Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Ah, I like the way you think, kid. There’s actually an official pay schedule. In Barrayaran marks, of course. It has codes for various services. I’ll have Roic check it, and do the conversions to Kibou-daini money.”

  “You propose to pay them adult rates?” asked Vorlynkin. Jin thought he sounded more startled than disapproving, and hoped he wouldn’t try to talk Miles-san out of this wonderful idea.

  “Damn straight.” Miles-san added, “My case budget allows for a lot of discretion, you know.”

  “Then I wish you’d buy some,” snapped Vorlynkin. He shut his mouth abruptly, as if startled at what had fallen out of it.

  Miles-san merely grinned at him. His stiff consul-face back in place, Vorlynkin shepherded Jin and Mina back up to the kitchen to feed them again. Jin glanced back over his shoulder at the four men turning intently back to their comconsoles, as that heavy door swung shut. He hoped the consulate had good spy stuff.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dr. Seiichiro Leiber proved to live in a rented row-house in a residential district on the west side of Northbridge, not far from his work. Miles had Johannes, driving the lift van, circle the block to give him a feel for the neighborhood. On this pleasant weekend morning, not a few folks were out tending their tiny plots of greenery; a gang of children raced noisily across the lawns, got yelled at by a gardener, and vanished, giggling, around the corner. Jin and Mina might well have grown up in a place much like this.

  Miles’s more focused researches last night had mainly turned up Leiber’s school records, with police records drawing a bland and virtuous blank. He wasn’t listed on any of Lisa Sato’s rosters of supporters or contributors, nor did his name appear among the arrestees at the rally riot, most of whom had been released without being charged. Charges had been made but later dropped against the two dead and the three, including Sato, who’d been suspiciously frozen. All tidy and quiet now.

  This Dr. Leiber had acquired his Ph.D. at the unprecocious age of twenty-eight, and gone directly into employment with NewEgypt for the four years subsequently. His thesis, which Miles had read—well, skimmed—had focused on improvements in cryonics fluids, which, given that a consortium of cryocorps had funded his scholarship, seemed perfectly reasonable. Several of the larger cryocorps maintained research departments that, in addition to overseeing quality control, worked on proprietary advances in their procedures designed to lure customers from their competition. Nothing odd about that, either.

  Miles had Johannes pull up at the corner. “I think our biggest problem here is going to be nosy neighbors, not electronic surveillance. You aren’t going to be able to sit or stand around without people coming out to see what you’re up to. So I’ll run an open comlink to you, Johannes”—Miles set his to record while he was at it—“and you find a place to pull in and buy coffee or something. Drop Roic around back on the way.” Miles eyed his bodyguard, dressed fairly neutrally but not quite locally. “I wish we could disguise you as a lamp post or something.”

  “I’ll manage,” said Roic.

  Miles nodded, waved Raven to follow him, and descended to the sidewalk.

  The door buzzer was answered by a dark-haired, blinking fellow with a tea mug in his hand, wearing a T-shirt and trousers, barefoot. Despite the weekend jaw shadow and lack of a lab coat, he was immediately recognizable as Miles’s quarry.

  Miles smiled. “Dr. Leiber?” Not giving the man time to answer, he continued, “My name is Miles Vorkosigan, and this is my associate, Dr. Raven Durona of the Durona Group.”

  A flash of recognition crossed Leiber’s face at the latter name, followed by puzzlement. “Durona?” said Leiber. “From the Escobar clinic?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard of us?” Raven smiled sunnily.

  “I read the journals.”

  Miles forged on, “We were both in town for the inter-Nexus cryo-conference last week, and hoped to see you. May we come in?” Leaving implied that the associate was bio-research. Miles would save the insinuation of interstellar cops for after they’d made it through the front door, and only if needed.

  At this reasonable-sounding explanation, Leiber gulped down his last swallow of tea and gave way. Miles hustled gratefully inside. He let his host guide them into his little living room, and took a seat promptly, the harder to be dislodged. The others naturally followed suit. “Did you attend the conference? I don’t recall seeing you.” In fact, Miles had checked—Leiber hadn’t been there.

  “No, but I was sorry to have missed it. Were you fellows caught up in that mess I saw on the news with the N.H.L.L.?”

  “I wasn’t, but Raven here was—” Miles gave Raven a go-ahead, and Raven supplied a few ice-breaking anecdotes about his brief adventures as a hostage, with the Barrayaran connections downplayed. Raven then went into a technical riff about the conference, drawing Leiber into questions in turn, equally divided between biochemistry and scurrilous gossip. He also touched on Leiber’s thesis, which Raven had actually read all the way through last night without his eyes glazing over. By this time Leiber seemed fully at ease.

  Miles decided on a direct approach. “I’m actually here this morning on behalf of the next-of-kin of Lisa Sato. I believe you had some dealings with her eighteen months ago, just before her arrest?”

  Shock and dismay bloomed unconcealed on Leiber’s face. Well, he was the scientist type, not a con artist, nor, probably, a very good liar. Fine by me.

  “How do you know—what makes you think that?” Leiber fumbled, confirming Miles’s judgment.

  “Eyewitness testimony.”

  “But no one saw—there wasn’t—but Suwabi died.”

  “There was one other.”

  Leiber gulped and seemed to pull himself together. “I’m sorry. It was an awkward time. A frightening time.”

  Miles prepared to utter something soothing, but his witness leaped to his feet. “I’m sorry, you’ve rattled me a bit. Some tea. I’ll fix some more tea. Would you like some tea?”

  Miles would rather not have given him time to invent lies, which they would then have to spend more time pulling apart, but he was already headed to his tiny kitchen. Miles waved an assent that Leiber didn’t even look back to see.

  Raven raised an eyebrow at Miles. “Congratulations.”

  “Indeed, a hit, a palpable hit.”

  Dishes rattled, water ran. A faint squeak and quiet tick of a door opening and closing…

  “Whoops.” Miles grabbed his cane and lurched to his feet.

  The kitchen was empty, silent but for the simmering electric kettle. Only one door led out. Onto the patio, its alley gate swinging.

  Miles lifted his wristcom to his lips. “Roic? Our suspect just ran out the back.”

  “I’m on him, m’lord,” Roic said grimly.

  The thump of big footsteps, quick gasps. A yelp, not from Roic. More footsteps. “Crap.”

  That last had been Roic. “What happened?” Miles demanded.

  Roic, a little breathless, returned, “He just dodged into a neighbor’s place. Gone to ground. There’s a woman and two kids staring at me out the glass. Now she’s arguing with Leiber. Well, she’s arguing, he’s wheezing.” And, after a moment, “You don’t want me to go in there. Trespassing. Assault.”

  Roic’s very firm tone of voice discouraged Miles from descanting on diplomatic immunity. He continued, “Now she’s gone off. To call the police, I’m guessing. What did you two do to the fellow?”

  Nothing was plainly not the right answer. “I’m not sure,” Miles said. “Well, withdraw for now and rendezvous with Johannes.”

  “Understood.”

  Miles turned to Raven. “All right, we have maybe five minutes to go over the place here. You take downstairs, I’ll take up.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Whatever he’s hiding.”

  Upstairs held a bedroom, a bedroom-turned-office, and a bathroom. An endearingly tame, by galactic standards, porn collection in the bedroom was out in plain sight,
suggesting Leiber did not have a girlfriend at present. The closets held clothes and shoes, and a residue of old sporting equipment. Miles was just eyeing the comconsole in the next room in frustration—he likely didn’t have time for a stealth download before the locals arrived, and besides the ImpSec devices that made such tasks a snap were back at the consulate—when Raven’s voice came from his wristcom.

  “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 ca
n’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 rolled 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.