At least you got the clones out.

No. Miles had got the clones out.

Dammit, dammit, dammit . . .

This half-baked disaster was not the glorious redemption of which he'd dreamed. Yet what had he expected the aftermath to be? In all his desperate plotting, he'd planned almost nothing past his projected return to Escobar with the Ariel. To Escobar, grinning, with the clones under his wing. He'd imagined himself dealing with an enraged Miles then, but then it would have been too late for Miles to stop him, too late to take his victory from him. He'd half expected to be arrested, but to go willingly, whistling. What had he wanted?

To be free of survivor guilt? To break that old curse? Nobody you knew back then is still alive. . . . That was the motive he'd thought was driving him, when he thought at all. Maybe it wasn't so simple. He'd wanted to free himself from something. . . . In the last two years, freed of Ser Galen and the Komarrans by the actions of Miles Vorkosigan, freed again altogether by Miles on a London street at dawn, he had not found the happiness he'd dreamed of during his slavery to the terrorists. Miles had broken only the physical chains that bound him; others, invisible, had cut so deep that flesh had grown around them.

What did you think? That if you were as heroic as Miles, they'd have to treat you like Miles? That they would have to love you?

And who were they? The Dendarii? Miles himself? Or behind Miles, those sinister, fascinating shadows, Count and Countess Vorkosigan?

His image of Miles's parents was blurred, uncertain. The unbalanced Galen had presented them, his hated enemies, as black villains, the Butcher of Komarr and his virago wife. Yet with his other hand he'd required Mark to study them, using unedited source materials, their writings, their public speeches, private vids. Miles's parents were clearly complex people, hardly saints, but just as clearly not the foaming sadistic sodomite and murderous bitch of Galen's raving paranoias. In the vids Count Aral Vorkosigan appeared merely a gray-haired, thick-set man with oddly intent eyes in his rather heavy face, with a rich, raspy, level voice. Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan spoke less often, a tall woman with red-roan hair and notable gray eyes, too powerful to be called pretty, yet so centered and balanced as to seem beautiful even though, strictly speaking, she was not.

And now Bothari-Jesek threatened to deliver him to them. . . .

He sat up and turned on the light. A quick tour of the cabin revealed nothing to commit suicide with. No weapons or blades—the Dendarii had disarmed him when he'd come aboard. Nothing to hang a belt or rope from. Boiling himself to death in the shower was not an option; a sealed fail-safe sensor turned it off automatically when it exceeded physiological tolerances. He went back to bed.