Cryoburn

by Lois M. Bujold

  "Yes?" said Miles. "I knew that."

  Vorlynkin's diplomatic tones grew notably strained. "How the devil-sir!-did you come to involve a child like that in your affairs-whatever they are?"

  "He's eleven," said Miles.

  "Eleven! Worse and worse!"

  "When my father was eleven," said Miles reasonably, "he became aide-de-camp to the general-my-grandfather in a full-scale civil war. By age thirteen he'd helped to bring down an emperor. I didn't figure an afternoon's jaunt across his home town and back-on a peaceful planet at that-to be beyond Jin's capacity." Yet apparently, he'd figured wrong. Miles winced inside. He hadn't thought through the implications of Jin's runaway status in a heavily monitored place like this, even while picking his own route to avoid notice as a matter of routine. The boy would be frantic for his animals by now, and that was the least of it. "My mistake to fix, then. I don't abandon my people if I can help it. We'll just have to retrieve him."

  Vorlynkin's jaw dropped. "He's a minor child. How? We have no rights to him!"

  "He was carrying all our petty cash, too," put in Johannes. "I'd have gone after that myself, but I had no way to prove it was ours." He frowned at Miles, the exactly as you directed complaint implied.

  Well, there's always your ping tracer, but before Miles could voice the thought, Vorlynkin went on.

  "If your underage courier talks, I expect the Northbridge police will be calling us. With some very hard-to-answer questions."

  Miles paused, alert. "Have they?"

  "No. Not yet."

  And if they didn't call, it would imply Jin had kept his mouth shut, and under conditions that had to be quite frightening to him. "That's . . . ​interesting."

  "Where did you pick up that boy, my lord?" said Vorlynkin.

  "Actually, he found me. On the street, more or less." Miles did some rapid internal editing. He had, after all, given Suze his tacit word not to reveal her lair in exchange for information, and he had certainly received information, even if he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with it yet. "You read my note to you, right?"

  Vorlynkin nodded.

  "Well, as I said, the drug the kidnappers tried to sedate me with triggered manic hallucinations instead, and I ended up lost in the Cryocombs." No need to say for how long; the situation was certainly elastic enough to cover the missing day he'd spent with Jin and company. "When I came to my senses and found my way out, I was still a bit paranoid about my kidnappers finding me again, and too exhausted to go on. Jin kindly helped me, and I owe him."

  Vorlynkin stared at Miles very hard. "Are you saying you weren't in your right mind?"

  "That might actually be a good explanation, should one be needed. Does this consulate keep a local lawyer?"

  "On retainer, yes."

  Standard practice. Can you trust him or her to keep our secrets? was a question Miles wasn't ready to ask out loud quite yet. "Good. As soon as possible, contact the lawyer and find out what we can do to get Jin back." He held out his mug for more tea; Yuuichi, the clerk, politely filled it. Miles's hand was shaking with fatigue, but he managed not to spill tea on the way to his lips. "Shower's as good as three hours of sleep. Shower first, and then the comconsole, if you please."

  "Shouldn't you rest, my lord?" said Vorlynkin.

  Miles choked back an impulse to scream, Don't argue with me! which was a pretty good indicator that, yes, he damn well should rest, but there were a few key things that he had to know, first. "Later," he said, then conceded, "Soon."

  After a moment, he added reluctantly, "You'd better let the Northbridge police know I escaped, was lost in the Cryocombs, and came back to the consulate on my own-I don't want them to waste their resources hunting me. You can tell them I'm uninjured but extremely fatigued, and am resting here. They can send someone to take a statement from me tomorrow, if they need one. Don't mention Jin unless they ask. If anyone else inquires after me . . . ​check with me."

  This won another hard stare from Vorlynkin, but he only nodded.

  Johannes led Miles upstairs to the sleeping quarters-it appeared that the two Barrayaran bachelors saved on rent by living on the premises-and the consulate personnel scored about a million points with Miles by providing his very own clothes and gear, retrieved along with Roic's from their hotel room after the kidnappings. Johannes eyed the Auditor's own secured communications equipment-ImpSec's best-with due respect, when handing it over. The personal belongings the kidnappers had stripped from Miles were still in the hands of the police, found discarded in a downtown alley and retained as evidence, except for his Auditor's seal, which Vorlynkin had managed to pry back from them with, Miles gathered, some vigorous diplomatic persuasion.

  Half an hour later-washed, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes-Miles had Johannes lead him down to the consulate's basement communications tight-room, such as it was, and settle him before a secured comconsole. Miles stretched his back and spread his fingers, then entered his first search term: Lisa Sato.

  "Who's that?" asked Johannes, looming over his shoulder.

  "Jin Sato's mother."

  "Is she important?"

  "Someone thought so, Lieutenant. Someone definitely thought so." As the vid plate flickered, Miles bent to the data stream.

  Chapter Six

  A brief conversation with m'lord over the comconsole at Northbridge police headquarters, once the rescued delegates arrived there, relieved Roic of his worst nightmare, that of losing the little gi-m'lord. New curiosities thronged to take its place. Why was m'lord insisting that Roic bring Dr. Durona along?

  "Actually, I'd planned to return to the conference hotel and collect my luggage," Raven interpolated, leaning into the vid pick-up.

  "See me first," m'lord replied.

  "I'll miss my jumpship."

  "There's one every day. In fact, don't reschedule your berth yet."

  Raven's black brows flicked up. "My time is money."

  "I'll keep that in mind."

  Raven shrugged amiably at m'lord's very dry tone, and followed Roic, both scuffing along in the paper slippers their hosts had provided while waiting for their stolen shoes to surface.

  It was midafternoon when the police at last dropped Roic and his bemused companion off at the consulate. The four‑square house seemed unduly modest, in Roic's view, though he supposed that upholding the dignity of the Imperium at this distance was costly enough. It did look as though it might provide a shower and a place to nap, Roic's two biggest remaining wants since the police had provided the freed captives with a meal, or at least as many ration bars as anyone would want to eat. High in protein and vitamins, tasting like chocolate-coated putty with kitty litter-some horrors were universal, it seemed.

  Roic stifled his wish for a wash-up and had Lieutenant Johannes guide them directly to m'lord, already ensconced like an invasive spider in the consulate's communications tight-room. In most planetary embassies that Roic had visited in m'lord's wake, the tight-room seemed the secret nerve center of the embassy's affairs, hushed and urgent. Here, it felt more like someone's leftover basement hobby room-for some very odd hobbies-retrofitted in high tech.

  M'lord swiveled in his station chair and waved Roic and Raven to seats, dismissing Johannes with a "Thank you, Lieutenant." Johannes, looking as though he longed to stay and eavesdrop, nodded and dutifully withdrew, closing the door with that muffled thump that betokened a good sound seal. Roic ignored the faint serial-killer ambiance of the windowless chamber, and tried to appreciate that here at last one might enjoy a truly private conversation.

  "Are you two all right?" A perfunctory inquiry; m'lord didn't even wait for Raven's nod and Roic's grunt before continuing, "Tell me everything that happened to you. And yes, I want all the details."

  M'lord listened, brows tightening, as the full tale of the kidnapping and rescue unwound, rewarding the tellers at the end with a mere, "Huh." He added to Raven, "I'm glad you're all right. I shouldn't have liked to explain your loss to your clone-sib
lings, or mine. I'd actually thought the Durona Group would send your sister Rowan."

  "No, she's much too busy these days for off-planet jaunts," said Raven. "She's our department head for Cryonics-we have over five hundred employees, between our clinical services, research, and administrative overhead. And she and that Escobaran medtech she married plan to pop their second kid from the uterine replicator any day now."

  "Not cloned, eh?"

  "No, it was all done the old-fashioned way, an egg and a sperm in a test tube. They didn't even go for any genetic mods, beyond the routine check for defects, of course."

  "Of course," murmured m'lord, without comment. "So good old Lily Durona is a real grandmother, now-or aunt, depending on how you look at it. She continues in good health for her age, I trust?"

  "Very much so."

  "Interesting."

  Raven tugged absently on his frazzled braid, laid over his shoulder, and continued, "As a department head, Rowan says she misses the hands-on surgical work. She hardly gets to do two revivals a week, these days. I do two to six a day, depending on complications. Nothing as complicated as you were-you took Rowan, me, and two shifts of medtechs eighteen hours straight, back in the day."

  "You did good work."

  "Thank you." Raven nodded in what seemed to Roic rather smug satisfaction.

  "Give Rowan my best, when you see her."

  "Oh, yeah, she said to say hi to you, too."

  This won an oddly ironic look, and a return nod.

  "I take it," put in Roic, "that Dr. Durona, here, wasn't at the conference by chance?"

  "Indeed, not. I'd asked the Durona Group to supply me with an independent technical evaluation of the cryo-conference, and whatever turned up at it."

  "The Group had actually received the conference's call for presentations well before you asked, Lord Vorkosigan. We were going to send one of our junior residents-this place is not without interest to us, actually."

  "And have you observed anything of special note so far? Technically." M'lord leaned back in his station chair and steepled his fingers, giving Raven a judicious stare.

  "Nothing new to us on the technical side. I did notice that they seemed more interested in freezing people than thawing them."

  "Yes, the cryocorps are plainly playing numbers games with their customers'-patrons, they call 'em-proxy votes."

  "It's a game they've won, from the sound of things."

  M'lord nodded. "It was barely discussed at the conference, yet there seems to be plenty of debate on the subject outside. In the streets and elsewhere."

  Raven put in, "The N.H.L.L. were sure complaining vigorously."

  "Yeah, but not very effectively," said Roic. "Loons like that are their own worst advertisement."

  "Does it strike you both as a pretty free debate, as such things go? Noisy?"

  "Well, yes," said Raven. "Not as noisy as Escobaran politics."

  "Noisier than Barrayar, though," Roic said.

  "Much noisier than Jackson's Whole," Raven granted, with a twisted grin.

  "That's not politics, that's predators versus prey," muttered m'lord. But he went on: "Well, thanks to the N.H.L.L., I had a very useful two days. Now that you're both back alive, I suppose I can afford to be grateful to them."

  "New answers?" asked Roic, with a sapient eyebrow-lift.

  "Better. A whole raft of new questions."

  And m'lord promptly topped-of course-Roic's tale with a hair-curling story of the appalling extent of the Cryocombs beneath the city, and of how m'lord had stumbled on a bootleg freezing operation run by, apparently, Kibou street geezers. Raven seemed less impressed by the bootleg cryonics-he was Jacksonian, after all. As near as Roic could tell, everything on Jackson's Whole was done illegally. Or, more precisely, lawlessly.

  "Fragile and doomed," was Raven's succinct opinion of Madame Suze's on-going operation. "I'm astonished she's gotten away with so much for so long."

  "Mm, maybe not. It's clandestine, but it doesn't really rock the cryocorps' boat. Everyone here being in the same boat, after all." M'lord rubbed his chin and squinted red-rimmed eyes that glinted a trifle too brightly. "Then we come to this woman Lisa Sato, and her group."

  "Your little zookeeper's frozen mama?" said Roic.

  "Yep. The N.H.L.L. is allowed to run its length, Suze's operation is overlooked, but Sato's seemingly much more reasonable and legal group is broken up, at considerable trouble and expense. All that ambient noise, and yet only one voice is silenced." M'lord gestured to the secured comconsole, now dark. "I've spent the past several hours doing some digging-"

  And as a former ImpSec galactic operative, this sort of digging was meat and drink to m'lord, Roic reflected.

  "-and in just that time, I've turned up anomalies galore. Lisa Sato was not the only member of her group to come to a bad end. Two others were frozen after supposedly-unsuccessful treatments for medical conditions that should not have been fatal, another died in an accident, and yet another was ruled a suicide of the fell-or-jumped sort. Even at the time, brows were raised, and quite a few people were offended, but the aftershocks were drowned out in the news by a flood of trivial sex scandals. What does this suggest to you?"

  "That Lisa Sato's group was getting ready to rock somebody's boat pretty hard," said Roic slowly.

  Raven nodded concurrence. "How?"

  "That, interestingly, does not turn up in the public record. Nor even in the less-public records. Somebody did a first-class job on the cleanup, there, even if they weren't able to make it completely invisible. That now heads my list of shiny new questions-just what got cleaned up, a year and a half ago?"

  Roic frowned. "Very riveting, m'lord, but . . . ​what has this got t' do with Barrayar's interests?"

  M'lord cleared his throat. "It is far too early to say," he said primly.

  Roic, glumly, read that as, I haven't made up a reason yet, but give me time. Was m'lord going all quixotic on account of that orphan boy? Emperor Gregor himself had warned Roic about m'lord's tendency to expensive knight-errantry, in one of their rare private conversations. From the Imperial sigh that had accompanied this, it had been unclear if Gregor actually expected Roic to restrain m'lord, or not.

  The door hissed open, and Consul Vorlynkin stuck his head through. "I've heard back from the lawyer, Lord Vorkosigan."

  "Ah, good!" M'lord waved him in; he stood, seeming a bit wary. "What's the word on Jin?"

  "As I thought, there is nothing we can legally do. If he were an orphan without kin, you could apply for custody of him, but it would take some months and almost certainly be rejected by the Northbridge courts, especially if there was any hint of taking him off-planet."

  "I didn't ask to adopt him, Vorlynkin. Just rescue him from the police."

  "In any case, my Lord Auditor, it's become moot-the police have already turned the boy over to his blood-kin, an aunt who is in fact his present legal guardian."

  "Damn!" M'lord slumped. "Damn. I hope Ako proves a more faithful zookeeper than I did."

  "Well, it's not as if we could kidnap him," said Vorlynkin, with a faint smile. M'lord eyed him. Perhaps thinking better of this mild venture into humor, Vorlynkin cleared his throat and went back to looking bland. Roic wondered if he should take Vorlynkin aside later and warn him not to say things like that around m'lord, and not because the Lord Auditor might take offense.

  Roic rubbed sandy eyelids. "Perhaps you'd best sleep on it, m'lord," he suggested, not without self-interest. M'lord had plainly had the advantage of a shower and fresh clothes, but still looked as if he'd been up all night, as had they all. And the shiny glitter in his eyes was a tip-off. "Have you checked your neurotransmitter levels since you got back?" The elevation of same being early warning of an impending seizure, and signal it was time to use the medical seizure-stimulator to short-circuit the fit-in some safe and controlled place.

  M'lord addressed an unrevealing mutter to his shoes.

  "Right," said Roic, in a very firm
tone.

  M'lord sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, yeah."

  "Can I go back to my hotel now?" asked Raven hopefully.

  "Yes, but stay in touch. In fact-Vorlynkin, please issue Dr. Durona a secured wristcom before he goes, eh?"

  Vorlynkin's brows rose, but he said only, "Yes, my lord."

  "I need more data," m'lord growled, to no one in particular. He looked up appraisingly at the consul. "All right, Vorlynkin. If WhiteChrys or any of our other late hosts call to inquire after me, I want you to tell them that I am very upset by the disruption of the conference and the kidnapping of my armsman. In fact, I'm furious, and as soon as I recover from my ordeal I plan to stalk home and give a very bad report of the affair to anyone who will listen, starting with Emperor Gregor."

  "Er . . . ​and are you?" asked Vorlynkin, sounding nonplussed.

  M'lord returned only an unreassuring grin. "I want you to test how far they'll go to reopen their lines of communication. Indicate you'll do your diplomatic best to calm me down, but you're not sure it can be done. If they offer you incentives for the task, take them up."

  "You . . . ​want me to accept a bribe, sir?" A little real offense tightened Vorlynkin's jaw, as well as understandable alarm.

  "Well, at least pretend to consider it, eh? It will show us who wants what, and how badly. If they don't come through, I'll have to think of another move, but if you're a tolerably good fisherman, I think you can hook them for me."

  "I'll, um . . . ​try my best, sir." Vorlynkin didn't exactly stare at the Lord Auditor as if the little man had sprouted two heads, but Roic could almost see the consul scrambling to keep pace. Yeah, welcome to my world.

  The debriefing broke up.

  The consulate harbored two spare bedrooms upstairs fitted out for guests, not much used for the purpose and slowly filling with assorted storage. One had been hastily cleared for the Lord Auditor. Roic turned down the bed and rummaged in m'lord's luggage for the seizure stimulator. M'lord stripped to his underwear, sat on the bed, and eyed the medical device with loathing.