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 gray 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

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 graying 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 the frosted panels.

"And you revived me?"

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

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