Miles felt very small and very brittle. Galen could very well begin by breaking Miles's arms with the same absent, nervous air that Elli Quinn bit her nails, just to release tension. Does he see me at all? Or am I an object, a symbol representing the enemy—will he murder me for the sake of sheer allegory?
"So," Ser Galen spoke. "This is the real thing at last. Not very impressive, to have seduced my son's loyalty. What can he see in you? Still, you represent Barrayar very well. The monster son of a monster father, Aral Vorkosigan's secret moral genotype made flesh for all to see. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe after all."
"Very poetic," choked Miles, "but biologically inaccurate, as you must know, having cloned me."
Galen smiled sourly. "I won't insist on it." He completed his circuit and faced Miles. "I suppose you couldn't help being born. But why have you never revolted from the monster? He made you what you are—" an expansive gesture of Galen's open hand summed up Miles's stunted and twisted frame. "What dictator's charisma does the man possess, that he's able to hypnotize not only his own son but everyone else's too?" The prone figure in the vid console seemed to pluck at Galen's eye. "Why do you follow him? Why does David? What corrupt kick can my son get out of crawling into a Barrayaran goon-uniform and marching behind Vorkosigan?" Galen's voice feigned light banter very badly; the undertones twisted with anguish.
Miles, glowering, clipped out, "For one thing, my father has never abandoned me in the presence of an enemy."
Galen's head jerked back, all pretense of banter extinguished. He turned abruptly away, and went to take up the hypospray from the bench.
Miles silently cursed his own tongue. But for that stupid impulse to grab the last word, to return the cut, he might have kept the man talking, and learned something. Now the talking, and the learning, would all be going the other way.
The two guards took him by the elbows. The one on the left pushed up his shirt sleeve. Here it came. Galen pressed the hypospray against the vein on the inside of Miles's elbow, a hiss, a prickling bite. "What is it?" Miles had just time to ask. His voice sounded unfortunately weak and nervous in his own ears.
"Fast-penta, of course," replied Galen easily.
Miles was not surprised, though he cringed inwardly, knowing what was to come. He had studied fast-penta's pharmacology, effects, and proper use in the Security course at the Barrayaran Imperial Academy. It was the drug of choice for interrogation, not only for the Imperial Service but galaxy-wide. The near-perfect truth serum, irresistible, harmless to the subject even with repeated doses. Irresistible and harmless, that is, except to the unfortunate few who had either a natural or artificially-induced allergic reaction to it. Miles had never even been considered as a candidate for this last conditioning, his person being judged more valuable than any secret information he might contain. Other espionage agents were less lucky. Anaphylactic shock was an even less heroic death than the disintegration chamber usually reserved for convicted spies.
Despairing, Miles waited to go ga-ga. Admiral Naismith had sat in on more than one real fast-penta interrogation. The drug washed all reason out to sea on a flood of benign good feeling and charitable cheer. Like a cat on catnip, it was highly amusing to watch—in somebody else. In moments he would be mellow to the point of drooling idiocy.
Ugly, to think of the resolute Captain Galeni having been so shamefully reduced. Four times running, he'd said. No wonder he was twitchy.
Miles could feel his heart racing, as though he'd overdosed on caffeine. His vision seemed to sharpen to an almost painful focus. The edge lines of every object in the room glowed, the masses they enclosed palpable to his exacerbated senses. Galen, standing back by the pulsing window, was a live-wiring diagram, electric and dangerous, loaded with deadly voltage awaiting some triggering discharge.
Mellow, this wasn't.
He had to be slipping into natural shock. Miles took his last breath. Would his interrogator ever be surprised. . . .
Rather to Miles's own surprise, he kept on panting. Not anaphylactic shock, then. Just another damned idiosyncratic drug reaction. He hoped the stuff wouldn't bring on those ghastly hallucinations like that bloody sedative he'd been given once by an unsuspecting surgeon. He wanted to scream. His eyes flashed white-edged to follow Galen's least motion.
One of the guards shoved a chair up behind him and sat him down. Miles fell into it gratefully, shivering uncontrollably. His thoughts seemed to explode in fragments and reform, like fireworks being run forward and then in reverse through a vid. Galen frowned down at him.
"Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy."
Surely they must have squeezed this basic information out of Captain Galeni already—it must merely be a question to check the effect of the fast-penta, ". . . of the fast-penta," Miles heard his own voice echoing his thoughts. Oh, hell. He'd hoped his odd reaction to the drug might have included the ability to resist spilling his mind out his mouth. "—what a repulsive image …" Head swaying, he stared down at the floor in front of his feet as if he might see a pile of bloody brains vomited there.
Ser Galen strode forward and yanked his head up by the hair, and repeated through his teeth, "Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy!"
"Sergeant Barth's in charge," Miles began impulsively. "Obnoxious bigot. No savoir faire at all, and a jock to boot—" Unable to stop himself, Miles poured out not only codes, passwords, scanner perimeters, but also personnel schedules, his private opinions of each and every individual, and a scathing critique of the Security net's defects. One thought triggered another and then the next in an explosive chain like a string of firecrackers. He couldn't stop; he babbled.
Not only could he not stop himself, Galen couldn't stop him either. Prisoners on fast-penta tended to wander by free association from the topic unless kept on track by frequent cues from their interrogators. Miles found himself doing the same on fast-forward. Normal victims could be brought up short by a word, but only when Galen struck him hard and repeatedly across the face, shouting him down, did Miles halt, and sit panting.
Torture was not a part of fast-penta interrogation because the happily drugged subjects were impervious to it. For Miles the pain pulsed in and out, at one moment detached and distant, the next flooding his body and whiting out his mind like a burst of static. To his own horror, he began to cry. Then stopped with a sudden hiccup.
Galen stood staring at him in repelled fascination.
"It's not right," muttered one of the guards. "He shouldn't be like that. Is he beating the fast-penta, some kind of new conditioning?"
"He's not beating it, though," Galen pointed out.
He glanced at his wrist chrono. "He's not withholding information. He's giving more. Too much more."
The comconsole began chiming insistently.
"I'll get it," volunteered Miles. "It's probably for me." He surged up out of his seat, his knees gave way, and he fell flat on his face on the carpet. It prickled against his bruised cheek. The two guards dragged him off the floor and propped him back up in the chair. The room jerked in a slow circle around him. Galen answered the comconsole.
"Reporting in." Miles's own crisp voice in its Barrayaran-accented incarnation rang from the vid.
The clone's face seemed not quite as familiar as the one Miles shaved daily in his mirror. "His hair's parted on the wrong side if he wants to be me," Miles observed to no one in particular. "No, it's not …" No one was listening, anyway. Miles considered angles of incidence and angles of reflection, his thoughts bouncing at the speed of light back and forth between the mirrored walls of his empty skull.