Johannes's breathless voice sounded from his side, not his wristcom. "What the hell is going on?" When Roic had said Watch my back, he hadn't meant from this close, but he couldn't fault the lieutenant for curiosity. Johannes's eyes widened, peering into the shadows.
Roic tucked his stunner away in its shoulder holster. "We just rescued Dr. Leiber. I'm not sure if he'll see it that way, though." He climbed into the cargo area, first checking both his victims for health. Stunner fire was by no means safe; it could trigger all sort of problems in people with underlying medical issues. Happily, these two seemed extremely fit. Having assured himself of their continued cooperation by the simple means of a light repeat stun to the base of each neck, he arranged them more tidily. He then turned to Leiber.
Roic was not called upon after all to trot out his encouraging We've saved you, be grateful, I'm taking you to a place of refuge speech, in which he had no faith; Leiber had lost consciousness. Roic hoped to hell it had just been a hypospray of knockout drugs, and not some deadly poison. Even if some bloody and secret murder was planned, if he were Leiber's enemy he'd sure want him alive to question under fast-penta first. Actually, Roic wanted to question Leiber under fast-penta on his own behalf. That decision would be up to m'lord, though.
Leiber's breathing continued evenly, and his skin did not turn any alarming colors. All right so far.
"Follow me to Madame Suze's place," he instructed Johannes. Dr. Durona would be there, among other useful amenities. He thought a moment. "No, better—lead me to Suze's."
He locked the back of the van, doused its flashing lights, and followed Johannes in convoy out of the parking lot. Roic wondered if m'lord's approach to life, or at least to his Auditorial investigations, was rubbing off on him. He'd never used to be this cavalier about due process. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if m'lord's style was the result of single-minded dedication to duty, habits of overweening Vor privilege, or simple insanity. Roic only knew that he had an inexplicable desire to whistle cheerfully, right now.
Instead he raised his wristcom to his lips, called m'lord, and gave a concise précis of his morning's mission, if m'lord's laconic order of, Roic, go nail that twit could be so grandly styled.
And then, being alone in the driver's cab, he whistled all the way to Suze's.
His imagination afire with possibilities, Jin sat at the consulate's kitchen table and counted out, again, his share of the money Roic had solemnly distributed to him and Mina at breakfast that morning. Mina had already secreted hers in her backpack upstairs, but she watched him with interest as he reshuffled his stack of currency—five thousand nuyen, more than he'd ever had at one time in his life. Back in the good times, before his father had died, Jin had never been given more than five hundred even for his best birthday.
"What are you going to do with yours?" Mina asked.
"I'm not sure yet. I could buy food for my creatures for months with this. Or get something new. I always wanted to try keeping fish, but Aunt Lorna would never let me, and there was no way at Suze's. You can't cart fish around with you if you might have to go live on the street."
Mina's eyebrows knit. "Do you guess we're going to be here that long?"
Jin hesitated. "I don't know."
"Do you think I have enough for a pony?"
"Where would you keep a pony? You need, like, lots of terraformed ground, I think. The back garden here's not big enough."
"Aunt Lorna's patio sure wasn't big enough," Mina agreed. "At least Consul Vorlynkin has grass."
Jin tried to picture this. The consulate's patch of back lawn was barely larger than its living room. Nice for a chicken run, but he didn't think it would work for anything much bigger. "Anyway," he said bracingly, "you still have Lady Murasaki. Pony's got four legs, spider's got eight, so she has to be twice as good, right?"
Mina cast him a look of cold scorn. "I'd like to see you try and put a saddle and bridle and stuff on her."
Jin tried to imagine spider-sized tack—knotted thread, perhaps?—and what kind of insect could you persuade to ride a wolf spider? That the spider wouldn't eat? Riding would be a much more exciting sport, he thought, if ponies ate prey like spiders did. Did the consulate have any thread they could borrow . . . ? But before he could pursue the vision further, Consul Vorlynkin and Miles-san came through the kitchen pulling on their jackets.
"Vorlynkin is going to drive me down to Madame Suze's to see about something," Miles-san told them. He and Roic had been spending a lot of time there lately, Jin thought, and come back looking grim and thoughtful, though no one had said why. And Raven-sensei hadn't come back at all. "Yuuichi Matson's here, so you won't be alone. But if any strangers come in on consulate business, you'll need to stay out of the front rooms and hall. Upstairs should be all right, or the back garden, if you don't make too much noise."
"I'll be back directly," Vorlynkin promised.
Mina looked up. "Do you think you'll ever find Mommy?"
"We hope to have good news soon," said Miles-san.
Jin wasn't sure how to interpret that soothing tone of voice. More grownup lies? By her scrunched face, he didn't think Mina was buying it, either.
But what she said was, "Lord Vorkosigan, if you had children you'd give them ponies, wouldn't you? Not spiders?"
He looked a little taken aback. "I do and I have. Ponies, not spiders. Although I suppose they could have spiders if they wanted some. God knows we have butterbugs. Monogrammed. Didn't I ever show you my pictures?"
And then, to Jin's surprise and growing dismay, he pulled a holocube out of his pocket and proceeded to show off scans of a regular-sized, dark-haired woman—Jin could tell she was regular-sized because there were some shots of the two of them together, and the top of Miles-san's head barely reached her shoulder—and a bewildering succession of children at different ages. Jin didn't quite sort them out till they came to a group shot—a dark-haired boy and a red-haired girl a bit younger than Mina, an infant in the pretty woman's arms, and a leggy toddler in the middle of the pack. Four children. He hoped Mina would muster the wit to look interested and not distraught. He still wasn't altogether sure what Miles-san was, but he seemed to have a lot of clout. Even the consul did whatever he said.
"And here's Helen on her pony down at Vorkosigan Surleau—it's a place we have in the country, on a lake—and here's Sasha petting his. Xander. Alex, I mean."
Jin wondered what kind of inattentive father Miles-san was, that he couldn't seem to remember his own son's name. There was only the one boy, after all. It wasn't as if he needed to run down a list till he got to the one who was irritating him, the way Uncle Hikaru had with him and Tetsu and Ken sometimes.
But Jin had to admit, they were very fine-looking ponies, one dappled silvery-gray, the other a glossy dark brown with black socks and mane and tail and a white star on its forehead, both with dark, liquid, friendly gazes, seeming tolerant of their child-admirers. Mina goggled, her mouth dropping open in naked longing. Yah and double-yah—a big place in the country. With lots of animals—there had been dogs and cats and birds in the backgrounds of some of those shots, and who knew what creatures lurked in those wooded hills? And fish in a real lake, not just in some little glass tank, and maybe creeping and crawling native marvels living in the streams running down into it—better than Jin had dared to dream.
And all belonging to these other children. Children who had a live mother and father, too. What was that line of Uncle Hikaru's? Them what has, gets.
And those that didn't have, didn't get, Jin supposed was the unspoken half of that lesson. He looked at those other children, and at Miles-san, so obviously pleased and proud, and didn't doubt that Mina probably felt like crying. His own throat was tight with envy and ridiculous anger. It wasn't as if Miles-san had kept his family a secret on purpose, just to bait Jin so belatedly.
"I wouldn't have dared not teach them to ride," Miles-san went on. "My grandfather's ghost would have haunted me if I hadn't, not that the old bu
zzard doesn't anyway. The Vor were a military caste, back in the Time of Isolation. Knights, of a sort—or bandits, perhaps, depending on your point of view. Horse soldiers, in any case. It's a tradition." He gave that last word a peculiar emphasis, as if it tasted funny in his mouth. "A perfectly useless skill, nowadays, but we keep it up all the same."
"Perhaps we'd better go," said Vorlynkin, and "Yeah," said Miles-san. He pocketed his holocube carefully, like it was something special to him. They went off through the garden toward the big garage.
Jin and Mina stared at each other.
"Well," said Mina at last. "At least I was right about the ponies." She blinked rapidly, and rubbed her reddened eyes.
Jin glowered down at his little stack of money, which had seemed such a big pile of possibilities just minutes ago.
"It's no good, after all," said Mina. "Maybe it never was. Maybe we should just go back to Aunt Lorna and Uncle Hikaru's."
Stop struggling? "You could, maybe," Jin said bitterly. "Not me. No, wait, you couldn't either—you'd gab."
Mina looked indignant at this accusation. With a "Huh!" she rose to go back upstairs. At the archway into the kitchen, she flung back over her shoulder, "Two ponies have eight legs, so there!"
Jin couldn't think of a counter-argument to that.
As Jin was fingering his nuyen and wondering if he dared help himself to a snack, the consulate clerk wandered into the kitchen to refill his mug of green tea. He leaned against the counter and stared at Jin, who fidgeted under the cool regard.
"You're Lisa Sato's children, aren't you? The cryo-rights activist?"
"Uh . . . yah?" Jin wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a secret here, but Matson-san obviously already knew.
Matson-san took a sip of tea and frowned. "Nobody's really told me anything. But, ah . . . if you want me to call the police for you and your sister, before the Barrayarans all get back, I could . . . ?"
Jin shot to his feet, almost knocking over his chair, and cried in horror, "No!"
Matson-san sloshed hot tea, swore, set the cup down, and wiped his scalded hand on his trousers.
"It was the police who took Mom!" said Jin.
"Call your relatives, then?"
"No! That's even worse!"
"Er," said Matson-san. "So you two kids are not, um, not . . . prisoners, here, are you?"
"Of course not! Miles-san is helping us!" He considered events so far, and amended that to, "Trying to, anyway." And then, because that sounded weak and ungrateful, "Nobody else has ever tried like him," which was certainly true.
Matson-san scratched his head and grimaced. "Ah." He took up his tea again. "Well, if you change you mind, you can tell me, all right?" Jin glowered at him in a dismay that made him hold up a placating hand. "Just trying to help, too."
Jin wanted to cry, If that's your idea of help, don't! but it seemed too rude a thing to say to a grownup. He settled on, "All right. But I won't. Change my mind."
Matson-san shrugged uneasily and went back out to that front office-room. Jin gathered his money and fled upstairs to hide it away.
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?"