"Your favorite kind, knocked out cold on the floor, unable to inject sense into the proceedings, so you could take off to get killed or worse when everybody would have blamed me. The last thing Aunt Cordelia said to me before we left was 'And try to keep him out of trouble, Ivan.'" He parodies the Betan accent and everything. "Anyway, as soon as I figured out what the hell was going on, I got away from the haut-ladies - they're just like my mother, Miles, several times over, ugh - anyway, and Lisbet very emphatically suggested I talk to ghem-Colonel Benin, and he seemed like he had his head screwed on straight -" Benin drifts over to listen in. "And God be praised he actually listened to me. Made sense of my - gabble."

"I was, of course," says Benin, "following the very unusual activities around the Star Creche today. My own investigations had already led me to suspect something was going on involving one or more of the haut-governors, so I had orbital squads on alert."

"Squads," snorts Ivan. "There's three Imperial battle cruisers surrounding this ship, right now."