"Hell, I thought we did every kind of stress and electroshock and stimulus known to science, to try to trigger something in the lab. I thought the pills you gave me had brought it under control."

"The standard anticonvulsant? Were you taking it properly?" She eyed him suspiciously.

"Yes." He bit back more profane protestations. "Have you thought of something else to try?"

"No, which is why I gave you that monitor to wear around." Her glance around the examining room did not disclose the device. "Where is it?"

"In my cabin."

Her lips thinned in exasperation. "Let me guess. You weren't wearing it at the time."

"It didn't fit under my combat armor."

Her teeth clenched. "Couldn't you have at least thought to—to disable your weapons?"

"I could hardly be of use to my squad in an emergency, disarmed. I might as well have stayed aboard the Peregrine."

"You were the emergency. And you certainly should have stayed aboard the Peregrine."

Or back on Barrayar. But securing Vorberg's person had been the most critical part of the operation, and Miles was the only Dendarii officer ImpSec entrusted with the Barrayaran Imperial recognition codes. "I—" He bit his tongue on futile defenses, and started over. "You are quite correct. It won't happen again, until . . . we get this straightened out. What do we do next?"

She opened her hands. "I've run every test I know. Obviously, the anticonvulsant isn't the answer. This is some kind of idiosyncratic cryonic damage on a cellular or subcellular level. You need to get your head to the highest-powered cryo-neurology specialist you can find."

He sighed, and shrugged into his black tee shirt and gray uniform jacket. "Are we done for now? I urgently need to supervise prisoner interrogation."

"I suppose." She grimaced. "But do us all a favor. Don't go armed."

"Yes, ma'am," he said humbly, and fled.

CHAPTER TWO

Miles sat before the secured comconsole in his cabin aboard the flagship Peregrine, composing what seemed like his thousandth classified field report to the Chief of Barrayaran Imperial Security, Simon Illyan. Well, it wasn't the thousandth, that was absurd. He couldn't have averaged more than three or four missions a year, and he'd been at it less than a decade, really, since the Vervain invasion adventure had made it all official. Less than forty assignments. But he could no longer name the actual number offhand without stopping to think, and add them all up, and it wasn't an effect of lingering cryo-amnesia, either.

Keep organizing, boy. His personal synopsis needed to be no more than a brief guide to the appendices of raw data, drawn from the Dendarii Fleet's own files. Illyan's intelligence analysts liked having lots of raw data to chew upon. It kept them occupied, down in their little cubicles in the bowels of ImpSec headquarters at Vorbarr Sultana. And entertained too, Miles sometimes feared.