Miles spent a few more minutes failing to find anything exciting on the vid logs, then Bel returned.

Miles shut down the vid. “I think I'd like a look at that funny Betan's cargo.”

“Can't help you there,” said Bel. “I don't have the codes to the freight lockers. Only the passengers are supposed to have the access to the space they rent, by contract, and the quaddies haven't bothered to get a court order to make them disgorge 'em. Decreases Graf Station's liability for theft while the passengers aren't aboard, y'see. You'll have to get Dubauer to let you in.”

“Dear Bel, I am an Imperial Auditor, and this is not only a Barrayaran-registered ship, it belongs to Empress Laisa's own family. I go where I will. Solian has to have a security override for every cranny of this ship. Roic?”

“Right here, m'lord.” The armsman tapped his notation device.

“Very well, then, let's take a walk.”

Bel and Roic followed him down the corridor and through the central lock to the adjoining freight section. The double-door to the second chamber down yielded to Roic's careful tapping on its lock pad. Miles poked his head through and brought up the lights.

It was an impressive sight. Gleaming replicator racks stood packed in tight rows, filling the space and leaving only narrow aisles between. Each rack sat bolted on its own float pallet, in four layers of five units—twenty to a rack, as high as Roic was tall. Beneath darkened display readouts on each, control panels twinkled with reassuringly green lights. For now.

Miles walked down the aisle formed by five pallets, around the end, and up the next, counting. More pallets lined the walls. Bel's estimate of a thousand seemed exactly right. “You'd think the placental chambers would be a larger size. These seem nearly identical to the ones at home.” With which he'd grown intimately familiar, of late. These arrays were clearly meant for mass production. All twenty units stacked on a pallet economically shared reservoirs, pumps, filtration devices, and the control panel. He leaned closer. “I don't see a maker's mark.” Or serial numbers or anything else that would reveal the planet of origin for what were clearly very finely made machines. He tapped a control to bring the monitor screen to life.

The glowing screen didn't contain manufacturing data or serial numbers either. Just a stylized scarlet screaming-bird pattern on a silver background. . . . His heart began to lump. What the hell was this doing here . . . ?

“Miles,” said Bel's voice, seeming to come from a long way off, “if you're going to pass out, put your head down.”

“Between my knees,” choked Miles, “and kiss my ass good-bye. Bel, do you know what that sigil is ?”

“No,” said Bel, in a leery now-what? tone.

“Cetagandan Star Cr?che. Not the military ghem-lords, not their cultivated—and I mean that in both senses—masters, the haut lords—not even the Imperial Celestial Garden. Higher still. The Star Cr?che is the innermost core of the innermost ring of the whole damned giant genetic engineering project that is the Cetagandan Empire. The haut ladies' own gene bank. They design their emperors, there. Hell, they design the whole haut race, there. The haut ladies don't work in animal genes. They think it would be beneath them. They leave that to the ghem-ladies. Not, note, to the ghem-lords . . .”

Hand shaking slightly, he reached out to touch the monitor and bring up the next control level. General power and reservoir readouts, all in the green. The next level allowed individual monitoring of each fetus contained within one of the twenty separate placental chambers. Human blood temperature, baby mass, and if that weren't enough, tiny individual vid spy cameras built in, with lights, to view the replicators' inhabitants in real time, floating peacefully in their amniotic sacs. The one in the monitor twitched tiny fingers at the soft red glow, and seemed to scrunch up its big dark eyes. If not quite grown to term, it—no, she—was damned close to it, Miles guessed. He thought of Helen Natalia, and Aral Alexander.

Roic swung on his booted heel, lips parting in dismay, staring up the aisle of glittering devices. “D'you mean, m'lord, that all these things are full of human babies?”

“Well, now, that's a question. Actually, that's two questions. Are they full, and are they human? If they are haut infants, that latter is a most debatable point. For the first, we can at least look . . .” A dozen more pallet monitors, checked at random intervals around the room, revealed similar results. Miles was breathing rapidly by the time he gave it up for proven.

Roic said in a puzzled tone, “So what's a Betan herm doing with a bunch of Cetagandan replicators? And just because they're Cetagandan make, how d'you know it's Cetagandans inside 'em? Maybe the Betan bought the replicators used?”

Miles, lips drawn back on a grin, swung to Bel. “Betan? What do you think, Bel? How much did you two talk about the old sandbox while you were supervising this visit?”

“We didn't talk much at all.” Bel shook its head. “But that doesn't prove anything. I'm not much for bringing up the subject of home myself, and even if I had, I'm too out of touch with Beta to spot inaccuracies in current events anyway. It wasn't Dubauer's conversation that was the trouble. There was just something . . . off, in its body language.”

“Body language. Just so.” Miles stepped to Bel, reached up, and turned the herm's face to the light. Bel did not flinch at his nearness, but merely smiled. Fine hairs gleamed on cheek and chin. Miles's eyes narrowed as he carefully revisualized the cut on Dubauer's cheek.

“You have facial down, like women. All herms do, right?”

“Sure. Unless they're using a really thorough depilatory, I suppose. Some even cultivate beards.”

“Dubauer doesn't.” Miles made to pace down the aisle, stopped himself, turned back, and held still with an effort. “Nary a sprout in sight, except for the pretty silver eyebrows and hair, which I'd wager Betan dollars to sand are recent implants. Body language, hah. Dubauer's not double-sexed at all—what were your ancestors thinking?”

Bel smirked cheerily.

“But altogether sexless. Truly 'it.' “

“It , in Betan parlance,” Bel began in the weary tone of one who has had to explain this far too often, “does not carry the connotation of an inanimate object that it does in other planetary cultures. I say this despite a certain ex-boss of my very distant past, who did a pretty fair imitation of the sort of large and awkward piece of furniture that one can neither get rid of nor decorate around—”

Miles waved this aside. “Don't tell me —I got that lecture at my mother's knee. But Dubauer's not a herm. Dubauer's a ba.”

“A who what?”

“To the casual outside eye, the ba appear to be the bred servitors of the Celestial Garden, where the Cetagandan emperor dwells in serenity in surroundings of aesthetic perfection, or so the haut lords would have you believe. The ba seem the ultimate loyal servant race, human dogs. Beautiful, of course, because everything inside the Celestial Garden must be. I first ran into the ba about ten years back, when I was sent to Cetaganda—not as Admiral Naismith, but as Lieutenant Lord Vorkosigan—on a diplomatic errand. To attend the funeral of Emperor Fletchir Giaja's mother, as it happened, the old Dowager Empress Lisbet. I got to see a lot of ba up close. Those of a certain age—relicts of Lisbet's youth a century ago, mainly—had all been made hairless. It was a fashion, which has since passed.

“But the ba aren't servants, or anyway, aren't just servants, of the Imperial haut. Remember what I said about the haut ladies of the Star Cr?che only working in human genes? The ba are where the haut ladies test out prospective new gene complexes, improvements to the haut race, before they decide if they're good enough to add to this year's new model haut cohort. In a sense, the ba are the haut's siblings. Elder siblings, almost. Children, even, from a certain angle of view. The haut and the ba are two sides of one coin.