more subtle for their subtlety. I saw the ba's face, when I destroyed that freezer case of genetic samples in front of it. Something shattered. Some last, desperate . . . something.” He had slain men's bodies, and bore the mark, and knew it. He did not think he'd ever before slain a soul, yet left the body breathing, bereft and accusing. I have to understand this .
   Pel was clearly not pleased to go on, but she understood the depth of a debt that could not be paid off with such trivialities as medals and ceremonies. “The ba, it seems,” she said slowly, “desired more than Lisbet's vision. It planned a new empire—with itself as both emperor and empress. It stole the haut children of Rho Ceta not just as a core population for its planned new society, but as . . . mates. Consorts. Aspiring to even more than Fletchir Giaja's genetic place, which, while part of the goal of haut, does not imagine itself the whole. Hubris,” she sighed. “Madness.”
   “In other words,” breathed Miles, “the ba wanted children. In the only way it could . . . conceive.”
   Ekaterin's hand, which had drifted to his shoulder, tightened.
   “Lisbet . . . should not have told it so much,” said Pel. “She made a pet of this ba. Treated it almost as a child , instead of a servitor. Hers was a powerful personality, but not always . . . wise. Perhaps . . . self-indulgent in her old age, as well.”
   Yes—the ba was Fletchir Giaja's sibling, perhaps the Cetagandan emperor's near-clone. Elder sibling. Test run, and the test judged successful—and decades of observant service in the Celestial Garden thereafter, with the question always hovering—so why was not the ba, instead of its brother, given all that honor, power, wealth, fertility?
   “One last question. If you will. What was the ba's name?”
   Pel's lips tightened. “It shall be nameless now. And forevermore.”
   Erased. Let the punishment fit the crime.
   Miles shivered.
   * * *
   The luxurious lift van banked over the palace of the Imperial Governor of Rho Ceta, the sprawling complex shimmering in the night. The vehicle began to drop into the vast dark garden, laced with veins of lights along its roads and paths, which lay to the east of the buildings. Miles stared in fascination out his window as they swooped down, then up over a small range of hills, trying to guess if the landscape was natural, or artificially carved out of Rho Ceta's surface. Partly carved, at any rate, for on the opposite side of the rise a grassy bowl of an amphitheater sheltered in the slope, overlooking a silky black lake a kilometer across. Beyond the hills on the lake's other side, Rho Ceta's capital city made the night sky glow amber.
   The amphitheater was lit only by dim, glowing globes lavishly spread across its width: a thousand haut lady force bubbles, set to mourning white, damped to the barest visible luminosity. Among them, other pale figures moved softly as ghosts. The view turned from his sight as the driver of the van swung it about and brought it down to a gentle landing a few meters inward from the lake shore at one edge of the amphitheater.
   The van's internal lighting brightened just a little, in red wavelengths designed to help maintain the passengers' dark adaptation. In the aisle across from Miles and Ekaterin, ghem-General Benin turned from his window. It was hard to read his expression beneath the formalized swirls of black-and-white face paint that marked him as an Imperial ghem-officer, but Miles took it for pensive. In the red light, his uniform glowed like fresh blood.
   All in all, and even taking into account his sudden close personal introduction to Star Crиche bioweapons, Miles wasn't sure if he'd have cared to trade recent nightmares with Benin. The past weeks had been exhausting for the senior officer of the Celestial Garden's internal security. The child-ship, carrying Star Crиche personnel who were his special charge, vanishing en route without a trace; garbled reports leaking back from Guppy's scrambled trail hinting not only at breathtaking theft, but possible biocontamination from the Crиche's most secret stores; the disappearance of that trail into the heart of an enemy empire.
   No wonder that by the time he had arrived in Rho Cetan orbit last night to interrogate Miles in person—with exquisite courtesy, to be sure—he'd looked as tired, even under the face paint, as Miles felt. Their contest for the possession of Russo Gupta had been brief. Miles certainly sympathized with Benin's strong desire, with the ba plucked from his hands by the Star Crиche, for someone to take his frustrations out on—but, first, Miles had given his Vor word, and secondly, he discovered, he could apparently do no wrong on Rho Ceta this week.
   Nevertheless, Miles wondered where to drop Guppy when this was all over. Housing him in a Barrayaran jail was a useless expense to the Imperium. Turning him loose back on Jackson's Whole was an invitation for him to return to his old haunts, and employment—no benefit to the neighbors, and a temptation to Cetagandan vengeance. He could think of one other nicely distant place to deposit a person of such speckled background and erratic talents, but was it fair to do that to Admiral Quinn . . . ? Bel had laughed, evilly, at the suggestion, till it had to stop to breathe.
   Despite Rho Ceta's key place in Barrayaran strategic and tactical considerations, Miles had never set foot on the world before. He didn't now, either, at least not right away. Grimacing, he allowed Ekaterin and ghem-General Benin to help him from the van into a floater. In the ceremony to come, he planned to stand on his feet, but a very little experimentation had taught him that he had better conserve his endurance. At least he wasn't alone in his need for mechanical aid. Nicol hovered, shepherding Bel Thorne. The herm sat up and managed its own floater controls, only the oxygen tube to its nose betraying its extreme debilitation.
   Armsman Roic, his Vorkosigan House uniform pressed and polished, took up station behind Miles and Ekaterin, at his very stiffest and most silent. Spooked half to death, Miles gauged. Miles couldn't blame him.
   Deciding he represented the whole of the Barrayaran Empire tonight, and not just his own House, Miles had elected to wear his plain civilian gray. Ekaterin seemed tall and graceful as a haut in some flowing thing of gray and black; Miles suspected under-the-table female sartorial help from Pel, or one of Pel's many minions. As ghem-General Benin led the party forward, Ekaterin paced beside Miles's floater, her hand resting lightly upon his arm. Her faint, mysterious smile was as reserved as ever, but it seemed to Miles as though she walked with a new and firm confidence, unafraid in the shadowed dark.
   Benin stopped at a small group of men, glimmering up out of the murk like specters, who were gathered a few meters from the lift van. Complex perfumes drifted from their clothing through the damp air, distinct, yet somehow not clashing. The ghem-general meticulously introduced each member of the party to the current haut governor of Rho Ceta, who was of the Degtiar constellation, cousin in some kind to the present Empress. The governor, too, was dressed, as were all the haut men present, in the loose white tunic and trousers of full mourning, with a multilayered white over-robe that swept to his ankles.
   The former occupant of this post, whom Miles had once met, had made it plain that outlander barbarians were barely to be tolerated, but this man swept a low and apparently sincere bow, his hands pressed formally together in front of his chest. Miles blinked, startled, for the gesture more resembled the bow of a ba to a haut than the nod of a haut to an outlander.
   “Lord Vorkosigan. Lady Vorkosigan. Portmaster Thorne. Nicol of the Quaddies. Armsman Roic of Barrayar. Welcome to Rho Ceta. My household is at your service.”
   They all returned suitably civil murmurs of thanks. Miles considered the wording—my household , not my government , and was reminded that what he was seeing tonight was a private ceremony. The haut governor was momentarily distracted by the lights on the horizon of a shuttle dropping from orbit, his lips parting at he peered up into the glowing night sky, but the craft banked disappointingly away toward the opposite side of the city. The governor turned back, frowning.
   A few minutes of polite small talk between the haut governor and Benin—formal wishes for the continued health of the Cetagandan emperor and his empresses, and somewhat more spontaneous-sounding inquiries after mutual acquaintances—was broken off again as another shuttle's lights appeared in the wide predawn dark. The governor swung around to stare again. Miles glanced back over the silent crowd of haut men and haut lady bubbles scattered like white flower petals across the bowl of the hillside. They emitted no cries, they scarcely seemed to move, but Miles felt rather than heard a sigh ripple across their ranks, and the tension of their anticipation tighten.
   This time, the shuttle grew larger, its lights brightening as it boomed down across the lake, which foamed in its path. Roic stepped back nervously, then forward again nearer to Miles and Ekaterin, watching the bulk of it loom almost above them. Lights on its sides picked out upon the fuselage a screaming-bird pattern, enameled red, that glowed like flame. The craft landed on its extended feet as softly as a cat, and settled, the chinks and clinks of its heated sides contracting sounding loud in the breathless, waiting stillness.
   “Time to stand up,” Miles whispered to Ekaterin, and grounded his floater. She and Roic helped hoist him out of it to his feet, and step forward to stand at attention. The close-cut grass, beneath his booted soles, felt like thick fine carpeting; its scent was damp and mossy.
   A wide cargo hatch opened, and a ramp extended itself, illuminated from beneath in a pale, diffuse glow. First down it drifted a haut lady bubble—its force field not opaque, as the others, but transparent as gauze. Within, its float chair could be seen to be empty.
   Miles murmured to Ekaterin, “Where's Pel? Thought this was all her . . . baby.”
   “It's for the Consort of Rho Ceta who was lost with the hijacked ship,” she whispered back. “The haut Pel will be next, as she conducts the children in the dead consort's place.”
   Miles had met the murdered woman, briefly, a decade ago. To his regret, he could remember little more of her now than a cloud of chocolate-brown hair that had tumbled down about her, stunning beauty camouflaged in an array of other haut women of equal splendor, and a ferocious commitment to her duties. But the float chair seemed suddenly even emptier.
   Another bubble followed, and yet more, and ghem-women and ba servitors. The second bubble drew up beside the haut governor's group, grew transparent, and then winked out. Pel in her white robes sat regally in her float chair.
   “Ghem-General Benin, as you are charged, please convey now the thanks of Emperor the haut Fletchir Giaja to these outlanders who have brought our Constellations' hopes home to us.”
   She spoke in a normal tone, and Miles didn't see the voice pickups, but a faint echo back from the grassy bowl told him their words were being conveyed to all assembled here.
   Benin called Bel forward; with formal words of ceremony, he presented a high Cetagandan honor to the Betan, a paper bound in ribbon, written in the Emperor's Own Hand, with the odd name of the Warrant of the Celestial House. Miles knew Cetagandan ghem-lords who would have traded their own mothers to be enrolled on the year's Warrant List, except that it wasn't nearly that easy to qualify. Bel dipped its floater for Benin to press the beribboned roll into its hands, and though its eyes were bright with irony, murmured thanks to the distant Fletchir Giaja in return, and kept its sense of humor, for once, under full control. It probably helped that the herm was still so exhausted it could barely hold its head upright, a circumstance for which Miles had not expected to be grateful.
   Miles blinked, and suppressed a huge grin, when Ekaterin was next called forward by ghem-General Benin and bestowed with a like beribboned honor. Her obvious pleasure was not without its edge of irony either, but she returned an elegantly worded thank you.
   “My Lord Vorkosigan,” Benin spoke.
   Miles stepped forward a trifle apprehensively.
   “My Imperial Master, the Emperor the haut Fletchir Giaja, reminds me that true delicacy in the giving of gifts considers the tastes of the recipient. He therefore charges me only to convey to you his personal thanks, in his own Breath and Voice.”
   First prize, the Cetagandan Order of Merit, and what an embarrassment that medal had been, a decade ago. Second prize, two Cetagandan Orders of Merit? Evidently not. Miles breathed a sigh of relief, only slightly tinged with regret. “Tell your Imperial Master from me that he is entirely welcome.”
   “My Imperial Mistress, the Empress the haut Rian Degtiar, Handmaiden of the Star Crиche, also charged me to convey to you her own thanks, in her own Breath and Voice.”
   Miles bowed perceptibly lower. “I am at her service in this.”
   Benin stepped back; the haut Pel moved forward. “Indeed. Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan of Barrayar, the Star Crиche calls you up.”
   He'd been warned about this, and talked it over with Ekaterin. As a practical matter, there was no point in refusing the honor; the Star Crиche had to have about a kilo of his flesh on private file already, collected not only during his treatment here, but from his memorable visit to Eta Ceta all those years back. So with only a slight tightening of his stomach, he stepped forward, and permitted a ba servitor to roll back his sleeve and present the tray with the gleaming sampling needle to the haut Pel.
   Pel's own white, long-fingered hand drove the sampling needle into the fleshy part of his forearm. It was so fine, its bite scarcely pained him; when she withdrew it, barely a drop of blood formed on his skin, to be wiped away by the servitor. She laid the needle into its own freezer case, held it high for a moment of public display and declaration, closed it, and set it away in a compartment in the arm of her float chair. The faint murmur from the throng in the amphitheater did not seem to be outrage, though there was, perhaps, a tinge of amazement. The highest honor any Cetagandan could achieve, higher even than the bestowal of a haut bride, was to have his or her genome formally taken up into the Star Crиche's banks—for disassembly, close examination, and possible selective insertion of the approved bits into the haut race's next generation.
   Miles, rolling his sleeve back down, muttered to Pel, “It's prob'ly nurture, not nature, y'know.”
   Her exquisite lips resisted an upward crook to form the silent syllable, Sh .
   The spark of dark humor in her eye was veiled again as if seen through the morning mist as she reactivated her force shield. The sky to the east, across the lake and beyond the next range of hills, was turning pale. Coils of fog curled across the waters of the lake, its smooth surface growing steel gray in reflection of the predawn luminescence.
   A deeper hush fell across the gathering of haut as through the shuttle's door and down its ramp floated array after array of replicator racks, guided by the ghem-women and ba servitors. Constellation by constellation, the haut were called forth by the acting consort, Pel, to receive their replicators. The Governor of Rho Ceta left the little group of visiting dignitaries/heroes to join with his clan, as well, and Miles realized that his humble bow, earlier, had not been any kind of irony after all. The white-clad crowd assembled were not the whole of the haut race residing on Rho Ceta, just the fraction whose genetic crosses, arranged by their clan heads, bore fruit this day, this year.
   The men and women whose children were here delivered might never have touched or even seen each other till this dawn, but each group of men accepted from the Star Crиche's hands the children of their getting. They floated the racks in turn to the waiting array of white bubbles carrying their genetic partners. As each constellation rearranged itself around its replicator racks, the force screens turned from dull mourning white to brilliant colors, a riotous rainbow. The rainbow bubbles streamed away out of the amphitheater, escorted by their male companions, as the hilly horizon across the lake silhouetted itself against the dawn fire, and above, the stars faded in the blue.
   When the haut reached their home enclaves, scattered around the planet, the infants would be given up again into the hands of their ghem nurses and attendants for release from their replicators. Into the nurturing crиches of their various constellations. Parent and child might or might not ever meet again. Yet there seemed more to this ceremony than just haut protocol. Are we not all called on to yield our children back to the world, in the end? The Vor did, in their ideals at least. Barrayar eats its children , his mother had once said, according to his father. Looking at Miles.
   So , Miles thought wearily. Are we heroes here today, or the greatest traitors unhung? What would these tiny, high haut hopefuls grow into, in time? Great men and women? Terrible foes? Had he, all unknowing, saved here some future nemesis of Barrayar—enemy and destroyer of his own children still unborn?
   And if such a dire precognition or prophecy had been granted to him by some cruel god, could he have acted any differently?
   He sought Ekaterin's hand with his own cold one; her fingers wrapped his with warmth. There was enough light for her to see his face, now. “Are you all right, love?” she murmured in concern.
   “I don't know. Let's go home.”

EPILOGUE

   They said good-bye to Bel and Nicol at Komarr orbit.
   Miles had ridden along to the ImpSec Galactic Affairs transfer station offices here for Bel's final debriefing, partly to add his own observations, partly to see that the ImpSec boys did not fatigue the herm unduly. Ekaterin attended too, both to testify and to make sure Miles didn't fatigue himself. Miles was hauled away before Bel was.
   “Are you sure you two don't want to come along to Vorkosigan House?” Miles asked anxiously, for the fourth or fifth time, as they gathered for a final farewell on an upper concourse. “You missed the wedding, after all. We could show you a very good time. My cook alone is worth the trip, I promise you.” Miles, Bel, and of course Nicol hovered in floaters. Ekaterin stood with her arms crossed, smiling slightly. Roic wandered an invisible perimeter as if loath to give over his duties to the unobtrusive ImpSec guards. The armsman had been on continuous alert for so long, Miles thought, he'd forgotten how to take a shift off. Miles understood the feeling. Roic was due at least two weeks of uninterrupted home leave when they returned to Barrayar, Miles decided.
   Nicol's brows twitched up. “I'm afraid we might disturb your neighbors.”
   “Stampede the horses, yeah,” said Bel.
   Miles bowed, sitting; his floater bobbed slightly. “My horse would like you fine. He's extremely amiable, not to mention much too old and lazy to stampede anywhere. And I personally guarantee that with a Vorkosigan liveried armsman at your back, not the most benighted backcountry hick would offer you insult.”
   Roic, passing nearby in his orbit, added a confirming nod.
   Nicol smiled. “Thanks all the same, but I think I'd rather go someplace where I don't need a bodyguard.”
   Miles drummed his fingers on the edge of his floater. “We're working on it. But look, really, if you—”
   “Nicol is tired,” said Ekaterin, “probably homesick, and she has a convalescing herm to look after. I expect she'll be glad to get back to her own sleepsack and her own routine. Not to mention her own music.”
   The two exchanged one of those League of Women looks, and Nicol nodded gratefully.
   “Well,” said Miles, yielding with reluctance. “Take care of each other, then.”
   “You, too,” said Bel gruffly. “I think it's time you gave up those hands-on ops games, hey? Now that you're going to be a daddy and all. Between this time and the last time, Fate has got to have your range bracketed. Bad idea to give it a third shot, I think.”
   Miles glanced involuntarily at his palms, fully healed by now. “Maybe so. God knows Gregor probably has a list of domestic chores waiting for me as long as a quaddie's arms all added together. The last one was wall-to-wall committees, coming up with, if you can believe it, new Barrayaran bio-law for the Council of Counts to approve. It took a year. If he starts another one with, 'You're half Betan, Miles, you'd be just the man'– I think I'll turn and run.”
   Bel laughed; Miles added, “Keep an eye on young Corbeau for me, eh? When I toss a protйgй in to sink or swim like that, I usually prefer to be closer to hand with a life preserver.”
   “Garnet Five messaged me, after I sent to tell her Bel was going to live,” said Nicol. “She says they're doing all right so far. At any rate, Quaddiespace hasn't declared all Barrayaran ships non grata forever or anything yet.”
   “That means there's no reason you two couldn't come back someday,” Bel pointed out. “Or at any rate, stay in touch. We are both free to communicate openly now, I might observe.”
   Miles brightened. “If discreetly. Yes. That's true.”
   They exchanged some un-Barrayaran hugs all around; Miles didn't care what his ImpSec lookouts thought. He floated, holding Ekaterin's hand, to watch the pair progress out of sight toward the commercial ship docks. But even before they'd rounded the corner he felt his face pulled around, as if by a magnetic force, in the opposite direction—toward the military arm of the station, where the Kestrel awaited their pleasure.
   Time ticked in his head. “Let's go.”
   “Oh, yes,” said Ekaterin.
   He had to speed his floater to keep up with her lengthening stride up the concourse.
   Gregor waited to greet Lord Auditor and Lady Vorkosigan upon their return, at a special reception at the Imperial Residence. Miles trusted whatever reward the Emperor had in mind would be less disturbingly arcane than that of the haut ladies. But Gregor's party was going to have to be put off a day or two. The word from their obstetrician back at Vorkosigan House was that the children's sojourn in their replicators was stretched to nearly its maximum safe extension. There had been enough oblique medical disapproval in the tone of the message, it didn't even need Ekaterin's nervous jokes about ten-month twins and how glad she was now for replicators to get him aimed in the right direction, and no more damned interruptions.
   * * *
   He'd undergone these homecomings what seemed a thousand times, yet this one felt different than any before. The groundcar from the military shuttleport, Armsman Pym driving, pulled up under the porte-cochиre of Vorkosigan House, looming stone pile that it ever was. Ekaterin bustled out first and gazed longingly toward the door, but paused to wait for Miles.
   When they'd left Komarr orbit five days ago he'd traded in the despised floater for a slightly less despised cane, and spent the journey hobbling incessantly up and down what limited corridors the Kestrel provided. His strength was returning, he fancied, if more slowly than he'd hoped. Maybe he would look into getting a swordstick like Commodore Koudelka's for the interim. He pulled himself to his feet, swung the cane in briefly jaunty defiance, and offered Ekaterin his arm. She rested her hand lightly upon it, covertly ready to grab if needed. The double doors swung open on the grand old black-and-white paved entry hall.
   The mob was waiting, headed by a tall woman with roan-red hair and a delighted smile. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan actually hugged her daughter-in-law first. A white-haired, stocky man advanced from the antechamber to the left, face luminous with pleasure, and stood in line for his chance with Ekaterin before turning to his son. Nikki clattered down the sweeping stairway and into his mother's arms, and returned her tight hug with only a tinge of embarrassment. The boy had grown at least three centimeters in the past two months. When he turned to Miles, and copied the Count's handshake with dauntingly grown-up resolve, Miles found himself looking up into his stepson's face.
   A dozen armsmen and servants stood around grinning; Ma Kosti, the peerless cook, pressed a splendid bunch of flowers on Ekaterin. The Countess handed off an awkwardly worded but sincere message of felicitation for their impending parenthood from Miles's brother Mark, at graduate school on Beta Colony, and a rather more fluent one from his Grandmother Naismith there. Ekaterin's older brother, Will Vorvayne, unexpectedly present, took vids of it all.
   “Congratulations,” Viceroy Count Aral Vorkosigan was saying to Ekaterin, “on a job well done. Would you like another? I'm sure Gregor can find you a place in the diplomatic corps after this, if you want it.”
   She laughed. “I think I have at least three or four jobs already. Ask me again in, oh, say about twenty years.” Her glance went to the staircase leading to the upper floors, and the nursery.
   Countess Vorkosigan, who caught the look, said, “Everything is waiting and ready as soon as you are.”
   After the briefest of washups in their second-floor suite, Miles and Ekaterin made their way down a servitor-crowded hallway to rendezvous with the core family again in the nursery. With the addition of the birth team—an obstetrician, two medtechs, and a bio-mechanic—the small chamber overlooking the back garden was as full as it could hold. It seemed as public a birth as those poor monarchs' wives in the old histories had ever endured, except that Ekaterin had the advantage of being upright, dressed, and dignified. All of the cheerful excitement, none of the blood or pain or fear. Miles decided that he approved.
   The two replicators, released from their racks, stood side by side on a table, full of promise. A medtech was just finishing fiddling with a cannula on one. “Shall we proceed?” inquired the obstetrician.
   Miles glanced at his parents. “How did you all do this, back then?”
   “Aral lifted one latch,” said his mother, “and I lifted the other. Your grandfather, General Piotr, lurked menacingly, but he came around to a wider way of thinking later.” His mother and his father exchanged a private smile, and Aral Vorkosigan shook his head wryly.
   Miles looked to Ekaterin.
   “It sounds good to me,” she said. Her eyes were brilliant with joy. It lifted Miles's heart to think that he had given her that happiness.
   They advanced to the table. Ekaterin went around, and the techs scrambled out of her way; Miles hooked his cane over the edge, supported himself with one hand, and raised the other to match Ekaterin's. A double snap sounded from the latches. They moved down and repeated the gesture with the second replicator.
   “Good,” Ekaterin whispered.
   Then they had to stand out of the way, watching with irrational anxiety as the obstetrician popped the first lid, swept the exchange tube matting aside, slit the caul, and lifted the pink squirming infant out into the light. A few heart-stopping moments clearing air passages, draining and cutting the cord; Miles breathed again when little Aral Alexander did, and blinked his blurring lashes. He felt less self-conscious when he noticed his father wipe his eyes. Countess Vorkosigan gripped her skirts at her sides, forcibly making hungry grandmotherly hands wait their turn. The Count's hand on Nikki's shoulder tightened, and Nikki in his front-and-center viewpoint lifted his chin and grinned. Will Vorvayne bobbed around trying to get better vid angles, until his little sister put on her firmest Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan voice and quashed his attempts at stage directing. He looked startled, but backed off.
   By some tacit assumption, Ekaterin got first dibs. She held her new son and watched as the second replicator yielded up her very first daughter. Miles leaned on his cane at her elbow, his eyes devouring the astonishing sight. A baby. A real baby. His . He'd thought his children had seemed real enough, when he'd touched the replicators in which they grew. That was nothing like this. Little Aral Alexander was so small. He blinked and stretched. He breathed, actually breathed, and placidly smacked his tiny lips. He had a notable amount of black hair. It was wonderful. It was . . . terrifying.
   “Your turn,” said Ekaterin, smiling at Miles.
   “I . . . I think I'd better sit down, first.” He half-fell into an armchair brought hastily forward for him. Ekaterin tucked the blanket-wrapped bundle into his panicked arms. The Countess hovered over the back of the chair like some maternal vulture.
   “He seems so small.”
   “What, four point one kilos!” chortled Miles's mother. “He's a little bruiser, he is. You were half that size when you were taken out of the replicator.” She continued with an unflattering description of Miles at that moment that Ekaterin not only ate up, but encouraged .
   A lusty yowl from the replicator table made Miles start; he looked up eagerly. Helen Natalia announced her arrival in no uncertain terms, waving freed fists and howling. The obstetrician completed his examination and pressed her rather hastily into her mother's reaching arms. Miles stretched his neck. Helen Natalia's dark, wet wisps of hair were going to be as auburn as promised, he fancied, when they dried.
   With two babies to go around, all the people lined up to hold them would have their chances soon enough, Miles decided, accepting Helen Natalia, still making noise, from her grinning mother. They could wait a few more moments. He stared at the two bundles more than filling his lap in a kind of cosmic amazement.
   “We did it,” he muttered to Ekaterin, now perching on the chair arm. “Why didn't anybody stop us? Why aren't there more regulations about this sort of thing? What fool in their right mind would put me in charge of a baby? Two babies?”
   Her brows drew together in quizzical sympathy. “Don't feel bad. I'm sitting here thinking that eleven years suddenly seems longer that I realized. I don't remember anything about babies.”
   “I'm sure it'll all come back to you. Like, um, like flying a lightflyer.”
   He had been the end point of human evolution. At this moment he abruptly felt more like a missing link. I thought I knew everything. Surely I knew nothing. How had his own life become such a surprise to him, so utterly rearranged? His brain had whirled with a thousand plans for these tiny lives, visions of the future both hopeful and dire, funny and fearful. For a moment, it seemed to come to a full stop. I have no idea who these two people are going to be .
   Then it was everyone else's turn, Nikki, the Countess, the Count. Miles watched enviously his father's sure grip of the infant on his shoulder. Helen Natalia actually stopped screaming there, reducing the noise level to one of more generalized, desultory complaint.
   Ekaterin slipped her hand into his and gripped tightly. It felt like free falling into the future. He squeezed back, and soared.

Barrayar

Lois McMaster Bujold

CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
EPILOGUE
VORKOSIGAN SURLEAU—FIVE YEARS LATER.
AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD

Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar. Shards of Honor

   For Anne and Paul

CHAPTER ONE

   I am afraid. Cordelia's hand pushed aside the drape in the third-floor parlor window of Vorkosigan House. She stared down into the sunlit street below. A long silver groundcar was pulling into the half-circular drive that serviced the front portico, braking past the spiked iron fence and the Earth-imported shrubbery. A government car. The door of the rear passenger compartment swung up, and a man in a green uniform emerged. Despite her foreshortened view Cordelia recognized Commander Illyan, brown-haired and hatless as usual. He strode out of sight under the portico. Guess I don't really need to worry till Imperial Security comes for us in the middle of the night. But a residue of dread remained, burrowed in her belly. Why did I ever come here to Barrayar? What have I done to myself, to my life?
   Booted footsteps sounded in the corridor, and the door of the parlor creaked inward. Sergeant Bothari stuck his head in, and grunted with satisfaction at finding her. "Milady. Time to go."
   "Thank you, Sergeant." She let the drape fall, and turned to inspect herself one last time in a wall-mounted mirror above the archaic fireplace. Hard to believe people here still burned vegetable matter just for the release of its chemically-bound heat.
   She lifted her chin, above the stiff white lace collar of her blouse, adjusted the sleeves of her tan jacket, and kicked her knee absently against the long swirling skirt of a Vor-class woman, tan to match the jacket. The color comforted her, almost the same tan as her old Betan Astronomical Survey fatigues. She ran her hands over her red hair, parted in the middle and held away from her face by two enameled combs, and flopped it over her shoulders to curl loosely halfway down her back. Her grey eyes stared back at her from the pale face in the mirror. Nose a little too bony, chin a shade too long, but certainly a servicable face, good for all practical purposes.
   Well, if she wanted to look dainty, all she had to do was stand next to Sergeant Bothari. He loomed mournfully beside her, all two meters of him. Cordelia considered herself a tall woman, but the top of her head was only level with his shoulder. He had a gargoyle's face, closed, wary, beak-nosed, its lumpiness exaggerated to criminality by his military-burr haircut. Even Count Vorkosigan's elegant livery, dark brown with the symbols of the house embroidered in silver, failed to save Bothari from his astonishing ugliness. But a very good face indeed, for practical purposes.
   A liveried retainer. What a concept. What did he retain? Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honors, for starters. She nodded cordially to him, in the mirror, and about-faced to follow him through the warren of Vorkosigan House.
   She must learn her way around this great pile of a residence as soon as possible. Embarrassing, to be lost in one's own home, and have to ask some passing guard or servant to detangle one. In the middle of the night, wearing only a towel. I used to be a jumpship navigator. Really. If she could handle five dimensions upside, surely she ought to be able to manage a mere three downside.
   They came to the head of a large circular staircase, curving gracefully down three flights to a black-and-white stone-paved foyer. Her light steps followed Bothari's measured tread. Her skirts made her feel she was floating, parachuting inexorably down the spiral.
   A tall young man, leaning on a cane at the foot of the stairs, looked up at the echo of their feet. Lieutenant Koudelka's face was as regular and pleasant as Bothari's was narrow and strange, and he smiled openly at Cordelia. Even the pain lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth failed to age that face. He wore Imperial undress greens, identical but for the insignia to Security Commander Illyan's. The long sleeves and high neck of his jacket concealed the tracery of thin red scars that netted half his body, but Cordelia mapped them in her mind's eye. Nude, Koudelka could pose as a visual aid for a lecture on the structure of the human nervous system, each scar representing a dead nerve excised and replaced with artificial silver threads. Lieutenant Koudelka was not quite used to his new nervous system yet. Speak truth. The surgeons here are ignorant clumsy butchers. The work was certainly not up to Betan standards. Cordelia permitted no hint of this private judgment to escape onto her face.
   Koudelka turned jerkily, and nodded to Bothari. "Hello, Sergeant. Good morning, Lady Vorkosigan."
   Her new name still seemed strange in her ear, ill-fitting. She smiled back. "Good morning, Kou. Where's Aral?"
   "He and Commander Illyan went into the library, to check out where the new secured comconsole will be installed. They should be right along. Ah." He nodded, as footsteps sounded through an archway. Cordelia followed his gaze. Illyan, slight and bland and polite, flanked—was eclipsed by—a man in his mid-forties resplendent in Imperial dress greens. The reason she'd come to Barrayar.
   Admiral Lord Aral Vorkosigan, retired. Formerly retired, till yesterday. Their lives had surely been turned upside down, yesterday. We'll land on our feet somehow, you bet. Vorkosigan's body was stocky and powerful, his dark hair salted with grey. His heavy jaw was marred by an old L-shaped scar. He moved with compressed energy, his grey eyes intense and inward, until they lighted on Cordelia.
   "I give you good morrow, my lady," he sang out to her, reaching for her hand. The syntax was self-conscious but the sentiment naked-sincere in his mirror-bright eyes. In those mirrors, I am altogether beautiful, Cordelia realized warmly. Much more flattering than that one on the wall upstairs. I shall use them to see myself from now on. His thick hand was dry and hot, welcome heat, live heat, closing around her cool tapering fingers. My husband. That fit, as smoothly and tightly as her hand fit in his, even though her new name, Lady Vorkosigan, still seemed to slither off her shoulders.
   She watched Bothari, Koudelka, and Vorkosigan standing together for that brief moment. The walking wounded, one, two, three. And me, the lady auxiliary. The survivors. Kou in body, Bothari in mind, Vorkosigan in spirit, all had taken near-mortal wounds in the late war at Escobar. Life goes on. March or die. Do we all begin to recover at last? She hoped so.
   "Ready to go, dear Captain?" Vorkosigan asked her. His voice was a baritone, his Barrayaran accent guttural-warm.
   "Ready as I'll ever be, I guess."
   Illyan and Lieutenant Koudelka led the way out. Koudelka's walk was a loose-kneed shamble beside Illyan's brisk march, and Cordelia frowned doubtfully. She took Vorkosigan's arm, and they followed, leaving Bothari to his Household duties.
   "What's the timetable for the next few days?" she asked.
   "Well, this audience first, of course," Vorkosigan replied. "After which I see men. Count Vortala will be choreographing that. In a few days comes the vote of consent from the full Councils Assembled, and my swearing-in. We haven't had a Regent in a hundred and twenty years, God knows what protocol they'll dig out and dust off."
   Koudelka sat in the front compartment of the groundcar with the uniformed driver. Commander Illyan slid in opposite Cordelia and Vorkosigan, facing rearward, in the back compartment. This car is armored, Cordelia realized from the thickness of the transparent canopy as it closed over them. At a signal from Illyan to the driver, they pulled away smoothly into the street. Almost no sound penetrated from the outside.
   "Regent-consort," Cordelia tasted the phrase. "Is that my official title?"
   "Yes, Milady," said Illyan.
   "Does it have any official duties to go with it?"
   Illyan looked to Vorkosigan, who said, "Hm. Yes and no. There will be a lot of ceremonies to attend—grace, in your case. Beginning with the emperors funeral, which will be grueling for all concerned—except, perhaps, for Emperor Ezar. All that waits on his last breath. I don't know if he has a timetable for that, but I wouldn't put it past him.
   "The social side of your duties can be as much as you wish. Speeches and ceremonies, important weddings and name-days and funerals, greeting deputations from the Districts—public relations, in short. The sort of thing Princess-dowager Kareen does with such flair." Vorkosigan paused, taking in her appalled look, and added hastily, "Or, if you choose, you can live a completely private life. You have the perfect excuse to do so right now—" his hand, around her waist, secretly caressed her still-flat belly, "—and in fact I'd rather you didn't spend yourself too freely."
   "More importantly, on the political side ... I'd like it very much if you could be my liaison with the Princess-dowager, and the ... child emperor. Make friends with her, if you can; she's an extremely reserved woman. The boy's upbringing is vital. We must not repeat Ezar Vorbarra's mistakes."
   "I can give it a try," she sighed. "I can see it's going to be quite a job, passing for a Barrayaran Vor."
   "Don't bend yourself painfully. I shouldn't like to see you so constricted. Besides, there's another angle."
   "Why doesn't that surprise me? Go ahead."
   He paused, choosing his words. "When the late Crown Prince Serg called Count Vortala a phoney progressive, it wasn't altogether nonsense. Insults that sting always have some truth in them. Count Vortala has been trying to form his progressive party in the upper classes only. Among the people who matter, as he would say. You see the little discontinuity in his thinking?"
   "About the size of Hogarth Canyon back home? Yes."
   "You are a Betan, a woman of galactic-wide reputation."
   "Oh, come on now."
   "You are seen so here. I don't think you quite realize how you are perceived. Very flattering for me, as it happens."
   "I hoped I was invisible. But I shouldn't think I'd be too popular, after what we did to your side at Escobar."
   "It's our culture. My people will forgive a brave soldier almost anything. And you, in your person, unite two of the opposing factions—the aristocratic military, and the pro-galactic plebians. I really think I could pull the whole middle out of the People's Defense League through you, if you're willing to play my cards for me."
   "Good heavens. How long have you been thinking about this?"
   "The problem, long. You as part of the solution, just today."
   "What, casting me as figurehead for some sort of constitutional party?"
   "No, no. That is just the sort of thing I will be sworn, on my honor, to prevent. It would not fulfill the spirit of my oath to hand over to Prince Gregor an emperorship gutted of power. What I want ... what I want is to find some way of pulling the best men, from every class and language group and party, into the Emperor's service. The Vor have simply too small a pool of talent. Make the government more like the military at its best, with ability promoted regardless of background. Emperor Ezar tried to do something like that, by strengthening the Ministries at the expense of the Counts, but it swung too far.
   The Counts are eviscerated and the Ministries are corrupt. There must be some way to strike a balance."
   Cordelia sighed. "I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, about constitutions. Nobody appointed me Regent of Barrayar. I warn you, though—I'll keep trying to change your mind."
   Illyan raised his brow at this. Cordelia sat back wanly, and watched the Barrayaran capital city of Vorbarr Sultana pass by through the thick canopy. She hadn't married the Regent of Barrayar, four months back. She'd married a simple retired soldier. Yes, men were supposed to change after marriage, usually for the worse, but—this much? This fast? This isn't the duty I signed up for, sir.
   "That's quite a gesture of trust Emperor Ezar placed in you yesterday, appointing you Regent. I don't think he's such a ruthless pragmatist as you'd have me believe," she remarked.
   "Well, it is a gesture of trust, but driven by necessity. You didn't catch the significance of Captain Negri's assignment to the Princess's household, then."
   "No. Was there one?"
   "Oh, yes, a very clear message. Negri is to continue right on in his old job as Chief of Imperial Security. He will not, of course, be making his reports to a four-year-old boy, but to me. Commander Illyan will in fact merely be his assistant." Vorkosigan and Illyan exchanged mildly ironic nods. "But there is no question where Negri's loyalties will lie, in case I should, um, run mad and make a bid for Imperial power in name as well as fact. He unquestionably has secret orders to dispose of me, in that event."
   "Oh. Well, I guarantee I have no desire whatsoever to be Empress of Barrayar. Just in case you were wondering."
   "I didn't think so."
   The groundcar paused at a gate in a stone wall. Four guards inspected them thoroughly, checked Illyan's passes, and waved them through. All those guards, here, at Vorkosigan House—what did they guard against? Other Barrayarans, presumably, in the faction-fractured political landscape. A very Barrayaran phrase the old Count had used that tickled her humor now ran, disquieting, through her memory. With all this manure around, there's got to be a pony someplace. Horses were practically unknown on Beta Colony, except for a few specimens in zoos. With all these guards around ... But if I'm not anyone's enemy, how can anyone be my enemy?
   Illyan, who had been shifting in his seat, now spoke up. "I would suggest, sir," he said tentatively to Vorkosigan, "even beg, that you re-consider and take up quarters here at the Imperial Residence. Security problems—my problems," he smiled slightly, bad for his image, with his snub features it made him look puppyish, "will be very much easier to control here."
   "What suite did you have in mind?" asked Vorkosigan.
   "Well, when ... Gregor succeeds, he and his mother will be moving into the Emperor's suite. Kareen's rooms will then be vacant."
   "Prince Serg's, you mean." Vorkosigan looked grim. "I ... think I would prefer to take official residence at Vorkosigan House. My father spends more and more time in the country at Vorkosigan Surleau these days, I don't think he'll mind being shifted."
   "I can't really endorse that idea, sir. Strictly from a security standpoint. It's in the old part of town. The streets are warrens. There are at least three sets of old tunnels under the area, from old sewage and transport systems, and there are too many new tall buildings overlooking that have, er, commanding views. It will take at least six full-time patrols for the most cursory protection."
   "Do you have the men?"
   "Well, yes."
   "Vorkosigan House, then." Vorkosigan consoled Illyan's disappointed look. "It may be bad security, but it's very good public relations. It will give an excellent air of, ah, soldierly humility to the new Regency. Should help reduce palace coup paranoia."
   And here they were at the very palace in question. As an architectural pile, the Imperial Residence made Vorkosigan House look small. Sprawling wings rose two to four stories high, accented with sporadic towers. Additions of different ages crisscrossed each other to create both vast and intimate courts, some justly proportioned, some rather accidental-looking. The east facade was of the most uniform style, heavy with stone carving. The north side was more cut-up, interlocking with elaborate formal gardens. The west was the oldest, the south the newest construction.
   The groundcar pulled up to a two-story porch on the south side, and Illyan led them past more guards and up wide stone stairs to an extensive second-floor suite. They climbed slowly, matching steps to Lieutenant Koudelka's awkward pace. Koudelka glanced up with a self-conscious apologetic frown, then bent his head again in concentration—or shame? Doesn't this place have a lift tube? Cordelia wondered irritably. On the other side of this stone labyrinth, in a room with a northern view of the gardens, a white old man lay drained and dying on his enormous ancestral bed ...
   In the spacious upper corridor, softly carpeted and decorated with paintings and side tables cluttered with knickknacks—objets d'art, Cordelia supposed—they found Captain Negri talking in low tones with a woman who stood with her arms folded. Cordelia had met the famous, or infamous, Chief of Barrayaran Imperial Security for the first time yesterday, after Vorkosigan's historic job interview in the northern wing with the soon-to-be-late Ezar Vorbarra. Negri was a hard-faced, hard-bodied, bullet-headed man who had served his emperor, body and blood, for the better part of forty years, a sinister legend with unreadable eyes.
   Now he bowed over her hand and called her "Milady" as if he meant it, or at least no more tinged with irony than any of his other statements. The alert blonde woman—girl?—wore an ordinary civilian dress. She was tall and heavily muscled, and she looked back at Cordelia with even greater interest.
   Vorkosigan and Negri exchanged curt greetings in the telegraphic style of two men who had been communicating for so long all of the amenities had been compressed into some kind of tight-burst code. "And this is Miss Droushnakovi." Negri did not so much introduce as label the woman for Cordelia's benefit, with a wave of his hand.
   "And what's a Droushnakovi?" asked Cordelia lightly and somewhat desperately. Everybody always seemed to get briefed around here but her, though Negri had also failed to introduce Lieutenant Koudelka; Koudelka and Droushnakovi glanced covertly at each other.
   "I'm a Servant of the Inner Chamber, Milady." Droushnakovi gave her a ducking nod, half a curtsey. "And what do you serve? Besides the chamber."
   "Princess Kareen, Milady. That's just my official title. I'm listed on Captain Negri's staff budget as Bodyguard, Class One." It was hard to tell which title gave her the more pride and pleasure, but Cordelia suspected it was the latter.
   "I'm sure you must be good, to be so ranked by him."
   This won a smile, and a "Thank you, Milady. I try." They all followed Negri through a nearby door to a long, sunny yellow room with lots of south-facing windows. Cordelia wondered if the eclectic mix of furnishings were priceless antiques, or merely shabby seconds. She couldn't tell. A woman waited on a yellow silk settee at the far end, watching them gravely as they trooped toward her en masse.
   Princess-dowager Kareen was a thin, strained-looking woman of thirty with elaborately dressed, beautiful dark hair, though her grey gown was of a simple cut. Simple but perfect. A dark-haired boy of four or so was sprawled on the floor on his stomach muttering to his cat-sized toy stegosaurus, which muttered back. She made him get up and turn off the robot toy, and sit beside her, though his hands still clutched the leathery stuffed beast in his lap. Cordelia was relieved to see the boy prince was sensibly dressed for his age in comfortable-looking play clothes.
   In formal phrases, Negri introduced Cordelia to the princess and Prince Gregor. Cordelia wasn't sure whether to bow, curtsey, or salute, and ended up ducking her head rather like Droushnakovi. Gregor, solemn, stared at her most doubtfully, and she tried to smile back in what she hoped was a reassuring way.
   Vorkosigan went down on one knee in front of the boy—only Cordelia saw Aral swallow—and said, "Do you know who I am, Prince Gregor?"
   Gregor shrank a little against his mother's side, and glanced up at her. She nodded encouragement. "Lord Aral Vorkosigan," Gregor said in a thin voice.
   Vorkosigan gentled his tone, relaxed his hands, self-consciously trying to dampen his usual intensity. "Your grandfather has asked me to be your Regent. Has anybody explained to you what that means?"
   Gregor shook his head mutely; Vorkosigan quirked a brow at Negri, a whiff of censure. Negri did not change expression.
   "That means I will do your grandfathers job until you are old enough to do it yourself, when you turn twenty. The next sixteen years. I will look after you and your mother in your grandfather's place, and see that you get the education and training to do a good job, like your grandfather did. Good government."
   Did the kid even know yet what a government was? Vorkosigan had been careful not to say, in your father's place, Cordelia noted dryly. Careful not to mention Crown Prince Serg at all. Serg was well on his way to being disappeared from Barrayaran history, it seemed, as thoroughly as he had been vaporized in orbital battle.
   "For now," Vorkosigan continued, "your job is to study hard with your tutors and do what your mother tells you. Can you do that?"
   Gregor swallowed, nodded.
   "I think you can do well." Vorkosigan gave him a firm nod, identical to the ones he gave his staff officers, and rose.
   I think you can do well too, Aral, Cordelia thought.
   "While you are here, sir," Negri began after a short wait to be certain he wasn't stepping on some further word, "I wish you would come down to Ops. There are two or three reports I'd like to present. The latest from Darkoi seems to indicate that Count Vorlakail was dead before his Residence was burned, which throws a new light—or shadow—on that matter. And then there is the problem of revamping the Ministry of Political Education—"
   "Dismantling, surely," Vorkosigan muttered.
   "As may be. And, as ever, the latest sabotage from Komarr ..."
   "I get the picture. Let's go. Cordelia, ah ..."
   "Perhaps Lady Vorkosigan would care to stay and visit a while," Princess Kareen murmured on cue, with only a faint trace of irony.
   Vorkosigan shot her a look of gratitude. "Thank you, Milady."
   She absently stroked her fine lips with one finger, as all the men trooped out, relaxing slightly as they exited. "Good. I'd hoped to have you all to myself." Her expression grew more animated, as she regarded Cordelia. At a wordless touch, the boy slid off the bench and returned, with backward glances, to his play.
   Droushnakovi frowned down the room. "What was the matter with that lieutenant?" she asked Cordelia.
   "Lieutenant Koudelka was hit by nerve disruptor fire," Cordelia said stiffly, uncertain if the girl's odd tone concealed some land of disapproval. "A year ago, when he was serving Aral aboard the General Vorkraft. The neural repairs do not seem to be quite up to galactic standard." She shut her mouth, afraid of seeming to criticize her hostess. Not that Princess Kareen was responsible for Barrayar's dubious standards of medical practice.
   "Oh. Not during the Escobar war?" said Droushnakovi.
   "Actually, in a weird sense, it was the opening shot of the Escobar war. Though I suppose you would call it friendly fire." Mind-boggling oxymoron, that phrase.
   "Lady Vorkosigan—or should I say, Captain Naismith—was there," remarked Princess Kareen. "She should know."
   Cordelia found her expression hard to read. How many of Negri's famous reports was the princess privy to?
   "How terrible for him! He looks as though he had been very athletic," said the bodyguard.
   "He was." Cordelia smiled more favorably at the girl, relaxing her defensive hackles. "Nerve disruptors are filthy weapons, in my opinion." She scrubbed absently at the sense-dead spot on her thigh, disruptor-burned by no more than the nimbus of a blast that had fortunately not penetrated subcutaneous fat to damage muscle function. Clearly, she should have had it fixed before she'd left home.
   "Sit, Lady Vorkosigan." Princess Kareen patted the settee beside her, just vacated by the emperor-to-be. "Drou, will you please take Gregor to his lunch?"
   Droushnakovi nodded understandingly, as if she had received some coded underlayer to this simple request, gathered up the boy, and walked out hand in hand with him. His child-voice drifted back, "Droushie, can I have a cream cake? And one for Steggie?"
   Cordelia sat gingerly, thinking about Negri's reports, and Barrayaran disinformation about their recent aborted campaign to invade the planet Escobar. Escobar, Beta Colony's good neighbor and ally ... the weapons that had disintegrated Crown Prince Serg and his ship high above Escobar had been bravely convoyed through the Barrayaran blockade by one Captain Cordelia Naismith, Betan Expeditionary Force. That much truth was plain and public and not to be apologized for. It was the secret history, behind the scenes in the Barrayaran high command, that was so ... treacherous, Cordelia decided, was the precise word. Dangerous, like ill-stored toxic waste.
   To Cordelia's astonishment, Princess Kareen leaned over, took her right hand, lifted it to her lips, and kissed it hard.
   "I swore," said Kareen thickly, "that I would kiss the hand that slew Ges Vorrutyer. Thank you. Thank you." Her voice was breathy, earnest, tear-caught, grateful emotion naked in her face. She sat up, her face growing reserved again, and nodded. "Thank you. Bless you."
   "Uh ..." Cordelia rubbed at the kissed spot. "Um ... I ... this honor belongs to another, Milady. I was present, when Admiral Vorrutyer's throat was cut, but it was not by my hand."
   Kareen's hands clenched in her lap, and her eyes glowed. "Then it was Lord Vorkosigan!"
   "No!" Cordelias lips compressed in exasperation. "Negri should have given you the true report. It was Sergeant Bothari. Saved my life, at the time."
   "Bothari?" Kareen sat bolt upright in astonishment. "Bothari the monster, Bothari, Vorrutyer's mad batman?"
   "I don't mind getting blamed in his place, ma'am, because if it had become public they'd have been forced to execute him for murder and mutiny, and this gets him off and out. But I ... but I should not steal his praise. I'll pass it on to him if you wish, but I'm not sure he remembers the incident. He went through some draconian mind-therapy after the war, before they discharged him—what you Barrayarans call therapy"—on a par with their neurosurgery, Cordelia feared, "and I gather he wasn't exactly, uh, normal before that, either."
   "No," said Kareen. "He was not. I thought he was Vorrutyer's creature."
   "He chose ... he chose to be otherwise. I think it was the most heroic act I've ever witnessed. Out of the middle of that swamp of evil and insanity, to reach for ..." Cordelia trailed off, embarrassed to say, reach for redemption. After a pause she asked, "Do you blame Admiral Vorrutyer for Prince Serg's, uh, corruption?" As long as they were clearing the air ... Nobody mentions Prince Serg. He thought to take a bloody shortcut to the Imperium, and now he's just ... disappeared.
   "Ges Vorrutyer ..." Kareen's hands twisted, "found a like-minded friend in Serg. A fertile follower, in his vile amusements. Maybe not... all Vorrutyer's fault. I don't know."
   An honest answer, Cordelia sensed. Kareen added lowly, "Ezar protected me from Serg, after I became pregnant. I had not even seen my husband for over a year, when he was killed at Escobar."
   Perhaps I will not mention Prince Serg again either. "Ezar was a powerful protector. I hope Aral may do as well," Cordelia offered. Ought she to refer to Emperor Ezar in the past tense already? Everybody else seemed to.
   Kareen came back from some absence, and shook herself to focus. "Tea, Lady Vorkosigan?" She smiled. She touched a comm link, concealed in a jeweled pin on her shoulder, and gave domestic orders. Apparently the private interview was over. Captain Naismith must now try to figure out how Lady Vorkosigan should take tea with a princess.
   Gregor and the bodyguard reappeared about the time the cream cakes were being served, and Gregor set about successfully charming the ladies for a second helping. Kareen drew the line firmly at thirds. Prince Serg's son seemed an utterly normal boy, if quiet around strangers. Cordelia watched him with Kareen with deep personal interest. Motherhood. Everybody did it. How hard could it be?
   "How do you like your new home so far, Lady Vorkosigan?" the princess inquired, making polite conversation. Tea-table stuff; no naked faces now. Not in front of the children.
   Cordelia thought it over. "The country place, south at Vorkosigan Surleau, is just beautiful. That wonderful lake—it's bigger than any open body of water on the whole of Beta Colony, yet Aral just takes it for granted. Your planet is beautiful beyond measure." Your planet. Not my planet? In a free-association test, "home" still triggered "Beta Colony" in Cordelia's mind. Yet she could have rested in Vorkosigan's arms by the lake forever.
   "The capital here—well, it's certainly more varied than anything we have at ho—on Beta Colony. Although," she laughed self-consciously, "there seem to be so many soldiers. Last time I was surrounded by that many green uniforms, I was in a POW camp."
   "Do we still look like the enemy to you?" asked the princess curiously.
   "Oh—you all stopped looking like the enemy to me even before the war was over. Just assorted victims, variously blind."
   "You have penetrating eyes, Lady Vorkosigan." The princess sipped tea, smiling into her cup. Cordelia blinked.
   "Vorkosigan House does tend to a barracks atmosphere, when Count Piotr is in residence," Cordelia commented. "All his liveried men. I think I've seen a couple of women servants so far, whisking around corners, but I haven't caught one yet. A Barrayaran barracks, that is. My Betan service was a different sort of thing."
   "Mixed," said Droushnakovi. Was that the light of envy in her eyes? "Women and men both serving."
   "Assignment by aptitude test," Cordelia agreed. "Strictly. Of course the more physical jobs are skewed to the men, but there doesn't seem to be that strange obsessive status-thing attached to them."
   "Respect," sighed Droushnakovi.
   "Well, if people are laying their lives on the line for their community, they ought certainly to get its respect," Cordelia said equably. "I do miss my—my sister-officers, I guess. The bright women, the techs, like my pool of friends at home." There was that tricky word again, home. "There have to be bright women around here somewhere, with all these bright men. Where are they hiding?" Cordelia shut her mouth, as it suddenly occurred to her that Kareen might mistakenly construe this remark as a slur on herself. Adding present company excepted would put her foot in it for sure, though.
   But if Kareen so construed, she kept it to herself, and Cordelia was rescued from further potential social embarrassment by the return of Aral and Illyan. They all made polite farewells, and returned to Vorkosigan House.
   That evening Commander Illyan popped in to Vorkosigan House with Droushnakovi in tow. She clutched a large valise, and gazed about her with starry-eyed interest.
   "Captain Negri is assigning Miss Droushnakovi to the Regent-consort for her personal security," Illyan explained briefly. Aral nodded approval.
   Later, Droushnakovi handed Cordelia a sealed note on thick cream paper. Brows rising, Cordelia broke it open. The handwriting was small and neat, the signature legible and without flourishes.
   With my compliments, it read. She will suit you well. Kareen.