"This is not a new mission, nor a new report. This is in relation to your last . . . I can hardly call it a mission, since I never ordered it. Your last adventure there." Illyan looked up at him.

"Oh?" said Miles cautiously.

"Complete copies of your cryo-revival surgeon's medical records finally surfaced. It took some time, due to the confusion of the Durona Group's hurried departure from Jackson's Whole, with their records scattered between Escobar and House Fell. House Fell, needless to say, was not forthcoming with extra data. It took even more time for the records to be received and processed by my analysis section, and to finally be read in detail by someone who realized their significance and implications. Some months, in fact."

Miles's belly went abruptly very cold, as if in memory of his freezing death. He had a sudden insight as to the exact state of mind of a person who fell/jumped/was pushed from the top of a very tall building, in that subjectively stretched eternity it took for them to reach the pavement below. We have just made a major mistake. Oh, yes.

"What bothers me most, of course," Illyan went on, "is not your seizures themselves, but the fact that you concealed them from the ImpSec physicians who were trying to return you fit for duty. You lied to them, and through them, to me."

Miles swallowed, searching his paralyzed consciousness for a defense for the indefensible. What couldn't be defended could only be denied. He pictured himself chirping brightly, What seizures, sir? No. "Dr. Durona . . . said they would go away on their own." She had, dammit, she had. "Or . . . they might," he corrected. "At that time, I thought they had."

Illyan grimaced. He picked a cipher-card from his desktop, and held it up between thumb and forefinger. "This," he stated, "is my latest independent report from the Dendarii. Including your fleet surgeon's medical reports. The ones she kept in her cabin, not in her sick bay office. They were not easy to obtain. I've been waiting for them. They came in last night."

He had a third observer. I might have known. I should have figured it.

"Do you want to try to play any more little guessing games about this?" Illyan added dryly.

"No, sir," Miles whispered. He hadn't meant it to come out a whisper. "No more games."

"Good." Illyan rocked slightly in his station chair, and tossed the card back to the desktop. His face looked like death itself. Miles wondered what his own face looked like. As wide-eyed as an animal in the headlights, as viewed from a groundcar traveling toward it at a hundred kilometers an hour, he suspected.

"This"—Illyan pointed to the cipher-card—"was a betrayal of the subordinates who depended on you as well as of the superiors who trusted you. And it was a knowing betrayal, proved on Lieutenant Vorberg's body. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"