“I’m not sure I was joking, exactly,” Miles-san said mildly. “But wait for the children to eat, please.”
Vorlynkin’s jaw tightened, but he nodded. After Jin and Mina could eat no more, and Johannes offered more wipes and put the leftovers away in the refrigerator for breakfast, just like at home, Miles-san leaned back in his chair and said, “I suggest we repair downstairs. The seats will be more comfortable.”
The other Barrayarans all gave Miles-san funny looks, but recalling Uncle Hikaru’s daily after-dinner saying, when shifting into his big chair, of Out of the bleachers and into the box seats!, Jin saw no objection to this. Yet when they’d all shuffled down the stairs after Miles-san, the room into which he led them only boasted four chairs, all officey-looking swivel types. Miles-san gestured Mina and Jin into a seat each, took one himself, and left the other three men to sort themselves out. Johannes parked one haunch on the long table shoved up to the wall, Raven-sensei copied him, and Vorlynkin, mouth pinched, dropped into the remaining chair.
“This is a funny vid room,” Mina remarked, staring around and swinging her feet, now encased in a pair of Miles-san’s socks donated to keep her bandages clean. When Roic closed the door and blandly sat cross-legged on the floor beside it, the air grew awfully hushed, and for the first time Jin wondered if this was a safe place to have brought her, and not just from the risk of being betrayed to the authorities. He kind of trusted Miles-san, or he would have been inclined to grab her and bolt. Though given Roic and that thick door, would that impulse have come too late…
Miles-san laced his hands together between his knees, and said, “Suze the Secretary told me something of the story of your mother, Jin, Mina. So when I got back here I looked up what I could about her on the planetary net. It made me very curious. I really don’t understand how it was she came to be frozen, when she wasn’t sick or dying, or even convicted of any crime.”
Jin’s tasty dinner suddenly felt like lead in his stomach.
“What do you—either of you—remember about your mother?” Miles-san went on. “Not personal things, but about her work, her cause. Especially anything that might have happened about the time of the riot at her rally, or just before she was arrested?”
Jin and Mina looked at each other uneasily. Jin said, “Mom didn’t talk to us much about her work. When she was doing anything, she mostly left us at Aunt Lorna’s unless I was in school. Then she just left Mina.”
“Aunt Lorna wasn’t too happy about all the babysitting,” Mina said.
“Yah, she said she hadn’t volunteered for this and didn’t much like being drafted.”
“And she was sorry about Daddy, but maybe if Mommy really cared that much she’d do better to stay home and look after his kids herself.” Mina looked away, frowning.
Jin put in hastily, “But she only said things like that when she was feeling ’specially cranky.” Not that he was fond of Aunt Lorna, but these galactics were outsiders, after all, and it felt funny to be talking about his family like this in front of them. And Mom had said you should always try to be fair.
“Didn’t your mother ever take you along to her meetings?”
Mina shook her head. “She said they weren’t for kids, and we’d just get bored and kick up a fuss.”
“Huh.” Miles-san rubbed his chin. “When I was a youngster Jin’s age, at home, I was often permitted to sit in on my father’s meetings with his, er, professional colleagues. My grandfather had done the same with him. I learned more just by the osmosis than I realized at the time. Of course, I had to stay quiet and make myself useful, or leave, naturally.”
Jin frowned. “You can’t leave if you’re out somewhere. Mom would have had to break off what she was doing to take us home.”
“Couldn’t she have just tapped—never mind. Didn’t she ever have meetings at your home? In the evenings, say?”
“There wasn’t much room in our apartment.”
“Did no one come to visit? Ever?”
Jin shook his head, but Mina, to his surprise, spoke up. “Some people from her group did once. Late at night.”
“When was this?”
Mina sucked on her lower lip. “Before she was arrested, anyway.”
“Close before?”
“Yah, I think so.”
“I don’t remember this,” said Jin.
Mina tossed her head. “You were asleep.”
“What woke you?” asked Miles-san.
“They were arguing in the kitchen. Kind of loud and scary. Plus, I had to go to the bathroom.”
“Can you remember what they were arguing about? Anything at all that was said?”
Mina scrunched her face in thought. “They were talking about the corps, and money. They were always talking about the corps, and money, only this time they seemed more excited. George-san’s voice was really boomy, and Mommy was talking all fast and sharp, except she didn’t sound mad, exactly. And the new guy yelled something about, it wasn’t any temp’rary setback—this could bring the corps to their knees, right before he came out in the hallway on the way to the bathroom and found me. And Mommy let me have an ice cream bar and put me back to bed and told me to stay there.”
“Do you know who the people were? Had you ever seen them before?”
Mina nodded. “There was George-san, he was always nice to me when he came to pick up Mommy. And old Mrs. Tennoji, she always wore a lot of perfume. They called the new one Leiber-sensei.”
“Do you remember the rest of their names? Jin?”
Headshakes. Miles-san tried, “George Suwabi, by chance?”
“Might have been,” said Mina, though sounding a bit doubtful.
“The timing is interesting in the extreme. And the cast. I smell a lethal secret, oh, yes.” Miles-san rose and began to pace back and forth across the little room. He forgot his cane, left by his chair, a snazzier one than he’d scavenged from Suze-san’s. “Suwabi and Tennoji came up in my researches. Dr. Leiber did not, I admit. Curious absence, not to be confused with an absence of curious. I wonder who the hell he was?”
Sounding as if he was being drawn into all this despite himself, Consul Vorlynkin said, “Could you trace these people and find out more?”
“Not Suwabi or Tennoji—they’re dead. And rotted, buried for real. The other one, I don’t know. Could be a long, cold trail, if he’s run off-world or gone to ground well enough to escape the corps. It might be faster just to wake up Lisa Sato and ask her.”
Mina drew a huge breath and shot to her feet, staring wildly at Miles-san. “You could do that? You could get my mommy back? Really?”
Miles-san stopped short. “Er.”
Jin’s heart jumped in his chest; Mina’s imploring look made him feel sick. “No, of course he can’t,” he said angrily. “It was just a stupid joke.”
Miles-san’s hand went to his throat, clutching something through his shirt; some kind of pendant, Jin thought. “Damn. If I were on Barrayar, I could just order it done.”
“But we’re not on Barrayar,” Armsman Roic muttered under his breath, almost the first Jin had heard the big man speak. Miles-san waved a hand as if to say, Yah, yah, though whether in agreement or protest Jin was not sure.
Mina looked crushed; her lower lip quivered. “It wasn’t… wasn’t a very nice thing to make a joke about it, if you didn’t really mean it!”
“No,” said Miles-san, staring, for some reason, at Raven-sensei. “It wasn’t. Could I, ah… really mean it? Technically?”
Raven-sensei scratched his chin. “Technically, yes. You will forgive me if I point out that the medical aspects would seem to be the least of it?”
Miles-san waved a hand in easy pardon.
“Assuming,” Raven-sensei went on, “the cryoprep was done correctly in the first place, of course. Or at all.”