"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."