Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

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.