They rode in silence for a few minutes, which Roic broke at last, low-voiced: "All this makes me think about Sergeant Taura.  All these other folks got to die in some hope for their future, why not her?  We were all right there at the Durona clinic, everything was in place for it, it wouldn't have cost much . . ."

Taura was one of the mercs from m'lord's old ImpSec covert ops days, before the needle-grenade and cryorevival damage had put him out of that business for good.  Like Raven and the rest of the Durona cloned siblings, she was a product of Jacksonian genetic engineering; unlike them, she was a sole survivor, in her case of a failed prototype batch of supposed super-soldiers.  She had escaped to m'lord's merc troop, where the super-soldier part had actually worked, m'lord testified.  But her creators had built in a fail-safe mechanism for their genetic prototypes; Taura would have been dead of old age at twenty-standard without the medical intervention that the Dendarii medics and later the Duronas had supplied her.  Roic had met her twice, desperately memorably, the first time when she'd attended m'lord's wedding, the second when m'lord and Roic had traveled to Escobar to attend her last days in the Durona hospice.

M'lord sighed.  "I, you, Rowan, and Raven all tried to talk her into it.  If her Dendarii insurance hadn't covered it, I'd have popped for it out of pocket, not that the Duronas would have let me.  They still figure they owed her and all the Dendarii mercs involved for their escape from Jackson's Whole.  But Taura wasn't having it at any price."

What, wake up, still a freak, in some strange place and time, with all my friends gone? Taura had said to the protesting Roic, in that terribly-wrong-for-her thready voice.  But you could make new friends! was an argument that had failed to move her, in the exhaustion of her failing metabolism.

Roic made a helpless gesture.  "You could have overridden her.  After she was too far gone to tell, ordered her cryoprepped."  God knew m'lord was capable of riding over any number of other people's wills.

M'lord shrugged, face sobered in the shared memory.  "That would have been for our benefit, then.  Not for hers.  But Taura chose fire over ice.  That, at least, I had no trouble understanding.  High temperature cremation leaves no DNA."

She'd been indifferent to where her ashes would be scattered, except not Jackson's Whole, so m'lord had provided a burial plot for her urn in his own family cemetery at Vorkosigan Surleau, overlooking the long lake, a task m'lord and Roic had seen to personally.

"Nobody," muttered Roic, "should die of old age at thirty-standard."  Certainly not such a blazing spirit as Taura's had been.

M'lord looked meditative.  "If the Duronas' or anybody else's anti-aging research ever succeeds, I wonder if death at three hundred or five hundred will come to seem as outrageous?"