Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Vorlynkin looked startled at this news. But when Mina’s anxious gaze targeted him, he returned her a flicker of a smile, the first Jin had seen lighten his face. Girls, hah. Nobody handed Jin smiles like that when he was scared… he more usually got some sort of unsympathetic and bracing advice to buck up.

  “Which reminds me, Vorlynkin,” Miles-san went on over his shoulder in a more clipped tone, “what are the limits of the political and legal protection this consulate can offer, once it becomes known that Madame Sato has, er, escaped custody, as it were? You’re not a full-scale embassy…”

  Vorlynkin said reluctantly, “By our budget, we’re a branch of the embassy on Escobar. But we’re legally more than a consulate, because we’re the only full-time diplomatic facility Barrayar maintains here. It would be… it could be an ambiguous argument.”

  “And ambiguous legal arguments burn lots of time, ah. That might just be good enough.” Miles-san rose to pace again.

  Mina sank back into her swivel chair, her expression caught between hopeful and confused. Jin realized he’d been gripping the arms of his own chair so hard his fingernails were white, and slowly released his clutch. Mina’s words whirled around and around in his head, You could get my mommy back? Really? Really? Really… ? Who did this half-sized galactic think he was? When he’d said he was a delegate to the cryo-conference, but didn’t seem to be a doctor, and the others had all called him an auditor, Jin had vaguely assumed his job had something to do with insurance. Or maybe, less boringly, insurance fraud. He seemed to know a lot about fraud, anyway.

  “First things first. Johannes, what vehicles does the consulate maintain?”

  Johannes jerked, as if he’d been a watcher of a play unexpectedly addressed by one of the characters. “Uh, the official groundcar, of course. And we have a lift van. I have a float bike, myself.”

  “Lift van, perfect. Tomorrow, then, we’ll take Jin and Raven and go pick up Jin’s creatures, and bring them back here to the consulate, so that’ll be off his mind and my conscience.”

  Jin looked up, caught between thrilled and bewildered. Didn’t these Barrayarans mean to let him go… ? On the other hand, as long as he had his animals back, and didn’t have to go back to Aunt Lorna and school, did it matter where he stayed?

  “My consulate isn’t exactly set up to host a menagerie,” said Vorlynkin.

  “No, they’ll be fine here!” Jin assured him, panicked at the thought of being separated yet again from all his pets. “There’s so much room. And your back garden is all walled in. They won’t bother you a bit.”

  “What kind of—no, never mind. Go on, Lord Vorkosigan.”

  “At the same time, I will take Raven to meet Suze and company, and inspect the facilities. We might avoid having to retool the consulate laundry room into a cryo revival facility—” though he did not sound as if this proposed renovation gave him much pause “—if, like the installation we saw today, her old place already has one. And it’s still in good shape, not stripped.”

  Jin said doubtfully, “If you want any favors from Suze-san, you better catch her early in the day. When she’s still sober.”

  “Not a problem,” Miles-san said. “Then, if everything proves workable, we can go on to the next step.”

  “What is the next step?” asked Consul Vorlynkin, in fascinated tones. He looked like a man staring at a groundcar wreck. In slow motion. That he was in.

  “Securing Madame Sato.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to have to do a spot more research first, to devise the optimum ploy. According to the public records, she’s being kept at the NewEgypt facility out in the Cryopolis here in Northbridge, which is actually pretty convenient.” Miles-san’s lips drew back on a peculiar grin. “It could be just like old times.”

  Armsman Roic sat up in alarm. He put in, with some urgency, “What about those commodified contracts Ron Wing was going on about? Maybe you could work out a way to just, I dunno, buy her. All peaceable and aboveboard.” He added after a moment, “Or under the table, but peaceable, anyway.”

  Miles-san paused again in his pacing, as if arrested by this notion. “Shrewd idea, Roic. But she’s not just any cryo-patron. I suspect that any interest in her is likely to send up a big red flag.” He fell into motion again. “Still, hold that thought. It might be useful later, for the retroactive tidying up.”

  Roic sighed.

  “The ideal,” Miles-san went on, “would be to arrange things so that she wasn’t missed at all.”

  “These commercial cryochambers are all continuously monitored,” said Raven-sensei. “You’d need some way to fudge the readouts.” He hesitated. “Or go low tech, and just swap in another cryo-corpse. That way, all the readings would be naturally right. They wouldn’t know the difference unless they pulled it out and unwrapped it.”

  Miles-san tilted his head, like Gyre the Falcon contemplating a choice morsel of meat. “The old shell game, eh? That… might actually be highly feasible. I wonder if I could borrow a spare from Suze? God knows, cryo-corpses are not an item in short supply around here.”

  Vorlynkin choked. “Do you have any idea how many different crimes you’ve just rattled off?”

  “No, but it might not hurt to make up a list, should your lawyer need it. Could speed things up, in a pinch.”

  “I thought the task of an Imperial Auditor was to uphold the law!”

  Miles-san’s eyebrows flew up. “No, whatever gave you that idea? The task of an Imperial Auditor is to solve problems for Gregor. Those greasy cryocorps bastards just tried to steal a third of his empire. That’s a problem.” Despite his smiling lips, Miles-san’s eyes glittered, and Jin realized with a start that underneath, he was really angry about something. “I’m still considering the solution.”

  Jin wondered who Gregor was. Miles-san’s insurance boss?

  Mina had scrunched her chair closer and closer to where Jin rocked in his. An audible sniffle escaped her, which made both Miles-san and Vorlynkin crank their heads around. Miles-san lurched and lifted a hand toward her, stopped short, and gestured at Jin instead, who, thus compelled, gave his sister a clumsy pat on the shoulder that only made her eyes fill up and overflow for real.

  “Lord Vorkosigan, for pity’s sake, enough for tonight,” said Consul Vorlynkin. “These children have to be exhausted. Both of them.”

  Jin could wish he hadn’t added that last. His eyes stung in contagion with Mina’s. Now he was offered it, Jin wasn’t so sure he wanted sympathy—it eroded his resolve as annoying bracing remarks never did.

  “To be sure,” said Miles-san immediately. “Baths, I think, and we can give them both Roic’s room. He can bunk in with me. I expect some clean T-shirts would do for nightclothes. Toothbrushes?”

  Miles-san and Vorlynkin arguing, Jin discovered, were not nearly so daunting as the pair of them united in sudden agreement. The ordinary business of bedtime blocked further tears. Jin expected Mina found the consulate house stranger than he did. He’d slept in parks, after all, and in all sorts of odd crannies at Suze-san’s. Vorlynkin even donated a fancy sonic toothbrush, though Jin and Mina had then to share it, with a trip through its sterilizing holder between customers.

  At last they were tucked up in clean sheets in a warm, quiet room. Jin waited for the door to softly shut, and the grownups’ feet to clump away back downstairs, before wriggling up and switching on the bedside lamp. Mina threw back her covers and helped him extract Lady Murasaki’s box from her backpack. She watched closely as Jin opened the lid to give their pet a breath of fresh air, and helped by tossing in one of the little powdery beige moths they’d collected earlier, while Jin’s fingers blocked the prisoner from escaping. He set the plastic box back on the table between their beds.

  “Is she going to eat it?” Mina asked, peering through the lid.

  “I’m not sure. She might only go for live prey.”

  Mina frowned thoughtfully. “They have that big garden out back. I bet we could catch
more bugs tomorrow.”

  A reassuring notion. Jin lay back down and pulled up his sheets, and Mina reached to turn out the lamp again before any betraying line of light showed under the bedroom door.

  After a while, Mina’s whisper came out of the dark: “Do you really think your galactic can get Mommy back? No one else ever could.”

  Had anyone else even tried? Jin didn’t know. Miles-san, all dapper and alert and concentrated and never sitting still, was proving an alarming acquaintance. Jin wasn’t sure but what he’d liked the grubby lost druggie better. Jin had a disconcerting feeling of having set a force in motion that he could not now stop, which wasn’t made better by not even knowing whether he wanted to.

  “I don’t know, Mina,” he said at last. “Be quiet and go to sleep.” He rolled over and hid from it all under his covers.

  Roic followed Consul Vorlynkin into the tight-room, where m’lord was already deeply involved with the comconsole, Johannes at his side, Raven leaning over and kibitzing. They all seemed to be examining some engineering schematics for the NewEgypt facility, pulled up from God knew where. Roic was relieved m’lord had finally decided to involve Johannes, if only by necessity. Backup at last! Inexperienced, but not untrained, and judging from his wide eyes it looked as if he was getting a tutorial in covert ops that would have done his ImpSec instructors proud.

  M’lord wheeled in his station chair to take in the new arrivals. “Ah, Vorlynkin, good. Your clerk, Matson—he’ll be back to work in the morning, right?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think we can keep those kids quiet enough to hide them from him in a house this small. He’ll have to be told they are protected witnesses, in some danger. That should be enough to settle him.”

  “Is it true?” said Vorlynkin.

  “How did someone so reluctant to tell lies become a diplomat? By the way, I can’t believe, with all your training, that you failed to admire Miss Sato’s blisters. What is it about this universal female conviction that medical conditions make one interesting? Judging from my daughter Helen, it starts younger than I would have believed possible.”

  “About the danger,” said Vorlynkin, winning Roic’s admiration by refusing to be drawn into m’lord’s flight of fancy. Judging from the brightness of his eyes, m’lord was as over-stimulated right now as his own kids after one of his bedtime stories, right enough. “Is it real? Because it’s unconscionable to keep those children from their guardians otherwise.”

  M’lord sobered. “Perhaps. This is an investigation, which means that not all leads pan out. Or otherwise one wouldn’t need to investigate. But I shouldn’t think Lisa Sato would have been removed in that brutal and effective way for any trivial reason. Which means waking her up could actually increase their hazard…” He tapped his lips, considering this. “I suspect Jin misjudges his aunt and uncle, actually. They may not merely lack the resources to fight the good fight for their kinswoman. They may be seriously intimidated.”

  “Hm,” said Vorlynkin.

  Roic’s own conviction was that as soon as that poor frozen woman had intersected m’lord’s orbit, this chain of events had become inevitable. Worse than dangling a string in front of a cat, it was. He likely shouldn’t explain this to Vorlynkin; an armsman was supposed to be loyal in thought, word, and deed. But not blind…

  “But if Jin and Mina were your children, would you want some off-worlder as good as kidnapping them to use for his own purposes?” Vorlynkin persisted. “No matter how well-intentioned?”

  “In my defense, I must point out, they turned up here on their own, but—if I were dead, my widow frozen, my children fallen into the hands of people either unwilling or incapable of helping them? I doubt I would care where the man came from who could reunite them with Ekaterin. I’d shower all my posthumous blessings upon him.” M’lord wheeled around and drummed his fingers on the comconsole counter. “Poor Jin! He makes me think about my missing grandmother, actually.”

  “Missing grandmother?” said Raven, leaning back against the counter. “I didn’t know you had any.”

  “Most people have two—not you, of course. My Betan grandmother is alive and well and opinionated to this day, in fact. If you ever meet her, you’ll understand a whole lot more about my mother. No, it’s a Barrayaran tale, the fate of Princess-and-Countess Olivia Vorbarra Vorkosigan.”

  “Then delightfully bloody, I daresay.” Raven’s sweeping hand gesture invited m’lord to go on, not that he needed any encouragement. Johannes, too, was listening in apparent fascination.

  “Very. If you’d learned your Barrayaran history, not that you would be expected to, you’d know that once upon a time—all the best stories start that way, you realize—that once upon a time, the death squads of Mad Emperor Yuri attempted to erase most of my family, thereby triggering the civil war that ended, eventually, in Yuri’s dismemberment. So many people wanted a piece of him by then, they were forced to share, y’see. The death squad shot my grandmother in front of my father, messily. He was eleven at the time, which is part of why Jin keeps reminding me of it.

  “But you see… for all the horrors of that day, and of the war that followed it, nobody, I’m not sure how to put this, nobody denied my father his experience. Jin’s mother was just as abruptly and unjustly taken from him, but he’s not been permitted his grief. No funeral, no mourning, no protest, even. No revenge—certainly not whatever satisfaction there might be of knowing she was escorted down into death by a procession of her enemies. For Jin and Mina, there’s just… silence. Frozen silence.”

  A rather frozen silence followed this, among the Barrayarans in the room.

  Vorlynkin cleared his throat, leaned on his hand, stared into the comconsole. “So. Lord Auditor. And, um… just how are we planning to give this woman her voice back… ?”

  Chapter Ten

  “Don’t land on the chickens,” Jin said, leaning anxiously over the back of the seat between Johannes, who was flying the lift van, and Miles, occupying the passenger side.

  Johannes grimaced and eased the lift van forward under the canopy of Jin’s rooftop refuge, then paused again while Jin leaped out to pull the cafe table out of the way, glance underneath the van, look relieved, and motion Johannes forward. As Johannes gingerly set them down atop the roof, a woman at the back of the tent-room stood hands-on-hips, watching them in suspicion, though she smiled briefly as Jin danced up to her. The whine of the van’s engines went silent.

  “Ah, Ako, good, she’s been faithful,” said Miles, and slid open his door. “The rest of you wait here till I signal,” he added over his shoulder. “We don’t want to stampede the poor woman.” Or look like a clown car, he did not add aloud. Johannes and Raven nodded silently; Roic’s disapproving frown at Miles seizing point-man position might as well have been audible.

  Ako was evidently attempting to feed Gyre; she wore heavy oven mitts and brandished a long fork with a fragment of raw meat fluttering from it. As she gestured to Jin, the bird stretched forward and snatched the slithery morsel, twisting its head and gulping it down. Ako jumped. “He bites, you know,” she said to Jin, almost apologetically.

  “Not very hard,” said Jin.

  “I needed antibiotic salve and plastic bandages the first time, thank you very much. I’ll allow the bird didn’t actually take off a finger.” She put her hands on her hips again and stared hard at Miles. “So you’re back! You gave me quite a turn, sneaking up in that van.”

  Miles hoped their sneaking had been successful. Though not hidden from more sophisticated scanners, at least the tent roof concealed their activities from casual observation, in this level morning light. Discreet, if not secret.

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back, and was wondering what to do with all these animals. But you found Jin after all!” She had nearly decided, Miles read in her eyes, that he’d dodged off without any intention of finding Jin.

  “We were both unavoidably delayed,” Miles said. “Jin actually fou
nd me, but in any case, we’re reunited. Thank you so much for looking after his creatures. They mean the world to him.”

  She sniffed, not displeased with some recognition of her efforts. “I know.”

  Jin returned from taking a rapid inventory of his menagerie, including counting his chickens. “Miles-san is going to take me and all my creatures away to, to his place. For a while,” he told Ako.

  Her brows tightened. “Yah?”

  “Yes, and I need to speak to Madame Suze about that,” Miles said. Ako looked marginally appeased at this indication of aboveboard-ness. “Tenbury told me you are something of an apprentice to the plant medtech?” Miles would be meeting her again soon, if things went as he hoped. Best to placate her.

  Ako went wary. “I help her clean and things. In the infirmary.”

  “Just so.” Miles motioned to the van; the rest of his entourage piled out.

  Miles was relieved of the problem of introductions by Jin taking them over, possibly more reassuringly than Miles could have: “This is Raven-sensei, he’s a friend from Escobar, this is Roic-san, he works for Miles-san, this is Lieutenant Johannes, he’s all right.”

  Ako bent and whispered, “Jin, they’re not policemen, are they? You should know better—”

  “Naw, they’re Barrayarans. Galactics.”

  Ako bit her lip, but seemed to accept this provisional guarantee. She watched as they sorted themselves out, Johannes and Roic to stay with the van till Jin got back to supervise loading it, Raven and Jin to accompany Miles.