The next day, Hephaestus, Erik and Spark were all busy gently prising apart the crumpled metal of Wonder's body and separating it into piles to see what needed repairing. Even Marvin helped briefly, spitting out a set of schematics for a more efficient wiring system shortly after lunch, but only, he said, because it was so irritating when everyone else was too stupid to see such an obvious solution. Then he went back to composing a song cycle about how much he hated every moment of the day and of the night.

Anakin wished he could do something to repair the damage he had wrought. Surely it must be possible to use the Force to coax metal molecules back into their original positions? But he had simply had far more practice – especially in the last quarter-century of his life – in destroying than in creating or healing. Right now, when he was in disgrace, Hephaestus and, especially, Spark, weren't likely to trust him to do anything more complex than levitating tools to them. In any case, it wasn't fair to try out his ideas first on the body components of an actual person. So, between passing tools across, he experimented with gently reshaping pieces of scrap metal.

In the evening, everyone except Marvin and the dismembered Wonder – but including Hephaestus – assembled to watch the next instalment of what Anakin was starting to think of as Attack of the Noncom.

The next memory phial carried on immediately from the end of the last one, with Aral Vorkosigan standing in the doorway, plasma arc in hand, the brown-haired spy standing behind him. Anakin blinked, not wanting to think what would have happened if any Imperial officers had walked in on him and Luke the moment after Emperor Palpatine's death. But these were different Imperials, after all, in a different Empire. This was fairly obvious from the fact that the younger man could gently remind Aral that it probably wasn't a good idea to gesticulate at things while holding a plasma arc in his hand. Anakin was fairly sure that – once he was Darth Vader, at any rate – any of his officers who had dared to warn him against waving his arms around while holding a lightsaber would have been strangled immediately. Before he was Darth Vader? Well, then he probably wouldn't actually have murdered a colleague just for criticising him, but he would have resented it, seeing it as nagging. Vorkosigan was mature enough to recognise when someone else had a fair point.

He also had a dry sense of humour which reminded Anakin of Obi-Wan – except that, while thinking about Obi-Wan made him furious enough to want to resurrect the man in order to kill him all over again, he could only feel liking and respect for Aral Vorkosigan.

'Which of you should I congratulate?'

'I'm not sure. How annoyed is everyone going to be about this?'

'The Emperor, for one, will be delighted. But – strictly in private.'

Oh joy, more Imperial politics. And by the sound of it, the Barrayaran Emperor was playing at least as complex a dejarik game as Darth Sidious. Anakin mentally cursed. How could he have been naïve enough to assume that Ges Vorrutyer was the Master? There's always a bigger Sith…

In the meantime, Aral needed to get both Cordelia and Konstantine well away from the murder scene. Cordelia knelt on the floor, reassuring the panic-stricken Konstantine: 'Bothari, look at me. You've got to get up, and walk a little way. Look. You're washed in blood. Blood washes away sin, right? You're going to be all right now. Uh, the bad man is gone, and in a little while the bad voices will go away too. So you come along with me, and I'll take you where you can rest.'

It struck Anakin that she was talking as though reassuring a frightened child, in contrast with the way that she normally spoke to Konstantine the same way she would to any other normal, intelligent adult. And by the look of the Konstantine in the memory, being mothered was exactly what he needed, right then. It was hauntingly reminiscent of the earlier scenes, caring for injured Ensign Dubauer as if he was a toddler. Evidently, the Force was preparing Aral and Cordelia for being parents.

The Konstantine watching the memory winced with embarrassment as his younger self in the memory, crazed with panic, hurled Cordelia at a wall and tried to throttle her after she startled him by injecting him with sedative. 'Sorry,' he muttered, and watched the flickering images in the stone dish intently until he was confident that she wasn't too badly injured. Judging by the way she slipped a pillow under his head and tried to make him as comfortable as possible, she wasn't even angry with him.

'She knows it's not your fault,' said Cheiron reassuringly. 'And if she didn't understand then what exactly you were going through – how you felt about someone trying to drug you – she would before much longer. Did she ever tell you what happened after she went back to Beta Colony, and why she left?'

'No.' A pause. 'She told Lord Vorkosigan some. I think – they thought she was a traitor.'

'You'll find out a bit more in the later memories,' Cheiron promised. 'Just – don't be too disappointed if she isn't as perfect as you want her to be, okay?'

Even if Cordelia's role was something like parenthood, a child was unlikely to be haunted enough with guilt to rave over the role he had been forced into, reduced to the status of a tool, a limb for another person, the way Konstantine described here: 'Servants of the beast are the beast's hands. He feeds them on the wife's blood. Bad servants.' And apparently, the work of Aral and the young man whom he introduced as 'Lieutenant Simon Illyan. He's my spy. He spies on me. He represents a compromise between the Emperor, the Ministry of Political Education, and myself,' was scarcely more honourable. Seemingly, despite being assigned to spy on Aral, Illyan wanted to be loyal to him, but, as Aral said, was torn between duty and conscience. And Aral evidently felt that he himself had made a horrible choice in the conflict between these two:

'Everything the Emperor requires of me will be accomplished. He's a great choreographer, and he shall have his dance of dreamers down to the last step. I have held nothing that is mine from his service. Not my life. Not even my honor.'

Cordelia's voice came through, saying exactly what Anakin wanted to say: 'Will someone please tell me what you are talking about?'

Illyan explained: 'You see, there was another incident with a prisoner, a few weeks ago. Commodore Vorkosigan wanted to, er, do something about it then. I talked him out of it. After – afterwards, I agreed that I would not interfere with any action he chose to take, should the situation come up again.'

Anakin could sense from the feel of Cordelia's memories that, looking back, she knew that this wasn't a complete answer. 'That is not all of what this is about, is it?' he said.

'No,' said Cheiron. 'They're zooming in and out of different levels of conscience and duty: the morality of how to behave when a senior officer is mistreating prisoners in a war, and the morality of whether you should even be at war in the first place.'

If this phial was filled with Aral and Cordelia's relationship and complex hints of the political situation back home, the next was filled with far more plot – and a bizarre camera angle. The first scene was a shot of the mirror of the shower room in which Cordelia and Konstantine were hiding, allowing her to see, reflected, an argument between Aral and Prince Serg:

'I will lead my troops on Escobar! Let my father and his cronies try to say I am no soldier now!'

'You will sit in that fortified palace and party in it, and let your men do your dying for you, until you've bought your ground by the sheer weight of the corpses piled on it, because that's the kind of soldiering your mentor has taught you. And then send bulletins home about your great victory.'

Anakin could sense his companions' emotions: Konstantine's snarling hatred and fear of Prince Serg, Severus's disgust and war-weariness – and Erik's curiosity and interest. 'He's been sent to make sure that prince is in the front line of fighting and gets killed, hasn't he?' he remarked. 'That's why he keeps on telling him to stay back, just to make him more determined to go.'

Cheiron's presence shone an obvious 'yes', but he only said, 'Are you so sure?'

'Quite sure. Several of the kings I've worked for had more sons than they knew what to do with.'

No matter how much Cheiron tried not to give away spoilers, the conclusion of that scene made it quite clear, as Aral, saying goodbye to his friend Admiral Vorhalas, begged him not to travel in the same ship as the Prince, and to make sure that his soldiers had their contingency orders for when the Escobarans counter-attacked. The Emperor had sent this invasion out to fail, and to kill his only son.

But in the meantime, Konstantine, overdosed on sedatives, had stopped breathing. This, Anakin realised, must be where he died. That was how the Force worked. You cannot turn to the Dark Side and return from it without dying. Nothing less can atone for your guilt.

Except that, obviously, Konstantine hadn't died at this point in the story. Anakin had seen his memories of the years that followed, alive and, if not exactly well, a lot healthier than Anakin had been for the latter half of his own life. Loved and accepted. In the images in these war memories, Anakin could see Aral and Cordelia frantically pounding on his chest to resuscitate him.

It was a different universe, with different rules, he realised. In Konstantine's world, you couldn't have interstellar radio conversations in real time, or travel through hyperspace except by naturally occurring wormholes, but you could survive redemption.

'Are you all right?' Cheiron asked him.

'Yes. I was just – thinking. Wondering how my life would have gone, if I could have turned from the Dark Side without dying. Or if Erik could.'

Severus gave a miaow that clearly meant, 'You don't think I deserved a chance at life, evidently.'

'You were not a villain in the first place,' Anakin told him.

'No, Severus wasn't a villain,' said Cheiron. 'But he was someone who had to tread a very difficult path, just as Aral does here.'

They could hear Aral's words:

'Ges Vorrutyer? He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present – they are real.'

Anakin wondered whether this was addressed to him. He had turned to the Dark Side because of his fears that Padme would die – and had ended up murdering her. But he had not been possessed by fear of a hypothetical future, but by his very vivid, specific visions of her death.

He didn't know what Palpatine's motivation for anything had been, but he was fairly sure that Palpatine had not become a Sith Lord, or worked to become absolute ruler of the galaxy, out of a desire to prevent some worse tragedy. Had Palpatine ever had anyone or anything that he loved or cared about or wanted to save? Probably not. He seemed not to have emotions in the way that a normal person did. Could you have motivation, if there was nothing you loved or feared? But then – if you couldn't feel anything except the Dark Side, wasn't that a motivation in itself, to follow the only thing that gave your life meaning?

Still, he could see the point of the speech. Most villains are not like Sheev Palpatine. Aral's Emperor perhaps wasn't, and Aral certainly wasn't, but that didn't stop them from being caught up in evil.

The memory looked so like a holovid that it was strange to be reminded that it wasn't. In a holo, there would have been a cut to a scene of Barrayaran ships being consumed by plasma fire. Instead, the audience could only see what Cordelia could see: the inside of Aral's cabin, and the people in it: Konstantine sick and delirious, trapped in a nightmare; Aral tense with worry about the upcoming battle, but ordered confined to quarters and unable to do anything about it; and Simon Illyan, innocently unaware of whatever Aral knew was going to happen. And then, at last, came the reports from ship commanders out in battle, suddenly cut off as they died. Anakin was startled to recognise the face of Korabik Gottyan, and even more so to hear Aral shouting hopelessly, 'Don't do it, Korabik!' – desperately wishing he could save the life of the man who had tried to murder him.

The third phial that evening continued the story of the war, with Aral now in command and responsible for organising the Barrayarans' retreat after their devastating defeat, Konstantine taken off somewhere – sick bay, Anakin could only hope – and Cordelia to the brig. He sensed Konstantine's presence jolt with a tangle of emotions on catching sight of Cordelia's cellmate, the beautiful young woman with long black hair, and he reached out a virtual hand to squeeze his friend's hand reassuringly.

It was growing late as they watched the third and then a fourth phial, but nobody was willing to abandon the story, as Cordelia and the other Betan and Escobaran prisoners were taken to the camp on the turquoise-skied planet, while the Barrayarans negotiated a peace deal. Cordelia learned that Aral's undeserved reputation as a brutal, mass-murdering war criminal continued unabated – in spite of the fact that he had just shot the camp commandant for allowing the abuse of prisoners – and that she herself now had an equally unmerited reputation as the hero who had killed Ges Vorrutyer, no matter how much she told people that she hadn't. Anakin supposed that everyone had credited Luke with killing him and Palpatine, too, and that they probably hadn't believed Luke if he denied it, either. At the very least, people expect heroes to be officers, Force-sensitive if possible, and full of youthful idealism and innocence. Not some ugly middle-aged guard – even less than an ugly middle-aged Sith Lord.

At last, Aral had the opportunity to explain to Cordelia in private the reasoning behind the war: that Prince Serg had been not just personally vile, and someone who had repeatedly tried to murder his father, but that he was too mentally weak to be a competent ruler, and would only have been a puppet of corrupt politicians and then the provocation for a civil war, but that simply killing him would not have solved the deeper problem:

'It was not enough to kill the Prince. The Emperor felt he had to destroy the whole war party, so effectively that it would not rise again for another generation. So first there was me, bitching about the strategic problems with Escobar. Then the information about the plasma mirrors. And then there was Grishnov, and the war party, and the Prince, all crying for glory. He had only to step aside and let them rush to their doom.'

Spark's voice broke in. 'When he says "the War Party", he doesn't mean just a few people who support the Prince and Grishnov, does he? He means the whole desire for war.'

'Yes, I think so,' said Cheiron. 'The thing to bear in mind about Barrayar' – he looked directly at Anakin here – 'is that it isn't the Empire, just an Empire, and not even the biggest in that galaxy. It had been a simple world of people just trying to get by, until a couple of generations ago when the Cetagandan Empire invaded it, back when Aral's father was young. So, they had the war to fight the Cetagandans off, and then the civil war when Aral was a child, after the Barrayaran Emperor at that time had killed his mother and brother and sister, and then the war that Aral had fought in to conquer the neighbouring planet of Komarr to stop the Komarrans from allowing the Cetagandans to launch any more attacks on Barrayar through Komarran local space. So, by that point, people had got into the habit of thinking of war as a normal way of life, so that when they discovered an uninhabited planet, their first thought wasn't "This looks a good place to colonise, and it gives us a useful route for travelling and trading with Escobar," but "This looks like a good point for invading Escobar." And so it took a truly crushing defeat to make enough people realise that invading a peaceful planet with lots of allies was a stupid idea, and put them off trying anything like that again.'

'Maybe that's the least bad reason for the war,' said Spark. 'I'm not saying that makes it a good enough reason. Just the least bad.'

In the memory, Aral was still agonising over the decision. 'Was I wrong, Cordelia, to give myself to this thing? If I had not gone, the Emperor would simply have had another. I've always tried to walk the path of honor. But what do you do when all choices are evil? Shameful action, shameful inaction, every path leading to a thicket of death.'

At this point, Severus gave a yowl of despair and then lay quite still, not like a cat asleep, but like a cat who had been hit by a speeder.

'Is he dead?' Erik asked.

'No,' Konstantine reported, after holding a hand close to the kitten's tiny nostrils. 'Breathing. But only just.'

'His soul is trying to go somewhere else,' said Anakin. Where could you escape to, if you were already dead and in the afterlife? He could sense a faint, emerald-green trail in the Force, leading to – wherever Severus had gone to. Anakin, was probably the only person there who might be able to follow Severus and reassure him. But if he suggested this, someone could tell him that worrying about Severus was an attachment and therefore could lead only to evil, or that he should leave Severus to his destiny and not interfere, or someone like that.

So he mustn't discuss it, but just go. Closing his eyes, he focused as intently as he could on finding the trail.

Author's note: No, Jim, don't cast Summon Bigger Sith! That's an even worse idea than summoning a giant fish in the Queen's court (Darths & Droids strip 0037) and dropping it on the Queen (Darths & Droids strip 0208). Seriously, though, 'Always a Bigger Sith' would have been a wonderful Darths & Droids strip title – if it wasn't for the fact that, despite the title of the comic, Sith don't actually play much of a part in their AU of Star Wars, and seemingly only exist when someone who was never meant by nature to be Force-sensitive has midi-chlorians transfused into them. They did find room for 'Sith Happens' (Darths & Droids strip 0203), nevertheless.