Galen's head jerked back, all pretense of banter extinguished. He turned abruptly away, and went to take up the hypospray from the bench.
Miles silently cursed his own tongue. But for that stupid impulse to grab the last word, to return the cut, he might have kept the man talking, and learned something. Now the talking, and the learning, would all be going the other way.
The two guards took him by the elbows. The one on the left pushed up his shirt sleeve. Here it came. Galen pressed the hypospray against the vein on the inside of Miles's elbow, a hiss, a prickling bite. 'What is it?' Miles had just time to ask. His voice sounded unfortunately weak and nervous in his own ears.
'Fast-penta, of course,' replied Galen easily.
Miles was not surprised, though he cringed inwardly, knowing what was to come. He had studied fast- penta's pharmacology, effects, and proper use in the Security course at the Barrayaran Imperial Academy. It was the drug of choice for interrogation, not only for the Imperial Service but galaxy-wide. The near-perfect truth serum, irresistible, harmless to the subject even with repeated doses. Irresistible and harmless, that is, except to the unfortunate few who had either a natural or artificially-induced allergic reaction to it. Miles had never even been considered as a candidate for this last conditioning, his person being judged more valuable than any secret information he might contain. Other espionage agents were less lucky. Anaphylactic shock was an even less heroic death than the disintegration chamber usually reserved for convicted spies.
Despairing, Miles waited to go ga-ga. Admiral Naismith had sat in on more than one real fast-penta interrogation. The drug washed all reason out to sea on a flood of benign good feeling and charitable cheer. Like a cat on catnip, it was highly amusing to watch—in somebody else. In moments he would be mellow to the point of drooling idiocy.
Ugly, to think of the resolute Captain Galeni having been so shamefully reduced. Four times running, he'd said. No wonder he was twitchy.
Miles could feel his heart racing, as though he'd overdosed on caffeine. His vision seemed to sharpen to an almost painful focus. The edge lines of every object in the room glowed, the masses they enclosed palpable to his exacerbated senses. Galen, standing back by the pulsing window, was a live-wiring diagram, electric and dangerous, loaded with deadly voltage awaiting some triggering discharge.
Mellow, this wasn't.
He had to be slipping into natural shock. Miles took his last breath. Would his interrogator ever be surprised. . . .
Rather to Miles's own surprise, he kept on panting. Not anaphylactic shock, then. Just another damned idiosyncratic drug reaction. He hoped the stuff wouldn't bring on those ghastly hallucinations like that bloody sedative he'd been given once by an unsuspecting surgeon. He wanted to scream. His eyes flashed white-edged to follow Galen's least motion.
One of the guards shoved a chair up behind him and sat him down. Miles fell into it gratefully, shivering uncontrollably. His thoughts seemed to explode in fragments and reform, like fireworks being run forward and then in reverse through a vid. Galen frowned down at him.
'Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy.'
Surely they must have squeezed this basic information out of Captain Galeni already—it must merely be a question to check the effect of the fast-penta, '. . . of the fast-penta,' Miles heard his own voice echoing his thoughts. Oh, hell. He'd hoped his odd reaction to the drug might have included the ability to resist spilling his mind out his mouth. '—what a repulsive image …' Head swaying, he stared down at the floor in front of his feet as if he might see a pile of bloody brains vomited there.
Ser Galen strode forward and yanked his head up by the hair, and repeated through his teeth, 'Describe the security procedures for entry and exit from the Barrayaran embassy!'
'Sergeant Barth's in charge,' Miles began impulsively. 'Obnoxious bigot. No savoir faire at all, and a jock to boot—' Unable to stop himself, Miles poured out not only codes, passwords, scanner perimeters, but also personnel schedules, his private opinions of each and every individual, and a scathing critique of the Security net's defects. One thought triggered another and then the next in an explosive chain like a string of firecrackers. He couldn't stop; he babbled.
Not only could he not stop himself, Galen couldn't stop him either. Prisoners on fast-penta tended to wander by free association from the topic unless kept on track by frequent cues from their interrogators. Miles found himself doing the same on fast-forward. Normal victims could be brought up short by a word, but only when Galen struck him hard and repeatedly across the face, shouting him down, did Miles halt, and sit panting.
Torture was not a part of fast-penta interrogation because the happily drugged subjects were impervious to it. For Miles the pain pulsed in and out, at one moment detached and distant, the next flooding his body and whiting out his mind like a burst of static. To his own horror, he began to cry. Then stopped with a sudden hiccup.
Galen stood staring at him in repelled fascination.
'It's not right,' muttered one of the guards. 'He shouldn't be like that. Is he beating the fast-penta, some kind of new conditioning?'
'He's not beating it, though,' Galen pointed out.
He glanced at his wrist chrono. 'He's not withholding information. He's giving more. Too much more.'
The comconsole began chiming insistently.
'I'll get it,' volunteered Miles. 'It's probably for me.' He surged up out of his seat, his knees gave way, and he fell flat on his face on the carpet. It prickled against his bruised cheek. The two guards dragged him off the floor and propped him back up in the chair. The room jerked in a slow circle around him. Galen answered the comconsole.
'Reporting in.' Miles's own crisp voice in its Barrayaran-accented incarnation rang from the vid.
The clone's face seemed not quite as familiar as the one Miles shaved daily in his mirror. 'His hair's parted on the wrong side if he wants to be me,' Miles observed to no one in particular. 'No, it's not …' No one was listening, anyway. Miles considered angles of incidence and angles of reflection, his thoughts bouncing at the speed of light back and forth between the mirrored walls of his empty skull.
'How's it going?' Galen leaned anxiously across the comconsole.
'I nearly lost it all in the first five minutes last night. That big Dendarii sergeant-driver turned out to be the damned cousin.' The clone's voice was low and tense. 'Blind luck, I was able to carry off my first mistake as a joke. But they've got me rooming with the bastard. And he snores.'
'Too true,' Miles remarked, unasked. 'For real entertainment, wait'll he starts making love in his sleep. Damn, I wish I had dreams like Ivan's. All I get are anxiety nightmares—playing polo naked against a lot of dead Cetagandans with Lieutenant Murka's severed head for the ball. It screamed every time I hit it toward the goal. Falling off and getting trampled …' Miles's mutter trailed off as they continued to ignore him.
'You're going to have to deal with all kinds of people who knew him, before this is done,' said Galen roughly to the vid. 'But if you can fool Vorpatril, you'll be able to carry it off anywhere—'
'You can fool all of the people some of the time,' chirped Miles, 'and some of the people all of the time, but you can fool Ivan anytime. He doesn't pay attention.'
Galen glanced over at him in irritation. 'The embassy is a perfect isolated test-microcosm,' he went on to the vid, 'before you go on to the larger arena of Barrayar itself. Vorpatril's presence makes it an ideal practice opportunity. If he tumbles to you, we can find some way to eliminate him.'
'Mm.' The clone seemed scarcely reassured. 'Before we started, I thought you'd managed to stuff my head with everything it was possible to know about Miles Vorkosigan. Then at the last minute you find out he's been leading a double life all this time—what else have you missed?'
'Miles, we've been over that—'
Miles realized with a start that Galen was addressing the clone with his name. Had he been so thoroughly conditioned to his role that he had no name of his own? Strange . . .
'We knew there'd be gaps over which you'd have to improvise. But we'll never have a better opportunity than this chance visit of his to Earth has given us. Better than waiting another six months and trying to maneuver in on Barrayar. No. It's now or never.' Galen took a calming breath. 'So. You got through the night all right.'
The clone snorted. 'Yeah, if you don't count waking up being strangled by a damned animated fur coat.
'What? Oh, the live fur. Didn't he give it to his woman?'
