“Give it up, Oki,” Roic advised genially. “It’s been over ever since I sent your confessions off in a bottle. I’d have thought you people would have realized that.”
Caught and nailed by Roic’s steady and implacable gaze as much as by the weapon aimed at his head, Oki reluctantly held his right arm wide and released his shock stick, which fell with a clatter. As he slumped, Leiber stood away from him, wheezing but with his spine actually straight for a change. Unasked, Oki folded his hands atop his head and stood looking downright miserable.
Madame Sato, distraught, slid to the floor to gather up her son’s limp body. The unconscious boy was pale, but Roic saw with satisfaction that the cut on his neck was a mere shallow scratch, barely bleeding.
“I’m sorry Jin was caught in my stunner nimbus, ma’am,” Roic said to her. “But I’ve found it’s usually better to resolve these hostage situations as directly as I can. Bad to let them spin out.”
“This is a nightmare,” she groaned.
Roic granted this with a nod, but said, “Cut short now, ma’am. Raven will get Jin some synergine right away”—Roic rolled his eye compellingly at Raven—“and he won’t even wake up with a headache.”
Raven took the hint and scurried back to the recovery room for suitable supplies.
M’lord strolled up, possessed himself of the shock stick, and regarded their captive with a curious and thoughtful air, like a biologist planning out the dissection of a promising new specimen.
Oki regarded him back, bewildered. “Who the hell are you people, anyway?”
“From your point of view,” said m’lord, “I suppose we’re your karma delivery service. Why the devil didn’t you and your buddy Hans run and keep on running when you had the chance, earlier today? Yesterday, by now, I guess. Why ever did you go back to your bosses?”
“We got families, you know.”
M’lord’s brows rose. Had this not occurred to him before now, Roic wondered? “If you didn’t want to be a disgrace to them, you’re about eighteen months too late, I think.”
Oki rocked a bit. “That, and the money.”
M’lord brows went up a bit further. Oki said defensively, “For the first time in my life, the money was good. We bought a house.”
Oki’s was not exactly a world of riotous living, Roic suspected. If NewEgypt’s plant security hiring practices were any good, he’d probably been an honest man, before he’d been sucked down into this bog by his bosses. Roic glanced at m’lord, prepared to give a hint and a nudge, but m’lord was on it already.
“It’s not too late even now to limit your damages. What’s the local equivalent of turning Emperor’s Witness around here, does anyone know? They must have one.”
“Prefecture’s Evidence, I believe, m’lord,” said Roic.
“I happen to have a good lawyer on retainer who can advise you, if you cooperate with me in a timely fashion,” m’lord told their captive. “That means, instantly.”
Roic took the cue and a tighter grip on his stunner, staring along its length into Oki’s eyes, for emphasis.
“Where were you taking Leiber and Sato just now?” asked m’lord. “Not for a walk, presumably.”
“Akabane’s waiting for us out front in the street with the van,” mumbled Oki.
“The NewEgypt finance chief? Alone?”
Oki wet his lips. “It was just supposed to be Leiber, see.”
M’lord’s eyes lit. “That one we want, Roic—in flagrante delicto and arrested on the premises, if possible. An enemy’s mistake is a tactical gift that must never be wasted.”
Oki added, unasked, “It was going to be wall-to-wall lawyers for them—President Kim, and Choi who runs Operations, and Napak, that research head. Akabane caught us after the big meeting—said it was plain that him and us were going to be the goats, that the other three would hand us over without a blink in the morning if nothing was done. But he knew from the last time that my brother-in-law was with the Legacy Liberators, and…”
“Division and panic, ah,” said m’lord, sounding quite satisfied. “That explains much. Hurry, Roic. Akabane’s bound to bolt as soon as the police show up in force.”
Raven was returning with a medkit. Roic passed his stunner briefly to m’lord, circled Oki and fastened his wrists behind his back with his own tanglecuffs, was blandly handed back his weapon, grabbed Leiber’s arm, and jogged for the end stairs.
“What do you want me for?” asked Leiber, sounding a touch alarmed, as they scuffed rapidly down the steps.
“You can ID Akabane for me. I wouldn’t want to stun the wrong fellow, after all.”
“You’re pretty free with that thing.”
“It’s all right. I have a license to stun.”
“I thought that was supposed to be a license to kill.”
Roic grimaced. “That, too. But you would not believe all the forms that have to be filled out, afterward.”
Leiber looked as if he weren’t sure if that was a joke or not, which was all right, since Roic wasn’t sure either. The procedures hadn’t been all that amusing at the time. Or in retrospect.
They pushed through the heavy metal doors at the intake building’s far end, turned left, and rounded the corner onto its long front side. A short, U-shaped driveway in the center led to a covered entry space, where patients and visitors had once been dropped off, no doubt. The drive embraced what had likely been a sweep of tidy lawn and landscaping, but now was a sad stretch of weeds. There was no security lighting, but a lot of flickering hand lights revealed a herd of elderly people in all sorts of dress and undress, milling about on the drive and the ex-lawn. To Roic’s relief, no orange fire-glow reflected in the night mist from the other side of the complex, but various colors of flashing emergency lights did, which helped illuminate the scene in a dance-party sort of fashion.
A double row of parking spaces ran the length of the facility’s front—Roic could see the end of the administration building, beyond the intake building, and mentally located Madame Suze’s corner office on its top floor. Beyond the parking row, the facility was bounded by the dilapidated chain link fence.
In the street beyond, only one or two dark and distant vehicles were parked, but just past the gate with its tumbled-down old security kiosk, a familiar van lurked in the shadows. The gate, interestingly, had been forced open and left standing wide.
“All right,” said Roic. “Wait’ll I take cover behind that gate kiosk, then go out to the end of the lawn and mill around like the others. Make sure you can be seen from the street, but don’t get within arm’s length of the drive.”
“Wait, what, you want to use me as bait?” said Lieber, indignant. “I thought you wanted me to identify Akabane!”
“This’ll do that,” said Roic reasonably. “Nobody else here is going to go grabbing for you. Plus it will lure him out of his vehicle and onto the grounds.” I hope.
“Why bother?”
“First, I can’t stun him through the side of the van, and second, if nothing else, Lord Mark can charge him with trespassing. Which will hold him for the night, and by morning it’ll be too late.”
“I thought that fellow Fuwa owned the place.”
“If Lord Mark doesn’t own it by now, I don’t know him.” Not that anyone did really know him, not even m’lord. Well, maybe Miss Kareen. “Go on.” Roic gave Lieber a little encouraging shove, then drifted away unobtrusively through the intermittent shadows to take cover on the facility side of the gate kiosk, out of sight of the street.
Leiber stumbled around quite convincingly among the weeds, albeit at a few meters farther range than Roic would have preferred, looking up and around as if in bewilderment, showing profile and full-face. For a minute, Roic wasn’t sure if Akabane would rise to his bait, and was just trying to think of a next ploy, when the van eased past the kiosk. Roic crouched down in the shadows.
For a horrible instant, he wondered if he’d misjudged the situation—if Akabane just lifted the van to head
-height and brought it down hard enough atop his victim, Leiber would be in no shape to confess anything to anyone again. Someone had tried to do that to m’lord once, as he’d told the story to Roic, with several passes like a big stomping boot coming within centimeters of reducing him to a smear on the pavement. Roic tensed like a runner at the start of a race, getting ready to sprint to his bait’s rescue.
But maybe these local vehicles had safety sensors to prevent those sorts of accidents, or maybe Akabane was inhibited by the hundred or so witnesses. In any case, as its side door slid open the van merely lurched up onto the lawn, cutting Leiber off from the sight of the old folks, who were mostly turned away craning their necks toward the source of the flashing lights.
A dark shape leaped from the van toward Leiber, who recoiled. Roic took a sweeping knee shot and brought the figure down in a muffled cry of astonishment and rage. A few swift paces, and Roic was in position to put his favorite low-stun immobilization into the back of the fellow’s neck, at can’t-miss range.
“Quick, help me toss him back into his van,” Roic told Leiber, who, puffing, nodded and complied.
Chief Financial Officer Akabane proved a local-looking sort—he might have been Raven’s middle-aged wicked uncle, if the Durona clone had owned any uncles of any description. Although Akabane did not look especially wicked at this point, just pale and limp. And, Roic hoped, defeated.
For all the days m’lord had been playing against the NewEgypt cabal, this was the first direct view Roic had gained of the enemy’s face, except for a few vid scans. It had all been action at a distance, like a space war. Or perhaps some bizarre mutant form of chess where the rules changed every two moves. M’lord’s formidable father, who’d once been a space admiral, might have felt at home, and m’lord had scarcely been given pause, but to Roic it felt strange and bloodless and removed, though he was very grateful for the bloodless part.
And then Roic wondered how m’lord’s sudden trail of chaos through their affairs, erupting out of seeming-nowhere, must have felt to the confused cryocorp men, who’d thought they’d had it all locked down. That was a vision to make a fellow smile, though it was a smile that made Leiber draw back in unease.
From the corner of his eye, Roic saw the lights of emergency vehicles turning into the street; they’d be through the gate in seconds. “Melt into the crowd and meet me back at the end door,” he told Leiber, and swiftly followed his own advice. Melting into this crowd proved a bit of a trick, as he was a head taller, as well as about a century younger, than anyone else around him. But there was plenty enough else going on right now that no one spared him much attention.
Leiber arrived a few paces behind him. “That’s it?” he asked.
Roic nodded. “M’lord will arrange the rest. Stunner tag’s over.” Roic took a moment’s modest satisfaction in his job performance. “It’s all words from here on. Which are not my department.” He added after a reflective pause: “Thankfully.”
Jin blinked open his eyes to discover himself staring at a ceiling—of the recovery room, he realized after turning his head. He touched his face, which was tingling, and scrunched his eyelids open and shut a few times, but he didn’t feel especially sick or dizzy. He didn’t feel especially good, either. Sort of blah, really. He seemed to be lying on one of the room’s several raised, narrow bed-tables, though it didn’t have any sheets, and its brittle old plastic felt nasty on his skin.
“Jin, are you all right?”
He sat up on one elbow to find his mother leaning over the side of the bed-table. She was wearing her filtering mask again, her robe all belted up tight, and her eyes searched him anxiously.
“I guess so.” He rubbed his face some more, then scrubbed his scalp where it still hurt from the hair-pulling.
Mina skipped to their mother’s side and looked up at him with great interest. “Armsman Roic shot you. I’d never seen anyone get shot for real before.”
Neither had Jin. It felt very strange to have been shot. For the first time, he wondered what it had really been like for Miles-san when he’d been shot with that needle-grenade. Of course, that was nothing like being merely stunned, Jin supposed, but that weird moment of looking into Armsman Roic’s unyielding face, and feeling so helpless and too late and that his world was being taken away from him by people he didn’t, couldn’t, control… He scowled, not liking that feeling much.
“It’s not broken,” came Raven-sensei’s voice, and, “You couldn’t prove it by me,” Vorlynkin’s voice returned.
Jin twisted around to find the pair of them at the next table over. Vorlynkin was sitting up with his legs dangling. His wide-sleeved coat was off, tossed aside, along with his undercoat, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. Raven-sensei stood in front of him, poking at his left arm, which Vorlynkin was holding rather defensively.
Vorlynkin’s face was all washed, and Nefertiti’s claw marks were now three thin red lines beneath a shiny layer of transparent plastic bandage. There was a lot of drying blood soaked on his shirt collar, though, and spattered elsewhere on his clothes, and Jin cringed in guilt for his new pet.
“You will have some magnificent bruises,” Raven-sensei continued.
“A crowbar will do that. I’m lucky I didn’t get my face bashed in.”
“Vorlynkin-san found more ninjas,” Mina confided to Jin. “They had a fight. Vorlynkin-san won.”
Vorlynkin looked over and smiled rather ruefully at her. “Fortunately for me, not ninjas. They were just a couple of borrowed thugs from the local chapter of the N.H.L.L. Finally trying to carry out their slogan, I suppose.”
“I thought they were all arrested after the conference kidnappings,” said Raven-sensei.
“That was an especially radical splinter group, apparently. Their organization is not very unified at the best of times, I gather.” Vorlynkin added to Jin, “I found the pair of them around the far end of the next building over from your hideout, trying to pry the door open and get down into the tunnels with more fire-starter. If they’d succeeded it would have been a major mess.”
Raven-sensei’s eyebrows lifted. “Would the arsonists even have gotten themselves out alive?”
“Hard to say. It seems awfully easy to get turned around down there. But the department was able to get the fire in the exchanger building under control quickly, once I’d told them it was asterzine. Ugly product, asterzine. You don’t want to put water on it, and it would have been a horrible surprise for the firefighters if they had. You can believe they’ll be going after the N.H.L.L. in the morning.”
Jin’s brow wrinkled. “Why a crowbar? The door around the next side after that is always left unlocked.”
Vorlynkin blinked, then laughed, then winced, touching his scratched face. “Just as well that none of us knew that, I suppose. After I confiscated the crowbar, I was able to hold them till the police arrived. Some of the firemen were more than eager to help. The pair fingered the NewEgypt security guards as having engaged them, evidently just to create a diversion for Dr. Leiber’s re-kidnapping, though I gather that some of the Liberators grew over-eager and exceeded their instructions. But it should lead back nicely to the senior men Lord Auditor Vorkosigan wished to target.”
Their mother rubbed her forehead, frown-lines deepening around her eyes. “If they don’t manage to suppress it all, again.”
“Not this time, I suspect,” said Vorlynkin, smiling at her in reassurance.
“Where’s Nefertiti?” asked Jin in sudden alarm.
Mina pointed at the desk built into the far wall, along with a lot of cupboards. From the shadows beneath came a mumbling sort of growl. “She’s hiding. Maybe you can get her to come out after she calms down. I tried some food, but I don’t think she’s hungry right now.”
Raven-sensei stepped around the tables to smile at Jin, peer into his eyes, thumb back his eyelids, and feel his pulse. “Headache? Nausea?”
“Not really.” Jin felt down his tingling face to find a strip of plastic b
andage across his neck.
“Just a nick,” Raven-sensei assured him.
“My face is a little numb.”
“That’s normal. It’ll pass in another hour. If it doesn’t, let me know.” Raven-sensei paused and cleared his throat. “Lord Vorkosigan said to tell you when you woke up, those few minutes of delay you and Mina caused with those NewEgypt thugs made all the difference to us. The rescue party, as it turned out.”
“Oh,” said Mina, sounding pleased.
Raven-sensei nodded. “If they’d hustled you out of the building before we arrived, he said, it would have been a long stern chase—one of his military turns of phrase, that—meaning, we’d have had a hell of a time catching up with you. Although I imagine he would have, somehow. He, ah… tends to be persistent.”
For the first time, Jin sat all the way up. In the glass booth next to his mother’s, the two big NewEgypt guys were penned, and Jin flinched in fear, till he saw that Hans was still out cold on the floor, and Oki was sitting with his hands fastened behind his back and his shoulders slumped, not paying attention to anything.
Jin pictured it—all of them dragged away in some windowless van to who-knew-where, and Mom taken away again… He gulped, which made the bandage tug on his skin. His desperate struggle with those big men hadn’t seemed to do much good at the time, had seemed utterly futile in fact, but maybe…
Miles-san himself blew in then, his step brisk, with Armsman Roic in tow. Oki still didn’t look up, and Jin was reminded that you couldn’t hear anything in those booths.
“Ah,” said Roic, smiling at Jin and giving him a friendly wave. “You’re awake. Good.”
Jin scowled back, not quite able to get that new picture out of his mind’s eye of Roic looking through him like he wasn’t there while he aimed the stunner. Roic’s face fell, a little, though he then tried his smile on Mina to better effect. Was it all a fake, that smile? Which was the real Roic, the big smiling man or that cold, intent, scary one?
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