Cryoburn

Chapter Nine

The kitchen of the consulate seemed homey, if spacious by Jin’s standards. Maybe it was the cool dusk falling in the back garden that made it so warm and bright. Maybe it was all the dishes piled in the sink that made it look so, well, kitchen-y, as if a fellow could wander in and out to snack at will without being yelled at, even. But the noise of all the footsteps clumping up from the basement made Jin shift uneasily, and when Mina’s little hand stole into his and clutched hard, he didn’t shake her off.

Jin’s timid knock had been answered by Lieutenant Johannes, who’d taken one look, cried You! and hustled them both inside, though he’d looked askance at Mina; added Wait right there, don’t move; and thumped downstairs before Jin could get three words into his much-rehearsed explanation of how the police had taken Miles-san’s money. So Jin was expecting the fierce-eyed Consul Vorlynkin, but behind him loomed the biggest Barrayaran Jin had seen yet, half a head taller than the tall consul. He wore clothes that reminded Jin of a military uniform, had short wavy brown hair and a firm square-jawed face, and looked older than Johannes but younger than the consul. Mina stared up at him with her mouth hanging open.

The big Barrayaran so filled up what had, till a moment before, seemed a wide doorway that it took a moment for Jin to notice the slim fellow with his hair in a neat dark braid who followed him, and another moment to spot Miles-san in their wake.

The little man shouldered past them all, coming face to face with Jin. He looked so different all cleaned up, more grownup, more… daunting, that it was a couple of heartbeats before Jin, recovering from his shock, inhaled and cried, “My creatures! You promised you’d look after them!”

Miles-san held up a hand. “They’re all right, Jin! When you didn’t come back by midnight, I copied out your instructions and gave them to Ako. When I implied I was going to look for you, she was very willing to help out.”

“But how did you get here?”

“Walked. Took me all that night.”

From behind Jin, Mina asked interestedly, “Did you get lost, too?”

“We weren’t lost, exactly,” Jin denied, harassed. “Just turned around a little.”

“And who are you, young lady?” Miles-san addressed Mina. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“Sister,” muttered Jin. “It wasn’t my idea to bring her.”

“I have a name,” Mina pointed out. “It’s Mina. Want to see my blisters?”

Miles-san didn’t even blink. “Sure! Are they good ones? Have they popped yet?”

“Oh, yes—they made my socks all bloody, too.”

“Well, Miss Mina, why don’t you sit down here—” Miles-san pulled out a kitchen chair with a flourish, and half-bowed Mina into it, as if she’d been a grownup lady, “—and show me.” He added over his shoulder, “Johannes. Find something for these children to eat. Cookies. Milk. Gingerbread, whatever.”

“Are you Jin’s galactic?” Mina asked, kicking off her sport shoes and picking at her splotched socks. “He told me all about you.”

“Did he?” Miles-san knelt and helped her peel off her socks; she said ow, ow, as they parted stickily from her scabs. “My word, those are good blisters, aren’t they?” He glanced up and gave Vorlynkin-san a head-jerk that sent the consul to rummage in the other end of the kitchen.

“Aunt Lorna buys all our shoes big to grow into,” Mina explained to Miles-san. “That’s why they slip around like that.”

Lieutenant Johannes, peering doubtfully into the depths of the refrigerator, murmured, “Beer… ?”

“Do you like beer, Mina?” Miles-san asked. She shook her head, making her straight black hair swing around her chin. “Thought not, somehow. You’ll have to do better, Johannes. Aren’t all you attaché fellows supposed to be ImpSec trained? Improvise!”

Johannes muttered something through his teeth that Jin couldn’t quite make out. He then conducted a brief survey which determined that vat-octopus pizza, no onions, was universally acceptable, and trod out to order some. Vorlynkin came back with what turned out to be a first-aid kit, which he handed off to the slim man with the braid, who didn’t look Barrayaran at all, but didn’t talk like someone from Kibou, either.

Mina leaned toward Miles-san and whispered anxiously, “That big guy isn’t a policeman, is he?”

“Used to be,” Miles-san whispered back gravely, “but now he works for me. Alas, Armsman Roic had to give up all his policeman’s principles when he entered my service.”

The big man cast Mina a pious nod.

Mina settled back, looking relieved, and let the slim man, who Miles-san introduced as Raven and said was a doctor from Escobar, attend to her feet. Vorlynkin watched closely, frowning, till he seemed to be satisfied with the skills displayed, then straightened up and narrowed his eyes at Jin. The big fellow, Armsman Roic, filled two glasses with water and set them on the table; Mina seized hers and drank thirstily, and Jin followed suit more warily.

When he’d washed down the dry lump in his throat, which actually had little to do with thirst, Jin embarked once more on his interrupted explanation of what had happened to the consulate’s money. Vorlynkin winced when Jin came to the part about the drug dealers and/or smugglers, but at Miles-san’s restraining hand-gesture, the consul let Jin stumble all the way to the end before saying, “We know. We traced the packet to the police evidence rooms, and picked up your arrest report, too.”

So they did believe him. That was something, anyway.

“Yes,” said Miles-san, “and I’m sure the consul thanks you for keeping mum and preserving his reputation. Don’t you, Vorlynkin?”

Vorlynkin’s lips compressed in an expression anything but grateful, but he choked out a, “Certainly.”

Then, through what Jin reluctantly recognized as a skillful series of questions—some put to Jin though many to Mina—Miles-san drew out the story of Jin’s escape from the custody of his aunt and uncle. By the time Johannes returned, balancing a stack of pizza boxes, two liters of milk, and more beer, Jin was afraid there wasn’t much Miles-san didn’t understand about Aunt Lorna, Uncle Hikaru, and cousins Tetsu and Ken. It made Jin feel uncomfortably exposed.

Miles-san kicked a stepstool to the sink and made Jin and Mina wash their hands, following up himself as if to enforce the good example. Lieutenant Johannes watched him mount the stepstool, glanced at the impassive Roic, and bit his lip. Miles-san, the consul, Jin and Mina then sat four around the kitchen table, that being all the chairs there were; Roic and the others leaned against the counter. Setting out the boxes and a roll of disposable wipes, the lieutenant said, “I checked the comconsole. Both these kids were reported missing yesterday. Every police officer in town must be on the lookout for them.”

Consul Vorlynkin pressed a hand to the bridge of his nose.

Jin bolted upright in alarm. “You can’t turn us in!”

Miles-san waved him back down. “No one is doing anything till after we eat.” He looked over the aromatic offering. “What, no vegetables? Don’t you two need vegetables?”

“No, we don’t!” said Mina. Jin shook his head vigorously in support.

Miles-san bit into his slice. “Ah, perhaps not. This does seem very healthy. And tasty.”

Mina, at least, dove readily into the first hot food they’d had for two days. Jin, overwhelmed by the aroma, followed suit. The consulate bought good pizza, not the cheapest frozen kind that Aunt Lorna served. The consul barely sipped his beer, Miles-san had water, and big Roic, to Jin’s surprise, after first pouring out for Jin and Mina, helped himself to a small glass of milk.

All this redirection might have worked to calm Jin, except Vorlynkin, after swallowing his first bite, said, “The consulate can’t harbor runaways, Lord Vorkosigan. Their guardians must be frantic.”

“We don’t want to stay here,” said Jin. “I want to get back to my creatures!”

Miles-san waved his nibbled pizza slice in the air. “Asylum?”

“That’s not amusing even as a joke,” said Vorlynkin. “Do you have any idea of the legal complications involved in giving political asylum to minors?”

“I’m not sure I was joking, exactly,” Miles-san said mildly. “But wait for the children to eat, please.”

Vorlynkin’s jaw tightened, but he nodded. After Jin and Mina could eat no more, and Johannes offered more wipes and put the leftovers away in the refrigerator for breakfast, just like at home, Miles-san leaned back in his chair and said, “I suggest we repair downstairs. The seats will be more comfortable.”

The other Barrayarans all gave Miles-san funny looks, but recalling Uncle Hikaru’s daily after-dinner saying, when shifting into his big chair, of Out of the bleachers and into the box seats!, Jin saw no objection to this. Yet when they’d all shuffled down the stairs after Miles-san, the room into which he led them only boasted four chairs, all officey-looking swivel types. Miles-san gestured Mina and Jin into a seat each, took one himself, and left the other three men to sort themselves out. Johannes parked one haunch on the long table shoved up to the wall, Raven-sensei copied him, and Vorlynkin, mouth pinched, dropped into the remaining chair.

“This is a funny vid room,” Mina remarked, staring around and swinging her feet, now encased in a pair of Miles-san’s socks donated to keep her bandages clean. When Roic closed the door and blandly sat cross-legged on the floor beside it, the air grew awfully hushed, and for the first time Jin wondered if this was a safe place to have brought her, and not just from the risk of being betrayed to the authorities. He kind of trusted Miles-san, or he would have been inclined to grab her and bolt. Though given Roic and that thick door, would that impulse have come too late…

Miles-san laced his hands together between his knees, and said, “Suze the Secretary told me something of the story of your mother, Jin, Mina. So when I got back here I looked up what I could about her on the planetary net. It made me very curious. I really don’t understand how it was she came to be frozen, when she wasn’t sick or dying, or even convicted of any crime.”

Jin’s tasty dinner suddenly felt like lead in his stomach.

“What do you—either of you—remember about your mother?” Miles-san went on. “Not personal things, but about her work, her cause. Especially anything that might have happened about the time of the riot at her rally, or just before she was arrested?”

Jin and Mina looked at each other uneasily. Jin said, “Mom didn’t talk to us much about her work. When she was doing anything, she mostly left us at Aunt Lorna’s unless I was in school. Then she just left Mina.”

“Aunt Lorna wasn’t too happy about all the babysitting,” Mina said.

“Yah, she said she hadn’t volunteered for this and didn’t much like being drafted.”

“And she was sorry about Daddy, but maybe if Mommy really cared that much she’d do better to stay home and look after his kids herself.” Mina looked away, frowning.

Jin put in hastily, “But she only said things like that when she was feeling ’specially cranky.” Not that he was fond of Aunt Lorna, but these galactics were outsiders, after all, and it felt funny to be talking about his family like this in front of them. And Mom had said you should always try to be fair.

“Didn’t your mother ever take you along to her meetings?”

Mina shook her head. “She said they weren’t for kids, and we’d just get bored and kick up a fuss.”

“Huh.” Miles-san rubbed his chin. “When I was a youngster Jin’s age, at home, I was often permitted to sit in on my father’s meetings with his, er, professional colleagues. My grandfather had done the same with him. I learned more just by the osmosis than I realized at the time. Of course, I had to stay quiet and make myself useful, or leave, naturally.”

Jin frowned. “You can’t leave if you’re out somewhere. Mom would have had to break off what she was doing to take us home.”

“Couldn’t she have just tapped—never mind. Didn’t she ever have meetings at your home? In the evenings, say?”

“There wasn’t much room in our apartment.”

“Did no one come to visit? Ever?”

Jin shook his head, but Mina, to his surprise, spoke up. “Some people from her group did once. Late at night.”

“When was this?”

Mina sucked on her lower lip. “Before she was arrested, anyway.”

“Close before?”

“Yah, I think so.”

“I don’t remember this,” said Jin.

Mina tossed her head. “You were asleep.”

“What woke you?” asked Miles-san.

“They were arguing in the kitchen. Kind of loud and scary. Plus, I had to go to the bathroom.”

“Can you remember what they were arguing about? Anything at all that was said?”

Mina scrunched her face in thought. “They were talking about the corps, and money. They were always talking about the corps, and money, only this time they seemed more excited. George-san’s voice was really boomy, and Mommy was talking all fast and sharp, except she didn’t sound mad, exactly. And the new guy yelled something about, it wasn’t any temp’rary setback—this could bring the corps to their knees, right before he came out in the hallway on the way to the bathroom and found me. And Mommy let me have an ice cream bar and put me back to bed and told me to stay there.”

“Do you know who the people were? Had you ever seen them before?”

Mina nodded. “There was George-san, he was always nice to me when he came to pick up Mommy. And old Mrs. Tennoji, she always wore a lot of perfume. They called the new one Leiber-sensei.”

“Do you remember the rest of their names? Jin?”

Headshakes. Miles-san tried, “George Suwabi, by chance?”

“Might have been,” said Mina, though sounding a bit doubtful.

“The timing is interesting in the extreme. And the cast. I smell a lethal secret, oh, yes.” Miles-san rose and began to pace back and forth across the little room. He forgot his cane, left by his chair, a snazzier one than he’d scavenged from Suze-san’s. “Suwabi and Tennoji came up in my researches. Dr. Leiber did not, I admit. Curious absence, not to be confused with an absence of curious. I wonder who the hell he was?”

Sounding as if he was being drawn into all this despite himself, Consul Vorlynkin said, “Could you trace these people and find out more?”

“Not Suwabi or Tennoji—they’re dead. And rotted, buried for real. The other one, I don’t know. Could be a long, cold trail, if he’s run off-world or gone to ground well enough to escape the corps. It might be faster just to wake up Lisa Sato and ask her.”

Mina drew a huge breath and shot to her feet, staring wildly at Miles-san. “You could do that? You could get my mommy back? Really?”

Miles-san stopped short. “Er.”

Jin’s heart jumped in his chest; Mina’s imploring look made him feel sick. “No, of course he can’t,” he said angrily. “It was just a stupid joke.”

Miles-san’s hand went to his throat, clutching something through his shirt; some kind of pendant, Jin thought. “Damn. If I were on Barrayar, I could just order it done.”

“But we’re not on Barrayar,” Armsman Roic muttered under his breath, almost the first Jin had heard the big man speak. Miles-san waved a hand as if to say, Yah, yah, though whether in agreement or protest Jin was not sure.

Mina looked crushed; her lower lip quivered. “It wasn’t… wasn’t a very nice thing to make a joke about it, if you didn’t really mean it!”

“No,” said Miles-san, staring, for some reason, at Raven-sensei. “It wasn’t. Could I, ah… really mean it? Technically?”

Raven-sensei scratched his chin. “Technically, yes. You will forgive me if I point out that the medical aspects would seem to be the least of it?”

Miles-san waved a hand in easy pardon.

“Assuming,” Raven-sensei went on, “the cryoprep was done correctly in the first place, of course. Or at all.”

Miles-san’s eyes narrowed, and he resumed his pacing. “Mm… no reason why it shouldn’t have been. We’re not on Jackson’s Whole, either, I note. What all would you need to do the trick? Technically.”

“A decently-equipped revival facility. This isn’t something I’d choose to do out of the consulate basement’s laundry tub, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not if there were any complications.”

“We couldn’t afford complications, no. Emphatically not.” He glanced at Jin and Mina.

Raven-sensei nodded. “Some standard medical supplies, synthesized blood and so on.”

“If I secured you a facility, could you scrounge the supplies?”

Raven-sensei got a faraway look. “Legally, or otherwise?”

A pause. “I’ve no intrinsic objection to legally, but it can’t leave a data trail back to us. Otherwise, alternate suppliers would do. If their merchandise was of proper quality, of course.”

“That goes without saying. How would you propose to gain custody of my patient?”

Miles-san’s expression grew equally faraway. “Now, that’s where it becomes quite interesting—”

“Lord Vorkosigan!” Vorlynkin interrupted. “What the hell are you thinking?” Jin wasn’t sure if he really didn’t know, or knew and objected. Strenuously.

Miles-san waved that airy hand again. “Any number of threads in my cat’s cradle of Kibou-daini mysteries seem to run back to Lisa Sato—and stop. I’m thinking I might be able to cut the whole knot right through if I had her to interrogate. Er, talk to. Grant you, it seems a little imaginative at first glance, but the more I think about it…”

“Imaginative! It seems outright mad!”

Miles-san cast the consul a soulful look. “But Vorlynkin, it would solve all your problems with asylum for minors at a blow. Their mother being their closest possible adult next-of-kin.”

“When did those become my… never mind.”

Miles-san grinned in a glinty way that Jin did not entirely understand. “Very good, Vorlynkin.”

“What are you all talking about?” Mina practically wailed.

Miles-san lost his glintiness at once, and dropped to one knee in front of her swivel chair. “Unpack, right. Um. You see, Mina, I was sent here by my government to check out some sneaky, nasty things that a Kibou cryocorp is trying to do back on one of my home worlds. I think your mommy might be able to answer some of my questions, or at least give me some interesting new information. Now, it just so happens that Dr. Durona over there”—Raven-sensei waved his long fingers kindly at Mina—“is a top cryorevival specialist, and he already works for me, which is what gives me this idea. See, there are three things that have to be in place before I could undertake to wake up your mommy. I have to be sure it would be medically safe for her, and I think Raven could see to that. I have to be able to secure her cry—I have to be able to get hold of her, get her away from the place where she’s now held without kicking up a dust, and I think I can do that. And afterward, I have to be able to protect her from being arrested and taken away again, or it will all be for nothing, and that will be Consul Vorlynkin’s job.”

Vorlynkin looked startled at this news. But when Mina’s anxious gaze targeted him, he returned her a flicker of a smile, the first Jin had seen lighten his face. Girls, hah. Nobody handed Jin smiles like that when he was scared… he more usually got some sort of unsympathetic and bracing advice to buck up.

“Which reminds me, Vorlynkin,” Miles-san went on over his shoulder in a more clipped tone, “what are the limits of the political and legal protection this consulate can offer, once it becomes known that Madame Sato has, er, escaped custody, as it were? You’re not a full-scale embassy…”

Vorlynkin said reluctantly, “By our budget, we’re a branch of the embassy on Escobar. But we’re legally more than a consulate, because we’re the only full-time diplomatic facility Barrayar maintains here. It would be… it could be an ambiguous argument.”

“And ambiguous legal arguments burn lots of time, ah. That might just be good enough.” Miles-san rose to pace again.

Mina sank back into her swivel chair, her expression caught between hopeful and confused. Jin realized he’d been gripping the arms of his own chair so hard his fingernails were white, and slowly released his clutch. Mina’s words whirled around and around in his head, You could get my mommy back? Really? Really? Really… ? Who did this half-sized galactic think he was? When he’d said he was a delegate to the cryo-conference, but didn’t seem to be a doctor, and the others had all called him an auditor, Jin had vaguely assumed his job had something to do with insurance. Or maybe, less boringly, insurance fraud. He seemed to know a lot about fraud, anyway.

“First things first. Johannes, what vehicles does the consulate maintain?”

Johannes jerked, as if he’d been a watcher of a play unexpectedly addressed by one of the characters. “Uh, the official groundcar, of course. And we have a lift van. I have a float bike, myself.”

“Lift van, perfect. Tomorrow, then, we’ll take Jin and Raven and go pick up Jin’s creatures, and bring them back here to the consulate, so that’ll be off his mind and my conscience.”

Jin looked up, caught between thrilled and bewildered. Didn’t these Barrayarans mean to let him go… ? On the other hand, as long as he had his animals back, and didn’t have to go back to Aunt Lorna and school, did it matter where he stayed?

“My consulate isn’t exactly set up to host a menagerie,” said Vorlynkin.

“No, they’ll be fine here!” Jin assured him, panicked at the thought of being separated yet again from all his pets. “There’s so much room. And your back garden is all walled in. They won’t bother you a bit.”

“What kind of—no, never mind. Go on, Lord Vorkosigan.”

“At the same time, I will take Raven to meet Suze and company, and inspect the facilities. We might avoid having to retool the consulate laundry room into a cryo revival facility—” though he did not sound as if this proposed renovation gave him much pause “—if, like the installation we saw today, her old place already has one. And it’s still in good shape, not stripped.”

Jin said doubtfully, “If you want any favors from Suze-san, you better catch her early in the day. When she’s still sober.”

“Not a problem,” Miles-san said. “Then, if everything proves workable, we can go on to the next step.”

“What is the next step?” asked Consul Vorlynkin, in fascinated tones. He looked like a man staring at a groundcar wreck. In slow motion. That he was in.

“Securing Madame Sato.”

“How?”

“I’m going to have to do a spot more research first, to devise the optimum ploy. According to the public records, she’s being kept at the NewEgypt facility out in the Cryopolis here in Northbridge, which is actually pretty convenient.” Miles-san’s lips drew back on a peculiar grin. “It could be just like old times.”

Armsman Roic sat up in alarm. He put in, with some urgency, “What about those commodified contracts Ron Wing was going on about? Maybe you could work out a way to just, I dunno, buy her. All peaceable and aboveboard.” He added after a moment, “Or under the table, but peaceable, anyway.”

Miles-san paused again in his pacing, as if arrested by this notion. “Shrewd idea, Roic. But she’s not just any cryo-patron. I suspect that any interest in her is likely to send up a big red flag.” He fell into motion again. “Still, hold that thought. It might be useful later, for the retroactive tidying up.”

Roic sighed.

“The ideal,” Miles-san went on, “would be to arrange things so that she wasn’t missed at all.”

“These commercial cryochambers are all continuously monitored,” said Raven-sensei. “You’d need some way to fudge the readouts.” He hesitated. “Or go low tech, and just swap in another cryo-corpse. That way, all the readings would be naturally right. They wouldn’t know the difference unless they pulled it out and unwrapped it.”

Miles-san tilted his head, like Gyre the Falcon contemplating a choice morsel of meat. “The old shell game, eh? That… might actually be highly feasible. I wonder if I could borrow a spare from Suze? God knows, cryo-corpses are not an item in short supply around here.”

Vorlynkin choked. “Do you have any idea how many different crimes you’ve just rattled off?”

“No, but it might not hurt to make up a list, should your lawyer need it. Could speed things up, in a pinch.”

“I thought the task of an Imperial Auditor was to uphold the law!”

Miles-san’s eyebrows flew up. “No, whatever gave you that idea? The task of an Imperial Auditor is to solve problems for Gregor. Those greasy cryocorps bastards just tried to steal a third of his empire. That’s a problem.” Despite his smiling lips, Miles-san’s eyes glittered, and Jin realized with a start that underneath, he was really angry about something. “I’m still considering the solution.”

Jin wondered who Gregor was. Miles-san’s insurance boss?

Mina had scrunched her chair closer and closer to where Jin rocked in his. An audible sniffle escaped her, which made both Miles-san and Vorlynkin crank their heads around. Miles-san lurched and lifted a hand toward her, stopped short, and gestured at Jin instead, who, thus compelled, gave his sister a clumsy pat on the shoulder that only made her eyes fill up and overflow for real.

“Lord Vorkosigan, for pity’s sake, enough for tonight,” said Consul Vorlynkin. “These children have to be exhausted. Both of them.”

Jin could wish he hadn’t added that last. His eyes stung in contagion with Mina’s. Now he was offered it, Jin wasn’t so sure he wanted sympathy—it eroded his resolve as annoying bracing remarks never did.

“To be sure,” said Miles-san immediately. “Baths, I think, and we can give them both Roic’s room. He can bunk in with me. I expect some clean T-shirts would do for nightclothes. Toothbrushes?”

Miles-san and Vorlynkin arguing, Jin discovered, were not nearly so daunting as the pair of them united in sudden agreement. The ordinary business of bedtime blocked further tears. Jin expected Mina found the consulate house stranger than he did. He’d slept in parks, after all, and in all sorts of odd crannies at Suze-san’s. Vorlynkin even donated a fancy sonic toothbrush, though Jin and Mina had then to share it, with a trip through its sterilizing holder between customers.

At last they were tucked up in clean sheets in a warm, quiet room. Jin waited for the door to softly shut, and the grownups’ feet to clump away back downstairs, before wriggling up and switching on the bedside lamp. Mina threw back her covers and helped him extract Lady Murasaki’s box from her backpack. She watched closely as Jin opened the lid to give their pet a breath of fresh air, and helped by tossing in one of the little powdery beige moths they’d collected earlier, while Jin’s fingers blocked the prisoner from escaping. He set the plastic box back on the table between their beds.

“Is she going to eat it?” Mina asked, peering through the lid.

“I’m not sure. She might only go for live prey.”

Mina frowned thoughtfully. “They have that big garden out back. I bet we could catch more bugs tomorrow.”

A reassuring notion. Jin lay back down and pulled up his sheets, and Mina reached to turn out the lamp again before any betraying line of light showed under the bedroom door.

After a while, Mina’s whisper came out of the dark: “Do you really think your galactic can get Mommy back? No one else ever could.”

Had anyone else even tried? Jin didn’t know. Miles-san, all dapper and alert and concentrated and never sitting still, was proving an alarming acquaintance. Jin wasn’t sure but what he’d liked the grubby lost druggie better. Jin had a disconcerting feeling of having set a force in motion that he could not now stop, which wasn’t made better by not even knowing whether he wanted to.

“I don’t know, Mina,” he said at last. “Be quiet and go to sleep.” He rolled over and hid from it all under his covers.

Roic followed Consul Vorlynkin into the tight-room, where m’lord was already deeply involved with the comconsole, Johannes at his side, Raven leaning over and kibitzing. They all seemed to be examining some engineering schematics for the NewEgypt facility, pulled up from God knew where. Roic was relieved m’lord had finally decided to involve Johannes, if only by necessity. Backup at last! Inexperienced, but not untrained, and judging from his wide eyes it looked as if he was getting a tutorial in covert ops that would have done his ImpSec instructors proud.

M’lord wheeled in his station chair to take in the new arrivals. “Ah, Vorlynkin, good. Your clerk, Matson—he’ll be back to work in the morning, right?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think we can keep those kids quiet enough to hide them from him in a house this small. He’ll have to be told they are protected witnesses, in some danger. That should be enough to settle him.”

“Is it true?” said Vorlynkin.

“How did someone so reluctant to tell lies become a diplomat? By the way, I can’t believe, with all your training, that you failed to admire Miss Sato’s blisters. What is it about this universal female conviction that medical conditions make one interesting? Judging from my daughter Helen, it starts younger than I would have believed possible.”

“About the danger,” said Vorlynkin, winning Roic’s admiration by refusing to be drawn into m’lord’s flight of fancy. Judging from the brightness of his eyes, m’lord was as over-stimulated right now as his own kids after one of his bedtime stories, right enough. “Is it real? Because it’s unconscionable to keep those children from their guardians otherwise.”

M’lord sobered. “Perhaps. This is an investigation, which means that not all leads pan out. Or otherwise one wouldn’t need to investigate. But I shouldn’t think Lisa Sato would have been removed in that brutal and effective way for any trivial reason. Which means waking her up could actually increase their hazard…” He tapped his lips, considering this. “I suspect Jin misjudges his aunt and uncle, actually. They may not merely lack the resources to fight the good fight for their kinswoman. They may be seriously intimidated.”

“Hm,” said Vorlynkin.

Roic’s own conviction was that as soon as that poor frozen woman had intersected m’lord’s orbit, this chain of events had become inevitable. Worse than dangling a string in front of a cat, it was. He likely shouldn’t explain this to Vorlynkin; an armsman was supposed to be loyal in thought, word, and deed. But not blind…

“But if Jin and Mina were your children, would you want some off-worlder as good as kidnapping them to use for his own purposes?” Vorlynkin persisted. “No matter how well-intentioned?”

“In my defense, I must point out, they turned up here on their own, but—if I were dead, my widow frozen, my children fallen into the hands of people either unwilling or incapable of helping them? I doubt I would care where the man came from who could reunite them with Ekaterin. I’d shower all my posthumous blessings upon him.” M’lord wheeled around and drummed his fingers on the comconsole counter. “Poor Jin! He makes me think about my missing grandmother, actually.”

“Missing grandmother?” said Raven, leaning back against the counter. “I didn’t know you had any.”

“Most people have two—not you, of course. My Betan grandmother is alive and well and opinionated to this day, in fact. If you ever meet her, you’ll understand a whole lot more about my mother. No, it’s a Barrayaran tale, the fate of Princess-and-Countess Olivia Vorbarra Vorkosigan.”

“Then delightfully bloody, I daresay.” Raven’s sweeping hand gesture invited m’lord to go on, not that he needed any encouragement. Johannes, too, was listening in apparent fascination.

“Very. If you’d learned your Barrayaran history, not that you would be expected to, you’d know that once upon a time—all the best stories start that way, you realize—that once upon a time, the death squads of Mad Emperor Yuri attempted to erase most of my family, thereby triggering the civil war that ended, eventually, in Yuri’s dismemberment. So many people wanted a piece of him by then, they were forced to share, y’see. The death squad shot my grandmother in front of my father, messily. He was eleven at the time, which is part of why Jin keeps reminding me of it.

“But you see… for all the horrors of that day, and of the war that followed it, nobody, I’m not sure how to put this, nobody denied my father his experience. Jin’s mother was just as abruptly and unjustly taken from him, but he’s not been permitted his grief. No funeral, no mourning, no protest, even. No revenge—certainly not whatever satisfaction there might be of knowing she was escorted down into death by a procession of her enemies. For Jin and Mina, there’s just… silence. Frozen silence.”

A rather frozen silence followed this, among the Barrayarans in the room.

Vorlynkin cleared his throat, leaned on his hand, stared into the comconsole. “So. Lord Auditor. And, um… just how are we planning to give this woman her voice back… ?”