"The worm plague has to have been the most disgusting in recent history," Miles agreed. "But it wasn't very lethal, as plagues go. Let me look. Was it on the Weapons Room listing?"

"Oh, yes, right where it should be. They think."

"So it's got to be a weapon. Maybe." Miles marked his place and refiled the poisons list he'd been examining on the Evidence Rooms' library comconsole, and pulled up that of the weapons section instead. The "Komarran virus" had a code classification that blocked access to its description and history to any but men of the very highest security clearances. ImpSec HQ was crammed with such men. Miles smiled slightly, and overrode the lockout with his Auditor's seal.

He hadn't read more than the first three lines before he began to laugh, very softly. He would swear, but he couldn't think of any invective foul enough.

"What?" snapped Ivan, craning around to peer over Miles's shoulder.

"Not a virus, Ivan. Somebody in Classification needs a lecture from Dr. Weddell. It's a bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote. A little bug that eats things, specifically, neurochip proteins. The prokaryote, Illyan's prokaryote. It's no danger to you at all, unless you've acquired a neurochip I don't know about. Oh, God. This is where it came from . . . or rather, this is where it came from last." He settled in and began to read; Ivan, hanging over the back of his station chair, knocked his hand aside when he tried to advance screens before Ivan had finished too.

This was it, hidden in plain sight, buried in an inventory of tens of thousands of other items. It had been sitting here demurely in Bin Twenty-Seven, Shelf Nine, collecting dust for nearly five years, ever since the day it was delivered to the ImpSec Evidence Room by an officer from Komarran Affairs. It had been picked up at that time by Imperial Counterintelligence right here in Vorbarr Sultana, on an arrest-sweep of Komarran terrorist cells associated with . . . the late Ser Galen, killed on Earth while trying to launch his last complicated, dramatic, and futile plot for bringing down the Barrayaran Imperium and freeing Komarr. The plot for which Galen had created Miles's clone-brother Mark.

"Oh, hell," said Ivan. "Has your damned clone got something to do with this?"

"Brother," corrected Miles, swallowing the same fear. "I don't see how. He's been on Beta Colony for almost the last half-year. My Betan grandmother can confirm it."

"If you want confirmation," said Ivan, "then you must be thinking what I'm thinking. Could he have been pretending to be you again?"

"Not without going on one hell of a crash diet."

Ivan grunted half-assent. "Could be done, with the right drugs."