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By Root 719 0

of Ekaterin overhead. He had gradually become used to that nightly presence. This marriage thing was getting to be a habit, one of his better ones. He touched the chrono on his wrist, and sighed. She was probably asleep by now. Too late to call and wake her just to listen to his blither. He counted over the days to Aral Alexander and Helen Natalia's decanting. Their travel margin was narrowing each day he fooled around here. His brain was putting together a twisted jingle to an old nursery tune, something about fast-penta and puppy dog tails early in the morning, when he mercifully drifted off.

"M'lord?"

Miles snapped alert at Roic's voice on the cabin intercom. "Yes?"

"The Prince Xav's surgeon is on the secured comconsole. I told him to hold, you'd wish to be wakened."

"Yes." Miles glanced at the glowing numerals of the wall chrono; he'd been asleep about four hours. Plenty enough for now. He reached for his jacket. "On my way."

Roic, again—no, still—in uniform, waited in the increasingly familiar little wardroom.

"I thought I told you to get some sleep," Miles said. "Tomorrow—today, it is now—could be a long one."

"I was checking through the Rudra's security vids, m'lord. Think I might have something."

"All right. Show me them after this, then." He slid into the station chair, powered up the security cone, and activated the com vid image.

The senior fleet surgeon, who by the collar tabs on his green uniform held a captain's rank, looked to be one of the young and fit New Men of Emperor Gregor's progressive reign; by his bright, excited eyes, he wasn't regretting his lost night's sleep much. "My Lord Auditor. Captain Chris Clogston here. I have your blood work."

"Excellent. What have you found?"

The surgeon leaned forward. "The most interesting was the stain on that handkerchief of yours. I'd say it was Cetagandan haut blood, without question, except that the sex chromosomes are decidedly odd, and instead of the extra pair of chromosomes where they usually assemble their genetic modifications, there are two extra pairs."

Miles grinned. Yes! "Quite. An experimental model. Cetagandan haut indeed, but this one is a ba—genderless—and almost certainly from the Star Crèche itself. Freeze a portion of that sample and mark it top secret, and send it along home to ImpSec's biolabs by the first available courier, with my compliments. I'm sure they'll want it on file."

"Yes, my lord."

No wonder Dubauer had tried to retrieve that bloodied handkerchief. Quite aside from blowing its cover, high-level Star Crèche gene work was not the sort of thing the haut ladies cared to have circulating at large, not unless they'd released it themselves, filtered through a few select Cetagandan ghem clans via their haut trophy wives and mothers. Granted, the haut ladies saved their greatest vigilance for the genes they gated in to their well-guarded genome, generations-long work of art that it was. Miles wondered how tidy a profit one might make, offering pirate copies of those cells he'd inadvertently collected. Or maybe not—this ba wasn't, clearly, their latest work. A near-century out of date, in fact.

Their latest work lay in the hold of the Idris. Urk.

"The other sample," Clogston went on, "was Solian II—that is, Lieutenant Solian's synthesized blood. Identical to the earlier specimen—same batch, I'd say."

"Good! Now we're getting somewhere." Where, for God's sake? "Thank you, Captain. This is invaluable. Go get some sleep, you've earned it."

The surgeon, disappointment writ plainly on his face at this dismissal without further explication, signed off.

Miles turned back to Roic in time to catch him stifling a yawn. The armsman looked embarrassed, and sat up straighter.

"So what do we have?" Miles prompted.

Roic cleared his throat. "The passenger Firka actually joined the Rudra after it was first due to leave, during that delay for repairs."

"Huh. Suggests it wasn't part of a long-laid itinerary, then . . . maybe. Go on."

"I've filtered out quite a few records of the fellow passing on and off the ship, before it was impounded