Cee shook his head, drank again. "For myself, I'm done with it. No more. I'd have walked into the fire three years ago, but for Janine."

"Ah," said Quinn. "Janine."

Cee looked up with piercing eyes. Not nearly drunk, Ethan thought. "You want a pound of flesh, mercenary? That's the price that will buy it. Find me Janine."

Quinn pursed her lips. "Mixed in, you say, with the rest of Athos's mail-order brides. Tricky." She wound a strand of hair around her finger. "You realize, of course, that my mission here is finished. I've done my job. And I could stun you where you sit, take my tissue sample, and be gone before you came to."

Cee stirred uneasily. "So?"

"So, just so you realize that."

"What do you want of me?" Cee demanded. Anger edged his voice. "To trust you?"

Her lips thinned. "You don't trust anybody. You never had to. Yet you demand that others trust you."

"Oh," said Cee, looking suddenly enlightened. "That."

"You breathe one word of that," she smiled through clenched teeth, "and I'll arrange an accident for you like Okita never dreamed of."

"Your Admiral's personal secrets are of no interest to me," said Cee stiffly. "They're hardly relevant to this situation anyway."

"They're relevant to me," Quinn muttered, but she gave him a small nod, conditional acceptance of this assurance of privacy.

Every sin that Ethan had ever committed or contemplated rose unbidden to his mind. He took Quinn's unspoken point. So, evidently, did Cee, for he turned the subject by turning to Ethan.

Ethan suddenly felt terribly naked. Everything that he least wanted to be caught thinking about seemed to race through his consciousness. Cee's marvelous physical attractiveness, for example, the nervous intelligent leanness of him, the electric blue eyes—Ethan damned his own weakness for blonds, and yanked his thoughts back from a slide to the sexual. Watching himself be mentally undressed in Ethan's thoughts would hardly impress Cee with Ethan's cool diplomatic medical professionalism. Ethan envied Quinn's bland, unfailing control.

But it could be worse. He could think about just how gossamer-thin was the shield of Athos's protection he had supposedly thrown over Cee, on the basis of which the telepath had revealed so damagingly much. How betrayed was Cee going to feel when he discovered that the asylum of Athos consisted of Ethan's wits, period? Ethan reddened, utterly ashamed, and stared at the floor.

He was going to lose Cee to Quinn and the glamour of the Dendarii Mercenaries before he even got a chance to tell him about Athos—the beautiful seas, the pleasant cities, the ordered communes and the patchwork terraformed farmlands, and beyond them the vast wild desolate wastes with their fascinating extremes of climate and people—the saintly, if grubby, contemplative hermits, the outlaw Outlanders… Ethan pictured himself taking Cee sailing on the South Province coast, checking the underwater fences of his father's fish farm—did Cetaganda have oceans?—salt sweat and salt water, hot hard work and cold beer and blue shrimp afterward.

Cee shivered, as a man forcing himself awake from some bright but dangerous narcotic dream. "There are oceans on Cetaganda," he whispered, "but I never saw them. My whole life was corridors."

Ethan's red went to scarlet. He felt transparent as glass.

Quinn, watching him, emitted a sour chuckle of perfect understanding. "I predict your talent will not make you popular at parties, Cee."

Cee appeared to pull himself back on track by force of will. Ethan was relieved.

"If you can give me asylum, Dr. Urquhart, why not Janine's seed as well? And if you can't protect her, how do you figure to…"

Ethan was not relieved. But lies were pointless now. "I haven't even figured out how to get my own tail out of this mess yet," he admitted ruefully, "let alone yours." He eyed Quinn. "But I'm not quitting."

A wave of her index finger indicated a touched "I might point out, gentlemen, that before any of us can do anything at all about that genetic shipment we must first find the damn thing. Now, there seems to be a missing element in this equation. Let's try to narrow it down. If none of us nor Millisor has it, who else might?"

"Anyone who found out what it was," answered Cee. "Rival planetary governments. Criminal organizations. Free mercenary fleets."

"Watch who you put in the same breath, Cee," Quinn muttered.

"House Bharaputra must have known," said Ethan.

Quinn smiled with half her mouth. "And they fit two categories out of the three, being both a government and a criminal organization…. Ahem. Pardon my prejudices. Yes. Certain individuals in House Bharaputra did know what it was. They all became smoking corpses. I fear that House Bharaputra no longer knows what it hatched. Internal evidence; Bharaputra didn't exactly take me into their entire confidence, but I submit that if they'd known, my assignment would have been to return Millisor and company to them alive for questioning and not, as explicitly requested, dead. " She caught Cee's eye. "You doubtless knew their minds better than I. Does my reasoning hold?"

"Yes," Cee admitted reluctantly.

"We're going in circles," Ethan observed.

Quinn twisted her hair. "Yeah."

"What about some individual entrepreneur," suggested Ethan, "stumbling on the knowledge by accident. A ship's crewman, say…"

"Aargh," groaned Quinn, "I said to narrow the range of possibilities, not widen them! Data. Data." She swung to her feet, studied Cee. "You done for now, Mr. Cee?"

Cee was hunched over, his hands pressing his head. "Yes, go. No more now."

Ethan was concerned. "Are you experiencing pain? Does it have a localized pattern?"

"Yes, never mind, it's always like this." Cee stumbled to his bed, rolled over, curled up.

"Where are you going?" Ethan asked Quinn.

"First, to empty my regular information traps; second, to try a little oblique interrogation of the warehouse personnel. Although what the human supervisor of an automated system is likely to remember after five to seven months about one shipment out of thousands… Oh, well. It's a loose end I can nail down. You may as well stay here, it's as safe as anyplace." A jerk of her head implied, And you can keep an eye on our friend in the bed.

Ethan ordered up three-fourths of a gram of salicylates and some B-vitamins from the room service console, and pressed them on the pale telepath. Cee took them and rolled back up with a never-mind-me gesture that failed to reassure Ethan. But Cee's clenched glazed stupor at last relaxed into sleep.

Ethan watched over him, chafing anew at his own helplessness. He had nothing to offer, nothing half so clever as Quinn's bags of tricks. Nothing but an insistent conviction that they all had hold of the problem by the wrong end.

Quinn's return woke Ethan, asleep on the floor. He creaked to his feet and let her in, rubbing sand out of his eyes. It was time for another shave, too; maybe he could borrow some depilatory from Cee.

"How did it go? What did you find out?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Millisor continues to maintain his cover routine. Rau's back at the listening post. I could call in an anonymous tip to Station Security where to look for him, but if he slipped out of Detention again I'd just have to track him down someplace new. And the warehouse supervisor can drink premium aquavit by the liter and talk for hours without remembering anything." She smothered a slightly aromatic belch herself.

Cee awoke to their voices and sat up on the edge of his bed. "Oh," he muttered, and lay back down rather more carefully, blinking. After a moment he sat up again. "What time is it?"

"Nineteen-hundred hours," said Quinn.

"Oh, hell." Cee jerked to his feet. "I've got to get to work."

"Should you go out at all?" asked Ethan anxiously.