“Did you get a chance to visit your mother, downside on Escobar?”

“Yes, thanks.” She smiled. “It was … nice, to have a little time. We had a chance to talk about some things we’d never talked about the first time we met.”

It had been good for both of them, Miles judged. Some of the permanent strain seemed gone from Elena’s dark eyes. Better and better, bit by bit. “Good.”

He glanced up as the doors hissed open, but it was only Quinn, blowing in with the secured files in hand. She was back in full officer’s undress kit, and looking very comfortable and efficient. She handed the files to Miles, and he loaded them into the comconsole, and waited another minute. Still no Bel Thorne.

Talk died away. His officers were giving him attentive, let’s-get-on-with-it looks. He’d better not stand around much longer with his thumb in his ear. Before bringing the console display to life, he inquired, “Is there some reason Captain Thorne is late?”

They looked at him, and then at each other. There can’t be something wrong with Bel, it would have been reported to me first thing. Still, a small leaden knot materialized in the pit of his stomach. “Where is Bel Thorne?”

By eye, they elected Elena Bothari-Jesek as spokesperson. That was an extremely bad sign. “Miles,” she said hesitantly, “was Bel supposed to be back before you?”

“Back? Where did Bel go?”

She was looking at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Bel left with you, in the Ariel, three days ago.”

Quinn’s head snapped up. “That’s impossible.”

“Three days ago, we were still en route to Escobar,” Miles stated. The leaden knot was transmuting into neutron star matter. He was not dominating this room at all well. In fact, it seemed to be tilting.

“You took Green Squad with you. It was the new contract, Bel said,” Elena added.

“This is the new contract,” Miles tapped the comconsole. A hideous explanation was beginning to suggest itself to his mind, rising from the black hole in his stomach. The looks on the faces around the table were also beginning to divide into two uneven camps, appalled surmise from the minority who had been in on that mess on Earth two years ago—oh, they were right with him—total confusion from the majority, who had not been directly involved… .

“Where did I say I was going?” Miles inquired. His tone was, he thought, gentle, but several people flinched.

“Jackson’s Whole.” Elena looked him straight in the eye, with much the steady gaze of a zoologist about to dissect a specimen. A sudden lack of trust …

Jackson’s Whole. That tears it. “Bel Thorne? The Ariel? Taura? Within ten jumps of Jackson’s Whole?” Miles choked. “Dear God.”

“But if you’re you,” said Truzillo, “who was that three days ago?”

“If you’re you,” said Elena darkly. The initiate crowd were all getting that same frowning look.

“You see,” Miles explained in a hollow voice to the What-the-hell-are-they-talking-about? portion of the room, “some people have an evil twin. I am not so lucky. What I have is an idiot twin.”

“Your clone,” said Elena Bothari-Jesek.

“My brother,” he corrected automatically.

“Little Mark Pierre,” said Quinn. “Oh … shit.”

Chapter Three

His stomach seemed to turn inside out, the cabin wavered, and shadow darkened his vision. The bizarre sensations of the wormhole jump were gone almost as soon as they began, but left an unpleasant somatic reverberation, as if he were a struck gong. He took a deep, calming breath. That had been the fourth jump of the voyage. Five jumps to go, on the tortuous zigzag through the wormhole nexus from Escobar to Jackson’s Whole. The Ariel had been three days en route, almost halfway.

He glanced around Naismith’s cabin. He could not continue to hide out in here much longer, pretense of illness or Naismithian black mood or not. Thorne needed every bit of data he could supply to plan the Dendarii raid on the clone-creche. He had used his hibernation well, scanning the Ariel’s mission logs back through time, all the way past his first encounter with the Dendarii two years ago. He now knew a great deal more about the mercenaries, and the thought of casual conversation with the Ariel’s crew was far less terrifying.

Unfortunately there was very little in the mission log to help him reconstruct what his first meeting with Naismith on Earth had looked like from the Dendarii point of view. The log had concentrated on rehabilitation and refit reports, dickerings with assorted ship’s chandlers, and engineering briefings. He’d found exactly one order pertinent to his own adventures embedded in the data flow, advising all ship masters that Admiral Naismith’s clone had been seen on Earth, warning that the clone might attempt to pass himself off as the Admiral, giving the (incorrect) information that the clone’s legs would show up on a medical scan as normal hone and not plastic replacements, and ordering use of stunners-only in apprehending the imposter. No explanations, no later revisions or updates. All of Naismith/Vorkosigan’s highest-level orders tended to be verbal and undocumented anyway, for security—from the Dendarii, not for them—a habit that had just served him well.

He leaned back in his station chair and glowered at the comconsole display. The Dendarii data named him Mark. That’s another thing you don’t get to choose, Miles Naismith Vorkosigan had said. Mark Pierre. You are Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, in your own right, on Barrayar.

But he was not on Barrayar, nor ever would be if he could help it. You are not my brother, and the Butcher of Komarr was never a father to me, his thought denied for the thousandth time to his absent progenitor. My mother was a uterine replicator.

But the power of the suggestion had ridden him ever after, sapping his satisfaction with every pseudonym he’d ever tried, though he’d stared at lists of names till his eyes ached. Dramatic names, plain names, exotic, strange, common, silly … Jan Vandermark was the alias he’d used the longest, the closest sideways skittish approach to identity.

Mark! Miles had shouted, being dragged away, for all he knew, to his own death. Your name is Mark!

I am not Mark. I am NOT your damned brother, you maniac. The denial was hot and huge, but when its echoes died away, in the hollow chamber left inside his skull he seemed not to be anyone at all.

His head was aching, a grinding tightness that crawled up his spine through his shoulders and neck, and spread out under his scalp. He rubbed hard at his neck, but the tension just circulated around through his arms and back into his shoulders.

Not his brother. But to be strictly accurate, Naismith could not be blamed for forcing him to life in the same way as the other House Bharaputran clones’ progenitors. Oh, they were genetically identical, yes. It was a matter of … intent, perhaps. And where the money came from.

Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan had been just six years old when the tissue sample from a biopsy was stolen from some clinical laboratory on Barrayar, during the last gasp of Komarran resistance to Barrayaran imperial conquest. No one, neither Barrayaran nor Komarran, was intrinsically interested in the crippled child Miles. The focus had all been on his father. Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan, Regent of Barrayar, Conqueror (or Butcher) of Komarr. Aral Vorkosigan had supplied the will and the wit which had made Komarr into Barrayar’s first off-planet conquest. And made himself the target of Komarran resistance and revenge. Hope for successful resistance had faded in time. Hope for revenge lived on in exiled bitterness. Stripped of an army, arms, support, one Komarran hate group plotted a slow, mad vengeance. To strike at the father through the son upon whom he was known to dote …