Cryoburn-ARC (13 page)

Raven tugged absently on his frazzled braid, laid over his shoulder, and continued, "As a department head, Rowan says she misses the hands-on surgical work. She hardly gets to do two revivals a week, these days. I do two to six a day, depending on complications. Nothing as complicated as you were—
you
took Rowan, me, and two shifts of medtechs eighteen hours straight, back in the day."

"You did good work."

"Thank you." Raven nodded in what seemed to Roic rather smug satisfaction.

"Give Rowan my best, when you see her."

"Oh, yeah, she said to say hi to you, too."

This won an oddly ironic look, and a return nod.

"I take it," put in Roic, "that Dr. Durona, here, wasn't at the conference by chance?"

"Indeed, not. I'd asked the Durona Group to supply me with an independent technical evaluation of the cryo-conference, and whatever turned up at it."

"The Group had actually received the conference's call for presentations well before you asked, Lord Vorkosigan. We were going to send one of our junior residents—this place is not without interest to us, actually."

"And have you observed anything of special note so far? Technically." M'lord leaned back in his station chair and steepled his fingers, giving Raven a judicious stare.

"Nothing new to us on the technical side. I did notice that they seemed more interested in freezing people than thawing them."

"Yes, the cryocorps are plainly playing numbers games with their customers'—patrons, they call 'em—proxy votes."

"It's a game they've won, from the sound of things."

M'lord nodded. "It was barely discussed at the conference, yet there seems to be plenty of debate on the subject outside. In the streets and elsewhere."

Raven put in, "The N.H.L.L. were sure complaining vigorously."

"Yeah, but not very effectively," said Roic. "Loons like that are their own worst advertisement."

"Does it strike you both as a pretty free debate, as such things go? Noisy?"

"Well, yes," said Raven. "Not as noisy as Escobaran politics."

"Noisier than Barrayar, though," Roic said.

"
Much
noisier than Jackson's Whole," Raven granted, with a twisted grin.

"That's not politics, that's predators versus prey," muttered m'lord. But he went on: "Well, thanks to the N.H.L.L., I had a very useful two days. Now that you're both back alive, I suppose I can afford to be grateful to them."

"New answers?" asked Roic, with a sapient eyebrow-lift.

"Better. A whole raft of new questions."

And m'lord promptly topped—of course—Roic's tale with a hair-curling story of the appalling extent of the Cryocombs beneath the city, and of how m'lord had stumbled on a bootleg freezing operation run by, apparently, Kibou street geezers. Raven seemed less impressed by the bootleg cryonics—he was Jacksonian, after all. As near as Roic could tell,
everything
on Jackson's Whole was done illegally. Or, more precisely, lawlessly.

"Fragile and doomed," was Raven's succinct opinion of Madame Suze's on-going operation. "I'm astonished she's gotten away with so much for so long."

"Mm, maybe not. It's clandestine, but it doesn't really rock the cryocorps' boat. Everyone here being in the same boat, after all." M'lord rubbed his chin and squinted red-rimmed eyes that glinted a trifle too brightly. "Then we come to this woman Lisa Sato, and her group."

"Your little zookeeper's frozen mama?" said Roic.

"Yep. The N.H.L.L. is allowed to run its length, Suze's operation is overlooked, but Sato's seemingly much more reasonable and legal group is broken up, at considerable trouble and expense. All that ambient noise, and yet only one voice is silenced." M'lord gestured to the secured comconsole, now dark. "I've spent the past several hours doing some digging—"

And as a former ImpSec galactic operative, this sort of digging was meat and drink to m'lord, Roic reflected.

"—and in just that time, I've turned up anomalies galore. Lisa Sato was not the only member of her group to come to a bad end. Two others were frozen after supposedly-unsuccessful treatments for medical conditions that should not have been fatal, another died in an accident, and yet another was ruled a suicide of the fell-or-jumped sort. Even at the time, brows were raised, and quite a few people were offended, but the aftershocks were drowned out in the news by a flood of trivial sex scandals. What does this suggest to you?"

"That Lisa Sato's group was getting ready to rock somebody's boat pretty hard," said Roic slowly.

Raven nodded concurrence. "How?"

"That, interestingly, does not turn up in the public record. Nor even in the less-public records. Somebody did a first-class job on the cleanup, there, even if they weren't able to make it completely invisible. That now heads my list of shiny new questions—just what got cleaned up, a year and a half ago?"

Roic frowned. "Very riveting, m'lord, but
.
.
.
what has this got t' do with Barrayar's interests?"

M'lord cleared his throat. "It is far too early to say," he said primly.

Roic, glumly, read that as,
I haven't made up a reason yet, but give me time
. Was m'lord going all quixotic on account of that orphan boy? Emperor Gregor himself had warned Roic about m'lord's tendency to expensive knight-errantry, in one of their rare private conversations. From the Imperial sigh that had accompanied this, it had been unclear if Gregor actually expected Roic to restrain m'lord, or not.

The door hissed open, and Consul Vorlynkin stuck his head through. "I've heard back from the lawyer, Lord Vorkosigan."

"Ah, good!" M'lord waved him in; he stood, seeming a bit wary. "What's the word on Jin?"

"As I thought, there is nothing we can legally do. If he were an orphan without kin, you could apply for custody of him, but it would take some months and almost certainly be rejected by the Northbridge courts, especially if there was any hint of taking him off-planet."

"I didn't ask to adopt him, Vorlynkin. Just rescue him from the police."

"In any case, my Lord Auditor, it's become moot—the police have already turned the boy over to his blood-kin, an aunt who is in fact his present legal guardian."

"Damn!" M'lord slumped. "Damn. I hope Ako proves a more faithful zookeeper than I did."

"Well, it's not as if we could kidnap him," said Vorlynkin, with a faint smile. M'lord eyed him. Perhaps thinking better of this mild venture into humor, Vorlynkin cleared his throat and went back to looking bland. Roic wondered if he should take Vorlynkin aside later and warn him not to
say
things like that around m'lord, and not because the Lord Auditor might take offense.

Roic rubbed sandy eyelids. "Perhaps you'd best sleep on it, m'lord," he suggested, not without self-interest. M'lord had plainly had the advantage of a shower and fresh clothes, but still looked as if he'd been up all night, as had they all. And the shiny glitter in his eyes was a tip-off. "Have you checked your neurotransmitter levels since you got back?" The elevation of same being early warning of an impending seizure, and signal it was time to use the medical seizure-stimulator to short-circuit the fit—in some safe and controlled place.

M'lord addressed an unrevealing mutter to his shoes.

"Right," said Roic, in a very firm tone.

M'lord sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, yeah."

"Can I go back to my hotel now?" asked Raven hopefully.

"Yes, but stay in touch. In fact—Vorlynkin, please issue Dr. Durona a secured wristcom before he goes, eh?"

Vorlynkin's brows rose, but he said only, "Yes, my lord."

"I
need
more
data
," m'lord growled, to no one in particular. He looked up appraisingly at the consul. "All right, Vorlynkin. If WhiteChrys or any of our other late hosts call to inquire after me, I want you to tell them that I am very upset by the disruption of the conference and the kidnapping of my armsman. In fact, I'm furious, and as soon as I recover from my ordeal I plan to stalk home and give a very bad report of the affair to anyone who will listen, starting with Emperor Gregor."

"Er
.
.
.
and are you?" asked Vorlynkin, sounding nonplussed.

M'lord returned only an unreassuring grin. "I want you to test how far they'll go to reopen their lines of communication. Indicate you'll do your diplomatic best to calm me down, but you're not sure it can be done. If they offer you incentives for the task, take them up."

"You
.
.
.
want me to accept a bribe, sir?" A little real offense tightened Vorlynkin's jaw, as well as understandable alarm.

"Well, at least pretend to consider it, eh? It will show us who wants what, and how badly. If they don't come through, I'll have to think of another move, but if you're a tolerably good fisherman, I think you can hook them for me."

"I'll, um
.
.
.
try my best, sir." Vorlynkin didn't exactly stare at the Lord Auditor as if the little man had sprouted two heads, but Roic could almost see the consul scrambling to keep pace.
Yeah, welcome to my world
.

The debriefing broke up.

The consulate harbored two spare bedrooms upstairs fitted out for guests, not much used for the purpose and slowly filling with assorted storage. One had been hastily cleared for the Lord Auditor. Roic turned down the bed and rummaged in m'lord's luggage for the seizure stimulator. M'lord stripped to his underwear, sat on the bed, and eyed the medical device with loathing.

"Kludgy thing."

"Yes, m'lord. Tell me, am I to trust the consulate fellows here, or not?"

"I'm not sure yet. I've been caught out before with embassy staff or even ImpSec couriers being suborned."

"Because if you mean to use them for backup, which we very much need, you're going to have to start including them in your loop. I could see Lieutenant Johannes, f'r instance, didn't know what to make of you leaving him out just now."

"It's this Lord Auditor thing. I
used
to be able to get almost anyone to talk to me, damn it. In your spare minutes, try your hand at evaluating them, eh? I've no doubt they'll be more willing to be frank with you, simple honest face and all that."

"Yes, m'lord."

"I already know that
somebody
out there is buying people. Question is, has the consulate been bought already, or did there seem no need to secure it before I showed up? At least neither of the Barrayarans have families here, so I don't have to worry about negative incentives." M'lord scowled, lay back, and set the stimulator to the curve of his skull. Roic handed him the mouth guard, which he fitted around his teeth. He took a breath and squeezed his eyes shut like someone about to down a dose of some nasty-tasting medicine, and triggered the stimulator.

Roic timed the seizure—it was a long one, suggesting m'lord had been pushing the limit. Roic was used to the rolled-back eyes, the weird grimace, and the shivering, but he doubted he'd ever be quite reconciled to the strange absence of that driving personality animating the face. In due course, the neural storm passed, and m'lord lay slack, his eyes opening again on the universe as though his gaze recreated it.

"God, I hate this," he muttered. His standard mantra at this point.

"Yes, m'lord," Roic soothed. His standard response.

"I'll be useless for the rest of the night even if I do get slept out. And tomorrow as well."

"I'll bring you coffee."

"Thanks, Roic." M'lord rolled over and drew up the covers, surrendering at last to the demands of his depleted body. Muffled into the pillow, almost inaudibly, "F'r everythin'
.
.
."

Roic shook his head and tiptoed off to find his own bunk.

Jin blinked open sore eyes in the semi-darkness of his sister Minako's tiny bedroom, then bit his lip on a groan. He'd meant to stay awake, outwait and maybe outwit his captors, but the exhaustion of the past day had betrayed him. He sat up on his elbow. A nightlight low on the wall shed a dim pink glow, but the room lacked a clock. It was still full dark outside, and the muffled rumble of Uncle Hikaru's snores sounded through the thin walls of the next room, so everyone else was asleep, but it could be any hour from midnight to near-dawn.

He swung bare legs out from under the covers of the narrow futon. Aunt Lorna had put him to bed in his underwear, since his cousin Tetsu's pajamas had been too big, and his cousin Ken's too small. His own clothes she had hauled away to wash, or maybe burn, she'd said, since there was no telling where they'd been. Jin sure wasn't telling, anyway.

Hopelessly, he went to the window and tried the lock. It unlatched, but the window only slid aside about three centimeters. Uncle Hikaru had climbed up on a borrowed ladder, after the argument at dinner, and blocked the window groove with a rod. Jin could just curl his fingers around the frame, but couldn't get his hand through. He wasn't going to be able to repeat his escape of last year.