Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

He’d spoken too soon, it seemed.

He’d sat in on every program m’lord had attended, in the back of the room where he could watch all the exits, and been hard-put to stay awake, though m’lord recorded everything indiscriminately. He followed m’lord to meals with other attendees and to lavish evening parties provided by the conference’s sponsors, at varying distances from looming over m’lord’s short shoulder to leaning against the far wall, as m’lord signaled. He learned far more about cryonics and the people who dealt with it than he had ever wanted to know.

And he had just about come to the conclusion that the entire jaunt was a put-up job between Lady Vorkosigan and Empress Laisa, to give Ekaterin a much-needed holiday from a spouse who diagnosed all complaints as a sign of boredom, to be alleviated with an exciting new task. Since Lady Vorkosigan already ran an enormous household, rode herd on four children under the age of six and a teenage son from a prior marriage, played political hostess for her husband in his roles both as an Imperial Auditor and as the Count’s heir, had undertaken supervisory responsibilities for agriculture and terraforming in the Vorkosigan’s District, and tried desperately, in her spare seconds, to maintain a garden design business, bets were on below-stairs as to when she would break and respond to m’lord’s idea of husbandly help by defenestrating the little man from the fourth floor of Vorkosigan House. This trip seemed a reasonable substitute to Roic.

But even the most loyal armsman had to go to the loo sometimes, which was why, economy be hanged, Roic argued constantly for a back-up man, or better, two, on these excursions. He’d returned… night before last?—or had he lost more than one day in this dazed captivity?—to the main room of the reception to discover m’lord gone, though a quick ping found him up a floor, past some winding stairs, in an even more private section of the party. Their wristcoms ran a scrambled security channel; no come-here-I-want-you code called, so Roic jittered impatiently and controlled his nerves. When m’lord at last trod back down the winding stairs, spotted Roic, and joined him, tugging down his cuffs in a self-satisfied way, his appearance was anything but reassuring. To anyone who knew him well, that is. It was the manic glitter in his eyes, and the fleeting smile, and the general air of elation. The damndest things could elate him.

“What?” Roic had murmured in alarm, and “Later,” m’lord had replied. “The walls have ears.”

Roic had to grind his teeth till midnight found them back in their shared room, where m’lord unpacked the anti-bug silencer for the first time, and his message encoder as well. He sat at the room’s sole desk and began typing.

“And so?” asked Roic. “Why do you look so happy all of a sudden?”

“I’ve had my very first break in this case, after days of dead time. Someone just tried to bribe me.”

Roic stiffened. An attempt to bribe an Imperial Auditor could warrant the death penalty, on Barrayar. But we’re not on Barrayar, more’s the pity . “Er… and this is a good thing?”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, they say.” M’lord continued cheerfully keying in whatever he was composing for Imperial Eyes Only. “Or maybe mirrors. Mind you, it was a subtle and elegant bribe. I’m almost glad I’m not dealing with idiots, here. Oh, Laisa, you were right, you were right. However did your cute Komarran nose know?”

“What did you say?” asked Roic anxiously.

“That’s right, you were never in a galactic mercenary outfit. Or covert ops. They both have tested policies for bribes. Back in my old fleet, the rule was accept everything, register it with Command, and go do exactly what you were going to do anyway. Covert ops was similar—accept and follow up as far as the string leads. Because strings run two ways, you know. Play it out, pull it in… see what’s on the other end… Hah!” He finished his entries with a flourish.

“What kind of bribe?” Roic pressed. “Or—should I not know?” Please, don’t make me work in t’ damned dark!

“Some very interesting stock options in the Shiragiku-sha—the White Chrysanthemum Cryonics Corporation, in full. WhiteChrys is the company in process of establishing a franchise on Komarr, you know. I could get in on the ground floor at a very favorable rate, it seems. In fact, they would lend me the money at no interest, to be paid back after my value doubles. Because what could be better for them than to boast a local stockholder with my insanely high connections? Though I am not, curiously enough, offered voting stock. The votes are reserved for their sub-zero patrons.”

Of all the brain-bending twists of democracy Roic had encountered, even worse than the secondary market in Komarran planetary voting shares, it was Kibou-daini’s custom of votes by the dead that most made his head hurt. Proxies, naturally—left in the hands of the cryocorps that shepherded their frozen charges into an unknown and curiously receding future. Because if you were going to trust a company with your death and next life, your vote was a small thing in comparison.

“It had doubtless,” m’lord had remarked crisply, upon first learning this fact, “seemed a good idea at the time.” Two, three hundred years ago, when New Hope’s strange burial customs, as Roic could not help thinking of them, were just beginning to gain popularity.

“Heh,” muttered m’lord, and sent his message on its coded and circuitous way.

Roic knew that Heh . It gave him cold chills.

And so to bed, to rise and face the last day of the conference, which had gone, as near as Roic could tell, as no one had expected, not even m’twisty lord.

And now, oh God, he’d gone and lost the little maniac…

Or had he? Belatedly, he wondered if m’lord had been captured in the melee in the lobby as well.

He could be here . Roic abandoned the bolt and shuffled over to rap three times three on his room’s side wall. Again. Nothing . He tried the other side of the room, though he had to stretch to reach. Silence. The adjoining rooms could be empty, or his fellow captives still too drugged to hear, or answer. Or maybe it was his captors over there, and he’d just alerted them of his return to consciousness. Damn . Try again later?

He went back to working on his bolt, which was producing blisters on his fingers but no discernable loosening, and brooded. He’d only taken his eyes off m’lord for a moment, and then his old street guard reflexes had cut in, as he’d hustled at least half-a-dozen potential kidnap victims into a lift tube and escape, because they were unarmed civilians but that wasn’t his job even though no one else was doing it. He’d sure won a whole lot of angry attention from their attackers by that, at least till the stunner beam had caught him. Maybe m’lord escaped, and will rescue me . An embarrassment, Roic decided, that he could happily live with.

At the sudden clack of the door being unbolted, he started and dropped his hands hastily to his lap. The door opened, and a skinny young man with lank dark hair, and a slitted eye set in a swollen magenta-and-purple contusion, eased through and stared for a suspicious moment at Roic, seated on his mattress. He limped forward to just beyond the arc of Roic’s chain, set some sort of commercial Reddi-Meal tray on the floor, and pushed it toward Roic with what appeared to be a broom handle. The tray was still sealed. So, Roic was not to be starved—or poisoned? Don’t make premature assumptions, he could almost hear m’lord’s voice intone. Roic realized he was terrifically hungry, but he made no move toward the tray.