“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.”