Cryoburn-ARC (6 page)

This place was drawing power and water enough to maintain decency, if not such luxuries as lift tubes. No signs of buckets used as chamber pots, stairwells doubling as urinals, or cookfires set in wastebaskets or bathtubs. So where was the power coming from, and the sewage going to? Was someone here paying for utilities, or were they being secretly siphoned from the municipal systems? The answers, Miles thought, might be revealing, if only he had time to pursue them.

Up another floor lay a corridor with fewer doors. Jin stopped at one on the end and knocked briskly. He waited a minute, leaning his shoulders on the wall and swinging one foot, then rapped again, louder.

"Yah, yah," a gruff voice sounded from within. "I hear you. Don't get your undies in a knot."

The door opened a hand-span. Miles dropped his gaze to not much higher than his own eyelevel, and found a seamed face scowling back at him. "What's this?" the grumbling voice demanded sharply. "Oh, it's you, Jin. What are you doing, bringing a stranger up here?"

"Yani and I found him last night," said Jin. "He was lost."

The red-rimmed eyes narrowed. "What, is that Yani's druggie?"

Miles cleared his throat, conscious of his piratical beard stubble. "Drugged, ma'am, but not a druggie. I had an unfortunate allergic reaction to some medication, in the course of which I was robbed and stumbled into the Cryocombs. It took me quite a while to find my way out again."

"You're not from around here."

"No, ma'am."

Jin jumped in: "He wants to use your comconsole, Suze-san."

The scowl deepened. "You can't call out on it. It only inloads."

This seemed unlikely to Miles, but for starters, he would take whatever he could get. It was plain this Suze really didn't like him here. An un-trusted outsider who Saw Too Much could come to a bad end, in a secretive community. Granted he hadn't spotted any bully boys, but murder didn't take muscle; slyness would do as well. "I just want to check the news, ma'am. Till I get my wallet and IDs back, I have to beg kindness from strangers."

Suze snorted. "You find many kindly strangers where you come from?"

"I've always found enough." A dozen times over, Miles's life had been handed back to him by people he barely knew. "I figure it gives me an obligation to take my turn being one."

"Huh," said Suze.

"Jinni and Lucky both like him," Jin testified in anxious aid.

Thin lips quirked. "Oh, well, if the rat and the cat both agree, who am I to argue
.
.
.
?" After another moment, the door swung open, and Jin shooed him in.

Suze might have been any age from a hard-worn eighty to a well-preserved century. She had certainly, Miles thought, been a head taller a couple of decades back; now she would need sturdy shoes to top five feet, but instead wore flat plastic sandals that snapped her dry-skinned heels as she stepped. That head was covered with frizzed and unruly gray curls. She might have seemed younger if she'd smiled, but the frown-grooves were deeply set around her pursed mouth. Her loose trousers, shirt, and over-shirt were not a set, but being black, black, and black, they could not mis-match.

Her quarters consisted of two rooms. An antechamber filled with much the same sort of junk storage Miles had glimpsed below-stairs might once have been the domain of some receptionist. The room beyond, a generous corner office with windows on two sides, had surely been executive territory. A rumpled bedroll lay along one inner wall; he spied the comconsole, with desk and chair, along the other. A battered table held a ewer and washbasin, damp towels, and a faint scent of soap competing with the close, old-woman air of the place. The tall storage cupboard, doors shut, might have held anything. A couple of spare swivel chairs, a couch leaking stuffing, and two armchairs, all used office furniture, suggested that Suze might not be as reclusive as she looked.

Suze gestured him to the comconsole. "It's open."

"Thank you, ma'am," Miles said, sliding into the station chair. Suze and Jin watched over his shoulder. Finding the local news feeds took only moments. He selected Nexus standard English from a menu of some dozen supported local language options, half of which he could not identify. Although Barrayaran Russian was most certainly not among them, which might come in handy should he need private speech with his bodyguard—if Roic was still alive.
.
.
.

As he'd suspected, yesterday morning's uproar at the cryo-conference was well covered. The vid commentary, as usual, was cursory and not too informative, but the detail-supplements proved more useful; they included a complete list of the kidnapped, with pictures, and pleas from the local authorities for anyone with information to step forward. Roic and Miles were both on the list, as was Dr. Durona, unfortunately. Two different extremist organizations, neither of which Miles had previously heard of—so much for his ImpSec reports on Kibou-daini—were claiming credit, or blame, for the kidnappings.

"That's you!" said Jin in excitement, pointing to Miles's face on the holovid. Miles didn't think it a flattering shot, but apparently it was recognizable. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not, just now. Jin went on, "Miles Vor—vor—vorka
see
gain."

"Vor-
ko
-suh-g'n," Miles corrected automatically.

"So, you were caught up in that stupid mess," said Suze. "Galactic, are you?"

She was not as unaware of the news as Jin. Interesting. "The kidnappers seemed to be targeting off-worlders. A group of us had been assembled in the lobby for a guided tour. It was listed on the public schedule, so the snatch wasn't necessarily an inside job."

"You just said you were robbed."

"So I was, right down to my shoes. But the sedative they jabbed me with as they were dragging me off was an unfortunate choice. Instead of knocking me out, it made me manic. I broke away."

"Why didn't you go back to the hotel?"

"Well, and then there were the hallucinations. About ten hours of them, I think."

Suze regarded him in deep suspicion. Miles hoped it sounded too screwy a tale to have been made up.

Nine delegates taken—no, eight, subtracting Miles, although the kidnappers hadn't confessed to losing him. The Barrayaran consulate here, tiny as it was, would surely already have reported this, though the message could not yet have arrived home.
Damn
. Admiral Miles Naismith, free mercenary, had never owned a home address, nor hostages to fortune. Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan did. He couldn't
not
report in. And yet, what an
interesting
chance to become temporarily invisible had been handed to him.
.
.
.

His old covert ops instincts were kicking in, and he wasn't at all sure he wanted them. He could walk out of here and into any store or restaurant, and sooner or later find someone who would let him call and get help and a pick-up. The call would, of course, be unsecured and wide-open to anyone else looking for him, not limited to the authorities. Yet if the authorities, or at any rate, the powerful people who he suspected ran them, hadn't drawn his negative attention night before last, he'd not hesitate to do just that. But he was hesitating now.

Suze pulled up a swivel chair and plumped down on it, watching more closely as he read on. Jin shifted from foot to foot, growing bored as Miles, frowning, sped through holoscreens of mostly non-useful data. "Hey Suze-san, you want me to bring you some cinnamon rolls? Ako was just getting them out of the oven."

"Do they have coffee down there?" Miles asked, diverted. "Can you bring me coffee? Black?"

Jin wrinkled his nose. "I don't know how anybody can stand to drink that stuff."

"It's a taste you acquire when you're older. Rather like an interest in girls."

Suze made a noise in her throat that might have been either a laugh, or phlegm.

Jin's nose wrinkled further, but he bobbed a sort of nod with his whole body, and trotted off.

"Two coffees!" Suze called after him. He waved an acknowledging hand as he thumped out the door.

Miles turned in his chair and looked after him—the boy was out of earshot already. "Nice kid, that."

"Yah."

"Good of you to take him in. What do you know about him?"
Prime the pump, my Lord Auditor.
"He told me his father was dead and his mother was frozen, making him an orphan of sorts, I suppose. I'd think his mother would have been too young for long-term cryo-sequestration. Usually at that age it's only used as a last-ditch emergency procedure to hold people till they can be treated." As Miles had once been. He couldn't even add,
To my cost,
because despite the imperfections of his revival, his life and everything in it for the past decade had been its grant.
And a gift of the kindness of strangers, don't forget them.
The Durona Group being about as strange as they came.

Suze's snort this time had a decidedly editorial tone. She looked him over and evidently came to some decision in his favor, for she went on: "Jin's father was killed in a construction accident. He didn't have a cryo-contract or cryo-insurance, so he was denied treatment till it was too late, though I expect things were happening brutally fast at the time."

Miles nodded. Emergency cryo-treatment was either fast or useless, giving a new meaning to the phrase,
the quick or the dead
. There was little point in reviving a body when the mind was irretrievable; you might as well just clone the victim and start over.

"Jin's mother went a little crazy after that. Launched a campaign for freezing as a universal public right, and went after the corps' grave-robbery as well. She became quite the spokeswoman, a few years back. Lawsuits, protests. Then one of her rallies went violent—they never did figure out who was to blame, though I have my own suspicions—and she was arrested. They rammed though an allegation of mental illness—not quite a charge of criminally insane, because that would have had to meet stricter standards—and some kindly friend of the court offered to fund her freezing till her cure could be discovered."

Miles's teeth tightened. "That chill the opposition, did it?"

"You could say."

"Didn't her relatives protest? Or anybody?"

"Her campaign group was broken up by the expenses of it all. Her relatives were embarrassed by her—put at risk of losing their own jobs, don't you know. I expect they were secretly glad when she was shut up." Suze eyed him. "You don't seem especially shocked."

Miles shrugged. "I've seen a fair number of worlds, met a lot of people. Encountered a variety of systems. I've seen worse. Granted, Jacksons' Whole, which is run by what are in effect high-tech warlords and their thugs, has a certain refreshing straightforwardness about its corruption. They don't have to pretend their evil is good in order to sell it to voters."

"Let me tell you, young man—the dirty little secret of democracy is that just because you get a vote, doesn't mean you get your choice." She sighed. "Though up till twenty, thirty years ago, it wasn't so bad, here. There were hundreds and hundreds of cryocorps, all run by different people with different ideas, so their vote-bags offset each other. Then some of them grew big enough to start gobbling up the others. Not because it was good for Kibou, or for their cryo-patrons, or for anyone but their top men in the grip of their greed, but just because they
could
. Nowadays it's down to half a dozen big corps that control most everything, plus a few scattered holdouts too small to matter."

"Jin called you Suze the Secretary," said Miles slowly. "What are you secretary
of
?"

Her lined face, briefly animated by her anger, grew more closed. "This place, once. It was a closely-held family corp, and I was executive secretary to our chief. Then we were bought out—swallowed up and stripped. Not because the buyer wanted us, but because they wanted to eliminate us."

"Who bought it out? WhiteChrys, by chance?"

Suze shook her head. "No, Shinkawa Perpetual. WhiteChrys got
them
later, though." A twisted smile suggested she thought this justice was cosmic, if a little too late.

"But how did you end up living in this shell?"

"A lot of us lost our jobs then, you know. No golden tram rides to retirement for mere employees. We had to go somewhere." She hesitated. "Other folks drifted in later."

"Executive secretary, huh? I guess you would know where all the bodies were buried."

She cast him a sharp look—what, frightened? This tough, haggish creature? But before Miles could pursue this line further, Jin banged back in, bearing a laden tray. It held—besides the promised rolls, redolent of cinnamon, a carton of milk, and two mismatched cups—an entire insulated
carafe
of coffee. Miles, proud of his restraint, did not fall on it rabidly, but waited for his hostess to serve him.

She dismayed him with delay by shuffling to her tall cupboard and returning with an unlabeled square glass bottle. She poured a
.
.
.
shot, Miles fancied, into her own cup, and, after a pause, raised her brows at Miles. "Want any freshener?"

"Er, no thanks. Just coffee." It sluiced down his throat, tonic enough all on its own. Jin sat back on the other swivel chair, contentedly munching rolls and swiveling with a steady
squeak-squeak-squeak
that made Suze wince and take a long swallow of her doctored drink.