Cryoburn-ARC

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "Miles?"

  "We've got to fly, Raven—I expect the police are on their way by now."

  "I don't think he'll have called them, actually." An arresting remark, for all that it was delivered in an amused drawl.

  "What have you found down there?"

  "Come look."

  Miles made his way down the stairs with rather more care than he'd pelted up them, collecting his cane on the way.

  The lowest level—it was not quite a basement—of Leiber's townhouse was much as one might expect: a laundry area, the mechanical and electrical guts of the dwelling, a larger room left half-finished for dirty projects or whatever were the owner's needs. Leiber's need seemed to be for a great deal of junk stowage. Raven stood between a dusty exercise machine and a long shape covered with an old bedspread.

  "Tah-dah!" he cried, and whisked off the bedspread. Revealing a portable cryochamber. Plugged into the house power. Running, and apparently occupied.

  "Do we know what we're both thinking?" asked Raven.

  "Yeah," said Miles, with proper admiration. "Although . . . ​could it be it normal to keep frozen people in your basement? Around here, I mean?"

  "Don't know," said Raven, running his hands over the machine in a search for identifying marks. "You'd have to ask Johannes, or Vorlynkin. Or Jin. What I wonder is how he ever got it in here."

  "Dark of night, at a guess."

  "No, I mean how he got it down the stairs. It would never make the turn. There has to be—ah, garage door. That's better." Raven climbed over some junk, opened it, and stuck his head through. "Ooh, nice float bike."

  Miles checked underneath the cryochamber. It was a less expensive model, without a built-in float pallet, but it was propped up on stacks of miscellaneous bricks, concrete blocks, and a wedge of squashed flimsies—the top one seemed to be a scientific paper—revealing where a float pallet had been slid out from underneath. No sign of the pallet in the other piles.

  He raised his wristcom. "Johannes?"

  "I just picked up Roic, sir," Johannes returned at once. "Should we swing around to get you now?"

  "One question, first. Do you still have the float pallet on board that we used the other day?"

  "Yes, sorry, I haven't had time to return it to the rental place yet."

  "Excellent. Come around to the back of the row. There will be a sunken garage entry. We'll meet you there. I have some heavy lifting for you."

  "On our way."

  Raven raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that theft? Breaking and entering?"

  "No, the homeowner let us in. Breaking and exiting, maybe. If it's theft, I'm guessing it's the second time around for this item. And while it's not true that you can't cheat an honest man, crooked men are less likely to complain to the authorities, afterward. I don't think Leiber will tell anyone." He went on, still peering underneath, "Did you spot any IDs on this thing?"

  "Maker's mark. It's a common brand. Ah, here's a serial number. That may help."

  "Later, yeah." First things first. If I don't know how to recognize and seize a tactical moment by now . . . He could be spectacularly wrong. Or spectacularly right. In any case, it'll be spectacular.

  By the time Johannes and Roic arrived with the van, they had the garage door open. Leaving muscle to do what muscle did best, Miles repaired upstairs to the kitchen and searched for something to write with, and on. A half-composed grocery list and a stylus came to hand. He thought, turned the list over, bent, and scribbled.

  Roic came up to find him. "A bit awkward, but we horsed it in. Had to lean on the rear hatch to close it. What are you doing?"

  "Leaving Leiber a note." Miles affixed it to the refrigerator door.

  "What t' devil . . . ​?" Roic bent to read it. "What kind of burglar leaves a note?"

  Miles was actually rather proud of the vague wording. Call on me at my consulate at your earliest convenience. Not even an initial in signature.

  "We never finished our conversation," Miles explained. "We now have something he wants. He'll come. Saves putting a trace on him, at least. Damn. Johannes is the only one of us he hasn't seen yet, but I need him for other tasks. You'll be glad to know I now regret not having brought that ImpSec team you always want."

  "Cold comfort," sighed Roic. "Why not just wait for Leiber to come back?"

  "He won't, not while we're here. If I've guessed right he risked his job, maybe his life, to secure what we found in the basement. He'll be skittish, till he has time to calm down and think it through." And then he'll be terrified.

  After considerately closing the garage door behind them, they all piled back into the lift van. "To Madame Suze's," Miles directed Johannes. "Circuitously and sedately."

  Raven leaned over the seat back. "You know, if we've just stolen that poor man's grandmother, we're going to be very embarrassed."

  Miles grinned, exhilarated. "Then we'll simply return her. Leave her on the lawn after dark. Or maybe ship her back anonymously. No, it would take a lot more than that to embarrass me."

  The thought was less amusing when Miles remembered yesterday morning's debacle. He wasn't sure if that noise from Roic was a sigh or a snort, but in either case, he elected to ignore it.

  Back when he'd been a young municipal street guard for the town of Hassadar, Roic had undergone first-aid training. Later, after taking the solemn oath of a Count's Armsman, he'd been sent off for a much more advanced course in military field aid. It had included how to do an emergency cryoprep, with practice on a disturbingly realistic and anatomically complete model person and fake cryo-fluid. It hadn't given him nightmares. Helping shift Madame Sato's body onto the procedure table, he wasn't so sure that would remain the case.

  Cutting away the protective caul and prepping the still form, Raven and Medtech Tanaka were too professional to permit much embarrassment on the helpless woman's behalf. But she didn't look like the model, she didn't—quite—look like a corpse, and she didn't look alive, either. Maybe no one had a slot in their old ape brain for this. Yet if he ever had to perform a cryoprep for real, God forbid, Roic suspected this experience would help him do a better job, knowing what all those rote steps were aimed at. He was conscious of an odd sense of privilege.

  At least m'lord had made damned sure he had the right woman this time, after that unholy mess day before yesterday. Fortunately, he'd stopped short of bringing in those poor kids to ID his new prize last night, after they'd got her to Suze's and unwrapped her. This time around, Jin and Mina hadn't even been told she was found yet. When he'd asked m'lord, But which is better? M'lord had replied simply, Neither. Which just about summed it up.

  Roic tried not to flinch as Raven punched the assorted tubings through thawed skin and carefully seated them in his vessels-of-choice. Roic did start at a brief rap on the door, and turned on his heel, alert.

  Consul Vorlynkin stuck his head in. "Lord Vorkosigan, a message came—oh."

  "You didn't bring the kids this time, did you?" demanded m'lord, alarmed.

  "No, no. Johannes is baby-sitting. They still don't know."

  "Whew. Though perhaps you could bring them over soon, if all goes well."

  "And if it doesn't?" asked Vorlynkin grimly.

  M'lord sighed. "Then maybe I can bring them."

  "You can come in," said Raven over his shoulder, "but you have to put on a filtering mask. You can't hang in the doorway like a cat."

  Ako hastened to hand Vorlynkin a mask, and helped him adjust it; he grimaced as the memoryseal bonded to his skin. He came cautiously up to the procedure table. "I did wonder what this was like."

  "Any problems so far?" m'lord asked. He was perched on a tall stool, partly to oversee the procedure, but mostly, Roic suspected, to block him from pacing.

  "Not yet," said Raven. He reached over and started the first flush of warmed, hyper-oxygenated IV fluid. His patient's skin began to turn from clay gray to an ethereal ice-pale. Someone had made an unexpected effort to preserve her long hair, treated with gel and rolle
d in a wrapping; it lay curled like a snail shell above her shoulder. Ms. Chen's hair had been cropped in a medically utilitarian bob.

  Madame Sato was taller than Roic had expected, fully five-foot-eight. That and her dark hair gave her a slight, unsettling resemblance to m'lord's wife Lady Ekaterin, actually, which Roic elected not to point out. Sato's face was a rounder shape, if also stretched over a fine symmetrical scaffolding of jaw and cheekbone, and her body was thinner in a way that suggested stress rather than athleticism. An elf-lady strung out on bad drugs and bad company.

  "She's not what . . ." Vorlynkin stared, mesmerized. "I thought you said she'd look terrible. Skin flaking and bleeding, hair falling out and so on."

  "There wasn't a thing wrong with her when they put her in cryo-stasis," said Raven, "and this appears to have been first-class prep, and recent at that. When he arrived on our operating table, Lord Vorkosigan was in much worse shape than average. To put it mildly. I suppose someone has to be better, to keep the average balanced."

  "She looks like something out of a fairy tale."

  "What," said m'lord, swinging one heel to tap upon a stool leg, "Snow White with just one dwarf?"

  Vorlynkin reddened, an I-didn't-say-that look in his eyes.

  M'lord snickered at him. "Now all we need is a prince."

  "So who's t' frog?" asked Roic, secretly glad not to be alone in his fanciful impressions.

  "Different fairy tale," m'lord told him kindly. "I hope."

  Raven switched tubing, and the clear fluid was replaced with dark red. The ice-woman look slowly changed, the skin tone shifting through faint pinkness like a chill spring to a warmer gold-ivory, as though she was receiving a transfusion of summer. At length, Raven closed the exit line draining from her leg, sealing vein and skin with plastic bandage. Raven and Tanaka fussed about with the leads and wires and the strange cap. "Clear," Raven called, looking up to be sure his amateur audience had stepped back. The snap of the electrical stimulus was quieter than Roic had expected, but still made him recoil.

  For the first time, the silent woman's chest rose, and her skin seemed suddenly not just pliable but alive. A few moments of uneven stuttering, while Tanaka watched their monitors and Raven stared narrow-eyed at his patient. His face was calm but his gloved hands, Roic noticed, were clenched. Then her lips parted on a longer indrawn breath, then another, and Raven's fists relaxed. Roic remembered to exhale before he disgraced himself by passing out, but only just.

  "Got it in one," said Raven, and shut down the external pump.

  M'lord's eyes squeezed closed in gratitude. Vorlynkin, transfixed, breathed, "That's astounding."

  "I just love this part," Raven confided, to the air generally as far as Roic could tell. "It makes me feel quite godlike. Or at least wizardly."

  M'lord's lips twitched. "Are you saying this is an ego-trip for you?"

  "The best ever," agreed Raven. "I live for these moments."

  "Always glad to see a man happy in his work," m'lord murmured.

  Raven circled his patient's body, tapping here and there with a stylus in a pattern Roic suspected was meaningful. And very old. "We have reflexes. Peripheral nerves are firing up nicely," he reported. He returned to her head, smoothing a stray strand of hair back from her forehead in a curiously tender gesture. "Madame Sato?" he called. "Lisa?"

  The eyelids fluttered, opened, squeezed shut. The lids bore the epicanthic folds of her Earth ancestry, the eyes the classic almond shape. The irises were a rich, dark brown, further reducing her resemblance to Lady Vorkosigan, whose eyes were a striking blue-gray.

  "Hearing's working," Raven murmured. "Grossly, at least." And, "Lisa?" he repeated. "Are you with us yet?"

  It could hardly be reassuring to the woman to open her eyes on a circle of masked faces, like bandits. Especially if the last thing she remembered were the faces of her all-but-murderers. Had they been leering? Coolly professional? Indifferent? But bandits indeed, stealing her will, her world, her life from her.

  Roic leaned in. In his best reassuring guardsman's tones, he tried, "Ma'am, you're all right. Safe and alive. Rescued. Your children are both safe and secure as well. You'll get to see them soon."

  Another fluttering of lids; a moan.

  "And larynx," said Raven happily. "That should please you, my Lord Auditor."

  "Indeed," said m'lord.

  She sighed again, the tension passing out of her.

  "She'll sleep for some hours, after this," said Raven. "The longer, the better."

  "We'll clean her up and move her to the isolation booth," said Medtech Tanaka. "Ako, you can help with the skin treatment."

  Tubes and needles were pulled away, lines coiled up, machines turned off. Roic helped shift the live woman off the procedure table onto the transfer cart. M'lord slid down from his stool, stretched his back, and leaned on his cane. "How soon till we can move her to the consulate?"

  "Depends on her white blood count, and a few other things," said Raven. "But possibly as early as the day after tomorrow. You'll have to keep her quiet in one of those upstairs bedrooms for a few days."

  "We can do that," said Vorlynkin.

  M'lord turned his head toward the consul. "Wait, why are you here? Has Leiber shown up?"

  "No, not yet. You have a sealed message from Barrayar that's arrived in the tight-room. We can't access it, so I don't know how urgent it may be." He added with reluctant honesty, "Also, I was curious how this was going. Given the need to deal with Mina and Jin." He didn't want to be blindsided again, Roic read this. Understandable.

  "Ah, all right," said m'lord. "Raven, if you're on top of things here, I guess I can go back."

  Raven waved assent and turned to follow the medtech and Ako, trundling his patient away. The room seemed very empty when they'd left, disconsolate and messy like the morning after a winter solstice party.

  Vorlynkin blinked and rolled his shoulders, as if trying to come back into himself from somewhere far away. "That was very strange. I've never seen anyone die, but this—it was like watching time run backwards. Or something."

  "I have, and yes," said m'lord.

  "Were we playing god?" Vorlynkin asked uneasily.

  "No more so than the people who put her down in the first place. And our cause is much more just." M'lord added in a mutter, "I hope." Frowning, he fished out his Auditor's seal on its chain for a slightly cross-eyed downward glance. "Sealed message, eh? You know, when I was Jin's age, I'd have been thrilled to own a secret decoder ring. Now I have one, it feels more like a sack of bricks. There's something sadly out of phase about that."

  When m'lord limped off to exchange one last word with Raven, Roic found himself briefly alone with the consul, who gazed in bemusement up the corridor after the short, retreating form. "Lord Vorkosigan is not exactly what I expected, when I was told the consulate should prepare for a visit from an Imperial Auditor."

  Roic, stoutly, didn't snicker. "The nine Imperial Auditors are actually a pretty varied lot, once you meet them. Lord Auditor Vorthys, who's also m'lady's uncle, looks like a rumpled old engineering professor because that's exactly what he is. There's this crusty admiral, a retired diplomat, an industrialist . . . ​m'lord's become more-or-less Gregor's galactic affairs expert. The Emperor's uncannily shrewd at matching his Auditors to their cases. Although I suppose we'll have to hit a dud one of these days, he hasn't sent us off-world on a fool's errand yet." Roic actually hoped for a dud case, someday. It could be restful.

  "That's reassuring." Vorlynkin hesitated. "I think."

  Roic smiled crookedly at the codicil. "Yeah."

  Back in the consulate's tight-room, Miles saw the address code on his message and relaxed. It looked to be the weekly report from Ekaterin, which explained why it didn't bear any of the usual urgent markers. Something nice, amid all this muddle. Reflecting on the difference between urgent and important, he leaned forward to let his Auditor's seal swing out on its chain, and unsealed the message.

  His wife's fac
e appeared, smiling, above the vid plate, and he paused the vid just to get a good look at her. She sailed through her days under such a constant barrage of interruptions, lately, he hardly ever saw her holding still unless she was sleeping. Clear blue-gray eyes raised in a candid gaze, sleek dark hair untouched by frost although she was his age plus a couple of months. Considering that he'd stuck her with four offspring in under six years, her lack of gray hairs seemed increasingly remarkable. They'd all been gestated in uterine replicators, but still. He'd been an only child himself, racked from birth by medical issues now not so much solved as exchanged for new ones. Perhaps—no, make that certainly—he'd underestimated how much work normal healthy children would take, even with all the help his money and position could buy. For there were some tasks you didn't want to delegate, because then you'd be missing the best parts.

  She was actually staring at a vid pick-up, not at him, he reminded himself, but under the weight of her faintly ironic look he set her back in motion, irrationally guilty at delaying her.

  "Greetings, my love," she said. "We've received your latest here with much relief and rejoicing, though fortunately I didn't tell the children about that first alarming message before the second had overtaken it. I shudder to think what your parents went through during your old career. Though I suppose your father kept his high-Vor upper lip suitably stiff, and your mother, well, I can scarcely imagine. Said tart Betan things, I suppose."

  Actually, he'd dodged those issues during his covert ops days by almost never sending any messages, or updates. It wasn't as if his father couldn't have demanded a report on his missions from the head of ImpSec any time he wanted one. Or nerved himself to it, he imagined his mother's voice remarking tartly.

  Ekaterin swung into a crisp recounting of a few Vorkosigan District matters, before the news from his household, always first things first—if ever she put matters the other way around, he'd know to be really alarmed for his family. He was reminded that he was neglecting duties down in the District, as well, although this week there did not seem to be anything that called for an urgent message to his—his father's, really—voting proxy in the Council of Counts. But both his parents were off tending to the Emperor's business on Sergyar, viceroy and vicereine respectively, and had been for some years.