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Miles essayed a short, ironic salaam in Haroche s direction. "Thank you,
General."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ivan found it two hours before dawn, not quite by chance.
It was in the fifth aisle of the second room he d tackled, Weapons IV. He d
placed Biologicals, Poisons, and the Cold Room last on his list for this very
contingency, in the hope that he might not have to do them at all. Miles would
have chosen to knock off the worst rooms first; sometimes, he had to admit,
Ivan was not such an idiot as he feigned.
Ivan trod out to the reception area. Miles had been cross-checking the
inventory lists on the comconsole there for the last several hours, ever since
he d overseen Haroche s three-man security systems analysis team selected and
put to work upstairs.
"I m in a Weapons Room, right?" Ivan demanded, waving his inventory sheaf of
plastic flimsies.
Miles tore his attention away from the chemical description of the
nine-hundred-and-ninth item in alphabetical order in the
Poisons Room: Ophidian Scrapings, Polian, Three Grams. "If you say so."
"Right. So what s a little box labeled Komarran virus doing on Aisle Five,
Shelf Nine, Bin Twenty-Seven? What the hell is it, and shouldn t it be in
Biologicals? Did somebody misclassify it? I m not unsealing the damned thing
till you find out what it is.
It might make me break out in green fungus, or bloat up like those poor
suckers with the Sergyaran worm plague. Or worse."
"The worm plague has to have been the most disgusting in recent history,"
Miles agreed. "But it wasn t very lethal, as plagues go. Let me look. Was it
on the Weapons Room listing?"
"Oh, yes, right where it should be. They think."
"So it s got to be a weapon. Maybe." Miles marked his place and re-filed the
poisons list he d been examining on the Evidence
Rooms library comconsole, and pulled up that of the weapons section instead.
The "Komarran virus" had a code classification that blocked access to its
description and history to any but men of the very highest security
clearances. ImpSec HQ was crammed with such men. Miles smiled slightly, and
overrode the lockout with his Auditor s seal.
He hadn t read more than the first three lines before he began to laugh, very
softly. He would swear, but he couldn t think of any invective foul enough.
"
What
?" snapped Ivan, craning around to peer over Miles s shoulder.
"Not a virus, Ivan. Somebody in Classification needs a lecture from Dr.
Weddell. It s a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote. A
little bug that eats things, specifically, neurochip proteins.
The prokaryote, Illyan s prokaryote. It s no danger to you at all, unless
you ve acquired a neurochip I don t know about. Oh, God.
This is where it came from... or rather, this is where it came from last."
He settled in and began to read; Ivan, hanging over the back of his station
chair, knocked his hand aside when he tried to advance screens before Ivan had
finished too.
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This was it, hidden in plain sight, buried in an inventory of tens of
thousands of other items. It had been sitting here demurely in Bin
Twenty-Seven, Shelf Nine, collecting dust for nearly five years, ever since
the day it was delivered to the ImpSec Evidence
Room by an officer from Komarran Affairs. It had been picked up at that time
by Imperial Counter-intelligence right here in
Vorbarr Sultana, on an arrest-sweep of Komarran terrorist cells associated
with... the late Ser Galen, killed on Earth while trying to launch his last
complicated, dramatic, and futile plot for bringing down the Barrayaran
Imperium and freeing Komarr. The plot for which Galen had created Miles s
clone-brother Mark.
"Oh, hell," said Ivan. "Has your damned clone got something to do with this?"
"Brother," corrected Miles, swallowing the same fear. "I don t see how. He s
been on Beta Colony for almost the last half-
year. My Betan grandmother can confirm it."
"If you want confirmation," said Ivan, "then you must be thinking what I m
thinking.
Could he have been pretending to be you again?"
"Not without going on one hell of a crash diet."
Ivan grunted half-assent. "Could be done, with the right drugs."
"I don t think so. I promise you, the last thing Mark wants is to be me, ever
again. I ll have his whereabouts formally checked anyway, just to stop
everyone from galloping down a blind alley. The ImpSec office at the embassy
on Beta Colony keeps him in their sights just because Mark is... who he is."
Miles read on. The Jacksonian connection was quite real too. The chip-eating
prokaryote had indeed been made to order there for the Komarran terrorists, by
one of the Houses Minor more usually known for its tailored drugs. And Illyan
had been its intended target from the beginning; the disruption of ImpSec had
been timed to coincide with the assassination of then-Prime
Minister Count Aral Vorkosigan. The ImpSec investigation of five years ago had
traced the prokaryote right back to its building of origin, and the Komarran
payment to the Jacksonian biochem team s bank accounts. The new search, just
launched, must sooner or later turn up the exact same data: later, if they had
to totally reconstruct the first tedious investigation; sooner, if the
organization overcame its collective amnesia and spotted the data in its own
files. Three to eight weeks, depending, Miles estimated.
"This explains... the frame, at least," Miles muttered.
Ivan cocked an eyebrow. "How so?"
"I came at it in the wrong order. My ersatz visit here was meant to be found,
yes, inevitably, but it wasn t meant to be found first. This data..." - Miles
waved at the comconsole - "when it finally arrived here, would have focused
attention on the Evidence
Rooms. Instead of starting with the comconsole records, and then checking the
inventory, the investigators would have begun with Bin Twenty-Seven and then
checked the security records of people going in and out. Where they would have
been quite pleased with themselves for finding me, a recently cashiered
officer with no business here. Gone at that way, it would have been a much
more convincing frame."
Miles sat for a moment, ordering his thoughts. Then he called ImpSec Forensics
and requisitioned the senior officer on call.
After that he put through a call to Dr. Vaughn Weddell s home console.
The machine blocked him, and tried to take a message; Weddell didn t care to
have his beauty sleep interrupted, it appeared.
He tried once more, with the same results, waited a full three seconds to
recover his patience, and then called the Imperial Guards.
Miles had the duty officer dispatch a couple of their largest uniformed men to
Weddell s flat with instructions to wake him up by whatever means were
required, and bring him at once to ImpSec HQ, carried bodily if necessary.
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