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himself if he can."
The closing signature was the usual hasty scribble.
After that, Cadet Galeni became the concern of officers much lower in the
Imperial hierarchy, his record the public and accessible one Miles had viewed
earlier.
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"The trouble with all this," Miles spoke aloud into the thick, ticking silence
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that had enveloped the room for the last thirty minutes, "fascinating as it
all is, is that it doesn t narrow the possibilities. It multiplies them.
Dammit."
Including, Miles reflected, his own pet theory of embezzlement and desertion.
There was nothing here that actually disproved it, just rendered it more
painful if true. And the shuttleport assassination idea took on new and
sinister overtones.
"He might also," Ivan Vorpatril put in, "just be the victim of some perfectly
ordinary accident."
The ambassador grunted, and pushed to his feet, shaking his head. "Most
ambiguous. They were right to seal it. It could be very prejudicial to the
man s career. I think, Lieutenant Vorpatril, I will have you go ahead and file
a missing person report now with the local authorities. Seal that back up,
Vorkosigan." Ivan followed the ambassador out.
Before he closed the console, Miles traced through the documents pertinent to
the tantalizing reference to Galeni s father.
After his sister was killed in the Solstice Massacre, the senior Galen had
apparently become an active leader in the Komarran underground. What wealth
the Barrayaran conquest had left to the once-proud family evaporated entirely
at the time of the violent Revolt six years later. Old Barrayaran Security
records explicitly traced some of it, transformed into smuggled weapons,
payroll, and expenses of the terrorist army; later, bribes for exit visas and
transport off-planet for the survivors. No transport off Komarr for Galeni s
father, though; he was blown up with one of his own bombs during the last,
futile, exhausted attack on a Barrayaran Security HQ. Along with Galeni s
older brother, incidentally.
Thoughtfully, Miles ran a cross-check. Rather to his relief there were no more
stray Galen relations among the
Earth-bound refugees listed in the embassy s Security files.
Of course, Galeni had had plenty of opportunity to edit those files, in the
last two years.
Miles rubbed his aching head. Galeni had been fifteen when the last spasm of
the Revolt had
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rothers%20In%20Arms.txt petered out. Was stamped out. Too young, Miles hoped,
to have been actively involved. And whatever his involvement, Simon
Illyan had apparently known of it and been willing to let it pass into
history. A closed book. Miles resealed the file.
Miles permitted Ivan to do all the dealing with the local police. True, with
the clone story now afloat he was in part protected from the chance of meeting
the same people in both his personas, but there was no point in pushing it.
The police could be expected to be more alert and suspicious than most others,
and he hadn t counted on being a two-headed crime wave.
At least the police seemed to take the military attaché s disappearance with
proper seriousness, promising cooperation even to the extent of honoring the
ambassador s request that the matter not be given to the news media. The
police, manned and equipped for such things, could take over the routine
legwork such as checking the identities of any unexplained human body parts
found in trash receptacles, etc.; Miles appointed himself official detective
for all matters inside the embassy walls.
Ivan, as senior man now, suddenly found all of Galeni s normal routine dumped
in his lap; Miles heartlessly left it there.
Twenty-four hours passed, for Miles mostly in a console station chair
cross-checking embassy records on Komarran refugees. Unfortunately, the
embassy had amassed huge quantities of such information. If there was
something significant, it was well camouflaged in the tons of irrelevencies.
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It simply wasn t a one-man job.
At two in the morning, cross-eyed, Miles gave it up, called Elli Quinn, and
dumped the whole problem on the Dendarii
Mercenaries Intelligence Department.
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