Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

For the first time, the silent woman’s chest rose, and her skin seemed suddenly not just pliable but alive . A few moments of uneven stuttering, while Tanaka watched their monitors and Raven stared narrow-eyed at his patient. His face was calm but his gloved hands, Roic noticed, were clenched. Then her lips parted on a longer indrawn breath, then another, and Raven’s fists relaxed. Roic remembered to exhale before he disgraced himself by passing out, but only just.

“Got it in one,” said Raven, and shut down the external pump.

M’lord’s eyes squeezed closed in gratitude. Vorlynkin, transfixed, breathed, “That’s astounding.”

“I just love this part,” Raven confided, to the air generally as far as Roic could tell. “It makes me feel quite godlike. Or at least wizardly.”

M’lord’s lips twitched. “Are you saying this is an ego-trip for you?”

“The best ever,” agreed Raven. “I live for these moments.”

“Always glad to see a man happy in his work,” m’lord murmured.

Raven circled his patient’s body, tapping here and there with a stylus in a pattern Roic suspected was meaningful. And very old. “We have reflexes. Peripheral nerves are firing up nicely,” he reported. He returned to her head, smoothing a stray strand of hair back from her forehead in a curiously tender gesture. “Madame Sato?” he called. “Lisa?”

The eyelids fluttered, opened, squeezed shut. The lids bore the epicanthic folds of her Earth ancestry, the eyes the classic almond shape. The irises were a rich, dark brown, further reducing her resemblance to Lady Vorkosigan, whose eyes were a striking blue-gray.

“Hearing’s working,” Raven murmured. “Grossly, at least.” And, “Lisa?” he repeated. “Are you with us yet?”

It could hardly be reassuring to the woman to open her eyes on a circle of masked faces, like bandits. Especially if the last thing she remembered were the faces of her all-but-murderers. Had they been leering? Coolly professional? Indifferent? But bandits indeed, stealing her will, her world, her life from her.

Roic leaned in. In his best reassuring guardsman’s tones, he tried, “Ma’am, you’re all right. Safe and alive. Rescued . Your children are both safe and secure as well. You’ll get to see them soon.”

Another fluttering of lids; a moan.

“And larynx,” said Raven happily. “That should please you, my Lord Auditor.”

“Indeed,” said m’lord.

She sighed again, the tension passing out of her.

“She’ll sleep for some hours, after this,” said Raven. “The longer, the better.”

“We’ll clean her up and move her to the isolation booth,” said Medtech Tanaka. “Ako, you can help with the skin treatment.”

Tubes and needles were pulled away, lines coiled up, machines turned off. Roic helped shift the live woman off the procedure table onto the transfer cart. M’lord slid down from his stool, stretched his back, and leaned on his cane. “How soon till we can move her to the consulate?”

“Depends on her white blood count, and a few other things,” said Raven. “But possibly as early as the day after tomorrow. You’ll have to keep her quiet in one of those upstairs bedrooms for a few days.”

“We can do that,” said Vorlynkin.

M’lord turned his head toward the consul. “Wait, why are you here? Has Leiber shown up?”

“No, not yet. You have a sealed message from Barrayar that’s arrived in the tight-room. We can’t access it, so I don’t know how urgent it may be.” He added with reluctant honesty, “Also, I was curious how this was going. Given the need to deal with Mina and Jin.” He didn’t want to be blindsided again, Roic read this. Understandable.

“Ah, all right,” said m’lord. “Raven, if you’re on top of things here, I guess I can go back.”

Raven waved assent and turned to follow the medtech and Ako, trundling his patient away. The room seemed very empty when they’d left, disconsolate and messy like the morning after a winter solstice party.

Vorlynkin blinked and rolled his shoulders, as if trying to come back into himself from somewhere far away. “That was very strange. I’ve never seen anyone die, but this—it was like watching time run backwards. Or something.”

“I have, and yes,” said m’lord.

“Were we playing god?” Vorlynkin asked uneasily.

“No more so than the people who put her down in the first place. And our cause is much more just.” M’lord added in a mutter, “I hope.” Frowning, he fished out his Auditor’s seal on its chain for a slightly cross-eyed downward glance. “Sealed message, eh? You know, when I was Jin’s age, I’d have been thrilled to own a secret decoder ring. Now I have one, it feels more like a sack of bricks. There’s something sadly out of phase about that.”

When m’lord limped off to exchange one last word with Raven, Roic found himself briefly alone with the consul, who gazed in bemusement up the corridor after the short, retreating form. “Lord Vorkosigan is not exactly what I expected, when I was told the consulate should prepare for a visit from an Imperial Auditor.”

Roic, stoutly, didn’t snicker. “The nine Imperial Auditors are actually a pretty varied lot, once you meet them. Lord Auditor Vorthys, who’s also m’lady’s uncle, looks like a rumpled old engineering professor because that’s exactly what he is. There’s this crusty admiral, a retired diplomat, an industrialist… m’lord’s become more-or-less Gregor’s galactic affairs expert. The Emperor’s uncannily shrewd at matching his Auditors to their cases. Although I suppose we’ll have to hit a dud one of these days, he hasn’t sent us off-world on a fool’s errand yet.” Roic actually hoped for a dud case, someday. It could be restful.

“That’s reassuring.” Vorlynkin hesitated. “I think.”

Roic smiled crookedly at the council. “Yeah.”

Back in the consulate’s tight-room, Miles saw the address code on his message and relaxed. It looked to be the weekly report from Ekaterin, which explained why it didn’t bear any of the usual urgent markers. Something nice, amid all this muddle. Reflecting on the difference between urgent and important, he leaned forward to let his Auditor’s seal swing out on its chain, and unsealed the message.

His wife’s face appeared, smiling, above the vid plate, and he paused the vid just to get a good look at her. She sailed through her days under such a constant barrage of interruptions, lately, he hardly ever saw her holding still unless she was sleeping. Clear blue-gray eyes raised in a candid gaze, sleek dark hair untouched by frost although she was his age plus a couple of months. Considering that he’d stuck her with four offspring in under six years, her lack of gray hairs seemed increasingly remarkable. They’d all been gestated in uterine replicators, but still. He’d been an only child himself, racked from birth by medical issues now not so much solved as exchanged for new ones. Perhaps—no, make that certainly—he’d underestimated how much work normal healthy children would take, even with all the help his money and position could buy. For there were some tasks you didn’t want to delegate, because then you’d be missing the best parts.

She was actually staring at a vid pick-up, not at him, he reminded himself, but under the weight of her faintly ironic look he set her back in motion, irrationally guilty at delaying her.

“Greetings, my love,” she said. “We’ve received your latest here with much relief and rejoicing, though fortunately I didn’t tell the children about that first alarming message before the second had overtaken it. I shudder to think what your parents went through during your old career. Though I suppose your father kept his high-Vor upper lip suitably stiff, and your mother, well, I can scarcely imagine. Said tart Betan things, I suppose.”