Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “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 council. “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 face 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, thoug
h 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.

  A fine tradition of neglect of one’s own in service to the Imperium, those Vorkosigans. At a cost. Miles recalled with a touch of wry pride what a District village speaker had once said to him of Ekaterin: We feel as though you belong to the Imperium, but Lady Vorkosigan belongs to us.

  Indeed.

  “On the home front,” Ekaterin went on, “here’s the latest achievement…”

  The vid cut to another, less steady. “Good job, Helen,” said Ekaterin’s voice as a room spun dizzily—the library at Vorkosigan House, Miles recognized despite its rabbiting speed, “but pan more slowly or you’ll give your papa vertigo.”

  “What’s vertigo?” came a young voice from off-side—Sasha? no, Lizzie, good heavens—and Ekaterin responded at once, “Dizzy.”

  “Oh.” The new word was duly accepted.

  The vid steadied on Taurie, ten months old, gray eyes wide under a mop of wispy black curls, clinging grimly to the edge of a low table. Sasha, five going on six, as he and his twin, Helen, phrased it, and their sister Lizzie, three, sat on a couch in the background, Sasha watching with interest, Lizzie looking bored and kicking her feet, as if to say, I’ve already done this, what’s the fuss?

  “Come on, Taurie,” Ekaterin’s voice cooed. “Come to mama.” Effective—Miles undertook not to fall through the vid plate, reaching for that seductive voice.

  Taurie turned, rocking, on her stout little legs, releasing one hand, which waved for balance. Then the other. Then began a bow-legged toddle toward her mama’s outstretched arms. How any child learned to walk while swaddled in a diaper, Miles didn’t know, but there she went, thump-thump-thump, to fall chortling into Ekaterin’s arms and be swung high in triumph.

  “Let me try her,” said Sasha, much as if his little sister were a robot car. He slid to his knees on the rug across from Ekaterin, and called encouragingly, “Come on, Taurie, you can do it!”

  Fresh from her first victory, Taurie screeched and toddled toward him even faster, promptly falling on her chin and setting up a wail, clearly more of outrage than pain—Miles could discern the different timbres while still lunging up from his sleep. Sasha gathered her up, laughing. “Hey, you’re supposed to learn to walk before you run!” He got her turned around and aimed back toward her mama, and the trial was repeated more successfully.

  Lizzie, who had slid down off the couch during all this, gave up spinning herself in circles singing, “Vertigo, vertigo, vertigo!” and made a grab for the vid recorder, which, judging from the way the view jerked wildly, her elder sister promptly raised out of her reach. “No, I wanna run the vid now,” came Lizzie’s voice. “Let me, let me! Mama, make her let me… !”

  Too soon, the domestic drama came to an end. Miles backed it up and re-ran it, wondering if these were indeed Taurie’s first steps, or a reenactment for his benefit. The vid recorder suggested the latter.

  Ekaterin’s face returned against the cluttered background of her third-floor office, the one on the north side overlooking her Barrayaran garden through the Earth-import treetops.

  “I’m so sorry Sergeant Taura never lived to see her namesake,” she said, looking reflective, “but I’m glad you were at least able to tell her about Taurie, before the end. Maybe we should have given her name to Lizzie, sooner, rather than your Betan grandmother’s. Oh, speaking of names. Sasha has now announced that he is Alex, I suppose because he gave up trying to talk everyone into Xander. Lexie and A.A. appear to be permanently rejected, now, too. Same rationale—if we don’t call him Aral because of Grandda Aral, we shouldn’t call him Sasha because of Grandpa Sasha, either. He seems to be sticking to this one, however, and he has Helen on his side at last, so in your next message, be sure to call him Lord Alex. That much logic and determination should be rewarded, I think.”

  Indeed. Miles had been deeply alarmed, earlier in his fatherhood, by what seemed Sasha’s—Alex’s—delay in verbal development, compared to his age-mate Helen, till Ekaterin had pointed out that the boy’s sister never let him ask a question for himself or get a word in edgewise after. He wasn’t delayed, merely amiable, and had caught up with complete sentences soon enough thereafter, as long as Helen wasn’t in the same room translating for him.

  “Come to think of it,” Ekaterin went on, “didn’t you once have some trouble deciding what you wanted to be called? And at a much older age. History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

  “But he loves you, whatever he’s named. We all do. Take care out there, Miles, and hurry home when you can.” The vid went dark.

  If only I could crawl through that vid plate and have myself beamed back to Barrayar at the speed of light… Miles sighed. All his life, his home had been something he couldn’t wait to escape. How had his polarity become so profoundly reversed?

  Roic’s remark stung: If only you’d quit while you were winning… Well, this tangle on Kibou-daini wasn’t all of his own making.

  He wished Leiber would show the hell up. Now would be a good time. Miles was surprised he was taking so long. He might have to send someone to collect the man after all. Or if Lisa Sato woke up with temporary cryo-amnesia, or simply didn’t know the answers. No, she has to know whatever Leiber knows. Because I’d bet Betan dollars to sand he’s the one who told her in the first place.

  Leiber’s evident alarm niggled at Miles. Why should he have been so afraid of us? He didn’t even know us. Leiber was obviously responding to some local threat, perhaps the very one that Miles wanted to know all about. But Miles was still having some trouble guessing what it might be.

  Just as Sato was bait for Leiber, the pair of them would be bait for… who? Why? Miles had staked people out like goats to draw the tiger du jour in the past, but not, knowingly, when they had children in tow. Or had you just never noticed their webs of relationships, before? He couldn’t remember. But if he didn’t have the personnel here to chase down Leiber, he surely didn’t have the personnel to put a round-the-clock guard on the consulate and the people it sheltered. Roic and Johannes between them weren’t enough, even if they hadn’t had other duties—handing the task to them without support would be downright abusive. Raven wasn’t the only one who didn’t like being set up to fail.

  Despite the distance it put between him and his family, Miles felt a little shiver of gratitude to Gregor for sending him so far afield on his sporadic Auditorial labors. Because it put that same distance between his family and whoever his investigations managed to piss off. Pissing off bad guys for the greater glory of Barrayar, that would be my job description, just about. Speaking of being happy in one’s work.

  He bent to the comconsole and began composing an Auditorial requisition to the Barrayaran embassy on Escobar for a security team, to be dispatched immediately, with a heads-up to put an ImpSec forensic accountant and, perhaps, legal team on stand-b
y. He knew nothing of his invisible enemy but that they played for keeps. Five days for the squad to get here, at their best speed. Had he known enough, five days ago, to ask for this? I suppose not.

  Miles called up the background data on NewEgypt Cryonics once more, and began to slog through it. Lisa Sato could not regain her voice soon enough.

  Chapter Fourteen

  By mid-morning of the day after Madame Sato’s successful revival, when Dr. Leiber still hadn’t contacted the consulate, m’lord allowed as how he might have been mistaken, and dispatched Roic and Johannes to find the man. Roic thought it might have made his job easier if m’lord had come to that conclusion earlier. He began with the two obvious first ploys, calling the man’s residence—no answer—and his work, where he learned that the researcher had called in sick the morning before, some stomach bug, he’d told his assistant, and he’d likely be out for a couple of days. Right.

  Roic then had Johannes pack up some of the consulate’s better surveillance equipment and drive him back out to Leiber’s townhouse. A complex under construction that had caught his eye the previous trip did so again, as they passed. Roic cranked his head around to study the sign. Century Estates, it read, and Were you born between 150 and 130 years ago? See us! “What’s that all about?” he asked Johannes.

  “A generational cohort enclave,” said Johannes. “You see them here and there in the bigger cities. Revives, at least those who wake up with enough money and health for it, often find they don’t like the new Kibou so much after all, and end up clustering together trying to recreate their youths.”

  “Huh,” said Roic. “A sort of do-it-yourself historical reenactment? At least you’d have someone to talk to who gets all your jokes.”

  “I guess,” said Johannes, a little doubtfully.

  Roic had Johannes pull in the van at the back of the house row while he tried Dr. Leiber’s front door. No answer. After a few minutes Johannes opened it from within. “He left the garage unlocked. Float bike’s gone.”