Tej knelt and began going through his pockets. His athletic appearance was not a facade; his body felt quite fit, beneath her probing fingers.

“Oh,” he mumbled after a moment. “You two are t’gether. Thass all right, then…”

The first thing Tej’s patting hand found was a small flimsy, tucked into his breast pocket. Featuring a still scan of her. A chill washed through her.

She seized his well-shaved jaw, stared into his eyes, demanded tightly: “Are you a hired killer?”

Still weirdly dilated from the stun nimbus, his eyes were not tracking quite in unison. He appeared to have to think this question over. “Well…in a sense…”

Abandoning interrogation in favor of physical evidence, Tej extracted the wallet he’d flashed earlier, a door remote much like her own, and a slender stunner hidden in an inner pocket. No more lethal weaponry surfaced.

“Let me see that,” said Rish, and Tej obediently handed up the stunner. “Who is this meat really?”

“Hey, I c’n answer that,” their victim mumbled, but fell prudently silent again as she jerked her aim back at him.

The top item in the wallet was the credit chit. Beneath it was a disquietingly official-looking security card with a heavy coding strip identifying the man further as one Captain Ivan X. Vorpatril, Barrayaran Imperial Service, Operations, Vorbarr Sultana. Another mentioned such titles as Aide-de-Camp to Admiral Desplains, Chief of Operations, with a complicated building address featuring lots of alphanumeric strings. There was also a strange little stack of tiny rectangles of heavy paper, reading only Lord Ivan Xav Vorpatril, nothing else. The fine, black, raised lettering bumped under her curious fingertips. She passed them all up for Rish’s inspection.

On sudden impulse, she drew off one of his polished shoes, which made him twitch in a scrambled reflex, and looked inside. Military issue shoes, aha, that explained their unusual style. 12 Ds, though she couldn’t think of a reason for that to be important, except that they fit the rest of his proportions.