"Simple," said Avakli, "is the last word I'd use to describe it."

"We're dealing with a case of deliberate sabotage, then," said Haroche.

Avakli sucked on his lower lip. "That, sir, is your department. I think I prefer to stand by my original wording, for the moment. An artificially created event. To explain this I will now turn you over to Dr. Weddell, who was"—a slight wrinkle passed over Avakli's high brow—"instrumental in assembling the chain of causality. Dr. Weddell, if you please."

By which wrinkle Miles deduced Weddell/Canaba was carrying on as usual, brilliantly and obnoxiously. If his brilliance ever failed, he'd doubtless be quite surprised at what a load of retribution his obnoxiousness had bought him. But Avakli was too honest a scientist to claim another's achievement as his own. Weddell took the podium, his patrician features weary, tense, and a little smug.

"If you would like to look at the culprit—the immediate culprit, that is—here is its portrait." Weddell fiddled with the holovid control; the plate projected a bright green, topologically complex blob, which turned slowly in air. "The color is a computer enhancement, of course—I took a little artistic license there—and the magnification several million times. That, gentlemen, is a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote. Or so I have reconstructed it."

"A what?" said Miles. "Simplify, please."

Weddell flashed a pained smile, doubtless searching his mind for words of one syllable. Miles regretted his last four beers. "A little bug that eats things," Weddell essayed, by way of further translation.

"Not that simplified," said Miles dryly. The Barrayarans around the table, knowing the power of an Imperial Auditor, cringed at his tone; immigrant Weddell did not. Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant. Miles let it go. "A prokaryote. So. Reconstructed?"

"I'll get to that in a moment, my Lord Auditor. It barely qualifies as a life-form, being smaller and simpler than the smallest bacterium, but it does perform two life-functions. In a manner of speaking it 'eats.' Specifically, it manufactures a proteolytic enzyme that breaks down the protein matrix found in the eidetic chip and several related galactic neuroenhancement applications. It destroys that and nothing else. And, after absorbing the resulting nutrients, it reproduces, by simple binary fission. A population of these prokaryotes, presented with a field, as it were, of chip proteins upon which to graze, will double and redouble in the usual geometric progression—up to a point. After a number of doublings, the prokaryote is programmed to self-destruct. By the time we obtained the chip for analysis, almost all of them had done so, leaving me a pretty jigsaw puzzle of fragments to play with. Another week, and there would have been nothing left to analyze."

Haroche winced.

"So," said Miles, "was this engineered for Illyan specifically? Or is it a commercial product, or what?"