He sat for a full minute, trying to marshal his scattered thoughts, his best arguments. "Look," he said at last. "You are wasting your resources, and one of the resources you are wasting is me. Send me back to Jackson's Whole. I know more about the entire situation than any other agent you have. I have some training, an assassin's training only maybe, but some. Enough to lose your spies three or four times on Earth! Enough to get this far. I know Jackson's Whole, visceral stuff you can only acquire growing up there. And you wouldn't even have to pay me!" He waited, holding his breath in the courage of his terror. Go back? Blood sprayed through his memory. Going to give the Bharaputrans a chance to correct their aim?

Illyan's cool expression did not change. "Your track record so far in covert ops is not notably impressive for its successes, Lord Mark."

"So, I'm not a brilliant combat field commander. I am not Miles. We all know that by now. How many of your other agents are?"

"If you are as, ah, incompetent as you have appeared, sending you would be a further waste. But suppose you are more sly than even I think. All your thrashing around here, a mere smokescreen." Illyan could deliver the veiled insults, too. Stiletto-sharp, right between the ribs. "And suppose you get to Miles before we do. What happens then?"

"What do you mean, what happens then?"

"If you return him to us as a room-temperature corpse, fit only for burying, instead of a cryo-stat hopeful—how will we know that was the way you found him? And you will inherit his name, his rank, his wealth, and his future. Tempting, Mark, to a man without an identity. Very tempting."

Mark buried his face in his hands. He sat crushed, infuriated, and wildly frustrated. "Look," he said through his fingers, "look. Either I'm the man who, by your theory, succeeded in half-assassinating Aral Vorkosigan and was so good I left no trace of proof—or I'm not. You can argue that I'm not competent enough to send. Or you can argue that I'm not trustworthy enough to send. But you can't use both arguments at once. Pick one!"

"I await more evidence." Illyan's eyes were like stones.

"I swear," Mark whispered, "excess suspicion makes us bigger fools than excess trust does." It had certainly been true in his case. He sat up suddenly. "So fast-penta me."

Illyan raised his brows. "Mm?"

"Fast-penta me. You never have. Relieve your suspicions." Fast-penta interrogations could be excruciatingly humiliating experiences, by all reports. So what. What was one more humiliation in his life? Warm and familiar, that was what.