Cryoburn

Chapter Eight

The wolf spider was perky and sharp in a black coat with white stripes and neat dots, like an aristocrat in a historical holovid dressed for a night on the town. Jin could clearly count all eight eyes in its fierce little face, two bright black buttons looking back at him, crowned by four more above, and another on each side of its head. Beneath its—no, beneath her abdomen clung a bundle of fine white fluff, like a tiny cotton ball—an egg case? Was she going to be a mama spider? Prone on the floor of the musty garden shed, Jin stiffened with excitement, then drew slowly backwards, careful not to startle her into scuttling into the cracks in the floor or walls before he could find something to capture her in. She was a good size for her breed, over three centimeters, quite as long and wide as the end joint of Jin’s thumb, so she was certainly a grownup spider. She seemed to wait patiently for him.

Jin stared around the shed in some frustration. It was taking a lot longer to walk from his aunt and uncle’s outlying northwest suburb to the near south side of the city than he had imagined. It was partly from Mina lagging and complaining as soon as she’d grown tired, just as Jin had expected, but mostly he was afraid he’d got turned around and lost during their long trudge last night. Streets curved unexpectedly, mixing him up, and the towers of the city center, glimpsed now and then from a hill or clear space, looked much the same from any direction.

This shelter had been a splendid find, early this morning. They’d stopped to buy half-liters of milk in a corner store of a neighborhoody area, then spent the next few blocks looking for a place to hide out during school hours. One house had a For Sale sign out front, and a peek through the windows revealed it cleared of furniture and empty of people, safe. It had been locked up tight, but the door to the shed around back proved unlatched. The garden was high-walled and full of sheltering bushes and trees, good to hide them from prying busybodies. Better yet, they’d found an outdoor spigot with the water still turned on. Mina’s lunch bars were holding out, if getting boring, but finding water had been more of a problem, though during the long march yesterday they’d twice lucked out with city parks that offered not only drinking fountains, but bathrooms. Mina had proved very cranky about going behind a bush, even in the concealing dark.

The shelves of this shed had been cleared of likely containers, unfortunately, as well as of garden tools except for one bent and rusty trowel. Jin’s eye fell on his sleeping sister, curled up with her jacket folded under her head, her zippered yellow backpack beside her, decorated with smiling but anatomically mis-drawn bees. He squatted down and began rooting through it. Ah, there!

“Hey!” mumbled Mina, sitting up and yawning. Her sleep-pale face was marked with creases from her makeshift pillow, and her hair hung every which way. What was it about sleeping in the daytime that made people so hot and rumpled? “Are you stealing my money?”

Jim popped open the clear plastic box she kept her coins in and dumped the contents back into the pack. “No! I just need the box.”

“What for?” asked Mina, enduring this rummage, but at least not theft, of her possessions with no more than a frown.

“Spider house.”

“Eew! I don’t like spiders. Their webs stick in your mouth.”

“She’s a wolf spider. They don’t spin webs.”

“Oh.” Mina blinked, considering this. She didn’t look altogether convinced, but at least she didn’t set up any stupid shrieking. She did keep her distance till Jin had snuck up on and captured his prey. But once the lady spider was safe behind the transparent barrier, Mina was at least willing to take a closer look, as Jin pointed out the manifold, if miniature, splendors of fur and eyes and mandibles, and the promising egg case.

“She really does have eight eyes!” said Mina, crossing her own as if trying to imagine the spider’s view of her. Emboldened by her brother’s example, she tapped on the plastic lid.

“Hey, don’t. You’ll scare her.”

“Will she be able to breathe in there?” asked Mina.

Jin regarded the box in new doubt. It was certainly secure, but it did seem rather airtight. The wolf spider scratched futilely at the walls of her prison with fine claws. “For a while, anyway.”

“What’s her name?”

“I haven’t named her yet.”

“She needs a name.”

Jin nodded full agreement. All right, sometimes Mina could be sensible. It was said there were thousands of wolf spider species back on old Earth, but the Kibou terraformers, stingily, had only imported half a dozen or so for their new ecosystem. But with no comlink here, he couldn’t look up his new pet’s real scientific name. He hoped it would turn out to be something as sophisticated as the spider herself.

“You could call her Spinner. Except you said she doesn’t spin. Wolfie?”

“Sounds like a boy’s name,” Jin objected. “It ought to be a lady’s name, to fit her. Something from old Earth.”

Mina scowled in thought a moment, then brightened. “Lady Murasaki! That’s the oldest lady’s name I know of.”

Jin, about to pooh-pooh her idea in brotherly reflex, paused. He eyed his spider. The name did fit. “All right.”

Mina grinned in triumph. “What does she eat?”

“Littler bugs. I should catch her some in the garden before we leave. I’m not sure how much longer it will take us to get, um. Home.”

Growing more interested after all this, Mina said, “Can I help feed her?”

“Sure.”

Mina stretched, and, perhaps reminded of food, dug in her pillaged backpack for another lunch bar. “Maybe we better split this. To make them last.”

“Good idea,” Jin admitted. He set the spider box aside and went out to rinse and fill their milk bottles with water from the garden spigot.

When he slipped back inside the shed, closing the door with a creak, Mina asked, “What time is it out there?”

“I’m not sure. Afternoon, anyway.”

“Do you think school’s out yet? Can we go on the streets again?”

“Pretty soon.”

They divided the lunch bar and the water.

“Maybe you should put Lady Murasaki in one of our water bottles, instead,” said Mina, draining hers and holding it up to the light falling through the shed’s one grimy window. “We could poke breath-holes through it.”

“I was going to rinse those out and fill them up with water to take with us. You know how you were yammering you were so hot and thirsty yesterday afternoon.”

“My feet were so sweaty inside my shoes,” Mina said. “They felt nasty.” She looked up at him, still a bit puffy-eyed from their uncomfortable day’s sleep. “How much longer is it going to take to get to your place?”

“Hard to say.” Jin shrugged uneasily. “I’ve been gone way longer than I’d planned. I sure hope Miles-san is taking care of all my creatures.”

“That’s your galactic friend, right?”

During their winding journey, the past day and a half, Jin had slowly unburdened himself of what he suspected were far too many of his secrets to Mina, partly to shut up her incessant questions, mostly because, well, he hadn’t had any other kids to talk to for so long.

“Yah.”

Jin’s own abysmal failure as a courier troubled his mind. Would Miles-san believe Jin hadn’t stolen his money? How was he getting along with Gyre? You had to be gentle but firm with the bird. The chickens were easier, except for the part about climbing down and carrying them back up the ladder or the stairs when they fluttered over the parapet. With that cane, could Miles-san manage both an indignant chicken and the stairs?

“Does Miles-san have any children?” Mina asked.

Jin frowned. “He didn’t say. He’s pretty old—thirty-something, he said. But he’s kind of funny-looking. I don’t know if he could get a girl.” Once the drug effects had worn off Miles-san had been a nice enough fellow, with that face where smiles seemed at home. Plus, he had seemed to understand Jin’s creatures, which made him quite smart, for a grownup. Jin wasn’t sure whether to wish him a short, understanding bride, or not.

After a long, thoughtful pause, Mina said, “Do you think he’d like some?”

“What?”

“Children. Like, if he’s lonely.”

At Jin’s baffled stare, Mina forged on: “We read this book for school this year, about two orphans adopted by a man from Earth. He took them there and they saw everything about where our ancestors came from.” She added enticingly, “They got new pets…”

Jin vaguely remembered that one from his own second school year, otherwise made burdensome by the infliction of beginning kanji. There had been a lot of sickly stuff about the girl getting a fancy kimono, but there had also been a chapter about going to the seaside which had featured some Earth sea creatures—much too short an episode, but at least there’d been pictures—and a cat who’d capped her excellence by having kittens at the end. “Miles-san isn’t from Earth. He’s from Barrayar, he said.”

“Where’s that?”

“Somewhere beyond Escobar, I guess.” Escobar, Jin knew, was Kibou’s closest nexus trading partner, by a shortish multi-jump route. Farther worlds didn’t much come up till galactic history in high school, except for Earth. Jin had studied a lot about Earth on his own, because of the zoology. Now, if only some benefactor would come along and offer to take Jin to Earth… Although come to think, Barrayar as Miles-san had described it might be almost as good, with its double biota.

A sudden picture bloomed in Jin’s mind of the odd little fellow living all alone in a cottage in the country—no, better, a big rambling old house with a vast overgrown garden. Like the book with that old professor who had taken in two children from the city during wartime—Jin didn’t know what war, except it was from a period before anybody got frozen. There’d been a horse that drew a cart, and wonderful adventures involving a cave with blind white fish. Jin had seen a horse in the Northbridge Zoo, once, on a class field trip. The braver children had all been allowed to pat its glossy neck, while one of the keepers held its lead; Jin remembered the huge beast blowing air out its soft, bellowslike nostrils in a warm whoosh across his cheek. Jin understood there were littler versions bred just for children, called ponies. Mina wouldn’t be scared of one that size. The looming beast at the zoo had alarmed even Jin, but he’d been younger then, too. A great rambling house, and animals, and…

It was all rubbish. Miles-san wasn’t a professor, or their uncle of any kind, great or regular, and for all Jin knew he lived in a cramped city apartment and wasn’t lonely at all. Jin decided he didn’t like that country daydream. It hurt too much when it stopped. He frowned at Mina. “Nobody’s going to adopt us and take us away from here. That’s a stupid idea.”

Mina looked offended. She turned one shoulder to him and began pulling on her socks. They were blotched with pinkish-brown stains where her blisters had popped and bled, and Jin gulped faint guilt. They both donned their shoes, Lady Murasaki was safely lodged in Mina’s backpack, where, Jin argued, she would endure less bouncing than in his pocket, and they sneaked out onto the street once more.

A winding kilometer farther on, during which Jin kept looking for, and not getting, a glimpse of the downtown towers for orientation, they came upon a busier street with a tube-tram station entry.

Mina’s footsteps had grown short and gimpy already. She looked at the entrance in some longing. “If you want to go on the tram”—she swallowed a bit—“I’ll pay our fares.”

“No, the police have vidcams in the stations. That’s how I got trapped day before yesterday. We can’t go in there.” But Jin’s eye was caught by a big colorful display on the outside of the entry kiosk. A map! He peered up carefully for scanning vidcams on this side, didn’t spot any, and ventured nearer, Mina trailing.

The lighted You Are Here arrow horrified Jin. They were nowhere near the south side of town, as he’d hoped from how far they’d trudged. They’d somehow ended up on the residential east side, instead, and still had maybe thirty kilometers left to hike before they reached the light industrial zone of the south, quite as far as they’d already come. Well, that explained why the houses were so nice around here. Jin stepped closer, squinting.

Just two stops farther on this line was the very station he’d exited to reach the Barrayaran consulate. It was about a three-kilometer walk above ground. Jin stared, thinking. He had dimly planned to offer Mina’s money to Miles-san, when they arrived at their destination, but his sister was proving pretty tight-fisted, in Jin’s view. She was sure to set up a screech, even though Jin was nearly certain Miles-san would replace it as soon as he could. But if he stopped at the consulate first and explained his loss, editing his situation a bit maybe, would they give him more money for the Barrayaran? Miles-san seemed fairly important to them. And they wouldn’t turn Jin in, because they were protecting their own secrets, right?

Contemplating this confession made him feel a little sick, but not as sick as going all the way back to Miles-san empty-handed as well as three days late. He stared harder at the map, trying to memorize the streets and turns.

“I know where we’re going now,” he said to Mina, trying to sound confident and big-brotherly. “Come on.”

After the WhiteChrys groundcar dropped them all off again at the consulate, Roic followed m’lord upstairs and watched him down two headache tabs and several glasses of water. Returning to the entry hall, m’lord stuck his head into the room Roic thought of as the parlor, where Raven Durona had been left to cool his heels, and said, “Debriefing downstairs again, I think.”

Raven nodded and unfolded himself to tag along. There had been little conversation on the way home; Aida had still been escorting, m’lord had settled into himself heavy-eyed, Vorlynkin had stared out the canopy with a set jaw, Roic considered himself an observer, and Raven had been disinclined to buck the obvious trend. They arrived downstairs at the door to the tight-room to discover it closed and locked.

M’lord hit the intercom. “Vorlynkin? Are you in there? Open up.”

“Just a moment, m’lord,” Vorlynkin’s voice came from the speaker. The moment turned into several minutes, while m’lord tapped his foot and Raven sat on the nearby step and yawned.

“Reminds me of a house with only one bathroom when the relatives have come to visit,” remarked Roic, as the wait stretched.

M’lord cast him a dry look. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never lived in a house with only one bathroom.” Roic returned him an ironic head-tilt.

At length, the doorseal popped, the vaultlike door swung open, and the consul admitted them. His eyes seemed electric blue, and he was breathing fast, as though he had been running. “You’re too late,” he announced.

M’lord’s brows rose. “Not a first. What for this time?”

A muscle jumped by Vorlynkin’s scowling mouth. “I just sent a full report of what I witnessed by tight-beam to General Allegre at ImpSec HQ, Barrayar. I never thought I’d live to see a Vorkosigan sell himself for money. My career may be slagged, but so will yours, my Lord Auditor.”

“Ah, excellent. That’s done.” M’lord kicked the door shut; it sealed with a sigh that seemed insufficiently dramatic for Vorlynkin’s mood.

“What?” Vorlynkin’s fists clenched.

“Not that every man doesn’t have his price,” m’lord went on amiably. “As I’m sure Wing-san would agree. I was more afraid that if he didn’t come up to scratch today, I’d have that whole parade at the conference to do over again.”

If the consul didn’t stop inhaling, he was going to pop a lung, Roic thought. He put in peaceably, “Stop baiting the poor fellow, m’lord.” Now that you have what you want, anyway. Roic didn’t want to have to wrestle the man to the floor if he went for m’lord’s throat, which he seemed on the verge of doing. Was that old phrase about being mad enough to spit nails supposed to apply to, like, roofing nails, or fingernails? Around m’lord, Roic had never been sure.

M’lord added a trifle impatiently, “Men like Wing don’t go around throwing their money at potential opponents at random, Vorlynkin. First they have to figure out that the target is bribable. I did my best to help him decide. Have a seat, Consul, Doctor. It’s time we talked.”

Vorlynkin’s mouth, which had opened to emit some hot remark, sagged. “Lord Vorkosigan—is this a sting?”

“It is now.” M’lord pulled out a station chair and plunked into it. “We weren’t sure at first, which is why they sent me—I could be bait and trap at the same time, saving the Imperium on jumpship fares if nothing else.”

Vorlynkin sank more slowly into a chair opposite; Roic breathed easier. The consul glanced in dismay at the secured comconsole. “M’lord—I sent the report.”

“Don’t apologize. Your next official visitor might really be on the take, after all. I don’t intend to apologize to you, either, if it makes you feel any better. I’ve seen our diplomatic personnel bought out before. I had to make sure.”

“You were… testing me?” That disturbing heat in Vorlynkin’s eyes, which had started to fade, flared once more.

“Why do you suppose I hauled you along today and let you see all this?”

Vorlynkin’s hands clenched on his knees, but slowly eased again. “I see. Very efficient.”

“Do try to keep up.” M’lord added more kindly, “It won’t be easy; this case has baffled a few ImpSec analysts.” He turned to Raven. “So, what did you learn of interest during the time you had with Storrs?”

Raven’s mouth twisted in doubt. “I’m not sure I learned anything new. Their cryofreezing program seems perfectly legitimate—nothing wrong with their procedures from a technical standpoint. I asked to see a revival, but Storrs said there weren’t any scheduled today, which by then didn’t surprise me. He did show me the revival facilities. They looked quite adequate. He angled to find out if I would be interested in employment with WhiteChrys, and tried to find out my current pay rate. I said my main interests lay with cryorevival, as it’s more medically challenging. He said he’d pass that along, although he didn’t say who to. We came back and joined your show in progress, where you’d finished the dogs and were on to the ponies. Eh.” Raven shrugged.

Vorlynkin blinked. “Lord Vorkosigan, is Dr. Durona your agent?”

“Civilian contract consultant,” m’lord clarified, “being paid out of my case budget. Are you still collecting your Durona Group salary simultaneously, Raven?”

Raven smirked. “That’s personal information.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. So don’t hesitate to use Dr. Durona on double shifts, if needed.”

Raven grinned and rose to prod the automatic beverage maker, strategically positioned near the secured comconsole and its satellite console. It coughed up something coffee-ish, judging by the smell. Raven picked up the cup and gestured politely toward his chair; Roic waved him back to it and took up a position propping the wall with his arms crossed, in a pose copied from a certain former ImpSec chief.

“To bring you up to speed, Vorlynkin,” m’lord went on. “WhiteChrys was vetted and cleared by ImpSec when its advance teams first scouted Komarr eighteen months ago, but ImpSec was looking for connections with military espionage and the like. Their business plan passed the local Komarran commissions, and they were in. No one would have given them a second look for years, if it hadn’t been for some good old-fashioned nepotism.

“Within the last few months, as the flagship facility we saw in Wing’s vid was nearing completion, WhiteChrys began collecting contracts on future customers. Not unnaturally, they targeted Solstice upper-class elderly women’s clubs. At the same time, another sales team made some limited strategic stock offerings to certain wealthy and influential Komarrans, to give the local powers-that-be a stake in the future success of their operations. I expect the two sales teams didn’t compare hit lists, nor realize that some wealthy old ladies are retired Komarran traders who can read a balance sheet to a gnat’s eyebrow.

“And one of those little old ladies looked at the two proposals before her and said, ‘This smells, but I don’t see how,’ so she took it to her beloved great-niece, who said, ‘You’re right, Auntie, this smells, but I don’t see how,’ who took the problem in turn to her devoted husband, better known as Emperor Gregor Vorbarra. Who handed it to his loyal Imperial Auditor, saying, and I quote, ‘Here, Miles, you’re better at diving into the privy and coming up with the gold ring than anyone I know. Have a go.’ And I said, ‘Thank you, Sire,’ and took ship for Kibou-daini.”

Vorlynkin blinked again. Deeply. Roic reflected that the Imperium’s shrewd Komarran Empress served Gregor in more ways than just the joint production of their several scarily smart children.

M’lord went on blithely, “The other thing wealthy old Komarrans tend to have is an excess of planetary voting shares—er, Raven, do I need to explain these to you?”

“Yes, please,” said Raven, settling back and looking fascinated.

“The system, as usual, is a relict of Komarr’s colonization history. The planet is presently unlivable—though undergoing long-term terraforming—all settlement is in sealed arcologies, the Domes.”

“I knew that much…”

“Right. So to encourage the development of the domes, the early Komarran colonists set up a reward system. In addition to an inalienable one-person-one-vote that every Komarran is born and dies with, the colony awarded additional votes to those taking on the work and risk of creating more living space. These were inheritable, tradable, salable, and in general accumulate-able. The basis of the Komarran oligarchy as it now stands is clan possession of blocks of these planetary voting shares. The place is putatively a democracy, but some are measurably more equal than others. You follow?”

Raven nodded.

“So,” said Vorlynkin, who had, after all, had two years to watch Kibou-daini in operation, “you think WhiteChrys plans to accumulate those votes wholesale?”

“I do now. Mind you, Komarr has a long history of attempted chicanery with its voting system. Over time it’s accumulated a huge number of rules to thwart same. Among other things, voting shares can’t be held outright by corporations—they have to be in the hands of individuals. There are tested systems for proxies, and so on. WhiteChrys’s contracts passed muster with the Komarran regulators, and, if anybody had still been looking by that point, we’d have accepted that.

“My two working hypotheses are either that WhiteChrys has bribed some regulators—a possibility I now find quite compelling—or that they have figured out some way to game the rules system to hide their true intention till too late. Or both.”

Roic couldn’t help thinking that m’lord oughtn’t to look quite so admiring, detailing this in front of the still-gently-steaming Vorlynkin. But, well, m’lord.

“The one thing that gave me pause was that there was no way this could be a get-rich-quick scheme, even if the Komarran system of voting shares gives it a turbo-boost compared to Kibou. The profit margin on what is arguably a service industry is razor-thin, yet WhiteChrys has been spending money like a drunken Vor lord. Why go to all this trouble for a payoff you’ll never live to see? Until the last thing Wing said to me this afternoon, which was that he planned to have himself frozen on Komarr.”

M’lord looked around proudly, as if expecting the room to burst into applause, and was plainly disappointed to receive three blank looks instead.

He inhaled, visibly backing up. “Unpack, Miles, right. What I now suspect is going on is a two-tiered scam. I think there is an inner cadre of White Chrys executives who plan to ride out the years in cryo-stasis, and all be revived in time to collect the goodies. In fact, if they’re as smart as I think, they likely plan to take turns, so there’s always someone on the team awake to look after their interests. While they quietly, automatically, bloodlessly buy Komarr. Or maybe not so bloodlessly, depending on whether you consider early freezing to be murder or suicide, or not. The slowest, subtlest, and, I have to say, creepiest planetary conquest scheme ever devised!”

Even Vorlynkin jumped at that, his lips parting in consternation. “Conquest!”

“I hardly know what else to call it. But I still have a hell of a lot of dots to connect before I can sign off on this investigation. As soon as we get your consulate deep data crawlers up and running, that’s the first thing I want to look for—a list of WhiteChrys personnel who have lately shifted all their investments to WhiteChrys Solstice, and are planning to follow them in person. Because, given the numbers, I also think it possible that this is could be a secret group inside WhiteChrys who are gutting their own company to feather their nests.”

“Whew!” said Raven, with proper admiration. M’lord bestowed a pleased smile upon him.

Vorlynkin ran his hands through his hair. “How do you plan to nail the bastards? Bribing an Imperial Auditor may be as illegal as all hell on Barrayar, but we’re on Kibou-daini. Even if you could prove it—and I’m afraid my testimony would be suspect, here—I doubt Wing would get more than a slap on the wrist.”

“Actually, I would prefer not to give the slightest hint to anyone on Kibou that we’ve tumbled to them. The ideal revenge would be to let WhiteChrys get their hand so far into the cookie jar on Komarr that they can’t get it out, then cut it off at the wrist by changing the contract rules just enough on ’em to make them drop the votes. Leaving them to be exactly what they feigned to be, a marginally profitable service company. That would hurt enough to be a warning to others. Brute nationalization is a last resort—it would piss off the rest of the Komarran business community regardless of the rights of the case. It’ll take some study—I’m afraid we’re going to be up to our ears in lawyers before this is done—but with luck my part of the task will be over by then.” M’lord glanced up at Vorlynkin. “So what do you think of your Lieutenant Johannes? He’s young, which makes him both poorer and potentially more gullible. Is he reliable enough for this?”

“I…” Vorlynkin was given pause. “I’ve never had cause to doubt him.”

“And your local clerk, Yuuichi what’s-his-name, Matson?”

“I’ve never had cause to doubt him, either. But we’ve never had a situation like this before.”

“That you knew,” sighed m’lord. “Yet routine travel visas for WhiteChrys personnel have been handled through the consulate all this time.”

“Yes, but all we ask is business or tourism? Plus a quick background check for criminal records.”

M’lord’s eyes crinkled in speculation. “I wonder if we should add a box to tick off—Reason for travel: creepy planetary conquest… no, I suppose not.”

Vorlynkin said slowly, “What if I hadn’t tried to turn you in just now?”

“Then you wouldn’t be part of this debriefing, and I’d be on the lookout for ways to nail you to the wall, too. In passing.” M’lord stretched and rolled his shoulders. Vorlynkin looked, Roic felt, properly thoughtful at last.

“Now, the other thing,” m’lord began, but was interrupted when the sealed door chimed.

Lieutenant Johannes’s voice issued from the intercom. “Consul? Lord Vorkosigan?”

“Yes?” responded m’lord.

“Um… Your half-sized courier’s just turned up at the back door. And he’s not alone.”

M’lord’s brows rose; Vorlynkin’s drew down. Raven cocked his head in curiosity.

“Don’t let him get away, Johannes,” m’lord called back. “We’ll be right there.”

Motioning Roic to unseal the door, m’lord grabbed his cane and levered to his feet.