Cryoburn b-17

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Jin and Mina stared at each other.

  “Well,” said Mina at last. “At least I was right about the ponies.” She blinked rapidly, and rubbed her reddened eyes.

  Jin glowered down at his little stack of money, which had seemed such a big pile of possibilities just minutes ago.

  “It’s no good, after all,” said Mina. “Maybe it never was. Maybe we should just go back to Aunt Lorna and Uncle Hikaru’s.”

  Stop struggling? “You could, maybe,” Jin said bitterly. “Not me. No, wait, you couldn’t either—you’d gab.”

  Mina looked indignant at this accusation. With a “Huh!” she rose to go back upstairs. At the archway into the kitchen, she flung back over her shoulder, “Two ponies have eight legs, so there!”

  Jin couldn’t think of a counter-argument to that.

  As Jin was fingering his nuyen and wondering if he dared help himself to a snack, the consulate clerk wandered into the kitchen to refill his mug of green tea. He leaned against the counter and stared at Jin, who fidgeted under the cool regard.

  “You’re Lisa Sato’s children, aren’t you? The cryo-rights activist?”

  “Uh… yah?” Jin wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a secret here, but Matson-san obviously already knew.

  Matson-san took a sip of tea and frowned. “Nobody’s really told me anything. But, ah… if you want me to call the police for you and your sister, before the Barrayarans all get back, I could… ?”

  Jin shot to his feet, almost knocking over his chair, and cried in horror, “No!”

  Matson-san sloshed hot tea, swore, set the cup down, and wiped his scalded hand on his trousers.

  “It was the police who took Mom!” said Jin.

  “Call your relatives, then?”

  “No! That’s even worse!”

  “Er,” said Matson-san. “So you two kids are not, um, not… prisoners, here, are you?”

  “Of course not! Miles-san is helping us!” He considered events so far, and amended that to, “Trying to, anyway.” And then, because that sounded weak and ungrateful, “Nobody else has ever tried like him,” which was certainly true.

  Matson-san scratched his head and grimaced. “Ah.” He took up his tea again. “Well, if you change you mind, you can tell me, all right?” Jin glowered at him in a dismay that made him hold up a placating hand. “Just trying to help, too.”

  Jin wanted to cry, If that’s your idea of help, don’t! but it seemed too rude a thing to say to a grownup. He settled on, “All right. But I won’t. Change my mind.”

  Matson-san shrugged uneasily and went back out to that front office-room. Jin gathered his money and fled upstairs to hide it away.

  With three of the four people he wanted to interrogate at Suze’s place still out cold, bless Roic, Miles perforce began with Madame Sato.

  Inside the glass-walled, softly-lit isolation booth, she was sitting up in her narrow bed, looking pale and exhausted but on the whole very good for a new revive. She was clean in a crisp patient gown and warmly padded robe, each extra layer of cloth providing protection from exposure both to germs and prying eyes. Miles suspected—no, knew very well—from his own too-frequent hospitalizations that the latter could be more important to one’s morale than the former. Ako had washed the gel from her hair; it lay undamaged in a silky fall over her shoulder.

  He eased into the booth, wondering if he seemed menacing to her or merely weird. Hard to tell from her stern glare. He adjusted his filtering mask and cleared his throat.

  “Good afternoon, Madame Sato. My name is Miles Vorkosigan.” He smiled reassuringly, then realized she couldn’t see his mouth. “Sorry about the mask. But Dr. Durona says your immune system’s coming back fast. We should be able to dispense with the sterile precautions and get you out of here fairly soon.”

  “Are you a doctor?” Her voice was raspy but functional.

  “No, your revival was done by Raven Durona, a specialist from Escobar. Who works for me,” Miles realized he’d better add. Explaining himself to her was going to be an uphill slog.

  “I saw him earlier.” She swallowed—partly nerves, partly still getting used to being back in control of her body, he expected. “Where is here? They said I was in Northbridge.” Her tone said she doubted this. Doubted everything, right now.

  Miles glanced around. The view from booth took in only the shadowed, deserted recovery room, which had no exterior windows, not even looking out on the wall of another building. “Northbridge, that’s right. You’re in an old, decommissioned cryonics facility on the south side, which has been taken over by some rather clever squatters.”

  “Someone said you have my children…” The tightening of her throat smeared that last word nearly soundless.

  Miles now wished he’d brought them along, even though he was still nervy from his prior failure. “Yes, Jin and Mina are safe at the Barrayaran consulate.” He added after a moment, when she still didn’t seem to know whether to parse this as a comfort or a threat, “Jin has all his creatures there, even Gyre-the-falcon and your old cat, so he’s content for now. Mina is pretty much sticking with Jin.” This familiar reference to the traveling zoo would convince her of his veracity, he hoped.

  “The Barrayaran consulate! Why?” She swallowed again. “Who are you? Why are you here?” She didn’t add, Why am I here? but Miles thought it was implied.

  “What do you remember?”

  Her lips clamped shut.

  Miles tried again. “The last thing Jin and Mina remember of you is your arrest by the Northbridge municipal police, eighteen months back. Two days ago, my people and I found you frozen in a portable cryochamber in Dr. Seiichiro Leiber’s townhouse basement. I’m now trying to close that eighteen-month memory gap. For both of us, I suppose.”

  That last plainly shocked her; her stare at him shifted from fear and misplaced anger to sheer bewilderment. “What?”

  Miles sighed, hitching himself up on the stool at the end of her bed. An Auditor was supposed to listen, not talk—one of Gregor’s wee jokes, was that?—but this woman had earned her briefing. Besides, it was quite likely that Lisa Sato didn’t know enough about Barrayar to point to it on a wormhole map. “I expect I had better begin at the beginning. I’m a galactic. My official job title is Imperial Auditor. That’s a high-level government investigator for the Barrayaran Imperium. You no doubt wonder what I’m doing on Kibou-daini.” Miles wondered himself, some moments. “I was originally sent to check out a smelly situation with a large WhiteChrys company franchise on Komarr—that’s the second planet of our empire—” As succinctly as he could, he explained the WhiteChrys scam with the Komarran planetary voting shares, including his successful bribery sting. For the first time, she looked faintly cheered.

  “Yes, hit them where they keep their hearts, in their wallets,” she murmured with satisfaction. “Although WhiteChrys isn’t even the worst of the corps.”

  “Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it. Now I need to explain how I met your son Jin, and found this place…” Necessarily, he backed up to his attendance at the cryo-conference, and the attack upon it by the N.H.L.L.

  “Those murderous idiots!” said Lisa Sato, her voice hearteningly enlivened with scorn for someone other than Miles.

  “In their defense, they don’t seem to have succeeded in killing anyone, this round. If not for lack of trying. I actually feel I owe them—they opened up my case for me in ways I’d have had trouble finding on my own, although I suppose the Komarr scam part would have run on rails regardless. Anyway, after I broke away from them I ended up lost in the Cryocombs…”

  That part held her nicely spellbound. Miles had the mother-wit to save most of his embroidering for after Jin had joined his tale, which drew her in fully. She had less trouble following the explanation of Suze’s schemes than Miles had, first encounter.

  “But why was Jin here?” she asked, at a loss. “I’d left the children with my sister Lorna. I only thought I’d be gone overnight, maybe a day o
r two, until I could get a lawyer—eighteen months?”

  “Do you remember being taken to be frozen? Who did it?”

  Her brow furrowed in an effort of recall. “I was in what was supposed to have been a temporary cell, more of a room, really, at the municipal police station. A man came in. I thought he might be from my lawyer. There was a hypospray, then…” She shook her head, then winced. Post-revival headache, no doubt. His had been a doozy.

  Hypnotic or knock-out drug, it hardly mattered which she had received. Miles suspected that not even more time to overcome any lingering cryo-amnesia—of which she showed very few signs—would recover anything after that.

  “After you were illegally, or in any case extra-legally, frozen, your sister and brother-in-law naturally looked after their nephew and niece. I gather that Jin ran away from your sister due to conflicts over his creatures in her crowded household. Mina stayed on. She was doing well in her second year of primary school”—that seemed a safe assumption—“until I inadvertently caused Jin to be returned to his aunt, and they both ran away together to, well, me.” At her Why you? look, he added, “Jin can tell you all the details when you see him.” Miles hoped Jin was enough of a Barrayaran partisan by now to convey the Lord Auditor’s good intentions. Good performance was still to be tested, unfortunately.

  “But enough about me.” Let’s talk about you. It had been a very long time, thankfully, since Miles had attempted to pick up a woman in a bar—and even that had been in the line of duty—but his sense of desperate seduction wasn’t altogether misplaced. He needed to persuade Lisa Sato to trust him, and quickly. “What was your connection with Seiichiro Leiber, and how did it come about?”

  For a long moment he feared she was going to clam up again, but after another cool look, she began, “Seiichiro came to us—to our political action council—with a secret he’d discovered through his work.”

  “How many times did he visit you?”

  “Two or three.”

  “Who all did he tell? Did he ever meet with all of you?”

  “George and Eiko and me, at first. There was one later meeting with all of us, when we planned the rally—George Suwabi and me, Seiichiro, Lee Kang, Rumi Khosla, and Eiko Tennoji.”

  Those last names were all too familiar to Miles from his researches. “Let me guess. You decided to make a public announcement of the secret at the rally, where things went so wrong.”

  Her gaze flicked up from her lap to go knife-narrow at him. “It wasn’t our people who made the trouble. We were hit by a counter-rally—a collection of thugs from the N.H.L.L. They were supposed to have stayed at the other end of the park, that night. We couldn’t afford to rent a hall, and neither could they.”

  “Was it really the N.H.L.L., or could it have been a gang hired to impersonate them?”

  “It was really them—I recognized a couple of the fellows involved. Locals.”

  “Mm, they might still have been employed for the task. Set upon you.”

  Her head tilted in consideration and half-agreement. “The police broke up the fight. There seemed to be an awful lot of police for the size of the scuffle, and they arrived very quickly. As if they’d already been warned. I saw several people with bleeding heads, or pushed to the ground.” The memory seemed distressing; to her, it was literally only yesterday, Miles was reminded. “That’s not the kind of protest we ever were. I think the N.H.L.L. is like the other side of the coin, literally, from the cryocorps. The N.H.L.L. frets about the money they don’t have, the cryocorps fret about money they do have, and neither one cares about anyone’s lives but their own.”

  A shrewd judgment, Miles thought. “May we come back to Dr. Leiber?” And his secret. “He does seem to have been the key man, in several senses.”

  She regarded him and seemed to come to a decision. “I suppose if you are some sort of bizarre cryocorp spy, you already know. And know that I know.” So what more is there to lose? hung unspoken.

  “For what it’s worth, I already have a big pointer in the fact that Dr. Leiber researched preservation solution chemistry for NewEgypt Cryonics.”

  She gave a gingerly half-nod. “What Seiichiro had discovered was that a certain formulation of cryo-preservative that was on the market a generation or so ago broke down chemically after a few decades. There must be thousands, maybe millions of people who were treated with it locked up in the corps freezers who are truly dead, not revivable. Meaning their votes are void and their assets due to be returned to their heirs. There must be billions of nuyen at stake from that alone. And that’s without even getting to the vast legal costs, plus all the procedures that will have to be devised to figure out which patrons from that period are which.”

  Miles blew out a soundless whistle, pieces of his puzzle slotting into place at light speed. Commodified contracts, indeed! Oh, he wanted an ImpSec meta-economics analyst to go with the forensic accountant from Escobar, and he wanted them now. With all the data-penetrating equipment they could carry, pre-keyed to the peculiarities of Kibou’s planetary net.

  And he’d order them the moment he was back at the consulate. But for the next few days, he was stuck with his old original organic brain. A used model, at that, sadly battered by all the wear and tear.

  What he said out loud was, “Yeah, that would sure account for it all.” Including, perhaps, poor Alice Chen, who’d been left by Leiber in Sato’s place—as a decoy, or as a clue? Or as a time-bomb?

  “We thought this was a revelation that could truly jolt the cryocorps’ hold on Kibou,” said Lisa Sato. “Even break their grip.” She stared around her cubicle, down at her lately-thawed hands. “I suppose we were right.” Her brow furrowed. “Wait. You mean to say they’ve still kept this silent for the past year and a half? It wasn’t a secret the corps could keep forever—as more and more bad revives turn up from that generation, disproportionately, people are bound to notice the pattern. That’s part of why George wanted to strike quickly, for the maximum public impact. Why didn’t… oh.” She turned suddenly bleak eyes upon Miles, who flinched in anticipation of what was coming next. “What happened to the six of us? Why didn’t anyone get the word out, after I was taken away? Were we all taken away?”

  “I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, Madame Sato, but that’s what it looks like. Kang, Khosla, and you were all frozen under questionable diagnoses within a few days of the rally. George Suwabi supposedly crashed his lightflyer into a lake, and Madame Tennoji fell from her apartment house balcony to her death, after excessive drinking. Needless to say, I should think it most interesting to see someone from your police homicide bureau re-open those two cases. Er… did she drink to excess?”

  She frowned, even paler about the mouth than her revival had left her. “Well, yes. She was in a lot of pain from her joint deterioration. But she didn’t fall off of things. Oh, no, poor George…”

  “The odd man out in all this is Dr. Leiber. He simply went back to work for the past eighteen months.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Fortunately, I’m going to be able to ask him about it. When he wakes up.”

  “Was he frozen, too?”

  “Ah, no. He had an encounter with a simple sedative this morning, according to my man Roic. Raven—Dr. Durona, that is—confirms. We’ve detained him here at Suze’s while he sleeps it off. He was trying to leave the planet when Roic picked him up. Somebody else was trying to prevent him, I think. It’s going to be an interesting interrogation.” Miles hesitated. This was, after all, Jin and Mina’s mother. Those two had to have inherited, or perhaps learned, some part of their admirable wits and determination from her. And you couldn’t demand trust without giving some in return.

  “Would you like to sit in?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Miles was itching to get to Leiber, but was diverted by Roic to consider his other captives. Thanks to one of Raven’s potions, both now slept peacefully on the floor of an empty office—or possibly abandoned utility close
t—adjoining the underground garage of the former patient intake building. Roic had spent the time constructively going through wallets, IDs, and the lift van.

  “This wasn’t what you might call deep covert ops, here,” Roic said, sorting out the wallets to demonstrate. “The van is registered to NewEgypt, and the scrubs they’re wearing are company issue. They were carrying all their own identifications. Hans Witta and Okiya Cermak. Johannes did some back-checking. T’ one is actually the senior officer for plant security, and t’other used to be a regular guard till eighteen months ago, when he got a big raise in pay and a promotion to personal assistant to his chief.”

  “Interesting,” murmured Miles.

  “Ayup. I’d say Dr. Leiber’s kidnapping was something they put together in a hurry, out of resources they had to hand. If they’d nailed him at work, or anywhere on the NewEgypt properties, they wouldn’t even have had to bother with that much. Thing is, now what do we do with ’em? We can’t keep ’em sacked out on the floor forever. I mean, you got to let a man pee sometime. And their bosses have to know by now that something went wrong. Catch and release? I figured to set them back in their van not far from Leiber’s hotel, and let them wake up on their own.”

  “Hm. Have you and Johannes rendered the van unlocatable?”

  “Of course, m’lord,” Roic said, his prim tone adding, I do my job.

  “But they did see you.”

  “Unavoidable, I’m afraid. I don’t think they saw Johannes, though.”

  “Is kidnapping kidnappers still kidnapping?” Miles mused.

  “Yes,” said Roic, unhelpfully.

  “Not that NewEgypt is likely to bring charges.”

  “Naw, they’d do something else.”

  “I am reminded. I could have Suze freeze and store them for us, I suppose. Technically.”

  Roic gave him the Look.

  “If push came to shove. As a Kibou-daini problem-solving technique, there seems to be precedent.”