Galeni raised his brows sardonically. "I see. And how do you propose to explain your clone to them?"

"If necessary, as a clone—of Admiral Naismith."

"Three of you, now?" said Galeni dubiously.

"Just set them to find your—find Ser Galen. Where he is, the clone will be too. It worked once."

"Hm," said Galeni.

"There's just one thing," Miles added. He ran one finger thoughtfully along the top of the chair back. "If we do succeed in catching them—just what is it that we plan to do with "em?"

The light pen tapped. "There are," said Galeni, "only two or three possibilities. One, they can be arrested, tried, and incarcerated for the crimes committed here on Earth."

"During the course of which," Miles observed seriously, "Admiral Naismith's cover as a supposedly independent operator will almost certainly be compromised, his true identity publicly revealed. I can't pretend the Barrayaran Empire will stand or fall on the Dendarii Mercenaries, but Security has found us useful in the past. Command may—I hope may—regard this as a poor trade. Besides, has my clone in fact committed any crimes he can be held for? I think he may even be a minor, by Eurolaw rules."

"Second alternative," Galeni recited. "Kidnap them and returned them secretly to Barrayar for trial, evading Earth's non-extradition status. If we had an order from on high, my guess is this would be it, the minimum proper paranoid Security response."

"For trial," said Miles, "or to be held indefinitely in some oubliette . . . For my—brother, that might not turn out as bad as he'd at first think. He has a friend in a very high place. If he can escape being secretly murdered by some—overexcited underling first, en route." Galeni and Miles exchanged glances. "But nobody's going to intercede for your father. Barrayar has always taken the killings in the Komarr Revolt to be civil crimes, not acts of war, and he never submitted to the loyalty oath and amnesty. He'll be up on capital charges. His execution will inevitably follow."

"Inevitably." Galeni pursed his lips, staring down at the toes of his boots. "The third possibility being—as you said—an order coming down for their secret assassination."

"Criminal orders can be successfully resisted," Miles observed, "if you have a strong enough stomach for it. High command isn't as free with that sort of thing as they were back in Emperor Ezar's day, fortunately. I submit a fourth possibility. It might be better not to catch these—awkward relatives—in the first place."

"Bluntly, Miles, if I fail to produce Ser Galen, my career will be smoke. I must already be suspect, for having failed to turn him up any time these last two years. Your suggestion skirts—not insubordination, that seems to be your normal mode of operation—but something worse."

"What about your predecessor here, who failed to discover him in five years? And if you do produce him now, will your career be any better off? You'll be suspect anyway, in the minds of those who are determined to be suspicious."

"I wish," Galeni's face had an inward look, deathly calm, his voice a reflective murmur, "I wish he had stayed dead in the first place. His first death was a much better one, glorious in the heat of battle. He had his place in history, and I was alone, past pain, without mother or father to torment me. How fortunate that science hasn't cracked human immortality. It's a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors."

Miles mulled over the dilemma. In jail on Earth, Galen destroyed both Galeni's career and Admiral Naismith's, but lived. Shipped to Barrayar, he died; Galeni's career would be a little better off, but Galeni himself—would not be quite sane, Miles rather thought. The patricide would not have the rooted serenity to serve Komarr's complex future needs, certainly. But Naismith would live, his thought whispered temptingly. Left loose, the persistent Galen and Mark remained a threat of unknown, and so intolerable, proportion; if Miles and Galeni did nothing, high command would most certainly take the choice from them, issuing who-knew-what orders sealing the fate of their perceived enemies.

Miles loathed the thought of sacrificing Galeni's promising career to this crabbed old revolutionary who refused to give up. Yet Galen's destruction would also damage Galeni, just as certainly. Dammit, why couldn't the old man have pensioned himself off to some tropical paradise, instead of hanging around making trouble for the younger generation on the grounds, no doubt, that it was good for 'em? Mandatory retirement for revolutionaries, that's what they needed now.

What do you choose when all choices are bad?

"This choice is mine," said Galeni. "We have to go after them."

They stared at each other, both very tired.

"Compromise," suggested Miles. "Send the Dendarii Mercenaries out to locate, track, and monitor them. Don't attempt to pick them up yet. This will permit you to put all the embassy's resources to work on the problem of the courier, a purely Barrayaran-internal matter on any scale."

There was a silence. "Agreed," Galeni said at last. "But whatever finally happens—I want to get it over with quickly."

"Agreed," said Miles.

Miles found Elli sitting alone in the embassy cafeteria, leaning tired and a little blank over the remains of her dinner, ignoring the covert stares and hesitant smiles of various embassy personnel. He grabbed a snack and tea and slid into the seat across from her. Their hands gripped briefly across the table, then she rested her chin on her cupped palms again, elbows propped.

"So, what's next?" she asked.

"What's the traditional reward for a job well done in this man's army?"

Her dark eyes crinkled. "Another job."

"You got it. I've persuaded Captain Galeni to let the Dendarii mercenaries find Galen, just as you found us. How did you find us, by the way?"

"Lotta damn work, that's how. We started by crunching through that awful pile of data you beamed up from the embassy files about Komarrans. We eliminated the well-documented ones, the young children, and so on. Then we put the Intelligence computer team downside to break into the economic net and pull out credit files, and into the Eurolaw net—that was tricky—and pull out criminal files, and started looking for anomalies. That's where we found the break. About a year ago, the Earth-born son of a Komarran expatriate was picked up by the Eurolaw cops on some minor misdemeanor and found to have an unregistered stunner in his possession. Not being a deadly weapon, it merely cost him a fine, and as far as Eurolaw was concerned, that was that. But the stunner wasn't of Earth manufacture. It was old Barrayaran military issue.

"We began following him, both physically and through the computer net, finding out who his friends were, people who weren't in the embassy's computer. We were following up several other leads at the same time that failed to pan out. But this is where I got a compelling hunch. One of this kid's frequent contacts, a man named Van der Poole, was registered as an immigrant to Earth from the planet Frost IV. Now, during that investigation I did a couple of years back involving the stolen genes, I passed through Jackson's Whole—"

Miles nodded in memory.

"So I knew you could buy documented pasts there—one of the little high-profit-margin services certain laboratories sell to go along with the new faces and voices and finger– and retina-prints they offer. One of the planets they frequently use for this is Frost IV, on account of the tectonic disaster having wrecked their computer net—not to mention the rest of the place—twenty-eight years ago. A lot of perfectly legitimate people who left Frost IV then have uncheckable documentation. If you're over twenty-eight years old, Jackson's Whole can fit you right in. So whenever I see somebody above a certain age who claims to be from Frost IV, I'm automatically suspicious. Van der Poole was Galen, of course."