"I spoke with Illyan," said Miles. "He reports no memory of ever having swallowed a small brown capsule in the last four months. Unfortunately, his memory isn't what it used to be."

"Oh, it wasn't swallowed," Weddell stated positively. "It was never designed to be swallowed."

"How do you know?"

"The capsule was neither permeable nor soluble. It was meant to be broken—a pinch of the fingers would do—and the sample mixed with air and breathed. The vector encapsulation design is obviously meant to be airborne. It's quite sporelike."

"The which what?"

"Here." Weddell banished the vid of the molecular chain presently occupying the vid plate, and brought up an image of an object that looked for all the world like a spherical satellite, bristling with antennae. "The actual prokaryotes would have been unmanageably tiny, if someone had simply attempted to load them naked into those large capsules. Instead, they are contained in these hollow sporelike particles"—Weddell pointed to the vid plate—"which float in air until they contact a wet surface, such as mucous membrane or bronchia. At that point, the delivery units dissolve, releasing their load."

"Could you see them in the air, like smoke or dust? Smell them?"

"If the light was strong I suppose one might see a brief puff as they were initially distributed, but then they would appear to vanish. They would be odorless."

"How long . . . would they hang in the air?"

"Several minutes, at least. Depending on the efficiency of the ventilation."

Miles stared in fascination at the malignant-looking sphere. "This is new information." Though he did not, offhand, see how it helped much.

"It was not possible to reconstruct it from the eidetic chip," noted Weddell a bit stiffly, "as no part of the vector encapsulation would ever reach the chip. There were several other potential means of administration."

"I . . . quite understand. Yes. Thank you." He pictured himself going back to Illyan: Can you remember every breath you took in the last four months? Once, Illyan might have.

A bleep from the comconsole interrupted his thoughts; the delivery-spore vanished and was replaced by the head of General Haroche.

"My Lord Auditor." Haroche nodded diffidently at Miles. "My apologies for interrupting you. But since you're in the building, I wonder if you could stop in and see me. At your convenience, of course, when you're done in the labs and so on."

Miles sighed. "Certainly, General." At least it gave him an excuse to put off seeing Galeni for a few more minutes. "I'll be up to your office shortly."

Miles took possession of the code-card containing Weddell's report, and the resealed residue of the sample, and released the man, who departed gratefully. Miles's step quickened as he paced down the too-familiar hallways of ImpSec HQ, up and around to Illyan's old office, Haroche's new one. Maybe, pray God, Haroche had found something fresh to share, something to render this whole tangle less painful.