Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Right. Let’s take a look around, then visit his comconsole.”

  No room, closet, shower, cupboard, or dustbin large enough to hold a body did so. M’lord’s thoughtful burglar’s note was gone from the refrigerator, which was still stocked with an assortment of bachelor rations. The kitchen was tidied, the bed upstairs more-or-less made, or at least the quilt pulled up. Clothes and shoes might have been taken—enough to fit in a duffle strapped to the back of a float bike?—but there was still a good bit left. Toiletries were absent.

  Johannes had started on Leiber’s comconsole, sucking a copy of its contents through the umbilicus of the secured cable onto his ImpSec recorder, watching the progress on his holoscreen.

  “Hey!” he said after a moment. “This thing is monitored. I wonder if Leiber knew that?”

  Roic leaned in. Hey, indeed! “This process won’t stir up his watchers, will it?”

  “It shouldn’t,” said Johannes.

  Not very reassuring. “Can you trace the bug?”

  “Partly. I might be able to finish the job from the tight-room.”

  “Give us a look at his communications over the past two days, since our first visit.”

  There were only three. Yesterday morning, Leiber had called in sick, purchased a jumpship passage to Escobar, and emptied most of his remaining savings account onto a couple of universal credit chits. There were no personal messages to relatives or friends. He might have left a door key or instructions with the folks next door, Roic supposed, but on the whole he thought not, and he was unwilling to go stir up trouble by asking around. People might remember their visit from day before yesterday. He wondered what tale Leiber had told his neighbor lady about them. Not the truth, he suspected.

  “This jumpship doesn’t leave till tomorrow evening,” Johannes pointed out.

  “Yeah, I see.”

  “Think he might have gone aboard already?”

  Roic frowned at the schedule. “Ah. No. That one doesn’t even make inbound orbit till this afternoon.” He thought a moment. “The minute he passes inside shuttleport security, he’s back on the grid, lit up for anyone who can look. And if we can spot him then, belike his enemies can, too—I don’t think they’re operating on a shoestring, not if they’re backed by one of those cryocorps. He’ll wait to the last to board. So he has to have gone to ground somewhere.”

  “With a friend, maybe? Could be hard to find.” Johannes squinted at the comconsole. “Although this could help.”

  “If he’s in as much fear for his life as this flight suggests, he might not want to endanger a friend,” said Roic slowly. “He didn’t strike m’lord as the ruthless type, he said.”

  “It’s a big city,” observed Johannes.

  “So, let’s start with the obvious.” Roic climbed to his feet. “Pack up here and drive us out to the shuttleport.”

  In the lift van, Roic opened its—ImpSec secured—comconsole and ran a search on lodgings around the shuttleport. Two were inside the security perimeter, half a dozen scattered in the surrounding light-industrial area. He balanced closest against cheapest, and decided to start with cheapest. As they threaded their way to it, he had time to reflect on how Nexus-wide transportation tech had shaped the cities it served, giving more sameness planet to planet than he’d expected, before he’d ever left Barrayar. This provincial boy’s come a long way. In a way, he was glad no good fairy had ever endowed him with the future he would have picked for himself when younger. It would have been so much smaller.

  “Now what?” asked Johannes, as they swung into the budget hostel’s lot. “Stake the place out? Ask at the front desk?”

  “Not sure anyone would remember Leiber even if they saw him,” said Roic, “and this is one of those self-serve places.” Not as cramped as some Roic had encountered on space stations, where sleep cubicles, rented by the hour, seemed a cross between a closet and a coffin, but the building’s utilitarian lines didn’t invite lingering. It was a shadowed place even in the mid-morning, huddled down below a long concrete road abutment and some sort of manufacturing plant. “Circle the lot. We’ll look for his float bike.”

  Around the building’s back, an open-faced shed sheltered a float bike lock-down. Roic recognized Leiber’s bike nestled among half a dozen others.

  “Right the first time!” said Johannes, in a tone of admiration.

  “I’ve had some practice, trailing m’lord around,” said Roic modestly, leaving out the dumb luck part. Well, smart luck, perhaps. Roic would have been surprised not to have turned up something within his first three tries. They sat in the van for a few minutes while Roic tried to think it through the way m’lord would. No, scratch that idea. He’d likely do better trying to think it through like Leiber. Or better still, like Roic.

  Would the enemy send cops or goons to collect their quarry? If it was a cryocorp, they could likely get all the cops they wanted—charges of employee theft would do the job—they had only to wait at the pinch-point inside the shuttleport and pick the man off as he scurried through. But that would leave a trail, names, security vid recordings, a whole lot of witnesses not under anyone’s direct control. A private goon squad pick-up before Leiber hit the port, that would be the quieter way to go about it. And if Roic could figure out where to look for the fellow, presumably all those smart men in the fancy trousers could, too. Roic wasn’t the part of his team born with the silver tongue in his mouth—could he persuade Leiber to come to the safety of the consulate, when m’lord had not? Guess I’ll have to try. He glanced up. “What’s that?”

  A pulsing blue light was reflecting off the concrete wall, coming from the front of the building.

  “Blue’s the color they use around here for emergency vehicles,” said Johannes uneasily.

  “Pull around front.”

  They arrived to see a pair of emergency medtechs dressed in blue scrubs yank a float pallet from the back of an unmarked van and hurry inside the sliding glass doors to the lobby. Both big fellows—one was tall, and the other looked as though he’d had some of those traditional wrestlers in his family tree. On both sides. Didn’t emergency services usually try to pair a woman in such a team? Well, not always, belike. With round the clock scheduling, as Roic knew from grappling with the guardsmen’s roster for Vorkosigan House and m’lord’s other two official residences, you took whatever combinations you could get.

  “Wait here.” Roic slid out of their own van and went to take a peek in the back of the other. The rear doors had no windows, but had been left unlocked. Careless of the techs, if it was carrying drugs and expensive equipment. Roic quietly opened a door, looked inside, and raised his wristcom to his lips. “Interesting, Johannes. The cupboard is bare. This isn’t an ambulance, just a van.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Think I’ll just take a stroll inside and intercept those fellows coming out. You watch my back from there.” Roic still wasn’t sure what was happening, here, although he was formulating some rapid guesses.

  An anxious young lady desk clerk was peering up the central hallway when Roic entered the lobby.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “One of our guests reported in very sick, apparently. He should have called the front desk—we would have assisted him…”

  “Was he from off-world? D’you think he might have brought in something bad?” asked Roic. “Contagious?”

  “No, no. Some sort of sudden seizure, I gather. He was lucky he could use his wristcom.” The clerk gathered her nerve. “I should go and lock up after them, make sure the gentleman’s property is secure.” She glanced back at Roic. “Were you checking in, sir? There’s only me on duty right now…”

  “Take your time. First things first.” Roic waved her away. She trotted off up the hall to where a loaded float pallet was already being shifted out a doorway and turned. The tall man hitched an IV to a pole, bent, and checked his patient. Roic glimpsed a blanketed male form, firmly strapped down, an oxygen mask in place across his face
muffling his moans. Roic stepped forward, radiating curiosity and concern, as the pallet floated out into the lobby flanked by its two escorts.

  Dr. Leiber blinked up with bleared eyes and groaned behind his plastic mask.

  “What happened?” Roic asked, following along out the front doors. “Is it anything dangerous? Do you need any help?”

  “Thanks, no,” the tall one told him. “Everything’s under control.”

  “So was it a heart attack?”

  “We don’t know, yet,” said the tall one. “He just collapsed.”

  “Drugs? Is this a bad area? I just landed, myself.” For once, Roic’s not-from-around-here looks and accent worked in his favor. “I was about to check in at this place and sleep off the jump-lag, but now I’m not so sure.”

  The broad one scowled at him in irritation. “No, it’s fine. Go check in.” The pair swung the van doors wide and slid the pallet aboard, both climbing inside to secure it.

  Roic stuck his head in after. “You sure?”

  “Yes, it’s safe,” said the tall one, exasperated, from the windowless cargo area.

  “Good,” said Roic, pulled his stunner, and shot them both.

  That would save some heavy lifting. And scuffling. Roic hated scuffles. Just because he was big didn’t mean he liked getting hurt.

  Johannes’s breathless voice sounded from his side, not his wristcom. “What the hell is going on?” When Roic had said Watch my back, he hadn’t meant from this close, but he couldn’t fault the lieutenant for curiosity. Johannes’s eyes widened, peering into the shadows.

  Roic tucked his stunner away in its shoulder holster. “We just rescued Dr. Leiber. I’m not sure if he’ll see it that way, though.” He climbed into the cargo area, first checking both his victims for health. Stunner fire was by no means safe; it could trigger all sort of problems in people with underlying medical issues. Happily, these two seemed extremely fit. Having assured himself of their continued cooperation by the simple means of a light repeat stun to the base of each neck, he arranged them more tidily. He then turned to Leiber.

  Roic was not called upon after all to trot out his encouraging We’ve saved you, be grateful, I’m taking you to a place of refuge speech, in which he had no faith; Leiber had lost consciousness. Roic hoped to hell it had just been a hypospray of knockout drugs, and not some deadly poison. Even if some bloody and secret murder was planned, if he were Leiber’s enemy he’d sure want him alive to question under fast-penta first. Actually, Roic wanted to question Leiber under fast-penta on his own behalf. That decision would be up to m’lord, though.

  Leiber’s breathing continued evenly, and his skin did not turn any alarming colors. All right so far.

  “Follow me to Madame Suze’s place,” he instructed Johannes. Dr. Durona would be there, among other useful amenities. He thought a moment. “No, better—lead me to Suze’s.”

  He locked the back of the van, doused its flashing lights, and followed Johannes in convoy out of the parking lot. Roic wondered if m’lord’s approach to life, or at least to his Auditorial investigations, was rubbing off on him. He’d never used to be this cavalier about due process. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if m’lord’s style was the result of single-minded dedication to duty, habits of overweening Vor privilege, or simple insanity. Roic only knew that he had an inexplicable desire to whistle cheerfully, right now.

  Instead he raised his wristcom to his lips, called m’lord, and gave a concise précis of his morning’s mission, if m’lord’s laconic order of, Roic, go nail that twit could be so grandly styled.

  And then, being alone in the driver’s cab, he whistled all the way to Suze’s.

  His imagination afire with possibilities, Jin sat at the consulate’s kitchen table and counted out, again, his share of the money Roic had solemnly distributed to him and Mina at breakfast that morning. Mina had already secreted hers in her backpack upstairs, but she watched him with interest as he reshuffled his stack of currency—five thousand nuyen, more than he’d ever had at one time in his life. Back in the good times, before his father had died, Jin had never been given more than five hundred even for his best birthday.

  “What are you going to do with yours?” Mina asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. I could buy food for my creatures for months with this. Or get something new. I always wanted to try keeping fish, but Aunt Lorna would never let me, and there was no way at Suze’s. You can’t cart fish around with you if you might have to go live on the street.”

  Mina’s eyebrows knit. “Do you guess we’re going to be here that long?”

  Jin hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think I have enough for a pony?”

  “Where would you keep a pony? You need, like, lots of terraformed ground, I think. The back garden here’s not big enough.”

  “Aunt Lorna’s patio sure wasn’t big enough,” Mina agreed. “At least Consul Vorlynkin has grass.”

  Jin tried to picture this. The consulate’s patch of back lawn was barely larger than its living room. Nice for a chicken run, but he didn’t think it would work for anything much bigger. “Anyway,” he said bracingly, “you still have Lady Murasaki. Pony’s got four legs, spider’s got eight, so she has to be twice as good, right?”

  Mina cast him a look of cold scorn. “I’d like to see you try and put a saddle and bridle and stuff on her.”

  Jin tried to imagine spider-sized tack—knotted thread, perhaps?—and what kind of insect could you persuade to ride a wolf spider? That the spider wouldn’t eat? Riding would be a much more exciting sport, he thought, if ponies ate prey like spiders did. Did the consulate have any thread they could borrow… ? But before he could pursue the vision further, Consul Vorlynkin and Miles-san came through the kitchen pulling on their jackets.

  “Vorlynkin is going to drive me down to Madame Suze’s to see about something,” Miles-san told them. He and Roic had been spending a lot of time there lately, Jin thought, and come back looking grim and thoughtful, though no one had said why. And Raven-sensei hadn’t come back at all. “Yuuichi Matson’s here, so you won’t be alone. But if any strangers come in on consulate business, you’ll need to stay out of the front rooms and hall. Upstairs should be all right, or the back garden, if you don’t make too much noise.”

  “I’ll be back directly,” Vorlynkin promised.

  Mina looked up. “Do you think you’ll ever find Mommy?”

  “We hope to have good news soon,” said Miles-san.

  Jin wasn’t sure how to interpret that soothing tone of voice. More grownup lies? By her scrunched face, he didn’t think Mina was buying it, either.

  But what she said was, “Lord Vorkosigan, if you had children you’d give them ponies, wouldn’t you? Not spiders?”

  He looked a little taken aback. “I do and I have. Ponies, not spiders. Although I suppose they could have spiders if they wanted some. God knows we have butterbugs. Monogrammed. Didn’t I ever show you my pictures?”

  And then, to Jin’s surprise and growing dismay, he pulled a holocube out of his pocket and proceeded to show off scans of a regular-sized, dark-haired woman—Jin could tell she was regular-sized because there were some shots of the two of them together, and the top of Miles-san’s head barely reached her shoulder—and a bewildering succession of children at different ages. Jin didn’t quite sort them out till they came to a group shot—a dark-haired boy and a red-haired girl a bit younger than Mina, an infant in the pretty woman’s arms, and a leggy toddler in the middle of the pack. Four children. He hoped Mina would muster the wit to look interested and not distraught. He still wasn’t altogether sure what Miles-san was, but he seemed to have a lot of clout. Even the consul did whatever he said.

  “And here’s Helen on her pony down at Vorkosigan Surleau—it’s a place we have in the country, on a lake—and here’s Sasha petting his. Xander. Alex, I mean.”

  Jin wondered what kind of inattentive father Miles-san was, that he couldn’t seem to remember his
own son’s name. There was only the one boy, after all. It wasn’t as if he needed to run down a list till he got to the one who was irritating him, the way Uncle Hikaru had with him and Tetsu and Ken sometimes.

  But Jin had to admit, they were very fine-looking ponies, one dappled silvery-gray, the other a glossy dark brown with black socks and mane and tail and a white star on its forehead, both with dark, liquid, friendly gazes, seeming tolerant of their child-admirers. Mina goggled, her mouth dropping open in naked longing. Yah and double-yah—a big place in the country. With lots of animals—there had been dogs and cats and birds in the backgrounds of some of those shots, and who knew what creatures lurked in those wooded hills? And fish in a real lake, not just in some little glass tank, and maybe creeping and crawling native marvels living in the streams running down into it—better than Jin had dared to dream.

  And all belonging to these other children. Children who had a live mother and father, too. What was that line of Uncle Hikaru’s? Them what has, gets.

  And those that didn’t have, didn’t get, Jin supposed was the unspoken half of that lesson. He looked at those other children, and at Miles-san, so obviously pleased and proud, and didn’t doubt that Mina probably felt like crying. His own throat was tight with envy and ridiculous anger. It wasn’t as if Miles-san had kept his family a secret on purpose, just to bait Jin so belatedly.

  “I wouldn’t have dared not teach them to ride,” Miles-san went on. “My grandfather’s ghost would have haunted me if I hadn’t, not that the old buzzard doesn’t anyway. The Vor were a military caste, back in the Time of Isolation. Knights, of a sort—or bandits, perhaps, depending on your point of view. Horse soldiers, in any case. It’s a tradition.” He gave that last word a peculiar emphasis, as if it tasted funny in his mouth. “A perfectly useless skill, nowadays, but we keep it up all the same.”

  “Perhaps we’d better go,” said Vorlynkin, and “Yeah,” said Miles-san. He pocketed his holocube carefully, like it was something special to him. They went off through the garden toward the big garage.