Cryoburn

Chapter Twelve

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.

Vorlynkin nodded, and herded the kids off. Jin looked around as if regretting his lost refuge. Mina reached up and took the consul’s hand, which made him twitch a little, possibly with guilt, but he manfully endured. This was clearly distressing for the children. Hell, it’s distressing for me.

Roic, sleep-rumpled, stuck his head out the door of the improvised bunk room and squinted as the trio vanished around the corner. “I heard voices. What’s going on?”

Miles brought him up to date. His expression, when he learned that they’d just deftly snatched the wrong body, was all that Miles had pictured. Of, course, you had to have been around Roic for a while to read all the nuances of bland his face and posture could convey. Was there some sort of secret school for armsmen to learn this, or was it all apprenticeship? Armsman-commander Pym was a master, but Roic was catching up.

“Y’know,” said Roic, as Pym would not have, because Pym would have had an exact bland to cover it, “if you’d quit while you were winning, right after Wing, we’d be on our way home right now.”

“Well, I can’t quit now,” said Miles tartly.

“I can see that, m’lord.” With a sigh, Roic followed him back into the lab.

Raven had tidied up and was getting ready for his next task. Medtech Tanaka was laying out an array of rather disturbing instruments on a tray next to the cryorevival table. She looked up at their entry and asked, “Will we still get our free cryorevivals, then?”

“Yes, of course,” said Miles automatically. “Rent, after all.” He was surprised she still trusted them for the task, but was vaguely heartened that she evidently agreed with Raven’s analysis. He did not add, And we might be back; he was growing more cautious. Belatedly.

Raven tapped his fingers on the table and looked over the instruments. “Do you want me to send any samples out to a commercial lab for analysis, or try to set up something here?”

“Which is faster, and which is better?”

“If I wanted to do a good job here in-house, I’d need to bring some of my team from Escobar. This would likely take more time than sending samples out. Either risks drawing attention. Results ought to be the same.”

“Hm. My instinct is to keep this close till we know what we’re dealing with. I’d say, go as far as you can on your own, and then we’ll take stock. My working hypothesis is that this was a deliberate substitution, sometime in the past eighteen months. If we knew who this woman was, where she came from, it might tell us something about who could have put her in Lisa Sato’s place.” Or not. “Makes a difference if she was just swapped out, or if she was actually frozen in place of Sato from the get-go, in which case…”

Raven frowned. “You think Jin and Mina’s mother might still be alive out there? In that case, why didn’t she let her poor kids know?”

“Depends entirely on how dangerous that knowledge might have been.”

Raven’s frown deepened.

“Well, I can tell you one thing straight off,” said Medtech Tanaka, bending to retrieve a scrap of plastic caul from the waste bin and holding it up to the light. “This woman here wasn’t frozen in place of the one you’re looking for, not in the past eighteen months at least. This is an older style of wrapping.”

Three heads turned abruptly toward her. “How old?” said Miles. “And how do you know?”

Her wrinkled eyelids narrowed. “Oh, heavens. I haven’t seen this brand with the hexagonal netting inside since my student days. At least thirty years old, maybe fifty?”

Miles groaned. “So this woman could have come from any time in the last two hundred and fifty years?”

“No, because there were other styles and brands before then. And after. This type was only on the market for about three decades.”

“Thank you, Medtech Tanaka,” said Miles. “That’s a start.”

His mystery, it seemed, had just split into two. Mystery mitosis. It seemed a retrograde sort of progress.

Raven lifted his first instrument and bent to his patient-turned-subject.

It was very quiet in the lift van for the first part of the trip back to the consulate. Jin’s throat was choked with disappointment. Mina, strapped in the middle of the next seat to the rear, was pale and withdrawn. Vorlynkin negotiated traffic by hand till they were well away from Suze-san’s, then linked to the municipal control grid and leaned back with a sigh.

He hitched around sideways to regard Jin and Mina both. “I’m really sorry about all this mix-up.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Jin conceded.

Vorlynkin opened his mouth to say something, evidently thought better of it, and substituted simply, “Thank you.” After a moment he added, “Although if you two had been my daughter, I’d have been furious to have you dragged into something like this.”

Before Jin could say, But I thought we dragged you in, Mina piped up eagerly, “You have a daughter? How old is she? Can she play with us?”

Vorlynkin grimaced. “Annah’s six, so she probably would like to play with you, but I’m afraid not. She’s on Escobar. With her mother.”

“Are they coming back soon?” asked Mina.

“No.” Vorlynkin hesitated. “We’re divorced.”

Both Jin and Mina flinched a little at the scary word.

“Why are you divorced?” asked Mina. If they’d been sitting together, Jin could have kicked her in the ankle to shut her up, but unfortunately she was out of reach.

Vorlynkin shrugged. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. She was an Escobaran. I met her when I was stationed at the embassy there as a junior secretary. When we first married, I thought it was understood that she would follow where my career took me. But by the time I was offered the promotion and the transfer to the Barrayaran embassy on Pol, Annah had come along. And my wife changed her mind. With a baby to look out for, she didn’t want to leave the security of her family and her homeworld. Or she didn’t trust me enough. Or something.”

After a silence, which Jin endured in faint embarrassment and Mina, apparently, in deep fascination, Vorlynkin added, “My ex-wife remarried recently. Another Escobaran. She wrote me that her new husband wants to adopt Annah. I don’t know. It might be better for her than a father she sees for maybe three days every three years. It’s hard to decide. To let go.” He had been talking to his lap but, unexpectedly, he raised his shrewd blue glance to Jin and Mina. “What do you think?”

Mina blinked, and blurted, “I’d want my real daddy.”

Vorlynkin didn’t look terribly cheered by this reply. Jin said more cautiously, “It depends, I guess. If he’s a nice guy or not.”

“I assume so. I haven’t met him yet. I suppose I ought to take some time and go do that, before signing off. Maybe visiting again would just confuse Annah. Surely she can’t remember much about me.”

“Don’t you send her messages and stuff?” asked Mina, frowning.

“Sometimes.”

Jin said slowly, “Couldn’t you have chosen to stay with your wife back then? Instead of going to Pol?” Wherever that was. Pretty far from Escobar, it sounded like. “Being a diplomat isn’t like being a soldier, is it? Aren’t you allowed to quit?”

Vorlynkin gave Jin an ironic salute, just a finger-touch to his forehead, and Jin felt even more uncomfortable. Maybe he shouldn’t have pointed that out?

“Yes, I could have made that choice. Then. I couldn’t go back now, of course. That chance has gone beyond recall.”

Mina’s frown deepened to a scowl. “It sounds like you already picked.”

“My younger self did, yes. I have to wonder about him, some days…” The autopilot beeped as they approached the consulate, and somewhat to Jin’s relief Vorlynkin turned away to re-take the controls.

Back in the consulate kitchen, Vorlynkin fixed them all a snack, then went off to the officelike front room to see about something his clerk wanted. Mina snitched Lucky and went upstairs. Jin went outside to check on all his creatures. By the time he arrived in the bedroom he shared with his sister, she was curled up on her bed around the cat, possessively. Lucky endured being clutched like a stuffed toy without protest beyond a lazy tail-twitch or two.

Jin was much too old to take a nap in the daytime, but his bed did look awfully inviting. He supposed if he tried to take Lucky away from Mina, she’d just set up a screech. Maybe wait till she fell asleep? Her face was stiff and blotchy, her eyes red, as if she’d been crying.

As he sat on his bed and plotted his recapture of the cat, Mina sniffed and said, “They lied.”

“Grownups always lie.” Jin brooded. “Mom lied. She always said everything was going to be all right, and it wasn’t.”

“Huh.” Mina curled tighter, face scrunching, and sniffed again. In a little while, both face and grip relaxed, and Jin bent over and fished Lucky back, careful not to wake Mina. He stroked the cat till she purred in concession to the trade, then went to curl up with her on his own bed. It was a nice bed, nicer than anything he’d had at Suze-san’s, but he still wished he was back there. Maybe grouchy old Yani had been right after all to want to leave Miles-san in the street…

He was wakened by Roic calling his name, big hand gently shaking his shoulder. Mina was already sitting up and rubbing the creases from her pillow out of her face. Lucky had gone off somewhere. The light on the carpet had shifted around. Jin glanced at the clock and realized that a couple of hours had slipped away.

“Sorry to wake you,” said Roic. “M’lord wants you to take a look at something on the comconsole in the tight-room.”

Roic waited patiently while both children visited the bathroom, making sure they’d washed their hands before following him downstairs. Now that he was getting used to the big man, Jin kind of liked Roic. For Miles-san, it must be like owning your own private grownup, following you around and doing stuff for you. Except you got to tell him what to do, instead of the other way around. Jin wished he owned a Roic.

There was a crowd in the strange sealable basement room where, Jin had figured out by now, the consulate kept all the nifty secret spy stuff. Miles-san and Vorlynkin sat at one comconsole. Raven-sensei had returned, and was bent over the long table along with Johannes, attending upon a small machine.

Jin dodged over to them. “What’s that?”

“DNA scanner,” said Johannes.

“Is that what you used to check Miles-sa—Lord Vorkosigan’s thumbprint, that first day?”

“Yes.”

“Handy,” said Raven-sensei. “There should have been one at Madame Suze’s, but evidently it was sold off or broken some time ago. I was afraid I was going to have to take the tissue sample to a commercial lab for even this basic data.”

Jin’s interest rose. “Could I make scans of my creatures’ DNA on it?”

“It’s not a toy,” said Johannes. “We use it for making positive IDs of people wanting travel documents and so on.” He looked at Jin and weakened. “You’ll have to ask Counsel Vorlynkin.”

Miles-san called Jin over to his comconsole, where Mina was already standing and shifting from foot to foot. Still-shots of four different men hovered in a row above the vid plate. Two had gray hair. One wore a white laboratory coat.

“Miss Mina, I’m hoping you can help us out, here,” said Miles-san. “All these men are different Dr. Leibers who live around greater Northbridge. We’ve already eliminated the female Dr. Leibers, trusting none has made a trip to Beta Colony lately.” His mouth twisted up at some joke that Jin didn’t understand, although Roic did, judging from his short smile. “Do any of them look like the man you overheard talking to your mommy, that night? Or, do any of them definitely not look like him?”

Mina peered anxiously at the scans. “It was a long time ago. I don’t really remember.”

“Do you remember anything at all? Was your Dr. Leiber young, or old?”

“Oh, old.”

“Gray hair?”

“No, black. I do remember that much. I’m not too good at telling grownups’ ages. But he was real old. Thirty, maybe?”

Miles-san and Vorlynkin exchanged a look; the consul’s lips twitched, but he didn’t say anything.

“So, old but not gray.” Miles-san tapped the vid controls, and the two gray-haired men vanished. The other two looked rather alike, with similar haircuts, except one’s face was bonier and the other’s more round.

“When I was a wee little kid,” remarked Roic, watching over their shoulders, “there was a time I thought that any skinny old man I saw was my grandfather. It was pretty confusing.”

“Nevertheless,” said Miles-san. “Jin, do you remember ever seeing either of these two men in your mother’s company? Even if you weren’t introduced?”

Jin shook his head.

After a long hesitation, Mina pointed at bony-face. “That one. Maybe. The other one seems too fat.”

“He might have gained weight,” Jin offered helpfully, getting into the spirit of this.

“Show her scans of a hundred fellows,” said Roic, “or even ten, and I doubt she’d be able to tell, m’lord. You’re leading your witness.”

“If we had to look at the entire pool of elderly gents of thirty on Kibou, that would doubtless be true,” said Miles-san. “Fortunately, we have some other sorting constraints.” He pointed at round-face. “This Dr. Leiber is an obstetrician at a replicator clinic in a northern suburb.” His finger swung to bony-face. “This Dr. Leiber is a biochemist working for NewEgypt Cryonics. Given that Mina’s witness does not positively eliminate him, that combination puts him at the top of my to-do list.”

“What happened to your theory that the fellow must have fled?” asked Roic. “This Leiber doesn’t look much like an activist. I mean—good salary, stock options, cryo-insurance. A company man, belike.”

Miles-san sat back and rubbed his chin. “That is a problem, true. Maybe I was wrong, before.”

Roic gave him a head-tilt, which induced a fleeting grin on Miles-san’s face for no reason that Jin could see.

Johannes and Raven-sensei had finished their task at the table and taken over the satellite comconsole. Now Raven-sensei said, “Ah! Is there a face scan of her? I have fingerprints and footprints for back-up, but—no, we’re not going to need them, are we.”

Miles-san shoved his chair back with his feet and swung around. “What have you found over there?”

Roic bent and peered. “Aye, that does look like our woman, doesn’t it? Look at her cheek bones. And her ears. And that same mole above her left eyebrow. This scan must have been taken pretty near the time she was frozen.”

“Can’t say as I’d noticed her ears…” Miles-san grabbed his cane and stood up to get a better view.

Jin wriggled in to look, too. Comparing the picture of the live, smiling woman with that still, alien figure they’d seen on the treatment table made him queasy all over again. Would his mother look all strange like that if she died for real?

“Good, this file has it all,” said Raven-sensei. “Biographical data, medical history, date of cryoprep… well, her contract and her financial data would seem to be cross-referenced elsewhere. Alice Chen, poor unlucky woman. I suppose I’m glad to know her name.”

“That was fast work,” said Miles-san. “Good job.”

“These patron data bases are pretty open to the public,” said Johannes, though he straightened a little at the praise. “Anyone from lawyers to academics doing demographic studies to medical researchers to just genealogists scouting their family trees can get in.” He sat back, staring into the screen of data the vid plate had flung up. “Looks like she was frozen about forty-five years ago. That’s lucky. You get back more than about a century and the data banks tend to have holes, from one cause or another.”

“Yeah, when I was, uh, working in my prior career, this planet used to be a favored source for untraceable false ID’s,” said Miles-san. “It was the only reason I’d ever heard of the place, before this investigation.” He squinted and pointed to a line. “What the devil’s that unpronounceable polysyllable?”

Raven-sensei looked. “Debilitating blood disease. Might have been why she chose to freeze a bit early.”

“Cause of death, do you think?”

Raven-sensei shook his head. “No, it shouldn’t have affected her revival. She would have needed treatment later, though.”

“Could she have had it? Effective treatment, that is?”

“Oh, yes, that one’s under control these days.”

“So what,” said Miles-san, “was a woman frozen nearly half a century ago doing in Lisa Sato’s cryo-drawer with Lisa Sato’s ID tag on her foot? It’s plain she didn’t get there by herself. While someone could have just cooked the drawer file numbers in the data banks, that damn tag pretty much guarantees it must have been a physical switch.”

“Where are your Madame Chen’s remains now, by the way?” said Consul Vorlynkin. “They really ought to be returned to her next of kin at some point. There may be an inheritance tied up, or who knows what. And her death is recent enough that someone still alive may have an emotional interest in her fate.” He hesitated. “Not that I’m looking forward to the lawsuits.”

“She’s tucked away downstairs at Madame Suze’s, for now,” said Raven-sensei. “Tenbury helped out.”

“Will she keep?” asked Miles-san.

“Indefinitely.”

Miles-san opened his hand to Vorlynkin. “Keep she must, till I’ve untangled all this. But hold that thought. So, now we have two ends, our straying dead lady and Dr. Leiber. It remains to follow them up and see if they meet in the middle. Was she frozen by NewEgypt, by the way?”

Johannes scrolled down. “By one of the cryocorps that NewEgypt later took over, I think.”

“On that same site?”

“I don’t think it was built out there yet, forty-five years back.” Johannes bent to a flurry of searches. “Ah, here we go. The place she was originally kept seems to have been decommissioned about ten years ago. Torn down. They moved her out to the new facility at the Cryopolis then.”

“That would certainly have made it easy for someone to swap her out,” said Miles-san. “Especially if the swapper was already on the inside, like an employee. I’m thinking Madame Chen was chosen at random. Who they wanted was Lisa Sato.”

“Are you saying somebody stole Mommy?” asked Mina, a quaver in her voice.

“It’s beginning to look that way…” Miles-san narrowed his eyes at the vid screen.

Vorlynkin’s grip on his shoulder and exasperated head-jerk toward Mina returned Miles-san’s attention to her. She looked like she was trying not to cry.

Miles-san made quick revision. “Although you have to figure, whoever took her had to care about her. You don’t steal something you don’t value. Suggests they would be careful with her.”

Grownup lies? On the whole, Jin liked that Miles-san didn’t talk down to him and Mina, but this was all just too weird.

As Mina failed to look encouraged, Miles-san babbled on, “After all, the portable cryochamber I was in was lost for a time, but it all came out right in the end.”

“Lost from your side’s point of view,” said Raven-sensei. “From our point of view, it was found.”

Miles-san gave Mina a big There, see? sort of smile, which faltered at her blank stare. Vorlynkin and Johannes were gazing at him in horrified fascination.

Miles drew himself up. “I’m going to go talk to this Dr. Leiber. In person. Not at his work, I think,” he added, his voice slowing in thought.

Roic’s mouth set in a grim line. “You will have a proper security perimeter.”

“Certainly. We’ll even take Johannes, so you won’t have to be the perimeter all by yourself.”

“It’s a start.”

Miles-san studied Mina, who was still shifting fretfully. “The connection between Dr. Leiber and your mother exists nowhere in the records I’ve seen so far—only in your witness, Miss Mina. If anything comes of it, it will be entirely due to the valuable intelligence you supplied.”

She cheered a little at this, or at least her lip stopped quivering. “Really?”

“Really. And valuable ImpSec informants get paid, you know. So do couriers, I am reminded,” he added with a glance at Jin.

“But I didn’t finish the job,” said Jin.

“Capture by the enemy rates hazard pay, actually.”

“How much?” asked Mina, brightening a lot more.

“Ah, I like the way you think, kid. There’s actually an official pay schedule. In Barrayaran marks, of course. It has codes for various services. I’ll have Roic check it, and do the conversions to Kibou-daini money.”

“You propose to pay them adult rates?” asked Vorlynkin. Jin thought he sounded more startled than disapproving, and hoped he wouldn’t try to talk Miles-san out of this wonderful idea.

“Damn straight.” Miles-san added, “My case budget allows for a lot of discretion, you know.”

“Then I wish you’d buy some,” snapped Vorlynkin. He shut his mouth abruptly, as if startled at what had fallen out of it.

Miles-san merely grinned at him. His stiff consul-face back in place, Vorlynkin shepherded Jin and Mina back up to the kitchen to feed them again. Jin glanced back over his shoulder at the four men turning intently back to their comconsoles, as that heavy door swung shut. He hoped the consulate had good spy stuff.