"You should have no complaint, my lord," Illyan stated, in the tone of a directive. Gregor must have lit quite a fire under him, earlier this morning, Mark reflected, as Illyan bowed himself out with a distinctly ironic nod. Hostile? No. That was unjust. Illyan was not nearly as hostile as he had a right to be. It's not only obedience to his emperor, Mark realized with a shiver. Illyan could have stood up to Gregor on a security issue like this if he'd really wanted to. He's getting desperate.

He took a deep breath and plunged into the files, reading, listening, and viewing. Illyan hadn't been joking about the everything part. There were literally hundreds of reports, generated by fifty or sixty different agents scattered throughout the near wormhole nexus. Some were brief and negative. Others were long and negative. But somebody seemed to have visited, at least once, every possible cryofacility on Jackson's Whole, its orbital and jump-point stations, and several adjoining local space systems. There were even recently-received reports tracing as far away as Escobar.

What was missing, Mark realized after quite a while, were any synopses or finished analyses. He had received raw data only, in all its mass. On the whole, he decided he preferred it that way.

Mark read till his eyes were dry and aching, and his stomach gurgled with festering coffee. Time to break for lunch, he thought, when a guard knocked at his door.

"Lord Mark, your driver is here," the guard informed him politely.

Hell—it was time to break for dinner. The guard escorted him back through the building and delivered him to Pym. It was dark outside. My head hurts.

Doggedly, Mark returned the next morning and started again. And the next. And the next. More reports arrived. In fact, they were arriving faster than he could read them. The harder he worked, the more he was falling behind. Halfway through the fifth day he leaned back in his station chair and thought, This is crazy. Illyan was burying him. From the paralysis of ignorance, he had segued with surprising speed to the paralysis of information-glut. I've got to triage this crap, or I'll never get out of this repulsive building.

"Lies, lies, all lies," he muttered wildly to his comconsole. It seemed to blink and hum back at him, sly and demure.

With a decisive punch, he turned off the comconsole with its endless babble of voices and fountains of data, and sat for a while in darkness and silence, till his ears stopped ringing.

ImpSec hasn't. Hasn't found Miles. He didn't need all this data. Nobody did. He just needed one piece. Let's cut this down to size.

Start with a few explicit assumptions. One. Miles is recoverable.

Let ImpSec look for a rotted body, unmarked grave, or disintegration record all they wanted. Such a search was no use to him, even if successful. Especially if successful.