Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

Roic stifled his wish for a wash-up and had Lieutenant Johannes guide them directly to m’lord, already ensconced like an invasive spider in the consulate’s communications tight-room. In most planetary embassies that Roic had visited in m’lord’s wake, the tight-room seemed the secret nerve center of the embassy’s affairs, hushed and urgent. Here, it felt more like someone’s leftover basement hobby room—for some very odd hobbies—retrofitted in high tech.

M’lord swiveled in his station chair and waved Roic and Raven to seats, dismissing Johannes with a “Thank you, Lieutenant.” Johannes, looking as though he longed to stay and eavesdrop, nodded and dutifully withdrew, closing the door with that muffled thump that betokened a good sound seal. Roic ignored the faint serial-killer ambiance of the windowless chamber, and tried to appreciate that here at last one might enjoy a truly private conversation.

“Are you two all right?” A perfunctory inquiry; m’lord didn’t even wait for Raven’s nod and Roic’s grunt before continuing, “Tell me everything that happened to you. And yes, I want all the details.”

M’lord listened, brows tightening, as the full tale of the kidnapping and rescue unwound, rewarding the tellers at the end with a mere, “Huh.” He added to Raven, “I’m glad you’re all right. I shouldn’t have liked to explain your loss to your clone-siblings, or mine. I’d actually thought the Durona Group would send your sister Rowan.”

“No, she’s much too busy these days for off-planet jaunts,” said Raven. “She’s our department head for Cryonics—we have over five hundred employees, between our clinical services, research, and administrative overhead. And she and that Escobaran medtech she married plan to pop their second kid from the uterine replicator any day now.”

“Not cloned, eh?”

“No, it was all done the old-fashioned way, an egg and a sperm in a test tube. They didn’t even go for any genetic mods, beyond the routine check for defects, of course.”

“Of course,” murmured m’lord, without comment. “So good old Lily Durona is a real grandmother, now—or aunt, depending on how you look at it. She continues in good health for her age, I trust?”

“Very much so.”

“Interesting.”

Raven tugged absently on his frazzled braid, laid over his shoulder, and continued, “As a department head, Rowan says she misses the hands-on surgical work. She hardly gets to do two revivals a week, these days. I do two to six a day, depending on complications. Nothing as complicated as you were— you took Rowan, me, and two shifts of medtechs eighteen hours straight, back in the day.”

“You did good work.”

“Thank you.” Raven nodded in what seemed to Roic rather smug satisfaction.

“Give Rowan my best, when you see her.”

“Oh, yeah, she said to say hi to you, too.”

This won an oddly ironic look, and a return nod.

“I take it,” put in Roic, “that Dr. Durona, here, wasn’t at the conference by chance?”

“Indeed, not. I’d asked the Durona Group to supply me with an independent technical evaluation of the cryo-conference, and whatever turned up at it.”

“The Group had actually received the conference’s call for presentations well before you asked, Lord Vorkosigan. We were going to send one of our junior residents—this place is not without interest to us, actually.”

“And have you observed anything of special note so far? Technically.” M’lord leaned back in his station chair and steepled his fingers, giving Raven a judicious stare.

“Nothing new to us on the technical side. I did notice that they seemed more interested in freezing people than thawing them.”

“Yes, the cryocorps are plainly playing numbers games with their customers’—patrons, they call ’em—proxy votes.”

“It’s a game they’ve won, from the sound of things.”

M’lord nodded. “It was barely discussed at the conference, yet there seems to be plenty of debate on the subject outside. In the streets and elsewhere.”

Raven put in, “The N.H.L.L. were sure complaining vigorously.”

“Yeah, but not very effectively,” said Roic. “Loons like that are their own worst advertisement.”

“Does it strike you both as a pretty free debate, as such things go? Noisy?”

“Well, yes,” said Raven. “Not as noisy as Escobaran politics.”

“Noisier than Barrayar, though,” Roic said.

“ Much noisier than Jackson’s Whole,” Raven granted, with a twisted grin.

“That’s not politics, that’s predators versus prey,” muttered m’lord. But he went on: “Well, thanks to the N.H.L.L., I had a very useful two days. Now that you’re both back alive, I suppose I can afford to be grateful to them.”

“New answers?” asked Roic, with a sapient eyebrow-lift.

“Better. A whole raft of new questions.”

And m’lord promptly topped—of course—Roic’s tale with a hair-curling story of the appalling extent of the Cryocombs beneath the city, and of how m’lord had stumbled on a bootleg freezing operation run by, apparently, Kibou street geezers. Raven seemed less impressed by the bootleg cryonics—he was Jacksonian, after all. As near as Roic could tell, everything on Jackson’s Whole was done illegally. Or, more precisely, lawlessly.

“Fragile and doomed,” was Raven’s succinct opinion of Madame Suze’s on-going operation. “I’m astonished she’s gotten away with so much for so long.”

“Mm, maybe not. It’s clandestine, but it doesn’t really rock the cryocorps’ boat. Everyone here being in the same boat, after all.” M’lord rubbed his chin and squinted red-rimmed eyes that glinted a trifle too brightly. “Then we come to this woman Lisa Sato, and her group.”

“Your little zookeeper’s frozen mama?” said Roic.

“Yep. The N.H.L.L. is allowed to run its length, Suze’s operation is overlooked, but Sato’s seemingly much more reasonable and legal group is broken up, at considerable trouble and expense. All that ambient noise, and yet only one voice is silenced.” M’lord gestured to the secured comconsole, now dark. “I’ve spent the past several hours doing some digging—”

And as a former ImpSec galactic operative, this sort of digging was meat and drink to m’lord, Roic reflected.

“—and in just that time, I’ve turned up anomalies galore. Lisa Sato was not the only member of her group to come to a bad end. Two others were frozen after supposedly-unsuccessful treatments for medical conditions that should not have been fatal, another died in an accident, and yet another was ruled a suicide of the fell-or-jumped sort. Even at the time, brows were raised, and quite a few people were offended, but the aftershocks were drowned out in the news by a flood of trivial sex scandals. What does this suggest to you?”

“That Lisa Sato’s group was getting ready to rock somebody’s boat pretty hard,” said Roic slowly.

Raven nodded concurrence. “How?”

“That, interestingly, does not turn up in the public record. Nor even in the less-public records. Somebody did a first-class job on the cleanup, there, even if they weren’t able to make it completely invisible. That now heads my list of shiny new questions—just what got cleaned up, a year and a half ago?”

Roic frowned. “Very riveting, m’lord, but… what has this got t’ do with Barrayar’s interests?”

M’lord cleared his throat. “It is far too early to say,” he said primly.

Roic, glumly, read that as, I haven’t made up a reason yet, but give me time . Was m’lord going all quixotic on account of that orphan boy? Emperor Gregor himself had warned Roic about m’lord’s tendency to expensive knight-errantry, in one of their rare private conversations. From the Imperial sigh that had accompanied this, it had been unclear if Gregor actually expected Roic to restrain m’lord, or not.