Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

With three of the four people he wanted to interrogate at Suze’s place still out cold, bless Roic, Miles perforce began with Madame Sato.

Inside the glass-walled, softly-lit isolation booth, she was sitting up in her narrow bed, looking pale and exhausted but on the whole very good for a new revive. She was clean in a crisp patient gown and warmly padded robe, each extra layer of cloth providing protection from exposure both to germs and prying eyes. Miles suspected—no, knew very well—from his own too-frequent hospitalizations that the latter could be more important to one’s morale than the former. Ako had washed the gel from her hair; it lay undamaged in a silky fall over her shoulder.

He eased into the booth, wondering if he seemed menacing to her or merely weird. Hard to tell from her stern glare. He adjusted his filtering mask and cleared his throat.

“Good afternoon, Madame Sato. My name is Miles Vorkosigan.” He smiled reassuringly, then realized she couldn’t see his mouth. “Sorry about the mask. But Dr. Durona says your immune system’s coming back fast. We should be able to dispense with the sterile precautions and get you out of here fairly soon.”

“Are you a doctor?” Her voice was raspy but functional.

“No, your revival was done by Raven Durona, a specialist from Escobar. Who works for me,” Miles realized he’d better add. Explaining himself to her was going to be an uphill slog.

“I saw him earlier.” She swallowed—partly nerves, partly still getting used to being back in control of her body, he expected. “Where is here? They said I was in Northbridge.” Her tone said she doubted this. Doubted everything, right now.

Miles glanced around. The view from booth took in only the shadowed, deserted recovery room, which had no exterior windows, not even looking out on the wall of another building. “Northbridge, that’s right. You’re in an old, decommissioned cryonics facility on the south side, which has been taken over by some rather clever squatters.”

“Someone said you have my children…” The tightening of her throat smeared that last word nearly soundless.

Miles now wished he’d brought them along, even though he was still nervy from his prior failure. “Yes, Jin and Mina are safe at the Barrayaran consulate.” He added after a moment, when she still didn’t seem to know whether to parse this as a comfort or a threat, “Jin has all his creatures there, even Gyre-the-falcon and your old cat, so he’s content for now. Mina is pretty much sticking with Jin.” This familiar reference to the traveling zoo would convince her of his veracity, he hoped.

“The Barrayaran consulate! Why?” She swallowed again. “Who are you? Why are you here?” She didn’t add, Why am I here? but Miles thought it was implied.

“What do you remember?”

Her lips clamped shut.

Miles tried again. “The last thing Jin and Mina remember of you is your arrest by the Northbridge municipal police, eighteen months back. Two days ago, my people and I found you frozen in a portable cryochamber in Dr. Seiichiro Leiber’s townhouse basement. I’m now trying to close that eighteen-month memory gap. For both of us, I suppose.”

That last plainly shocked her; her stare at him shifted from fear and misplaced anger to sheer bewilderment. “What?”

Miles sighed, hitching himself up on the stool at the end of her bed. An Auditor was supposed to listen, not talk—one of Gregor’s wee jokes, was that?—but this woman had earned her briefing. Besides, it was quite likely that Lisa Sato didn’t know enough about Barrayar to point to it on a wormhole map. “I expect I had better begin at the beginning. I’m a galactic. My official job title is Imperial Auditor. That’s a high-level government investigator for the Barrayaran Imperium. You no doubt wonder what I’m doing on Kibou-daini.” Miles wondered himself, some moments. “I was originally sent to check out a smelly situation with a large WhiteChrys company franchise on Komarr—that’s the second planet of our empire—” As succinctly as he could, he explained the WhiteChrys scam with the Komarran planetary voting shares, including his successful bribery sting. For the first time, she looked faintly cheered.

“Yes, hit them where they keep their hearts, in their wallets,” she murmured with satisfaction. “Although WhiteChrys isn’t even the worst of the corps.”

“Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it. Now I need to explain how I met your son Jin, and found this place…” Necessarily, he backed up to his attendance at the cryo-conference, and the attack upon it by the N.H.L.L.

“Those murderous idiots!” said Lisa Sato, her voice hearteningly enlivened with scorn for someone other than Miles.

“In their defense, they don’t seem to have succeeded in killing anyone, this round. If not for lack of trying. I actually feel I owe them—they opened up my case for me in ways I’d have had trouble finding on my own, although I suppose the Komarr scam part would have run on rails regardless. Anyway, after I broke away from them I ended up lost in the Cryocombs…”

That part held her nicely spellbound. Miles had the mother-wit to save most of his embroidering for after Jin had joined his tale, which drew her in fully. She had less trouble following the explanation of Suze’s schemes than Miles had, first encounter.

“But why was Jin here?” she asked, at a loss. “I’d left the children with my sister Lorna. I only thought I’d be gone overnight, maybe a day or two, until I could get a lawyer—eighteen months ?”

“Do you remember being taken to be frozen? Who did it?”

Her brow furrowed in an effort of recall. “I was in what was supposed to have been a temporary cell, more of a room, really, at the municipal police station. A man came in. I thought he might be from my lawyer. There was a hypospray, then…” She shook her head, then winced. Post-revival headache, no doubt. His had been a doozy.

Hypnotic or knock-out drug, it hardly mattered which she had received. Miles suspected that not even more time to overcome any lingering cryo-amnesia—of which she showed very few signs—would recover anything after that.

“After you were illegally, or in any case extra-legally, frozen, your sister and brother-in-law naturally looked after their nephew and niece. I gather that Jin ran away from your sister due to conflicts over his creatures in her crowded household. Mina stayed on. She was doing well in her second year of primary school”—that seemed a safe assumption—“until I inadvertently caused Jin to be returned to his aunt, and they both ran away together to, well, me.” At her Why you? look, he added, “Jin can tell you all the details when you see him.” Miles hoped Jin was enough of a Barrayaran partisan by now to convey the Lord Auditor’s good intentions. Good performance was still to be tested, unfortunately.

“But enough about me.” Let’s talk about you . It had been a very long time, thankfully, since Miles had attempted to pick up a woman in a bar—and even that had been in the line of duty—but his sense of desperate seduction wasn’t altogether misplaced. He needed to persuade Lisa Sato to trust him, and quickly. “What was your connection with Seiichiro Leiber, and how did it come about?”

For a long moment he feared she was going to clam up again, but after another cool look, she began, “Seiichiro came to us—to our political action council—with a secret he’d discovered through his work.”

“How many times did he visit you?”

“Two or three.”

“Who all did he tell? Did he ever meet with all of you?”

“George and Eiko and me, at first. There was one later meeting with all of us, when we planned the rally—George Suwabi and me, Seiichiro, Lee Kang, Rumi Khosla, and Eiko Tennoji.”