information. If they'd had any sense of self-preservation at all, they should have returned Lieutenant Vorberg and his packets, undamaged and unexamined, immediately to the nearest drop-point, with profuse apologies.
Instead, they'd tried to sell him to the highest bidder.
Assuming it was luck. Miles itched to go oversee the interrogation of the prisoners; Illyan's second sharpest concern after the retrieval of Vorberg alive was to determine if the courier had been kidnapped by accident or on purpose. If on purpose . . . somebody had some internal investigating to do. In all, Miles was extremely glad that sort of messy job did not fall into his area of expertise.
The surgeon, still dressed in her sterile garb, entered at last. She put her hands on her hips, stared at Miles, and sighed. She looked tired.
'How's the Barrayaran?' Miles ventured. 'Will, um . . . he recover?'
'He's not too bad. The cuts were very clean, and luckily just below the knee joints, which saved a world of complications. He'll be about three centimeters shorter after this.'
Miles winced.
'But he'll be on his feet by the time he gets home,' she added, 'assuming that takes about six weeks.'
'Ah. Good.' But suppose the random blare of the plasma arc had taken Vorberg through the knees. Or about a meter higher, cutting him in half. There were limits to the miracles even his Dendarii surgical expert could perform. It would not have been a career high point, after Miles had airily assured his ImpSec chief that he could rescue Vorberg with scarcely a ripple in his routine, to return him packed in a body bag. Two body bags. Miles felt faint with a weird mixture of relief and horror.
The surgeon studied Miles's scans, muttering medical incantations. 'We're still on baseline, here. No obvious abnormalities show up. The only way I can get any leverage into this is to have you monitored while you undergo an attack.'
'Hell, I thought we did every kind of stress and electroshock and stimulus known to science, to try to trigger something in the lab. I thought the pills you gave me had brought it under control.'
'The standard anticonvulsant?
'No, which is why I gave you that monitor to wear around.' Her glance around the examining room did not disclose the device. 'Where is it?'
'In my cabin.'
Her lips thinned in exasperation. 'Let me guess. You weren't wearing it at the time.'
'It didn't fit under my combat armor.'
Her teeth clenched. 'Couldn't you have at least thought to—to disable your weapons?'
'I could hardly be of use to my squad in an emergency, disarmed. I might as well have stayed aboard the
'You
She opened her hands. 'I've run every test I know. Obviously, the anticonvulsant isn't the answer. This is some kind of idiosyncratic cryonic damage on a cellular or subcellular level. You need to get your head to the highest-powered cryo-neurology specialist you can find.'
He sighed, and shrugged into his black tee shirt and gray uniform jacket. 'Are we done for now? I urgently need to supervise prisoner interrogation.'
'I suppose.' She grimaced. 'But do us all a favor. Don't go armed.'
'Yes, ma'am,' he said humbly, and fled.
CHAPTER TWO
Miles sat before the secured comconsole in his cabin aboard the flagship
The
The prisoners had been dumped downside, for the Vegan and Zoavan governments to divide between them—preferably in the same sense as poor Vorberg had been. The ex-hijackers were a vile crew. Miles was almost sorry the pinnace had surrendered.
The important thing from Illyan's point of view was that no evidence had been extracted which would indicate that the kidnapping of the Barrayaran courier was anything but an accidental side effect of the hijacking. Unless—Miles made sure to note this in his synopsis—that information had been known only to those hijackers who had been killed. Since that number included both their so-called captain and two of the higher-ranking officers, there were enough possibilities in this direction to keep Illyan's analysts earning their pay. But that lead must now be traced from the other end, through the House Hargraves representatives who had been trying to handle the sale or ransom of the courier for the hijackers. Miles hoped cordially that ImpSec would focus its best negative attentions upon the Jacksonian semicriminal Great House. Though House Hargraves's agents had been extremely, if unwittingly, useful in helping the Dendarii set up their raid.
Illyan ought to like the accountant's report. The Dendarii had not only succeeded in keeping their costs under budget this time—