AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD

   I was asked by my publisher if I would like to contribute a preface to Cordelia's Honor. Upon reflection, I decided I'd rather write an afterword. For one thing, it was a horrifying thought that anything at all should further delay new readers from meeting my characters; secondly, discursive comments about a book make ever so much more sense after people have read it.
   I'd like to thank Baen Books for this combined edition of Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Here at last in one set of covers is the whole story arc, very much as I originally conceived its shape, if not its details. As a longtime series reader, and now writer, I'm very aware of the pitfalls of what I've come to believe is another story form, as distinct from the novel as the novel is from the short story. A proper series in this sense is neither an extension of the novel (as in the multi-volume single story) nor a replication (as when essentially the same story is told over and over, cookie-cutter fashion), but another animal altogether, with its own internal demands. In addition, one must assume that readers, as I did when reading my own favorite series, will encounter the books in utterly random order. Therefore each series novel must simultaneously be a complete tale in itself, and uphold its unique place in the growing structure; it must be two books at once. The understructure must be global and timeless as well as linear and sequential. The series landscape must satisfy its readers regardless of what direction they chance to travel through it, or how often.
   I had no more idea of all this when I started writing the Vorkosigan series than I had of what my own life would be like when I started living it. A brief history of how I came to write these two books may illustrate both.
   I began what was to become Shards of Honor in December of 1982. Inspired by the example of a new-writer friend, and by the economic pressures of the rust-belt Midwest town in which I was living, I set out to Write A Novel. My writing career has been on-the-job training throughout, and this was no exception; my only plan of how to structure my material was to plant an eavesdropping device in my main character's brain and follow her through her first weeks of action. This brought Cordelia and me to the end of what later became the first section of Shards. (It then had the working title of Mirrors.) I now had in hand a messy first draft of about a hundred pages of narrative, with no chapter breaks, that clearly wasn't long enough to be a novel. I paused briefly, flirted with a really bad scenario about a convenient alien invasion that would force Barrayar and Beta to ally, decided "Why should I make things easy on my characters?", and plunged on to the much better and more inherent idea of the Escobar invasion, thus accidentally discovering my first application of the rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask "So what's the worst possible thing I can do to this guy?" And then do it.
   Thus I already knew, at this early date, that Aral and Cordelia would have a physically handicapped son in Barrayar's intensely militaristic culture, though I did not yet know how it would come about. Though I was not really aware of it when I was writing Chapter One, Ensign Dubauer is clearly the first statement of this theme. I had a toddler myself at that time, and I thought of the injured ensign as a 180-pound one-year-old, and amused myself putting Aral and Cordelia through reflections of my own harried parental tribulations—which incidentally allowed them to unconsciously scope each other out as potential parents. The birth of a child is the proper climax, after all, of any romance that starts out "boy meets girl," if the romance is not falsely truncated. So I knew even then that the end of the story should be Miles's birth.
   I wrote industriously through the spring and early summer of 1983. The book had now acquired the opposite problem from that of mid-winter, of being too short; it was now getting longer, but not getting any closer to the end. (I've experienced that phenomenon subsequently on other books, one of which managed to stay three chapters from the end for at least five chapters straight, so now it doesn't daunt me so much.) Since it was apparent that this really was going to be a book, and not just another false start in life, marketing considerations began to come into play. Editors' slush piles of unsolicited manuscripts from unknowns were enormous, I was told; a thinner book had a better chance of being read first than a fat one. Besides, new characters with entire attached subplots were arriving on page 378, all demanding development at length, my internal clue that I had overshot the end and was already into the sequel, unless this was going to be a multi-volume novel as fat as a major fantasy trilogy.
   The last scene I wrote back in '83 before making the decision to go back and cut it short was Cordelia's conversation with Dr. Vaagen; the introduction of Droushnakovi, Koudelka's swordstick and depression, Cordelia's first encounters with Barrayaran culture, with Padma and Alys, with the Vorhalas clan, and the soltoxin attack were already written then. I did not yet have the ideas for the war of Vordarian's Pretendership; the action-plot upon which all this good stuff then hung was much weaker, making the decision to stop easier, if still a little heartbreaking.
   With much labor, and a lot of help from writer-friends, I revised and put Mirrors into proper submission format. I then went on to write the book which became The Warrior's Apprentice (which, for you fellow Dumas fans out there, I thought of for a while as Twenty Years After, though it opens seventeen years after the events of Shards). Though I hoped to develop a series, I didn't dare count on it; series books might float together, but they also can sink together, and I wanted to make sure each novel had its own lifeboat. So the each-book-independent format, which I later came to regard as a Really Good Artistic Idea, began as a mere survival plan. Mirrors came back rejected from its first submission when I was about halfway through Warrior's, with an editorial suggestion that I tighten it; I set it aside till the second book was finished, then turned my attention to one last edit, cutting altogether about 80 pages, mostly in sentence or paragraph lengths. It was a good learning experience; I've written more tightly ever since, and no, there isn't much of it I'd put back now if I could. Trust me on this one. In the late summer of '85, about the time I was finishing Ethan of Athos, Warrior's made it in over the transom at Baen Books, and I was abruptly elevated from slush-pile wannabe to real author with three completed books sold. The re-titled Shards of Honor was published in June of 1986, allowing my father to see the finished book just six weeks before he died.
   Having captured a publisher at last, I went on to write Falling Free, which was serialized in Analog magazine, and won me my first Nebula Award, for best SF novel of 1988. Brothers in Arms, Borders of Infinity, and The Vor Game followed, as the ever-lively Miles proceeded to take over his surroundings as usual. About this time—summer of 1989—Philcon, a long-established science fiction convention in Philadelphia, invited me to be a writer guest. Their program-book editor asked me for a short story or outtake to donate for their program book. I hadn't written a short story since 1986, but I thought of the soltoxin scene, reasoned that enough readers were familiar with Miles by this time to make it interesting in its own right, and took myself to my overheated attic to find the box with the old drafts. Leafing through the carbons (Shards/Mirrors was written in my old typewriter days, pre-word-processor), I was caught again by my own story, and the desire to finish it grew. It ought to be easy and quick, I reasoned; it was already a third written, after all.
   Jim Baen was at first a little nonplussed to be offered a sequel to my then-least-selling novel, but we struck deals that fall for Barrayar, for a fantasy novel I'd long wanted to write, and also for a blank Miles book, contents to be announced by me later. (That one turned out to be Mirror Dance, which won my third best-novel Hugo.)
   Still under the happy illusion about the "easy and quick" part (Hah. Novels never are. Never.), I started Barrayar, with the unenticing working title of Shardssequel. I wrote a new opening chapter, to reintroduce the characters and situation for new readers, cut and fit most of the old material into its new frame, and began the story again as Count Piotr argued with Cordelia and Captain Negri expired on the lawn at Vorkosigan Surleau. From that point on, the tale ran on its own legs, and turned into something I didn't expect. It turned into the book it always should have been, a real book, where plot, character, and theme all worked together to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. It turned out to be about something, beyond itself. It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.
   Shards/Barrayar, as it finally evolved, became a book about the price of becoming a parent, particularly but not exclusively a mother. Not just Aral and Cordelia, but all the other supporting couples took up and played their symphonic variations on the theme, exploring its complexities: Kou and Drou, Padma and Alys, Piotr and his dead wife, Vordarian and Serg and Kareen, and most strangely and finally, Bothari and the uterine replicator.
   All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe—if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again. Cordelia undergoes such a fearsome transformation, at the climax of Barrayar laying down everything about her old persona, even her cherished Betan principles, to bring her child to life.
   Shards and Barrayar between them contain most of what I presently have to say about being a mother; it's not by chance that Barrayar was dedicated to my children, who were my teachers in learning about this part of becoming human. Further explorations on this theme will almost certainly not return to Cordelia, but take a new start-point, though Cordelia may yet have a word to say on other topics. Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished. It's not something you do once for all. Miles and his family and friends have become my vehicle for exploring identity, in what promises to be a continuing fascination. I have not come to the end of that story yet, nor will I, till I stop learning new things about what it takes to be human.

Mirror Dance

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
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Lois McMaster Bujold
Mirror Dance

CHAPTER ONE

   The row of comconsole booths lining the passenger concourse of Escobar's largest commercial orbital transfer station had mirrored doors, divided into diagonal sections by rainbow-colored lines of lights. Doubtless someone's idea of decor. The mirror-sections were deliberately set slightly out of alignment, fragmenting their reflections. The short man in the grey and white military uniform scowled at his divided self framed therein.
   His image scowled back. The insignia-less mercenary officer's undress kit_pocketed jacket, loose trousers tucked into ankle-topping boots_was correct in every detail. He studied the body under the uniform. A stretched-out dwarf with a twisted spine, short-necked, big-headed. Subtly deformed, and robbed by his short stature of any chance of the disturbing near-rightness passing unnoticed. His dark hair was neatly trimmed. Beneath black brows, the grey eyes' glower deepened. The body, too, was correct in every detail. He hated it.
   The mirrored door slid up at last, and a woman exited the booth. She wore a soft wrap tunic and flowing trousers. A fashionable bandolier of expensive electronic equipment hanging decoratively on a jeweled chain across her torso advertised her status. Her beginning stride was arrested at the sight of him, and she recoiled, buffeted by his black and hollow stare, then went carefully around him with a mumbled, "Excuse me . . . I'm sorry. ..."
   He belatedly twisted up his mouth on an imitation smile, and muttered something half-inaudible conveying enough allegiance to the social proprieties for him to pass by. He hit the keypad to lower the door again, sealing himself from sight. Alone– at last, for one last moment, if only in the narrow confines of a commercial comm booth. The woman's perfume lingered cloyingly in the air, along with a frisson of station odors; recycled air, food, bodies, stress, plastics and metals and cleaning compounds. He exhaled, and sat, and laid his hands out flat on the small countertop to still their trembling.
   Not quite alone. There was another damned mirror in here, for the convenience of patrons wishing to check their appearance before transmitting it by holovid. His dark-ringed eyes flashed back at him malevolently, then he ignored the image. He emptied his pockets out onto the countertop. All his worldly resources fit neatly into a space little larger than his two spread palms. One last inventory. As if counting it again might change the sum . . .
   A credit chit with about three hundred Betan dollars remaining upon it: one might live well for a week upon this orbital space station for that much, or for a couple of lean months on the planet turning below, if it were carefully managed. Three false identification chits, none for the man he was now. None for the man he was. Whoever he was. An ordinary plastic pocket comb. A data cube. That was all. He returned all but the credit chit to various pockets upon and in the jacket, gravely sorting them individually. He ran out of objects before he ran out of pockets, and snorted. You might at least have brought your own toothbrush . . . too late now.
   And getting later. Horrors happened, proceeding unchecked, while he sat struggling for nerve. Come on. You've done this before. You can do it now. He jammed the credit card into the slot, and keyed in the carefully memorized code number. Compulsively, he glanced one last time into the mirror, and tried to smooth his features into something approaching a neutral expression. For all his practice, he did not think he could manage the grin just now. He despised that grin anyway.
   The vid plate hissed to life, and a woman's visage formed above it. She wore grey-and-whites like his own, but with proper rank insignia and name patch. She recited crisply, "Comm Officer Hereld, Triumph, Dendarii Free . . . Corporation." In Escobaran space, a mercenary fleet sealed its weapons at the Outside jumppoint station under the watchful eyes of the Escobaran military inspectors, and submitted proof of its purely commercial intentions, before it was even allowed to pass. The polite fiction was maintained, apparently, in Escobar orbit.
   He moistened his lips, and said evenly, "Connect me with the officer of the watch, please."
   "Admiral Naismith, sir! You're back!" Even over the holovid a blast of pleasure and excitement washed out from her straightened posture and beaming face. It struck him like a blow. "What's up? Are we going to be moving out soon?"
   "In good time, Lieutenant . . . Hereld." An apt name for a communications officer. He managed to twitch a smile. Admiral Naismith would smile, yes. "You'll learn in good time. In the meanwhile, I want a pick-up at the orbital transfer station."
   "Yes, sir. I can get that for you. Is Captain Quinn with you?"
   "Uh . . . no."
   "When will she be following?"
   ". . . Later."
   "Right, sir. Let me just get clearance for_are we loading any equipment?"
   "No. Just myself."
   "Clearance from the Escobarans for a personnel pod, then ..." she turned aside for a few moments. "I can have someone at docking bay E17 in about twenty minutes."
   "Very well." It would take him almost that long to get from this concourse to that arm of the station. Ought he to add some personal word for Lieutenant Hereld? She knew him; how well did she know him? Every sentence that fell from his lips from this point on packed risk, risk of the unknown, risk of a mistake. Mistakes were punished. Was his Betan accent really right? He hated this, with a stomach-churning terror. "I want to be transferred directly to the Ariel."
   "Right, sir. Do you wish me to notify Captain Thorne?"
   Was Admiral Naismith often in the habit of springing surprise inspections? Well, not this time. "Yes, do. Tell them to make ready to break orbit."
   "Only the Ariel?" Her brows rose.
   "Yes, Lieutenant." This, in quite a perfect bored Betan drawl. He congratulated himself as she grew palpably prim. The undertone had suggested just the right hint of criticism of a breach of security, or manners, or both, to suppress further dangerous questions.
   "Will do, Admiral."
   "Naismith out." He cut the comm. She vanished in a haze of sparkles, and he let out a long breath. Admiral Naismith. Miles Naismith. He had to get used to responding to that name again, even in his sleep. Leave the Lord Vorkosigan part completely out of it, for now; it was difficult enough just being the Naismith half of the man. Drill. What is your name? Miles. Miles. Miles.
   Lord Vorkosigan pretended to be Admiral Naismith. And so did he. What, after all, was the difference?
   But what is your name really?
   His vision darkened in a rush of despair, and rage. He blinked it back, controlling his breathing. My name is what I will. And right now I will it to be Miles Naismith.
   He exited the booth and strode down the concourse, short legs pumping, both riveting and repelling the sideways stares of startled strangers. See Miles. See Miles run. See Miles get what he deserves. He marched head-down, and no one got in his way.
   He ducked into the personnel pod, a tiny four-man shuttle, as soon as the hatch seal sensors blinked green and the door dilated. He hit the keypad for it to close again behind him immediately. The pod was too little to maintain a grav field. He floated over the seats and pulled himself carefully down into the one beside the lone pilot, a mail in Dendarii grey tech coveralls.
   "All right. Let's go."
   The pilot grinned and sketched him a salute as he strapped in. Otherwise appearing to be a sensible adult male, he had the same look on his face as the comm officer, Hereld; excited, breathless, watching eagerly, as if his passenger were about to pull treats from his pockets.
   He glanced over his shoulder as the pod obediently broke free of the docking clamps and turned. They swooped away from the skin of the station into clear space. The traffic control patterns made a maze of colored lights on the navigation console, through which the pilot swiftly threaded them.
   "Good to see you back, Admiral," said the pilot as soon as the tangle grew less thick. "What's happening?"
   The edge of formality in the pilot's tone was reassuring. Just a comrade in arms, not one of the Dear Old Friends, or worse, Dear Old Lovers. He essayed an evasion. "When you need to know, you'll be told." He made his tone affable, but avoided names or ranks.
   The pilot vented an intrigued "Hm," and smirked, apparently contented.
   He settled back with a tight smile. The huge transfer station fell away silently behind them, shrinking into a mad child's toy, then into a few glints of light. "Excuse me. I'm a little tired." He settled down further into his seat and closed his eyes. "Wake me up when we dock, if I fall asleep."
   "Yes, sir," said the pilot respectfully. "You look like you could use it."
   He acknowledged this with a tired wave of his hand, and pretended to doze.
   He could always tell, instantly, when someone he met thought they were facing "Naismith." They all had that same stupid hyper-alert glow in their faces. They weren't all worshipful; he'd met some of Naismith's enemies once, but worshipful or homicidal, they reacted. As if they suddenly switched on, and became ten times more alive than ever before. How the hell did he do it? Make people light up like that? Granted, Naismith was a goddamn hyperactive, but how did he make it so freaking contagious?
   Strangers who met him as himself did not greet him like that. They were blank and courteous, or blank and rude, or just blank, closed and indifferent. Covertly uncomfortable with his slight deformities, and his obviously abnormal four-foot-nine-inch height. Wary.
   His resentment boiled up behind his eyes like sinus pain. All this bloody hero-worship, or whatever it was. All for Naismith. For Naismith, and not for me . . . never for me. . . .
   He stifled a twinge of dread, knowing what he was about to face. Bel Thorne, the Ariel's captain, would be another one. Friend, officer, fellow Betan, yes, a tough test, well enough. But Thorne also knew of the existence of the clone, from that chaotic encounter two years ago on Earth. They had never met face to face. But a mistake that another Dendarii might dismiss in confusion could trigger in Thorne the suspicion, the wild surmise. . . .
   Even that distinction Naismith had stolen from him. The mercenary admiral, publicly and falsely, now claimed to be a clone himself. A superior cover, concealing his other identity, his other life. You have two lives, he thought to his absent enemy. I have none. I'm the real done, damn it. Couldn't I have even that uniqueness? Did you have to take it all?
   No. Keep his thoughts positive. He could handle Thorne. As long as he could avoid the terrifying Quinn, the bodyguard, the lover, Quinn. He had met Quinn face to face on Earth, and fooled her once, for a whole morning. Not twice, he didn't think. But Quinn was with the real Miles Naismith, stuck like glue; he was safe from her. No old lovers this trip.
   He'd never had a lover, not yet. It was perhaps not quite fair to blame Naismith for that as well. For the first twenty years of his life he had been in effect a prisoner, though he hadn't always realized it. For the last two . . . the last two years had been one continuous disaster, he decided bitterly. This was his last chance. He refused to think beyond. No more. This had to be made to work.
   The pilot stirred, beside him, and he slitted open his eyes as the deceleration pressed him against his seat straps. They were coming up on the Ariel. It grew from a dot to a model to a ship. The Illyrican-built light cruiser carried a crew of twenty, plus room for supercargo and a commando squad. Heavily powered for its size, an energy profile typical of warships. It looked swift, almost rakish. A good courier ship; a good ship to run like hell in. Perfect. Despite his black mood, his lips curled up, as he studied that ship. Now I take, and you give, Naismith.
   The pilot, clearly quite conscious that he was conveying his admiral, brought the personnel pod into its docking clamps with a bare click, eat and smooth as humanly possible. "Shall I wait, sir?"
   "No. I shouldn't be needing you again."
   The pilot hurried to adjust the tube seals while his passenger was till unbuckling, and saluted him out with another idiot broad proud mile. He twitched a returning smile and salute, then grasped the handlebars above the hatch and swung himself into the Ariel's gravity ield.
   He dropped neatly to his feet in a small loading bay. Behind him, he pod pilot was already re-sealing the hatch to return himself and iis pod to its vessel of origin, probably the flagship Triumph. He looked up _ always, up _ into the face of the waiting Dendarii officer, face he had studied before this only in a holovid.
   Captain Bel Thorne was a Betan hermaphrodite, a race that was remnant of an early experiment in human genetic and social engineering that had succeeded only in creating another minority. "home's beardless face was framed by soft brown hair in a short, ambiguous cut that either a man or a woman might sport. Its officer's jacket hung open, revealing the black tee shirt underneath curving over modest but distinctly feminine breasts. The gray Dendarii uniform trousers were loose enough to disguise the reciprocal bulge in he crotch. Some people found hermaphrodites enormously disturbing. he was relieved to realize he found that aspect of Thorne only slightly disconcerting. Clones who live in glass houses shouldn't throw . . . what? It was the radiant I-love-Naismith look on the hermaphrodite's face that really bothered him. His gut knotted, as he returned the Ariel's captain's salute.
   "Welcome aboard, sir!" The alto voice was vibrant with enthusiasm.
   He was just managing a stiff smile, when the hermaphrodite stepped up and embraced him. His heart lurched, and he barely choked off a cry and a violent, defensive lashing-out. He endured he embrace without going rigid, grasping mentally after shattered composure and his carefully rehearsed speeches. It's not going to kiss me, is it?!
   The hermaphrodite set him at arm's length, hands familiarly upon his shoulders, without doing so, however. He breathed relief. Thorne cocked its head, its lips twisting in puzzlement. "What's wrong, Miles?"
   First names? "Sorry, Bel. I'm just a little tired. Can we get right to the briefing?"
   You look a lot tired. Right. Do you want me to assemble the whole crew?"
   No . . . you can re-brief them as needed." That was the plan, as little direct contact with as few Dendarii as possible.
   "Come to my cabin, then, and you can put your feet up and drink tea while we talk."
   The hermaphrodite followed him into the corridor. Not knowing which direction to turn, he wheeled and waited as if politely for Thorne to lead on. He trailed the Dendarii officer through a couple of twists and turns and up a level. The ship's internal architecture was not as cramped as he'd expected. He noted directions carefully. Naismith knew this ship well.
   The Ariel's captain's cabin was a neat little chamber, soldierly, not revealing much on this side of the latched cupboard doors about the personality of its owner. But Thorne unlatched one to display an antique ceramic tea set and a couple of dozen small canisters of varietal teas of Earth and other planetary origins, all protected from breakage by custom-made foam packing. "What kind?" Thorne called, its hand hovering over the canisters.
   "The usual," he replied, easing into a station chair clamped to the floor beside a small table.
   "Might have guessed. I swear I'll train you to be more venturesome one of these days." Thorne shot a peculiar grin over its shoulder at him_was that intended to be some sort of double entendre? After a bit more rattling about, Thorne placed a delicately hand-painted porcelain cup and saucer upon the table at his elbow. He picked it up and sipped cautiously as Thorne hooked another chair into its clamps a quarter turn around the table, produced a cup for itself, and sat with a small grunt of satisfaction.
   He was relieved to find the hot amber liquid pleasant, if astringent. Sugar? He dared not ask. Thorne hadn't put any out. The Dendarii surely would have, if it expected Naismith to use sugar. Thorne couldn't be making some subtle test already, could it? No sugar, then.
   Tea-drinking mercenaries. The beverage didn't seem nearly poisonous enough, somehow, to go with the display, no, working arsenal, of weapons clamped to the wall: a couple of stunners, a needier, a plasma arc, a gleaming metal crossbow with an assortment of grenade-bolts in a bandolier hung with it. Thorne was supposed to be good at its job. If that was true, he didn't care what the creature drank.
   "You're in a black study. I take it you've brought us a lovely one this time, eh?" Thorne prodded after another moment's silence.
   "The mission assignment, yes." He certainly hoped that was what Thorne meant. The hermaphrodite nodded, and raised its brows in encouraging inquiry. "It's a pick-up. Not the biggest one we've ever attempted, by any means_"
   Thorne laughed.
   "But with its own complications."
   "It can't possibly be any more complicated than Dagoola Four. Say on, oh do."
   He rubbed his lips, a patented Naismith gesture. "We're going to knock over House Bharaputra's clone creche, on Jackson's Whole. Clean it out."
   Thorne was just crossing its legs; both feet now hit the floor with a thump. "Kill them?" it said in a startled voice.
   "The clones? No, rescue them! Rescue them all."
   "Oh. Whew." Thorne looked distinctively relieved. "I had this horrible vision for a second_they are children, after all. Even if they are clones."
   "Just exactly so." A real smile tugged up the corners of his mouth, surprising him. "I'm . . . glad you see it that way."
   "How else?" Thorne shrugged. "The clone brain-transplant business is the most monstrous, obscene practice in Bharaputra's whole catalog of slime services. Unless there's something even worse I haven't heard about yet."
   "I think so too." He settled back, concealing his startlement at this instant endorsement of his scheme. Was Thorne sincere? He knew intimately, none better, the hidden horrors behind the clone business on Jackson's Whole. He'd lived through them. He had not expected someone who had not shared his experiences to share his judgment, though.
   House Bharaputra's specialty was not, strictly speaking, cloning. It was the immortality business, or at any rate, the life extension business. And a very lucrative business it was, for what price could one put on life itself? All the market would bear. The procedure Bharaputra sold was medically risky, not ideal . . . wagered only against a certainty of imminent death by customers who were wealthy, ruthless, and, he had to admit, possessed of unusual cool foresight.
   The arrangement was simple, though the surgical procedure upon which it was based was fiendishly complex. A clone was grown from a customer's somatic cell, gestated in a uterine replicator and then raised to physical maturity in Bharaputra's creche, a sort of astonishingly-appointed orphanage. The clones were valuable, after all, their physical conditioning and health of supreme importance. Then, when the time was right, they were cannibalized. In an operation that claimed a total success rate of rather less than one hundred percent, the clone's progenitor's brain was transplanted from its aged or damaged body into a duplicate still in the first bloom of youth. The clone's brain was classified as medical waste.
   The procedure was illegal on every planet in the wormhole nexus except Jackson's Whole. That was fine with the criminal Houses that ran the place. It gave them a nice monopoly, a steady business with lots of practice upon the stream of wealthy off-worlders to keep their surgical teams at the top of their forms. As far as he had ever been able to tell, the attitude of the rest of the worlds toward it all was out of sight, out of mind." The spark of sympathetic, righteous anger in Thorne's eyes touched him on a level of pain so numb with use he was scarcely conscious of it any more, and he was appalled to realize he was a heartbeat away from bursting into tears. It's probably a trick. He blew out his breath, another Naismith-ism.
   Thorne's brows drew down in intense thought. "Are you sure we should be taking the Ariel? Last I heard,Baron Ryoval was still alive. It's bound to get his attention."
   House Ryoval was one of Bharaputra's minor rivals in the illegal medical end of things. Its specialty was manufacturing genetically-engineered or surgically sculptured humans for any purpose, including sexual, in effect slaves made-to-order; evil, he supposed, but not the killing evil that obsessed him. But what had the Ariel to do with Baron Ryoval? He hadn't a clue. Let Thorne worry about it. Perhaps the hermaphrodite would drop more information later. He reminded himself to seize the first opportunity to review the ship's mission logs.
   "This mission has nothing to do with House Ryoval. We shall avoid them."
   "So I hope," agreed Thorne fervently. It paused, thoughtfully sipping tea. "Now, despite the fact that Jackson's Whole is long overdue for a housecleaning, preferably with atomics, I presume we are not doing this just out of the goodness of our hearts. What's, ah, the mission behind the mission this time?"
   He had a rehearsed answer for that one. "In fact, only one of the clones, or rather, one of its progenitors, is of interest to our employer. The rest are to be camouflage. Among them, Bharaputra's customers have a lot of enemies. They won't know which one is attacking who. It makes our employer's identity, which they very much desire to keep secret, all the more secure."
   Thorne grinned smugly. "That little refinement was your idea, I take it."
   He shrugged. "In a sense."
   "Hadn't we better know which clone we're after, to prevent accidents, or in case we have to cut and run? If our employer wants it alive_or does it matter to them if the clone is alive or dead? If the real target is the old bugger who had it grown."
   "They care. Alive. But . . . for practical purposes, let us assume that all the clones are the one we're after."
   Thorne spread its hands in acquiescence. "It's all right by me." The hermaphrodite's eyes glinted with enthusiasm, and it suddenly smacked its fist into its palm with a crack that made him jump. "It's about time someone took those Jacksonian bastards on! Oh, this is going to be fun!" It bared its teeth in a most alarming grin. "How much help do we have lined up on Jackson's Whole? Safety nets?"
   "Don't count on any."
   "Hm. How much hindrance? Besides Bharaputra, Ryoval, and Fell, of course."
   House Fell dealt mainly in weapons. What had Fell to do with any of this? "Your guess is as good as mine."
   Thorne frowned; that was not the usual sort of Naismith answer, apparently.
   "I have a great deal of inside information about the creche, that I can brief you on once we're en route. Look, Bel, you hardly need me to tell you how to do your job at this late date. I trust you. Take over the logistics and planning, and I'll check the finals."
   Thorne's spine straightened. "Right. How many kids are we talking about?"
   "Bharaputra does about one of these transplants a week, on average. Fifty a year, say, that they have coming along. The last year of the clones' lives they move them to a special facility near House headquarters, for final conditioning. I want to take the whole year's supply from that facility. Fifty or sixty kids."
   "All packed aboard the Ariel? It'll be tight."
   "Speed, Bel, speed."
   "Yeah. I think you're right. Timetable?"
   "As soon as possible. Every week's delay costs another innocent life." He'd measured out the last two years by that clock. I have wasted a hundred lives so far. The journey from Earth to Escobar alone had cost him a thousand Betan dollars and four dead clones.
   "I get it," said Thorne grimly, and rose and put away its tea cup. It switched its chair to the clamps in front of its comconsole. "That kid's slated for surgery, isn't it."
   "Yes. And if not that one, a creche-mate."
   Thorne began tapping keypads. "What about funds? That is your department."
   "This mission is cash on delivery. Draw your estimated needs from Fleet funds."
   "Right. Put your palm over here and authorize my withdrawal, then." Thorne held out a sensor pad.
   Without hesitation, he laid his palm flat upon it. To his horror, the red no-recognition code glinted in the readout. No! It has to be right, it has to_!
   "Damn machine." Thorne tapped the sensor pad's corner sharply on the table. "Behave. Try again."
   This time, he laid his palm down with a very slight twist; the computer digested the new data, and this time pronounced him cleared, accepted, blessed. Funded. His pounding heart slowed in relief.
   Thorne keyed in more data, and said over its shoulder, "No question which commando squad you want to requisition for this one, eh?"
   "No question," he echoed hollowly. "Go ahead." He had to get out of here, before the strain of the masquerade made him blow away his good start.
   "You want your usual cabin?" Thorne inquired.
   "Sure." He stood.
   "Soon, I gather . . ." The hermaphrodite checked a readout in the glowing complexity of logistics displays above the comconsole vid plate. "The palm lock is still keyed for you. Get off your feet, you look beat. It's under control."
   "Good."
   "When will Elli Quinn be along?"
   "She won't be coming on this mission."
   Thorne's eyes widened in surprise. "Really." Its smile broadened, quite inexplicably. "That's too bad." Its voice conveyed not the least disappointment. Some rivalry, there? Over what?
   "Have the Triumph send over my kit," he ordered. Yes, delegate that thievery too. Delegate it all. "And . . . when you get the chance, have a meal sent to my cabin."
   "Will do," promised Thorne with a firm nod. "I'm glad to see you've been eating better, by the way, even if you haven't been sleeping. Good. Keep it up. We worry about you, you know."
   Eating better, hell. With his stature, keeping his weight down had become a constant battle. He'd starved for three months just to get back into Naismith's uniform, that he'd stolen two years ago and now wore. Another wave of weary hatred for his progenitor washed over him. He let himself out with a casual salute that he trusted would encourage Thorne to keep working, and managed to keep from snarling under his breath till the cabin door hissed shut behind him.
   There was nothing for it but to try every palm lock in the corridor till one opened. He hoped no Dendarii would come along while he was rattling doors. He found his cabin at last, directly across from the hermaphrodite captain's. The door slid open at his touch on the sensor pad without any heart-stopping glitches this time.
   The cabin was a little chamber almost identical to Thorne's, only blanker. He checked cupboards. Most were bare, but in one he found a set of gray fatigues and a stained tech coverall just his size. A residue of half-used toiletries in the cabin's tiny washroom included a toothbrush, and his lips twisted in an ironical sneer. The neatly made bed which folded out of the wall looked extremely attractive, and he nearly swooned into it.
   I'm on my way. I've done it. The Dendarii had accepted him, accepted his orders with the same stupid blind trust with which they followed Naismith's. Like sheep. All he had to do now was not screw it up. The hardest part was over.
   He'd grabbed a quick shower and was just pulling on Naismith's trousers when his meal arrived. His undress state gave him an excuse to wave the attentive tray-bearing Dendarii out again quickly. The dinner under the covers turned out to be real food, not rations. Grilled vat steak, fresh-appearing vegetables, non-synthetic coffee, the hot food hot and the cold food cold, beautifully laid out in little portions finely calculated to Naismith's appetite. Even ice cream. He recognized his progenitor's tastes, and was daunted anew by this rush by unknown people to try to give him exactly what he wanted, even in these tiny details. Rank had its privileges, but this was insane.
   Depressed, he ate it all, and was just wondering if the fuzzy green stuff arranged to fill up all the empty space on the plate was edible too, when the cabin buzzer blatted again.
   This time, it was a Dendarii non-com and a float pallet with three big crates on it.
   "Ah," he blinked. "My kit. Just set it there in the middle of the floor, for now."
   "Yes, sir. Don't you want to assign a batman?" The non-com's inviting expression left no doubt about who was first in line to volunteer.
   "Not . . . this mission. We're going to be cramped for space, later. Just leave it."
   "I'd be happy to unpack it for you, sir. I packed it all up."
   "Quite all right."
   "If I've missed anything, just let me know, and I'll run it right over."
   "Thank you, corporal." His exasperation leaked into his voice; fortunately, it acted as a brake upon the corporal's enthusiasm. The Dendarii heaved the crates from the float pallet and exited with a sheepish grin, as if to say, Hey, you can't blame me for trying.
   He smiled back through set teeth, and turned his attention to the crates as soon as the door sealed. He flipped up the latches and hesitated, bemused at his own eagerness. It must be rather like getting a birthday present. He'd never had a birthday present in his life. So, let's make up for some lost time.
   The first lid folded back to reveal clothes, more clothes than he'd ever owned before. Tech coveralls, undress kit, a dress uniform_he held up the grey velvet tunic, and raised his brows at the shimmer and the silver buttons_boots, shoes, slippers, pajamas, all regulation, all cut down to perfect fit. And civilian clothes, eight or ten sets, in various planetary and galactic styles and social levels. An Escobaran business suit in red silk, a Barrayaran quasi-military tunic and piped trousers, ship knits, a Betan sarong and sandals, a ragged jacket and shirt and pants suitable for a down-on-his-luck dockworker anywhere. Abundant underwear. Three kinds of chronos with build-in comm units, one Dendarii regulation, one very expensive commercial model, one appearing cheap and battered, which turned out to be finest military surplus underneath. And more.
   He moved to the second crate, flipped up the lid, and gaped. Space armor. Full-bore attack unit space armor, power and life support packs fully charged, weapons loaded and locked. Just his size. It seemed to gleam with its own dark and wicked glow, nested in its packing. The smell of it hit him, incredibly military, metal and plastic, energy and chemicals . . . old sweat. He drew the helmet out and stared with wonder into the darkened mirror of its visor. He had never worn space armor, though he'd studied it in holovids till his eyes crossed. A sinister, deadly carapace . . .
   He unloaded it all, and laid the pieces out in order upon the floor. Strange splashes, scars, and patches deckled the gleaming surfaces here and there. What weapons, what strikes, had been powerful enough to mar that metalloy surface? What enemies had fired them? Every scar, he realized, fingering them, had been intended death. This was not pretend.
   It was very disturbing. No. He pushed away the cold shiver of doubt. If he can do it, I can do it. He tried to ignore the repairs and mysterious stains on the pressure suit and its soft, absorbent under-liner as he packed it all away again and stowed the crate. Blood? Shit? Burns? Oil? It was all cleaned and odorless now, anyway.
   The third crate, smaller than the second, proved to contain a set of half-armor, lacking built-in weapons and not meant for space, but rather for dirtside combat under normal or near-normal pressure, temperature, and atmospheric conditions. Its most arresting feature was a command headset, a smooth duralloy helmet with built-in telemetry and a vid projector in a flange above the forehead that placed any data on the net right before the commander's eyes. Data flow was controlled by certain facial movements and voice commands. He left it out on the counter to examine more thoroughly later, and repacked the rest.
   By the time he finished arranging all the clothing in the cabin's cupboards and drawers, he'd begun to regret sending the batman away so precipitously. He fell onto the bed, and dimmed the lights. When he next woke, he should be on his way to Jackson's Whole. . . .
   He'd just begun to doze when the cabin comm buzzed. He lurched up to answer it, mustering a reasonably coherent "Naismith here," in a sleep-blurred voice.
   "Miles?" said Thorne's voice. "The commando squad's here."
   "Uh . . . good. Break orbit as soon as you're ready, then."
   "Don't you want to see them?" Thorne said, sounding surprised.
   Inspection. He inhaled. "Right. I'll ... be along. Naismith out." He hurried back into his uniform trousers, taking a jacket with proper insignia this time, and quickly called up a schematic of the ship's interior layout on the cabin's comconsole. There were two locks for combat drop shuttles, port and starboard. Which one? He traced a route to both.
   The operative shuttle hatch was the first one he tried. He paused a moment in shadow and silence at the curve of the corridor, before he was spotted, to take in the scene.
   The loading bay was crowded with a dozen men and women in grey camouflage flight suits, along with piles of equipment and supplies. Hand and heavy weapons were stacked in symmetrical arrays. The mercenaries sat or stood, talking noisily, loud and crude, punctuated with barks of laughter. They were all so big, generating too much energy, knocking into each other in half-horseplay, as if seeking an excuse to shout louder. They bore knives and other personal weapons on belts or in holsters or on bandoliers, an ostentatious display. Their faces were a blur, animal-like. He swallowed, straightened, and stepped among them.
   The effect was instantaneous. "Heads up!" someone shouted, and without further orders they arranged themselves at rigid attention in two neat, dead silent rows, each with his or her bundle of equipment at their feet. It was almost more frightening than the previous chaos.
   With a thin smile, he walked forward, and pretended to look at each one. A last heavy duffle arced out of the shuttle hatch to land with a thump on the deck, and the thirteenth commando squeezed through, stood up, and saluted him.
   He stood paralyzed with panic. Whatinhell was it? He stared at a flashing belt buckle, then tilted his head back, straining his neck. The freaking thing was eight feet tall. The enormous body radiated power that he could feel almost like a wave of heat, and the face_the face was a nightmare. Tawny yellow eyes, like a wolf's, a distorted, outslung mouth with fangs, dammit, long white canines locked over the edges of the carmine lips. The huge hands had claws, thick, powerful, razor-edged_enamelled with carmine polish. . . . What? His gaze traveled back up to the monster's face. The eyes were outlined with shadow and gold tint, echoed by a little gold spangle glued decoratively to one high cheekbone. The mahogany-colored hair was drawn back in an elaborate braid. The belt was cinched in tightly, emphasizing a figure of sorts despite the loose-fitting multi-grey flight suit. The thing was female_?
   "Sergeant Taura and the Green Squad, reporting as ordered, sir!" The baritone voice reverberated in the bay.
   "Thank you_" It came out a cracked whisper, and he coughed to unlock his throat. "Thank you, that will be all, get your orders from Captain Thorne, you may all stand down." They all strained to hear him, compelling him to repeat, "Dismissed!"
   They broke up in disorder, or some order known only to themselves, for the bay was cleared of equipment with astonishing speed.
   The monster sergeant lingered, looming over him. He locked his knees, to keep himself from sprinting from it_her. . . .
   She lowered her voice. "Thanks for picking the Green Squad, Miles. I take it you've got us a real plum."
   More first names? "Captain Thorne will brief you en route. It's . . . a challenging mission." And this would be the sergeant in charge of it?
   "Captain Quinn have the details, as usual?" She cocked a furry eyebrow at him.
   "Captain Quinn . . . will not be coming on this mission."
   He swore her gold eyes widened, the pupil's dilating. Her lips drew back baring her fangs further in what took him a terrifying moment to realize was a smile. In a weird way, it reminded him of the grin with which Thorne had greeted that same news.
   She glanced up; the bay had emptied of other personnel. "Aah?" Her voice rumbled, like a purr. "Well, I'll be your bodyguard any time, lover. Just give me the sign."
   What sign, what the hell_
   She bent, her lips rippling, carmine clawed hand grasping his shoulder_he had a flashing vision of her tearing off his head, peeling, and eating him_then her mouth closed over his. His breath stopped, and his vision darkened, and he almost passed out before she straightened and gave him a puzzled, hurt look. "Miles, what's the matter?"
   That had been a kiss. Freaking gods. "Nothing," he gasped. "I've . . . been ill. I probably shouldn't have gotten up, but I had to inspect."
   She was looking very alarmed. "I'll say you shouldn't have gotten up_you're shaking all over! You can barely stand up. Here, I'll carry you to sickbay. Crazy man!"
   "No! I'm all right. That is, I've been treated. I'm just supposed to rest, and recover for a while, is all."
   "Well, you go straight back to bed, then!"
   "Yes."
   He wheeled. She swatted him on the butt. He bit his tongue. She said, "At least you've been eating better. Take care of yourself, huh?"
   He waved over his shoulder, and fled without looking back. Had that been military cameraderie? From a sergeant to an admiral? He didn't think so. That had been intimacy. Naismith, you bug-fuck crazy bastard, what have you been doing in your spare time? I didn't think you had any spare time. You've got to be a freaking suicidal maniac, if you've been screwing that_
   He locked his cabin door behind him, and stood against it, trembling, laughing in hysterical disbelief. Dammit, he'd studied everything about Naismith, everything. This couldn't be happening. With friends like this, who need enemies?
   He undressed and lay tensely upon his bed, contemplating Naismith/Vorkosigan's complicated life, and wondering what other booby-traps it held for him. At last a faint change in the susurrations and creaks of the ship around him, a brief tug of shifting grav fields, made him realize the Ariel was breaking free of Escobar orbit. He had actually succeeded in stealing a fully armed and equipped military fast cruiser, and no one even knew it. They were on their way to Jackson's Whole. To his destiny. His destiny, not Naismith's. His thoughts spiraled toward sleep at last.
   But if you claim your destiny, his demon voice whispered at the last, before the night's oblivion, why can't you claim your name?

CHAPTER TWO

   They exited the flex tube from the passenger ship in step, arm in arm, Quinn with her duffle swung over her shoulder, Miles with his flight bag gripped in his free hand. In the orbital transfer station's disembarkation lounge, people's heads turned. Miles stole a smug sideways glance at his female companion as they strolled on past the men's half-averted, envious stares. My Quinn.
   Quinn was looking particularly tough this morning_was it morning? he'd have to check Dendarii fleet time_having half-returned to her normal persona. She'd managed to make her pocketed grey uniform trousers masquerade as a fashion statement by tucking them into red suede boots (the steel caps under the pointed toes eluded notice) and topping them with a skimpy scarlet tank top. Her white skin glowed in contrast to the tank top and to her short dark curls. The surface colors distracted the eye from her athleticism, not apparent unless you knew just how much that bloody duffle weighed.
   Liquid brown eyes informed her face with wit. But it was the perfect, sculptured curves and planes of the face itself that stopped men's voices in midsentence. An obviously expensive face, the work of a surgeon-artist of extraordinary genius. The casual observer might guess her face had been paid for by the little ugly man whose arm she linked with her own, and judge the woman, too, to be a purchase. The casual observer never guessed the price she'd really paid: her old face, burned away in combat off Tau Verde. Very nearly the first battle loss in Admiral Naismith's service_ten years ago, now? God. The casual observer was a twit, Miles decided.
   The latest representative of the species was a wealthy executive who reminded Miles of a blond, civilian version of his cousin Ivan, and who had spent much of the two-week journey from Sergyar to Escobar under such misapprehensions about Quinn, trying to seduce her. Miles glimpsed him now, loading his luggage onto a float pallet and venting a last frustrated sigh of defeat before sloping off. Except for reminding Miles of Ivan, Miles bore him no ill-will. In fact, Miles felt almost sorry for him, as Quinn's sense of humor was as vile as her reflexes were deadly.
   Miles jerked his head toward the retreating Escobaran and murmured, "So what did you finally say to get rid of him, love?"
   Quinn's eyes shifted to identify the man, and crinkled, laughing. "If I told you, you'd be embarrassed."
   "No, I won't. Tell me."
   "I told him you could do push-ups with your tongue. He must have decided he couldn't compete."
   Miles reddened.
   "I wouldn't have led him on so far, except that I wasn't totally sure at first that he wasn't some kind of agent," she added apologetically.
   "You sure now?"
   "Yeah. Too bad. It might have been more entertaining."
   "Not to me. I was ready for a little vacation."
   "Yes, and you look the better for it. Rested."
   "I really like this married-couple cover, for travel," he remarked. "It suits me." He took a slightly deeper breath. "So we've had the honeymoon, why don't we have the wedding to go with it?"
   "You never give up, do you?" She kept her tone light. Only the slight flinch of her arm, under his, told him his words had given pain, and he silently cursed himself.
   "I'm sorry. I promised I'd keep off that subject."
   She shrugged her unburdened shoulder, incidentally unlinking elbows, and let her arm swing aggressively as she walked. "Trouble is, you don't want me to be Madame Naismith, Dread of the Dendarii. You want me to be Lady Vorkosigan of Barrayar. That's a downside post. I'm spacer-born. Even if I did marry a dirtsucker, go down into some gravity well and never come up again . . . Barrayar is not the pit I'd pick. Not to insult your home."
   Why not? Everyone else does. "My mother likes you," he offered.
   "And I admire her. I've met her, what, four times now, and every time I'm more impressed. And yet . . . the more impressed, the more outraged I am at the criminal waste Barrayar makes of her talents. She'd be Surveyor-General of the Betan Astronomical Survey by now, if she'd stayed on Beta Colony. Or any other thing she pleased."
   "She pleased to be Countess Vorkosigan."
   "She pleased to be stunned by your Da, whom I admit is pretty stunning. She doesn't give squat for the rest of the Vor caste." Quinn paused, before they came into the hearing of the Escobaran customs inspectors, and Miles stood with her. They both gazed down the chamber, and not at each other. "For all her flair, she's a tired woman underneath. Barrayar has sucked so much out of her. Barrayar is her cancer. Killing her slowly."
   Mutely, Miles shook his head.
   "Yours too. Lord Vorkosigan," Quinn added somberly. This time it was his turn to flinch.
   She sensed it, and tossed her head. "Anyway, Admiral Naismith is my kind of maniac. Lord Vorkosigan is a dull and dutiful stick by contrast. I've seen you at home on Barrayar, Miles. You're like half yourself there. Damped down, muted somehow. Even your voice is lower. It's extremely weird."
   "I can't ... I have to fit in, there. Scarcely a generation ago, someone with a body as strange as mine would have been killed outright as a suspected mutant. I can't push things too far, too fast. I'm too easy to target."
   "Is that why Barrayaran Imperial Security sends you on so many off-planet missions?"
   "For my development as an officer. To widen my background, deepen my experience."
   "And someday, they're going to hook you out of here permanently, and take you home, and squeeze all that experience back out of you in their service. Like a sponge."
   "I'm in their service now, Elli," he reminded her softly, in a grave and level voice that she had to bend her head to hear. "Now, then, and always."
   Her eyes slid away. "Right-oh ... so when they do nail your boots to the floor back on Barrayar, I want your job. I want to be Admiral Quinn someday."
   "Fine by me," he said affably. The job, yes. Time for Lord Vorkosigan and his personal wants to go back into the bag. He had to stop masochistically rerunning this stupid marriage conversation with Quinn, anyway. Quinn was Quinn; he did not want her to be not-Quinn, not even for . . . Lord Vorkosigan.
   Despite this self-inflicted moment of depression, anticipation of his return to the Dendarii quickened his step as they made their way through customs and into the monster transfer station. Quinn was right. He could feel Naismith refilling his skin, generated from somewhere deep in his psyche right out to his fingertips. Goodbye, dull Lieutenant Miles Vorkosigan, deep cover operative for Barrayaran Imperial Security (and overdue for a promotion); hello, dashing Admiral Naismith, space mercenary and all-around soldier of fortune.
   Or misfortune. He slowed as they came to a row of commercial comconsole booths lining the passenger concourse, and nodded toward their mirrored doors. "Let's see how Red Squad is cooking, first. If they're recovered sufficiently for release, I'd like to go downside personally and spring them."
   "Right-oh." Quinn dumped her duffle dangerously close to Miles's sandaled feet, swung into the nearest empty booth, jammed her card into the slot, and tapped out a code on the keypad.
   Miles set down his flight bag, sat on the duffle, and watched her from outside the booth. He caught a sliced reflection of himself on the mosaic of mirror on the next booth's lowered door. The dark trousers and loose white shirt that he wore were ambiguously styled as to planetary origin, but, as fit his travel-cover, very civilian. Relaxed, casual. Not bad.
   Time was he had worn uniforms like a turtle-shell of high-grade social protection over the vulnerable peculiarities of his body. An armor of belonging that said, Don't mess with me. I have friends. When had he stopped needing that so desperately? He was not sure.
   For that matter, when had he stopped hating his body? It had been two years since his last serious injury, on the hostage rescue mission that had come right after that incredible mess with his brother on Earth. He'd been fully recovered for quite some time. He flexed his hands, full of plastic replacement bones, and found them as easily his own as before they were last crunched. As before they were ever crunched. He hadn't had an osteo-inflammatory attack in months. I'm feeling no pain, he realized with a dark grin. And it wasn't just Quinn's doing, though Quinn had been . . . very therapeutic. Am I going sane in my old age?
   Enjoy it while you can. He was twenty-eight years old, and surely at some sort of physical peak. He could feel that peak, the exhilarating float of apogee. The descending arc was a fate for some future day.
   Voices from the comm booth brought him back to the present moment. Quinn had Sandy Hereld on the other end, and was saying, "Hi, I'm back."
   "Hi, Quinnie, I was expecting you. What can I do for you?" Sandy had been doing strange things to her hair, again, Miles noted even from his offsides vantage.
   "I just got off the jumpship, here at the transfer station. Planning a little detour. I want transport downside to pick up the Red Squad survivors, then back to the Triumph. What's their current status?"
   "Hold tight, I'll have it in a second ..." Lieutenant Hereld punched up data on a display to her left.
   In the crowded concourse a man in Dendarii greys walked past. He saw Miles, and gave him a hesitant, cautious nod, perhaps uncertain if the Admiral's civilian gear indicated some sort of cover. Miles returned a reassuring wave, and the man smiled and strode on. Miles's brain kicked up unwanted data. The man's name was Travis Gray, he was a field tech currently assigned to the Peregrine, a six-year-man so far, expert in communications equipment, he collected classic pre-Jump music of Earth origin . . . how many such personnel files did Miles carry in his head, now? Hundreds? Thousands?
   And here came more. Hereld turned back, and rattled off, "Ives was released to downside leave, and Boyd has been returned to the Triumph for further therapy. The Beauchene Life Center reports that Durham, Vifian, and Aziz are available for release, but they want to talk to someone in charge, first."
   "Right-oh."
   "Kee and Zelaski . . . they also want to talk about."
   Quinn's lips tightened. "Right," she agreed flatly. Miles's belly knotted, just a little. That was not going to be a happy conversation, he suspected. "Let them know we're on our way, then," Quinn said.
   "Yes, Cap'n." Hereld shuffled files on her vid display. "Will do. Which shuttle do you want?"
   "The Triumph's smaller personnel shuttle will do, unless you have some cargo to load on at the same time from the Beauchene shuttleport."
   "None from there, no."
   "All right."
   Hereld checked her vid. "According to Escobaran flight control, I can put Shuttle Two into docking bay J-26 in thirty minutes. You'll be cleared for immediate downside departure."
   "Thanks. Pass the word_there'll be a captain and captain-owner's briefing when we get back. What time is it at Beauchene?"
   Hereld glanced aside. "0906, out of a 2607 hour day."
   "Morning. Great. What's the weather down there?"
   "Lovely. Shirtsleeves."
   "Good, I won't have to change. We'll advise when we're ready to depart Port Beauchene. Quinn out."
   Miles sat on the duffle, staring down at his sandals, awash in unpleasant memories. It had been one of the Dendarii Mercenaries' sweatier smuggling adventures, putting military advisors and material down on Marilac in support of its continuing resistance to a Cetagandan invasion. Combat Drop Shuttle A-4 from the Triumph had been hit by enemy fire on the last trip up-and-out, with all of Red Squad and several important Marilacans aboard. The pilot, Lieutenant Durham, though mortally injured and in shock himself, had brought his crippled and burning shuttle into a sufficiently low-velocity crunch with the Triumph's docking clamps that the rescue team was able to seal on an emergency flex tube, slice through, and retrieve everyone aboard. They'd managed to jettison the damaged shuttle just before it exploded, and the Triumph itself broke orbit barely ahead of serious Cetagandan vengeance. And so a mission that had started out simple, smooth, and covert ended yet again in the sort of heroic chaos that Miles had come to despise. The chaos, not the heroism.
   The score, after heartbreaking triage: twelve seriously injured; seven, beyond the Triumph's resources for resuscitation, cryogenically frozen in hope of later help; three permanently and finally dead. Now Miles would find out how many of the second category he must move to the third. The faces, names, hundreds of unwanted facts about them, cascaded through his mind. He had originally planned to be aboard that last shuttle, but instead had gone up on an earlier flight to deal with some other forest fire. . . .
   "Maybe they won't be so bad," Quinn said, reading his face. She stuck out her hand, and he pulled himself up off the duffle and gathered up his flight bag.
   "I've spent so much time in hospitals myself, I can't help identifying with them," he excused his dark abstraction. One perfect mission. What he wouldn't give for just one perfect mission, where absolutely nothing went wrong. Maybe the one upcoming would finally be it.
   The hospital smell hit Miles immediately when he and Quinn walked through the front doors of the Beauchene Life Center, the cryotherapy specialty clinic the Dendarii dealt with on Escobar. It wasn't a bad smell, not a stench by any means, just an odd edge to the air-conditioned atmosphere. But it was an odor so deeply associated with pain in his experience, he found his heart beating faster. Fight or flight. Not appropriate. He breathed deeply, stroking down the visceral throb, and looked around. The lobby was much in the current style of techno-palaces anywhere on Escobar, clean but cheaply furnished. The real money was all invested upstairs, in the cryo-equipment, regeneration laboratories, and operating theaters.
   One of the clinic's senior partners, Dr. Aragones, came down to greet them and escort them upstairs to his office. Miles liked Aragones' office, crammed with the sort of clutter of info disks, charts, and journal-flimsie offprints that indicated a technocrat who thought deeply and continuously about what he was doing. He liked Aragones himself, too, a big bluff fellow with bronze skin, a noble nose, and graying hair, friendly and blunt.
   Dr. Aragones was unhappy not to be reporting better results. It hurt his pride, Miles judged.
   "You bring us such messes, and want miracles," he complained gently, shifting in his station chair after Miles and Quinn settled themselves. "If you want to assure miracles, you have to start at the very beginning, when my poor patients are first prepared for treatment."
   Aragones never called them corpsicles, or any of the other nervous nicknames coined by the soldiers. Always my patients. That was another thing Miles liked about the Escobaran physician.
   "In general_unfortunately_our casualties don't arrive on a scheduled, orderly, one-by-one basis," Miles half-apologized in turn. "In this case we had twenty-eight people hit sickbay, with every degree and sort of injury_extreme trauma, burns, chemical contamination_all at once. Triage got brutal, for a little while, till things sorted out. My people did their best." He hesitated. "Do you think it would be worth our while to re-certify a few of our medtechs in your latest techniques, and if so, would you be willing to lead the seminar?"
   Aragones spread his hands, and looked thoughtful. "Something might be worked out . . . talk with Administrator Margara, before you go."
   Quinn caught Miles's nod, and made a note on her report panel.
   Aragones called up charts on his comconsole. "The worst first. We could do nothing for your Mr. Kee or Ms. Zelaski."
   "I ... saw Kee's head injury. I'm not surprised." Smashed like a melon. "But we had the cryo-chamber available, so we tried."
   Aragones nodded understanding. "Ms. Zelaski had a similar problem, though less externally obvious. So much of her internal cranial circulation was broken during the trauma, her blood could not be properly drained from her brain, nor the cryo-fluids properly perfused. Between the crystalline freezing and the hematomas, the neural destruction was complete. I'm sorry. Their bodies are presently stored in our morgue, waiting your instructions."
   "Kee wished his body to be returned for burial to his family on his homeworld. Have your mortuary department prepare and ship him through the usual channels. We'll give you the address." He jerked his chin at Quinn, who made another note. "Zelaski listed no family or next of kin_some Dendarii just don't, or won't, and we don't insist. But she did once tell some of her squad mates how she wanted her ashes disposed of. Please have her remains cremated and returned to the Triumph in care of our medical department."
   "Very well." Aragones signed off the charts on his vid display; they disappeared like vanishing spirits. He called up others in their place.
   "Your Mr. Durham and Ms. Vifian are both presently only partially healed from their original injuries. Both are suffering from what I would call normal neural-traumatic and cryo-amnesia. Mr. Durham's memory loss is the more profound, partly because of complications due to his pilot's neural implants, which we alas had to remove."
   "Will he ever be able to have another headset installed?"
   "It's too early to tell. I would call both their long-term prognoses good, but neither will be fit to return to their military duties for at least a year. And then they will need extensive re-training. In both cases I highly recommend they each be returned to their home and family environments, if that is possible. Familiar surroundings will help facilitate and trigger re-establishment of their access to their own surviving memories, over time."
   "Lieutenant Durham has family on Earth. We'll see he gets there. Tech Vifian is from Kline Station. We'll see what we can do."
   Quinn nodded vigorously, and made more notes.
   "I can release them to you today, then. We've done all we can, here, and ordinary convalescent facilities will do for the rest. Now . . . that leaves your Mr. Aziz."
   "My trooper Aziz," Miles agreed to the claim. Aziz was three years in the Dendarii, had applied and been accepted for officer's training. Twenty-one years old.
   "Mr. Aziz is ... alive again. That is, his body sustains itself without artificial aids, except for a slight on-going problem with internal temperature regulation that seems to be improving on its own."
   "But Aziz didn't have a head wound. What went wrong?" asked Miles. "Are you telling me he's going to be a vegetable?"
   "I'm afraid Mr. Aziz was the victim of a bad prep. His blood was apparently drained hastily, and not sufficiently completely. Small freezing hemocysts riddled his brain tissue with necrotic patches. We removed them, and started new growth, which has taken hold successfully. But his personality is permanently lost."
   "Everything?"
   "He may perhaps retain a few frustrating fragments of memories. Dreams. But he cannot re-access his neural pathways through new routes or sub-routines, because the tissue itself is gone. The new man will start over as a near-infant. He's lost language, among other things."
   "Will he recover his intelligence? In time?"
   Aragones hesitated for too long before answering. "In a few years, he may be able to do enough simple tasks to be self-supporting."
   "I see," Miles sighed.
   "What do you want to do with him?"
   "He's another one with no next of kin listed." Miles blew out his breath. "Transfer him to a long-term care facility here on Escobar. One with a good therapy department. I'll ask you to recommend one. I'll set up a small trust fund to cover the costs till he's out on his own. However long that takes."
   Aragones nodded, and both he and Quinn made notes.
   After settling further administrative and financial details, the conference broke up. Miles insisted on stopping to see Aziz, before picking up the other two convalescents.
   "He cannot recognize you," Dr. Aragones warned as they entered the hospital room.
   "That's all right."
   At first glance, Aziz did not look as much like death warmed over as Miles had expected, despite the unflattering hospital gown. There was color and warmth in his face, and his natural melanin level saved him from being hospital-pale. But he lay listlessly, gaunt, twisted in his covers. The bed's sides were up, unpleasantly suggesting a crib or a coffin. Quinn stood against the wall and folded her arms. She had visceral associations about hospitals and clinics too.
   "Azzie," Miles called softly bending over him. "Azzie, can you hear me?"
   Aziz's eyes tracked momentarily, but then wandered again.
   "I know you don't know me, but you might remember this, later. You were a good soldier, smart and strong. You stood by your mates in the crash. You had the sort of self-discipline that saves lives." Others, not your own. "Tomorrow, you'll go to another sort of hospital, where they'll help you keep on getting better." Among strangers. More strangers. "Don't worry about the money. I'm setting it up so it'll be there as long as you need it." He doesn't know what money is. "I'll check back on you from time to time, as I get the opportunity," Miles promised. Promised who? Aziz? Aziz was no more. Himself? His voice softened to inaudibility as he ran down.
   The aural stimulation made Aziz thrash around, and emit some loud and formless moans; he had no volume control yet, apparently. Even through a filter of desperate hope, Miles could not recognize it as an attempt at communication. Animal reflexes only.
   "Take care," he whispered, and withdrew, to stand a moment trembling in the hallway.
   "Why do you do that to yourself?" Quinn inquired tartly. Her crossed arms, hugging herself, added silently, And to me?
   "First, he died for me, literally, and second," he attempted to force his voice to lightness, "don't you find a certain obsessive fascination in looking in the face of what you most fear?"
   "Is death what you most fear?" she asked curiously.
   "No. Not death." He rubbed his forehead, hesitated. "Loss of mind. My game plan all my life has been to demand acceptance of this" a vague wave down the length, or shortness, of his body, "because I was a smart-ass little bastard who could think rings around the opposition, and prove it time after time. Without the brains ..." Without the brains I'm nothing. He straightened against the aching tension in his belly, shrugged, and twitched a smile at her. "March on, Quinn."
   After Aziz, Durham and Vifian were not so hard to deal with. They could walk and talk, if haltingly, and Vifian even recognized Quinn. They took them back to the shuttleport in the rented groundcar, and Quinn tempered her usual go-to-hell style of driving in consideration of their half-healed wounds. Upon reaching the shuttle Miles sent them forward to sit with the pilot, a comrade, and by the time reached the Triumph Durham had recalled not only the man's name, but some shuttle piloting procedures. Miles turned both convalescents over to the medtech who met them at the shuttle hatch door, who escorted them off to sickbay to bed down again after the exhaustion of their short journey. Miles watched them exit, and felt a little better.
   "Costly," Quinn observed reflectively.
   "Yes," Miles sighed. "Rehabilitation is starting to take an awfully bite out of the medical department's budget. I may have Fleet accounting split it off, so Medical doesn't find itself dangerously short-changed. But what would you have? My troops were loyal beyond measure; I cannot betray them. Besides," he grinned briefly, "the Barrayaran Imperium is paying."
   "Your ImpSec boss was on about your bills, I thought, at your mission briefing."
   "Illyan has to explain why enough cash to fund a private army keeps disappearing in his department budget every year, without ever admitting to the private army's existence. Certain Imperial accountants tend to accuse him of departmental inefficiency, which gives him great anguish."
   The Dendarii shuttle pilot, having shut down his ship, ducked into the corridor and sealed the hatch. He nodded to Miles. "While I was waiting for you at Port Beauchene, sir, I picked up another story on the local news net, that you might be interested in. Local news here on Escobar, that is." The man was bouncing lightly his toes.
   Say on, Sergeant Lajoie." Miles cocked an eyebrow up at him.
   "The Cetagandans have just announced their withdrawal from Marilac. They're calling it_what was that, now_'Due to great progress in the cultural alliance, we are turning police matters over to local control.' "
   Miles's fists clenched, joyously. "In other words, they're abandoning their puppet government! Ha!" He hopped from foot to foot, and pounded Quinn on the back. "You hear that, Elli! We've won! I mean, They've won, the Marilacans." Our sacrifices are redeemed. . . . He regained control of his tightening throat before he burst into song or some like foolishness. "Do me a favor, Lajoie. Pass the word through the Fleet. Tell them I said, You folks do good work. Eh?"
   "Yes, sir. My pleasure." The grinning pilot saluted cheerfully, and loped off up the corridor.
   Miles's grin stretched his face. "See, Elli! What Simon Illyan just bought would have been cheap at a thousand times the cost. A full-scale Cetagandan planetary invasion_first impeded_then bogged_then foundered_failed!" And in a fierce whisper, "I did it! I made the difference."
   Quinn too was smiling, but one perfect eyebrow curved in a certain dry irony. "It's lovely, but if I was reading between the lines correctly, I thought what Barrayaran Imperial Security really wanted was for the Cetagandan military to be tied up in the guerilla war on Marilac. Indefinitely. Draining Cetagandan attention away from Barrayaran borders and jump points."
   "They didn't put that in writing." Miles's lips drew back wolfishly. "All Simon said was, 'Help the Marilacans as opportunity presents.' That was the standing order, in so many words."
   "But you knew damn well what he really wanted."
   "Four bloody years was enough. I have not betrayed Barrayar. Nor anyone else."
   "Yeah? So if Simon Illyan is so much more Machiavellian than you are, how is it that your version prevailed? Someday, Miles, you are going to run out of hairs to split with those people. And then what will you do?"
   He smiled, and shook his head, evading answer.
   His elation over the news from Marilac still made him feel like he was walking in half-gravity when he arrived at his cabin aboard the Triumph. After a surreptitious glance to be sure the corridor was unpeopled, he embraced and kissed Quinn, a deep kiss that was going to have to last them for a long while, and she went off to her own quarters. He slipped inside, and echoed the door's closing sigh with his own. Home again.
   It was home, for half his psyche, he reflected, tossing his flight bag onto his bed and heading directly for the shower. Ten years ago, Lord Miles Vorkosigan had invented the cover identity of Admiral Naismith out of his head in a desperate moment, and frantically faked his way to temporary control of the hastily re-named Dendarii Mercenaries. Barrayaran Imperial Security had discovered the cover to be useful . . . no. Credit where it was due. He had persuaded, schemed, demonstrated, and coerced ImpSec into finding use for this cover. Be careful what you pretend to be. You might become it.
   When had Admiral Naismith stopped being a pretense? Gradually, surely, but mostly since his mercenary mentor Commodore Tung had retired. Or perhaps the wily Tung had recognized before Miles had that his services in propping Miles up to his prematurely exalted rank were no longer required. Colored vid arrays of Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet organization bloomed in Miles's head as he showered. Personnel_equipment_administra tion_logistics_he knew every ship, every trooper, every shuttle and piece of ordnance, now. He knew how they fit together, what had to be done first, second, third, twentieth, how to place a precisely calculated force at any point on the tactical field. This was expertise, to he able to look at a ship like the Triumph and see with his mind's eye right through the walls to every engineering detail, every strength and vulnerability; to look at a commando raid, or a briefing table ringed with captains and captain-owners and know what each one would do or say before they knew it themselves. I'm on top. Finally, I'm on top of it all. With this lever, I can move worlds. He switched the shower to "dry," and turned in the blast warm air. He left the bathroom still chortling under his breath. I like it. His chortle died away in puzzlement when he unlatched the door to his uniform cupboard, and found it bare. Had his batman taken them all off for cleaning or repairs? His bewilderment grew as he looked other drawers, and found only a residue of the wildly assorted Virilian togs he wore when he stretched the chain of his identity one link further, and played spy for the Dendarii. Plus some of his shabbier underwear. Was this some sort of practical joke? If so, he'd have have the last laugh. Naked and irritated, he snapped open the locker where his space armor dwelt. Empty. That was almost shocking. Somebody's taken it down to Engineering to re-calibrate it, or add tactics programs, or something. His batman should have returned it by now, though. What if he needed it in a hurry?
   Time. His people would be gathering. Quinn had once claimed he could carry on naked, and only make those around him feel overdressed. He was momentarily tempted to test her assertion, but overcame the mordant vision, and put the shirt and trousers and sandals he'd been wearing back on. He didn't need a uniform in order to dominate a briefing room, not any more.
   On the way to the meeting, he passed Sandy Hereld in the corridor, coming off duty, and gave her a friendly nod. She wheeled and walked backward in startlement. "You're back, sir! That was quick." He would hardly describe his several-week journey to Imperial HQ Barrayar as quick. She must mean the trip downside. "It only took two hours."
   "What?" Her nose wrinkled. She was still walking backwards, reached the end of the corridor.
   He had a briefing room full of senior officers waiting. He waved and swung down a lift tube. The briefing room was comfortingly familiar, right down to the array of faces around the darkly shining table. Captain Auson of the Triumph. Elena Bothari-Jesek, recently promoted captain of the Peregrine. Her husband Commodore Baz Jesek, Fleet engineer and in charge, in Miles's absence, of all the repair and refit activities of the Dendarii Fleet in Escobar orbit. The couple, Barrayarans themselves, were with Quinn among the handful of Dendarii apprised of Miles's double identity. Captain Truzillo of the Jayhawk, and a dozen more, all tested and true. His people.
   Bel Thorne of the Ariel was late. That was unusual. One of Thorne's driving characteristics was an insatiable curiosity; a new mission briefing was like a Winterfair gift to the Betan hermaphrodite. Miles turned to Elena Bothari-Jesek, to make small talk while they waited.
   "Did you get a chance to visit your mother, downside on Escobar?"
   "Yes, thanks." She smiled. "It was . . . nice, to have a little time. We had a chance to talk about some things we'd never talked about the first time we met."
   It had been good for both of them, Miles judged. Some of the permanent strain seemed gone from Elena's dark eyes. Better and better, bit by bit. "Good."
   He glanced up as the doors hissed open, but it was only Quinn, blowing in with the secured files in hand. She was back in full officer's undress kit, and looking very comfortable and efficient. She handed the files to Miles, and he loaded them into the comconsole, and waited another minute. Still no Bel Thorne.
   Talk died away. His officers were giving him attentive, let's-get-on-with-it looks. He'd better not stand around much longer with his thumb in his ear. Before bringing the console display to life, he inquired, "Is there some reason Captain Thorne is late?"
   They looked at him, and then at each other. There can't be something wrong with Bel, it would have been reported to me first thing. Still, a small leaden knot materialized in the pit of his stomach. "Where is Bel Thorne?"
   By eye, they elected Elena Bothari-Jesek as spokesperson. That was an extremely bad sign. "Miles," she said hesitantly, "was Bel supposed to be back before you?"
   "Back? Where did Bel go?"
   She was looking at him as though he'd lost his mind. "Bel left with you, in the Ariel, three days ago."
   Quinn's head snapped up. "That's impossible."
   "Three days ago, we were still en route to Escobar," Miles stated. The leaden knot was transmuting into neutron star matter. He was not dominating this room at all well. In fact, it seemed to be tilting.
   "You took Green Squad with you. It was the new contract, Bel said," Elena added.
   "This is the new contract," Miles tapped the comconsole. A hideous explanation was beginning to suggest itself to his mind, rising from the black hole in his stomach. The looks on the faces around the table were also beginning to divide into two uneven camps, appalled surmise from the minority who had been in on that mess on Earth two years ago_oh, they were right with him_total confusion from the majority, who had not been directly involved. . . .
   "Where did I say I was going?" Miles inquired. His tone was, he thought, gentle, but several people flinched.
   "Jackson's Whole." Elena looked him straight in the eye, with much the steady gaze of a zoologist about to dissect a specimen. A sudden lack of trust . . .
   Jackson's Whole. That tears it. "Bel Thorne? The Ariel? Taura? Within ten jumps of Jackson's Whole?" Miles choked. "Dear God."
   "But if you're you," said Truzillo, "who was that three days ago?"
   "If you're you," said Elena darkly. The initiate crowd were all getting that same frowning look.
   "You see," Miles explained in a hollow voice to the What-the-hell-are-they-talking-about? portion of the room, "some people have an evil twin. I am not so lucky. What I have is an idiot twin."
   "Your clone," said Elena Bothari-Jesek.
   "My brother," he corrected automatically.
   "Little Mark Pierre," said Quinn. "Oh . . . shit."
   

CHAPTER THREE

   His stomach seemed to turn inside out, the cabin wavered, and shadow darkened his vision. The bizarre sensations of the wormhole jump were gone almost as soon as they began, but left an unpleasant somatic reverberation, as if he were a struck gong. He took a deep, calming breath. That had been the fourth jump of the voyage. Five jumps to go, on the tortuous zigzag through the wormhole nexus from Escobar to Jackson's Whole. The Ariel had been three days en route, almost halfway.
   He glanced around Naismith's cabin. He could not continue to hide out in here much longer, pretense of illness or Naismithian black mood or not. Thorne needed every bit of data he could supply to plan the Dendarii raid on the clone-creche. He had used his hibernation well, scanning the Ariel's mission logs back through time, all the way past his first encounter with the Dendarii two years ago. He now knew a great deal more about the mercenaries, and the thought of casual conversation with the Ariel's crew was far less terrifying.
   Unfortunately there was very little in the mission log to help him reconstruct what his first meeting with Naismith on Earth had looked like from the Dendarii point of view. The log had concentrated on rehabilitation and refit reports, dickerings with assorted ship's chandlers, and engineering briefings. He'd found exactly one order pertinent to his own adventures embedded in the data flow, advising all ship masters that Admiral Naismith's clone had been seen on Earth, warning that the clone might attempt to pass himself off as the Admiral, giving the (incorrect) information that the clone's legs would show up on a medical scan as normal hone and not plastic replacements, and ordering use of stunners-only in apprehending the imposter. No explanations, no later revisions or updates. All of Naismith/Vorkosigan's highest-level orders tended to be verbal and undocumented anyway, for security_from the Dendarii, not for them_a habit that had just served him well.
   He leaned back in his station chair and glowered at the comconsole display. The Dendarii data named him Mark. That's another thing you don't get to choose, Miles Naismith Vorkosigan had said. Mark Pierre. You are Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, in your own right, on Barrayar.
   But he was not on Barrayar, nor ever would be if he could help it. You are not my brother, and the Butcher of Komarr was never a father to me, his thought denied for the thousandth time to his absent progenitor. My mother was a uterine replicator.
   But the power of the suggestion had ridden him ever after, sapping his satisfaction with every pseudonym he'd ever tried, though he'd stared at lists of names till his eyes ached. Dramatic names, plain names, exotic, strange, common, silly . . . Jan Vandermark was the alias he'd used the longest, the closest sideways skittish approach to identity.
   Mark! Miles had shouted, being dragged away, for all he knew, to his own death. Your name is Mark!
   I am not Mark. I am NOT your damned brother, you maniac. The denial was hot and huge, but when its echoes died away, in the hollow chamber left inside his skull he seemed not to be anyone at all.
   His head was aching, a grinding tightness that crawled up his spine through his shoulders and neck, and spread out under his scalp. He rubbed hard at his neck, but the tension just circulated around through his arms and back into his shoulders.
   Not his brother. But to be strictly accurate, Naismith could not be blamed for forcing him to life in the same way as the other House Bharaputran clones' progenitors. Oh, they were genetically identical, yes. It was a matter of ... intent, perhaps. And where the money came from.
   Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan had been just six years old when the tissue sample from a biopsy was stolen from some clinical laboratory on Barrayar, during the last gasp of Komarran resistance to Barrayaran imperial conquest. No one, neither Barrayaran nor Komarran, was intrinsically interested in the crippled child Miles. The focus had all been on his father. Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan, Regent of Barrayar, Conqueror (or Butcher) of Komarr. Aral Vorkosigan had supplied the will and the wit which had made Komarr into Barrayar's first off-planet conquest. And made himself the target of Komarran resistance and revenge. Hope for successful resistance had faded in time. Hope for revenge lived on in exiled bitterness. Stripped of an army, arms, support, one Komarran hate group plotted a slow, mad vengeance. To strike at the father through the son upon whom he was known to dote . . .
   Like a sorcerer in an old tale, the Komarrans dealt with a devil to have a simulacrum made. A bastard clone, he thought with a silent, humorless laugh. But things went wrong. The crippled original boy, poisoned before birth by yet another murderous enemy of his father's, grew strangely, unpredictably; his genetic duplicate grew straight . . . that had been his first clue that he was different from the other clones, he reflected. When the other clones went to the doctors for treatment they came back stronger, healthier, growing ever-faster. Every time he went, and he went often, their painful treatments seemed to make him sicklier, more stunted. The braces they put on his bones, neck, back, never seemed to help much. They had made him into this hunchbacked dwarfling as if molding him in a press, die-cut from a cast of his progenitor. I could have been normal, if Miles Vorkosigan had not been crippled.
   When he first began to suspect the true purpose of his fellow clones, for rumors passed among the children in wild ways even their careful handlers could not totally control, his growing somatic deformations brought him silent suppressed joy. Surely they could not use this body for a brain transplant. He might be discarded_he might yet escape his pleasant, smiling jailer-servants. . . .
   His real escape, when his Komarran owners came to collect him at age fourteen, was like a miracle. And then the training had begun. The endless harsh tutoring, drill, indoctrination. At first a destiny, any destiny at all, seemed glorious compared to his creche-mates' end. He determinedly took up the training to replace his progenitor, and strike a blow for dear Komarr, a place he had never seen, against evil Barrayar, a place he had never seen either. But learning to be Miles Vorkosigan turned out to be like running the race in Zeno's paradox. No matter how much he learned, how frantically he drilled, how harshly his mistakes were punished, Miles learned more, faster; by the time he arrived, his quarry had always moved on, intellectually or otherwise.
   The symbolic race became literal once his Komarran tutors actually moved to effect the substitution. They chased the elusive young Lord Vorkosigan halfway around the wormhole nexus, never realizing that when he vanished, he utterly ceased to exist, and Admiral Naismith appeared. The Komarrans had never found out about Admiral Naismith. Not planning but chance had finally brought them together two years ago on Earth, right back where the whole stupid race had started, in pursuit of a vengeance gone twenty years cold.
   The time-delay had been critical in a way the Komarrans had not even noticed. When they first began chasing Vorkosigan, their customized clone had been at the peak of his mental conditioning, committed to the goals of the revolt, unreflectingly eager. Had they not saved him from the fate of clones? Eighteen months of watching them screw up, eighteen months of travel, observation, exposure to uncensored news, views, even a few people, had planted secret doubts in his mind. And, bluntly, one could not duplicate even an imitation of a galactic-class education like Vorkosigan's without inadvertently learning something about how to think. In the middle of it all, the surgery to replace his perfectly sound leg bones with synthetics, just because Vorkosigan had smashed his, had been stunningly painful. What if Vorkosigan broke his neck, next time? Realization had crept over him.
   Stuffing his head full of Lord Vorkosigan, in bits over time, was just as much of a brain transplant as anything done with vibra-scalpels and living tissue. He who plots revenge, must dig two graves. But the Komarrans had dug the second grave for him. For the person he never had a chance to become, the man he might have been if he had not been forced at shock-stick point to continually struggle to be someone else.
   Some days he was not sure who he hated more, House Bharaputra, the Komarrans, or Miles Naismith Vorkosigan.
   He shut off the comconsole with a snort, and rose to pick out his precious data cube from the uniform pocket in which it was still hidden. Upon reflection, he cleaned up and depilated again, before donning fresh Dendarii officer's undress greys. That was as regulation as he could make himself. Let the Dendarii see only the polished surface, and not the man inside the man inside. . . .
   He steeled himself, exited the cabin, stepped across the corridor, and pressed the buzzer to the hermaphrodite captain's quarters.
   No response. He pressed it again. After a short delay Thorne's blurred alto voice came, "Yes?"
   "Naismith here."
   "Oh! Come in, Miles." The voice sharpened with interest.
   The door slid aside, and he stepped within, to realize that the reason for the delay was that he'd woken Thorne from sleep. The hermaphrodite was sitting up on one elbow in bed, brown hair tousled, its free hand falling away from the keypad which had released the door.
   "Excuse me," he said, stepping backward, but the door had already sealed again.
   "No, it's all right," the hermaphrodite smiled sleepily, curled its body in a C, and patted the bed invitingly in front of its sheeted . . . lap. "For you, anytime. Come sit. Would you like a back rub? You look tense." It was wearing a decidedly frilly nightgown, flowing silk with lace trim edging a plunging vee neckline that revealed the swelling pale flesh of its breasts.
   He sidled to a station chair instead. Thorne's smile took on a peculiarly sardonic tinge, even while remaining perfectly relaxed. He cleared .his throat. "I ... thought it was time for that more detailed mission briefing I promised." I should have checked the duty-roster. Would Admiral Naismith have known the captain's sleep-cycle?
   "Time and past time. I'm glad to see you come up out of the fog. What the hell have you been doing, wherever you went for the past eight weeks, Miles? Who died?"
   "No one. Well, eight clones, I suppose."
   "Hm." Thorne nodded wry acknowledgment. The seductive sinuosity faded from its posture, and it sat up straight, and rubbed the last of the sleep from its eyes. "Tea?"
   "Sure. Or, uh, I could come back after your sleep-shift." Or after you're dressed.
   It swung its silk-swathed legs from the bed. "No way. I'd be up in an hour anyway. I've been waiting for this. Seize the day." It padded across the cabin to do its tea-ritual again. He set up the data cube in the comconsole and paused, both polite and practical, for the captain to take its first sips of the hot black liquid, and come fully awake. He wished it would put its uniform on.
   He keyed up the display as Thorne wandered close. "I have a detailed holomap of House Bharaputra's main medical complex. This data is not more than four months old. Plus guard schedules and patrol patterns_their security is much heavier than a normal civilian hospital, more like a military laboratory, but it's no fortress. Their everyday concern is more against individual local intruders intent on theft. And, of course, in preventing certain of their less voluntary patients from escaping." A significant chunk of his former fortune had gone into that map cube.
   The color-coded image spread itself in lines and sheets of light above the vid plate. The complex was truly that, a vast warren of buildings, tunnels, therapy-gardens, labs, mini-manufacturing areas, flyer pads, warehouses, garages, and even two shuttle docks for direct departure to planetary orbit.
   Thorne put down its cup, leaned over the comconsole, and stared with interest. It took up the remote control and turned the map-image, shrank and expanded and sliced it. "So do we want to start by capturing the shuttle bays?"
   "No. The clones are all kept together over here on the west side, in this sort of hospice area. I figure if we land here in this exercise court we'll be damn near on top of their dormitory. Naturally, I'm not overly concerned about what the drop shuttle damages, coming down."
   "Naturally." A brief grin flickered over the captain's face. "Timing?" "I want to make it a night drop. Not so much for cover, because here's no way we're going to make a combat drop shuttle inconspicuous, but because that's the one time all the clones are together in a mall area. In the day they're all spread out in the exercise and play areas, the swimming pool and what-not."
   "And classrooms?"
   "No, not exactly. They don't teach 'em much beyond the minimum necessary for socialization. If a clone can count to twenty and read signs, that's all they need. Throw-away brains." That had been the other way he'd known he was different from the rest. A real human tutor had introduced him to a vast array of virtual learning programs. He'd lost himself for days at a time in the computer's patient praise. Unlike his Komarran tutors later, they repeated themselves endlessly, and never punished him, never swore or raged or struck or forced him to physical exertion till he grew sick or passed out. . . . "The clones pick up a surprising amount of information despite it all, though. A lot from their holovid games. Bright kids. Damn few of these clones have stupid progenitors, or they wouldn't have amassed a sufficient fortune to buy this form of life-extension. Ruthless, maybe, but not stupid."
   Thorne's eyes narrowed as it dissected the area on the vid, taking apart the buildings layer by later, studying the layout. "So a dozen full-kit Dendarii commandos wake fifty or sixty kids out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night ... do they know we're coming?"
   "No. By the way, make sure the troops realize, they won't look exactly like kids. We're taking them in their last year of development. They're mostly ten or eleven years old, but due to the growth accelerators they will appear to have the bodies of late teenagers."
   "Gawky?"
   "Not really. They get great physical conditioning. Healthy as hell. That's the whole point of not just growing them in a vat till transplant time."
   "Do they . . . know? Know what's going to happen to them?" Thorn e asked with an introspective frown.
   "They're not told, no. They're told all kinds of lies, variously. They're told they're in a special school, for security reasons, to save them from some exotic danger. That they're all some kind of prince or princess, or rich man's heir, or military scion, and someday very soon their parents or their aunts or their ambassadors are going to come and take them away to some glamorous future . . . and then, of course, at last some smiling person comes, and calls them away from their playmates, and tells them that today is the day, and they run . . ." he stopped, swallowed, "and snatch up their things, and brag to their friends. . . ."
   Thorne was tapping the vid control unconsciously in its palm, and looking pale. "I get the picture."
   "And walk out hand-in-hand with their murderers, eagerly."
   "You can stop with the scenario-spinning, unless you're trying to make me lose my last meal."
   "What, you've known for years that this was going on," he mocked. "Why get all squeamish about it now?" He bit off his bitterness. Naismith. He must be Naismith.
   Thorne shot him a sharp glare. "I was ready to fry them from orbit the last time, as you may recall. You wouldn't let me."
   What last time? No time in the last three years. He'd have to scan the mission logs back even further, dammit. He shrugged, ambiguously.
   "So," said Thorne, "are these . . . big kids ... all going to decide we're their parents' enemies, kidnapping them just before they go home? I see trouble, here."
   He clenched, and spread, the fingers of his right hand. "Maybe not. Children . . . have a culture of their own. Passed down from year to year. There are rumors. Boogeyman stories. Doubts. I told you, they aren't stupid. Their adult handlers try to stamp out the stories, or make fun of them, or mix them up with other, obvious lies." And yet . . . they had not fooled him. But then, he had lived in the creche much longer than the average. He'd had time to see more clones come and go, time to see stories repeated, pseudo-biographies duplicated. Time for their handlers' tiny slips and mistakes to accumulate in his observation. "If it's the same_" If it's the same as it was in my time, he almost said, but saved himself, "I should be able to persuade them. Leave that part to me."
   "Gladly." Thorne swung a console chair into clamps close beside his, settled down, and rapidly entered some notes on logistics and angle of attack, point-men and back-ups, and traced projected routes through the buildings. "Two dormitories?" it pointed curiously. Thorne's fingernails were cut blunt, undecorated.
   "Yes. The boys are kept segregated from the girls, rather carefully. The female_usually female_customers expect to wake up in a body with the seal of virginity still on it."
   "I see. So. We get all these kids loaded, by some miracle, before the Bharaputrans arrive in force_"
   "Speed is of the essence, yes."
   "As usual. But the Bharaputrans will be all over us if there is any little hitch or hold-up. Unlike with the Marilacans at Dagoola IV, I haven't had weeks and weeks to drill these kids on shuttle-loading procedures. What if, then?"
   "Once the clones are loaded into the shuttle they become in effect our hostages. We'll be safe from lethal fire with them aboard. The Bharaputrans won't risk their investment as long as any chance of recovery remains."
   "Once they decide all chance is lost, they'll seek vigorous retribution, to discourage imitators, though."
   "True. We must cloud their minds with doubt."
   "Then their next move_if we get the shuttle airborne_must be to try to blow up the Ariel in orbit before we get there, cutting off our escape."
   "Speed," he repeated doggedly.
   "Contingencies, Miles dear. Wake up. I don't usually have to restart your brain in the morning_do you want some more tea? No? I suggest, if we suffer dangerous delay downside, that the Ariel take refuge at Fell Station, and we rendezvous with it there."
   "Fell Station? The orbital one?" He hesitated. "Why?"
   "Baron Fell is still in a state of vendetta with Bharaputra and Ryoval, isn't he?"
   Jacksonian internecine House politics; he was not as current on them as he should be. He had not even thought of looking for an ally among the other Houses. They were all criminal, all evil, tolerating or sabotaging each other in shifting patterns of power. And here was Ryoval, mentioned again. Why? He took refuge in another wordless shrug. "Getting pinned, trapped on Fell Station with fifty young clones while Bharaputra hustles for control of the jumppoint stations, would not improve our position. No Jacksonian is to be trusted. Run and jump as fast as we can is still the safest strategy."
   "Bharaputra won't swing Jumpstation Five into line, it's Fell-owned."
   "Yes, but I want to return to Escobar. The clones can all get safe asylum there."
   "Look, Miles, the jump back on this route is held by the consortium already dominated by Bharaputra. We'll never get back out the way we jump in, unless you've got something up your sleeve_no? Then may I suggest our best escape route is via Jumppoint Five."
   "Do you really see Fell as so reliable an ally?" he inquired cautiously.
   "Not at all. But he is the enemy of our enemies. This trip."
   "But the jump from Five leads to the Hegen Hub. We can't jump into Cetagandan territory, and the only other route out of the Hub is to Komarr via Pol."
   "Roundabout, but much safer."
   Not for me! That's the damned Barrayaran Empire! He swallowed a wordless shriek.
   "The Hub to Pol to Komarr to Sergyar and back to Escobar," Thorne recited happily. "You know, this could really work out." It made more notes, leaning across the comconsole, its nightgown shifting and shimmering in the candy lights of the vid display. Then it put its elbows on the console and rested its chin in its hands, breasts compressing, shifting beneath the thin fabric. Its expression grew gently introspective. It glanced up at him at last with an odd, rather sad smile.
   "Have any clones ever escaped?" Thorne asked softly.
   "No," he answered quickly, automatically.
   "Except for your own clone, of course."
   A dangerous turn in the conversation. "My clone did not escape either. He was simply removed by his purchasers." He should have tried to escape . . . what life might he have led, had he succeeded?
   "Fifty kids," Thorne sighed. "Y'know_I really approve of this mission." It waited, watching him with sharp and gleaming eyes.
   Acutely uncomfortable, he suppressed an idiocy such as saying Thank you, but found himself with no remark to put in its place, resulting in an awkward silence.
   "I suppose," said Thorne thoughtfully after the too-long moment, "it would be very difficult for anyone brought up in such an environment to really trust . . . anyone else. Anyone's word. Their good will."
   "I ... suppose." Was this casual conversation, or something more sinister? A trap . . .
   Thorne, still with that weird mysterious smile, leaned across their station chairs, caught his chin in one strong, slender hand, and kissed him.
   He did not know if he was supposed to recoil or respond, so did neither, in cross-eyed, panicked paralysis. Thorne's mouth was warm, and tasted of tea and bergamot, silky and perfumed. Was Naismith screwing_this_too? If so, who did what to whom? Or did they take turns? And would it really be that bad? His terror heightened with an undeniable stirring of arousal. I believe I would die for a lover's touch. He had been alone forever.
   Thorne withdrew at last, to his intense relief, though only a little way, its hand still trapping his chin. After another moment of dead silence, its smile grew wry. "I shouldn't tease you, I suppose," it sighed. "There is a sort of cruelty in it, all things considered."
   It released him, and stood, the sensuous langour abruptly switched off. "Back in a minute." It strode to its cabin washroom, sealing the door behind it.
   He sat, unstrung and shaking. What the hell was that all about? And from another part of his mind, You could lose your damned virginity this trip, I bet, and from another, No! Not with that!
   Had that been a test? But had he passed, or failed? Thorne had not cried out in accusation, nor called for armed back-up. Perhaps the captain was arranging his arrest right now, by comm link from the washroom. There was no place to run away, aboard a small ship in deep space. His crossed arms hugged his torso. With effort he uncrossed them, placed his hands on the console, and willed his muscles to uncoil. They probably won't kill me. They'd take him back to the fleet and let Naismith kill him.
   But no security squad broke down the door, and soon enough Thorne returned. Nattily dressed in its uniform, at last. It plucked the data cube from the comconsole, and closed its palm over it. "I'll sit down with Sergeant Taura and this and do some serious planning, then."
   "Ah, yes. It's time." He hated to let the precious cube out of his sight. But it seemed he was still Naismith in Thorne's eyes.
   Thorne pursed its lips. "Now that it's time to brief the crew, don't you think it would be a good idea to put the Ariel on a communications blackout?"
   An outstanding idea, though one he'd been afraid to suggest as too suspicious and strange. Maybe it wasn't so unusual, on these covert ops. He'd had no certain idea as to when the real Naismith was supposed to return to the Dendarii fleet, but from the mercenaries' easy acceptance of him, it had to have been expected soon. He'd lived for the past three days in fear of frantic orders arriving by tight-beam and Jump-courier from the real Admiral, telling the Ariel to turn around. Give me a few more days. Just a few more days, and I'll redeem it all. "Yes. Do so."
   "Very good, sir." Thorne hesitated. "How are you feeling, now? Everybody knows these black miasmas of yours can run for weeks. But if only you'll rest properly, I trust you'll be your usual energetic self in time for the drop mission. Shall I pass the word to leave you alone?"
   "I ... would appreciate that, Bel." What luck! "But keep me informed, eh?"
   "Oh, yes. You can count on me. It's a straightforward raid, except for handling that herd of kids, in which I defer to your superior expertise."
   "Right." With a smile and a cheery salute, he fled across the corridor to the safe isolation of his own cabin. The pulsing combination of elation and his tension headache made him feel as if he were floating. When the door sealed behind him, he fell across his bed and gripped the coverings to hold himself in place. It's really going to happen!
   Later, diligently scanning ship's logs on his cabin comconsole, he finally found the four-year-old records of the Ariel's previous visit to Jackson's Whole. Such as they were. They started out with utterly boring details about an ordnance deal, inventory entries regarding a cargo of weapons to be loaded from House Fell's orbital transfer station. Completely without preamble, Thorne's breathless voice made a cryptic entry, "Murka's lost the Admiral. He's being held prisoner by Baron Ryoval. I'm going now to make a devil's bargain with Fell."
   Then records of an emergency combat drop shuttle trip downside, followed by the Ariel's abrupt departure from Fell Station with cargo only half loaded. These events were succeeded by two fascinating, unexplained conversations between Admiral Naismith, and Baron Ryoval and Baron Fell, respectively. Ryoval was raving, sputtering exotic death threats. He studied the Baron's contorted, handsome face uneasily. Even in a society that prized ruthlessness, Ryoval was a man whom other Jacksonian power-brokers stepped wide around. Admiral Naismith appeared to have stepped right in something.
   Fell was more controlled, a cold anger. As usual, all the really essential information, including the reason for the visit in the first place, was lost in Naismith's verbal orders. But he did manage to gather the surprising fact that the eight-foot-tall commando, Sergeant Taura, was a product of House Bharaputra's genetics laboratories, a genetically-engineered prototype super-soldier.
   It was like unexpectedly meeting someone from one's old home town. In a weird wash of homesickness, he longed to look her up and compare notes. Naismith had apparently stolen her heart, or at least stolen her away, although that did not seem to be the offense Ryoval was foaming about. It was all rather incomprehensible.
   He did garner one other, unpleasant fact. Baron Fell was a would-be clone consumer. His old enemy Ryoval in a move of vendetta had apparently arranged to have Fell's clone murdered before the transplant could take place, trapping Fell in his aging body, but the intent was there. Regardless of Bel Thorne's contingency planning, he resolved he would have nothing to do with Baron Fell if he could help it.
   He blew out his breath, shut down the comconsole, and went back to practicing simulations with the command headset helmet, a manufacturer's training program that happily had never been deleted from its memory. I'm going to bring this off. Somehow.
   

CHAPTER FOUR

   "No reply from the Ariel from this courier-hop either, sir," Lieutenant Hereld reported apologetically.
   Miles's fists clenched in frustration. He forced his hands flat again along his trouser seams, but the energy only flowed to his feet, and he began to pace from wall to wall in the Triumph's Nav and Com room. "That's the third_third? You have been repeating the message with every courier?"
   "Yes, sir."
   "The third no-reply. Dammit, what's holding Bel up?"
   Lieutenant Hereld shrugged helplessly at this rhetorical question.
   Miles re-crossed the room, frowning fiercely. Damn the time-lag. He wanted to know what was happening right now. Tight-beam communications crossed a local-space region at the speed of light, but the only way to get information through a wormhole was to physically record it, put it on a jumpship, and jump it through to the next relay station, where it was beamed to the next wormhole and jumped again, if it was economically worthwhile to maintain such a service. In regions of heavy message traffic, such couriers jumped as often as every half-hour or even oftener. Between Escobar and Jackson's Whole, the couriers maintained an every-four-hours schedule. So on top of the delay from the speed of light limitation, was added this other, arbitrary human one. Such a delay could be quite useful sometimes, to people playing complex games with interstellar finances, exchange rates, and futures. Or to independent-minded subordinates wishing to conceal excess information about their activities from their superior officers_Miles had occasionally used the lag for that purpose himself. A couple of clarification requests, and their replies, could buy enough time to bring off all sorts of events. That was why he'd made certain his recall order to the Ariel was personal, forceful, and crystal-clear. But Bel had not returned some counterfeit-demure What do you mean by that, sir? Bel had not replied at all.
   "It's not some fault in the courier-system, is it? Other traffic_is other traffic on the route getting their messages through?"
   "Yes, sir. I checked. Information flow is normal all the way through to Jackson's Whole."
   "They did file a flight plan to Jackson's Whole, they did actually jump through that exit-point_"
   "Yes, sir."
   Four bleeding days ago, now. He considered his mental picture of the wormhole nexus. No mapped jumps leading off this standard shortest route from Escobar to Jackson's Whole had ever been discovered to go anywhere of interest. He could not imagine Bel choosing this moment to play Betan Astronomical Survey and go exploring. There was the very rare ship that jumped through some perfectly standard route but never materialized on the other side . . . converted to an unrecoverable smear of quarks in the fabric of space-time by some subtle malfunction in the ship's Necklin rods or the pilot's neurological control system. The jump couriers kept track of traffic on such a heavily commercialized route as this, though, and would have reported such a disappearance promptly.
   He came_was driven_to decision, and that alone heated his temper a few more degrees. He had grown unaccustomed of late to being chivvied into any action by events not under his own control. This was not in my plans for the day, blast it. "All right, Sandy. Call me a staff meeting. Captain Quinn, Captain Bothari-Jesek, Commodore Jesek, in the Triumph's briefing room, as soon as they can assemble."
   Hereld raised her brows at the list of names even as her hands moved over the comconsole interface to comply. Inner Circle all. "Serious shit, sir?"
   He managed an edged smile, and tried to lighten his voice. "Seriously annoying only, Lieutenant."
   Not quite. What had his idiot baby brother Mark in mind to do with that commando squad he'd requisitioned? A dozen fully-equipped Dendarii troopers were not trivial firepower. Yet, compared to the military resources of, say, House Bharaputra . . . enough force to get into a hell of a lot of trouble, but not enough force to shoot their way back out. The thought of his people_Taura, God!_blindly following the ignorant Mark into some tactical insanity, trustingly thinking it was him, drove him wild inside. Klaxons howled and red lights flashed in his head. Bel, why aren't you answering?
   * * *
   Miles found himself pacing in the Triumph's main briefing room, too, around and around the big main tac display table, until Quinn raised her chin from her hands to growl, "Will you please sit down?" Quinn was not as anxious as he; she was not biting her fingernails yet. The ends remained neat, uneclipsed half-moons. He found that faintly reassuring. He swung into a station chair. One of his booted feet began tapping on the friction matting. Quinn eyed it, frowned, opened her mouth, closed it, and shook her head. He stilled the foot and bared his teeth at her in a quick false grin. Happily, before his nervous energy could materialize into some even more irritating compulsive twitch, Baz Jesek arrived.
   "Elena is podding over from the Peregrine right now," Baz reported, seating himself in his usual station chair, and by habit calling up the fleet engineering ops interface from the comconsole. "She should be along in just a few minutes."
   "Good, thanks," Miles nodded.
   The engineer had been a tall, thin, dark-haired, tensely unhappy man in his late twenties when Miles had first met him, almost a decade ago, at the birth of the Dendarii Mercenaries. The outfit had then consisted only of Miles, his Barrayaran bodyguard, his bodyguard's daughter, one obsolete freighter slated for scrap and its suicidally depressed jump pilot, and an ill-conceived get-rich-quick arms-smuggling scheme. Miles had sworn Baz in as a liege-man to Lord Vorkosigan before Admiral Naismith had even been invented. Now in his late thirties, Baz remained just as thin, with slightly less dark hair, and just as quiet, but possessed of a serene self-confidence. He reminded Miles of a heron, stalking in some reedy lake-margin, all long stillnesses and economical motions.
   As promised, Elena Bothari-Jesek entered the chamber shortly thereafter, and seated herself beside her engineer-husband. Both being on duty, they limited the demonstration of their reunion to the exchange of a smile and a quick hand-touch under the table. She spared a smile for Miles, too. Secondly.
   Of all the Dendarii Inner Circle who knew him as Lieutenant Lord Vorkosigan, Elena was surely the deepest inside. Her father, the late Sergeant Bothari, had been Miles's liege-sworn armsman and personal protector from the day Miles had been born. Age mates, Miles and Elena had been practically raised together, since Countess Vorkosigan had taken a maternal interest in the motherless girl. Elena knew Admiral Naismith, Lord Vorkosigan, and just-plain-Miles as thoroughly_perhaps more thoroughly_as anyone in the universe.
   And had chosen to marry Baz Jesek instead . . . Miles found it comforting and useful to think of Elena as his sister. Foster-sister she nearly was in truth. She was as tall as her tall husband, with cropped ebony hair and pale ivory skin. He could still see the echo of borzoi-faced Sergeant Bothari in the aquiline bones of her features, Bothari's leaden ugliness transmuted to her golden beauty by some genetic alchemy. Elena, I still love you, dammit... he clipped off the thought. He had Quinn now. Or anyway, the Admiral Naismith half of him did.
   As a Dendarii officer, Elena was his finest creation. He'd watched her grow from a shy, angry, off-balance girl, barred from military service on Barrayar by her gender, to squad leader to covert operative to staff officer to ship-master. The retired Commodore Tung had once named her his second-best military apprentice ever. Miles sometimes wondered how much of his on-going maintenance of the Dendarii Mercenaries was really service to Imperial Security, how much was the wild self-indulgence of a very questionable aspect of his own faceted_or fractured_personality, and how much was a secret gift to Elena Bothari. Bothari-Jesek. The true springs of history could be murky indeed.
   "There's still no word from the Ariel," Miles began without preamble; no formalities required with this group. Deep insiders all, he could dare to think out loud in front of them. He could feel his mind relax, re-blending Admiral Naismith and Lord Vorkosigan. He could even let his accent waver from Naismith's strict Betan drawl, and allow a few Barrayaran gutterals to slip in with the swear words. There were going to be swear words, this staff meeting, he was fairly sure. "I want to go after them."
   Quinn drummed her nails on the table, once. "I expected you would. Therefore, could little Mark be expecting it too? He's studied you. He's got your number. Could this be a trap? Remember how he diddled you the last time."
   Miles winced. "I remember. The possibility that this is some kind of set-up has crossed my mind. That's one reason I didn't take off after them twenty hours ago." Right after the embarrassing, hastily-dismissed full staff meeting. He'd been in the mood for fratricide on the spot. "Assuming, as seems reasonable, that Bel was fooled at first_and I don't see why not, everybody else was_the time-lag might have given Mark a chance to slip up, and Bel to see the light. But in that case the recall order should have brought the Ariel back."
   "Mark does do an awfully good you," Quinn observed, from personal experience. "Or at least he did two years ago. If you're not expecting the possibility of a double, he seems just like you on one of your off days. His exterior appearance was perfect."
   "But Bel does know of the possibility," Elena put in.
   "Yes," said Miles. "So maybe Bel hasn't been fooled. Maybe Bel's been spaced."
   "Mark would need the crew, or a crew, to run the ship," said Baz. "Though he might have had a new crew waiting, farside."
   "If he'd been planning such outright piracy and murder, he'd hardly have taken a Dendarii commando squad along to resist it." Reason could be very reassuring, sometimes. Sometimes. Miles took a breath. "Or maybe Bel has been suborned."
   Baz raised his brows; Quinn unconsciously closed her teeth upon, but did not bite through, the little fingernail of her right hand.
   "Suborned how?" said Elena. "Not by money." Her smile twisted up. "D'you figure Bel's finally given up trying to seduce you, and is looking for the next best thing?"
   "That's not funny," Miles snapped. Baz converted a suspicious snort into a careful cough, and met his glare blandly, but then lost it and sniggered.
   "At any rate, it's an old joke," Miles conceded wearily. "But it depends upon what Mark is up to, on Jackson's Whole. The kind of . . . hell, outright slavery, practiced by the various Jacksonian body-sculptors, is a deep offense to Bel's progressive Betan soul. If Mark is thinking of taking some kind of bite out of his old home planet, he just might talk Bel into going along with it."
   "At Fleet expense?" Baz inquired.
   "That does . . . verge on mutiny," Miles agreed reluctantly. "I'm not accusing, I'm just speculating. Trying to see all the possibilities."
   "In that case, is it possible Mark's destination isn't Jackson's Whole at all?" said Baz. "There are four other jumps out of Jacksonian local space. Maybe the Ariel is just passing through."
   "Physically possible, yes," said Miles. "Psychologically . . . I've studied Mark, too. And while I can't say that I have his number, I know Jackson's Whole looms large in his life. It's only a gut-feeling, but it's a strong gut-feeling." Like a bad case of indigestion.
   "How did we get blindsided by Mark this time?" Elena asked. "I thought ImpSec was supposed to be keeping track of him for us."
   "They are. I get regular reports from Illyan's office," Miles said. "The last report, which I read at ImpSec headquarters not three weeks ago, put Mark still on Earth. But it's the damn time-lag. If he left Earth, say, four or five weeks ago, that report is still in transit from Earth to Illyan on Barrayar and back to me. I'll bet you Betan dollars to anything you please that we get a coded message from HQ in the next few days earnestly warning us that Mark has dropped out of sight. Again."
   "Again?" said Elena. "Has he dropped out of sight before?"
   "A couple of times. Three, actually." Miles hesitated. "You see, every once in a while_three times in the last two years_I've tried to contact him myself. Invited him to come in, come to Barrayar, or at least to meet with me. Every time, he's panicked, gone underground and changed his identity_he's rather good at it, from all the time he spent as a prisoner of the Komarran terrorists_and it takes Illyan's people weeks or months to locate him again. Illyan's asked me not to try to contact Mark any more without his authorization." He brooded. "Mother wants him to come in so much, but she won't have Illyan order him kidnapped. At first I agreed with her, but now I wonder."
   "As your clone, he_" began Baz.
   "Brother," Miles corrected, instantly. "Brother. I reject the term 'clone' for Mark. I forbid it. 'Clone' implies something interchangeable. A brother is someone unique. And I assure you, Mark is unique."
   "In guessing . . . Mark's next moves," Baz began again, more carefully, "can we even use reason? Is he sane?"
   "If he is, it's not the Komarrans' fault." Miles rose and began pacing again around the table, despite Quinn's exasperated look. He avoided her eyes and watched his boots, grey on grey against the friction matting, instead. "After we finally discovered his existence, Illyan had his agents do every kind of background check on him they could. Partly to make up for the acute embarrassment of ImpSec's having missed him, all these years, I think. I've seen all the reports. Trying and trying to get inside Mark's mind." Around the corner, down the other side, and back.
   "His life in Bharaputra's clone-creche didn't seem too bad_they coddle those bodies_but after the Komarran insurgents picked him up, I gather it got pretty nightmarish. They kept training him to be me, but every time they thought they'd got it, I'd do something unexpected and they had to start over. They kept changing and elaborating their plans. The plot dragged on for years after the time they'd first hoped to bring it off. They were a small group, operating on a shoestring anyway. Their leader, Ser Galen, was half-mad himself, I think." Around and around.
   "Part of the time Galen would treat Mark like the great hope for a Komarran uprising, or pet him and set him up with the idea that they were going to make him Emperor of Barrayar in a coup. But part of the time Galen would slip a cog, and see Mark as the personal genetic representative of our father, and make him whipping-boy for all his hatred of the Vorkosigans and Barrayar. Disguising the most ferocious punishments, tortures really_from himself, and maybe even from Mark_as 'training discipline.' Illyan's agent had some of this from a rather illegal fast-penta interrogation of an ex-subordinate of Galen's, so it's flat truth." Around and around.
   "For example, apparently Mark's and my metabolisms are not the same. So whenever Mark's weight exceeded my parameters, instead of doing the intelligent thing and having Mark's appetite medically adjusted, Galen would first withhold food for days, then let him gorge, and then force him at shock-stick point to exercise till he vomited. Weird stuff like that, really disturbing. Galen apparently had a hair-trigger temper, at least where Mark was concerned. Or maybe he was deliberately trying to make Mark crazy. Create a Mad Emperor Miles, to replay Mad Emperor Yuri's reign and destroy the Barrayaran government from the top down. Once_this fellow reported_Mark tried to get a night out, just a night out, and actually got away for a while, till Galen's goons brought him back. Galen went nuts, accused him of trying to escape, took his shock-stick and_" his eye caught Elena's paling face, and he hastily edited his nervous outburst, "and did some ugly things." Which couldn't have helped Mark's sexual adjustment any. It had been so bad that Galen's own goons had begged him to stop, according to the informant.
   "No wonder he hated Galen," said Quinn softly.
   Elena's glance was rather sharper. "There's nothing you could have done. You didn't even know Mark existed, back then."
   "We should have known."
   "Right. So to what extent is this retroactive guilt distorting your thinking right now, Admiral?"
   "Some, I suspect," he admitted. "That's why I called you all here. I feel the need of a cross-check, on this." He paused, and forced himself to sit again. "That's not the only reason, however. Before this mess with the Ariel leaped out of the wormhole, I had started out to give you a real, bona fide mission assignment."
   "Ah, ha," said Baz with satisfaction. "At last."
   "The new contract." Despite his distractions, he smiled. "Before Mark showed up, I had it figured for a mission where nothing could possibly go wrong. An all-expenses-paid vacation."
   "What, a no-combat-special?" quipped Elena. "I thought you always looked down on old Admiral Oser for those."
   "I've changed." He felt, as ever, a brief flash of regret for the late Admiral Oser. "His command philosophy looks better all the time. I'm growing old, I guess."
   "Or up," suggested Elena. They exchanged a dry look.
   "In any case," Miles continued, "Barrayaran high command wishes to supply a certain independent deep-space transfer station with a better grade of weaponry than they presently own. Vega Station is, not coincidentally, just off one of the Cetagandan Empire's back doors. However, said vacuum-republic is in an awkward junction in the wormhole nexus. Quinn, the map, please."
   Quinn keyed up a three-dimensional holovid schematic of Vega Station and its neighbors. The jump routes were represented by sparkling jagged lines between hazy spheres of local space systems.
   "Of the three jump points Vega Station commands, one leads into the Cetagandan sphere of influence via its satrapy Ola Three, one is blocked by a sometimes-Cetagandan-ally, sometimes-enemy Toranira, and the other is held by Zoave Twilight, politically neutral with respect to Cetaganda, but wary of its big neighbor." As he spoke of it, Quinn highlighted each system. "Vega Station is outright blockaded through Ola Three and Toranira against the import of any kind of major space-based offensive or defensive weapons systems. Zoave Twilight, under pressure from Cetaganda, is reluctantly cooperating with the arms embargo."
   "So where do we come in?" asked Baz.
   "Literally, through Toranira. We're smuggling pack-horses."
   "What?" said Baz, though Elena caught the reference and suddenly smirked.
   "You've never heard that story? From Barrayaran history? It goes, Count Selig Vorkosigan was at war with Lord Vorwyn of Hazelbright, during the First Bloody Century. The town of Vorkosigan Vashnoi was besieged. Twice a week Lord Vorwyn's patrols would stop this crazy, motley fellow with a train of pack horses and search his packs for contraband, food or supplies. But his packs were always filled with rubbish. They poked and prodded and emptied them_he'd always gather it carefully back up_shook him down and searched him, and finally had to let him go. After the war, one of Vorwyn's border guards met Count Selig's leigeman, no longer motley, by chance in a tavern. 'What were you smuggling?' he asked in frustration. 'We know you were smuggling something, what was it?'
   "And Count Selig's leigeman replied, 'Horses.'
   "We're smuggling spaceships. To wit, the Triumph, the D-16, and the Ariel, all fleet-owned. We enter Vega Station local space through Toranira, on a through-flight plan, bound for Illyrica. Which we really will be. We exit through Zoave, still with every trooper, but minus three aging ships. We then continue on to Illyrica, and pick up our three brand-new warships, which are being completed even as we speak in the Illyrican orbital shipyards. Our happy Winterfair gift from Emperor Gregor."
   Baz blinked. "Will this work?"
   "No reason it shouldn't. The spadework_permits, visas, bribes and so on_is all being completed by ImpSec agents on-site. All we have to do is waft through without alarming anybody. There's no war on, not a shot should be fired. The only problem is that one-third of my trade-inventory just left for Jackson's Whole," Miles concluded with a descending snort.
   "How much time do we have to recover it?" asked Elena.
   "Not as much as we need. The time-window ImpSec has set up for this smuggling scenario is flexible in terms of a few days, but not weeks. The fleet must leave Escobar before the end of this week. I'd originally scheduled it for tomorrow."
   "So do we go without Ariel?" asked Baz.
   "We're going to have to. But not empty-handed. I have an idea for a substitution. Quinn, shunt those Illyrican specs to Baz."
   Quinn bent her head to the secured data cube in her comconsole interface, and released a burst of code to Baz's station. The engineer began keying through advertising displays, descriptions, specifications, and plans from the Illyrican shipbuilders. His thin face lit in a rare smile. "Father Frost is generous this Winterfair," he murmured. His lips parted with delight as the ships' power-plant specs came up, and his eyes moved avidly.
   Miles let him wallow for a few minutes more. "Now," he said, when Baz self-consciously came up for air. "The next-up ship in the fleet from the Ariel in terms of function and firepower is Truzillo's Jay-hawk." Unfortunately, Truzillo was a captain-owner under independent contract to the Fleet corporation, not a Fleet employee. "Do you think he could be persuaded to trade? His replacement ship would be newer and faster, but while it's definitely a step up in firepower from the Ariel, it's a slight step down from the Jayhawk. I'd meant us all to trade up, not even, when we first cooked up this deal."
   Elena raised her eyebrows and grinned. "This is one of your scenarios, isn't it?"
   He shrugged. "Illyan asked me to solve the arms embargo problem, yes. He accepted my solution."
   "Oh," Baz purred, still awash in data, "wait'll Truzillo sees this . . . and this . . . and . . ."
   "So do you think you can persuade him?" asked Miles.
   "Yes," said Baz, with certainty. He glanced up. "So could you."
   "Except I'll be headed the other way. Though if things go well, it's not impossible that I might catch up with you later. I'm putting you in charge of this mission, Baz. Quinn will give you the complete orders, all the codes and contact-people_everything Illyan gave me."
   Baz nodded. "Very good, sir."
   "I'm taking the Peregrine to go after the Ariel," Miles added.
   Baz and Elena exchanged only one quick, sideways glance. "Very good, sir," echoed Elena, with scarcely a pause. "I shifted the Peregrine from twenty-four-hour to one-hour alert status yesterday. When shall I schedule our departure with Escobaran flight control?"
   "In one hour." And, though no one had asked for explanations, he added, "The Peregrine is the next-fastest thing we have that packs significant firepower, besides the Jayhawk and the Ariel itself. I think that speed is going to be of the essence. If we can overtake the Ariel_well, it's a lot easier to prevent a mess than to try to clean up after one. I'm sorry now I didn't leave yesterday, but I had to give it a chance to be simple. I'm assigning Quinn to myself as floating staff because she's had valuable previous experience with intelligence-gathering on Jackson's Whole."
   Quinn rubbed her arm. "House Bharaputra is damn dangerous, if that's where Mark's headed. They have heavy money, heavy shit, and a sharp memory for revenge."
   "Why d'you think I avoid the place? That's another danger, that certain Jacksonians will mistake Mark for Admiral Naismith. Baron Ryoval, for example."
   Baron Ryoval was a persistent danger. The Dendarii had disposed of the latest bounty-hunter Ryoval had sent seeking Admiral Naismith's scalp only three months ago; he had been the fourth to appear so far. It was shaping up to an annual event. Maybe Ryoval dispatched an agent on each anniversary of their first encounter, as a memorial tribute. Ryoval did not command great powers, nor possess a long reach, but he had undergone life-extension treatments; he was patient, and could keep this up for a long, long time.
   "Have you considered another possible solution to the problem?" said Quinn slowly. "Send ahead to Jackson's Whole and warn them. Have, say, House Fell arrest Mark and impound the Ariel till you arrive to retrieve them. Fell hates Ryoval enough to protect Mark from him for the annoyance-factor alone."
   Miles sighed. "I have considered it." He traced a formless pattern on the polished tabletop with his fingertip.
   "You asked for a cross-check, Miles," Elena pointed out. "What's wrong with that idea?"
   "It might work. But if Mark has really convinced Bel he's me, they might resist arrest. Maybe fatally. Mark is paranoid about Jackson's Whole. Mark is paranoid, period. I don't know what he'd do in a panic."
   "You are awfully tender of Mark's sensibilities," said Elena.
   "I'm trying to get him to trust me. I can hardly start the process by betraying him."
   "Have you considered how much this little side-jaunt is going to cost, once the bill for it arrives on Simon Illyan's desk?" Quinn asked.
   "ImpSec will pay. Without question."
   Quinn said, "You sure? What's Mark to ImpSec anyway, now that he's only a left-over from the exploded plot? There is no danger any more to Barrayar of him being secretly substituted for you. I thought they only watched him for us as a courtesy. A rather expensive courtesy."
   Miles replied carefully, "It is ImpSec's explicit task to guard the Barrayaran Imperium. That includes not only protecting Gregor's person, and running a certain amount of galactic espionage_" a wave of his hand included the Dendarii fleet, and Illyan's far-flung, if thinly stretched, network of agents, military attaches, and informants, "but also keeping watch over Gregor's immediate heirs. Keeping watch not only to protect them, but to protect the Imperium from any little plot got up by them, or by others seeking to use them. I am acutely conscious that the question of just who is Gregor's heir is rather tangled at present. I wish to hell he'd marry and get us all off the hook soon." Miles hesitated for a long moment. "By one interpretation, Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan has a place as heir-claimant to the Barrayaran Imperium second only to my own. That makes him not only ImpSec's business, it makes him our primary business. My personal pursuit of the Ariel is fully justified."
   "Justifiable," Quinn corrected dryly.
   "Whatever."
   "If Barrayar_as you have often claimed_would not accept you as Emperor because of suspicion of mutation, I should think it'd go into spasms at the thought of your clone installed in the Imperial Residence," said Baz. "Twin brother," he amended hastily as Miles opened his mouth.
   "It doesn't require the probability of success at gaining the Imperium to make the possibility of an attempt to do so into an ImpSec problem." Miles snorted. "It's funny. All the time the Komarrans thought of their faux-Miles as an imposter-claimant. I don't think either they or Mark realized they'd made a real claimant. Well, I'd have to be dead first anyway, so from my point of view the question is moot." He rapped the table and rose. "Let's get moving, people."
   On the way out the door, Elena lowered her voice to ask him, "Miles_did your mother see those horrific investigation-reports of Illyan's about Mark, too?"
   He smiled bleakly. "Who d'you think ordered them done?"
   

CHAPTER FIVE

   He began donning the half-armor. First, next to his skin, a piece of the hottest new technology on the market: a nerve-disrupter shield-net. The field-generating net was worked into the fabric of a close-fitting grey body-suit and a hood that protected skull, neck, and forehead, leaving only his eyes, nose, and mouth peeping from the hole. And so the threat of one of the most fearsome anti-personnel weapons, the brain-killing nerve disrupter, was rendered null. As an added bonus, the suit stopped stunner-fire, too. Trust Naismith to have the best and newest, and custom-made to fit ... was the elastic fabric supposed to be this bloody tight?
   Over the net-suit went a flexible torso-armor that would stop any projectile up to small hand-missiles and down to deadly needier spines. Fortunately for his ability to breathe, its catches were adjustable. He let them out to their fullest extension, rendering the valuable protection merely comfortably and correctly snug. Over it went blessedly loose camouflage-grey fatigues, made of a combat-rated fabric that would neither melt nor burn. Then came belts and bandoliers with stunner, nerve disrupter, plasma arc, grenades, power cells, a rappel-harness and spool, emergency oxygen. On his back he shrugged the harness holding a neat, flat power pack that generated, at the first touch of enemy fire, a one-man-sized plasma arc mirror field, with so miniscule a time lag one barely had time to cook, much. It was good for absorbing thirty or forty direct hits before the power cell, and its porter, died. It seemed almost a misnomer to call it all half-armor: triple armor was more like it.
   Over the nerve-disruptor net covering his feet he pulled thick socks, then Naismith's combat boots. At least the boots fit without any embarrassing adjustments. A mere week of inactivity, and his body fought him, thickening . . . Naismith was a damned anorectic, that was it. A hyperactive anorectic. He straightened. Properly distributed, the formidible array of equipment was surprisingly light.
   On the countertop next to his cabin comconsole, the command helmet sat waiting. The empty shadow beneath its forehead flange made him think, for whatever morbid reason, of an empty skull. He raised the helmet in his hands, and turned it in the light, and stared hungrily at its elegant curves. His hands could control one weapon, two at most. This, through the people it commanded, controlled dozens; potentially, hundreds or even thousands. This was Naismith's real power.
   The cabin buzzer blatted; he jumped, nearly dropping the helmet. He could have pitched it against the wall and not harmed it, but still he set it down carefully.
   "Miles?" came Captain Thorne's voice on the intercom. "You about ready?"
   "Yes, come in." He touched the keypad to release the door lock.
   Thorne entered, attired identically to himself, but with hood temporarily pushed back. The formless fatigues rendered Thorne not bi-sexed, but neuter, a genderless thing, a soldier. Thorne too bore a command helmet under its arm, of a slightly older and different make.
   Thorne walked around him, eyes flicking over every weapon and belt-hook, and checking the readouts of his plasma-shield pack. "Good." Did Captain Thorne normally inspect its Admiral before combat? Was Naismith in the habit of wandering into battle with his boots unfastened, or something? Thorne nodded to the command helmet sitting on the countertop. "That's quite a machine. Sure you can handle it?"
   The helmet appeared new, but not that new. He doubted Naismith supplied himself with used military surplus for his personal use, regardless of what economies he practiced in the fleet at large. "Why not?" he shrugged. "I have before."
   "These things," Thorne lifted his own, "can be pretty overwhelming at first. It's not a data flow, it's a damn data flood. You have to learn to ignore everything you don't need, otherwise it can be almost better to switch the thing off. You, now . . ." Thorne hesitated, "have that same uncanny ability as old Tung did, of appearing to ignore everything as it goes by, and yet being able to remember and yank it out instantly if it's needed. Of somehow always being on the right channel at the right time. It's like your mind works on two levels. Your command-response time is incredibly fast, when your adrenalin is up. It's kind of addictive. People who work with you a lot come to expect_and rely_on it." Thorne stopped, waited.
   What was it expecting him to say? He shrugged again. "I do my best."
   "If you're still feeling ill, you know, you can delegate this whole raid to me."
   "Do I look ill?"
   "You're not yourself. You don't want to make the whole squad sick." Thorne seemed tense, almost urgent.
   "I'm fine, now, Bel. Back off!"
   "Yes, sir," Thorne sighed.
   "Is everything ready out there?"
   "The shuttle is fueled and armed. Green Squad is kitted up, and is doing the final loading right now. We have it timed so we come into parking orbit just at midnight, downside at Bharaputra's main medical facility. We drop instantly, no waiting around for people to start asking questions. Hit and go. The whole operation should be over in an hour, if things run to plan."
   "Good." His heart was beating faster. He disguised a deep breath in a strung-out sigh. "Let's go."
   "Let's ... do our helmet communication checks first, huh?" said Thorne.
   That was a good idea, here in the quiet cabin, rather than in the noise and excitement and tension of the drop shuttle. "All right," he said, and added slyly, "Take your time."
   There were over a hundred channels in use in the command headset, even for this limited raid. In addition to direct voice contact with the Ariel, Thorne, and every trooper, there were battle computers on the ship, in the shuttle, and in the helmet itself. There were telemetry readouts of every sort, weapon power checks, logistics updates. All the troopers' helmets had vid pick-ups so he could see what they were seeing in infra-red, visual, and UV bands; full sound; their medical readouts; holovid map displays. The holomap of the clone-creche had been specially programmed in, and the plan of attack and several contingencies pre-loaded. There were channels to be dedicated, on the fly, to eavesdropping upon enemy telemetry. Thorne already had Bharaputra's security guards' comm links locked in. They could even pick up commercial entertainment broadcasts from the planet they were approaching. Tinny music filled the air momentarily as he switched past those channels.
   They finished, and he found himself and Thorne staring at each other in an awkward silence. Thorne was hollow-faced, apprehensive, as if struggling with some suppressed emotion. Guilt? Strange perception, surely not. Thorne couldn't be on to him, or it would have called a halt to this whole operation.
   "Pre-combat nerves, Bel?" he said lightly. "I thought you loved your work."
   Thorne came out of its lip-sucking abstraction with a start. "Oh, I do." It took a breath. "Let's do it."
   "Go!" he agreed, and led the way at last out of his isolated cabin-cave into the light of the corridor and the peopled reality his actions_ his actions_had created.
   The shuttle-hatch corridor resembled his first view of it, reversed; the hulking Dendarii commandos were filing out, not spilling in. They seemed quieter this time, not as much clowning and joking. More businesslike. They had names, now, too, all filed in his command headset, which would keep them straight for him. All wore some variety of half-armor and helmet, with an array of heavier equipment in addition to such hand-weapons as he bore.
   He found himself looking at the monster sergeant with new eyes, now that he knew her history. The log had said she was only nineteen years old, though she looked older; she'd been only sixteen, four years ago when Naismith had stolen her away from House Ryoval. He squinted, trying to see her as a girl. He had been taken away at age fourteen, eight years ago. Their mutual time as genetic products and prisoners of House Bharaputra must have overlapped, though he had never met her. The genetic engineering research labs were in a different town from the main surgical facility. House Bharaputra was a vast organization, in its strange Jacksonian way almost a little government. Except Jackson's Whole didn't have governments.
   Eight years ... No one you knew then is still alive. You know that, don't you?
   If I can't do what I want, I'll at least do what I can.
   He stepped up to her. "Sergeant Taura_" she turned, and his brows climbed in startlement. "What is that around your neck?" Actually, he could see what it was, a large fluffy pink bow. He supposed his real question was, why was it around her neck?
   She_smiled, he guessed that repellent grimace was, at him, and fluffed it out a bit more with a huge clawed hand. Her claw-polish was bright pink, tonight. "D'you think it'll work? I wanted something to not scare the kids."
   He looked up at eight feet of half-armor, camouflage cloth, boots, bandoliers, muscle and fang. Somehow, I don't think it'll be enough, Sergeant. "It's . . . certainly worth a try," he choked. So, she was conscious of her extraordinary appearance. . . . Fool! How could she not be? Are you not conscious of yours? He was almost sorry now he had not ventured out of his cabin earlier in the voyage, and made her acquaintance. My home-town girl.
   "What does it feel like, to be going back?" he asked suddenly; a nod in no particular direction indicated the House Bharaputra drop-zone, coming up.
   "Strange," she admitted, her thick brows drawing down.
   "Do you know this landing-site? Ever been there before?"
   "Not that medical complex. I hardly ever left the genetics facility, except for a couple of years that I lived with hired fosterers, which was in the same town." Her head turned, her voice dropped an octave, and she barked an order about loading equipment at one of her men, who gave a half-wave and hustled to obey. She turned back to him and her voice re-softened to conscious, careful lightness. In no other way did she display any inappropriate intimacy while on duty; it seemed she and Naismith were discreet lovers, if lovers they were. The discreetness relieved him. She added, "I didn't get out much."
   His own voice lowered. "Do you hate them?" As 1 do? A different kind of intimate question.
   Her outslung lips twisted in thought. "I suppose ... I was terribly manipulated by them when I was growing up, but it didn't seem like abuse to me at the time. There were a lot of uncomfortable tests, but, it was all science . . . there wasn't any intent to hurt in it. It didn't really hurt till they sold me to Ryoval's, after the super-soldier project was cancelled. What Ryoval's wanted to do to me was grotesque, but that was just the nature of Ryoval's. It was Bharaputra . . . Bharaputra that didn't care. That threw me away. That hurt. But then you came . . ." She brightened. "A knight in shining armor and all that."
   A familiar, surly wave of resentment washed over him. Bugger the knight in shining armor, and the horse he rode in on. And, I can rescue people too, dammit! She was looking away, fortunately, and didn't catch the spasm of anger in his face. Or perhaps she took it for anger at their former tormentors.
   "But for all that," she murmured, "I would not have even existed, without House Bharaputra. They made me. I am alive, for however long . . . shall I return death for life?" Her strange distorted face grew deeply introspective.
   This was not the ideal gung-ho frame of mind to inculcate in a commando on a drop mission, he realized belatedly. "Not . . . necessarily. We're here to rescue clones, not kill Bharaputran employees. We kill only if forced to, eh?"
   This was good Naismithery; her head came up, and she grinned at him. "I'm so relieved you're feeling better. I was terribly worried. I wanted to see you, but Captain Thorne wouldn't allow it." Her eyes warmed like bright yellow flames.
   "Yes, I was . . . very ill. Thorne did right. But . . . maybe we can talk more on the way home." When this was over. When he'd earned the right . . . earned the right to what?
   "You got a date, Admiral." She winked at him, and straightened, ferociously joyous. What have I promised? She bounded forward, happily sergeantly again, to oversee her squad.
   He followed her into the combat-drop shuttle. The light level was much lower in here, the air colder, and, of course, there was no gravity. He floated forward from hand-grip to hand-grip after Captain Thorne, mentally dividing up the floor space for his intended cargo. Twelve or fifteen rows of kids seated four across . . . there was plenty of room. This shuttle was equipped to carry two squads, plus armored hovercars or a whole field hospital. It had a first-aid station at the back, including four fold-down bunks and a portable emergency cryo-chamber. The Dendarii commando-medic was rapidly organizing his area and battening down his supplies. Everything was being fastened down, by quietly-moving fatigue-clad soldiers, with very little fuss or conversation. A place for everything and everything in its place.
   The shuttle pilot was at his post. Thorne took the co-pilot's seat. He took a communication station chair just behind them. Out the front window he could see distant hard-edged stars, nearby the winking colored lights of some human activity, and, at the very edge of the field of view, the bright slice of the planet's curvature. Almost home. His belly fluttered, and not just from zero-gee. Bands of tightness throbbed around his head beneath his helmet-straps.
   The pilot hit his intercom. "Gimme a body-check back there, Taura. We've got a five-minute thrust to match orbit, then we blow bolts and drop."
   After a moment Sergeant Taura's voice returned, "Check. All troops tied down, hatch sealed. We are ready. Go-repeat-go."
   Thorne glanced over its shoulder, and pointed. Hastily, he fastened his seat straps, and just in time. The straps bit deeply, and he lurched from side to side as the Ariel shuddered into its parking orbit, accelerative effects that would have been compensated for and nullified by the artificial gravity generated between the decks of the larger ship.
   The pilot poised his hands, and abruptly dropped them, as if he were a musician playing some crescendo. Loud, startling clanks reverberated through the fuselage. Ululating whoops keened in response from the compartment behind the flight deck.
   When they say drop, he thought wildly, they mean it. Stars and the planet turned, nauseatingly, in the forward window. He closed his eyes; his stomach tried to climb his esophagus. He suddenly realized a hidden advantage to full space armor. If you shit yourself with terror, going down, the suit's plumbing would take care of it, and no one would ever know.
   Air began to scream over the outer hull as they hit the ionosphere. His seat straps tried to slice him like an egg. "Fun, huh?" yelled Thorne, grinning like a loon, its face distorted and lips flapping with deceleration. They were pointed straight down, or so the shuttle's nose was aimed, although his seat was attempting to eject him into the cabin ceiling with neck-breaking and skull-smashing force.
   "I sure hope there's nothing in our way," the pilot yelled cheerfully. "This hasn't been cleared with anybody's flight control, y'know!"
   He pictured a mid-air collision with a large commercial passenger shuttle . . . five hundred women and children aboard . . . vast yellow and black explosions and arcing bodies. . . .
   They crossed the terminator into twilight. Then darkness, whipping clouds . . . bigger clouds . . . shuttle vibrating and bellowing like an insane tuba . . . still pointed straight down, he swore, though how the pilot could tell in this screaming fog he did not know.
   Then, suddenly, they were level as an airshuttle, clouds above, lights of a town like jewels spilled on a carpet below. An airshuttle that was dropping like a rock. His spine began to compress, harder, harder. More hideous clanks, as the shuttle's feet extended. An array of half-lit building bulked below. A darkened playing-court_ Shit, that's it, that's it! The buildings loomed up beside them, above them. Thud-crunch-crunch. A solid, six-legged landing. The silence stunned him.
   "All right, let's go!" Thorne swung up out of its seat, face flushed, eyes lit, with blood-lust or fear or both he could not tell.
   He tramped down the ramp in the wake of a dozen Dendarii. His eyes were about half dark-adapted, and there were enough lights around the complex, diffused by the cool and misty midnight air, that he had no trouble seeing, though the view was drained of color. The shadows were black and sinister. Sergeant Taura, with silent hand signals, divided her squad. No one was making noise. Silent faces were gilded by brief staccato flashes of light as their helmet vids supplied some data bit or another, projected to the side of their vision. One Dendarii, with extra 'scopes on her helmet, rolled out a personal float-bike, mounted it, and rose quietly into the darkness. Air cover.
   The pilot stayed aboard, and Taura counted off four other Dendarii. Two vanished into the shadows of the perimeter, two stayed with the shuttle as rear-guard. He and Thorne had argued about that. Thorne had wanted more perimeter. His own gut-feel was that they would need as many troopers as possible at the clone-creche. The civilian hospital guards were little threat, and it would take time for their better-armed back-up to arrive. By then, the Dendarii would be gone, if they could move the clones along fast enough. He cursed himself, in retrospect, for not ordering two commando squads instead of one, back at Escobar. He could have done so, just as easily, but he'd been caught up in calculations about the Ariel's passenger capacity, and fancied himself conserving life support for the final escape. So many factors to balance.
   His own helmet framed his vision with a colored clutter of codes, numbers, and graphs. He'd studied them all, but they flicked by too fast; by the time he'd taken one in, and interpreted it to himself, it was gone, replaced by another. He took Thorne's advice, and with a whispered word reduced the light intensity to a bare hallucinatory murmur. The helmet's audio pick-up was not so bad. No one was doing any unnecessary chatter.
   He, Thorne, and the other seven Dendarii followed Taura at a trot_her stride_between two adjacent buildings. There was activity on the Bharaputran security guards' comm links, he found by keying his helmet to their audio bands. The first What the hell. Did you hear that? Joe, check sector four, stirrings of response. More to follow, he was sure, though he had no intention of waiting around for it.
   Around a corner. There. A three-story, pleasant white building with lots of plants and landscaping, big windows, balconies. Not quite a hospital, not quite a dormitory, vague, ambiguous, discreet. the life house it was labelled in Jacksonian double-speak. The death house. My dear old home. It was terribly familiar and terribly strange. Once, it had seemed quite splendid to him. Now it seemed . . . smaller than he remembered.
   Taura raised her plasma arc, adjusted its beam to wide, and removed the locked glass front doors in an orange, white, and blue spray of flying, spattering melt. Dendarii bounded through, splitting right and left, before the glow of the spattered globs of glass died. One took up station patrolling the ground floor. Alarms and fire alarms went off: Dendarii killed the noisy speakers they passed with more plasma fire, on the fly, but units in more distant parts of the building kept up a muted clamor. Automatic sprinklers made steam and a mess in their trail.
   He ran to catch up. A uniformed Bharaputran security guard in brown trimmed with pink lurched into the corridor ahead. Three Dendarii stunners simultaneously downed him as his own stunner beam was absorbed harmlessly by the ceiling.
   Taura and two female Dendarii took the lift tube toward the third floor; another trooper passed them in hope of gaining the roof. He led Thorne and the remaining troopers out into the second floor foyer and to the left. Two unarmed adults, one a night-gowned woman pulling on a robe, were felled the instant they appeared. There. Through those double doors. They were locked, and someone was beating on them from the inside.
   "We're going to break the door open," Thorne bellowed through it. "Back away, or you'll get hurt!" The pounding stopped. Thorne nodded. A trooper adjusted his plasma arc to narrow beam, and sliced through a metal bolt. Thorne kicked the doors wide.
   A blond young man fell back a pace, and stared at Thorne with bewilderment. "You're not the firemen."
   A crowd of other men, tall boys, filled the corridor behind the blond. He did not have to remind himself that these were a bunch of ten-year-olds, but he wasn't sure about the perceptions of the troopers. Every variation of height and racial mix and build was represented, much more motley than the Greek-god look one might have anticipated from their garden-and-fountain setting. Personal wealth, not personal beauty, had been the ticket for their creation. Still, each was as glowingly healthy as the particularities of his genetics permitted. They all wore uniform sleepwear, bronze-brown tunics and shorts. "Front," Thorne hissed, and shoved him forward. "Start talking." "Get me a head-count," he ripped out of the corner of his mouth as Thorne pulled him past. "Right."
   He'd practiced the speech for this supreme moment in his mind ten thousand times, every possible variation. The only thing he knew for certain that he was not going to start with was, I'm Miles Naismith. His heart was racing. He inhaled a huge gulp of air. "We're the Dendarii Mercenaries, and we're here to save you."
   The boy's expression was repelled, scared, and scornful all mixed. "You look like a mushroom," he said blankly.
   It was so ... so off-script. Of his thousand rehearsed second lines, not one followed this. Actually, with the command helmet and all, he probably did look a bit like a big gray_ not the heroic image he'd hoped to_
   He tore off his helmet, ripped back his hood, and bared his teeth. The boy recoiled.
   "Listen up, you clones!" he yelled. "The secret you may have heard whispered is true! Every single one of you is waiting in line to be murdered by House Bharaputra surgeons. They're gonna stick somebody else's brain in your head, and throw your brain away. That's where your friends have been going, one by one, to their deaths. We're here to take you to Escobar, where you'll be given sanctuary_" Not all the boys had assembled in the corridor in the first place, and now ones at the rear of the mob began to break away and retreat into individual rooms. A babble started to rise from them, and yells and cries. One dark-haired boy tried to dart past them to the corridor beyond the big double doors, and a trooper grabbed him in a standard arm-lock. He screamed in pain and surprise, and the sound and shock seemed to blow the others back in a wave. The boy struggled without effect in the trooper's iron grip. The trooper looked exasperated and uncertain, and stared at him as if expecting some direction or order. "Get your friends and follow me!" he yelled desperately to the retreating boys. The blond turned on his heel and sprinted.
   "I don't think they bought us," said Thorne. The hermaphrodite's face was pale and tense. "It might actually be easier to stun them all and carry them. We can't afford to lose time in here, not with that iamned thin perimeter."
   "No_"
   His helmet was calling him. He jammed it back on. Comm-link babble burst in his ears, but Sergeant Taura's deep voice penetrated, selectively enhanced by her channel. "Sir, we need your help up here."
   "What is it?"
   Her answer was lost in an override from the woman riding the float-bike. "Sir, there's three or four people climbing down the outside balconies of the building you're in. And there's a group of four Bharaputran security people approaching you from the north."
   He sorted frantically through channels till he found the one outgoing to the air-guard. "Don't let any get away!"
   "How should I stop 'em, sir?" Her voice was edged.
   "Stunner," he decided helplessly. "Wait! Don't stun any that are hanging off the balcony, wait'll they reach the ground."
   "I may not have a clear shot."
   "Do your best." He cut her off and found Taura again. "What do you want, Sergeant?"
   "I want you to come talk to this crazy girl. You can convince her if anyone can."
   "Things are_not quite under control down here."
   Thorne rolled its eyes. The captured boy was drumming his bare heels against the Dendarii trooper's shins. Thorne set its stunner to the lightest setting, and touched it to the back of the squirming boy's neck. He convulsed and hung more limply. Still conscious, eyes blearing and wild, the boy began to cry.
   In a burst of cowardice he said to Throne, "Get them rounded up. Any way you can. I'm going to help Sergeant Taura."
   "You do that," growled Thorne in a distinctly insubordinate tone. It wheeled, gathering its men. "You and you, take that side_you, take the other. Get those doors down_"
   He retreated ignominiously to the sound of shattering plastic.
   Upstairs, things were quieter. There were fewer girls than boys altogether, a disproportion that had also prevailed in his time. He'd often wondered why. He stepped over the stunned body of a heavy-set female security guard, and followed his vid map, projected by his helmet, to Sergeant Taura.
   A dozen or so girls were seated cross-legged on the floor, their hands clasped behind their necks, under the waving threat of one Dendarii's stunner. Their sleep-tunics and shorts were pink silk, otherwise identical to the boys'. They looked frightened, but at least they sat silent. He stepped into a side room to find Taura and the other trooper confronting a tall Eurasian girl-woman, who sat at a comconsole with her arms aggressively crossed. Where the vid plate should have been was a smoking hole, hot and recent, from plasma fire.
   The Eurasian girl's head turned, her long black hair swinging, from Taura to himself and back. "My lady, what a circus!" Her voice was a whip of contempt.
   "She refuses to budge," said Taura. Her tone was strangely worried.
   "Girl," he nodded curtly. "You are dead meat if you stay here. You are a clone. Your body is destined to be stolen by your progenitor. Your brain will be removed and destroyed. Perhaps very soon."
   "I know that," she said scornfully, as if he were a babbling idiot.
   "What?" His jaw dropped.
   "I know it. I am perfectly aligned with my destiny. My lady required it to be so. I serve my lady perfectly." Her chin rose, and her eyes rested in a moment of dreamy, distant worship, of what he could not guess.
   "She got a call out to House Security," reported Taura tightly, with a nod at the smoking holovid. "Described us, our gear_even reported an estimate of our numbers."
   "You will not keep me from my lady," the girl affirmed with a short, cool nod. "The guards will get you, and save me. I'm very important."
   What the hell had the Bharaputrans done to turn this girl's head inside-out? And could he undo it in thirty seconds or less? He didn't think so. "Sergeant," he took a deep breath, and said in a high, light voice on the outgoing sigh, "Stun her."
   The Eurasian girl started to duck, but the sergeant's reflexes worked at lightning speed. The stunner beam took her precisely between the eyes as she leapt. Taura vaulted the comconsole and caught the girl's head before it could strike the floor.
   "Do we have them all?" he asked.
   "At least two went down the back stairs before we blocked them," Taura reported with a frown.
   "They'll be stunned if they try to escape the building," he reassured her.
   "But what if they hide, downstairs? It'll take time to find 'em." Her tawny eyes flicked sideways to take in some chrono display from her helmet. "We should all be on our way back to the shuttle by now."
   "Just a second." Laboriously, he keyed through his channels till he found Thorne again. Off in the distance, carried thinly by the audio, someone was yelling, " 'n-of-a-bitch! You little_"
   "What?" Thorne snapped in a harried voice. "You got those girls rounded up yet?"
   "Had to stun one. Taura can carry her. Look, did you get that head-count yet?"
   "Yes, took it off a comconsole in a keeper's room_thirty-eight boys and sixteen girls. We're missing four boys who apparently went over the balcony. Trooper Philippi accounted for three of them but says she didn't spot a fourth. How about you?"
   "Sergeant Taura says two girls went down the back stairs. Watch for them." He glanced up, peering out of his vid display, which was swirling like an aurora. "Captain Thorne says there should be sixteen bodies here."
   Taura stuck her head out into the corridor, lips moving, then returned and eyed the stunned Eurasian girl. "We're still short one. Kesterton, make a pass around this floor, check cupboards and under the beds."
   "Right, Sergeant." The Dendarii trooper ran to obey.
   He followed her, Thorne's voice urging in his ears, "Move it up there! This is a smash-and-grab, remember? We don't have time to round up strays!"
   "Wait, dammit."
   In the third room the trooper checked, she bent to look under a bed and said, "Ha! Got her, Sergeant!" She swooped, grabbed a couple of kicking ankles, and yanked. Her prize slid into the light, a short girl-woman in the pink crossover tunic and shorts. She emitted little helpless muted noises, distress with no hope of her cries bringing help. She had a cascade of platinum curls, but her most notable feature was a stunning bustline, huge fat globes that the strained pink silk of her tunic failed to contain. She rolled to her knees, buttocks on heels, her upraised hands vaguely pushing and cradling the heavy flesh as if it still shocked and unaccustomed to finding it there.
   Ten years old. Shit. She looked twenty. And such monstrous hypertrophy couldn't be natural. The progenitor-customer must have ordered body-sculpture, prior to taking possession. That made sense, let the clone do the surgical and metabolic suffering. Tiny waist, flare of hip . . . from her exaggerated, physically mature femininity, he wondered if she might be one of the change-of-sex transfers. Almost certainly. She must have been slated for surgery very soon.
   "No, go away," she was whimpering. "Go away, leave me alone . . . my mother is coming for me. My mother is coming for me tomorrow. Go away, leave me alone, I'm going to meet my mother. ..."
   Her cries, and her heaving . . . chest, would shortly make him crazy, he thought. "Stun that one too," he croaked. They'd have to carry her, but at least they wouldn't have to listen to her.
   The trooper's face was flushed, as transfixed and embarrassed as he by the girl's grotesque build. "Poor doll," she whispered, and put her out of her misery with a light touch of stunner to her neck. She slumped forward, splayed on the floor.
   His helmet was calling him, he wasn't sure which trooper's voice. "Sir, we just drove back a crew of House Bharaputra fire-fighters with our stunners. They didn't have anti-stun suits. But the security people who are coming on now do. They're sending new teams, carrying heavier weapons. The stunner-tag game is about over."
   He keyed through helmet displays, trying to place the trooper on the map-grid. Before he could, the air-guard's breathless voice cut in. "A Bharaputran heavy-weapons team is circling around your building to the south, sir. You've got to get the hell out of there. It's about to turn real nasty out here."
   He waved the Dendarii trooper and her doll-woman burden out of the bedroom ahead of him. "Sergeant Taura," he called. "Did you pick up those outside reports?"
   "Yes, sir. Let's move it."
   Sergeant Taura slung the Eurasian girl over one broad shoulder and the blonde over the other, apparently without noticing their weight, and they herded the mob of frightened girls down the end stairs. Taura made them walk two-by-two, holding hands, keeping them rather better organized than he would have expected. The girls' hushed voices burbled in shock when they were directed into the boys' dormitory section. "We're not allowed down here," one tried to protest, in tears. "We'll get in trouble."
   Thorne had six stunned boys laid out face-up on the corridor floor, and another twenty-odd lined up leaning against the wall, legs spread, arms extended, prisoner-control posture, with a couple of nervous troopers yelling at them and keeping them in their places. Some clones looked angry, some were crying, and all looked scared to death.
   He looked with dismay at the pile of stunner victims. "How are we going to carry them all?"
   "Have some carry the rest," Taura said. "It leaves your hands free and ties up theirs." She gently laid down her own burdens at the end of the row.
   "Good," said Thorne, jerking its gaze, with difficulty, from fascinated fixation on the doll-woman. "Worley, Kesterton, let's_" its voice stopped, as the same static-laden emergency message over-rode channels in both their command helmets.
   It was the bike-trooper, screaming, "Sonofabitch, the shuttle_watch out guys, on your left_" a hot wash of static, and "_oh holy fuckin' shit_" Then a silence, filled only with the hum of an empty channel.
   He keyed frantically for a readout, any readout at all, from her helmet. The locator still functioned, plotting her on the ground between two buildings in back of the play-court where the shuttle was parked. Her medical readouts were flatline blanks. Dead? Surely not, there should at least still be blood chemistry . . . the static, empty view being transmitted, upward at an angle into the night fog, at last found him. Phillipi had lost her helmet. What else she'd lost, he couldn't tell.
   Thorne called the shuttle pilot, over and over, alternated with the outer-guards; no replies. It swore. "You try."
   He found empty channels too. The other two perimeter Dendarii re tied up in an exchange of fire with the Bharaputran heavy-weapons squad to the south that the bike-trooper had reported earlier. "We gotta reconnoiter," snarled Thorne under its breath. "Sergeant Taura, take over here, get these kids ready to march. You_" This is to his address, apparently; why did Thorne no longer call him Admiral, or Miles? "Come with me. Trooper Sumner, cover us." Thorne departed at a flat-out run; he cursed his short legs as he fell steadily farther behind. Down the lift-tube, out the still-hot front doors, around one dark building, between two others. He caught up with the hermaphrodite, who was flattened against a corner of the building at the edge of the playing-court.
   The shuttle was still there, apparently undamaged_surely no hand-weapon could penetrate its combat-hardened shell. The ramp was drawn up, the door closed. A dark shape_downed Dendarii, or enemy?_slumped in the shadow beneath its wing-flanges. Thorne, whispering curses, jabbed codes into a computer control plate bound to its left forearm. The hatch slid aside, and the ramp tongued outward with a whine of servos. Still no human response. "I'm going in," said Thorne.
   "Captain, standard procedure says that's my job," said the trooper Thorne had detailed to cover them, from his vantage behind a large concrete tree-tub.
   "Not this time," said Thorne grimly. Not continuing the argument, dashed forward in a zigzag, then straight up the ramp, hurtling aside, plasma arc drawn. After a moment its voice came over the mm. "Now, Sumner."
   Uninvited, he followed Trooper Sumner. The shuttle's interior was pitch-dark. They all turned on their helmet lights, white fingers darting and touching. Nothing inside appeared disturbed, but the door to the pilot's compartment was sealed.
   Silently, Thorne motioned the trooper to take up a firing stance opposite him, bracketing the door in the bulkhead between fuselage and flight-deck. He stood behind Thorne. Thorne punched another code into its arm control-pad. The door slid open with a tortured groan, then shuddered and jammed.
   A wave of heat boiled out like the breath of a blast furnace. A soft orange explosion followed, as enough oxygen rushed into the steering compartment to re-ignite any flammables that were left. The trooper fastened his emergency oxygen mask, grabbed a chemical fire-extinguisher from a clamp on the wall, and aimed it into the flight deck. After a moment they followed in his wake.
   Everything was slagged and burned. The controls were melted, communications equipment charred. The compartment stank, chokingly, of toxic oxidation products from all the synthetic materials. And one organic odor. Carbonized meat. What was left of the pilot_he turned his head, and swallowed. "Bharaputra doesn't have_isn't supposed to have heavy weapons on-site!"
   Thorne hissed, beyond swearing. It pointed. "They threw a couple of our own thermal mines in here, closed the door, and ran. Pilot had to have been stunned first. One smart goddamn Bharaputran son-of-a-bitch . . . didn't have heavy weapons, so they just used ours. Drew off or ganged up on my guards, got in, and grounded us. Didn't even stick around to ambush us ... they can do that at their leisure, now. This beast won't fly again." Thorne's face looked like a chiseled skull-mask in the white light from their helmets.
   Panic clogged his throat. "What do we do now, Bel?"
   "Fall back to the building. Set a perimeter. Use our hostages to negotiate some kind of surrender."
   "No!"
   "You got a better idea_ Miles?" Thorne's teeth gritted. "I thought not."
   The shocked trooper stared at Thorne. "Captain_" he glanced back and forth between them, "the Admiral will pull us through. We've been in tighter spots than this."
   "Not this time." Thorne straightened, voice drawn with agony. "My fault_take full responsibility. . . . That's not the Admiral. That's his clone-brother, Mark. He set us up, but I've known for days. Tumbled to him before we dropped, before we ever made Jacksonian locals pace. I thought I could bring this off, and not get caught."
   "Eh?" The trooper's brows wavered, disbelieving. A clone, going under anesthetic, might have that same stunned look on his face.
   "We can't_we can't betray those children back into Bharaputra's hands," Mark grated. Begged.
   Thorne dug its bare hand into the carbonized blob glued to what used to be the pilot's station chair. "Who is betrayed?" It lifted its hand, rubbed a black crumbling smear across his face from cheek to chin. "Who is betrayed?" Thorne whispered. "Do you have. A better. Idea."
   He was shaking, his mind a white-out blank. The hot carbon on his face felt like a scar.
   "Fall back to the building," said Thorne. "On my command."
   

CHAPTER SIX

   "No subordinates," said Miles firmly. "I want to talk to the head an, once and done. And then get out of here." "I'll keep trying," said Quinn. She turned back to her comconsole the Peregrine's tac room, which was presently transmitting the face of a high-ranking Bharaputran security officer, and began the argument again.
   Miles sat back in his station chair, his boots flat to the deck, his hands held deliberately still along the control-studded armrests. Calm and control. That was the strategy. That was, at this point, the only strategy left to him. If only he'd been nine hours sooner . . . he'd methodically cursed every delay of the past five days, in four languages, till he'd run out of invective. They'd wasted fuel, profligately, pushing the Peregrine at max accelerations, and had nearly made up the Ariel's lead. Nearly. The delays had given Mark just enough time to take a bad idea, and turn it into a disaster. But not Mark alone. Miles was no longer a proponent of the hero-theory of disaster. A mess this complete required the full cooperation of a cast of dozens. He very much wanted to talk privately with Bel Thorne, and very, very soon. He had not counted on Bel proving as much of a loose cannon as Mark himself.
   He glanced around the tac room, taking in the latest information from the vid displays. The Ariel was out of it, fled under fire to dock at Fell Station under Thorne's second-in-command, Lieutenant Hart, 'hey were now blockaded by half a dozen Bharaputran security vessels, lurking outside Fell's zone. Two more Bharaputran ships presently escorted the Peregrine in orbit. A token force, so far; the Peregrine outgunned them. That balance of power would shift when all their Bharaputran brethren arrived topside. Unless he could convince Baron Bharaputra it wasn't necessary.
   He called up a view of the downside situation on his vid display, insofar as it was presently understood by the Peregrine's battle computers. The exterior layout of the Bharaputran medical complex was plain even from orbit, but he lacked the details of the interiors he'd have liked if he were planning a clever attack. No clever attack. Negotiation, and bribery ... he winced in anticipation of the upcoming costs. Bel Thorne, Mark, Green Squad, and fifty or so Bharaputran hostages were presently pinned down in a single building, separated from their damaged shuttle, and had been for the last eight hours. The shuttle pilot dead, three troopers injured. That would cost Bel its command, Miles swore to himself.
   It would be dawn down there soon. The Bharaputrans had evacuated all the civilians from the rest of the complex, thank God, but had also brought in heavy security forces and equipment. Only the threat of harm to their valuable clones held back an overwhelming Bharaputran onslaught. He would not be negotiating from a position of strength, alas. Cool.
   Quinn, without turning around, raised her hand and flashed him a high sign, Get ready. He glanced down, checking his own appearance. His officer's undress grays were borrowed from the next smallest person aboard the Peregrine, a five-foot-tall female from Engineering, and fit him sloppily. He only had half his proper insignia. Aggressively messy was a possible command style, but he really needed more props to bring it off. Adrenalin and suppressed rage would have to power his appearance. If not for the biochip on his vagus nerve, his old ulcers would be perforating his stomach about now. He opened his comconsole to Quinn's communications shunt, and waited.
   With a sparkle, the image of a frowning man appeared over the vid plate. His dark hair was drawn back in a tight knot held by a gold ring, emphasizing the strong bones of his face. He wore a bronze-brown silk tunic, and no other jewelry. Olive-brown skin; he looked a healthy forty or so. Appearances were deceiving. It took more than one lifetime to scheme and fight one's way to the undisputed leadership of a Jacksonian House. Vasa Luigi, Baron Bharaputra, had been wearing the body of a clone for at least twenty years. He certainly took good care of it. The vulnerable period of another brain transplant would be doubly dangerous for a man whose power so many ruthless subordinates coveted. This man is not for playing games with, Miles decided.
   "Bharaputra here," the man in brown stated, and waited. Indeed, the man and the House were one, for practical purposes.
   Naismith here," said Miles. "Commanding, Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet."
   "Apparently not completely," said Vasa Luigi blandly.
   Miles peeled back his lips on set teeth, and managed not to flush. "Just so. You do understand, this raid was not authorized by me?"
   "I understand you claim so. Personally, I should not be so anxious announce my failure of control over my subordinates."
   He's baiting you. Cool. "We need to have our facts straight. I have not yet established if Captain Thorne was actually suborned, or merely taken in by my fellow-clone. In any case, it is your own product, for whatever sentimental reasons, who has returned to attempt to extract some personal revenge upon you. I'm just an innocent bystander, trying to straighten things out."
   "You," Baron Bharaputra blinked, like a lizard, "are a curiosity. We not manufacture you. Where did you come from?"
   "Does it matter?"
   "It might."
   "Then it is information for sale or trade, not for free." That was old Jacksonian etiquette; the Baron nodded, unoffended. They were entering the realm of Deal, if not yet a deal between equals. Good.
   The Baron did not immediately pursue Miles's family history, though. "So what is it you want from me, Admiral?"
   "I wish to help you. I can, if given a free hand, extract my people from that unfortunate dilemma downside with a minimum of further damage to Bharaputran persons or property. Quiet and clean. I would even consider paying reasonable costs of physical damages thus far incurred."
   "I do not require your help, Admiral."
   "You do if you wish to keep your costs down."
   Vasa Luigi's eyes narrowed, considering this. "Is that a threat?"
   Miles shrugged. "Quite the reverse. Both our costs can be very low_or both our costs can be very high. I would prefer low."
   The Baron's eyes flicked right, at some thing or person out of range he vid pick-up. "Excuse me a moment, Admiral." His face was laced with a holding-pattern.
   Quinn drifted over. "Think we'll be able to save any of those poor clones?"
   He ran his hands through his hair. "Hell, Elli, I'm still trying to Green Squad out! I doubt it."
   "That's a shame. We've come all this way."
   "Look, I have crusades a lot closer to home than Jackson's Whole, if you want 'em. A hell of a lot more than fifty kids are killed each year in the Barrayaran backcountry for suspected mutation, for starters. I can't afford to get . . . quixotic like Mark. I don't know where he picked up those ideas, it couldn't have been from the Bharaputrans. Or the Komarrans."
   Quinn's brows rose; she opened her mouth, then shut it as if on some second thought, and smiled dryly. But then she said, "It's Mark I was thinking about. You keep saying you want to get him to trust you."
   "Make him a gift of the clones? I wish I could. Right after I finish strangling him with my bare hands, which will be right after I finish hanging Bel Thorne. Mark is Mark, he owes me nothing, but Bel should have known better." His teeth clenched, aching. Her words shook him with galloping visions. Both ships, with every clone aboard, jumping triumphantly from Jacksonian local space . . . thumbing their noses at the bad Bharaputrans . . . Mark stammering gratitude, admiring . . . bring them all home to Mother . . . madness. Not possible. If he'd planned it all himself, from beginning to end, maybe. His plans certainly would not have included a midnight frontal assault with no back-up. The vid plate sparkled again, and he waved Quinn out of range. Vasa Luigi reappeared.
   "Admiral Naismith," he nodded. "I have decided to allow you to order your mutinous crew to surrender to my security forces."
   "I would not wish to put your security to any further trouble, Baron. They've been up all night, after all. Tired, and jumpy. I'll collect all my people myself."
   "That will not be possible. But I will guarantee their lives. The individual fines for their criminal acts will be determined later."
   Ransoms. He swallowed rage. "This ... is a possibility. But the fines must be determined in advance."
   "You are hardly in a position to add conditions, Admiral."
   "I only wish to avoid misunderstandings, Baron."
   Vasa Luigi pursed his lips. "Very well. The troopers, ten thousand Betan dollars each. Officers, twenty-five thousand. Your hermaphrodite captain, fifty thousand, unless you wish us to dispose of it ourselves_no? I do not see that you have any use for your, ah, fellow clone, so we'll retain custody of him. In return, I shall waive property damage charges." The Baron nodded in satisfaction at his own generosity.
   Upwards of a quarter of a million. Miles cringed inwardly. Well, it could be done. "But I am not without interest in the clone. What . . . price do you put on his head?"
   "What possible interest?" Vasa Luigi inquired, surprised.
   Miles shrugged. "I'd think it was obvious. My profession is full of hazards. I am the only survivor of my clone-clutch. The one I call Mark was as much a surprise to me as I was to him, I think; neither of us knew there was a second cloning project. Where else would I find such a perfect, ah, organ-donor, and on such short notice?"
   Vasa Luigi opened his hands. "We might arrange to keep him safe )r you."
   "If I needed him at all, I'd need him urgently. In the circumstances, I'd fear a sudden rise in the market price. Besides, accidents happen. Look at the accident that happened to poor Baron Fell's clone, in your keeping."
   The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees, and Miles cursed is tongue. That episode was apparently still classified information in these parts, or at least some kind of hot button. The Baron studied him, if not with more respect, then with increased suspicion. "If you wish another clone made for transplant purposes, Admiral, you've come to the right place. But this clone is not for sale."
   "This clone does not belong to you," Miles snapped out, too quickly. No_steady on. Keep it cool, keep his real thoughts buried deep, maintain that smarmy surface persona that could actually cut a deal with Baron Bharaputra without vomiting. Cool. "Besides, there's that ten-year lead time. It's not some long-anticipated death from old age that concerns me. It's the abrupt surprise sort." After a pause, and with a heroic effort, he choked out, "You need not waive the property damage charges, of course."
   "I need not do anything at all, Admiral," the Baron pointed out. Coolly.
   Don't bet on it, you Jacksonian bastard. "Why do you want this particular clone, Baron? Considering how readily you could make yourself another."
   "Not that readily. His medical records reveal he was quite a challenge." Vasa Luigi tapped the side of his aquiline nose with one forefinger, and smiled without much humor.
   "Do you plan punishment? A warning to other malefactors?"
   "He will doubtless regard it so."
   So, there was a plan for Mark, or at least an idea that smelled of some profit. "Nothing in the direction of our Barrayaran progenitor, I trust. That plot is long dead. They know about us both."
   "I admit, his Barrayaran connections interest me. Your Barrayaran connections interest me too. It is obvious from the name that you took for yourself that you've long known where you came from. Just what is your relationship with Barrayar, Admiral?"
   "Queasy," he admitted. "They tolerate me, I do them a favor now and then. For a price. Beyond that, mutual avoidance. Barrayaran Imperial Security has a longer arm even than House Bharaputra. You don't want to attract their negative attention, I assure you."
   Vasa Luigi's brows rose, politely skeptical. "A progenitor and two clones . . . three identical brothers. And all so short. Among you, I suppose you make a whole man."
   Not to the point; the Baron was casting for something, information, presumably. "Three, but hardly identical," said Miles. "The original Lord Vorkosigan is a dull stick, I am assured. The limitations of Mark's capacities, he has just demonstrated, I fear. I was the improved model. My creators planned higher things for me, but they did their job too well, and I began planning for myself. A trick neither of my poor siblings seems to have mastered."
   "I wish I could talk with your creators."
   "I wish you could too. They are deceased."
   The Baron favored him with a chill smile. "You're a cocky little fellow, aren't you?"
   Miles stretched his lips in return, and said nothing.
   The Baron sat back, tenting his fingers. "My offer stands. The clone is not for sale. But every thirty minutes, the fines will double. I advise you to close your deal quickly, Admiral. You will not get a better."
   "I must have a brief consultation with my Fleet accountant," Miles temporized. "I will return your call shortly."
   "How else?" Vasa Luigi murmured, with a small smile at his own wit.
   Miles cut the comm abruptly, and sat. His stomach was shaking, hot red waves of shame and anger radiating outward through his whole body from the pit of his belly.
   "But the Fleet accountant isn't here," Quinn pointed out, sounding slightly confused. Lieutenant Bone had indeed departed with Baz and the rest of the Dendarii from Escobar.
   "I ... don't like Baron Bharaputra's deal."
   "Can't ImpSec rescue Mark later?"
   "I am ImpSec."
   Quinn could hardly disagree; she fell silent.
   "I want my space armor," he growled petulantly, hunching in his station chair.
   "Mark has it," said Quinn.
   "I know. My half-armor. My command headset."
   "Mark has those too."
   "I know." His hand slapped down hard on the arm of the chair, the harsh crack in the quiet chamber making Quinn flinch. "A squad leader's helmet, then!"
   "What for?" said Quinn in a flat, unencouraging tone. "No crusades here, you said."
   "I'm cutting myself a better deal." He swung to his feet. His blood beat in his ears, hotter and hotter. "Come on."
   The seat straps bit into his body as the drop shuttle blew its clamps and accelerated away from the side of the Peregrine. Miles glanced up over the pilot's shoulder for a quick check of the planet's curvature sliding across the window, and a glimpse of his two fighter-shuttles falling away from the mothership to cover them. They were followed the Peregrine's second combat drop shuttle, the other half of his two-pronged attack. His faint feint. Would the Bharaputrans take it seriously? You hope. He turned his attention back to the glittering digital data-world supplied by his command headset, glad he was not stuck with a squad leader's helmet after all. He'd commandeered Elena Bothari-Jesek's downside-team captain's gear, while she rode the tactics room back aboard the Peregrine. Bring it back without any unsightly holes through it, damn you, she'd told him, her face pale with unexpressed anxiety. Practically everything he wore was liberated. An oversized nerve-disruptor shield-net suit had its cuffs turned up and held with elastic bands at wrists and ankles. Quinn had insisted on it, and as nerve-disruptor damage was his particular nightmare, he hadn't argued. Sloppy fatigues, held ditto. The plasma-mirror field pack straps cinched the extra fabric around his body reasonably well. Two pairs of thick socks kept his borrowed boots from sliding around. It was all very annoying, but hardly his greatest concern while trying to pull together a downside raid on thirty minutes' notice.
   His greatest concern was their landing site. On top of Thorne's building would have been his first choice, but the shuttle pilot claimed that the whole building would collapse if they tried to set the shuttle down on it, and anyway the roof was peaked, not flat. The next closest possible site was occupied by the Ariel's dead and abandoned shuttle. The third-choice site looked like it was going to a long walk, especially on the return journey when Bharaputra's security would have had time to set up counter measures. Straight up the slot was not his preferred attack style. Well, maybe Sergeant Kimura and Yellow Squad in the second drop shuttle would give Baron Bharaputra something more urgent to think about. Take care your shuttle, Kimura. It's our only back-up, now. I should have brought the whole damned fleet.
   He ignored his own shuttle's clanks and screams of deceleration as they hit the atmosphere_it was an excellent hell-drop, but it couldn't go fast enough to suit him_and watched the progress of his high cover in the colored codes and patterns of his helmet data display, the startled Bharaputran fighter-shuttles that had been guarding the Peregrine now found their attention suddenly divided. They wasted a few futile shots against the Peregrine itself, wavered after Kimura, then turned to pursue Miles's attack formation. One Bharaputran was blown to bits for its attempt almost immediately, and Miles whispered a pithy commendation for his Dendarii fighter pilot into his recorder on the spot. The other Bharaputran, unnerved, broke away to await reinforcements. Well, that had been easy. It was the trip back that was going to be maximum fun. He could feel the adrenalin high starting already, stranger and sweeter than a drug-rush through his body. It would last for hours, then depart abruptly, leaving him a burnt-out husk with hollow eyes and voice. Was it worth it? It will be if we win.
   We will win.
   As they rounded the planet to line-of-sight to their target, he tried contacting Thorne again. The Bharaputrans were jamming the main command channels. He tried dropping down and broadcasting a brief query on commercial bands, but got no response. Someone should have been assigned to monitor those. Well, he'd be able to punch through once they were on-site. He called up the holoview of the medical complex, ghost images dancing before his eyes. Speaking of straight up the slot, he was briefly tempted to order his fighter-shuttles to lay down a line of fire and blast a trench from his proposed landing site to Thorne's refuge, removing those inconvenient buildings from his path. But the trench would take too long to cool, and besides, the cover might benefit his own as much as Bharaputra's forces. Not quite as much, the Bharaputrans knew the layout better. He considered the probability of tunnels, utility tunnels, and ducts. He snorted at the thought of ducts, and frowned at the thought of Taura, led blindly into this meat grinder by Mark.
   The wild, jerking decelerations ended at last as buildings rose around them_ sniper vantage-points_and the shuttle thumped to the ground. Quinn, who'd been trying to raise communication channels from the station chair opposite his, behind the co-pilot, looked up and said simply, "I've got Thorne. Try setting 6-2-j. Audio only, no vids so far."
   With a flick of his eyes and a controlled blink, he keyed in his erstwhile subordinate. "Bel? We're down, and coming for you. Get ready to break out. Is anyone left alive down here?"
   He didn't have to see Bel's face to sense the wince. But at least Bel didn't waste time on excuses or apologies. "Two non-walking wounded. Trooper Phillipi died about fifteen minutes ago. We packed her head in ice. If you can bring the portable cryo-chamber, we might save something."
   "Will do, but we don't have much time to fool with her. Start prepping her now. We'll be there as fast as we can." He nodded to Quinn, and they both rose and exited the flight-deck. He had the pilots seal the door behind them.
   Quinn passed the word to the medic on what he was going to be dealing with, and the first half of Orange Squad swarmed from the shuttle to take up defensive positions. Two small armored hovercars went up immediately behind them, to clear any vantage points of Bharaputran snipers and replace them with Dendarii. When they reported a temporary Clear! Miles and Quinn followed Blue Squad down the ramp into the chill, damp dawn. He left the entire second half of Orange Squad to guard the shuttle, lest the Bharaputrans try to repeat their previous successful ploy.
   Morning mist roiled faintly around the shuttle's hot skin. The sky was pearly with the slow-growing light, but the medical complex's structures still loomed in blotted shadow. A float-bike soared aloft, two troopers took the point at a dead run, and Blue Squad followed. Miles concentrated, forcing his short legs to pump fast enough to keep up. He wanted no long-legged trooper to temper his stride for his sake, ever. This time at least, none did, and he grunted satisfaction under his remaining breath. A scattered roar of small-arms fire echoing all around told him his Orange Squad perimeter-people were already hard at work.
   They streamed around one building, under the cover of a second's portico, then past a third, the half-squads leap-frogging and covering each other. It was all too easy. The complex reminded Miles of those carnivorous flowers with the nectar-coated spines that all faced inwards. Slipping in was simple, for little bugs like him. It was the attempt to get out that would exhaust and kill. . . .
   It was therefore almost a relief when the first sonic grenade went off. The Bharaputrans weren't saving it all for dessert. The explosion was a couple of buildings away, and rocked and reverberated strangely around the walkways. Not Dendarii issue, its deafening timbre was a tad off. He keyed his command helmet to follow the fire fight, half-subliminally, as Orange Squad rooted out a nest of Bharaputran security. It wasn't the Bharaputrans his people could smoke out that worried him. It was the ones they overlooked. . . . He wondered if the enemy had brought in more mass-projectile weapons in addition to sonic grenades, and was coldly conscious of the missing element in his borrowed half-armor. Quinn had tried to make him take her torso-armor, but he'd convinced her its oversized loose sliding around as he moved would just make him crazy. Crazier, he'd thought he'd heard her mutter, but he hadn't asked for an amplification. He wasn't planning on leading any cavalry charges this trip, that was certain.
   He blinked away the distracting ghostly data flow as they rounded a final corner, scared off three or four lurking Bharaputrans, and approached the clone-creche. Big blocky building, it looked like a hotel. Shattered glass doors led into a foyer where shadowy gray-camouflaged defenders moved among hastily-raised shielding, metal doors torn from hinges and propped up. A quick exchange of countersigns, and they were in. Half of Blue Squad scattered instantly to reinforce the building's weary Green Squad defenders; the other half guarded him.
   The medic warped the float pallet containing the portable cryo-chamber through the doors, and was hurriedly directed down a hallway by his comrades. Intelligently, they were prepping Phillipi in a side room, out of sight of their clone hostages. Step One was to remove as much as possible of the patient's own blood; under these hasty combat conditions, without any attempt to recover and store it. Rough, ready, and extremely messy; it was not a sight for the faint-hearted, nor the unprepared mind.
   "Admiral," said a quiet alto voice.
   He wheeled to find himself face to face with Bel Thorne. The hermaphrodite's features were almost as gray as the shield-net hood that framed them, an oval of lined and puffy fatigue. Plus another look, one he hated seeing there despite his anger. Defeat. Bel looked beaten, looked like it had lost it all. And so it has. They did not exchange a single word of blame or defense. They didn't need to; it was all plain in Bel's face and, he suspected, his own. He nodded in acknowledgment, of Bel, of it all.
   Beside Bel stood another soldier, the top of his helmet_ my helmet_not quite level with the top of Bel's shoulder. He had half-forgotten how startling Mark was. Do I really look like that?
   "You_" Miles's voice cracked, and he found he had to stop and swallow. "Later, you and I are going to have a long talk. There's a lot you don't seem to understand."
   Mark's chin came up, defiantly. Surely my face is not that round. It must be an illusion, from the hood. "What about these kids?" said Mark. "These clones."
   "What about them?" A couple of young men in brown silk tunics and shorts appeared to be actually helping the Dendarii defenders, scared and excited rather than surly. Another group, boys and girls mixed, sat in a plain-scared bunch on the floor under the watchful eye of a stunner-armed trooper. Crap, they really are just kids.
   "We've_you've got to take them along. Or I'm not going." Mark's teeth were set, but Miles saw him swallow.
   "Don't tempt me," snarled Miles. "Of course we're taking them along, how the hell else would we get out of here alive?"
   Mark's face lit, torn between hope and hatred. "And then what?" he demanded suspiciously.
   "Oh," Miles carolled sarcastically, "we're just going to waltz right over to Bharaputra Station and drop them off, and thank Vasa Luigi kindly for the loan. Idiot! What d'you think? We load up and run like hell. The only place to put them would be out the airlock, and I guarantee you'd go first!"
   Mark flinched, but took a deep breath and nodded. "All right, then."
   "It is not. All. Right," Miles bit out. "It is merely . . . merely ..." he could not come up with a word to describe what it merely was, aside from the most screwed-up mess he'd ever encountered. "If you were going to try and pull a stupid stunt like this, you might at least have consulted the expert in the family!"
   "You? Come to you for help? D'you think I'm crazy?" demanded Mark furiously.
   "Yes_" They were interrupted by a staring blond clone boy, who'd walked up to them open-mouthed.
   "You really are clones," he said in wonderment.
   "No, we're twins born six years apart," snapped Miles. "Yes, we're just as much clones as you are, that's right, go back and sit down and obey orders, dammit."
   The boy retreated hastily, whispering, "It's true!"
   "Dammit," Mark howled under his breath, if that squeezed sotto vioce could be so described, "how come they believe you and not me? It's not fair!"
   Quinn's voice, through his helmet, derailed the family reunion. "If you and Don Quixote Junior are done greeting each other, Medic Norwood has Phillipi prepped and loaded, and the wounded ready to transport."
   "Form up, let's get the first batch out the door, then," he responded. He called up Blue Squad's sergeant. "Framingham, take the first convoy. You ready to roll?"
   "Ready. Sergeant Taura has marshalled them for me."
   "Go. And don't look back."
   Half a dozen Dendarii, about three times that many bewildered and exhausted clones, and the two wounded troopers on float pallets assembled in the foyer and filed out the ruined doors. Framingham did not look too happy to be using a couple of young girls as a projectile-weapon shield; his chocolate-dark face was grim. But any Bharaputran snipers were going to have to take aim very, very carefully. The Dendarii forced the kids forward, if not at a run, then at least at a steady jog. A second group followed the first within a minute. Miles ran both non-coms' helmet transmissions down either side of his peripheral vision, while his ears strained for the deadly whine of small-arms fire.
   Were they going to bring this off? Sergeant Taura shepherded the final gaggle of clones into the foyer. She greeted him with a demi-salute, without even pausing to puzzle between himself and Mark. "Glad to see you, sir," she rumbled.
   "You too, Sergeant," he replied, heart-felt. If Mark had managed to get Taura killed, he didn't know how it could ever have been made right between them. At some more convenient moment he urgently wanted to find out how Mark had managed to fool her, and how intimately. Later.
   Taura moved closer, and lowered her voice. "We lost four kids, escaped back to the Bharaputrans. Makes me kinda sick. Any chance . . . ?
   Regretfully, he shook his head. "No way. No miracles this time. We've got to take what we can get and go, or we'll lose it all."
   She nodded, understanding the tactical situation perfectly well. Understanding didn't cure the gut-churning nausea of regret, unfortunately. He offered her a brief I'm sorry smile, and her long lips twisted up on one side in wry response.
   The Blue Squad medic brought in the big float pallet containing the cryo-chamber, a blanket tossed over the transparent part of the gleaming cylinder to shield his comrade-and-patient's naked and cooling body from uncomprehending or horrified outsiders' eyes. Taura urged the clones to their feet.
   Bel Thorne glanced around. "I hate this place," it said levelly.
   "Maybe we can bomb it this time, on the way out," Miles returned, equally levelly. "Finally."
   Bel nodded.
   The mob of them, the fifteen or so last clones, the float pallet, the Dendarii rear-guard, Taura and Quinn, Mark and Bel, oozed out the front door. Miles glanced up, feeling like he had a bull's-eye painted on the top of his helmet, but the moving shape crossing the roof of the building opposite wore Dendarii grays. Good. The holovid on the right side of his field of view informed him Framingham and his group had made it to the shuttle without incident. Even better. He cut Framingham's helmet transmissions, squelched the second squad leader's to a bare murmur, and concentrated on the present moment.
   His concentration was broken by Kimura's voice, the first he'd heard from Yellow Squad across town in their own drop zone. "Sir, resistance is soft. They're not buying us. How far should I go to make them take us seriously?"
   "All the way, Kimura. You've got to draw Bharaputran attention off us. Draw them away, but don't risk yourselves, and especially don't risk your shuttle." Miles hoped Lieutenant Kimura was too busy to reflect upon the slightly schizoid logic of that order. If_
   The first sign of Bharaputran sharpshooters arrived with a bang, literally; a sonic grenade put down about fifteen meters ahead of them. It blew a hole in the walkway, which returned a few moments later in obedience to gravity as a sharp hot patter of raining fragments, startling but not very dangerous. The clone-childrens' screams were muffled, in his stunned ears.
   "Gotta go, Kimura. Use your initiative, huh?"
   The miss hadn't been accidental, Miles realized as plasma fire struck a potted tree to the right and a wall to the left of them, exploding both. They were being deliberately bracketed to panic the clones. It was working quite nicely, too_they were ducking, dropping, clutching each other and screaming, and showing every sign of getting ready to bolt off in all directions. There would be no rounding them up after that. A plasma arc beam hit a Dendarii square on, just to prove the Bharaputrans could do it, Miles supposed; the beam was absorbed by his mirror-field and re-emitted with the usual hellish blue snap, further terrifying the nearby kids. The more experienced troopers fired back coolly, while Miles yelled into his headset for his air cover. The Bharaputrans were above them, mostly, judging by the angle of fire.
   Taura studied the hysterical clones, glanced around, raised her plasma arc, and blew apart the doors of the nearest building, a big windowless warehouse or garage-looking structure. "Inside!" she bellowed.
   It was good, in that if they were going to bolt, at least it had them all bolting in the same direction. As long as they didn't stop inside. If they got pinned down and penned up again, there'd be no big brother to rescue him.
   "Move!" Miles seconded the idea, "but keep moving. Out the other side!"
   She waved an acknowledgement as the kids stampeded out of the fire-zone into what no doubt looked like safety to them. To him, it looked like a trap. But they needed to stay together. If there was anything worse than being pinned down, it was being scattered and pinned down. He waved the squad through and followed. A couple of Blue Squad troopers took rear guard, firing plasma arcs upward at their . . . herders, Miles feared. He figured it for keep-your-heads-down warning shots, but one trooper got lucky. His plasma arc beam hit a Bharaputran who unwisely attempted to dart along the roof-edge on the building opposite. The Bharaputran's shielding absorbed the shot, but then he unbalanced and fell, screaming. Miles tried not to hear the sound when he hit the concrete, but did not quite succeed, even with grenade-stunned ears. The screaming stopped.
   Miles turned and dashed down the corridor and through some big double doors, beckoned anxiously onward by Thorne, who waited to help cover him.
   "I'll take rear guard," Thorne volunteered.
   Was Thorne entertaining thoughts of dying heroically, thus avoiding the inevitable court-martial? For a moment, Miles entertained thoughts of letting it do so. It would be the Vorish thing to do. The Old Vor could be a bunch of assholes, at times. "You get those clones to the shuttle," Miles snapped in turn. "Finish the job you took on. If I'm paying this much, I want to get what I'm paying for."
   Thorne's teeth bared, but it nodded. They both galloped after the squad.
   The double doors opened onto an enormous concrete-floored room, which obviously nearly filled the big building. Red– and green-painted catwalks ran around a girdered ceiling high above, festooned with looping cables of mysterious function. A few harsh pale lights shone down, casting multiple shadows. He blinked in the gloom and almost lowered his infra-red visor. It appeared to be an assembly area for large projects of some kind, though at the moment there seemed to be nothing in progress. Quinn and Mark hesitated, waiting for them to catch up despite Miles's urgent gesture for them to hurry on. "What are you stopping for?" he barked in furious fear. He skidded to a halt beside them.
   "Look out!" someone yelled. Quinn spun, raising her plasma arc, seeking aim. Mark's mouth opened, the "o" foolishly echoing the circle of his gray hood around his face.
   Miles saw the Bharaputran because they were looking square at each other, in that frozen moment. A team of brown-clad Bharaputran snipers, probably come up through the tunnels. They were scrambling along the girders, barely more prepared than the Dendarii they pursued. The Bharaputran had a hand-sized projectile weapon launcher of some kind pointed straight at him, its muzzle bright with flare.
   Miles could not, of course, see the projectile, not even as it entered his chest. Only his chest, bursting outward like a flower, and a sound not heard but only felt, a hammer-blow launching him backward. Dark flowers bloomed too in his eyes, covering everyone.
   He was astonished, not by how much he thought, for there was no time for thought, but by how much he felt, in the time it took for his last heartburst of blood to finish flowing through his brain. The chamber careening around him . . . pain beyond measure . . . rage, and outrage . . . and a vast regret, infinitesimal in duration, infinite in depth. Wait, I haven't_
   

CHAPTER SEVEN

   Mark was standing so close, the report of the exploding projectile was like a silence, pressing in his ears, obliterating all other sounds. It happened too fast for understanding, too fast to close the eyes and defend the mind against the sight. The little man who had been yelling and gesturing them onward fluttered backward like a gray rag, arms outflung, face contorted. A spray of blood spattered across Mark with stinging force, part of a wide half-circle of blood and tissue-bits. Quinn's whole left side was scarlet.
   So. You are not perfect, was his first absurd thought. This sudden absolute vulnerability shocked him unbearably. I didn't think you could be hurt. Damn you, I didn't think you could be_
   Quinn was screaming, everyone was recoiling, only he stood still, paralyzed in his private, ear-stunned silence. Miles lay on the concrete with his chest blown out, open-mouthed, unmoving. That's a dead man. He'd seen a dead man before, there was no mistaking it.
   Quinn, her face wild, fired her plasma arc at the Bharaputrans, shot after shot, till hot ceiling fragments started to fall lethally back down around them, and a Dendarii knocked her weapon aside. "Taura, get them!" Quinn pointed upward with her free hand.
   The monster sergeant fired a rappel-hook upward, which wrapped around a girder. She rose upon it at full acceleration, like a mad spider. Between the lights and the shadows, Mark could scarcely follow her progress, leaping at inhuman speed along the catwalks, until broken-necked Bharaputran security personnel began raining down. All their high-tech half-armor was no protection at all against those huge, enraged clawed hands. Three men fell in a welter of their own blood, their throats torn out, an insane bombardment; one Dendarii trooper, running across the chamber, was almost smashed beneath an enemy body. Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells.
   Quinn paid no attention, scarcely seeming to care about the results of her order. She knelt by Miles's side, her shaking hands outspread, hesitating. Then they dove and pulled off Miles's command helmet. She flung her own squad leader's helmet to the floor and replaced it on her smooth gray hood with Miles's. Her lips moved, establishing contact, checking channels. The helmet was undamaged, apparently. She yelled orders to perimeter-people, queries to the drop shuttle, and one other. "Norwood, get back here, get back here. Yes, bring it, bring it now. On the double, Norwood!" Her head swivelled away from Miles only long enough to shout, "Taura, get this building secured!" From above, the sergeant in turn bellowed orders to her scurrying troopers.
   Quinn pulled a vibra-knife from her belt sheath and began cutting away Miles's fatigues, ripping through belts and the nerve-disruptor shield-suit, tossing the bloody fragments aside. Mark looked up, following her glance, to see the medic with the float-pallet returning, hauling his burden across the concrete. The float-pallet counteracted gravity, but not mass; the inertia of the heavy cryo-chamber fought his attempts to run, and fought him again as he braked and lowered the pallet to the floor near his dead commander. Half a dozen confused clones followed the medic like baby ducks, clustering together and staring around in horror at the ghastly aftermath of the brief sharp firefight.
   The medic looked back and forth from Miles's body to the loaded cryo-chamber. "Captain Quinn, it's no good. It won't hold two."
   "The hell it's not." Quinn staggered to her feet, her voice grating like gravel. She seemed unaware of the tears running down her face, tracking pinkly through the spatter. "The hell it's not." She stared bleakly at the gleaming cryo-chamber. "Dump her."
   "Quinn, I can't!"
   "On my order. On my hands."
   "Quinn . . ." The medic's voice was anguished. "Would he have ordered this?"
   "He just lost his damn vote. All right." She took a deep breath. "I'll do it. You start prepping him."
   Teeth clenched, the medic moved to obey. He flipped open a door at the end of the chamber and removed a tray of equipment. It was all in disarray, having been used once already and hastily re-packed. He rolled out some big insulated bottles, keyed open the chamber. Its lid popped, breaking the seal, I rose. She reached within, unfastening things that Mark could not :. Did not wish to see. She hissed, as instantly-frozen skin tore from r hands, but reached again. With a grunt, she heaved a woman's greenish, empurpled nude body from the chamber and laid it on the floor. It was the smashed-up bike-trooper, Phillipi. Thorne's patrol, ring Bharaputran fire, had finally found her near her downed floater some two buildings away from her lost helmet. Broken back, broken limbs; she'd taken hours to die, against all the Green Squad medic's heroic efforts to save her. Quinn looked up and saw Mark ring at her. Her face was ravaged.
   "You, you useless . . . wrap her." She pointed to Phillipi, then hurried around the cryo-chamber to where the Blue Squad medic now sit beside Miles.
   Mark broke his paralysis at last, to scuttle around and find a thin foil heat wrap among the medical supplies. Frightened of the body, but too terrified by Quinn to disobey, he laid out the silver wrap and led the cold dead woman up in it. She was stiff and heavy, under his cringing touch.
   He rose to hear the medic muttering, with his ungloved hands plunged deep into the gory mess that had been Miles Vorkosigan's chest, "I can't find an end. Where the hell's an end? At least the damned aorta, something ..."
   'It's been over four minutes," snarled Quinn, pulled out her vibra-blade again, and cut Miles's corpse's throat, two neat slashes bracketing but not touching the windpipe. Her fingers scrabbled in the cut. The medic glanced up only to say, "Be sure you get the carotid and not the jugular."
   I'm trying. They're not color-coded." She found something pale and rubbery. She pulled tubing from the top of one of the insulated lines, and jammed its plastic end-nozzle into the presumed artery. She switched the power on; the tiny pump hummed, pushing translucent green-cryo-fluid through the transparent tubing. She pulled out a second piece of tubing from the jug and inserted it on the other side of Miles's neck. Blood began to flow from the slashed exit veins, over her hands, over everything; not spurting as from a heartbeat, but in steady, inhuman, mechanical fashion. It spread on the floor in a shimmering pool, then began to flow away across some subtle drain-slope, a little carmine creek. An impossible quantity of blood. The clustered clones were weeping. Mark's own head throbbed, pain so great it darkened his vision.
   Quinn kept the pumps going till what came out ran greenish-clear.
   The medic meanwhile had apparently found the ends he was looking and attached two more tubes. More blood, mixed with cryo-fluid, welled up and spilled from the wound. The creek became a river.
   The medic pulled Miles's boots and socks off, and ran sensors over his paling feet. "Almost there . . . damn, we're nearly dry." He hastened to his jug, which had switched itself off and was blinking a red indicator light.
   "I used all I had," said Quinn.
   "It's probably enough. They were both small people. Clamp those ends_" He tossed her something glittering, which she snatched out of the air. They bent over the little body. "Into the chamber, then," said the medic. Quinn cradled the head, the medic took the torso and hips. The arms and legs dangled down. "He's light . . ." They swung their stripped burden hastily into the cryo-chamber, leaving the blood-soaked uniform on the floor in a sodden heap. Quinn left the medic to make the last connections and turned away blind-eyed, talking to her helmet. She did not look down at the long silver package at her feet.
   Thorne appeared, crossing the chamber at a jog. Where had it been? Thorne caught Quinn's eye, and with a jerk of its head at the dead Bharaputrans reported, "They came up through the tunnels, all right. I have the exits secured, for now." Thorne glowered bleakly at the cryo-chamber. The hermaphrodite looked suddenly . . . middle-aged. Old.
   Quinn acknowledge this with a nod. "Key to Channel 9-C. We got trouble outside."
   A kind of dreary curiosity winkled through Mark's numb shock. He turned his own headset back on. He'd had it helplessly and hopelessly turned off for hours, ever since Thorne had snatched back its command. He followed the captains' transmissions.
   The Blue and Orange Squad perimeter teams were under heavy pressure from beefed-up Bharaputran security forces. Quinn's delay in this building was drawing Bharaputrans like flies to carrion, with a buzzing excitement. With over two-thirds of the clones now packed aboard the shuttle, the enemy had stopped directing heavy fire toward it, but airborne reinforcements were gathering fast, hovering like vultures. Quinn and company were in imminent danger of being surrounded and cut off.
   "Got to be another way," muttered Quinn. She switched channels. "Lieutenant Kimura, how's it going with you? Resistance still soft?"
   "It's hardened up beautifully. I kinda got my hands full right now, Quinnie." Kimura's thin, weirdly cheerful voice came back cut by a wash of static indicating plasma fire and the activation of his plasma mirror field. "We've achieved our objective and are pulling out now. Trying to. Chat later, huh?" More static.
   "Which objective? Take care of your damn shuttle, y'hear, boy? You may yet have to come for us. Report to me the second you're back in the air."
   "Right." A slight pause. "Why isn't the Admiral on this channel, Quinnie?"
   Quinn's eyes squeezed shut in pain. "He's . . . temporarily out of contact. Move it, Kimura!"
   Kimura's reply, whatever it was, broke up in another wash of static. A program regarding Kimura and his objective was loaded in Mark's helmet, but the lieutenant seemed to be transmitting from somewhere other than the medical complex. A feint? If so, Kimura wasn't drawing nearly enough enemy troops away from them. Sergeant Framingham's sentinel, from the drop shuttle, broke in urging Quinn to hurry, almost simultaneously with an Orange Squad perimeter team reporting themselves forced off another vantage point.
   "Could the shuttle land on top of this building and pick us up?" Quinn inquired, gazing at the girders overhead. Thorne frowned, following her eyes. "I think it would cave in the roof."
   "Hell. Other ideas?"
   "Down," said Mark suddenly. Both Dendarii jerked, catching themselves from flattening to the floor as they realized what he meant, through the tunnels. The Bharaputrans got in, we can get back out."
   "It's a blind warren," objected Quinn.
   "I have a map," said Mark. "All of Green Squad does, loaded programs. Green Squad can lead."
   Why didn't you say so earlier?" snapped Quinn, illogically ignoring fact that there had hardly been an earlier.
   Thorne nodded confirmation, and began hastily tracing through its net's holovid map. "Can do. There's a route_puts us up inside a building beyond your shuttle, Quinn. Bharaputran defenses are _ there, and all facing the other way. And their superior numbers 't help them, down below."
   Quinn stared down. "I hate dirt. I want vacuum, and elbow room, right, let's do it. Sergeant Taura!"
   A flurry of organization, a few more doors blown away, and the party was on the march once more, down a lift tube and into utility tunnels. Troopers scouted ahead of the main group. Taura and half a dozen clones carry Phillipi's wrapped body, laid across the metal bars she'd torn from the catwalk railings. As if the bike-trooper still had some forlorn hope of preservation and revival. Mark found himself pacing beside the cryo-chamber on its float pallet, tugged along by the anxious medic. He glanced from the corner is eye through the transparent cover. His progenitor lay open-tried, pale and gray-lipped and still. Frost formed feathers along seals, and a blast of waste heat flowed from the refrigeration unit's motor. It would burn like a bonfire on an enemy's infra-red sensor. Mark shivered, and crouched in the heat. He was hungry, and terribly cold. Damn you, Miles Vorkosigan. There was so much I wanted to say to you, and now you're not listening.
   The straight tunnel they were traversing passed under another building, giving way through double doors to a wide foyer full of multiple cross-connections; several lift tubes, emergency stairs, other tunnels, and utility closets. All the doors were opened or blown open by the point-men looking for Bharaputran resistance. The air was pungent with smoke and the harsh lingering tang from plasma arc fire. Unfortunately, at this juncture the point men found what they were looking for.
   The lights went out. Dendarii helmet visors snapped shut all around Mark, as they switched to infra-red. He followed suit, and stared disoriented into a world drained of color. His helmet crackled with voice communications stepping on each other as two point-men came running backwards into the foyer from separate corridors, firing plasma arcs that blared blindingly on his heat-enhanced vision. Four half-armored Bharaputran security personnel swung out of a lift tube, cutting Quinn's column in half. So confined was the confusion, they found themselves fighting hand-to-hand. Mark was knocked down by accident by a swinging Dendarii, and crouched near the float-pallet.
   "This isn't shielded," the medic groaned, slapping the cryo-chamber as arcs of fire whipped by close overhead. "One square hit, and . . ."
   "Into the lift tube, then," yelled Mark at him. The medic nodded, and swung the pallet around into the nearest dark opening free of Bharaputrans. The lift-tube was switched off, or the conflicting grav fields might have blown circuits on both tube and pallet. The medic scrambled aboard the cryo-chamber as if it were a horse, and began to sink from sight. Another trooper followed, hand over hand down the emergency ladder on the tube's interior. Plasma arc fire struck Mark three times in rapid succession, as he scrambled to his feet, knocking him down again. His mirror-field shed a roar of blue crackles as he rolled toward the tube through waves of heat. He swung down the ladder after the trooper, out of the line of fire.
   But not for long. A Bharaputran helmet flashed above them in the entrance, then plasma arc fire followed them downward with a glare like lightning in the tube. The trooper helped the medic yank and heave the float-pallet out of this sudden shooting gallery and through the lowest entrance, and ducked after. Mark scrambled in their wake, feeling like a human torch, netted and entwined with racketing blue incandescence. How many shots had that been? He'd lost count. How many more could his shielding take before it gave way and burned out?
   The trooper took a firing stance aimed back into the lift tube, but no Bharaputran followed them. They stood in a pocket of dark and quiet, shouts and shots echoing faintly down the tube from the battle overhead. This was a much smaller foyer, with only two exits. Dim low emergency lighting along the floor gave a falsely cozy sense of warmth.
   "Hell," said the medic, staring upward. "I think we've just cut ourselves off."
   "Not necessarily," said Mark. Neither the medic nor the trooper were Green Squad, but Mark's helmet of course had Green Squad programming. He called up the holomap, found their current location, And let the helmet's computer sketch a route. "You can get there from this level, too. It's a bit more roundabout, but you're less likely encounter Bharaputrans for that very reason."
   "Let me see," demanded the medic.
   Half-reluctant, half-relieved, Mark gave his helmet up to him. The medic jammed it on his head, and studied the red line snaking through the 3-D schematic grid of the medical complex, projected before his eyes. Mark risked a darting glance up the lift tube. No Bararaputrans loomed overhead, and the sounds of combat were muffled, as if growing more distant. He ducked back to find the trooper looking at him, unsettling glints of his eyes gleaming through his visor. I'm not your damned Admiral. Mores the pity, eh? The trooper probably was of the opinion that the Bharaputrans had shot the wrong short man. Mark didn't even need words to get that message. He ached.
   "Yeah," the medic decided. His jaw tightened, behind his visor. "If you hurry, you might even get there ahead of Captain Quinn," said Mark. He still held the medic's helmet. There were no more sounds from overhead. Should he run after Quinn's moving fire-fight, stay and try to help guide and guard the float-pallet? He was not sure if he was more afraid of Quinn, or of the Bharaputran fire her party drew. Either way he'd probably be safer with the cryo-chamber. He took a deep breath. "You . . . keep my helmet. I'll take yours." Th medic and the trooper were both glowering at him with disfavor, tellingly. "I'll go after Quinn and the clones." His clones. Would Quinn have any regard at all for their lives?
   "Go, then," said the medic. He and the trooper aimed the float-pallet out the doors, and didn't look back. They obviously had him judged as more of a liability than an asset, and felt well-rid of him. Grimly, he climbed the ladder back up the lift tube. He peeked cautiously across the foyer floor, as it came to his eye level. A lot of property damage. A sprinkler system had added steam to the choking smoke. One brown-clad body lay prone, unmoving. The floor was wet and slippery. He swung out of the tube and darted skittishly out the corridor the Dendarii company must have taken, if they were sticking heir planned route. More plasma arc damage assured him he was the right track.
   He rounded a corner, skidded to a halt, and flung himself backward, out of sight. The Bharaputrans hadn't seen him; they'd been facing the other way. He retreated back down the corridor while awkwardly keying through the channels of the unfamiliar helmet till he made contact with Quinn.
   "Captain Quinn? Uh, Mark here."
   "Where the hell are you, where's Norwood?"
   "He's got my helmet. He's taking the cryo-chamber through by another route. I'm behind you, but I can't close up. There are at least four Bharaputrans in full space armor between us, coming up on your rear. Watch out."
   "Hell, now we're outgunned. That tears it." Quinn paused. "No. I can take care of them. Mark, get the hell away, follow Norwood. Run!"
   "What are you going to do?"
   "Drop the roof on those bastards. Lotta good space armor'll do 'em then. Run!"
   He ran, realizing what she was planning. At the first lift tube he came to, he took to the ladder, climbing wildly, regardless of where it led. He didn't want to be any further underground than he had to when_
   It was like an earthquake. He clung as the tube cracked and buckled, and the felt sound beat through his body. It was over in a moment, but for an echoing rumble, and he resumed his climb. Daylight ahead, reflecting silver down a tube entrance.
   He came out on the ground floor of a building furnished like a fancy office. Its windows were cracked and starred. He knocked a hole in one and climbed through, and flipped up his infra-red visor. To his right, half of another building had fallen away into an enormous crater. Dust still rose in choking clouds. The Bharaputrans in their sturdy, deadly space armor were possibly still alive, under all that, but it would take an excavation crew hours to dig them out. He grinned despite his terror, panting in the daylight.
   The medic's helmet did not have nearly the eavesdropping capacity of the command headset, but he found Quinn again. "All right, Norwood, keep on going," she was saying. "Go like hell! Framingham! Got that? Lock on Norwood. Start pulling in your perimeter people. Lift as soon as Norwood and Tonkin are aboard. Kimura! You in the air?" A pause; Mark could not get Kimura's reply, whoever and wherever he was. But he could fill in the sense of it from Quinn's continuation. "Well, we've just made you a new drop zone. It's a bit lumpy, but it'll do. Follow my signal, come straight down into the crater. You'll just fit. Yes, you will too, I've laser-'scoped it, you do too have clearance. You can risk the shuttle now, Kimura. Come on!"
   He made for the crater too, scuttling along close to the side of the building, taking advantage of overhangs till the patter of falling concrete chips made him realize that the blast-damaged balcony above his head was losing its structural integrity. Stay under and get mashed, or step out in the open and get shot? Whichever he did would prove the wrong choice, he was certain. What was that line Vorkosigan's military textbooks were so fond of quoting? No battle in survives first contact with the enemy. Quinn's tactics and dispositions shifted with bewildering speed. She was exploiting a quite literal new opening_the roar of a drop shuttle grew in his ears, and he sprinted out from under the balcony as the vibrations weakened it. The end gave way and fell with a crash. He kept on sprinting. Let the Bharaputran snipers try to hit a moving target. . . . Quinn and her group ventured into the open just as the drop shuttle, feet extended like an enormous insect, felt its way carefully into the crater. A few last Bharaputrans were in position on a roof opposite to offer harrying fire. But they had only plasma arcs, and were still being careful of the clones, though one pink-clad girl screamed, caught in the backwash of a Dendarii plasma mirror field. Light burns, painful but not fatal. She was crying and panicked, but a Dendarii trooper nevertheless caught her and aimed her at the shuttle hatch, now opening and extruding a ramp.
   The few Bharaputrans, hopeless of bringing the shuttle down with there sniper's weapons, changed their tactics. They began concentrating their fire on Quinn, shot after shot pumping into her overloading mirror field. She shimmered in a haze of blue fire, staggering under the impact. Clones and Dendarii pelted up the ramp. Command helmets draw fire. He could see no other way but to run in front of her. The air around him lit as his mirror field spilled energy, but in the brief respite Quinn regained her balance. She grabbed him by the hand and together they sprinted up the ramp, the last to board. The shuttle was lurching back into the air and the ramp withdrawing even as they fell through the hatch. The hatch sealed behind them. The silence felt like a song. Mark rolled over on his back and lay gasping for air, lungs on fire, Quinn sat up, her face red in its circle of gray. Just a sunburn. She cried hysterically for three breaths, then clamped her mouth shut. Tearfully, her fingers touched her hot cheeks, and Mark remembered at this was the woman who had had her face burned entirely away by plasma fire, once. But not twice. Not twice.
   She scrambled to her knees, and began keying through command channels on her almost-fatal headset again. She then yanked herself to her feet and ricocheted forward in the jinking accelerations of the shuttle. Mark sat up and stared around, disoriented. Sergeant Taura, Thorne, the clones, he recognized. The rest were strange Dendarii, Lieutenant Kimura's Yellow Squad presumably, some in the usual gray fatigues, some in full space armor. They looked rather the worse for wear. All four bunks for wounded in the hack were folded down and filled, and a fifth man was laid out on the floor. But the attending medic moved smoothly, not frantically. Her patients were clearly stabilized, able to wait for further treatment under more favorable conditions. Yellow Squad's cryo-chamber was recently occupied, though. The prognosis was now so bad for the foil-wrapped Phillipi, Mark wondered if they would even attempt to continue freezing her, once they were back aboard the Peregrine. But except for the bike-trooper and the cryo-chamber, there were no more covered forms, no body bags_Kimura's squad seemed to have made it through their mission, whatever it had been, fairly lightly.
   The shuttle banked; they were circling, not boosting to orbit yet. Mark moaned under his breath, and rose to follow Quinn and find out what was going on.
   When he came in sight of the prisoner he stopped short. The man sat with his hands bound behind him, securely strapped into a seat and guarded by two Yellow Squad troopers, a big fellow and a thin woman who made Mark think of a snake, all sinuous muscle and unblinking beady eyes. The prisoner looked a striking forty or so years of age, and wore a torn brown silk tunic and trousers. Loose strands of dark hair escaped from a gold ring on the back of his head and fell about his face. He did not struggle, but sat calmly, waiting, with a cold patience that quite matched the snake-woman's.
   Bharaputra. The Bharaputra, Baron Bharaputra, Vasa Luigi himself. The man hadn't changed a hair in the eight years since Mark had last glimpsed him.
   Vasa Luigi's face rose, and his eyes widened slightly, seeing Mark. "So, Admiral," he murmured.
   "Just so," Mark responded automatically with a Naismith-phrase. He swayed as the shuttle banked more sharply, concealing weak-kneed terror, concealing exhaustion. He hadn't slept the night before this mission, either. Bharaputra, here?
   The Baron cocked an eyebrow. "Who is that on your shirt?"
   Mark glanced down at himself. The bandolier of blood had not yet turned brown, and was still damp, sticky and cold. He found himself actually wanting to answer, My brother, for the shock value. But he wasn't sure the Baron was shockable. He fled forward, avoiding more intimate conversation. Baron Bharaputra. Did Quinn and company plan to ride this tiger, and how? But at least he now understood why the shuttle could circle the combat zone without apparent fear of enemy fire.
   He found Quinn and Thorne both in the pilot's compartment, along with Kimura the Yellow Squad commander. Quinn had taken over the shuttle's communication station, her gray hood pushed back, sweat-soaked dark curls in disarray.
   "Framingham! Report!" she was crying into the comm. "You've got to get into the air. Bharaputran airborne reinforcements are almost on top of you."
   Across the flight deck at the station opposite Quinn's, Thorne monitored a tactical holovid. Two Dendarii colored dots, fighter shuttles, set upon but failed to break up an array of enemy shuttles passing a ghost city, astral projection of the live city turning below them. Mark glanced out the window past the pilots' shoulders, but could not spot the originals in the sunlit morning smog. We have a downed-man recovery in progress, ma'am," Framing-s voice returned. "One minute, till the squad gets back."
   "Do you have everyone else? Do you have Norwood? I can't raise his helmet!"
   There was a short delay. Quinn's fists clenched, opened. Her finger-were bitten to red stumps.
   Framingham's voice at last. "We've got him now, ma'am. Got everyone–the quick and the dead alike, except for Phillipi. I don't want to leave anyone for those bloody bastards if I can help it_" We have Phillipi."
   "Thank God! Then everyone's accounted for. We have lift-off now, Captain Quinn."
   "That's precious cargo, Framingham," said Quinn. "We rendezvous in the Perigrine's umbrella of fire. The fighter shuttles will guard your ass." In the tac display, the Dendarii dots peeled away from the faltering enemy and left them behind. "What about your wings?"
   "We'll be right behind you. Yellow Squad bought us a first-class ticket home free. Home free is Fell Station."
   "And then we head out?"
   "No. The Ariel took some damage, earlier. We're docking."
   "Understood. See you there."
   The Dendarii formation came together at last, and began to boost hard. Mark fell into a station chair, and hung on. The fighter shuttles were more at risk from enemy fire than the drop shuttles, he feared, watching the tac display. One fighter shuttle was distinctly lagging. It clung close to the Yellow Squad's craft. The formation slowed itself to its wounded member. But for once, things ran to plan. Bharaputran harriers dropped reluctantly behind as they broke 'f the atmosphere and into orbit.
   Quinn rested her elbows for a weary moment on her console, and hid her red-and-white face in her hands, rubbing tender eyelids. Thorne sat silent. Quinn, Thorne, himself, all bore broken segments of that ribbon of blood. Like a red ribbon, binding them one to another.
   Fell Station was coming up at last. It was a huge structure, the largest of the orbital transfer stations circling Jackson's Whole, and House Fell's headquarters and homei city. Baron Fell liked holding the high ground. In the delicate interlocking network of the Great Houses, House Fell probably held the most raw power, in terms of capacity for destruction. But raw destruction was seldom profitable, and coup was counted in coins, here. What coin were the Dendarii using to buy Fell Station's help, or at least neutrality? The person of Baron Bharaputra, now secured in the cargo bay? What kind of bargaining chips were the clones, then, small change? And to think he'd despised the Jacksonians for being dealers in flesh.
   Fell Station was just now passing out of the planet's eclipse, the advancing line of sunlight dramatically unveiling its vast extent. They decelerated toward one arm, giving up direction to Fell's traffic controllers and some heavily armed tugs which appeared out of nowhere to escort them. And there was the Peregrine, coasting in. The drop shuttles and the fighter shuttles all gavotted around their mother ship, coming meekly to their docking clamps. The Peregrine itself eased delicately toward its assigned mooring.
   With a clank of the portside clamps and the hiss of flex-tube seals, they were home. In the cargo bay, the Dendarii expedited removal of the wounded to the Peregrine's infirmary, then turned much more slowly and wearily to tie-down and clean-up chores. Quinn shot past them, Thorne close on her heels. As if pulled by that mortal red ribbon, Mark followed.
   The goal of Quinn's mad dash was the starboard side shuttle hatch, where Framingham's shuttle was coming to dock. They arrived there just as the flex-tube seals were secured, then had to stand out of the way as the wounded were rushed out first. Mark was disturbed to recognize Trooper Tonkin, who had accompanied Norwood the medic, among them. Tonkin had reversed roles, from guard to patient. His face was dark and still, unconscious, as eager hands hustled him past and shifted him onto a float pallet. Something's very wrong, here.
   Quinn shifted impatiently from foot to foot. Other Dendarii troopers started to exit, herding clones. Quinn frowned, and shouldered upstream past them through the flex tube and into the shuttle.
   Thorne and Mark went after her into free fall chaos. There were clone-youths everywhere, some crying, some violently sick_Dendarii were attempting to catch them, and get them towed to the exit. One harried trooper with a hand-vac was chasing floating globs of some child's last meal before everyone had to breathe it. The shouts and screams and babble were like a blow to the mind. Framingham's bellows were failing to speed a return to military order any faster than the terrorized clones could be removed from the cargo bay.
   "Framingham!" Quinn floated over and grabbed him by the ankle. "Framingham! Where the hell's the cryo-chamber Norwood was escorting?"
   He glanced down, frowning. "But you said you had it, Captain." What?"
   "You said you had Phillipi." His lips stretched in a fierce grimace, "Goddammit, if we've left her behind I'll_"
   We have Phillipi, yes, but she's_she was no longer in the cryo-chamber. Norwood was supposed to be getting it to you, Norwood and Tonkin."
   "They didn't have it when my rescue patrol pulled them out. We them both, what was left of 'em. Norwood was killed. Hit through eye with one of those frigging projectile spine-grenades. Blew his head apart. But I didn't leave his body, it's in the bag over there." Command helmets draw fire, oh yes, I knew that. . . . No wonder Quinn hadn't been able to raise Norwood's comm channels.
   "The cryo-chamber, Framingham!" Quinn's voice held a high pitch anguish Mark had never heard before.
   "We didn't see any goddamn cryo-chamber, Quinn! Norwood and Tonkin didn't have it when we got to them! What's so frigging important about the cryo-chamber if Phillipi wasn't even in it?" Quinn released his ankle, and floated in a tightening ball, arms and legs drawing in. Her eyes were dark and huge. She bit off a string of inadequate foul words, grinding her teeth so hard her gums went white. Thorne looked like a chalk doll.
   "Thorne," Quinn said, when she could speak again. "Get on the comm to Elena. I want both ships on a total security blackout, as of now. No leaves, no passes, no communications with Fell Station or anybody else that isn't cleared by me. Tell her to get Lieutenant Hart over here from the Ariel. I want to meet with them both at once, do not over comm channels. Go."
   Thorne nodded, rotated in air, and launched itself forward toward the flight deck.
   "What is this?" demanded Sergeant Framingham. Quinn took a deep, slow breath. "Framingham, we left the Admiral downside."
   "Have you lost your mind, he's right there_" Framingham's finger sagged in mid-point at Mark. His hand closed into a fist. "Oh." He realized. "That's the clone."
   Quinn's eyes burned; Mark could feel them boring through to the back of his skull like laser-drills. "Maybe not," Quinn said heavily. "Not as far as House Bharaputra needs to know."
   "Ah?" Framingham's eyes narrowed in speculation. No! Mark screamed inside. Silently. Very silently.
   

CHAPTER EIGHT

   It was like being trapped in a locked room with half a dozen serial killers with hangovers. Mark could hear each one's breathing from where they sat in a ring around the officer's conference table. They were in the briefing chamber off the Peregrine's main tactics room. Quinn's breath was the lightest and fastest, Sergeant Taura's was the deepest and most ominous. Only Elena Bothari-Jesek at her captain's place at the head of the table, and Lieutenant Hart on her right, were shipboard-clean and natty. The rest had come as they were from the drop mission, battered and stinking: Taura, Sergeant Framingham, Lieutenant Kimura, Quinn on Bothari-Jesek's left. And himself, of course, lonely at the far end of the oblong table.
   Captain Bothari-Jesek frowned, and wordlessly handed around a bottle of painkiller tablets. Sergeant Taura took six. Only Lieutenant Kimura passed. Taura handed them across to Framingham without offering any to Mark. He longed for the tablets as a thirsty man might yearn after a glass of water, poured out and sinking into desert sand. The bottle went back up the table and disappeared into the captain's pocket. Mark's eyes throbbed in time to his sinuses, and the back of his head felt tight as drying rawhide.
   Bothari-Jesek spoke. "This emergency debriefing is called to deal with just two questions, and as quickly as possible. What the hell happened, and what are we going to do next? Are those helmet recorders on their way?"
   "Yes, ma'am," said Sergeant Framingham. "Corporal Abromov is bringing them."
   "Unfortunately, we are missing the most pertinent one," said Quinn. "Correct, Framingham?"
   "I'm afraid so, ma'am. I suppose it's embedded in a wall somewhere at Bharaputra's, along with most of the rest of Norwood's helmet. Friggin' grenades."
   "Hells." Quinn hunched in her seat.
   The briefing room door slid open, and Corporal Abromov entered at a jog. He carried four small, clear plastic trays, stacked, and labeled "Green Squad," "Yellow Squad," "Orange Squad," and "Blue Squad." Each tray held an array of ten to sixteen tiny buttons. Helmet recorders. Each trooper's personal records of the past hours, tracking every movement, every heartbeat, every scan, shot, hit, and communication. Events that had passed too rapidly for comprehension in real-time could be slowed, analyzed, teased apart, errors of procedure detected and corrected_next time.
   Abromov saluted and handed the trays to Captain Bothari-Jesek. She dismissed him with thanks, and passed the trays on to Captain Quinn, who in turn inserted them into the simulator's data slot and downloaded them. She also encoded the file top secret. Her raw-tipped fingers darted over the vid control panel.
   The now-familiar ghostly three-dimensional holomap of Bharaputra's medical facility formed above the table top. "I'll jump forward to the time we were attacked in the tunnel," Quinn said. "There we are, Blue Squad, part of Green Squad ..." A spaghetti-tangle of lines of green and blue colored light appeared deep inside a misty building. "Tonkin was Blue Squad Number Six, and kept his helmet throughout what follows." She made Tonkin's Number Six map-track yellow, for contrast. "Norwood was still wearing Blue Squad Number Ten. Mark . . ." her lips pinched, "was wearing Helmet One." That track, of course, was conspicuously missing. She made Norwood's Number Ten track pink. "At what point did you change helmets with Norwood, Mark?" She did not look at him as she asked this question.
   Please, let me go. He was sure he was sick, because he was still shivering. A small muscle in the back of his neck spasmed, tiny twitches in a prickling underlayer of pain. "We went to the bottom of that lift tube." His voice came out a dry whisper. "When . . . when Helmet Ten comes back up, I'm wearing it. Norwood and Tonkin went on together, and that's the last I saw of them."
   The pink line indeed crawled back up the tube and wormed after the mob of blue and green lines. The yellow track went on alone.
   Quinn fast-forwarded voice contacts. Tonkin's baritone came out in a whine like an insect on amphetamines. "When I last contacted them, they were here." Quinn marked the spot with a glowing dot of light, in an interior corridor deep inside another building. She fell silent, and let the yellow line snake on. Down a lift tube, through yet another utility tunnel, under a structure, up and through yet another.
   "There," said Framingham suddenly, "is the floor they were trapped on. We picked up contact with 'em there."
   Quinn marked another dot. "Then the cryo-chamber has to be somewhere near the line of march between here and here." She pointed to the two bright dots. "It has to be." She stared, eyes narrowed. "Two buildings. Two and a half, I suppose. But there's not a damn thing on Tonkin's voice transmissions that gives me a clue." The insect-voice described Bharaputran attackers, and cried for help, over and over, but did not mention the cryo-chamber. Mark's throat contracted in synchrony. Quinn, turn him off, please. . . .
   The program ran to its end. All the Dendarii around the table stared at it, as if willing it to yield up something more. There was no more.
   The door slid aside and Captain Thorne entered. Mark had never seen a more exhausted-looking human being. Thorne too was still dressed in dirty fatigues, only the plasma mirror pack discarded from its half armor. Its gray hood was pushed back, brown hair plastered flat to its head. A circle of grime in the middle of Thorne's pale face marked the hood opening, gray twin to the circle of red on Quinn's face from her mirror-field overload burn. Thorne's movements were hurried and jerky, will overriding a fatigue close to collapse. Thorne leaned, hands on the conference table, mouth a grim horizontal line.
   "So, could you get anything at all out of Tonkin?" asked Quinn of Thorne. "What the computer has, we just saw. And I don't think it's enough."
   "The medics got him waked up, briefly," reported Thorne. "He did talk. I was hoping the recorders would make sense of what he said, but . . ."
   "What did he say?"
   "He said when they reached this building," Thorne pointed, "they were cut off. Not yet surrounded, but blocked from a line to the shuttle, and the enemy closing the ring fast. Tonkin said, Norwood yelled he had an idea, he'd seen something "back there". He had Tonkin create a diversion with a grenade attack, and guard a particular corridor_must be that one there. Norwood took the cryo-chamber and ran back along their route. He returned a few minutes later_not more than six minutes, Tonkin said. And he told Tonkin, "It's all right now. The Admiral will get out of here even if we don't." About two minutes later, he was killed by that projectile grenade, and Tonkin was knocked loopy by the concussion."
   Framingham nodded. "My crew got there not three minutes after that. They drove off a pack of Bharaputrans who were searching the bodies_looting, looking for intelligence, or both, Corporal Abromov wasn't sure_they picked up Tonkin and Norwood's body and ran like hell. Nobody in the squad reported seeing a cryo-chamber anywhere."
   Quinn chewed absently on a fingernail stump. Mark did not think he was even conscious of the gesture. "That's all?"
   "Tonkin said Norwood was laughing," Thorne added.
   "Laughing." Quinn grimaced. "Hell."
   Captain Bothari-Jesek was sunk in her station chair. Everyone around the table appeared to digest this last tidbit, staring at the holomap. "He did something clever," said Bothari-Jesek. "Or something that he thought was clever."
   "He only had about five minutes. How clever could he be in five minutes?" Quinn complained. "Gods damn the clever jerk to sixteen hells for not reporting!"
   "He was doubtless about to." Bothari-Jesek sighed. "I don't think we need to waste time rationing blame. There's going to be plenty to go around."
   Thorne winced, as did Framingham, Quinn, and Taura. Then they all glanced at Mark. He cringed back in his seat.
   "It's only been," Quinn glanced at her chrono, "less than two hours. Whatever Norwood did, the cryo-chamber has to still be down there. It has to."
   "So what do we do?" Lieutenant Kimura asked dryly. "Mount mother drop mission?"
   Quinn thinned her lips in non-appreciation of the weary sarcasm. "You volunteering, Kimura?" Kimura flipped up his palms in surrender and subsided.
   "In the meantime," Bothari-Jesek said, "Fell Station is calling us, pretty urgently. We have to start dealing. I presume this will involve our hostage." A short nod of thanks in Kimura's direction acknowledged the only wholly successful part of the drop mission, and Kimura nodded back. "Does anyone here know what the Admiral intended to do with Baron Bharaputra?"
   A circle of negative headshakes. "Don't you know, Quinnie?" asked Kimura, surprised.
   "No. There wasn't time to chat. I'm not even sure if the Admiral seriously expected your kidnapping expedition to succeed, Kimura, or whether it was only for the diversionary value. That would be more like his strategizing, not to let the whole mission turn on one unknown outcome. I expect he planned," her voice faded in a sigh, "to use his initiative." She sat up straight. "But I sure as hell know what I intend to do. The deal this time is going to be in our favor. Baron Bharaputra could be the ticket out of here for all of us, and the Admiral too, but we have to work it just right."
   "In that case," said Bothari-Jesek, "I don't think we should let on to House Bharaputra just how valuable a package we left downside."
   Bothari-Jesek, Thorne, Quinn, all of them, turned to look at Mark, coldly speculative.
   "I've thought of that too," said Quinn.
   "No," he whispered. "No!" His scream emerged as a croak. "You can't be serious. You can't make me be him, I don't want to be him any more, God! No!" He was shaking, shivering, his stomach turning and knotting. I'm cold.
   Quinn and Bothari-Jesek glanced at each other. Bothari-Jesek nodded, some unspoken message.
   Quinn said, "You are all dismissed to your duties. Except you, Captain Thorne. You are relieved of command of the Ariel. Lieutenant Hart will take over."
   Thorne nodded, as if this were entirely expected. "Am I under arrest?"
   Quinn's eyes narrowed in pain. "Hell, we don't have the time. Or the personnel. And you're not debriefed yet, and besides, I need your experience. This . . . situation could change rapidly at any moment. Consider yourself under house arrest, and assigned to me. You can guard yourself. Take a visiting officer's cabin here on the Peregrine, and call it your cell if it makes you feel any better."
   Thorne's face went very bleak indeed. "Yes, ma'am," it said woodenly.
   Quinn frowned. "Go clean up. We'll continue this later."
   Except for Quinn and Bothari-Jesek, they all filed out. Mark tried to follow them. "Not you," said Quinn in a voice like a death bell. He sank back into his station chair and huddled there. As the last Dendarii cleared the chamber, Quinn reached over and turned off all recording devices.
   Miles's women. Elena-the-childhood-sweetheart, now Captain Bothari-Jesek, Mark had studied back when the Komarrans had tutored him to play Lord Vorkosigan. Yet she was not quite what he had expected. Quinn the Dendarii had taken the Komarran plotters by surprise. The two women had a coincidental resemblance in coloration, both with short dark hair, fine pale skin, liquid brown eyes. Or was it so coincidental? Had Vorkosigan subconsciously chosen Quinn as Bothari-Jesek's substitute, when he couldn't have the real thing? Even their first names were similar, Elli and Elena.
   Bothari-Jesek was the taller by a head, with long aristocratic features, and was more cool and reserved, an effect augmented by her clean officer's undress grays. Quinn, fatigue-clad and combat-booted, was shorter, though still a head taller than himself, rounder and hotter. Both were terrifying. Mark's own taste in women, if ever he should live to exercise it, ran more to something like that little blonde clone they'd pulled from under the bed, if only she'd been the age looked to be. Somebody short, soft, pink, timid, somebody who wouldn't kill and eat him after they mated.
   Elena Bothari-Jesek was watching him with a sort of appalled fascination. "So like him. Yet not him. Why are you shivering?"
   "I'm cold," muttered Mark.
   " You're cold!" Quinn echoed in outrage. "You're cold! You gods-damned little sucker_" She turned her station chair abruptly around, and sat with her back to him.
   Bothari-Jesek rose and walked around to his end of the table. Willow-wood woman. She touched his forehead, which was clammy; he flinched almost explosively. She bent and stared into his eyes. "Quin–back off. He's in psychological shock."
   "He doesn't deserve my consideration!" Quinn choked.
   "He's still in shock, regardless. If you want results, you have to take it into account."
   "Hell." Quinn turned back. New clean wet tracks ran down from eyes across her red-and-white, dirt-and-dried-blood-smudged face. "You didn't see. You didn't see Miles lying there with his heart blown all over the room."
   "Quinnie, he's not really dead. Is he? He's just frozen, and . . . and placed." Was there the faintest tinge of uncertainty, denial, in her voice?
   "Oh, he's really dead all right. Very really frozen dead. And he's going to stay that way forever if we don't get him back!" The blood all over her fatigues, caked in the grooves of her hands, smeared across her face, was finally turning brown.
   Bothari-Jesek took a breath. "Let's focus on the business to hand. The immediate question is, can Mark fool Baron Fell? Fell met the real Miles once."
   "That's one of the reasons I didn't put Bel Thorne under close arrest. Bel was there, and can advise, I hope."
   Yes. And that's the curious thing . . ." She hitched a hip over the tabletop, and let one long booted leg swing. "Shock or no shock, Mark hasn't blown Miles's deep-cover. The name Vorkosigan hasn't passed lips, has it?"
   "No," Quinn admitted.
   Bothari-Jesek twisted up her mouth, and studied him. "Why not?" She asked suddenly.
   He crouched down a little further in his station chair, trying to ape the impact of her stare. "I don't know," he muttered. She tried implacably for more, and he mustered in an only slightly louder mumble, "Habit, I guess." Mostly Ser Galen's habit of beating the shit of him whenever he'd screwed up, back in the bad old days. "When I do the part, I do the part. Miles would never have slipped that one, so I don't either."
   "Who are you when you're not doing the part?" Bothari-Jesek's gaze was narrowed, calculating.
   "I ... hardly know." He swallowed, and tried again for more volume in his voice. "What's going to happen to my_to the clones?"
   As Quinn began to speak, Bothari-Jesek held up her hand, stopping her. Bothari-Jesek said instead, "What do you want to have happen to them?"
   "I want them to go free. To be set free somewhere safe, where House Bharaputra can't kidnap them back."
   "A strange altruism. I can't help wondering, why? Why this whole mission in the first place? What did you hope to gain?"
   His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He couldn't answer. He was still clammy, weak and shaking. His head ached blackly, as though draining of blood. He shook his head.
   "Peh!" snorted Quinn. "What a loser. What a, a damned anti-Miles. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."
   "Quinn," said Bothari-Jesek quietly. There was a profound reproof in her voice, just in that single word, which Quinn heard and acknowledged with a shrug of her shoulder. "I don't think either one of us knows quite what we have hold of, here," Bothari-Jesek continued. "But I know when I'm out of my depth. However, I know someone who wouldn't be."
   "Who?"
   "Countess Vorkosigan."
   "Hm." Quinn sighed. "That's another thing. Who's going to tell her about_" A downward jerk of her thumb indicated Jackson's Whole, and the fatal events that had just passed there. "And gods help me, if I'm really in command of this outfit now, I'm gonna have to report all this to Simon Illyan." She paused. "Do you want to be in command, Elena? As senior shipmaster present, now that Bel's under quasi-arrest, and all that. I just grabbed 'cause I had to, under fire."
   "You're doing fine," said Bothari-Jesek with a small smile. "I'll support you." She added, "You've been more closely involved with intelligence all along, you're the logical choice."
   "Yes, I know." Quinn grimaced. "You'll tell the family, if it comes to that?"
   "For that," Bothari-Jesek sighed, "I am the logical choice. I'll tell the Countess, yes."
   "It's a deal." But they both looked as if they wondered who had the better, or worse, half of it.
   "As for the clones," Bothari-Jesek eyed Mark again, "how would you like to earn their freedom?"
   "Elena," said Quinn warningly, "don't make promises. We don't know what we're going to have to trade yet, to get out of here. To get_" another gesture downward, "him back."
   "No," Mark whispered. "You can't. Can't send them . . . back down there, after all this."
   "I traded Phillipi," said Quinn grimly. "I'd trade you in a heartbeat, except that he . . . Do you know why we came downside on this bloody drop mission in the first place?" she demanded.
   Wordlessly, he shook his head.
   "It was for you, you little shit. The Admiral had a deal half-cut with Baron Bharaputra. We were going to buy out Green Squad for quarter of a million Betan dollars. It wouldn't have cost much more than the drop mission, counting all the equipment we lost along with Thorne's shuttle. And the lives. But the Baron refused to throw you into the pot. Why he wouldn't sell you, I don't know. You're worthless to everybody else. But Miles wouldn't leave you!"
   Mark stared down at his hands, which plucked at each other. He lanced up to see Bothari-Jesek studying him again as if he were some vital cryptogram.
   "As the Admiral would not leave his brother," said Bothari-Jesek lowly, "so Mark will not leave the clones. Will you? Eh?"
   He would have swallowed, but he'd run out of spit.
   "You'll do anything to save them, eh? Anything we ask?"
   His mouth opened and closed. It might have been a hollow, sound-less yes.
   "You'll play the part of the Admiral for us? We'll coach you, of course."
   He half-nodded, but managed to blurt out, "What promise_?"
   "We'll take all the clones with us when we go. We'll put them down somewhere House Bharaputra can't reach."
   "Elena!" objected Quinn.
   "I want," he did swallow this time, "I want the Barrayaran woman's word. Your word," he said to Bothari-Jesek.
   Quinn sucked on her lower lip, but did not speak. After a long muse, Bothari-Jesek nodded. "All right. You have my word on it. But you give us your total cooperation, understood?"
   "Your word as what?"
   "Just my word."
   ". . . Yes. All right."
   Quinn rose and stared down at him. "But is he even fit to play the part right now?"
   Bothari-Jesek followed her look. "Not in that condition, no, I suppose not. Let him clean up, eat, rest. Then we'll see what can be lone."
   "Baron Fell may not give us time to coddle him."
   "We'll tell Baron Fell he's in the shower. That'll be true enough."
   A shower. Food. He was so ravenous as to be almost beyond hunger, numb in the belly, listless in the flesh. And cold.
   "All I can say," said Quinn, "is that he's a damn poor imitation of the real Miles Vorkosigan."
   Yes, that's what I've been trying to tell you.
   Bothari-Jesek shook her head in, presumably, exasperated agreement. "Come on," she said to him.
   She escorted him to an officer's cabin, small but thank-God private. It was disused, blank and clean, military-austere, the air a little stale. He supposed Thorne must now be similarly housed nearby.
   "I'll get some clean clothes sent over for you from the Ariel. And send some food."
   "Food first_please?"
   "Sure."
   "Why are you being nice to me?" His voice came out plaintive and suspicious, making him sound weak and paranoid, he feared.
   Her aquiline face went introspective. "I want to know . . . who you are. What you are."
   "You know. I'm a manufactured clone. Manufactured right here on Jackson's Whole."
   "I don't mean your body."
   He hunched in an automatic defensive posture, though he knew it emphasized his deformities.
   "You are very closed," she observed. "Very alone. That's not at all like Miles. Usually."
   "He's not a man, he's a mob. He's got a whole damned army trailing around after him." Not to mention the harrowing harem. "I suppose he likes it like that."
   Her lips curved in an unexpected smile. It was the first time he'd seen her smile. It changed her face. "He does, I think." Her smile faded. "Did."
   "You're doing this for him, aren't you. Treating me like this because you think he'd want it." Not in his own right, no, never, but all for Miles and his damned brother-obsession.
   "Partly."
   Right.
   "But mostly," she said, "because someday Countess Vorkosigan will ask me what I did for her son."
   "You're planning to trade Baron Bharaputra for him, aren't you?"
   "Mark . . ." her eyes were dark with a strange . . . pity? irony? He could not read her eyes. "She'll mean you."
   She turned on her heel and left him by himself, sealed in the cabin.
   He showered in the hottest water the tiny unit would yield, and stood for long minutes in the heat of the dryer-blast, till his skin flushed red, before he stopped shivering. He was dizzy with exhaustion. When he finally emerged, he found someone had been and gone and left clothes and food. He hastily pulled on underwear, a black Dendarii T-shirt, and a pair of his progenitor's ship-knit grey trousers, and fell upon the dinner. It wasn't a dainty Naismith-special-diet this time, but rather a tray of standard ready-to-eat rations designed to keep a large and physically active trooper going strong. It was far from gourmet fare, but it was the first time he'd had enough food on s plate for weeks. He devoured it all, as if whatever fairy had delivered it might reappear and snatch it away again. Stomach aching, he crawled into bed and lay on his side. He no longer shivered as if from cold, nor felt drained and sweating and shaky from low blood sugar, yet a kind of psychic reverberation still rolled like a black tide through is body.
   At least you got the clones out.
   No. Miles got the clones out.
   Dammit, dammit, dammit . . .
   This half-baked disaster was not the glorious redemption of which he'd dreamed. Yet what had he expected the aftermath to be? In all is desperate plotting, he'd planned almost nothing past his projected return to Escobar with the Ariel. To Escobar, grinning, with the clones under his wing. He'd imagined himself dealing with an enraged Miles then, but then it would have been too late for Miles to stop him, too late to take his victory from him. He'd half-expected to be arrested, but to go willingly, whistling. What had he wanted?
   To be free of survivor guilt? To break that old curse? Nobody you knew back then is still alive. . . . That was the motive he'd thought of as driving him, when he thought at all. Maybe it wasn't so simple, he'd wanted to free himself from something. ... In the last two years, reed of Ser Galen and the Komarrans by the actions of Miles Vorkosigan, freed again altogether by Miles on a London street at dawn, he had not found the happiness he'd dreamed of during his slavery to he terrorists. Miles had broken only the physical chains that bound him; others, invisible, had cut so deep that flesh had grown around hem.
   What did you think? That if you were as heroic as Miles, they'd lave to treat you like Miles? That they would have to love you?
   And who were they? The Dendarii? Miles himself? Or behind Stiles, those sinister, fascinating shadows, Count and Countess Vorkosigan?
   His image of Miles's parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, he Butcher of Komarr and his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he'd required Mark to study them, using unedited source materials, heir writings, their public speeches, private vids. Miles's parents were Nearly complex people, hardly saints, but just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of Galen's raving paranoias.
   In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a grey-haired, thick-set man with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with red-roan hair and notable grey eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she was not.
   And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them . . .
   He sat up, and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades_the Dendarii had disarmed him when he'd come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option, a sealed fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological tolerances. He went back to bed.
   The image of a little, urgent, shouting man with his chest exploding outward in a carmine spray replayed in slow motion in his head. He was surprised when he began to cry. Shock, it had to be the shock that Bothari-Jesek had diagnosed. I hated the little bugger when he was alive, why am I crying? It was absurd. Maybe he was going insane.
   Two nights without sleep had left him ringingly numb, yet he could not sleep now. He only dozed, drifting in and out of near-dreams and recent, searing memories. He half-hallucinated about being in a rubber raft on a river of blood, bailing frantically in the red torrent, so that when Quinn came to get him after only an hour's rest, it was actually a relief.