Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

“They insisted,” Vorlynkin explained, unnecessarily. “I told them she wouldn’t be awake till tomorrow— you told them how unappetizing you looked when you came out of cryo—but they still insisted. Even if they could only see her through the glass. I don’t think they slept all night. Woke me up three times… I thought maybe if they could just see , they’d settle down. Take naps later, something.” Vorlynkin’s voice slowed as he took in Miles’s grim stance. So he only mouthed, and did not voice, the words What’s wrong?

Miles wasn’t ready for this now. Hell, he wasn’t ready for this ever. He’d had the unenviable task before of informing next-of-kin or the friends who stood in that place, but they’d always been adults. Never children, never so wide open and unarmored.

Mina and Jin’s excitement was quelled, as they looked at him. Because if things had gone well, wouldn’t he be puffing it off already, taking the credit? There was no way to make this better, and only one way to make it over. He wanted to kneel, to grovel, but it seemed only right to look Jin in the eye. He took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Something went wrong with the cryorevi—no, with the cryoprep. There was nothing Raven-sensei could do. We tried… we think your mother died during her cryoprep eighteen months ago, or sometime soon after.”

Jin and Mina stood still in shock. But not crying, not yet. They just stared at Miles. Stared and stared.

“But we wanted to see her,” said Mina, in a thin little voice. “You said we would see her.”

Jin’s voice was throaty, husky, entirely unlike himself. “You promised…”

The trio had fallen apart from each other at the blow of this news. Quite spontaneously and uncharacteristically, Jin’s hand found Mina’s. Mina’s other hand wavered and gripped Vorlynkin’s again; he looked down at her in dismay. “Now?” he said. “Are you sure… ?” His hard gaze rose as if to nail Miles to the wall.

“They have a right,” said Miles in reluctance. “Though I don’t know if an ugly memory is better than no memory. I just… don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” admitted Vorlynkin.

Mina’s chin jutted out. “I want to see. I want to see her.”

Jin gulped and nodded.

“Wait a moment, then…” Miles slipped—fled—back through the door and said, “Raven, we have visitors. Next of kin. Can we, ah, tidy her up a bit?”

Raven the supposed Jacksonian hard-ass looked deeply shaken at this news. “Oh gods, it’s not those poor kids? What are they doing here ? Must they come in?”

“They’ve a right,” Miles repeated, wondering why those words seemed to resonate in his mind. He ought to know, but these days he couldn’t blame every memory lapse on his own ten-year-old cryorevival.

Raven, Tanaka and Miles hurried to get the silent figure decently draped, to remove the useless tangle of technology from about her, tubes and electrodes and the strange cap. Miles smoothed the short black hair back over the ears. Its slickness rendered the middle-aged female face sophisticated yet skull-like, and Miles wondered how the children’s mother had worn her hair. Weird little things like that could matter all out of proportion. A swift and useless tidying-up, this.

Over, let it be over . Miles went to the door and held it wide.

Jin and Mina and Vorlynkin filed through. The look Vorlynkin flicked at Miles in passing had very little love in it. Jin took the consul’s free hand as they came up to the tableside. Because who else was there left to hang onto, in this spinning hour?

The children stared some more. Mina’s lips parted in bewilderment; Jin raised his eyes to Miles with a half-voiced Huh?

Drawing back in something between outrage and scorn, Mina said, “But that’s not our mommy!”

Miles just barely kept himself from blurting, idiotically, Are you sure? Neither set young face held the least doubt. “Then who,” he choked, wheeling to stare at Raven, at the draped figure on the table, “was it that we just…” Murdered was unfair, as well as inaccurate. And, he suspected, would also be deeply offensive to the upset cryorevival specialist. “That we just…” Fortunately, no one here seemed to expect him to fill in the blank.

“Her numbers were right,” said Raven. “…Or anyway, her numbers were the ones you gave me.”

So either Miles had grabbed the wrong drawer code from the cryo-storage data, which he knew very well he had not, or the numbers had been fudged somewhere upstream. By somebody. For some reason. Concealment? To protect Lisa Sato’s cryo-corpse from kidnapping by her supporters, or someone like the N.H.L.L.? Or by Miles—no, Miles didn’t think anyone on Kibou-daini could have imagined a nosy Barrayaran Imperial Auditor taking this interest. Or might it have been a genuine error? In which case—Miles pictured the millions of cryo-drawers in, under, or around Northbridge alone, and his heart sank. The thought that nobody might actually know where Lisa Sato had been stashed was too horrible to contemplate for more than an instant.

Or—and the notion was so arresting, Miles caught his breath—someone else had been ahead of him, with the exact same idea. In which case… No. Before his inner visions could proliferate madly, he’d better fasten them down with at least a few facts. Physical ones, not all these trailing tenuous tentacled inductions.

Miles took a deep breath, to slow his hammering heart. “All right. All right. We’ll start with what we can know. First is to ID that poor, um, patron. Make that a priority for your autopsy, Raven. I’ll go back to the consulate tight-room and—” Miles broke off as Vorlynkin cleared his throat, ominously.

Vorlynkin nodded to Jin and Mina, clinging together in white-faced silence. Miles wasn’t sure whether to read their postures as fear, or anger, though at least they weren’t weeping. In either case, Vorlynkin was probably right—it wouldn’t do to discuss the gruesome details of an autopsy in front of them just now, even if the subject wasn’t their mother after all. Children, as Miles had reason to know, ranged naturally from deeply sensitive to remarkably bloody-minded; sometimes, confusingly, the same child at different times. Was dealing with women practice for dealing with children? It was likely just as well he didn’t have time to follow up that thought. With a sweep of his arms, Miles shepherded Vorlynkin and his charges back out into the corridor.

“I’m so sorry about all this,” Miles repeated inanely. “I promise you”—damn, he really needed to cull that phrase from his vocabulary—“I’m still going to look for your mommy. The problem has just suddenly become a lot more interesting. Er, difficult. It’s just become a bit more difficult. I need more data, d—” Need more data, dammit, was an old mantra of his, almost comforting in its familiarity. Some setbacks were simply setbacks. Others were opportunities breaking down the door in disguise. He was reasoning ahead of his data— remember, data? —to imagine this was the second sort. Well, that was what experience could grant one—a high degree of certainty while making one’s mistakes…

Mina said, “But what’s going to happen to us, now?”

Jin added anxiously, “You’re not going to make us go back to Aunt Lorna and Uncle Hikaru, are you?”

“No. Or at least, not yet. Consul Vorlynkin will take you back to the consulate for the moment, until we get somewhere with all this, or…”

“Or?” Vorlynkin repeated, as Miles trailed off.

“We’ll get somewhere.” I just don’t know where . “I’ll stay here for the clean-up, then join you all there later. When you get back, Vorlynkin, put Lieutenant Johannes on a preliminary data sweep-search for me. I want to try to find that Dr. Leiber, the one who was associated with Lisa Sato’s group here in Northbridge eighteen months ago.” Not much of a clue, but he had to go with what little was in hand. Miles wondered just how common that surname was on Kibou. Well, he’d find out shortly.