Miles-san tilted his head, like Gyre the Falcon contemplating a choice morsel of meat. “The old shell game, eh? That… might actually be highly feasible. I wonder if I could borrow a spare from Suze? God knows, cryo-corpses are not an item in short supply around here.”
Vorlynkin choked. “Do you have any idea how many different crimes you’ve just rattled off?”
“No, but it might not hurt to make up a list, should your lawyer need it. Could speed things up, in a pinch.”
“I thought the task of an Imperial Auditor was to uphold the law!”
Miles-san’s eyebrows flew up. “No, whatever gave you that idea? The task of an Imperial Auditor is to solve problems for Gregor. Those greasy cryocorps bastards just tried to steal a third of his empire. That’s a problem.” Despite his smiling lips, Miles-san’s eyes glittered, and Jin realized with a start that underneath, he was really angry about something. “I’m still considering the solution.”
Jin wondered who Gregor was. Miles-san’s insurance boss?
Mina had scrunched her chair closer and closer to where Jin rocked in his. An audible sniffle escaped her, which made both Miles-san and Vorlynkin crank their heads around. Miles-san lurched and lifted a hand toward her, stopped short, and gestured at Jin instead, who, thus compelled, gave his sister a clumsy pat on the shoulder that only made her eyes fill up and overflow for real.
“Lord Vorkosigan, for pity’s sake, enough for tonight,” said Consul Vorlynkin. “These children have to be exhausted. Both of them.”
Jin could wish he hadn’t added that last. His eyes stung in contagion with Mina’s. Now he was offered it, Jin wasn’t so sure he wanted sympathy—it eroded his resolve as annoying bracing remarks never did.
“To be sure,” said Miles-san immediately. “Baths, I think, and we can give them both Roic’s room. He can bunk in with me. I expect some clean T-shirts would do for nightclothes. Toothbrushes?”
Miles-san and Vorlynkin arguing, Jin discovered, were not nearly so daunting as the pair of them united in sudden agreement. The ordinary business of bedtime blocked further tears. Jin expected Mina found the consulate house stranger than he did. He’d slept in parks, after all, and in all sorts of odd crannies at Suze-san’s. Vorlynkin even donated a fancy sonic toothbrush, though Jin and Mina had then to share it, with a trip through its sterilizing holder between customers.
At last they were tucked up in clean sheets in a warm, quiet room. Jin waited for the door to softly shut, and the grownups’ feet to clump away back downstairs, before wriggling up and switching on the bedside lamp. Mina threw back her covers and helped him extract Lady Murasaki’s box from her backpack. She watched closely as Jin opened the lid to give their pet a breath of fresh air, and helped by tossing in one of the little powdery beige moths they’d collected earlier, while Jin’s fingers blocked the prisoner from escaping. He set the plastic box back on the table between their beds.
“Is she going to eat it?” Mina asked, peering through the lid.
“I’m not sure. She might only go for live prey.”
Mina frowned thoughtfully. “They have that big garden out back. I bet we could catch more bugs tomorrow.”
A reassuring notion. Jin lay back down and pulled up his sheets, and Mina reached to turn out the lamp again before any betraying line of light showed under the bedroom door.
After a while, Mina’s whisper came out of the dark: “Do you really think your galactic can get Mommy back? No one else ever could.”
Had anyone else even tried? Jin didn’t know. Miles-san, all dapper and alert and concentrated and never sitting still, was proving an alarming acquaintance. Jin wasn’t sure but what he’d liked the grubby lost druggie better. Jin had a disconcerting feeling of having set a force in motion that he could not now stop, which wasn’t made better by not even knowing whether he wanted to.
“I don’t know, Mina,” he said at last. “Be quiet and go to sleep.” He rolled over and hid from it all under his covers.
Roic followed Consul Vorlynkin into the tight-room, where m’lord was already deeply involved with the comconsole, Johannes at his side, Raven leaning over and kibitzing. They all seemed to be examining some engineering schematics for the NewEgypt facility, pulled up from God knew where. Roic was relieved m’lord had finally decided to involve Johannes, if only by necessity. Backup at last! Inexperienced, but not untrained, and judging from his wide eyes it looked as if he was getting a tutorial in covert ops that would have done his ImpSec instructors proud.
M’lord wheeled in his station chair to take in the new arrivals. “Ah, Vorlynkin, good. Your clerk, Matson—he’ll be back to work in the morning, right?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think we can keep those kids quiet enough to hide them from him in a house this small. He’ll have to be told they are protected witnesses, in some danger. That should be enough to settle him.”
“Is it true?” said Vorlynkin.
“How did someone so reluctant to tell lies become a diplomat? By the way, I can’t believe, with all your training, that you failed to admire Miss Sato’s blisters. What is it about this universal female conviction that medical conditions make one interesting? Judging from my daughter Helen, it starts younger than I would have believed possible.”
“About the danger,” said Vorlynkin, winning Roic’s admiration by refusing to be drawn into m’lord’s flight of fancy. Judging from the brightness of his eyes, m’lord was as over-stimulated right now as his own kids after one of his bedtime stories, right enough. “Is it real? Because it’s unconscionable to keep those children from their guardians otherwise.”
M’lord sobered. “Perhaps. This is an investigation, which means that not all leads pan out. Or otherwise one wouldn’t need to investigate. But I shouldn’t think Lisa Sato would have been removed in that brutal and effective way for any trivial reason. Which means waking her up could actually increase their hazard…” He tapped his lips, considering this. “I suspect Jin misjudges his aunt and uncle, actually. They may not merely lack the resources to fight the good fight for their kinswoman. They may be seriously intimidated.”
“Hm,” said Vorlynkin.
Roic’s own conviction was that as soon as that poor frozen woman had intersected m’lord’s orbit, this chain of events had become inevitable. Worse than dangling a string in front of a cat, it was. He likely shouldn’t explain this to Vorlynkin; an armsman was supposed to be loyal in thought, word, and deed. But not blind…
“But if Jin and Mina were your children, would you want some off-worlder as good as kidnapping them to use for his own purposes?” Vorlynkin persisted. “No matter how well-intentioned?”
“In my defense, I must point out, they turned up here on their own, but—if I were dead, my widow frozen, my children fallen into the hands of people either unwilling or incapable of helping them? I doubt I would care where the man came from who could reunite them with Ekaterin. I’d shower all my posthumous blessings upon him.” M’lord wheeled around and drummed his fingers on the comconsole counter. “Poor Jin! He makes me think about my missing grandmother, actually.”
“Missing grandmother?” said Raven, leaning back against the counter. “I didn’t know you had any.”
“Most people have two—not you, of course. My Betan grandmother is alive and well and opinionated to this day, in fact. If you ever meet her, you’ll understand a whole lot more about my mother. No, it’s a Barrayaran tale, the fate of Princess-and-Countess Olivia Vorbarra Vorkosigan.”
“Then delightfully bloody, I daresay.” Raven’s sweeping hand gesture invited m’lord to go on, not that he needed any encouragement. Johannes, too, was listening in apparent fascination.