Cordelia considered unexpectedly grabbing Sircoj by the throat and attempting to squeeze reason into him. Impractical. She took a deep breath. "What will you let me do? Can I at least see him on vid?"

Sircoj looked thoughtful. "That might be all right. A cross-check on our identification, and we can record. Very well."

He took her into another room, and keyed up a monitor viewer. Her breath blew out with a small moan.

Vaagen was alone in a holding room, pacing from wall to wall. He wore green uniform trousers and a brown-stained white shirt. He was terribly changed from the trim and energetic scientist she'd last seen in his lab at ImpMil. Both his eyes were ringed with red-purple blotches, one lid swollen nearly shut; the slit glowed a frightening blood-scarlet. He moved bent-over. Bathless, sleepless, swollen lips . . .

"You get a medtech for that man!" Cordelia realized she'd yelled when Sircoj jumped.

"He's been triaged. His condition is not life-threatening. We can start treating him just as soon as he's security-cleared," said Sircoj doggedly.

"Then you put him on-line with me," Cordelia said through set teeth. "Drou, go back to the office, call Aral. Tell him what's going on."

Sircoj looked worried at this, but stuck valiantly to his procedures. More endless seconds, while someone went back to the prison-area and took Vaagen to a comconsole.

His face came up over the plate at last; Cordelia could see her own face reflected in the passionate intensity in his. Connected at last.

"Vaagen! What happened?"

"Milady!" His hands clenched, trembling, as he leaned on them toward the vid pickup. "The idiots, the morons, the ignorant, stupid—" he sputtered into helpless obscenities, then caught his breath and began again, quickly, concisely, as if her image might be snatched away again at any moment.

"We thought we might be all right at first, after the first two days' fighting trailed off. We hid the replicator at ImpMil, but nobody came. We lay low, and took turns sleeping in the lab. Then Henri managed to smuggle his wife out of town, and we both stayed. We tried to continue the treatments in secret. Thought we might wait it out, wait till rescue. Things had to break, one way or another. . . .

"We'd almost stopped expecting them, but they came. Last—yesterday." He rubbed a hand through his hair as if seeking some connection between real-time and nightmare-time, where clocks ran crazy. "Vordarian's squad. Came looking for the replicator. We locked the lab, they broke in. Demanded it. We refused, refused to talk, they couldn't fast-penta either of us. So they beat us up. Beat him to death, like street scum, like he was nobody, all that intelligence, all that education, all that promise wasted, dropped by some mumbling moron swinging a gun butt. . . ." Tears were running down his face.