His image of Miles's parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, the Butcher of Komarr and his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he'd required Mark to study them, using unedited source materials, their writings, their public speeches, private vids. Miles's parents were clearly complex people, hardly saints, but just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of Galen's raving paranoias. In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a gray-haired, thick-set man with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with red-roan hair and notable gray eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she was not.

And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them. . . .

He sat up and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades—the Dendarii had disarmed him when he'd come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option; a sealed fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological tolerances. He went back to bed.

The image of a little, urgent, shouting man with his chest exploding outward in a carmine spray replayed in slow motion in his head. He was surprised when he began to cry. Shock, it had to be the shock that Bothari-Jesek had diagnosed. I hated the little bugger when he was alive, why am I crying? It was absurd. Maybe he was going insane.

Two nights without sleep had left him ringingly numb, yet he could not sleep now. He only dozed, drifting in and out of near-dreams and recent, searing memories. He half-hallucinated about being in a rubber raft on a river of blood, bailing frantically in the red torrent, so that when Quinn came to get him after only an hour's rest, it was actually a relief.

CHAPTER NINE

"Whatever you do," said Captain Thorne, "don't mention the Betan rejuvenation treatment.

Mark frowned. "What Betan rejuvenation treatment? Is there one?"

"No."

"Then why the hell would I mention it?"

"Never mind, just don't."