Cryoburn

Chapter Nineteen

To Roic’s surprise, he was actually aided in his capture of the remaining NewEgypt security fellow by Dr. Leiber. Oki had grabbed the scientist when Roic had shouted, presumably to keep him from bolting, but then found him harder to get rid of; Leiber hung on to the thick left arm that was trying to shake him off, turning and twisting and evading what looked to be a heavy-duty shock stick, just long enough for Roic to close the distance and aim his stunner between Oki’s eyes at point-blank range.

“Give it up, Oki,” Roic advised genially. “It’s been over ever since I sent your confessions off in a bottle. I’d have thought you people would have realized that.”

Caught and nailed by Roic’s steady and implacable gaze as much as by the weapon aimed at his head, Oki reluctantly held his right arm wide and released his shock stick, which fell with a clatter. As he slumped, Leiber stood away from him, wheezing but with his spine actually straight for a change. Unasked, Oki folded his hands atop his head and stood looking downright miserable.

Madame Sato, distraught, slid to the floor to gather up her son’s limp body. The unconscious boy was pale, but Roic saw with satisfaction that the cut on his neck was a mere shallow scratch, barely bleeding.

“I’m sorry Jin was caught in my stunner nimbus, ma’am,” Roic said to her. “But I’ve found it’s usually better to resolve these hostage situations as directly as I can. Bad to let them spin out.”

“This is a nightmare,” she groaned.

Roic granted this with a nod, but said, “Cut short now, ma’am. Raven will get Jin some synergine right away”—Roic rolled his eye compellingly at Raven—“and he won’t even wake up with a headache.”

Raven took the hint and scurried back to the recovery room for suitable supplies.

M’lord strolled up, possessed himself of the shock stick, and regarded their captive with a curious and thoughtful air, like a biologist planning out the dissection of a promising new specimen.

Oki regarded him back, bewildered. “Who the hell are you people, anyway?”

“From your point of view,” said m’lord, “I suppose we’re your karma delivery service. Why the devil didn’t you and your buddy Hans run and keep on running when you had the chance, earlier today? Yesterday, by now, I guess. Why ever did you go back to your bosses?”

“We got families, you know.”

M’lord’s brows rose. Had this not occurred to him before now, Roic wondered? “If you didn’t want to be a disgrace to them, you’re about eighteen months too late, I think.”

Oki rocked a bit. “That, and the money.”

M’lord brows went up a bit further. Oki said defensively, “For the first time in my life, the money was good. We bought a house.”

Oki’s was not exactly a world of riotous living, Roic suspected. If NewEgypt’s plant security hiring practices were any good, he’d probably been an honest man, before he’d been sucked down into this bog by his bosses. Roic glanced at m’lord, prepared to give a hint and a nudge, but m’lord was on it already.

“It’s not too late even now to limit your damages. What’s the local equivalent of turning Emperor’s Witness around here, does anyone know? They must have one.”

“Prefecture’s Evidence, I believe, m’lord,” said Roic.

“I happen to have a good lawyer on retainer who can advise you, if you cooperate with me in a timely fashion,” m’lord told their captive. “That means, instantly.”

Roic took the cue and a tighter grip on his stunner, staring along its length into Oki’s eyes, for emphasis.

“Where were you taking Leiber and Sato just now?” asked m’lord. “Not for a walk, presumably.”

“Akabane’s waiting for us out front in the street with the van,” mumbled Oki.

“The NewEgypt finance chief? Alone?”

Oki wet his lips. “It was just supposed to be Leiber, see.”

M’lord’s eyes lit. “That one we want, Roic—in flagrante delicto and arrested on the premises, if possible. An enemy’s mistake is a tactical gift that must never be wasted.”

Oki added, unasked, “It was going to be wall-to-wall lawyers for them—President Kim, and Choi who runs Operations, and Napak, that research head. Akabane caught us after the big meeting—said it was plain that him and us were going to be the goats, that the other three would hand us over without a blink in the morning if nothing was done. But he knew from the last time that my brother-in-law was with the Legacy Liberators, and…”

“Division and panic, ah,” said m’lord, sounding quite satisfied. “That explains much. Hurry, Roic. Akabane’s bound to bolt as soon as the police show up in force.”

Raven was returning with a medkit. Roic passed his stunner briefly to m’lord, circled Oki and fastened his wrists behind his back with his own tanglecuffs, was blandly handed back his weapon, grabbed Leiber’s arm, and jogged for the end stairs.

“What do you want me for?” asked Leiber, sounding a touch alarmed, as they scuffed rapidly down the steps.

“You can ID Akabane for me. I wouldn’t want to stun the wrong fellow, after all.”

“You’re pretty free with that thing.”

“It’s all right. I have a license to stun.”

“I thought that was supposed to be a license to kill.”

Roic grimaced. “That, too. But you would not believe all the forms that have to be filled out, afterward.”

Leiber looked as if he weren’t sure if that was a joke or not, which was all right, since Roic wasn’t sure either. The procedures hadn’t been all that amusing at the time. Or in retrospect.

They pushed through the heavy metal doors at the intake building’s far end, turned left, and rounded the corner onto its long front side. A short, U-shaped driveway in the center led to a covered entry space, where patients and visitors had once been dropped off, no doubt. The drive embraced what had likely been a sweep of tidy lawn and landscaping, but now was a sad stretch of weeds. There was no security lighting, but a lot of flickering hand lights revealed a herd of elderly people in all sorts of dress and undress, milling about on the drive and the ex-lawn. To Roic’s relief, no orange fire-glow reflected in the night mist from the other side of the complex, but various colors of flashing emergency lights did, which helped illuminate the scene in a dance-party sort of fashion.

A double row of parking spaces ran the length of the facility’s front—Roic could see the end of the administration building, beyond the intake building, and mentally located Madame Suze’s corner office on its top floor. Beyond the parking row, the facility was bounded by the dilapidated chain link fence.

In the street beyond, only one or two dark and distant vehicles were parked, but just past the gate with its tumbled-down old security kiosk, a familiar van lurked in the shadows. The gate, interestingly, had been forced open and left standing wide.

“All right,” said Roic. “Wait’ll I take cover behind that gate kiosk, then go out to the end of the lawn and mill around like the others. Make sure you can be seen from the street, but don’t get within arm’s length of the drive.”

“Wait, what, you want to use me as bait?” said Lieber, indignant. “I thought you wanted me to identify Akabane!”

“This’ll do that,” said Roic reasonably. “Nobody else here is going to go grabbing for you. Plus it will lure him out of his vehicle and onto the grounds.” I hope.

“Why bother?”

“First, I can’t stun him through the side of the van, and second, if nothing else, Lord Mark can charge him with trespassing. Which will hold him for the night, and by morning it’ll be too late.”

“I thought that fellow Fuwa owned the place.”

“If Lord Mark doesn’t own it by now, I don’t know him.” Not that anyone did really know him, not even m’lord. Well, maybe Miss Kareen. “Go on.” Roic gave Lieber a little encouraging shove, then drifted away unobtrusively through the intermittent shadows to take cover on the facility side of the gate kiosk, out of sight of the street.

Leiber stumbled around quite convincingly among the weeds, albeit at a few meters farther range than Roic would have preferred, looking up and around as if in bewilderment, showing profile and full-face. For a minute, Roic wasn’t sure if Akabane would rise to his bait, and was just trying to think of a next ploy, when the van eased past the kiosk. Roic crouched down in the shadows.

For a horrible instant, he wondered if he’d misjudged the situation—if Akabane just lifted the van to head-height and brought it down hard enough atop his victim, Leiber would be in no shape to confess anything to anyone again. Someone had tried to do that to m’lord once, as he’d told the story to Roic, with several passes like a big stomping boot coming within centimeters of reducing him to a smear on the pavement. Roic tensed like a runner at the start of a race, getting ready to sprint to his bait’s rescue.

But maybe these local vehicles had safety sensors to prevent those sorts of accidents, or maybe Akabane was inhibited by the hundred or so witnesses. In any case, as its side door slid open the van merely lurched up onto the lawn, cutting Leiber off from the sight of the old folks, who were mostly turned away craning their necks toward the source of the flashing lights.

A dark shape leaped from the van toward Leiber, who recoiled. Roic took a sweeping knee shot and brought the figure down in a muffled cry of astonishment and rage. A few swift paces, and Roic was in position to put his favorite low-stun immobilization into the back of the fellow’s neck, at can’t-miss range.

“Quick, help me toss him back into his van,” Roic told Leiber, who, puffing, nodded and complied.

Chief Financial Officer Akabane proved a local-looking sort—he might have been Raven’s middle-aged wicked uncle, if the Durona clone had owned any uncles of any description. Although Akabane did not look especially wicked at this point, just pale and limp. And, Roic hoped, defeated.

For all the days m’lord had been playing against the NewEgypt cabal, this was the first direct view Roic had gained of the enemy’s face, except for a few vid scans. It had all been action at a distance, like a space war. Or perhaps some bizarre mutant form of chess where the rules changed every two moves. M’lord’s formidable father, who’d once been a space admiral, might have felt at home, and m’lord had scarcely been given pause, but to Roic it felt strange and bloodless and removed, though he was very grateful for the bloodless part.

And then Roic wondered how m’lord’s sudden trail of chaos through their affairs, erupting out of seeming-nowhere, must have felt to the confused cryocorp men, who’d thought they’d had it all locked down. That was a vision to make a fellow smile, though it was a smile that made Leiber draw back in unease.

From the corner of his eye, Roic saw the lights of emergency vehicles turning into the street; they’d be through the gate in seconds. “Melt into the crowd and meet me back at the end door,” he told Leiber, and swiftly followed his own advice. Melting into this crowd proved a bit of a trick, as he was a head taller, as well as about a century younger, than anyone else around him. But there was plenty enough else going on right now that no one spared him much attention.

Leiber arrived a few paces behind him. “That’s it?” he asked.

Roic nodded. “M’lord will arrange the rest. Stunner tag’s over.” Roic took a moment’s modest satisfaction in his job performance. “It’s all words from here on. Which are not my department.” He added after a reflective pause: “Thankfully.”

Jin blinked open his eyes to discover himself staring at a ceiling—of the recovery room, he realized after turning his head. He touched his face, which was tingling, and scrunched his eyelids open and shut a few times, but he didn’t feel especially sick or dizzy. He didn’t feel especially good, either. Sort of blah, really. He seemed to be lying on one of the room’s several raised, narrow bed-tables, though it didn’t have any sheets, and its brittle old plastic felt nasty on his skin.

“Jin, are you all right?”

He sat up on one elbow to find his mother leaning over the side of the bed-table. She was wearing her filtering mask again, her robe all belted up tight, and her eyes searched him anxiously.

“I guess so.” He rubbed his face some more, then scrubbed his scalp where it still hurt from the hair-pulling.

Mina skipped to their mother’s side and looked up at him with great interest. “Armsman Roic shot you. I’d never seen anyone get shot for real before.”

Neither had Jin. It felt very strange to have been shot. For the first time, he wondered what it had really been like for Miles-san when he’d been shot with that needle-grenade. Of course, that was nothing like being merely stunned, Jin supposed, but that weird moment of looking into Armsman Roic’s unyielding face, and feeling so helpless and too late and that his world was being taken away from him by people he didn’t, couldn’t, control… He scowled, not liking that feeling much.

“It’s not broken,” came Raven-sensei’s voice, and, “You couldn’t prove it by me,” Vorlynkin’s voice returned.

Jin twisted around to find the pair of them at the next table over. Vorlynkin was sitting up with his legs dangling. His wide-sleeved coat was off, tossed aside, along with his undercoat, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. Raven-sensei stood in front of him, poking at his left arm, which Vorlynkin was holding rather defensively.

Vorlynkin’s face was all washed, and Nefertiti’s claw marks were now three thin red lines beneath a shiny layer of transparent plastic bandage. There was a lot of drying blood soaked on his shirt collar, though, and spattered elsewhere on his clothes, and Jin cringed in guilt for his new pet.

“You will have some magnificent bruises,” Raven-sensei continued.

“A crowbar will do that. I’m lucky I didn’t get my face bashed in.”

“Vorlynkin-san found more ninjas,” Mina confided to Jin. “They had a fight. Vorlynkin-san won.”

Vorlynkin looked over and smiled rather ruefully at her. “Fortunately for me, not ninjas. They were just a couple of borrowed thugs from the local chapter of the N.H.L.L. Finally trying to carry out their slogan, I suppose.”

“I thought they were all arrested after the conference kidnappings,” said Raven-sensei.

“That was an especially radical splinter group, apparently. Their organization is not very unified at the best of times, I gather.” Vorlynkin added to Jin, “I found the pair of them around the far end of the next building over from your hideout, trying to pry the door open and get down into the tunnels with more fire-starter. If they’d succeeded it would have been a major mess.”

Raven-sensei’s eyebrows lifted. “Would the arsonists even have gotten themselves out alive?”

“Hard to say. It seems awfully easy to get turned around down there. But the department was able to get the fire in the exchanger building under control quickly, once I’d told them it was asterzine. Ugly product, asterzine. You don’t want to put water on it, and it would have been a horrible surprise for the firefighters if they had. You can believe they’ll be going after the N.H.L.L. in the morning.”

Jin’s brow wrinkled. “Why a crowbar? The door around the next side after that is always left unlocked.”

Vorlynkin blinked, then laughed, then winced, touching his scratched face. “Just as well that none of us knew that, I suppose. After I confiscated the crowbar, I was able to hold them till the police arrived. Some of the firemen were more than eager to help. The pair fingered the NewEgypt security guards as having engaged them, evidently just to create a diversion for Dr. Leiber’s re-kidnapping, though I gather that some of the Liberators grew over-eager and exceeded their instructions. But it should lead back nicely to the senior men Lord Auditor Vorkosigan wished to target.”

Their mother rubbed her forehead, frown-lines deepening around her eyes. “If they don’t manage to suppress it all, again.”

“Not this time, I suspect,” said Vorlynkin, smiling at her in reassurance.

“Where’s Nefertiti?” asked Jin in sudden alarm.

Mina pointed at the desk built into the far wall, along with a lot of cupboards. From the shadows beneath came a mumbling sort of growl. “She’s hiding. Maybe you can get her to come out after she calms down. I tried some food, but I don’t think she’s hungry right now.”

Raven-sensei stepped around the tables to smile at Jin, peer into his eyes, thumb back his eyelids, and feel his pulse. “Headache? Nausea?”

“Not really.” Jin felt down his tingling face to find a strip of plastic bandage across his neck.

“Just a nick,” Raven-sensei assured him.

“My face is a little numb.”

“That’s normal. It’ll pass in another hour. If it doesn’t, let me know.” Raven-sensei paused and cleared his throat. “Lord Vorkosigan said to tell you when you woke up, those few minutes of delay you and Mina caused with those NewEgypt thugs made all the difference to us. The rescue party, as it turned out.”

“Oh,” said Mina, sounding pleased.

Raven-sensei nodded. “If they’d hustled you out of the building before we arrived, he said, it would have been a long stern chase—one of his military turns of phrase, that—meaning, we’d have had a hell of a time catching up with you. Although I imagine he would have, somehow. He, ah… tends to be persistent.”

For the first time, Jin sat all the way up. In the glass booth next to his mother’s, the two big NewEgypt guys were penned, and Jin flinched in fear, till he saw that Hans was still out cold on the floor, and Oki was sitting with his hands fastened behind his back and his shoulders slumped, not paying attention to anything.

Jin pictured it—all of them dragged away in some windowless van to who-knew-where, and Mom taken away again… He gulped, which made the bandage tug on his skin. His desperate struggle with those big men hadn’t seemed to do much good at the time, had seemed utterly futile in fact, but maybe…

Miles-san himself blew in then, his step brisk, with Armsman Roic in tow. Oki still didn’t look up, and Jin was reminded that you couldn’t hear anything in those booths.

“Ah,” said Roic, smiling at Jin and giving him a friendly wave. “You’re awake. Good.”

Jin scowled back, not quite able to get that new picture out of his mind’s eye of Roic looking through him like he wasn’t there while he aimed the stunner. Roic’s face fell, a little, though he then tried his smile on Mina to better effect. Was it all a fake, that smile? Which was the real Roic, the big smiling man or that cold, intent, scary one?

“You’re all here, excellent,” said Miles-san to the room at large. He hopped up on a chair like a teacher about to give a lecture, commanding everyone’s attention, and making himself quite as tall as Roic. It should have looked silly, and Jin wasn’t sure why it didn’t.

“The Northbridge police will be here in minutes to start recording statements, and to take delivery of our NewEgypt guests,” Miles-san went on, with a wave at the jail-booth. “We should be getting a couple of sleepy lawyers by then, too. Madame Xia has categorically insisted she has no expertise in criminal law, but we’ve woken up a couple of associates from her firm’s criminal department. We’ll have the senior partner in later today, when we’re all back at the consulate and have rested up a bit.”

Jin’s mother stiffened. “We never had good luck with lawyers before.”

“This time, they’ll be on your side,” Miles-san promised. “Meanwhile, Raven, Dr. Leiber, Consul Vorlynkin, we have just time to get our stories straight.”

Raven-sensei looked interested, Leiber-sensei alarmed, and Consul Vorlynkin resigned.

Miles-san went on, “This whole chain of events is too complex and interlocking to adjust much, but on the whole I’d prefer to be less prominent in it, for reasons having to do with the other half of my investigations on Kibou. Which do not concern and should not impinge on your affairs, Madame Sato, so don’t be alarmed. Fortunately, Raven and Dr. Leiber, here, are well positioned to be the local heroes.”

Raven-sensei’s brows rose. Leiber’s stare at Miles-san grew glumly suspicious.

“Short version is, when Raven and I visited you that first day, Dr. Leiber, it was because Raven was head-hunting a top cryo-preservatives chemist for the Durona Group’s proposed new expansion to this Northbridge facility. Which is a position you will in fact be offered, by the way, assuming we can keep you out of jail.”

“Oh!” said Leiber-sensei, sitting up, his sudden smile surprised but gratified.

“At that time, Dr. Leiber explained his renewed plans to blow the whistle on NewEgypt for the decomposed cryo-solution and commodified contracts scandal, and that he had abstracted Madame Sato’s cryo-corpse to assure her safety as a future witness. Seizing his opportunity, he engaged Dr. Durona to revive her, as part of his price for employment, and Dr. Durona, anxious to secure his services, agreed.”

“And carried her stolen cryochamber off to my secret laboratory on the spot?” inquired Raven-sensei, a bit dryly.

“Precisely.” Miles-san smiled cheerfully at him. “Though let’s not use the term stolen in your statements, should the issue arise. Rescued would be all right, or secured.”

Raven-sensei waved assent. “And then what?”

“Dr. Leiber’s attempt to leave Kibou for Escobar was a feint, to draw NewEgypt off, and out, till Madame Sato was revived and ready to testify. Unfortunately, it worked a little too well. But his rescue by Roic, at Raven’s request, was allowed by me as a nepotistic favor to my brother’s company.

“I was along for the ride tonight merely to keep an eye on Mark, whose movements are of on-going interest to Barrayaran Imperial Security for purely Barrayaran political reasons. Which also happens to be true, by the way. Having concluded that there is no current threat to the Imperium from Mark’s new enterprise, I shall be withdrawing from Kibou-daini shortly to tend to my own urgent affairs.”

Jin blinked at this news. Yah, well… of course it had to be that way. People always left. Nothing was ever really secure, or safe. He bit his lip.

“I suggest we not volunteer any information on the late Alice Chen tonight, and I think her existence is unlikely to come up as yet, but if it does, Raven abstracted her at Dr. Leiber’s request as well, as independent physical evidence for the effects of the bad cryo-solution. Raven being enough of both a scientist and a businessman not to put his company at risk on mere hearsay.”

Raven tilted his head and grinned at this. “That works for me.”

Miles-san rolled his shoulders and stretched. He did look a little gray-faced, a very four-o’clock-in-the-morning look, if no more tired than anyone else here. His eyes were bright, though. He turned to Jin’s mother. “I have an experienced forensic economics analyst already en route from the Barrayaran embassy on Escobar. As it happens, my need for him has been largely short-circuited the events of the last day, but to justify the expenses of his journey I will make you a loan of him for a few days. I expect he could be of considerable help in strategizing your next moves, should you decide to try to revive your political action committee. Or even if you don’t.”

Jin’s mother rubbed her forehead. In a rather thick voice, she said, “But what if the police try to take Jin and Mina?”

It was a horrible thought, one that Jin had been trying not to think ever since Miles-san had announced the imminent arrival of the authorities.

“I think they are unlikely to question minors when abundant adult witnesses are ready-to-hand. You are next-of-kin; they’ll have to request your permission to interrogate your children, which I suggest you deny for now on the grounds that the pair are too traumatized by the recent fright of their thwarted kidnapping.”

Mina made a faint indignant noise at this. Jin wasn’t so sure.

“The lawyer will support you,” Miles-san went on. “If it becomes an issue, which I doubt it will in this immediate aftermath, tell the police to come see them later at the consulate if needed—which, by then, I suspect it won’t be, and in any case we’ll be on home ground there.”

Vorlynkin nodded reassurance at her. She shook her head in doubt, but Jin thought some of the strain eased around her eyes.

Jin glanced up to find Armsman Roic eyeing him closely. Jin shrugged uncomfortably and turned his head away.

“Madame Sato,” came Roic’s slow, deep voice, “can Jin and Mina come out in the corridor with me for a moment? I’d like to show them something.”

Jin looked back, about to decline, but Mina was already hopping up and down in agreement, readily prevailing over their mother who seemed to want to say something to the consul anyway, so Jin ended up letting himself be shepherded out with his sister. Roic closed the door firmly behind them.

To Jin’s surprise, Roic went down on one knee, which made him, well, not much shorter than Jin and still taller than Mina.

“I thought,” said Roic, “that you might like to try firing my stunner.” He drew the weapon that had hurt so shockingly out of the holster under his jacket, and Jin flinched.

“Ooh, ooh!” said Mina. “Wow, can we?”

Which made it impossible for Jin to say No. He nodded warily.

“You must never point a weapon at a person unless you intend to fire,” Roic began a short tutorial. “No matter if you think it’s uncharged, or the safety lock is on, or what. Make it an absolute habit, and it will never be a question.” He pointed out the various features of the device, including a sensor in the grip that was keyed to his own palm, and which he turned off with a code. Then he let Jin take it, making sure it was pointed up the empty corridor.

The grip was still warm from Roic’s hand, like a chair you’d sat down in too soon after someone else got out of it. The stunner was lighter than Jin expected, but solid enough. The power pack in the grip gave it the most of its heft. It didn’t feel like a toy.

Jin stared down the sight the way Roic told him too, and squeezed the trigger. The buzz in his hand startled him, but there was no recoil, and he managed not to drop it.

Encouraged, Jin let Roic show him how the automatic laser sight worked, and fired again. This time, he didn’t jump. And again. The charge hit the wall pretty nearly just where he’d intended, this time. Jin didn’t exactly smile, but he felt his jaw ease.

Mina was by this time eager to try, Let me! Let me! so Jin reluctantly gave the device up to her. Roic went through his instructions once more, prudently kneeling behind Mina and keeping a hand hovering to help steady her—she had to hold the thing up in both fists—and the drill was repeated.

Roic stood up, reset the code, and holstered the weapon. “Better?” he asked Jin.

“Yah,” said Jin, in some wonder. “It’s like a tool. It’s just a tool.”

“That’s right.”

This time, when Roic smiled down at him, Jin smiled up. He let the armsman lead them back into the recovery room.

Miles leaned forward and spoke earnestly into the secure holovid recorder. “I just want you to know, Gregor, that if the planet melts down over all this, it wasn’t my fault. The trip-wire was laid long before I stumbled across it.”

He considered the opening remark of his report cover for a moment, then reached out and deleted it. The one good thing about the very asynchronous vid communication entailed by Nexus info-squirts, moving at light speed between jump points and ship-carried through them, was that if you didn’t think before you spoke, you could at least think before you hit send. Not that he hadn’t generated some of his best ideas as his brain raced to catch up with his moving mouth. Also, some of my worst. He wondered which kind his recent examples would ultimately prove to be.

He glanced around the consulate’s tight-room, which he had all to himself, having run out the exhausted Johannes before embarking on this private and personal recording. Since Johannes was the closest thing to an ImpSec analyst the out-of-the-way consulate boasted, Miles had spent much of the past two days in training him in just what information, out of the uproar of the local planetary feeds, to screen and forward to Galactic Affairs on Komarr. Multitasking, always a good thing. Johannes proved a diligent enough student. If the attaché had been one of the Imperial Service’s brighter stars, he’d have been sent to some hotter posting, but if he’d been less responsible, he wouldn’t have been sent to such an autonomous one.

Miles added a note commending the lieutenant’s conscientiousness, while he was thinking of it, which reminded him in turn of his early suspicions of the clerk, Yuuichi Matson. He’d caught the tail end of a short conversation between Matson and his boss Vorlynkin in the kitchen, day-before-yesterday, when the media siege of the consulate was just beginning.

“People told me I’d be able to pocket a tidy amount of baksheesh in this job,” the clerk complained, “but in five years nobody offered me anything. And when they finally do, it’s because they want dirt on Sato-san. Sato-san. As if I would! Agh!”

Vorlynkin’s blue eyes crinkled. “You were doing it wrong, Yuuichi. You’re not supposed to wait for offers, you’re supposed to ask. Or at least hint. You should ask the Lord Auditor for pointers.”

Matson just shook his head and stalked off, nursing his green tea and his umbrage. Miles grinned and bent to add a kind word for the overworked clerk, as well.

Trying to bring his mind back into focus, Miles scanned down the long index of attachments, both raw data and his synopses, that he’d generated for HQ, a tedious but necessary chore. This should suffice to keep some unfortunate team of ImpSec Galactic Affairs analysts busy and happy for a week or three, till he caught up with them in person. Well, busy, anyway. The Imperial Councilor, as the Barrayaran viceroy on Komarr was dubbed, would be invited into the loop as well when this arrived by coded tight-beam. A full analysis of the planetary voting shares scam should be awaiting the Lord Auditor by the time he made Komarr orbit, and a plan for suitable countermeasures for the vote-theft, as well.

Miles indulged himself with a brief fantasy of Ron Wing and friends waking up from cryo-stasis, expecting to have stolen a planet, as destitute and distraught as old Yani. Alas, the affair would doubtless be wound up before matters progressed that far. Cosmic justice was very appealing, but the regular kind would also do.

Putting together his Auditorial report had also sufficed to keep Miles out of the way of the consulate upstairs, and out of sight of its visitors, as the consequences had spun out from that very useful night at Madame Suze’s. The NewEgypt execs were under arrest for conspiracy, and, possibly, murder, and as the degenerated-cryopreservatives-and-commodified-contracts scandal hit the newsfeeds in force, it was likely that enough other charges would be thrown in atop to keep them from wriggling out. The attempted kidnapping involving real kids looked to prove especially damaging to their cause, score another point for Jin and Mina, which Miles must remember to tell them. Lawsuits on behalf of Madame Sato and her group were in preparation, and she’d given her first interview, under the watchful protection of Vorlynkin and with the shrewd advice of her new attorney, who was working, very enthusiastically, on contingency.

WhiteChrys and a number of other cryocorps, shoved into premature responses by these breaking events, were making noises like outraged victims after all, and Miles, smirking, wished Ron Wing all the luck he deserved in his damage control. Asterzine was all very well for setting a building on fire, but if one wanted to set a world alight… well.

Miles hardly needed, he reminded himself for the nth time, to mix in further, above-stairs. Consul Vorlynkin was doing a fine job of looking out for Barrayar’s interests, not to mention those of the Sato family, and Mark was atop affairs from the Durona Clinic end. Miles had danced uncomfortably close to jeopardizing his primary mission with WhiteChrys on these fascinating side-issues with NewEgypt, but given Mark’s new enterprise, they might not prove so sidewise after all. Miles was not above taking credit for accidental foresight; really, none of this would have come to pass if he hadn’t gone on poking just a little farther than he’d needed to. He must be sure to point that out to Gregor.

Ah. Gregor. The cover message would go to the Emperor’s eyes and ears only. For inspiration, Miles called up a still vid of Gregor in full uniform and his sternest glower, the official pose that Gregor had dubbed the rod up my Imperial butt look. Alas, it only inspired Miles to want to clown till he made that grave face crack a smile. No, Gregor had clowns enough in his life. Starting with about half of the Council of Counts, though they seldom made him smile.

Miles hit record once more, and began with crisp efficiency.

“Good day, Gregor. As my follow-up note to Vorlynkin’s little misguided emergency message last week indicated, suspicions of WhiteChrys chicanery on Komarr have proven correct. The raw data and my summations are in the main body of my report. I’m not sure what to do with the bribe. I’m not going to give it back, but it’s not going to be worth what Ron Wing promised, either, which makes dumping it directly onto the Imperial Service Veterans’ Hospice a questionable proposition. But we can deal with that later. I’ll stop at Solstice on my return trip if ImpSec Komarr and the Imperial Councilor want to ask further questions, though really, this should be enough to get them started.

“Oh, and with respect to Vorlynkin, I want a suitable Auditorial commendation to go on his diplomatic department record for exemplary assistance during my visit, or, ah, visitation. And after, as I’m running away tomorrow and dumping all of the cleanup on the poor fellow.” Better him than me.

“Meanwhile, I suppose I’d better give you a quick synopsis of the erupting NewEgypt scandal, as it has impinged on my investigation. It all started when the local loony party broke into the cryo-conference and failed to carry me off, which I described in brief in my last report, but after that…”

As succinctly as he could, Miles summarized the events of the past days, from Jin’s arrival at the consulate’s back door through the successful arrest of the NewEgypt crew. He was a little out of breath by the time he finished. Miles tried not to wince as he imagined the look on Gregor’s face as he heard all this out. Nonplussed? Pained? Bland? Gregor could out-bland Pym.

“So far, no criminal charges have been leveled against me, and I trust I’ll be long gone from Kibou-daini before anyone on the other side thinks of it,” he concluded in cheerful reassurance.

He sought for an upbeat note on which to end. “In the department of only on Kibou, we actually got to summon the dead to testify against the bad guys, which is a moment of cosmic justice if ever there was one.”

What was that creepy old quote… ? Something read in his Academy days, or more likely on one of his Academy leaves, an ancient tale from Old Earth. Before cryonics was invented or even imagined, so seeming strangely prescient. The words were branded in his brain, though their literary source was long forgotten, buried under the chaos of his intervening decades and possibly a touch of lingering cryo-amnesia. I will break the door of hell and smash the bolts; I will summon the dead to take food with the living, and the living shall be outnumbered by the host of them…

Ah, not something he cared to share with Gregor, that. Gregor, as Miles had reason to know, already had enough creepy crap stuffed into his Imperial head that it was a wonder his skull hadn’t exploded. But it did bring Miles to his finale.

“I shouldn’t wonder if Mark’s rejuvenation research here doesn’t turn out to be more important, in the long run, than my mission. Too early to judge, but the Durona Group will be something to keep an eye on, and not just ImpSec’s spy-eyes, either. A private word in the ear of Laisa’s great-aunt, if she’s looking for a better investment than WhiteChrys Solstice, might be a suitable reward for her first bringing the affair to our attention, come to think.

“I missed today’s commercial jumpship to Escobar, but I’ve snagged berths on tomorrow’s. I’m eager to get home.

“And oh, tell Laisa from me—Good catch.”

Miles closed the recording, security-sealed it, attached it to his coded report, and sent it on its way.