Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “I should come with you,” Roic muttered to Miles’s ear.

  “These people are justifiably nervous of outsiders. I won’t get what I want if we hit them en masse, and you’re en masse all by yourself.” Miles tapped his wristcom. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Roic returned him The Sigh, familiar shorthand for the usual argument. Miles let Jin lead him and Raven off down the exchanger tower. Ako trailed as far as the kitchen, where Miles prudently detoured to grab a carafe of coffee and some cups. She stared after them as they trod away toward the stairs to Suze’s suite.

  As they waited for an answer to Miles’s knock, he turned his head and said to Jin, “I had better pitch this to her in my own way. I’ll let you know when you can chime in.”

  Jin, shifting from foot to foot, gulped and nodded.

  A slow shuffle from within heralded the door opening a crack. Suze’s bleary eye peered out. “You again!” she said. “I thought we were well rid of you.” She squinted at Jin. “Of both of you.” The eye traveled on to Raven. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Raven Durona, from Escobar,” Raven answered readily. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “He’s a friend,” Miles said. “As in, Pass, friend.” He brandished the carafe. “May we come in?”

  “Eh…” Reluctantly, but with her one open eye on the carafe, Suze gave way. She wore the same loose black garments as before; she probably slept in them. Her inner chamber had the same close geriatric smell. She went to her window and set the polarization to admit a grudging shade more morning, and waved Miles, and his carafe, cups, and followers, to her battered seats.

  “You found your wallet, I see,” she said, settling across from them. At Miles’s gesture, Jin hastened to distribute coffee.

  “Yes, and my luggage and my friends. I’m back in business.”

  “And just what is your business? Thank you, Jin.”

  “I’m an investigator, of a sort.”

  Suze’s cup halted on its way to her lips. Her seamed face set in stiff panic.

  “Not for any authority on Kibou, however,” Miles added.

  “Insurance fraud,” Jin put in, in hasty reassurance. “He’s not a policeman. Or a doctor or a lawyer, even though he went to that conference. Raven-sensei’s the doctor.”

  Miles’s eyebrows went up at this description of himself. Clearly, at some point he was going to have to take the boy aside and explain Imperial Auditor to him in greater detail, but perhaps this would do for now. “Not precisely, but close enough. As it happens, the powers-that-be on Kibou are the subject of my inquiries, not its sponsors. I have no interest whatsoever in shutting down your operation. I’d actually like to make use of your facilities. I may be able to make it worth your time.”

  Suze’s eyes narrowed over her coffee cup; she finally drank. “We get by here because we don’t draw anyone’s attention.”

  “I don’t wish to draw attention, either.”

  Suze sat back, leathery lips pursing. “You want someone illegally frozen? Hoping you can bribe me into storing the body for you?” Her tone was remarkably neutral, neither leading nor guiding.

  Her suggestion came up far too readily—ye gods, had Suze ever provided such services, perhaps for the local underworld? Did Kibou-daini have an underworld? Aside from the literal one he’d been lost in, that is. Could this be the source of some of her protection? Because crime lords would want to cheat death, too. Though you’d think they could afford their own private arrangements—still, they would need benefits to distribute to lesser followers. And for the discreet disposal of enemies, those ranks of anonymous drawers downstairs would certainly trump lead weights and a swim in the nearest river. It would even render murder reversible, if one had been too hasty in one’s crime-lordly commands, or otherwise made a mistake. Man, if I wanted to hide a body on Kibou… Miles wrenched his mind from this fascinating side-path. “Have you done such favors before?” he asked cautiously.

  Suze shrugged, her alarm giving way to dry amusement in the face of his consternation. “If I had, would I tell you?”

  “I have no need to know,” Miles assured her. Want to know yes, but then, he wanted to know everything. “My need is quite the reverse. We wish to do a private cryorevival. Which requires proper facilities. And discretion. You may be able to lend us both.”

  This took her aback. Her jaw worked, and she covered her confusion with another swallow of coffee, then grimaced. “Jin, fetch my medicine out of the cupboard,” she commanded. Jin leapt up, rummaged for the square bottle, and brought it to her. At her gesture, he also uncapped and poured—scantly, both Miles and, he thought, Suze noted, but she didn’t complain as the boy settled once more. “Cryorevival! How?”

  “Dr. Durona, here, is a noted cryorevival specialist. If your facilities meet his specs, we’d like to, as it were, rent them.”

  A long pause. “How much?” Suze said at last.

  “I thought I’d offer you something your money can’t buy. In exchange for letting us revive our, um, patron—and for the discretion, of course—Raven will throw in a top-class revival for any other candidate of your choice.”

  Suze’s jaw unhinged. She sank back in her chair. And after a moment breathed, “You devil.”

  Money would have worked, Miles thought. But some things worked better.

  Suze jerked her head toward Raven. “Just how good is he?”

  For answer, Miles unbuttoned his gray tunic and white shirt. “This”—his hand traced the spider web of pale scars—“was a needle-grenade, very well aimed, at close range. Ten years ago. Raven did my revival.” Assisted at, strictly speaking, but Raven had acquired a decade’s more experience and seniority since then. “I guarantee, as a medical challenge nothing that you have downstairs can compare.”

  Suze looked away as he buttoned up again. “Old age,” she said, “is slower than a grenade, but a lot more thorough.”

  “This is unfortunately true,” said Raven, “though I may have a few aids for that as well. What I would suggest is that Madame Suze, here, draw up a list of half a dozen or so candidates, and let me triage them for the maximum chance of medical success. This should produce the most satisfactory result all round.”

  “Mm,” she said. Her hand crept up and rubbed her chest, over her heart. “Hm.”

  Jin, unable to contain himself any longer, burst out, “Please, Suze-san! Let them!”

  The caterpillar eyebrows climbed. “What’s it to you, boy?”

  Jin pressed his lips together and looked imploringly at Miles.

  “Are you sure you want to know?” Miles inquired.

  Suze was shrewd enough to hesitate a long moment before her curiosity overcame her better judgment. “Yah.”

  Miles opened his hand to Jin, who cried, “Miles-san promised to get my mother back!”

  Suze’s face pinched in horror. “Oh, and you think you aren’t going to draw attention, mister galactic investigator? Lisa Sato was all about attention!”

  “We may draw some eventually, but not to you,” Miles said smoothly. “As soon as her recovery permits, we’ll remove her to the Barrayaran consulate and reunite her with both her children. No link to this place.”

  “You think so? Those that froze her will sure enough want to find out who unfroze her! Which will drop them right back in my lap, which isn’t big enough to hold them, I promise you!”

  “Yes, but the first thing they’ll run into is me. I plan…” Miles hesitated. He didn’t exactly have a plan, yet. More of a stab in the dark. He still wasn’t sure what his blade would connect with…

  “What?” demanded Suze.

  “I plan to give them other worries.” He glanced at Raven. “Much depends on Madame Sato, both on what she has to say and how soon she can say it. I had rather severe cryo-amnesia, myself. Which lingered uncomfortably.”

  “I remember that,” said Raven. “Uncomfortable it may have been, but it didn’t really last that long. We were just pressed for time, back then
. Madame Sato—well, I can’t give any guarantees at this point.”

  Miles nodded understanding, both of what was said and what was unsaid, and turned again to Suze. “I need one more favor. I’d like to borrow a cryo-corpse.”

  “What,” Suze began in a towering tone, which weakened to, “…kind?”

  “Female, about fifty kilos. As young as you have available. Anything else, Raven?”

  Raven shook his head. “That should do it.”

  “We undertake not to damage her in any way that would compromise her future revival,” Miles went on, hoping he didn’t sound too airy.

  “That a guarantee, galactic?”

  “It won’t be wholly under my control, but if things go my way, she should be all right.” I hope. “In any covert operation, people… take their chances.”

  Raven winced—ah, maybe not the best parallel to draw, after the chest display.

  “When?”

  “Soon. Possibly tonight, no later than tomorrow night.”

  Suze’s nostrils flared in a long, indrawn breath of doubt.

  Miles held up a pair of fingers. “Two cryorevivals of your choice.”

  Suze turned her head and made a throwing-away gesture. “Go see the plant medtech. Vristi Tanaka. Jin will show you the way. If you can talk her into going along with all this nonsense, though I suppose you will… Talk, talk, talk. Makes me tired.”

  Miles rose quickly, so as not to outwear his welcome or her decision. “Thank you, Madame Suze. I promise you…” you won’t regret this was too big a diplomacy to push past even his teeth. “…it will be interesting,” he finished.

  Suze’s snort sent them on their way.

  The infirmary turned out to be on the second floor of the facility’s old patron intake building. Jin led Miles and Raven through double doors to a corridor with some two or three rooms apparently furbished up for action, judging from the fresh medical smell. They found Tenbury lingering outside of one of them, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, a narrow float pallet grounded at his feet.

  “Jin!” he said, looking pleased. “They said you’d got lost!” He looked somewhat less pleased at Miles. “You again.” His brow wrinkled at Raven.

  “We came to see Tanaka-san,” Jin explained. “It’s important.”

  “She’s busy right now”—Tenbury jerked a thumb at the room beyond—“but they should be done soon.”

  Raven craned his neck to peer through a narrow glass window in the door. “Ah, cryoprep in progress? I’d like to see that.”

  “Raven-sensei’s a doctor. From Escobar,” Jin began. Tenbury looked perturbed, and began to speak. Miles cut the debate short by simply knocking.

  The knock was answered by a frowning woman, brown skin like old leather, spare of build and with straight white hair where Suze was stout and frizzy, but of a like age, Miles judged, and without the alcohol fumes. Her face lightened when she saw Jin.

  “Ah, you’re found, Jin! And who have your creatures savaged now, and can it wait?”

  “No one, Tanaka-san. But it’s kind of urgent. Suze-san sent us over.”

  Miles let Jin run through his introductions, at which the boy was becoming nicely practiced. He picked up: “We’ve made arrangements with Madame Suze to use your facilities for a private cryorevival, if they meet Dr. Durona’s needs. May we come in?”

  “Huh!” she said, and gave way, staring at Raven. Miles wondered if he’d rumpled Raven’s clothes, mussed his neat hair, and doused him with gin if he would have seemed less out of place, here, less alarming to these people. Too late.

  On a table standing out from the far wall lay the naked body of a frail old man, detained, Miles thought, at the border crossing between life and death. A sheet draped across his middle lent him a scrap of dignity, as much as one could have when given over to plastic tubes and the will or whim of others. A cold-blanket wrapped around his skull sped the chilling of his brain. A tube from a tank above, divided partway down, ran a clear liquid into both carotid arteries. A wider tube, from a vein in his thigh, ran a dark pink color to a knee-height tub with a drain, with a trickle of water from a spout above to keep things flowing. Judging from the paleness of the skin and nails, and the color of the murky exit fluid, the old body was almost wholly perfused with cryo-solution.

  Ako hovered, closely supervising the process; she’d evidently overheard something through the doorway, because she looked up and said excitedly, “A doctor? We’re getting a real doctor?”

  Miles waved down this hope, before it could grow big and bite. “Just visiting. We’ll explain it all when you’re finished, here.”

  Jin was staring; Miles wondered how disturbing this process was to the boy, or if he’d seen it before. It was disturbing to Miles, and he’d done it before, or had it done to him. Maybe the more unsettling for that? For the first time, he wondered how much the news of his own encounter with the needle-grenade had felt like history repeats to his father, if it had triggered unwelcome old memories of the Princess-and-Countess Olivia’s messy death. I must apologize to him for that, when next we meet.

  “It almost seems too simple,” Miles murmured to Raven.

  Raven said, “The complexity lies in the cryo-preservation fluid, which has a whole pharmaceutical facility behind it. Or so one trusts. Where are you getting your cryo-fluid, Madame Tanaka?”

  The medtech’s old mouth set in a flat smile. “The concentrate falls off the back of a few loading docks of hospitals here in town. They discard their outdated supplies a couple of times a year. We distill our own water to reconstitute it.”

  Miles’s brows rose. “Is that, um… all right? Medically?”

  Raven shrugged. “If the use-by dating is fairly conservative, yes.”

  It was not, Miles supposed, a choice between discarded fluid and fresh, but between discarded and none. He was reminded again that this place was a parasite operation, clinging to the underbelly of a more functional economy, without which it could not continue to exist. Granted, if its host economy functioned rather better, it wouldn’t need to exist.

  Medical sensors blinked timing lights. Ako withdrew the tubes and sealed the entry and exit incisions with plastic bandage, and carefully lathered the skin with ointment. She and Medtech Tanaka horsed the body into a sort of plastic body-glove, then joined forces with Tenbury to shift it all onto the float pallet, where Tenbury covered it more corpselike with a sheet. He guided the pallet out the door. “Want to help me, Jin?” Tenbury asked hopefully over his shoulder. Jin, planting his feet, doggedly shook his head. Tenbury sighed and trundled his burden away.

  Ako turned to the clean-up process, Raven leaned against a counter, and Miles found a stool to perch upon. While the medtech folded her arms and listened dubiously, Miles embarked on much the same pitch as he’d presented to Madame Suze, heavy on the implication that Suze had sent them over here with her full blessing. Since Tanaka seemed susceptible to the boy, Miles also unleashed Jin for a judicious blast of heartfelt imploring.

  As a result, her frown at the end seemed more technical than political. “We haven’t had most of that section open for years. A lot of the equipment that wasn’t stripped out when the place was decommissioned went later.”

  Palmed and pawned or sold, Miles presumed.

  “But I do maintain… huh. I think we’ll have to go up and take a look around.”

  Not a flat no, impossible, then. Good so far. “That’s what Raven is here for,” Miles assured her. “Suze said—is that her first name or her last, by the way?”

  “Both,” said the medtech. “Susan Suzuki.”

  “Have you been working with her for long?”

  “Since the beginning. There were three of us put the scheme together—Suze, her sister, who was assistant to the comptroller, and me. We roped in Tenbury pretty quick, though.”

  “A younger man then, was he? You were critical for the cryoprep, obviously. Did you have any plans for the other end of things, the revivals?”

/>   She blew out her lips in a short laugh. “At the time, I didn’t think we’d go more than a year before we all ended up in jail. I figured it for more of a hopeless protest than anything. Then the street people started coming in, even more desperate than we were, and we found we couldn’t quit. Couldn’t betray them as everyone else had.”

  “The world is made by the people who show up for the job,” Miles agreed.

  Medtech Tanaka eyed Ako, who had finished cleaning up and drifted over to listen in. “That’s a true thing. Ako and her great-aunt used to run a cook-shop. The usual—the old woman grew ill, the medical bills bankrupted them, the shop failed, they were evicted… came in to us. Ako’d never finished school, but she knew how to clean and wasn’t afraid of work, so I took her on.” Earnest but timid Ako, Miles guessed, would never have gained entry to, let alone graduated from, any medtech academy. This place gave a whole new dimension to the term unlicensed.

  “Shouldn’t we take Raven-sensei upstairs now?” Jin urged.

  They mounted one floor to the corridor directly above, which had apparently once been a fully-equipped cryorevival facility, with half a dozen operating theaters, a recovery room, and some intensive care booths. Most of it was dark and dusty and, indeed, sadly stripped, but Medtech Tanaka apparently maintained one operating room for procedures more demanding than what antibiotic ointment, surgical glue, and bracing advice would cover. She and Raven fell into intense but by no means discouraged tech-speak, medical division, which ended with sending Jin downstairs to bring back Tenbury for more consultation.

  “Who is the owner-of-record for this place?” Miles asked the medtech while they were waiting. “If it was legally abandoned, I’d have thought the city would have seized it for back taxes by now.”

  “There have been a couple of supposed owners, over the years. The city won’t seize it for the same reason the current owner, poor slob, can’t unload it. Legal liability for two or three thousand destitute cryo-corpses. He was a contractor, who bought it for what he thought was a song and only then discovered what came with it. Suze has him under control for now. We think the biggest current danger is that he’ll try to solve his dilemma through a spot of arson, but we keep a watch.”