How wonderfully succinct. If he answered in full, it could take him the next six hours.

“I need to be in on ImpSec’s search for Miles. Illyan won’t let me. You can override him.”

Gregor sat still for a minute, then barked a brief laugh. He swiped a hand through sleep-bent black hair. “Have you asked him?”

“Yes. Just now. He turned me down.”

“Mm, well … it’s his job to be cautious for me. So that my judgment may remain untrammeled.”

“In your untrammeled judgment, sir. Sire. Let me in!”

Gregor studied him thoughtfully, rubbing his face. “Yes …” he drawled slowly after a moment. “Let’s … see what happens.” His eyes were not bleary now.

“Can you call Illyan right now, sire?”

“What is this, pent-up demand? The dam breaks?”

I am poured out like water … where did that quote come from? It sounded like something of the Countess’s. “He’s still up. Please. Sire. And have him call me back at this console to confirm. I’ll wait.”

“Very well,” Gregor’s lips twisted up in a peculiar smile, “Lord Mark.”

“Thank you, sire. Uh … good night.”

“Good morning.” Gregor cut the comm.

Mark waited. The seconds ticked by, stretched out of all recognition. His hangover was starting, but he was still slightly drunk. The worst of both worlds. He had started to doze when the comconsole chimed at last, and he nearly spasmed out of his chair.

He slapped urgently at the controls. “Yes. Sir?”

Illyan’s saturnine face appeared over the vid plate. “Lord Mark.” He gave Mark the barest nod. “If you come to ImpSec headquarters at the beginning of normal business hours tomorrow morning, you will be permitted to review the files we discussed.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Mark sincerely.

“That’s two-and-one-half hours from now,” Illyan mentioned with, Mark thought, an understandable hint of sadism. Illyan hadn’t slept either.

“I’ll be there.”

Illyan acknowledged this with a shiver of his eyelids, and vanished.

Damnation through good works, or grace alone? Mark meditated on Gregor’s grace. He knew. He knew it before I did. Lord Mark Vorkosigan was a real person.

Chapter Eighteen

The level light of dawn turned the night’s lingering mist to gold, a smoky autumnal haze that gave the city of Vorbarr Sultana an almost magical air. The Imperial Security Headquarters building stood windowless, foursquare against the light, a vast utilitarian concrete block with enormous gates and doors certainly designed to diminish any human supplicant fool enough to approach it. In his case, a redundant effect, Mark decided.

“What awful architecture,” he said to Pym, beside him, chauffeuring him in the Count’s ground car.

“Ugliest building in town,” the armsman agreed cheerfully. “It dates back to Mad Emperor Yuri’s Imperial architect, Lord Dono Vorrutyer. An uncle to the later vice-admiral. He managed to get up five major structures before Yuri was killed, and they stopped him. The Municipal Stadium runs this a close second, but we’ve never been able to afford to tear it down. Still stuck with it, sixty years later.”

“It looks like the sort of place that has dungeons in the basement. Painted institutional green. Run by ethics-free physicians.”

“It did,” said Pym. The Armsman negotiated their way past the gate guards and slowed in front of a vast flight of steps.

“Pym … aren’t those steps a bit oversized?”

“Yep,” grinned the Armsman. “You’d have a cramp in your leg by the time you reached the top, if you tried to take it in one go.” Pym eased the ground car forward, and stopped to let Mark off “But if you go around the left end, here, you’ll find a little door at ground level, and a lift tube foyer. That’s where everybody actually goes in.”

“Thank you.” Pym popped the front canopy, and Mark climbed out. “Whatever happened to Lord Dono, after Mad Yuri’s reign? Assassinated by the Architectural Defense League, I hope?”

“No, he retired to the country, lived off his daughter and son-in-law, and died stark mad. There’s a bizarre set of towers he built on their estate, that they charge admission to see, now.” With a wave, Pym lowered the canopy and pulled away.

Mark trod around to the left, as directed. So here he was, bright and early … or at least, early. He’d taken a long shower, donned comfortable dark civilian clothes, and tanked himself on enough painkillers, vitamins, hangover remedies, and stimulants to leave him feeling artificially normal. More artificial than normal, but he was determined not to let Illyan bully him out of his chance.

He presented himself to the ImpSec guards in the foyer. “I’m Lord Mark Vorkosigan. I’m expected.”

“Hardly that,” growled a voice from the lift tube. Illyan himself swung out. The guards braced; Illyan put them back at ease with an unmilitary wave. Illyan too had showered, and changed back into his usual undress greens. Mark suspected Illyan had eaten pills for breakfast too. “Thank you, Sergeant, I’ll take him up.”

“What a depressing building to work in,” Mark commented, as he rose in the lift tube beside the ImpSec chief.

“Yes,” sighed Illyan. “I visited the Investigatif Federate building on Escobar, once. Forty-five stories, all glass … I was never closer to emigrating. Dono Vorrutyer should have been strangled at birth. But … it’s mine now.” Illyan glanced around with a dubious possessiveness.

Illyan led him deep into the—yes, this building definitely had bowels, Mark decided. The bowels of ImpSec. Their footsteps echoed down a bare corridor lined with tiny, cubicle-like rooms. Mark glanced through a few half-open doors at highly-secured corn-consoles manned by green-uniformed men. One man at least had a bank of non-regulation full spectrum lights blazing away, aimed at his station chair. There was a large coffee dispenser at the end of the corridor. He didn’t think it was random chance that Illyan led him to the cubicle numbered thirteen.

“This comconsole has been loaded with every report I’ve received pertaining to the search for Lieutenant Vorkosigan,” said Illyan coolly. “If you think you can do better with it than my trained analysts have, I invite you to try.”

“Thank you, sir.” Mark slid into the station chair, and powered up the vid plate. “This is unexpectedly generous.”

“You should have no complaint, my lord,” Illyan stated, in the tone of a directive. Gregor must have lit quite a fire under him, earlier this morning, Mark reflected, as Illyan bowed himself out with a distinctly ironic nod. Hostile? No. That was unjust. Illyan was not nearly as hostile as he had a right to be. It’s not only obedience to his Emperor, Mark realized with a shiver. Illyan could have stood up to Gregor on a security issue like this if he’d really wanted to. He’s getting desperate.

He took a deep breath and plunged into the files, reading, listening, and viewing. Illyan hadn’t been joking about the everything part. There were literally hundreds of reports, generated by fifty or sixty different agents scattered throughout the near wormhole nexus. Some were brief and negative. Others were long and negative. But somebody seemed to have visited, at least once, every possible cryo-facility on Jackson’s Whole, its orbital and jump point stations, and several adjoining local space systems. There were even recently-received reports tracing as far away as Escobar.

What was missing, Mark realized after quite a while, were any synopses or finished analyses. He had received raw data only, in all its mass. On the whole, he decided he preferred it that way.

Mark read till his eyes were dry and aching, and his stomach gurgled with festering coffee. Time to break for lunch, he thought, when a guard knocked at his door.

“Lord Mark, your driver is here,” the guard informed him politely.