A soft snort from the com link taped inside Miles's helmet apprised him that Ekaterin was back, listening in. She would not interrupt, he suspected.

Vorpatril's voice sounded suddenly, breaking his concentration. The admiral was sputtering. “The spineless scoundrels! The four-armed bastards! My Lord Auditor!” Ah, Miles was promoted again. “The goddamn little mutants are giving this sexless Cetagandan plague-vector a jump pilot!”

“What?” Miles's stomach knotted. Tighter. “They found a volunteer? Quaddie, or downsider?” There couldn't be that large a pool of possibilities to choose from. The pilots' surgically installed neuro-controllers had to fit the ships they guided through the wormhole jumps. However many jump pilots were currently quartered—or trapped—on Graf Station, chances were that most would be incompatible with the Barrayaran systems. So was it the Idris 's own pilot or relief pilot, or a pilot from one of the Komarran sister ships . . . ?

“What makes you think he's a volunteer?” snarled Vorpatril. “I can't bloody believe they're just handing . . .”

“Maybe the quaddies are up to something. What do they say?”

Vorpatril hesitated, then spat, “Watts cut me out of the loop a few minutes ago. We were having an argument over whose strike team should go in, ours or the quaddie militia's, and when. And under whose orders. Both at once with no coordination struck me as a supremely bad idea.”

“Indeed. One perceives the potential hazards.” The ba was beginning to seem a trifle outnumbered. But then there were its bio-threats . . . Miles's nascent sympathy died as his vision blurred again. “We are guests in their polity . . . hang on. Something seems to be happening at one of the outer airlocks.”

Miles enlarged the security vid image from the lock that had suddenly come alive. Docking lights framing the outer door ran through a series of checks and go-aheads. The ba, he reminded himself, was probably looking at this same view. He held his breath. Were the quaddies, under the mask of delivering the demanded jump pilot, about to attempt to insert their own strike force?

The airlock door slid open, giving a brief glimpse of the inside of a tiny, one-person personnel pod. A naked man, the little silver contact circles of a jump pilot's neural implant gleaming at mid-forehead and temples, stepped through into the lock. The door slid shut again. Tall, dark-haired, handsome but for the thin pink scars running, Miles could now see, all over his body in a winding swathe. Dmitri Corbeau. His face was pale and set.

“The jump pilot has just arrived,” Miles told Vorpatril.

“Dammit . Human or quaddie?”

Vorpatril was really going to have to work on his diplomatic vocabulary. . . . ”Downsider,” Miles answered, in lieu of any more pointed remark. He hesitated, then added, “It's Lieutenant Corbeau.”

A stunned silence: then Vorpatril hissed, “Son-of-a-bitch . . . !”

“H'sh. The ba is finally coming on.” Miles adjusted the volume, and opened his faceplate again so that Vorpatril could overhear too. As long as Roic kept his suit sealed, it was . . . no worse than ever. Yeah, and how bad is that, again?

“Turn toward the security module and open your mouth,” the ba's voice instructed coolly and without preamble over the lock vid monitor. “Closer. Wider.” Miles was treated to a fair view of Corbeau's tonsils. Unless Corbeau harbored a poison-filled tooth, no weapons were concealed therein.

“Very well . . .” The ba continued with a chill series of directions for Corbeau to go through a humiliating sequence of gyrations which, while not as thorough as a body cavity search, gave at least some assurance that the jump pilot carried nothing there , either. Corbeau obeyed precisely, without hesitation or argument, his expression rigid and blank.

“Now release the pod from the docking clamps.”

Corbeau rose from his last squat and stepped through the lock to the personnel hatch entry area. A chink and a clank—the pod, released but unpowered, drifted away from the side of the Idris.

“Now listen to these instructions. You will walk twenty meters toward the bow, turn left, and wait for the next door to open for you.”

Corbeau obeyed, still almost expressionless, except for his eyes. His gaze darted about, as if he searched for something, or was trying to memorize his route. He passed out of sight of the lock vids.

Miles considered the peculiar pattern of old worm scars across Corbeau's body. He must have rolled, or been rolled, across a bad nest. A story seemed written in those fading hieroglyphs. A young colonial boy, perhaps the new boy in camp or town—tricked or dared or maybe just stripped and pushed? To rise again from the ground, crying and frightened, to the jangle of some cruel mockery . . .

Vorpatril swore, repetitively, under his breath. “Why Corbeau? Why Corbeau ?”

Miles, who was frantically wondering the same thing, hazarded, “Perhaps he volunteered.”

“Unless the bloody quaddies bloody sacrificed him. Instead of risking one of their own. Or . . . maybe he's figured out another way to desert.”

“I . . .” Miles held his words for a long moment of thought, then let them out on a breath, “think that would be doing it the hard way.” It was a sticky suspicion, though. Just whose ally might Corbeau prove?

Miles caught Corbeau's image again as the ba walked him through the ship toward Nav and Com, briefly opening and closing airseal doors. He passed through the last barrier and out of vid range, straight-backed, silent, bare feet padding quietly on the deck. He looked . . . cold.

Miles's attention was jerked aside by the flicker of another airlock sensor alarm. Hastily, he called up the image of another lock—just in time to see a quaddie in a green biotainer suit whap the vid monitor mightily with a spanner while beyond, two more green figures sped past. The image shattered and went dark. He could still hear, though—the beep of the lock alarm, the hiss of a lock door opening—but no hiss when it closed. Because it did not close, or because it closed on vacuum? Air, and sound, returned as the lock cycled. The lock, therefore, had opened on vacuum; the quaddies had made their getaway into space around the station.

That answered his question about their biotainer suits—unlike the Idris 's cheaper issue, they were vacuum-rated. In Quaddiespace, that made all kinds of sense. Half a dozen station locks offered refuge within little more than a few hundred meters; the fleeing quaddies would have their pick, in addition to whatever pods or shuttles hovered nearby able to swoop down on them and take them inboard.

“Venn and Greenlaw and Leutwyn just escaped out an airlock,” he reported to Vorpatril. “Good timing.” Shrewd timing, to go just when the ba was both distracted by the arrival of its pilot and, with the real possibility of a getaway now in hand, less inclined to carry out the station-ramming threat. It was exactly the right move, to leak hostages from the enemy's grip at every opportunity. Granted, this use of Corbeau's arrival was ruthlessly calculated in the extreme. Miles could not be sorry. “Good. Excellent! Now this ship is entirely cleared of civilians.”

“Except for you, m'lord,” Roic pointed out, started to say something else, intercepted the dark look Miles cast over his shoulder, and ran down in a mumble.

“Ha,” muttered Vorpatril. “Maybe this will change Watts's mind.” His voice lowered, as if directed away from his audio pickup, or behind his hand. “What, Lieutenant?” Then murmured, “Excuse me,” Miles was not certain to whom.

So, only Barrayarans left aboard now. Plus Bel—on the ImpSec payroll, therefore an honorary Barrayaran for all mortal accounting purposes. Miles smiled briefly despite it all as he considered Bel's probable outraged response to such a suggestion. The best time to insert a strike force would be before the ship started to move, rather than to attempt to play catch-up in mid-space. At some point, Vorpatril was probably going to stop waiting for quaddie permission to launch his men. At some point, Miles would agree.