"Taura, what happened? You're a Jacksonian. You know what Ryoval is, what this place is. How did you all lose sight of that?"

She shook her big head. "Captain Quinn thought Mark was a complete screw-up. After your death, she was so angry she could barely give him the time of day. And at first I agreed with her. But . . . I don't know. He tried so hard. The crèche raid only failed by a hair. If we'd been faster, or if the shuttle defense perimeter had done their job, we would have brought it off, I think."

He grimaced in agreement. "There's no mercy for failures of timing in no-margin operations like that one was. Commanders can have no mercy either, or you might as well stay in orbit and feed your troops directly into the ship's waste disintegrators, and save steps." He paused. "Quinn will be a good commander someday."

"I think so, sir." Taura pulled off her helmet and hood, and stared around. "I kind of came to like the little schmuck, though. He tried. He tried and failed, but no one else tried at all. And he was so alone."

"Alone. Yes. Here. For five days."

"We really did think Ryoval would figure out he wasn't you."

"Maybe . . . maybe so." Some part of his mind clung to that hope himself. Maybe it hadn't been as bad as it looked, as bad as his galloping imagination supplied.

Quinn and company returned, looking universally grim.

"So," he said, "you've found me. Now maybe we can all focus on Mark. I've been all over this place in the last hours, and I haven't found a clue. Did the absconding staff take him along? Is he out wandering around in the desert somewhere, freezing? I've got six of Iverson's men looking outside with 'scopes, and another one checking the facility's disintegration records for fifty-plus-kilo lumps of protein. And other bright ideas, folks?"

Elena came back from a peek in the next room. "Who do you figure did the honors on Ryoval?"

Miles opened his hands. "Don't know. He had hundreds of mortal enemies, after his career."

"He was killed by an unarmed person. A kick to the throat, then beaten to death somehow after he was down."

"I noticed that."

"You notice the tool kit?"

"Yeah."

"Miles, it was Mark."

"How could it have been? It had to have happened sometime last night. After what, five days of being worked over—and Mark's a little guy like me. I don't think it's physically possible."

"Mark's a little guy, but not like you," said Elena. "And he almost killed a man in Vorbarr Sultana with a kick to the throat."

"What?"

"He was trained, Miles. He was trained to take out your father, who is an even bigger man than Ryoval, and has years of combat experience."