Miles and Galeni settled back. Galeni looked as exhausted as Miles felt.

"Bastard?" sighed Miles. "No. That's the one thing he is not, I'm afraid."

"Nail him first," Galeni murmured. "Define him later."

"Agreed," said Miles.

"How shall we go in?" asked Galeni as they approached the embassy in the late-morning light.

"Only one way," said Miles. "Through the front door. Marching. Pull up at the front, Elli."

Miles and Galeni looked at each other and snickered. Miles's beard was well behind Galeni's in development—Galeni's after all had a four-day head start—but his split lips, bruises, and the dried blood on his shirt made up for it, Miles figured, in augmenting his general air of seedy degradation. Besides, Galeni had found his boots and uniform jacket back at the Komarrans' house, and Miles had not. Carried off by the clone, perhaps. Miles was not sure which of them smelled worse—Galeni had been incarcerated longer, but Miles fancied he'd sweated harder—and he wasn't going to ask Elli Quinn to sniff and rate them. From Galeni's twitching lips and crinkling eyes Miles thought he might be undergoing the same delayed reaction of lunatic relief that was presently bubbling up through his own chest. They were alive, and it was a miracle and a wonderment.

They matched steps, going up the ramp. Elli sauntered behind, watching the performance with interest.

The guard at the entrance saluted by reflex even as astonishment spread over his face. "Captain Galeni! You're back! And, er. . ."he glanced at Miles, opened and closed his mouth, "you. Sir."

Galeni returned the salute blandly. "Call Lieutenant Vorpatril up here for me, will you? Vorpatril only."

"Yes, sir." The embassy guard spoke into his wrist comm, not taking his eyes off them; he kept looking sideways at Miles with a very puzzled expression. "Er—glad to have you back, Captain."

"Glad to be back, Corporal."

In a moment, Ivan popped out of a lift tube and came running across the marble-paved foyer.

"My God, sir, where have you been?" he cried, grabbing Galeni by the shoulders. He remembered himself belatedly, and saluted.

"My absence wasn't voluntary, I assure you." Galeni tugged on one earlobe, blinking, and ran the hand through his beard stubble, clearly a little touched by Ivan's enthusiasm. "As I shall explain in detail, later. Right now—Lieutenant Vorkosigan? It is perhaps time to surprise your, er, other relative."

Ivan glanced at Miles. "They let you out, then?" He looked more closely, then stared "Miles …"

Miles bared his teeth, and moved them out of earshot of the mesmerized corporal. "All shall be revealed when we arrest the other me. Where am I, by the way?"

Ivan's lips wrinkled in dawning dismay. "Miles . . . are you trying to diddle my head? It's not very funny. …"

"No diddle. And not funny. The individual you've been rooming with for the last four days—wasn't me. I've been rooming with Captain Galeni, here. A Komarran revolutionary group tried to plant a ringer on you, Ivan. The sucker is my clone, for real. Don't tell me you never noticed anything!"

"Well …" said Ivan. Belief, and growing embarrassment, began to suffuse his features. "You did seem sort of, um, off your feed, the last couple of days."

Elli nodded thoughtfully, highly sympathetic to Ivan's embarrassment.

"In what way?" asked Miles.

"Well. . . I've seen you manic. And I've seen you depressive. But I've never seen you—well—neutral."

"I had to ask. And yet you never suspected anything? He was that good?"

"Oh, I wondered about it the very first night!"

"And what?" yelped Miles. He felt like tearing his hair.

"And I decided it couldn't be. After all, you'd made that clone story up yourself a few days ago."

"I shall now demonstrate my amazing prescience. Where is he?"

"Well, that's why I was so surprised to see you, you see."

Galeni was now standing with his arms crossed, and his hand to his forehead, supportingly; Miles could not read his lips, though they were moving slightly—counting to ten, perhaps. "Why, Ivan?" said Galeni, and waited.

"My God, he hasn't left for Barrayar already, has he?" said Miles urgently. "We've got to stop him—"

"No, no," said Ivan. "It was the locals. That's why we're all in such a flap, here."

"Where is he?" snarled Miles, going for a grip on Ivan's green uniform jacket with his good hand.

"Calm down, that's what I'm trying to tell you!" Ivan glanced down at Miles's white-knuckled fist. "Yeah, it's you all right, isn't it? The local police came through here a couple of hours ago and arrested you—him—whatever. Well, not arrested, exactly, but they had a detention order, forbidding you to leave this legal jurisdiction. You—he—was frantic, 'cause it meant you'd miss your ship. You were shipping out tonight. They subpoenaed you for questioning, before the municipal bench's investigator, to ascertain if there was enough evidence to file formal charges."

"Charges for what, what are you babbling about, Ivan!"

"Well, that's it, why it's such a mess. Somewhere, they got this short circuit in their brains about embassies—they came and arrested you, Lieutenant Vorkosigan, for suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. To wit, you are suspected of hiring those two goons who tried to assassinate Admiral Naismith at the shuttleport last week."

Miles stamped in a circle. "Ah. Ah. Agh!"

"The ambassador is filing protests all over the place. Naturally, we couldn't tell them why we thought they were mistaken."

Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't panic."

"I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining."

Miles pressed his forehead. "Right. Right. Let us begin by assuming all is not lost. Let us assume the lad hasn't panicked—hasn't broken. Yet. Suppose he has climbed up on an aristocratic high horse and is sneering a lot of no-comments at them. He'd do that well, it's how he thinks Vor are supposed to act. Little schmuck. Assume he's holding out."

"Assume away," remarked Ivan. "So what?"

"If we hurry, we can save—"

"Your reputation?" said Ivan.

"Your . . . brother?" ventured Galeni.

"Our asses?" said Elli.

"Admiral Naismith," Miles finished. "He's the one at risk, now." Miles's gaze crossed Elli's; her eyebrows arched in dawning worry. "The key word is cover, as inblown— or, just possibly, permanently assured.

"You and I," he nodded to Galeni, "have to get cleaned up. Meet me back here in fifteen minutes. Ivan, bring a sandwich. Two sandwiches. We'll take you along for muscle." Ivan was well endowed in that resource. "Elli, you drive."

"Drive where?" asked Quinn.

"The Assizes. We go to the rescue of poor, misunderstood Lieutenant Vorkosigan. Who will return with us gratefully, whether he wants to or not. Ivan, better bring a hypospray with two cc's of tholizone, in addition to those sandwiches."

"Hold it, Miles," said Ivan. "If the ambassador couldn't get him sprung, how do you expect us to?"

Miles grinned. "Not us. Admiral Naismith."

The London Municipal Assizes was a big black crystal of a building some two centuries old. A slash of similar architecture erupted unevenly through a district of even older styles, representing the bombings and fires of the Fifth Civil Disturbance. Urban renewal here seemed to wait on disaster. London was so filled up, a cramped jigsaw of juxtaposed eras, with Londoners stubbornly hanging on to bits of their past; there was even a committee to save the singularly ugly disintegrating remnants of the late twentieth century. Miles wondered if Vorbarr Sultana, presently expanding madly, would look like this in a thousand years, or whether it would obliterate its history in the rush to modernize.

Miles paused in the Assizes's soaring foyer to adjust his Dendarii admiral's uniform. "Do I look respectable?" he asked Quinn.