Cryoburn

Chapter Five

Roic waited for dusk to deepen, and for the occasional echo of footsteps along the gallery to fall silent for a good long time, before venturing a cautious reconnoiter. The door lock yielded to force, or rather, the flimsy doorframe splintered and gave up the mechanism whole, more loudly than he would have liked, but no one called out or came to investigate. Crouching to slip beneath any view from the windows, bare feet silent on the boards but for an occasional tiny clink from the chain swathing his ankle, he discovered that the gallery wrapped the rectangular building on three sides, with stairs down on either end. About a dozen rooms like his lined this level. There was no third storey.

Another building, with faint yellow gleams leaking from its windows, lay down the slope to the right. Obscured in the trees behind it seemed to be a parking area, but a marked lack of security lighting made the details invisible—both to Roic and to anyone passing overhead in a lightflyer, he guessed. Right now he was grateful for the shadows. He slipped around to the far end. A third building, vaguely shedlike, sat low and black in the gloom down at the border of the level scrubland. Roic wondered if there’d been a fire, to so clear out the crowded conifers.

Roic’s heart nearly failed him when a voice above his head hissed, “Roic! Up here!”

He jerked his head back to see a pale smudge of a face peering over the edge of the roof. A long black braid swung forward over the figure’s shoulder, triggering recognition and relief. “Dr. Durona? Raven? So they got you, too!”

“Sh! Not so loud. We were in the same lift van. You were out cold. Come up, before someone comes back.” A pair of lean arms extended downward; Raven was apparently lying prone. “Careful of my hands…”

With no more noise than a grunt and a scrape, Roic scrambled up to the flat rooftop. Their careful foot-slides making no thumps that could be heard through a ceiling below, they took shelter of sorts in the lee of a vent housing.

Raven Durona could have passed for a Kibou-daini native—a slim intellectual Eurasian in body and face, with a high-bridged nose and straight black hair to his waist—till he opened his mouth and that un-local accent came out. Delegate from the Durona Medical Group on Escobar, he’d been the only other person at the cryo-conference Roic had known, and moderately well at that, but m’lord, inexplicably, had signed them away from each other. Raven had accepted the signal with the merest nod and eyebrow twitch, and steered around Roic and m’lord thereafter. Leaving m’lord clear, Roic realized in retrospect, to trawl for his own targets.

Roic lowered himself to sit cross-legged, the Escobaran cryo-surgeon wrapped his arms around his knees, and they put their faces close together.

In a nearly voiceless murmur, Roic said, “Seen any guards?”

“No, but our captors are still awake,” Dr. Durona returned in a matching tone. “They’re mostly still down in the dining hall, but some wander back up here at random. They sleep below us.”

“How’d you get out of your room?”

“Surgery on my bathroom window-lock.”

An exit doubtless aided by the fact that the man was lithe as a snake; Roic’s shoulders would not have fit. “And the chains?”

“Chains? You had chains? Special, Roic!”

“Never mind. How far are we from Northbridge, did you see? And where t’hell are we?”

“About a hundred, hundred and fifty kilometers, I’d guess. The one glimpse I had was all forest as far as I could see. There don’t seem to be any roads—everything must come in by lightflyer or lift van. This place used to be some kind of lake resort for Northbridge weekenders, before the dam blew out in a storm and the lake ran down the river. The rebuild got tied up in lawsuits, so the resort has been defunct for a couple of years. One of our kidnappers owns it, turns out. Which may have been how the Legacy Liberators came up with this crazed scheme in the first place.”

“What t’hell are they doing—no, wait. First, have you seen Lord Vorkosigan?”

Raven shook his dark head. “I thought I saw them tackle him, back in the lobby when they grabbed me and you were throwing people into the lift tube and bellowing at them to keep climbing—I swear some of those poor delegates were more scared of you than of our attackers—but I haven’t seen him since. There are only six other hostages here, plus me and you. All locked in for the night. It seems the N.H.L.L. was setting up to host three times that many. They’re not best pleased with you for that.”

“How many bad guys?”

“What a Barrayaran turn of phrase! About a dozen here, at a guess. I’ve not seen them all together. They take it in shifts to harass us.”

“Huh?”

“Lecturing us, mostly. About the stern and glorious goals of the New Hope Legacy Liberators.”

“Oh. I had a sample.”

“Only a sample? The rest of us have endured hours of it. They marched us down to the dining hall and harangued us till they were hoarse.”

“How come I wasn’t invited?”

“You have a reputation as a bold Barrayaran barbarian—say that six times really fast—too dangerous to let loose. Chains, huh? You were fortunate to miss class. I think they might be trying to inculcate some sort of identify-with-one’s-captors syndrome in us, but are doing it wrong. Old Baron Ryoval could have eaten them all for breakfast.”

Roic had heard m’lord’s clone-brother Lord Mark quote the late Baron Ryoval of Jackson’s Whole only once—some mutter about, And then we shall explore the interesting focusing effects of threatening your remaining eye—and had not been moved to inquire further. He’d been moved to edge away, actually, despite overtopping Lord Mark by half a meter of height. Roic only knew that the entire Durona Group, thirty-five or so cloned siblings possessing extraordinary medical talents, felt they owed their escape from Jacksonian techno-slavery to a new, free life to Lord Mark and Lord Vorkosigan. The reason for Raven’s peculiar mélange of an accent, and that of every other Durona, was that they were all refugees from Jackson’s Whole who’d been living for over a decade on Escobar. The reason that the infamous Baron was the late was Lord Mark. The reason Roic and Raven found themselves sitting on this roof together… was still unclear.

Well, Raven had been invited to the conference to give an illustrated lecture on cryorevival techniques after death from extreme trauma, which m’lord and perforce Roic had sat in on three days ago, after Raven had hinted, during a chance encounter in a hotel lift-tube, that m’lord would find special interest in the very complicated case of Patient C, a messy death by needler-grenade to the chest. It was, Raven had informed his audience, one of his earliest and most memorable cases as a young assistant surgeon. M’lord had indeed been riveted. Roic had closed his eyes. But besides that.

“Yes, but why are these idiots lecturing you?”

“Pitching their cause, I think. Rather like the past several days at the cryo-conference, really, except in reverse. And with much worse food.”

“Are they suppressed by the government, or censored by the local media?”

“Not at all, apparently. They even have a site on the planetary net that tells everyone all they would want to know about their views. No one wants to know much, it appears, so they’ve turned to more forcible ways of getting attention. Now, robbing at gunpoint actually works. Selling at gunpoint—not so good. We all started today scared to death. But by the end, it was just dreary.” Raven rubbed his nose. “They seem to plan to keep it up for days. Hence my escape attempt, but it’s not going too well.”

“We both got this far…”

“Yes, but here we are in the middle of a hundred kilometers of woods—lots more if you take a wrong turn—and even if this forest isn’t stocked with people-eating predators, it would be insane to plunge off into the darkness with no shoes or gear. And all the vehicles in the parking lot are neatly locked. I just checked.”

“Huh. Pity.”

Raven eyed Roic in speculation. “Now, by myself I don’t think I could jump someone coming out to his lightflyer and grab it after it was opened, but if we worked an ambush together…”

Roic took this, resignedly, as, If you jumped him and I cheered you on…

Raven frowned. “Except this crew doesn’t seem to come or go very often. All locked down tight, making no noise. Till you came along, I was starting to wonder if I should let myself back into my room and pretend this never happened, wait for some better chance.”

“I don’t think I could do that,” said Roic, remembering his ruined doorframe. He craned his neck to stare over the roof edge at that third darkened structure. If that was an old shoreline down there… “What’s that other building?”

“Don’t know. I haven’t seen anybody go in or out.”

“I’m thinking it could be a boathouse. Or a tool shed—an isolated place like this would need one—but likely a boathouse.”

Raven glanced wryly at the dried lake bed, and murmured, “I’ve never ridden in a boat. This doesn’t seem the night to start. Tools, now… do you think you could pry open a lightflyer? But then you’d still need the code keys to power it up. Crowbar’s no use there. Except maybe to hit the owner on the head?”

“M’lord keeps boats. He has a place on a lake down in the Vorkosigan’s District, back on Barrayar, couple hours from the capital by lightflyer.” A thought niggled in Roic’s aching head. “I say, let’s go see.”

Raven gave him a dubious look, but shrugged agreement.

With painful caution, they lowered themselves from the roof and tiptoed down the far stairs. They made a straight line for the cover of the trees, then circled to come out on the shore side of the low building. The effect of the sticks, rocks, and debris on Roic’s bare feet made him reluctantly agree with Raven’s negative view of any longer walk in the woods.

The window glass was unbreakable, the entry facing the ex-lake padlocked, but it gave way to the same method Roic had used on his room door. Raven winced at the rending crunch; they both froze, listening hard, but no outcry came. They edged inside.

The outer door opened onto an office; the door beyond was, thanks be, unlocked. Roic swung it open upon a garagelike space. Also very dark, but—could one smell boats? The scent of wood and oil and old bilge and dried waterweed was quite unmistakable, and strangely happy, like preserved summer. As his eyes adjusted, Roic could just make out half a dozen kayak-or-canoe shapes slung from the ceiling, and a couple of wider hulls up on sturdy cradles. Workbench on the far side of the room, mostly cleared away. Raven started for it, hands held out before him in wariness of head-cracking pillars or other shadowy obstacles, but Roic whispered him back.

“Come over here. This big power boat—help me get the cover off.”

“Roic, even if we could haul it out the doors, the lake is dry.”

“That’s not it. Just help, all right?”

The hull was maybe five meters long and half that wide, and a stretched plastic cover protected a large open cockpit. The fastenings parted reluctantly, and Roic dragged the cover aside and climbed in. Raven followed in curiosity.

Roic felt his way to the controls, just behind a windshield, and opened what proved—yes!—to be a small vid plate cover. Now, if this comlink was independently powered, as it bloody well should be—Roic’s fumbling fingers found the on-switch at last, and green and amber lights threw back the pools of darkness.

“Hey!” said Raven, in a hearteningly impressed tone—most Duronas daunted Roic. “Did you know that would be there?”

“I had a guess. If this place rented out boats to its customers, it would’ve had to keep something to go rescue them in. Comlink is a pretty standard built-in for pleasure boats this size, along with the depth-finder and nav links and so on.”

The emergency channel was easy to find. Within minutes, Roic had talked his way back through the system to the Northbridge police. His years as a street guard gave him a good idea of just what to say to smoothly reach the folks with clout, and the boat’s navigation aid provided a precise location. He reported, briefly, his experiences and Raven’s to the startled but pleased Northbridge detective officer in charge of the—by now highly publicized, Roic sensed in his tone—kidnapping case. To Roic’s intense worry, it seemed no one had found Lord Vorkosigan yet. As the Northbridge police scrambled, Roic closed the link and leaned back.

“Now what?” asked Raven.

“Now we wait.”

“For rescue? Do you think we ought to do something for the others?”

“Lying low’s better. No point in stirring up anything if our captors aren’t going to miss us for a while yet. Let the Kibou fellows do their job, and hope they get here first.” Roic recalled some of m’lord’s cautionary lectures on local liability, a concern that m’lord himself seemed to take to heart only intermittently.

Speaking of locals… Roic leaned forward again and searched out the number of the Barrayaran consulate in Northbridge. Unfortunately, the public net only supplied the public number, not the secured emergency link coded on his wristcom, presumably discarded back in the city by his captors for well-founded fear of tracers. A polite recorded voice told him to call back during office hours, or leave a message. The muted background music was a popular Barrayaran military march that gave Roic a twinge of homesickness. He was halfway through recording a succinct report on his current situation when, to his relief, he was interrupted by a live human.

Roic recognized Lieutenant Johannes, the young driver who—along with Consul Vorlynkin himself, because m’lord was, after all, m’lord—had picked them up at the shuttleport nigh on a week ago and transported them to the conference hotel. Military attaché, ImpSec of sorts, and for all Roic knew, cook, gardener, and the consul’s batman. He felt a dim sense of comradeship, contemplating Johannes.

“Armsman Roic!” Johannes’s voice was curt and anxious. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

Roic began his summary once more; halfway through, the strained face of Consul Vorlynkin joined Johannes’s image above the vid plate.

“If you follow up with the Northbridge police from your end, you’ll likely know as soon and as much as we do,” Roic finished.

Vorlynkin said, “Lord Auditor Vorkosigan is not with you—right?”

“We haven’t spotted him here. Any sign back there?”

A too-long pause. “We aren’t quite sure.”

What t’hell did that mean?

“When you get free, report in to the consulate at once,” Vorkynkin went on. “Should I send Johannes to coordinate with the police?”

Roic scratched his head. “If m’lord’s not here, there’s no point t’ get in a panic about us. I’ll get back with the others.”

“What about me?” said Raven, either indignant or amused, it was hard to tell.

“Who is that?” said Vorlynkin sharply.

“Dr. Durona. An acquaintance from Escobar, one of the delegates,” Roic replied.

Raven obligingly leaned forward into range of the vid pick-up and smiled benignly. Vorlynkin frowned back.

“M’lord would want to know he was”—safe seemed a premature claim—“with me,” Roic explained.

Vorlynkin said distantly, “You know, if you people would be more forthcoming, we could do our job of supporting you much better.”

The faint bitterness in the consul’s voice was more reassuring to Roic than the man could possibly imagine. It sounded quite like Vorlynkin had undergone some recent dealing with m’lord, one that he was loath to transmit over an unsecured comlink.

“Yes, sir,” said Roic, in a mollifying tone.

He cut the com.

“Now what?” said Raven. “Just sit here and wait for the sirens?”

“There had better not be sirens,” said Roic. “Best they drop down and secure the hostages first before making any noise.” That was what he’d suggested, at least.

After a longer pause, Raven said, “The Liberators didn’t really act like they wanted to kill us. Just convert us.”

“Panic does odd things to people.”

Raven sighed. “You could stand to be more reassuring, Roic, you know?”

Huddling around the indicator lights as if at a very tiny campfire, they waited in the darkness.

Miles rattled the consulate’s wrought-iron front gate, found it locked, and stared over it wearily. Beyond a dainty front garden sat a dinky house, overshadowed by its grander neighbors, although at least it looked well-kept. Maybe it had once been servants’ quarters? Kibou-daini had never been considered strategically important enough to spend much Imperial money upon, its system being in a wormhole cul-de-sac on the far side of Escobar, well outside of Barrayar’s web of influence. This consulate existed mainly to ease the occasional Barrayaran or more likely Komarran trading venture through planetary regulations, aid any members of the Imperium who found themselves in local trouble, and direct and quietly vet the even rarer Kibou traveler planning to visit the Imperium. Miles’s arrival was likely the most excitement the place had endured in years. Yeah, well, it’s about to get more so.

The pre-dawn chill was damp and penetrating, his legs were cramped, and his back ached. He sighed and clambered awkwardly over the gate, retrieved his cane, stumped up the short walk, and leaned on the door chime.

The porch and hall lights flicked on; a face peered through the glass, and the door opened a crack. A young man Miles didn’t recognize spoke in a Kibou accent: “Sir, you’ll have to come back during business hours. We open in about two more—”

Miles wedged his cane through the opening, levered it wider, put his head down, and barged in.

“Sir—!”

The minion was only saved from a shattering blast of Auditorial ire by Consul Vorklynkin strolling through an archway at the back of the hall, saying, “What is it, Yuuichi?… Oh my God, Lord Vorkosigan!”

Showing a swift sense of self-preservation, Yuuichi fell back from between them.

Vorlynkin, tall and lean, was half-dressed in trousers, shirt, and slippers, bleary-eyed, and clutching a mug that steamed with the gentle perfume of hot green tea. Miles was so distracted by the smell that he was almost thrown off his well-rehearsed opening, but he’d had a lot of hours this past night to rehearse.

“Vorlynkin, what the hell have you done with my courier?”

Vorlynkin’s spine snapped straight, unconsciously revealing a military hitch sometime in his earlier life. A look of partial, but only partial, relief lit his blue eyes. “We can answer that! My lord.”

“So Jin did make it here?”

“Um, yes, sir.”

The problem had occurred on Jin’s way back, then. Not good… Miles had waited in growing anxiety till midnight, then pressed Ako into substitute pet care and taken matters unto his own hands, or feet. The hours it had cost him to make it here unobserved had not improved his mood. Neither had the rain.

The consul’s brows drew down as he took in Miles’s appearance in turn, a very far cry from Miles’s cultivated gray-eminence-look of their brief meeting last week. Although the ragged, stained clothing, two-day growth of face stubble, general reek, and peculiar shoes might not be the whole of why he flinched. But, showing a keen eye that was well-placed in the diplomatic corps, he caught Miles’s gaze tracking his waving mug, and added smoothly, “Do you want to come to the kitchen and sit down, my Lord Auditor? We were just having breakfast.”

“Tea, yes,” said Miles, relieved from his impulse to wrench the mug out of the man’s hand. Gods, yes.

Vorlynkin led through the back archway, saying, “How did you get here?”

“Walked. Thirty-odd kilometers since midnight, back ways, dodging twice because I didn’t want to explain myself in my current condition to the local street guards. Needless to say, this was not my original plan.”

The kitchen was a modest tidy room, with a round dining table squeezed into a sort of bay overlooking the walled back garden. The windows mostly reflected the room’s bright interior, but beyond, the night’s damp blackness was turning to bluer shadow. The blond kid, the attaché Johannes, turned from the microwave and almost dropped whatever pre-packaged bachelor fare he’d just heated. At his boss’s head-jerk, he hastened to pull out a chair for the very important, if very unkempt, visitor. Miles fell into it, trying not to let his gratitude overcome his exasperation, because the latter was about all that was keeping him functional.

“Can I get you something, my lord?” asked the lieutenant solicitously.

“Tea. Also a shower, dry clothes, food, sleep, and a secured comconsole, though I’d settle for just the comconsole, but let’s start with the tea.” Or else he risked pillowing his head on his arms and going for the sleep first, right here. “Did you get my don’t-panic message off to Barrayar, and my wife? Coded, I trust?”

Vorlynkin said, a little stiffly, “We notified ImpSec Galactic Affairs on Komarr that we’d heard from you, and that you were not in the hands of the kidnappers.”

“Good enough. I’ll send my own update in a bit.” Miles trusted it would overtake any word anyone had been maladroit enough to hand on to Ekaterin, or he’d have some groveling to do when he got home. “Meanwhile, I’ve had no news since yesterday. Have you heard more on the hostages taken from the cryo-conference? Anything on Armsman Roic?”

Vorlynkin slid into his chair a quarter-wedge around the table from Miles. “Good news there, sir. Your Armsman managed to escape his captors long enough to reach a comlink of some sort and call the Northbridge authorities. The police rescue team reached them not long ago—we’ve been up all night following developments. It seems everyone was freed alive. I don’t know how long it will take him to get back—he said he had to stay till he’d given his testimony.”

“Ah, yes. Roic has a deal more sympathy for police procedure than I do.” Miles took his first swallow of hot tea with profound relief. “And the boy—wait. And who might you be?” Miles eyed Yuuichi, who had taken refuge with Johannes on the far side of the kitchen.

“This is our consulate clerk, Yuuichi Matson,” Vorkynkin put in. “Our most valuable employee. He’s been here about five years.” The clerk cast his boss a grateful look and slanted Miles a civil bow.

The consulate’s only employee, actually. And since Vorlynkin had been here two years, and Johannes had only arrived last year, Matson was also the oldest, in time of service if not age. Who do you trust, my Lord Auditor? In a situation like this, no one but Roic, Miles supposed, but misplaced paranoia could be as great a mistake as misplaced faith. Careful, then, but not bloody paralyzed. “So what happened to Jin?”

“We dispatched him back to you exactly as you directed, my lord. We did take the precaution of placing a microscopic ping tracer in the envelope, however.”

Not exactly the don’t follow him that Miles had written, but it would be hypocritical to quibble over fine points now. Results, after all.

“By early evening, the envelope had come to rest in what we think is the evidence room of the Northbridge central police station—it’s in that building, anyway. The boy Jin, after apparently passing through the hands of the police, ended up at the juvenile detention center, where he’s been all night. With that much to go on, Lieutenant Johannes was able to access the public arrest records for yesterday, and identify him by process of elimination. It seems the boy’s full name is Jin Sato, and he’s a runaway who’s been missing for over a year!”

“Yes?” said Miles. “I knew that.”

Vorlynkin’s diplomatic tones grew notably strained. “How the devil—sir!—did you come to involve a child like that in your affairs—whatever they are?”

“He’s eleven,” said Miles.

“Eleven! Worse and worse!”

“When my father was eleven,” said Miles reasonably, “he became aide-de-camp to the general-my-grandfather in a full-scale civil war. By age thirteen he’d helped to bring down an emperor. I didn’t figure an afternoon’s jaunt across his home town and back—on a peaceful planet at that—to be beyond Jin’s capacity.” Yet apparently, he’d figured wrong. Miles winced inside. He hadn’t thought through the implications of Jin’s runaway status in a heavily monitored place like this, even while picking his own route to avoid notice as a matter of routine. The boy would be frantic for his animals by now, and that was the least of it. “My mistake to fix, then. I don’t abandon my people if I can help it. We’ll just have to retrieve him.”

Vorlynkin’s jaw dropped. “He’s a minor child. How? We have no rights to him!”

“He was carrying all our petty cash, too,” put in Johannes. “I’d have gone after that myself, but I had no way to prove it was ours.” He frowned at Miles, the exactly as you directed complaint implied.

Well, there’s always your ping tracer, but before Miles could voice the thought, Vorlynkin went on.

“If your underage courier talks, I expect the Northbridge police will be calling us. With some very hard-to-answer questions.”

Miles paused, alert. “Have they?”

“No. Not yet.”

And if they didn’t call, it would imply Jin had kept his mouth shut, and under conditions that had to be quite frightening to him. “That’s… interesting.”

“Where did you pick up that boy, my lord?” said Vorlynkin.

“Actually, he found me. On the street, more or less.” Miles did some rapid internal editing. He had, after all, given Suze his tacit word not to reveal her lair in exchange for information, and he had certainly received information, even if he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with it yet. “You read my note to you, right?”

Vorlynkin nodded.

“Well, as I said, the drug the kidnappers tried to sedate me with triggered manic hallucinations instead, and I ended up lost in the Cryocombs.” No need to say for how long; the situation was certainly elastic enough to cover the missing day he’d spent with Jin and company. “When I came to my senses and found my way out, I was still a bit paranoid about my kidnappers finding me again, and too exhausted to go on. Jin kindly helped me, and I owe him.”

Vorlynkin stared at Miles very hard. “Are you saying you weren’t in your right mind?”

“That might actually be a good explanation, should one be needed. Does this consulate keep a local lawyer?”

“On retainer, yes.”

Standard practice. Can you trust him or her to keep our secrets? was a question Miles wasn’t ready to ask out loud quite yet. “Good. As soon as possible, contact the lawyer and find out what we can do to get Jin back.” He held out his mug for more tea; Yuuichi, the clerk, politely filled it. Miles’s hand was shaking with fatigue, but he managed not to spill tea on the way to his lips. “Shower’s as good as three hours of sleep. Shower first, and then the comconsole, if you please.”

“Shouldn’t you rest, my lord?” said Vorlynkin.

Miles choked back an impulse to scream, Don’t argue with me! which was a pretty good indicator that, yes, he damn well should rest, but there were a few key things that he had to know, first. “Later,” he said, then conceded, “Soon.”

After a moment, he added reluctantly, “You’d better let the Northbridge police know I escaped, was lost in the Cryocombs, and came back to the consulate on my own—I don’t want them to waste their resources hunting me. You can tell them I’m uninjured but extremely fatigued, and am resting here. They can send someone to take a statement from me tomorrow, if they need one. Don’t mention Jin unless they ask. If anyone else inquires after me… check with me.”

This won another hard stare from Vorlynkin, but he only nodded.

Johannes led Miles upstairs to the sleeping quarters—it appeared that the two Barrayaran bachelors saved on rent by living on the premises—and the consulate personnel scored about a million points with Miles by providing his very own clothes and gear, retrieved along with Roic’s from their hotel room after the kidnappings. Johannes eyed the Auditor’s own secured communications equipment—ImpSec’s best—with due respect, when handing it over. The personal belongings the kidnappers had stripped from Miles were still in the hands of the police, found discarded in a downtown alley and retained as evidence, except for his Auditor’s seal, which Vorlynkin had managed to pry back from them with, Miles gathered, some vigorous diplomatic persuasion.

Half an hour later—washed, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes—Miles had Johannes lead him down to the consulate’s basement communications tight-room, such as it was, and settle him before a secured comconsole. Miles stretched his back and spread his fingers, then entered his first search term: Lisa Sato.

“Who’s that?” asked Johannes, looming over his shoulder.

“Jin Sato’s mother.”

“Is she important?”

“Someone thought so, Lieutenant. Someone definitely thought so.” As the vid plate flickered, Miles bent to the data stream.