Cryoburn

Chapter Fifteen

Miles was itching to get to Leiber, but was diverted by Roic to consider his other captives. Thanks to one of Raven’s potions, both now slept peacefully on the floor of an empty office—or possibly abandoned utility closet—adjoining the underground garage of the former patient intake building. Roic had spent the time constructively going through wallets, IDs, and the lift van.

“This wasn’t what you might call deep covert ops, here,” Roic said, sorting out the wallets to demonstrate. “The van is registered to NewEgypt, and the scrubs they’re wearing are company issue. They were carrying all their own identifications. Hans Witta and Okiya Cermak. Johannes did some back-checking. T’ one is actually the senior officer for plant security, and t’other used to be a regular guard till eighteen months ago, when he got a big raise in pay and a promotion to personal assistant to his chief.”

“Interesting,” murmured Miles.

“Ayup. I’d say Dr. Leiber’s kidnapping was something they put together in a hurry, out of resources they had to hand. If they’d nailed him at work, or anywhere on the NewEgypt properties, they wouldn’t even have had to bother with that much. Thing is, now what do we do with ’em? We can’t keep ’em sacked out on the floor forever. I mean, you got to let a man pee sometime. And their bosses have to know by now that something went wrong. Catch and release? I figured to set them back in their van not far from Leiber’s hotel, and let them wake up on their own.”

“Hm. Have you and Johannes rendered the van unlocatable?”

“Of course, m’lord,” Roic said, his prim tone adding, I do my job.

“But they did see you.”

“Unavoidable, I’m afraid. I don’t think they saw Johannes, though.”

“Is kidnapping kidnappers still kidnapping?” Miles mused.

“Yes,” said Roic, unhelpfully.

“Not that NewEgypt is likely to bring charges.”

“Naw, they’d do something else.”

“I am reminded. I could have Suze freeze and store them for us, I suppose. Technically.”

Roic gave him the Look.

“If push came to shove. As a Kibou-daini problem-solving technique, there seems to be precedent.”

Roic said nothing, firmly.

“Ah, well,” sighed Miles. “Lock the door and let them nap, for now. Onwards.”

Working around Madame Sato’s bio-isolation proved only a brief challenge. Miles set up his interrogation chamber in the empty booth next to hers, and lent her Raven’s wristcom to listen in. With his booth brightly lit, hers not, and the curtain mostly drawn on her side of the glass wall, it was as good as a one-way mirror as long as she didn’t move around too much. She understood, if perhaps did not entirely approve, his plan to split the interrogation into two parts, the first with Leiber unaware of her presence, to see if the same story was extracted both ways. Miles wasn’t sure when to spring her on Leiber for maximum utility. It would doubtless come to him.

Leiber was still woozy when Raven and Roic guided him into the booth and sat him in a chair. Roic took a wall-propping pose against the door. With no bed, the booth wasn’t exactly crowded even with the four of them, but its slightly claustrophobic air was more of a feature than a failing, in Miles’s view.

“You again!” Leiber said, staring at Miles.

Raven, with a benevolent air, bent to press a hypospray against Leiber’s arm.

Leiber jerked. “Fast-penta?” he growled, looking helpless and angry.

“Synergine,” Raven soothed. “That headache should clear right up.”

Leiber rubbed his arm and scowled, but, after pressing a suspicious hand to his forehead, blinked in surprise and, in a moment more, belief.

So, and when did you ever have fast-penta, that you can tell the difference? Miles added the question to his long list. Miles waved Raven to a chair against the wall, and took one himself at a not-too-looming distance from his subject. Although to loom properly, he supposed he’d have to stand on the chair, which just wouldn’t have the same effect. Best to delegate that task to Roic.

“So, Dr. Leiber. We might have saved steps by having this conversation day before yesterday, but I suppose your living room might have been monitored like your comconsole. Maybe it’s just as well. Here, I can assure you, we are totally private.” Miles smiled toothily. Imperial Auditor, threat or menace? You decide.

Leiber’s lips moved, My comconsole! “Dammit, I thought I’d taken care of that. So that’s how you traced me?”

“That’s how the two gentlemen dressed in the medical kit traced you, I imagine. Armsman Roic, here”—Miles waved his hand; Roic nodded amiably—“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to introduce you two properly earlier—Roic followed them. More or less. And took you away from them. Did you recognize them, by the way?”

“Hans and Oki? Of course. The Gang of Four’s pet muscle.”

“Highly paid, these coworkers of yours?”

“Oh, yah.” Leiber smiled sourly. “And great job security, too.”

“As good as yours?”

“Not as far as I know. Lucky for them.” Leiber squinted. “Took me away how?”

“Stunner,” said Roic.

“That’s illegal!”

“No, actually, I have a local permit. Bodyguard, y’know.”

Official government bodyguard, in point of fact. Which was as close as Vorlynkin had been able to get to Armsman on the Prefecture’s application form. Roic had acquired even odder designations in past ventures, true.

“Who the hell are you people, anyway?” Leiber sat up indignantly; Roic tensed a trifle. “Did you steal Lisa from me?”

“Her cryochamber is safe,” said Miles, truthfully. It was still tucked away down the hall.

“Not for long if NewEgypt’s onto me!”

“You’re safe too, for the moment. We’re holed up in an old decommissioned cryofacility on the south side of town, if you want to know. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Not likely,” muttered Leiber, subsiding.

“How about this,” said Miles. “I’ll tell you what I know, and you tell me what I don’t know.”

“Why should I?”

“We’ll come to that. To start with, I really was a Barrayaran delegate to the cryo-conference.”

“You’re no doctor. Or academic.” Leiber frowned. “Prospective patron?”

Not if I can help it. “No, I’m an Imperial Auditor. A high-level investigator for my government. Among my several tasks here is to study the social and legal problems Kibou-daini faces as a result of its deep engagement with cryonics. I shall inevitably be tapped as an advisor to upgrading Barrayar’s admittedly-archaic legal codes, to avoid repeating your mistakes, if we can.” Granted, that wasn’t his explicit task, but Gregor was bound to think of it sooner or later. Miles shuddered to foresee another few years of arm-wrestling subcommittees from the Councils of Counts and Ministers, just like his last gig about galactic reproductive and cloning technologies. On the bright side, he could go home every night; on the less bright, work would follow him there… “The punishment for a job well done, as it were. But it didn’t take long to figure out that the only troubles the conference seriously addressed were the technical ones.”

Raven waved agreement.

Miles went on, “The rest was pretty much cryocorps sales pitches. So I went looking on my own.”

“For troubles? Well, you’ve found mine.”

“Indeed, and instructive they are.”

Leiber hunched, looking offended.

“So far, I’ve discovered that Kibou’s scheme of proxy votes for the frozen, originally devised on the assumption that people would be revived sooner and in greater numbers, has proved a fascinating demographic trap. Still thinking about that one. Also, that a certain brand of cryo-preservative from about a generation ago turned out not to be good for more than about thirty years, and that NewEgypt and presumably all the other corps are sitting on a financial time-bomb of unrevivable corpses, for which, sooner or later, someone is going to have to pony up. And NewEgypt has gone to great lengths to insure that the someone won’t be them.”

Leiber went rigid. “How—!”

He’d doubtless twig to how Miles knew in a bit; Miles had no intention of hurrying his thought processes. “I know that you figured this out, that you went to Lisa Sato’s political action group for help, and that the result was a riot at their rally that ended with three of her people frozen and two murdered. Did you set them up at NewEgypt’s behest?”

“No!” cried Leiber indignantly. But then, deflating, “Not on purpose.”

“Betray them for money?”

“No! The bribe came later, just to make it look that way.”

Miles hadn’t even gone looking for evidence of bribes, yet. Ah, yes, deliver yourself into my hands, Doctor. You know you want to. “Then what did happen? In your own words.”

Leiber clasped his hands and stared at his feet for so long that Miles began to fancy fast-penta, with or without his subject’s permission, but at last began, “It all started about two years ago. I was assigned the problem of figuring out the unusual number of bad revivals we were getting from that era. When I’d narrowed it down to the decomposing cryo-fluid, I went to my boss, who went to his bosses to report. I thought they’d do something about it, I mean, right away, but weeks went by and nothing happened.”

“Who were these bosses? Which men were told about this?”

“The Gang of Four? There was my R & D supervisor, Roger Napak. And Ran Choi, the chief operating officer, and Anish Akabane, he’s chief of finance, and Shirou Kim, the NewEgypt president. They clamped down and kept the information tight right away.

“They promised me something was going to be done about the problem. I began to figure out they didn’t mean the same problem I did when Akabane unveiled his commodified contracts scheme. They weren’t trying to do anything about the bad preps, just about NewEgypt’s financial liabilities! When I complained to Rog, he told me to pipe down or I’d be fired, and I pointed out that if I were fired, I’d have no reason to pipe down, and he went real quiet, and then he promised me he’d do something. By that time, I didn’t trust their ideas about problem-solving one bit.

“I’d been following Lisa Sato on the news for a year or two by then. She seemed to me one of the few people on Kibou who wasn’t just arguing about the money. I mean, moral arguments, you know?”

Her detractors had certainly been arguing about the money, though, from the bits Miles had seen. The corps claimed her schemes would just set up a rival corp run by the government for the poor, for which everyone would pay. Illogically, they also claimed her scheme would damage their business, but if they weren’t taking in those poor patrons anyway, Miles didn’t see how they were losing anything. The N.H.L.L. just wanted to set fire to all the metabolically disadvantaged regardless of net worth. Though they certainly wanted to start with the rich, which suggested a certain shrewd efficiency in liberating their hypothesized legacy.

“So I went to see Lisa Sato in person. I didn’t even make an appointment over the comconsole, just went and knocked on her door one night. And she was everything I’d hoped she would be! I went again, and gave copies of all the data I had to her and George Suwabi, poor guy, and that’s when they came up with the rally speech idea, to release it all at once in a way the corps couldn’t quash. I thought it was all fixed.

“A few days later, when I went into work, Rog called me in to his office, and suddenly I was being given a shot of fast-penta. They squeezed everything out of me.” He hesitated. “Almost everything. Everything about the rally plan, and then they ran off in a hurry to do something about it. That’s where Hans and Oki first got into it, I think—they did the legwork setting up the riot. I think Oki had a relative in the N.H.L.L., actually, which gave them their in.”

“Who all was present at this interrogation?”

“All of them. The big four, I mean.”

“Was that legal or illegal here? The use of fast-penta on an employee, I mean?”

“Kind of legal. I guess. I mean, they’re allowed to use it in suspected cases of employee theft and crimes on the premises and so on. You have to sign a release when you’re first employed.”

“I see.”

“There are rules about how it has to be conducted to make it admissible in court, later. But I don’t think they were paying much attention to those in my case. Because the last thing they’d want is for any of this to get to a court. Because then they locked me up in Security’s holding area.”

“Was that also kind-of-legal?”

“They’re allowed to hold suspects till the real police arrive. Except, of course, the police never did. By the time they let me out, two days later, it was all over for Lisa and her people.” He bit his lip, clenched his hands. “I was helpless. Although not as helpless as the Gang of Four had figured, thanks to Lisa.”

“How was that?”

“When I brought her and George the data, she told me to place a copy somewhere secret—lawyer, bank vault, wherever—with instructions to simultaneously release it to a bunch of places—the courts, all the Prefecture departments of justice, the news, the net—in the event of my death, freezing, or disappearance. Which I did.”

“And that bought you protection from your bosses?”

“No, they had the location out of me in no time. Thing is, Lisa and George also hid copies, and by the time NewEgypt figured this out, they were both… well, Lisa was frozen and George was dead. The Gang searched, but they never found the other two copies.”

“How do you know?”

Leiber smiled grimly. “I’m still above room temperature and walking around.”

“Ah. Reasonable inference.” Miles rubbed his lips. “Were Suwabi and Tennoji murdered on purpose, then? By Hans and Oki, perhaps?”

“By Hans and Oki, but I don’t think they were told to kill anyone. I think those were attempted snatches that went wrong. They managed to get Kang and Khosla and Lisa, though.” Leiber’s lips twisted. “Speaking of job security. Both were given bonuses and raises, after, despite the big screw-ups. I wasn’t privy to the under-the-table agreements. They can’t turn in their bosses without incriminating themselves, and vice versa. And I think the Four kind of liked the idea of owning their own dirty-work squad. In case they needed someone to handle people like me again.

“Anyway, the impasse bought everyone time to calm down and think, even me. I felt so badly about it all. Especially Lisa. I mean, I’d destroyed everything she’d worked for, even though I was just trying to help. So when I was offered the bribe, I took it, even though I didn’t believe it for a minute, because I thought it would pacify them.” He brooded. “They’d bribed Rog a lot earlier, I think.”

“What form did this bribe take?”

“Nothing immediately useful, they knew better than that. It’s all unvested stock options that cut in after a certain numbers of years. I always figured they’d fire me just before they had to pay anything out, but I don’t know. They did let me do some real work—I developed a noninvasive scanner test for the bad preps, which wasn’t a task they could have assigned to anyone else, after all. The first payment option was due to cut in soon, though, and that’s what I set my plan on.”

“What plan?”

“To rescue Lisa.” Leiber’s eyes brightened, and he met Miles’s gaze for almost the first time. “It’s what’s kept me going for the past year and a half.” His voice lowered, beseeching. “I had to keep my job with NewEgypt in order to have access to her cryochamber, do you see? I realized it practically right away. Originally, I figured to save enough money to rescue them all, Kang and Khosla and Lisa, ship all three cryochambers secretly to Escobar for revival there. But it cost a lot more than I thought it would. Time was drawing on, I thought the Four were finally dropping their guard on me a bit, so I revised the plan to take just Lisa, alone. Take her to Escobar, make the charges against NewEgypt and the whole corrupt system from there, where we’d be safe.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot, I see,” said Miles neutrally, and pressed his hand to his lips to prevent the escape of any premature editorials.

Leiber’s expression grew almost exalted. “It would have worked! We could have been safe, together. We wouldn’t even have had to come back to Kibou, if we didn’t want. With my credentials, I could have found a job, supported us both.”

A slight, indignant disturbance of the curtain, Miles saw out of the corner of his eye. He carefully didn’t turn his head that way.

Leiber cast a speculative look at Raven. “Maybe even a place like the Durona Group.” His gaze grew more urgent. “Maybe, if you people could help me, it still could still work out—”

Leiber’s heroic visions were abruptly interrupted by the curtain being yanked back, and Madame Sato pounding on the glass and yelling something, alas made unintelligible by the barrier. Miles pointed helpfully to his wristcom.

Leiber nearly fell off his chair. “Lisa!” he cried, whether gladly or in terror Miles wasn’t sure.

Madame Sato apparently didn’t get the message about the wristcom, because she clenched her fists and whirled to dodge out her booth door, instead. Raven lurched up to intercept her, although only to hastily make her don a filtering mask before their own booth door slammed open—Roic had prudently moved out of the way.

“Seiichiro Leiber, you moron!” cried Madame Sato, which was approximately what Miles had guessed she’d been trying to say, since he’d been hard-pressed not to say it himself. “What were you thinking? You were going to kidnap me, take me off-planet, and abandon my children? And trap me there, with no money to get home?”

“No, no!” said Leiber, rising hastily and turning his hands out in pleading. “It wasn’t like that! Wasn’t going to be like that!”

It had been going to be exactly like that, in Leiber’s mind, Miles guessed. A princely rescue, with Leiber in the starring role, and the happily-ever-after, if not planned, at least much wished upon. Had Snow White in her glass coffin ever had a vote? Or a voice?

“Lisa, I know this was all my fault! I was going to make it right, I swear!”

Behind her mask, Miles thought Madame Sato was sputtering, almost beyond words. He could see her point. She snarled, “Make it right? Make it worse!”

Raven put in, “You know, upsetting and stressing a new revive is not good for their immune system. Or any other system.”

Some milder exercise than towering rage was indicated, certainly. Strokes were another real possibility in the more fragile revives, Miles dimly recalled. Interested as he was in what more might be squeezed out of Leiber, it was time to intervene.

“Well, his plan is certainly thwarted now,” Miles soothed her. “We’ll have to see if we can’t come up with something rather better.” He jumped up and dragged Raven’s chair around. “Please, Madame Sato, do sit down. I should be extremely glad of your input, at this point.”

Out of breath, Madame Sato sank into the seat, her brown eyes still glaring at Leiber over the top of her filtering mask. Leiber, too, sank down, or maybe his knees gave way.

Madame Sato rubbed her furrowed forehead, a gesture that made Raven frown medically. Her voice drooped in exhaustion along with her body. “If the corps have grown so corrupt and above the law that they can get away not just with theft, but with murder, what hope is there left for Kibou?”

“Escape?” Leiber offered.

Her eyes shot sparks of scorn, over her mask. “Leaving my children to be chewed up in this maw?” She drew breath. “Everyone’s children?”

Miles said mildly, “NewEgypt hasn’t got away with murder yet. In fact, their very secrecy suggests they’re still vulnerable on that point. A big enough stink bomb, suitably aimed, might still land on the target.”

Madame Sato shook her head. Miles wasn’t sure if her spasm of despair was the result of post-revival exhaustion, perfectly understandable under the circumstances, or of an acquaintance with Kibou-daini’s troubles much deeper than his own. Raven’s glower at him suggested the former, though.

“Roic,” he said over his shoulder, “I want you to run a fast-penta interrogation on both those goons we have downstairs. Focus on the murders, but get as much else as you can, especially about their bosses. Shoot the recordings over to the consulate, secured link.”

“Will such confessions be admissible to the local courts?”

“Mm, I need to think about that. The fact that we’re not the local authorities may put a wrinkle in it. Vorlynkin can ask the consulate lawyer.” Miles wondered what that as-yet-unmet woman was making of the recent stream of bizarre legal questions from her client. Well, it was doubtless time she earned her retainer. “In any case, I want to secure the evidence for my own purposes. Birds in the hand and all that.”

“Do we still want to release them, after? If they’re murderers?”

“It sounds as if they were amateurs, not contract killers. And bungling amateurs at that. Eh. Depends on what turns up in the interrogations. Raven can assist, but don’t let them see him. No point in letting them know any more than they do already.”

“And if either or both of them are allergic?”

An induced, and fatal, allergy to fast-penta was not uncommon among galactic covert operatives; Miles wasn’t sure about these civilians. “Have Raven check first. The test patches are in my kit along with the fast-penta. If so, call me.”

Roic nodded. Miles was confident in Roic’s interrogation skills on criminal matters; this was one task he might safely delegate.

“The larger issues…” Miles’s voice slowed. “I don’t have a handle on yet. It’s hard to see how this technology, widely adopted and combined with human nature, wouldn’t run into the same traps everywhere, in due course. In a broader sense, this is Barrayar’s problem, too, or will be.” Good, he had an all-purpose defense for his expense reports for this case. That had been a minor but growing concern.

Roic scratched his head. “Thing is—everyone here’s headed for the same end. If the higher-ups allow the whole system to get too corrupt, how do they expect to assure their own future revivals?”

“Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,” said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

Roic tapped his fingers on his trouser seam. “Yeah, belike.”

A motion caught Miles’s eye—the outer door of the recovery room opening. Vorlynkin appeared, being anxiously towed by Jin and Mina.

Miles pointed. “Madame Sato, I believe you have some visitors.”

Her head turned. She gasped, under her mask, and her eyes widened. She scrambled from her chair, Raven springing to the alert in case the sudden motion made her dangerously dizzy, but she was already banging out of the booth.

“Jin! Mina!”

“Mommy!”

The pair raced forward, but, since they did not let go of Vorlynkin, the man was pulled into a few long, unbalanced strides that brought him face to face with Madame Sato. She fell to one knee to clutch her children to her, first one, then the other, then both together, as hard as she could hug. Miles thought she might be crying. He made his way to the booth door and leaned on the jamb, watching. Even Jin, with all the austerity of his almost-twelve, didn’t reject the huggy-kissy stuff now.

“Mina!” Madame Sato held her daughter a little away from herself, and stared over her mask. Her voice shook. “You’ve grown!”

For the first time, Miles thought, those eighteen missing months and what they’d stolen from her was brought home. Proof she could touch, not just words and more words.

She looked up at last, in some bewilderment, at Vorlynkin. “And who’s this?”

Mina answered eagerly, “It’s Vorlynkin-san, Mommy. He took care of us at his house. It has a great garden! All Jin’s creatures like it, too.” She grabbed Vorlynkin’s hand and swung on it, without the least dismay on his part.

Vorlynkin smiled and offered Madame Sato his other hand up, which, after her first wobbling attempt to rise, she realized she needed, and took. He was tall enough that she actually had to look up—she’d been eye-to-eye with Leiber.

“Stefin Vorlynkin, Madame Sato. I’m the Barrayaran Consul to Kibou-daini. I’m very pleased to meet you at last.”

She made an abortive motion for her daughter to stop using the consul as a swing-set, but Mina had already abandoned the hand and was running around the pair in excited circles. Jin hopped up and down in a burst of explanations, most of which seemed to turn on the continued health and well-being of his creatures, with special reference to Lucky.

“You’ve been looking after my children?” she said uncertainly.

“Only for the past few days, ma’am. You have a couple of really good kids, there. Very bright.”

Miles thought a flicker of a smile might have turned her mouth, under the mask. It was certainly the first time he’d seen her dark eyes crinkle with pleasure.

Raven intervened at this point to run his still-new revive back to her bed, but he indulgently allowed the family reunion to go along. Miles watched through the glass, the children waving their arms and explaining their lives for the last eighteen months, Madame Sato looking dismayed as she struggled to keep up.

Vorlynkin came to watch over his shoulder. “So glad to see her awake and cognizant. It solves several legal conundrums for me. Now I can actually protect those kids.”

“Just so.” Miles smiled.

Roic collected Raven and padded off about their next task. Leiber, looking confused, waved inarticulately through the glass at the Sato family and said, “But now what do I do?”

Miles turned to him, folding his arms and leaning against the wall. “Well, you’re certainly not a prisoner. The only people on this planet I have the legal authority to actually arrest are other Barrayarans.”

“Uh, but what about Hans and Oki?”

“I didn’t arrest them, I kidnapped them. According to Roic. I see I shall have to explain to you the difference between permission and forgiveness, sometime.”

“And what is the difference?” inquired Vorlynkin, brows rising.

“Success, usually. In any case, Dr. Leiber, you are free to leave at any time. I just don’t recommend it, not unless you have a better plan for hiding out than your last one. Presuming Hans and Oki are not your bosses’ only resource for legwork.”

“No, they’re not,” sighed Leiber.

“You are also free to stay. Camping here overnight would make a better hiding place than any commercial venue, to be sure. We could all use a little time to digest all this, I suspect. Although I’d also suggest you re-think any attempt to make your orbital shuttle tomorrow afternoon. You’d certainly not make it past the shuttleport.”

“No,” Leiber agreed unhappily. “Not now.”

“And what are you going to do next, my Lord Auditor?” asked Vorlynkin.

Miles rubbed his jaw and scowled in thought. “What any commander does when he’s outnumbered, I suppose. Look for allies.”