“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.