Brothers in Arms

'Improving my chances of survival past the first five minutes I set foot on Barrayar, I trust,' said the clone coolly. 'You do need me to survive a little while, even to serve your purposes, no?'

'I told you, it was too damn dangerous!' Galen was almost, but not quite, shouting. 'I've had a lifetime of experience fighting the Vorkosigans. They are the most insidious propagandists ever to cloak self-serving greed with pseudo-patriotism. And this one is stamped from the same mold. His lies will trip you, trap you—he's a subtle little bastard, and he never takes his eye off the main chance.'

'But his choice of lies was very interesting.' The clone moved about like a nervous horse, kicking at the carpet, half-defiant, half-placating. 'You've had me study how he moves, talks, writes. But I've never been really clear on how he thinks.'

'And now?' purred Galen dangerously.

The clone shrugged. 'He's looney. I think he really believes his own propaganda.'

'The question is, do you?'

Do you, do you? thought Miles frantically.

'Of course not.' The clone sniffed, jerked up his chin, twang.

Galen jerked his head toward Miles, gathering in the guards by eye. 'Take him back and lock him up.'

He followed on untrustingly as Miles was untied and dragged out. Miles saw his clone, beyond Galen's shoulder, staring at the floor, still scuffing one booted foot across the carpet.

'Your name is Mark!' Miles shouted back to him as the door shut. 'Mark!'

Galen gritted his teeth and swung on Miles, a sincere, unscientific, roundhouse blow. Miles, held by the guards, could not dodge, but did flinch far enough that Galen's fist landed glancingly and did not shatter his jaw. Fortunately, Galen shook out his fist and did not strike again, regaining a thin crust of control.

'Was that for me, or him?' Miles inquired sweetly through an expanding bubble of pain.

'Lock him up,' growled Galen to the guards, 'and don't let him out again until I, personally, tell you to.' He pivoted and swung away up the hall, back to the study.

Two on two, thought Miles sharply as the guards prodded him down the lift tube to the next level. Or at any rate, two on one and a half. The odds will never be better, and the time margin can only get worse,

As the door to his cell-room swung open, Miles saw Galeni—asleep on his bench, the sodden, sullen, despairing ploy of a man shutting out inescapable pain in the only way left to him. He'd spent most of last night pacing the cell silently, restless to the point of being frantic—the sleep that had eluded him then was now captured. Wonderful. Now, just when Miles needed him on his feet and primed like an overtightened spring.

Try anyway. 'Galeni!' Miles yelled. 'Now, Galeni! Come on!'

Simultaneously, he plunged backward into the nearest guard, going for a nerve-pinching grip on the hand that held the stunner. A joint snapped in one of Miles's fingers, but he shook the stunner loose and kicked it across the floor toward Galeni, who was lumbering bewilderedly up off his bench like a wart-hog out of the mud. Despite his half-conscious state, he reacted fast and accurately, lunging for the stunner, scooping it up, and rolling across the floor out of the line of fire from the door.

Miles's guard wrapped an arm around Miles's neck and lifted him off his feet, lurching around to face the second guard. The little grey rectangle of the business end of the second guard's weapon was so close Miles almost had to cross his eyes to bring it into focus. As the Komarran's finger tightened on the trigger the stunner's buzz fragmented, and Miles's head seemed to explode in a burst of pain and colored lights.

Chapter Eleven

He woke in a hospital bed, an unwelcome but familiar environment. In the distance, out his window, the towers of the skyline of Vorbarr Sultana, capital city of Barrayar, glowed strangely green in the darkness. Imp Mil, then, the Imperial Military Hospital. This room was undecorated in the same severe style he had known as a child, when he'd been in and out of its clinical laboratories and surgeries for painful therapies so often Imp Mil had seemed his home away from home.

A doctor entered. He appeared to be about sixty: clipped greying hair, pale lined face, body thickening with age. dr. galen, his name badge read. Hyposprays clanked together in his pockets. Copulating and breeding more, perhaps. Miles had always wondered where hyposprays came from.

'Ah, you're awake,' said the doctor gladly. 'You're not going to go away on us again this time, now, are you?'

'Go away?' He was tied down with tubes and sensor wires, drips and control leads. It hardly seemed he was going anywhere.

'Catatonia. Cloud-cuckoo-land. Ga-ga. In short, insane. In short is the only way you can go, I suppose, eh? It runs in the family. Blood will tell.'

Miles could hear the susurration of his red blood cells, in his ears, whispering thousands of military secrets to each other, cavorting drunkenly in a country dance with molecules of fast-penta which were flipping their hydroxyl groups at him like petticoats. He blinked away the image.

Galen's hand rummaged in his pocket; then his face changed. 'Ow!' He yanked his hand out, shook off a hypospray, and sucked at his bleeding thumb. 'The little bugger bit me.' He glanced down, where the young hypospray skittered about uncertainly on its spindly metal legs, and crunched it underfoot. It died with a tiny squeak.

'This sort of mental slippage is not at all unusual in a revived cryo-corpse, of course. You'll get over it,' Dr. Galen reassured him.

'Was I dead?'

'Killed outright, on Earth. You spent a year in cryogenic suspension.'

Oddly enough, Miles could remember that part. Lying in a glass coffin like a fairy-tale princess under a cruel spell, while figures flitted silent and ghostlike beyond die frosted panels.

'And you revived me?'

'Oh, no. You spoiled. Worst case of freezer-burn you ever saw.'

'Oh,' Miles paused, nonplussed, and added in a small voice, 'Am I still dead, then? Can I have horses at my funeral, like Grandfather?'

'No, no, no, of course not.' Dr. Galen clucked like a mother hen. 'You aren't allowed to die, your parents would never permit it. We transplanted your brain into a replacement body. Fortunately, there was one ready to hand. Pre-owned, but hardly used. Congratulations, you're a virgin again. Was it not clever of me, to get your clone all ready for you?'

'My cl—my brother? Mark?' Miles sat bolt upright, tubes falling away from him. Shivering, he pulled out his tray table and stared into the mirror of its polished metal surface. A dotted line of big black stitches ran across his forehead. He stared at his hands, turning them over in horror. 'My God. I'm wearing a corpse.'

He looked up at Galen. 'If I'm in here, what have you done with Mark? Where did you put the brain that used to be in this head?'

Galen pointed.

On the table at Miles's bedside squatted a large glass jar. In it a whole brain, like a mushroom on a stem, floated rubbery, dead, and malevolent. The pickling liquid was thick and greenish.

'No, no, no!' cried Miles. 'No, no, no!' He struggled out of bed and clutched up the jar. The liquid sloshed cold down over his hands. He ran out into the hall, barefoot, his patient gown flapping open behind him. There had to be spare bodies around here; this was Imp Mil. Suddenly, he remembered where he'd left one.

He burst through another door and found himself in the combat drop shuttle over Dagoola IV. The shuttle