Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

With a grating noise and a puff of powder, the bolt popped out of the concrete.

“Finally,” breathed Roic.

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.”