"Obviously," muttered Bothari-Jesek. Her chin went up, and her eyes nailed Mark, still clinging to the wall. "You're confined to quarters, mister. I'm putting the guard back on your door. Don't even try to come out."

I won't, I won't.

They marched Maree away. The door seals hissed closed like a falling guillotine blade. He rolled onto his narrow bed, shaking.

Two weeks to Komarr. He very seriously wished he were dead.

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

Mark spent the first three days of his solitary confinement lying in a depressed huddle. He had meant his heroic mission to save lives, not destroy them. He added up the body count, one by one. The shuttle pilot. Phillipi. Norwood. Kimura's trooper. And the eight seriously wounded. All those people hadn't had names, back when he had first been planning this. And all the anonymous Bharaputrans, too. The average Jacksonian security guard was just a joe scrambling for a living. He wondered bleakly if any of the dead Bharaputrans were people he had once met or joked with when he'd lived in the clone crèche. As ever, the little people were ground up like meat, while those with enough power to really be held responsible escaped, walking out free like Baron Bharaputra.

Did the lives of forty-nine clones outweigh four dead Dendarii? The Dendarii did not seem to think so. Those people were not volunteers. You tricked them to their deaths.

He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.

I didn't mean it to come out this way.

And the clones. The blonde girl. He of all men knew she was not the mature woman her general physique and particular augmentations so stunningly advertised her as being. The sixty-year-old brain that had been planning to move in doubtless would have known how to handle such a body. But Mark had seen her so clearly, in his mind, that ten-year-old on the inside. He hadn't wanted to hurt or frighten her, yet he'd managed to do both. He'd wanted to please her, make her face light. The way they all lit up for Miles? the internal voice mocked.

None of the clones could possibly respond as he so ached to have them do. He must let that fantasy go. Ten years from now, twenty years from now, they might thank him for their lives. Or not. I did all I could. I'm sorry.