"In other words, you lied to your superiors. And now you're caught."

I'm not caught yet. "You know what I have to lose." He rose and circled the desk to take her hand, before she started biting her nails; they fell into an embrace. He tilted his face back, slipped an arm up around her neck, and pressed her down to his level for a kiss. He could feel the fear, as suppressed in her as it was in him, in her quick breathing and somber eyes.

"Oh, Miles. Tell them—tell them your brains were still thawing out back then. You weren't responsible for your judgments. Throw yourself on Illyan's mercy, quick, before it gets any worse."

He shook his head. "Any time up to last week, that might have worked, maybe, but after what I did to Vorberg? I don't think it can get any worse. I wouldn't have any mercy on a subordinate who pulled a trick like that, why should Illyan? Unless Illyan . . . isn't presented with the problem in the first place."

"Great and little gods, you're not thinking you can still conceal this, are you?"

"It drops out of this mission report quite neatly."

She pushed back from him, aghast. "Your brains did get frostbitten."

Irritated, he snapped, "Illyan cultivates his reputation for omniscience quite carefully, but it's hype. Don't let those Horus-eye badges"—he mimed the ImpSec insignia by holding his circled thumb and fingers up to his eyes, and peering through owlishly—"affect your mind. We just try to look like we always know what we're doing. I've seen the secret files, I know how screwed up things can really get, behind the scenes. That fancy memory chip in Illyan's brain doesn't make him a genius, just remarkably obnoxious."

"There are too many witnesses."

"All Dendarii missions are classified. The troops won't blab."

"Except to each other. The story's all over the ship, half-garbled. People have asked me about it."

"Uh . . . what did you tell them?"

She shrugged a shoulder, angrily. "I've been implying it was a suit malfunction."

"Oh. Good. Nevertheless . . . they're all here, and Illyan's way over there. A vast distance. What can he learn, except through what I tell him?"

"Only half-vast." Quinn's bared teeth had little in common with a smile.

"Come on, use your reason. I know you can. If ImpSec was going to catch this, they should have done it months ago. All the Jacksonian evidence has obviously escaped them clean."

A pulse beat in her throat. "There's nothing reasonable about this! Have you lost your grip, have you lost your frigging mind? I swear to the gods, you are getting as impossible to manage as your clone-brother Mark!"