“Give Rowan my best, when you see her.”
“Oh, yeah, she said to say hi to you, too.”
This won an oddly ironic look, and a return nod.
“I take it,” put in Roic, “that Dr. Durona, here, wasn’t at the conference by chance?”
“Indeed, not. I’d asked the Durona Group to supply me with an independent technical evaluation of the cryo-conference, and whatever turned up at it.”
“The Group had actually received the conference’s call for presentations well before you asked, Lord Vorkosigan. We were going to send one of our junior residents—this place is not without interest to us, actually.”
“And have you observed anything of special note so far? Technically.” M’lord leaned back in his station chair and steepled his fingers, giving Raven a judicious stare.
“Nothing new to us on the technical side. I did notice that they seemed more interested in freezing people than thawing them.”
“Yes, the cryocorps are plainly playing numbers games with their customers’—patrons, they call ’em—proxy votes.”
“It’s a game they’ve won, from the sound of things.”
M’lord nodded. “It was barely discussed at the conference, yet there seems to be plenty of debate on the subject outside. In the streets and elsewhere.”
Raven put in, “The N.H.L.L. were sure complaining vigorously.”
“Yeah, but not very effectively,” said Roic. “Loons like that are their own worst advertisement.”
“Does it strike you both as a pretty free debate, as such things go? Noisy?”
“Well, yes,” said Raven. “Not as noisy as Escobaran politics.”
“Noisier than Barrayar, though,” Roic said.
“Much noisier than Jackson’s Whole,” Raven granted, with a twisted grin.
“That’s not politics, that’s predators versus prey,” muttered m’lord. But he went on: “Well, thanks to the N.H.L.L., I had a very useful two days. Now that you’re both back alive, I suppose I can afford to be grateful to them.”
“New answers?” asked Roic, with a sapient eyebrow-lift.
“Better. A whole raft of new questions.”
And m’lord promptly topped—of course—Roic’s tale with a hair-curling story of the appalling extent of the Cryocombs beneath the city, and of how m’lord had stumbled on a bootleg freezing operation run by, apparently, Kibou street geezers. Raven seemed less impressed by the bootleg cryonics—he was Jacksonian, after all. As near as Roic could tell, everything on Jackson’s Whole was done illegally. Or, more precisely, lawlessly.
“Fragile and doomed,” was Raven’s succinct opinion of Madame Suze’s on-going operation. “I’m astonished she’s gotten away with so much for so long.”
“Mm, maybe not. It’s clandestine, but it doesn’t really rock the cryocorps’ boat. Everyone here being in the same boat, after all.” M’lord rubbed his chin and squinted red-rimmed eyes that glinted a trifle too brightly. “Then we come to this woman Lisa Sato, and her group.”
“Your little zookeeper’s frozen mama?” said Roic.
“Yep. The N.H.L.L. is allowed to run its length, Suze’s operation is overlooked, but Sato’s seemingly much more reasonable and legal group is broken up, at considerable trouble and expense. All that ambient noise, and yet only one voice is silenced.” M’lord gestured to the secured comconsole, now dark. “I’ve spent the past several hours doing some digging—”
And as a former ImpSec galactic operative, this sort of digging was meat and drink to m’lord, Roic reflected.
“—and in just that time, I’ve turned up anomalies galore. Lisa Sato was not the only member of her group to come to a bad end. Two others were frozen after supposedly-unsuccessful treatments for medical conditions that should not have been fatal, another died in an accident, and yet another was ruled a suicide of the fell-or-jumped sort. Even at the time, brows were raised, and quite a few people were offended, but the aftershocks were drowned out in the news by a flood of trivial sex scandals. What does this suggest to you?”
“That Lisa Sato’s group was getting ready to rock somebody’s boat pretty hard,” said Roic slowly.
Raven nodded concurrence. “How?”
“That, interestingly, does not turn up in the public record. Nor even in the less-public records. Somebody did a first-class job on the cleanup, there, even if they weren’t able to make it completely invisible. That now heads my list of shiny new questions—just what got cleaned up, a year and a half ago?”
Roic frowned. “Very riveting, m’lord, but… what has this got t’ do with Barrayar’s interests?”
M’lord cleared his throat. “It is far too early to say,” he said primly.
Roic, glumly, read that as, I haven’t made up a reason yet, but give me time. Was m’lord going all quixotic on account of that orphan boy? Emperor Gregor himself had warned Roic about m’lord’s tendency to expensive knight-errantry, in one of their rare private conversations. From the Imperial sigh that had accompanied this, it had been unclear if Gregor actually expected Roic to restrain m’lord, or not.
The door hissed open, and Consul Vorlynkin stuck his head through. “I’ve heard back from the lawyer, Lord Vorkosigan.”
“Ah, good!” M’lord waved him in; he stood, seeming a bit wary. “What’s the word on Jin?”
“As I thought, there is nothing we can legally do. If he were an orphan without kin, you could apply for custody of him, but it would take some months and almost certainly be rejected by the Northbridge courts, especially if there was any hint of taking him off-planet.”
“I didn’t ask to adopt him, Vorlynkin. Just rescue him from the police.”
“In any case, my Lord Auditor, it’s become moot—the police have already turned the boy over to his blood-kin, an aunt who is in fact his present legal guardian.”
“Damn!” M’lord slumped. “Damn. I hope Ako proves a more faithful zookeeper than I did.”
“Well, it’s not as if we could kidnap him,” said Vorlynkin, with a faint smile. M’lord eyed him. Perhaps thinking better of this mild venture into humor, Vorlynkin cleared his throat and went back to looking bland. Roic wondered if he should take Vorlynkin aside later and warn him not to say things like that around m’lord, and not because the Lord Auditor might take offense.
Roic rubbed sandy eyelids. “Perhaps you’d best sleep on it, m’lord,” he suggested, not without self-interest. M’lord had plainly had the advantage of a shower and fresh clothes, but still looked as if he’d been up all night, as had they all. And the shiny glitter in his eyes was a tip-off. “Have you checked your neurotransmitter levels since you got back?” The elevation of same being early warning of an impending seizure, and signal it was time to use the medical seizure-stimulator to short-circuit the fit—in some safe and controlled place.
M’lord addressed an unrevealing mutter to his shoes.
“Right,” said Roic, in a very firm tone.
M’lord sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Can I go back to my hotel now?” asked Raven hopefully.
“Yes, but stay in touch. In fact—Vorlynkin, please issue Dr. Durona a secured wristcom before he goes, eh?”
Vorlynkin’s brows rose, but he said only, “Yes, my lord.”
“I need more data,” m’lord growled, to no one in particular. He looked up appraisingly at the consul. “All right, Vorlynkin. If WhiteChrys or any of our other late hosts call to inquire after me, I want you to tell them that I am very upset by the disruption of the conference and the kidnapping of my armsman. In fact, I’m furious, and as soon as I recover from my ordeal I plan to stalk home and give a very bad report of the affair to anyone who will listen, starting with Emperor Gregor.”
“Er… and are you?” asked Vorlynkin, sounding nonplussed.
M’lord returned only an unreassuring grin. “I want you to test how far they’ll go to reopen their lines of communication. Indicate you’ll do your diplomatic best to calm me down, but you’re not sure it can be done. If they offer you incentives for the task, take them up.”