Trying to follow them gave him an almost instant headache. This was no ballasted and gimballed vid pick-up, no steady pan, but rather the jerky, snatching glances of real head movements. He slowed the replay to watch himself in the lift-tube foyer, a short, agitated fellow in gray camouflage, glittering eyes in a set face. Do I really look like that? The deformities of his body were not so apparent as he'd imagined, under the loose uniform.

He sat behind Tonkin's eyes and walked with him through the hurried maze of Bharaputra's buildings, tunnels, and corridors, all the way to the last firefight at the end. Thorne had quoted Norwood correctly; it was right there on the vid. Though he'd been wrong on the time; Norwood was gone eleven minutes by the helmet's unsubjective clock. Norwood's flushed face reappeared, panting, the urgent laugh sounded—and, moments later, the grenade-strike, the explosion—almost ducking, Mark hastily shut off the vid, and glanced down at himself as if half-expecting to be branded with another mortal splattering of blood and brains.

If there's any clue, it has to be earlier. He started the program again from the parting in the foyer. The third time through, he slowed it down and took it step by step, examining each. The patient, finicky, self-forgetful absorption was almost pleasurable. Tiny details—you could lose yourself in tiny details, an anesthetic for brain-pain.

"Got you," he whispered. It had flashed past so fast as to be subliminal, if you were running the vid in real-time. The briefest glimpse of a sign on the wall, an arrow on a cross-corridor labeled Shipping and Receiving.

He looked up to find Bothari-Jesek watching him. How long had she been sitting there? She slumped relaxed, long legs crossed at booted ankles, long fingers tented together. "What have you got?" she asked quietly.

He called up the holomap of the ghostly buildings with Norwood and Tonkin's line of march glowing inside. "Not here," he pointed, "but there." He marked a complex well off-sides from the route the Dendarii had traveled with the cryo-chamber. "That's where Norwood went. Through that tunnel. I'm sure of it! I've seen that facility—been all over that building. Hell, I used to play hide and seek in it with my friends, till the babysitters made us stop. I can see it in my head as surely as if I had Norwood's helmet vid playing right here on the table. He took that cryo-chamber down to Shipping and Receiving, and he shipped it!"

Bothari-Jesek sat up. "Is that possible? He had so little time!"