Cryoburn-ARC (5 page)

Lord Vorkosigan's post-cryorevival seizures actually consisted of him sinking down, shivering with his eyes rolled back for a couple of minutes in an unattractive manner, and then waking up very, very cranky. The fits were unlikely to be fatal, at least since Lady Vorkosigan had extracted his promise never, ever to attempt to drive himself in any powered vehicle—ground car, aircar, lightflyer, shuttle, or mode unnamed. Horses and bicycles had been a compromise, and though m'lord hated the helmets, he did comply.

Skinny didn't need to know this, however, so Roic embroidered the medical facts to the limit of his invention till Skinny, doubt growing in his eyes, weakened and said, "All right! I'll ask." He added—as no professional would have—"I didn't see anyone who looked like that guy here, though."

Skinny withdrew, leaving Roic thinking,
Uh-huh. Minion, not master.
Skinny seemed a type Roic had met often in his early days as a street guard in the Vorkosigan District capital of Hassadar. While not reliable enough to be put in charge of anything more complicated than a dishwasher, they were very easy to convince that all their troubles were someone else's fault. Roic knew this because they used to tell him so, at great and often incoherent length, while he was hauling them somewhere safe to sleep off their current binge of drink or drugs or arguments. That didn't mean they couldn't be truly dangerous, especially when they found themselves in over their heads, and it didn't take a very deep pool of troubles to manage that, either.

His own pool seemed an abyss, right now. Did the Legacy Liberators' plans for their captives include killing them one by one till their demands were met?
Our fringe loonies on Barrayar sure would,
Roic thought semi-proudly. Yet the affair had been oddly bloodless, so far—stunners and sleepy-drugs, not needlers and nerve gas. But maybe, maybe—dare he hope?—m'lord
wasn't
in their queue.

Because if m'lord died on Roic's watch, there would be nothing for it but to file the testimony by secured comlink and slit his own throat right here. Death would be better than making that report to certain persons in person. He pictured the faces of Count and Countess Vorkosigan, of Lady Ekaterin, hearing the news. Of Commander Pym, of Aurie. He imagined Sasha and little Helen, five years old—he'd have to kneel to look them in the eye—
Where's Papa, Roic?

He lacked a suitable blade. He'd heard of prisoners choking themselves by swallowing their own tongues—he curled his experimentally—but he doubted it would work for him. There was the wall. Strong enough to hold that damned bolt, certainly. Could he run against that wall hard enough to break his own sturdy neck?

It seemed premature, but it was something to keep in mind. M'lord, now, he was very big on getting a good meal on board before making life-or-death decisions, and so was m'lady, come to think. Roic sighed, crawled over, and collected his Reddi-Meal.

Miles woke in a blink to broad daylight, a canvas roof, and a curious feline face staring into his from a cat's breath away. Glad to discover the weight on his chest was not some alarming new medical condition, he lifted the three-legged beast off and gingerly sat up. Post-drug headache, check. Fatigue, check. No screaming angels, double-check and an exclamation point or two. His vision seemed clear of all unrealities, and his surroundings, though odd, were not out of any nightmare he owned.

He pushed his blanket aside and looked around the rooftop refuge. All of the castlelike details had faded, to be replaced by a utilitarian flat quadrangle with a couple of exchanger towers supporting the canvas room. Or barn. Or zoo. In addition to the bird-of-prey on its perch, elegant and haughty and clearly the Vor lord of all it surveyed, some battered metal shelving displayed the cages harboring the black-and-white rat collection, along with several glass-walled terrariums. Though most of their occupants were out of sight behind artfully-arranged vegetation, he was fairly sure he saw a turtle. Along the wall opposite his bedroll, three boxes lined with shredded flimsies made nests for the chicken population; Twig, the brown hen, still dozed in hers. Miles eyed the clothesline still tied around his ankle.
Have I been collected?
He'd known worse fates.

And here was his zookeeper. Jin, sitting at the little round table, turned around and smiled at him. "Oh good, you're awake!"

Freed of an upwhacked brain chemistry's re-imaging, Jin proved a skinny kid just shy of puberty, with a shock of straight black hair in need of a cut and bright brown eyes, his features typical of the multi-racial blends of the local founder populations. He was dressed in a shirt too large for him, the sleeves rolled up and the shirttail trailing down over a pair of baggy shorts. Worn sport shoes without socks slopped on his feet. "Would you like breakfast?" Jin asked. "I have fresh eggs this morning—three of 'em!"

A proud young farmer; Miles could see that eggs loomed in his near future. "In a bit. I'd like to wash up first."

"Wash?" said Jin, as if this were a novel notion.

"Do you have any soap?" Miles went on. "I don't expect you have any depilatory."

Jin shook his head at this last, but jumped up to rummage on his crowded shelves and came up with a bar of rather dry soap, a plastic basin, and a grayish towel. Miles had to ask for Jin's help un-knotting the safety line, then accepted the soap and supplies with thanks and shuffled around the exchanger tower to the working water tap, where he stripped off his clothes, what was left of them, knelt, and managed a wash and rinse not only of his face, but head and whole body, including a good soaping of his sore feet and knees. The latter were contused and scabbed this morning, but showed no sign of infection, good. Jin tagged along to watch, frowning curiously at the pale scars lacing his torso. Miles slid back into his ragged and somewhat smelly garb, combed his hair with his fingers, and shuffled back to sink gratefully into the lone chair, toward which his young host gestured him.

Jin set a metal pot of water to boil on an ordinary, if battered, rechargeable camp heater. The boy's rooftop realm was clearly furnished out of back-alley scavenges, but some fruitful ones. The water heated quickly, and Jin slipped his three eggs, precious treasures, gently in. "Twig laid the brown one," Jin informed Miles, "and Galli the other two. They're fresh last night. And I have salt!"

Jin bustled about and produced a couple of plastic plates, the bottle of water refilled and ready for sharing between them, and half a loaf of what proved to be surprisingly excellent bread, if a trifle dry. With an air of confession, Jin lowered his voice. "Eggs come out of chickens' butts, you know."

"Yes, I knew that," Miles returned gravely. "We have Earth chickens, and other birds, where I come from, too."

Jin relaxed. "Oh, good. Some people get upset when they first find that out."

"Some people think Barrayar is a primitive world," Miles offered.

Jin brightened. "Does it have many animals?"

"Yes, the usual Earth imports, atop its own native ecosystem. The native animals are mostly small, like bugs, though. There are larger creatures in the seas."

"Do people fish?"

"Not in the seas. In stocked lakes, yes. The Barrayaran plants and animals are mostly toxic to humans."

Jin nodded wisely. "Around here, the native stuff they first found on the equator was mostly microorganisms. They figure that's where the oxygen came from, before the last big freeze. They set up a lot of Earth plants to follow the melting glaciers, north and south. But not many animals."

"Kibou-daini is a lot like Komarr—that's the second planet of my Empire," Miles said. "A cold world, being slowly terraformed. Sergyar—that's the third world—you'd probably like it. It has a fully-developed native ecosystem, and lots of amazing animals, or so my mother tells me. It's only been colonized in the last generation, so scientists are still finding out new things about the biota."

Jin looked at Miles more warmly. It seemed he had just risen in the boy's estimation—were adults who could make sensible conversation rare in Jin's world, perhaps? For a certain value of sensible equating to
zoological,
apparently.

"I don't suppose you have any coffee. Or tea," Miles said, without much hope.

Jin shook his head. "I have a couple of cola bulbs, though." He darted back to his shelves to return with a pair of bright plastic drink bulbs. "Except they're warm."

Miles took one up and squinted at the ingredients label, a vile concoction of cheap sugars and chemicals, and decided he couldn't manage this before breakfast even if one of the chemicals might be caffeine.
So, when did you grow so nice, my Lord Auditor?
Or was it
grow so old
? The eggs, bread and water would be challenge enough for his queasy stomach. He shook his head no-thanks and set the bulb down.

The eggs were still simmering. Miles looked around and said, "Interesting place, this. Not at all like anything I've been shown on Kibou so far." Not with the cryocorps stage-managing the tours, certainly. "How many other people live here?"

Jin shrugged. "A hundred—two hundred? I'm not sure. Suze-san would know."

Miles's eyebrows rose. "That many!" They stayed out of sight well. He supposed a community of illegal squatters would have to be discreet in order to last. "How did you come here?"

Another shrug. "I just found it. Or it found me. A couple of folks out collecting tripped over me sleeping in a park, and sort of collected me, too."

A tradition, it seemed. "Do you have other family here?"

"No."

An atypically short response, from the chatty—lonely?—child. "Family anywhere?"

"My dad's dead." A hesitation. "My mom's frozen."

A distinction with a difference, on this planet. "Siblings?"

"I have a little sister. Somewhere. With
relatives
."

That last word had almost been spit out. Miles controlled his brows, maintaining an empty, inviting silence.

"She was too little to take with me," Jin went on, a bit defensively, "and she didn't understand anything that was going on anyway."

"And what was, er, going on?"

The shrug again. Jin jumped up. "Oh, the eggs are done!"

So was Jin an orphan? A runaway? Both? Miles dimly thought Kibou-daini maintained the sort of children's social services usual to technologically advanced planets, if perhaps not up to the relentless standards of, say, Beta Colony. Jin was a mystery, but not, alas, the most pressing one on his hands this morning.

Jin rolled hot eggs onto their plates, making sure Miles got the special brown one, and Miles kept the wits not to argue about his guestly double-portion. Jin handed over a restaurant packet of salt from someplace called Ayako's Cafe, and they divided the bread and shared the water. "Excellent," said Miles around a mouthful. "Couldn't be fresher." Jin smiled.

Miles swallowed a bite of bread, and said, "So, you said someone around here had a comconsole? Would they let me use it?"

"Suze-san." Jin nodded. "She might. If you get to her early in the day, when she's not so grouchy." He added more reluctantly, "I could take you."

Was he regretting untying that ankle-rope? "I'd like that very much, thanks. It's rather important to me."

The
I'm-pretending-I-don't-care
shrug again. As if the only way Jin could imagine keeping any living thing was by tying it up and feeding it, lest it run away and never be seen again.

Jin bustled about after breakfast to feed meat shreds to the falcon, bread bits to the chickens, and other carefully sorted scraps to the rats and the residents of the glass boxes. He cleaned cages and swished out and refilled water pans with fresh drinks all round. Miles was quietly impressed with his thoroughness, though the boy might have also been dragging his feet, reluctant to end this visit. In due course, and feeling much stronger and less dizzy, Miles followed his guide cautiously down the ladder once more.

Chapter Three

Miles trailed Jin through another unlocked metal door, down some stairs into a disturbingly darkened corridor, through a utility tunnel, and into yet another building. Subliminal sounds and smells, as well as better lighting, suggested this one was occupied, and indeed, around another turn they came to what had obviously once been an employee kitchen and cafeteria. About a dozen people lingered there, some cooking, some eating. All watched in wary silence as the pair passed, except for a young woman working at an industrial-sized mixer who spotted Jin, waved a large spoon in the air, and called him to breakfast.

Jin faltered, sniffing at the aroma of baked goods wafting from her vicinity, but then smiled and shook his head. "Later, Ako! I got a guest!" Miles stared back over his shoulder as Jin drew him onward.

Along a corridor two flights up, they passed a row of doors to what formerly, Miles thought, might have been offices, but now seemed to be living quarters. Through the open ones he saw filtered daylight, and piles of personal junk variously tidy or messy, the sort of shabby, battered goods that only folks who feared they couldn't get more would ever use, or save. The people he glimpsed seemed to be mostly dozing in bedrolls on the floor, or puttering quietly. A few residents squinted back at Miles as they passed. While they seemed a mix of ages, a disproportionate number were elderly. Maybe the able-bodied young ones, like Ako-the-cook, were out doing things?