"What a lovely place to live, if only the rent weren't so high," mutters Linya.

"Quite. So. Canaba then called me up demanding an in-person audience before his covert pickup, which I was forced to grant because he threatened not to show up otherwise, and my orders were very clear on the subject of getting that man off the planet and onto Barrayar. He's still around, by the way, I can tell you his new name if you promise not to let on that you know anything at all about where he came from. Canaba spun me a tale about how he'd been part of a team commissioned to create a super-soldier by mixing human and animal genes, and he'd stored some samples of his other work in the last living prototype of this failed project, for unclear reasons. Then House Bharaputra sold the beast to House Ryoval. Canaba wanted me to sneak in, grab his samples, kill the critter, and sneak out again. I tried to buy the prototype first, but Ryoval decided to take the opportunity to demand that I trade him an illicitly obtained gene sample from Fell's quaddie musician. I declined this honour, and therefore had to go with the sneak-in-and-grab method."

"Why did he want the super-soldier killed?"

"Because he was a selfish arrogant ass. Well, and all the other prototypes had died agonizing deaths of premature old age and this one was slated to do the same after an unknown period of time spent in Ryoval's sex dungeons, so he imagined he was doing it a favour in the asking."

"The reason I know about Bharaputra's specialty is because it was often a subject of mockery," Linya mutters.

"Canaba's pretty brilliant, from what I can tell, but he did not do his best work on this project. But at the time I had only the vaguest idea what this prototype looked like, except 'eight feet tall with fangs'. I planned my mission, I took my team in - we got caught just inside the main building of Ryoval's biologicals facility. Or should I say, they got caught. I was hiding in the ceiling at the time. Ensign Murka, the team leader, performed an amazing feat of Managing to Convince and got them all rather gently thrown out as idiot soldiers trying to peep at Ryoval's girls and mistakenly breaking into the biologicals facility when they meant to break into the whorehouse, as opposed to what would have happened to them if anyone had realized they'd come on purpose to steal things. I promoted him for it when we got back, and then he died at Dagoola - but I'm getting ahead of myself. Since I was still in the ceiling after Murka and the boys were summarily evicted, I decided to crawl around and see if I could find any good intel before I tackled the problem of getting out again. In a stroke of brilliant anti-genius, I dropped into the facility's security ops center and interrogated their chief of security thinking he was some kind of tech or clerk. I got caught. When they brought him around from the fast-penta, he was extremely upset with me."

"Oh dear."

"In fact, he was so upset that after calling his boss and getting permission to do whatever he wanted with me, he threw me in the sub-basement with the super-soldier prototype, who was down there being starved as a punishment for nearly murdering one of Ryoval's customers. I'm sure they thought the creature would eat me or something. Instead we made friends. They were calling him 'Seven' - I named him Asterion, recruited him to the Dendarii, and started crawling around in all the ductwork we could jointly access, trying to find a way out of there. Before we managed that, we found the lab where Ryoval keeps—kept—his library of tissue samples, the gene bank from which he concocts his creations. All lined up neatly in three enormous walk-in freezers, completely unattended, because it was the dark of night and all the security arrangements were aimed at preventing people from coming in the door to the lab as opposed to crawling out of a pillar. We turned on the heat sterilization cycle on the freezers with all the samples still inside, then booked it back down the pillar and escaped out the sub-basement's vehicle entrance after a little more noodling around looking for things to pick the lock with."

Linya giggles.

"Yes, I'm very pleased with myself about that one. After that, we found our way back to the Ariel and departed in short order, pausing along the way only long enough to listen to Ryoval nearly asphyxiate on his own rage and then make a deal with Fell to let that quaddie musician come along with us. She had a nice few days with Thorne before splitting off and starting her journey back to quaddiespace. And that is the story of why Baron Ryoval wants Admiral Naismith dead in the vilest possible way."

"I am afraid I probably can't call him off by being haut at him."

"I doubt it, yeah. If you get within spitting distance he'll probably try to collect a gene sample so he can run off fifty clones of you for unsavoury purposes."

"Eugh."

"Yes, that is my feeling also."

Pet, pet. "So now you have an ineptly cobbled together friendly super-soldier. How super is he?"

"Reasonably super. Incredible strength, speed, reflexes - he pays heavy metabolic tax on it all, of course. Eats like four men, fights like five."

"Well, that seems like a reasonable tradeoff from a hiring perspective, if not the very frontier of engineering efficiency."

"Could you do better?" he half-jokes. "Should I ask Asterion to release a gene sample so you can give him hautish little siblings who'll eat like three men, fight like ten, and live past twenty-five?"

"Do you want your very own super-soldier project, Miles? For your birthday?"

He giggles. "No, thank you."

"I imagine I could improve on his genome, but I doubt I could perfect it, anyway - when I was studying I already strongly expected that I'd be doing half-haut children, not elaborate cutting-edge research and development, so that was where I focused. I am thoroughly qualified to work on Little Aral Adri and would need to study up considerably to do super-soldiers."

"I imagine the inter-species aspect would complicate matters, too."

"Yes. It's an exaggeration to say that haut never touch animal genetics - some take it up as a hobby and there is a popular toy project with designer butterflies that some of my acquaintances did when I was nine, that sort of thing - but it's definitely not a focus."

"Designer butterflies?"

"Butterflies are fun! I didn't do the project, but I critiqued color schemes when the deadline hit and everyone showed theirs off."