Cryoburn-ARC (23 page)

"Shouldn't we take Raven-sensei upstairs now?" Jin urged.

They mounted one floor to the corridor directly above, which had apparently once been a fully-equipped cryorevival facility, with half a dozen operating theaters, a recovery room, and some intensive care booths. Most of it was dark and dusty and, indeed, sadly stripped, but Medtech Tanaka apparently maintained one operating room for procedures more demanding than what antibiotic ointment, surgical glue, and bracing advice would cover. She and Raven fell into intense but by no means discouraged tech-speak, medical division, which ended with sending Jin downstairs to bring back Tenbury for more consultation.

"Who
is
the owner-of-record for this place?" Miles asked the medtech while they were waiting. "If it was legally abandoned, I'd have thought the city would have seized it for back taxes by now."

"There have been a couple of supposed owners, over the years. The city won't seize it for the same reason the current owner, poor slob, can't unload it. Legal liability for two or three thousand destitute cryo-corpses. He was a contractor, who bought it for what he thought was a song and only then discovered what came with it. Suze has him under control for now. We think the biggest current danger is that he'll try to solve his dilemma through a spot of arson, but we keep a watch."

"It doesn't sound like a very stable situation."

"Never has been. We just try to go from day to day. Surprising where you can end up, that way."

Raven, Miles noticed, was listening intently to all this, not in the least appalled. Well, Jacksonian-trained, after all. The Hippocratic Oath, if he'd ever heard of it, was likely only considered a guideline there.

Tenbury came back, and there followed a lot more tech-speak, then visits to other chambers with some alarming thumping and crashing. Miles sent the fretful Jin back to his roof to supervise the loading-up of his menagerie. When the noises of inventory at last died away, Raven returned.

"Well?" said Miles. "Go or no-go?"

"Go," said Raven. "There will have to be some prep, but I find these people are good at improvising. And the physical impediments are made up for by a delightful lack of paperwork."

"How soon will you be ready for me to make my snatch? I'll probably want you along on the insertion, by the way, in case we run into any snags that are medical rather than security-related. How do you feel about risking arrest, by the way?"

Raven shrugged. "I'm sure your brother will extract me if you can't. In any case, you can make your switch any time. Madame Sato can just as well wait here till we're ready."

"My time is not infinitely elastic." Besides his wanting to go home, of course, there was no telling what can of worms would be emptied onto his plate with the revival of Jin's mother. Miles was getting itchy to know.

"You can take that kid back to the consulate. I expect I'll be working late here," Raven went on. "I can get back to my hotel by public transport."

Miles pointed to Raven's consulate-issued wristcom. "Check in first. Secured channel. I'll want a report. And it may be better to send Johannes to pick you up."

"Actually
.
.
." Raven hesitated. "I think I will want to stop back at the consulate anyway. Can I use your secured tight-beam links to report in to my boss on Escobar?"

"Lily, or Mark?"

"Both. Though I'm not just sure where Lord Mark is, right now. Do you know?"

Miles shook his head. "His enterprises have become rather far-flung. I don't track him daily. Are you arranging bail in advance?"

"Well, that's a thought, but mainly because I may have found some elements of interest to the Durona group, here."

"If they impinge on my investigation, I want to be fully apprised. Or even if they don't."

"Understood."

Miles waved him back to work, and made his way back down through the basement maze and up to Jin's rooftop.

As they unloaded the van, Consul Vorlynkin came out to see what all they were dumping in his back garden. Mina danced ahead of him and pounced on Lucky with an excited cry, rubbing her face in the soft fur. "Lucky! I thought you were dead!" The old gray cat endured the hug, but wriggled free promptly. "Do you still have your ratties, Jin?"

"Yes," said Jin, lifting the cage he was lugging to show them off. "Jinnie and most of her children."

"Handsome," said Vorlynkin, inspecting Gyre, chained to his perch, from a prudent distance. "How do you keep it from eating your chickens?" Galli and Twig, released from their transport box by Lieutenant Johannes, ran past his knees, flapping their wings and squawking, then slowed to stare in apparent amazement at the grass patch before them, warm and green-smelling in the noon sun.

"Well, the big ones sort of defend themselves. I had to keep Gyre chained to his perch when the chicks were littler. I'll have to keep him chained here anyway, till he figures out this is where he belongs." Jin watched as Armsman Roic, with due care, unloaded a stack of terrariums onto the shelf they'd brought from Jin's refuge. Tucked up against the back of the house and sheltered by its eaves, concealed by the house, the tall stone garden walls, and all the trees and bushes, the shelf and its contents would be almost as safe as in his tent-shelter at Suze-san's.

"Cats and mice together as well?" Vorkynkin went on. "What next, lions and lambs?"

"Rats," Jin corrected austerely. "Though I
wish
I might have a lion
.
.
.
! Anyway, Lucky's too old and lazy to bother the big ones, and I keep the little ones in cages with tops." He looked around with satisfaction. "Now that I have all my creatures back, you can keep Lady Murasaki," he told Mina generously.

She made a face. "But
Lucky's
half mine. Because she wasn't yours to start with, you know, even if you did steal her away."

"I saved her from Aunt Lorna," Jin reminded her.

Lucky curled around Vorlynkin's ankles, rubbing her chin to scent-mark him as her new property and leaving a trail of hairs plastered to his formerly-tidy hakama trousers. He bent rather absently to scritch her spine, and she arched shamelessly under his hand.

Mina addressed him anxiously, "Oh sir, can we keep Lucky inside? Till she knows this is home? Cats
do
get lost, you know!"

Looking down into Mina's upturned face, Vorlynkin said reluctantly, "Is she housebroken?"

Mina nodded vigorously. "I can fix her cat pan in my room!"

"The washroom off the kitchen would likely do as well," he told her. "You and Jin
.
.
.
well, yes, I expect it will be good for you and your brother to look after her."

Miles-san strolled past. "All shipshape here, Jin? Then I need Johannes back." He added to Consul Vorlynkin, "We'll be in your tight-room for a time. A lot of detail-work still to do." At his gesture, Roic rose and took up what seemed his accustomed place at his shoulder.

"Is your scheme going to fly, then?" Vorlynkin asked. Miles-san nodded. Vorlynkin grimaced.

Miles-san returned a wry smile. "Flexibility, Vorlynkin. That's the key." He trod indoors, swinging his cane. Jin and Vorlynkin stared after him.

Vorlynkin voiced Jin's own half-formed thought: "Was that supposed to be reassuring?"

Chapter Eleven

Roic figured midnight would have been the right time for a body-snatching expedition, possibly in the middle of a thunderstorm. Among other things, an electrical storm might help account for any power-flicker anomalies they left in their wake. But there were no suitable cold fronts predicted any time soon, and so Roic found himself, Raven, and m'lord, with Johannes driving the lift van again, turning in at the impressive entrance of the NewEgypt facility at high noon. It was only in Roic's imagination that the dog-headed statues flanking the main gate seemed to follow them with their painted eyes.

Johannes was armed with a couple of little floral arrangements in water tubes and a script, but he wasn't called upon to deploy either; the human gate guard waved them right through.

"What t' hell," said Roic.

"It's visiting hours," said m'lord mildly. "They aren't going to harass their patrons' kin, nor their potential future customers coming in for their tour, at this time of day. This isn't a military installation. All NewEgypt security has to worry about is theft—which is more likely to come from an employee—vandalism, which isn't likely to occur in broad daylight, and maybe something like the N.H.L.L.—who would probably wait for that midnight thunderstorm you wanted. Seems like their style, somehow."

Roic settled back with a disgruntled, "Huh."

He shifted uncomfortably in his somewhat-too-tight hospital uniform,
XL
, scavenged by Raven and Medtech Tanaka, possibly from the same source as some of their medical supplies now laid in and waiting back at Madame Suze's. M'lord wore a similar set,
XS
, a bit too loose, with the sleeve and trouser ends rolled up. Raven's set fit perfectly. Johannes was dressed in what Roic had been assured were unexceptionable Kibou street clothes, tidy and middle-class.

The van slipped past both the pyramid-topped building's lobby, fronted by an inviting faux-Egyptian garden with stone sphinxes, and the sign pointing to the loading docks for pre-frozen patron intake, hidden on the more utilitarian backside, then on around to a discreet side entrance meant for employees.

"All right, this is where we unload," m'lord said. "Don't look hurried, but don't waste time."

Trying not to look hurried, not to mention harried, Roic helped Raven open the back of the lift van and slide out the float pallet. A stack of boxes, emptied of their medical supplies, concealed the long shape in what Roic thought of as the freezer bag beneath. The body bag, designed for short-term transport, would, if left sealed, keep its contents at cryo-temperature for a couple of days, Raven had explained to him. Roic had to grant, it was a hell of a lot less bulky and eye-catching than a portable cryochamber. Johannes drove off to find the visitor parking and wait, and m'lord led the pallet and its handlers inside through automatic doors that parted for them without protest.

M'lord checked the holomap on his wristcom and led off through a succession of corridors. They encountered a trio of gossiping employees and an elderly couple, clearly visitors, on their way to the cafeteria that Roic smelled in passing, but none spared the pallet a glance. Roic carefully did not look back. Two more turns and a short ride down a freight lift tube, and they were pacing along an underground corridor that stopped at a double door, the first locked barrier they'd encountered.

M'lord opened one of the boxes, whipped out his
special
tool kit, ImpSec standard issue with upgrades, and knelt to the electronic lock. He muttered unreassuringly, "God, it's been a while. Hope I haven't lost my touch
.
.
." He puttered for a minute or two, while Roic jittered and kept glancing over his shoulder, and Raven looked bland. The doors parted so soundlessly, Roic was taken by surprise. M'lord looked smug. "Ah, good. I'd hoped not to leave any evidence by damaging the lock." He waved them through like some demented mâitre d'hôtel escorting diners to the best table in the room, and closed the doors gently again when the pallet had passed through.

The new corridor was much darker. And, Roic was surprised to see, unfinished, which made him worry about encountering workmen, but he supposed a construction crew would have lights that would warn them. Beneath the pyramidal building lay three sub-levels. Around the core stack of utilities on each level, four concentric corridors extended outward in squares, with radial connecting halls at the midpoint of each side. Too regular to be called a maze, it nonetheless seemed to Roic that it would be easy to get turned around down here. So just how disturbing it had been to m'lord to be lost for hours in a true maze, with
no
light?

They turned in at the next connecting spoke; m'lord's lips moved as he counted off side branches, then set in a smile as the core stack hove into view. Another pause, while m'lord weaseled his way into a locked electrical access panel, did some careful counting, and nodded. They then went out another spoke and turned right into one of the corridors, this one completed, dimly lit with utility lighting and lined with loaded cryo-drawers.

"This doesn't look so fancy," Roic murmured.

"These are the cheap seats," said m'lord. "If you want to be filed away behind faux mahogany and brass fittings—or gold, I'm told—NewEgypt can supply, on the upper levels."

Even down here, a lot of the drawers had small holders set in the walls beside them for odd little personal offerings, including tiny bottles of wine, wrapped snacks, or burned-down stubs of incense sticks. Most common were flowers, mostly plastic or silk but sometimes real ones—some fresh, some brown and drooping sadly from their dried-out water tubes.

"Here," said m'lord, stopping abruptly. He craned his neck at a drawer at the top of the stack. "Read off the number, Raven."

Raven recited a long alphanumeric string, twice.

M'lord checked carefully against the data on his wristcom. "This is it."

The disguising boxes then found another use, as m'lord filched one to boost him to a convenient height to examine the drawer lock and attach his ImpSec-special door opener to it. "All right," he murmured, climbing back down. "When the lights go out, make the switch."