Quinn was a little breathless, describing this. Her lovely face was not, after all, the original, but a replacement after her own violent encounter with plasma fire, over a decade ago. "Miles, what the hell was going on with you?"

"I think I had . . . some kind of seizure. Like epilepsy, except that it doesn't seem to leave any neurological tracks. I'm afraid it might be an aftereffect from my cryo-revival last year." You know damned well it is. He touched the twin scars on either side of his neck, now grown faint and pale, the lesser souvenirs of that event. Quinn's emergency stunner-treatment explained his lengthy bout of unconsciousness and subsequent headache. So, the seizures were no worse than before. . . .

"Oh, dear," said Quinn. "But is this the first—" She paused, and looked at him more closely. Her voice went flatter. "This isn't the first time you've done this, is it."

The silence stretched; Miles forced himself to speak before it snapped. "It happened three or four," or five "times soon after I was brought back from stasis. My cryo-revival surgeon said they might go away on their own, the way the memory loss and the shortness of breath have. And after that they seemed to stop."

"And ImpSec let you go out on a covert ops field mission with that kind of time bomb in your head?"

"ImpSec . . . does not know."

"Miles …"

"Elli," he said desperately, "they'd pull me right off line duty, you know they would. Nail my boots to the floor behind some desk at best. Medical discharge at worst—and that would be the end of Admiral Naismith. Forever."

She froze, stricken.