A fine tradition of neglect of one's own in service to the Imperium, those Vorkosigans. At a cost. Miles recalled with a touch of wry pride what a District village speaker had once said to him of Ekaterin: We feel as though you belong to the Imperium, but Lady Vorkosigan belongs to us.
Indeed.
"On the home front," Ekaterin went on, "here's the latest achievement . . ."
The vid cut to another, less steady. "Good job, Helen," said Ekaterin's voice as a room spun dizzily—the library at Vorkosigan House, Miles recognized despite its rabbiting speed, "but pan more slowly or you'll give your papa vertigo."
"What's vertigo?" came a young voice from off-side—Sasha? no, Lizzie, good heavens—and Ekaterin responded at once, "Dizzy."
"Oh." The new word was duly accepted.
The vid steadied on Taurie, ten months old, gray eyes wide under a mop of wispy black curls, clinging grimly to the edge of a low table. Sasha, five going on six, as he and his twin, Helen, phrased it, and their sister Lizzie, three, sat on a couch in the background, Sasha watching with interest, Lizzie looking bored and kicking her feet, as if to say, I've already done this, what's the fuss?
"Come on, Taurie," Ekaterin's voice cooed. "Come to mama." Effective—Miles undertook not to fall through the vid plate, reaching for that seductive voice.
Taurie turned, rocking, on her stout little legs, releasing one hand, which waved for balance. Then the other. Then began a bow-legged toddle toward her mama's outstretched arms. How any child learned to walk while swaddled in a diaper, Miles didn't know, but there she went, thump-thump-thump, to fall chortling into Ekaterin's arms and be swung high in triumph.
"Let me try her," said Sasha, much as if his little sister were a robot car. He slid to his knees on the rug across from Ekaterin, and called encouragingly, "Come on, Taurie, you can do it!"
Fresh from her first victory, Taurie screeched and toddled toward him even faster, promptly falling on her chin and setting up a wail, clearly more of outrage than pain—Miles could discern the different timbres while still lunging up from his sleep. Sasha gathered her up, laughing. "Hey, you're supposed to learn to walk before you run!" He got her turned around and aimed back toward her mama, and the trial was repeated more successfully.
Lizzie, who had slid down off the couch during all this, gave up spinning herself in circles singing, "Vertigo, vertigo, vertigo!" and made a grab for the vid recorder, which, judging from the way the view jerked wildly, her elder sister promptly raised out of her reach. "No, I wanna run the vid now," came Lizzie's voice. "Let me, let me! Mama, make her let me . . . !"
Too soon, the domestic drama came to an end. Miles backed it up and re-ran it, wondering if these were indeed Taurie's first steps, or a reenactment for his benefit. The vid recorder suggested the latter.
Ekaterin's face returned against the cluttered background of her third-floor office, the one on the north side overlooking her Barrayaran garden through the Earth-import treetops.
"I'm so sorry Sergeant Taura never lived to see her namesake," she said, looking reflective, "but I'm glad you were at least able to tell her about Taurie, before the end. Maybe we should have given her name to Lizzie, sooner, rather than your Betan grandmother's. Oh, speaking of names. Sasha has now announced that he is Alex, I suppose because he gave up trying to talk everyone into Xander. Lexie and A.A. appear to be permanently rejected, now, too. Same rationale—if we don't call him Aral because of Grandda Aral, we shouldn't call him Sasha because of Grandpa Sasha, either. He seems to be sticking to this one, however, and he has Helen on his side at last, so in your next message, be sure to call him Lord Alex. That much logic and determination should be rewarded, I think."
Indeed. Miles had been deeply alarmed, earlier in his fatherhood, by what seemed Sasha's—Alex's—delay in verbal development, compared to his age-mate Helen, till Ekaterin had pointed out that the boy's sister never let him ask a question for himself or get a word in edgewise after. He wasn't delayed, merely amiable, and had caught up with complete sentences soon enough thereafter, as long as Helen wasn't in the same room translating for him.
"Come to think of it," Ekaterin went on, "didn't you once have some trouble deciding what you wanted to be called? And at a much older age. History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.
"But he loves you, whatever he's named. We all do. Take care out there, Miles, and hurry home when you can." The vid went dark.
If only I could crawl through that vid plate and have myself beamed back to Barrayar at the speed of light . . . Miles sighed. All his life, his home had been something he couldn't wait to escape. How had his polarity become so profoundly reversed?
Roic's remark stung: If only you'd quit while you were winning . . . Well, this tangle on Kibou-daini wasn't all of his own making.
He wished Leiber would show the hell up. Now would be a good time. Miles was surprised he was taking so long. He might have to send someone to collect the man after all. Or if Lisa Sato woke up with temporary cryo-amnesia, or simply didn't know the answers. No, she has to know whatever Leiber knows. Because I'd bet Betan dollars to sand he's the one who told her in the first place.
Leiber's evident alarm niggled at Miles. Why should he have been so afraid of us? He didn't even know us. Leiber was obviously responding to some local threat, perhaps the very one that Miles wanted to know all about. But Miles was still having some trouble guessing what it might be.
Just as Sato was bait for Leiber, the pair of them would be bait for . . . who? Why? Miles had staked people out like goats to draw the tiger du jour in the past, but not, knowingly, when they had children in tow. Or had you just never noticed their webs of relationships, before? He couldn't remember. But if he didn't have the personnel here to chase down Leiber, he surely didn't have the personnel to put a round-the-clock guard on the consulate and the people it sheltered. Roic and Johannes between them weren't enough, even if they hadn't had other duties—handing the task to them without support would be downright abusive. Raven wasn't the only one who didn't like being set up to fail.
Despite the distance it put between him and his family, Miles felt a little shiver of gratitude to Gregor for sending him so far afield on his sporadic Auditorial labors. Because it put that same distance between his family and whoever his investigations managed to piss off. Pissing off bad guys for the greater glory of Barrayar, that would be my job description, just about. Speaking of being happy in one's work.
He bent to the comconsole and began composing an Auditorial requisition to the Barrayaran embassy on Escobar for a security team, to be dispatched immediately, with a heads-up to put an ImpSec forensic accountant and, perhaps, legal team on stand-by. He knew nothing of his invisible enemy but that they played for keeps. Five days for the squad to get here, at their best speed. Had he known enough, five days ago, to ask for this? I suppose not.
Miles called up the background data on NewEgypt Cryonics once more, and began to slog through it. Lisa Sato could not regain her voice soon enough.
Chapter Fourteen
By mid-morning of the day after Madame Sato's successful revival, when Dr. Leiber still hadn't contacted the consulate, m'lord allowed as how he might have been mistaken, and dispatched Roic and Johannes to find the man. Roic thought it might have made his job easier if m'lord had come to that conclusion earlier. He began with the two obvious first ploys, calling the man's residence—no answer—and his work, where he learned that the researcher had called in sick the morning before, some stomach bug, he'd told his assistant, and he'd likely be out for a couple of days. Right.
Roic then had Johannes pack up some of the consulate's better surveillance equipment and drive him back out to Leiber's townhouse. A complex under construction that had caught his eye the previous trip did so again, as they passed. Roic cranked his head around to study the sign. Century Estates, it read, and Were you born between 150 and 130 years ago? See us! "What's that all about?" he asked Johannes.
"A gener
ational cohort enclave," said Johannes. "You see them here and there in the bigger cities. Revives, at least those who wake up with enough money and health for it, often find they don't like the new Kibou so much after all, and end up clustering together trying to recreate their youths."
"Huh," said Roic. "A sort of do-it-yourself historical reenactment? At least you'd have someone to talk to who gets all your jokes."
"I guess," said Johannes, a little doubtfully.
Roic had Johannes pull in the van at the back of the house row while he tried Dr. Leiber's front door. No answer. After a few minutes Johannes opened it from within. "He left the garage unlocked. Float bike's gone."
"Right. Let's take a look around, then visit his comconsole."
No room, closet, shower, cupboard, or dustbin large enough to hold a body did so. M'lord's thoughtful burglar's note was gone from the refrigerator, which was still stocked with an assortment of bachelor rations. The kitchen was tidied, the bed upstairs more-or-less made, or at least the quilt pulled up. Clothes and shoes might have been taken—enough to fit in a duffle strapped to the back of a float bike?—but there was still a good bit left. Toiletries were absent.
Johannes had started on Leiber's comconsole, sucking a copy of its contents through the umbilicus of the secured cable onto his ImpSec recorder, watching the progress on his holoscreen.
"Hey!" he said after a moment. "This thing is monitored. I wonder if Leiber knew that?"
Roic leaned in. Hey, indeed! "This process won't stir up his watchers, will it?"
"It shouldn't," said Johannes.
Not very reassuring. "Can you trace the bug?"
"Partly. I might be able to finish the job from the tight-room."
"Give us a look at his communications over the past two days, since our first visit."
There were only three. Yesterday morning, Leiber had called in sick, purchased a jumpship passage to Escobar, and emptied most of his remaining savings account onto a couple of universal credit chits. There were no personal messages to relatives or friends. He might have left a door key or instructions with the folks next door, Roic supposed, but on the whole he thought not, and he was unwilling to go stir up trouble by asking around. People might remember their visit from day before yesterday. He wondered what tale Leiber had told his neighbor lady about them. Not the truth, he suspected.
"This jumpship doesn't leave till tomorrow evening," Johannes pointed out.
"Yeah, I see."
"Think he might have gone aboard already?"
Roic frowned at the schedule. "Ah. No. That one doesn't even make inbound orbit till this afternoon." He thought a moment. "The minute he passes inside shuttleport security, he's back on the grid, lit up for anyone who can look. And if we can spot him then, belike his enemies can, too—I don't think they're operating on a shoestring, not if they're backed by one of those cryocorps. He'll wait to the last to board. So he has to have gone to ground somewhere."
"With a friend, maybe? Could be hard to find." Johannes squinted at the comconsole. "Although this could help."
"If he's in as much fear for his life as this flight suggests, he might not want to endanger a friend," said Roic slowly. "He didn't strike m'lord as the ruthless type, he said."
"It's a big city," observed Johannes.
"So, let's start with the obvious." Roic climbed to his feet. "Pack up here and drive us out to the shuttleport."
In the lift van, Roic opened its—ImpSec secured—comconsole and ran a search on lodgings around the shuttleport. Two were inside the security perimeter, half a dozen scattered in the surrounding light-industrial area. He balanced closest against cheapest, and decided to start with cheapest. As they threaded their way to it, he had time to reflect on how Nexus‑wide transportation tech had shaped the cities it served, giving more sameness planet to planet than he'd expected, before he'd ever left Barrayar. This provincial boy's come a long way. In a way, he was glad no good fairy had ever endowed him with the future he would have picked for himself when younger. It would have been so much smaller.
"Now what?" asked Johannes, as they swung into the budget hostel's lot. "Stake the place out? Ask at the front desk?"
"Not sure anyone would remember Leiber even if they saw him," said Roic, "and this is one of those self-serve places." Not as cramped as some Roic had encountered on space stations, where sleep cubicles, rented by the hour, seemed a cross between a closet and a coffin, but the building's utilitarian lines didn't invite lingering. It was a shadowed place even in the mid-morning, huddled down below a long concrete road abutment and some sort of manufacturing plant. "Circle the lot. We'll look for his float bike."
Around the building's back, an open-faced shed sheltered a float bike lock-down. Roic recognized Leiber's bike nestled among half a dozen others.
"Right the first time!' said Johannes, in a tone of admiration.
"I've had some practice, trailing m'lord around," said Roic modestly, leaving out the dumb luck part. Well, smart luck, perhaps. Roic would have been surprised not to have turned up something within his first three tries. They sat in the van for a few minutes while Roic tried to think it through the way m'lord would. No, scratch that idea. He'd likely do better trying to think it through like Leiber. Or better still, like Roic.
Would the enemy send cops or goons to collect their quarry? If it was a cryocorp, they could likely get all the cops they wanted—charges of employee theft would do the job—they had only to wait at the pinch-point inside the shuttleport and pick the man off as he scurried through. But that would leave a trail, names, security vid recordings, a whole lot of witnesses not under anyone's direct control. A private goon squad pick-up before Leiber hit the port, that would be the quieter way to go about it. And if Roic could figure out where to look for the fellow, presumably all those smart men in the fancy trousers could, too. Roic wasn't the part of his team born with the silver tongue in his mouth—could he persuade Leiber to come to the safety of the consulate, when m'lord had not? Guess I'll have to try. He glanced up. "What's that?"
A pulsing blue light was reflecting off the concrete wall, coming from the front of the building.
"Blue's the color they use around here for emergency vehicles," said Johannes uneasily.
"Pull around front."
They arrived to see a pair of emergency medtechs dressed in blue scrubs yank a float pallet from the back of an unmarked van and hurry inside the sliding glass doors to the lobby. Both big fellows—one was tall, and the other looked as though he'd had some of those traditional wrestlers in his family tree. On both sides. Didn't emergency services usually try to pair a woman in such a team? Well, not always, belike. With round the clock scheduling, as Roic knew from grappling with the guardsmen's roster for Vorkosigan House and m'lord's other two official residences, you took whatever combinations you could get.
"Wait here." Roic slid out of their own van and went to take a peek in the back of the other. The rear doors had no windows, but had been left unlocked. Careless of the techs, if it was carrying drugs and expensive equipment. Roic quietly opened a door, looked inside, and raised his wristcom to his lips. "Interesting, Johannes. The cupboard is bare. This isn't an ambulance, just a van."
"Uh-oh."
"Think I'll just take a stroll inside and intercept those fellows coming out. You watch my back from there." Roic still wasn't sure what was happening, here, although he was formulating some rapid guesses.
An anxious young lady desk clerk was peering up the central hallway when Roic entered the lobby.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"One of our guests reported in very sick, apparently. He should have called the front desk—we would have assisted him . . ."
"Was he from off-world? D'you think he might have brought in something bad?" asked Roic. "Contagious?"
"No, no. Some sort of sudden seizure, I gather. He was lucky he could use his wristcom." The clerk gathered her nerve. "I should go and lock up after them, make sure the gen
tleman's property is secure." She glanced back at Roic. "Were you checking in, sir? There's only me on duty right now . . ."
"Take your time. First things first." Roic waved her away. She trotted off up the hall to where a loaded float pallet was already being shifted out a doorway and turned. The tall man hitched an IV to a pole, bent, and checked his patient. Roic glimpsed a blanketed male form, firmly strapped down, an oxygen mask in place across his face muffling his moans. Roic stepped forward, radiating curiosity and concern, as the pallet floated out into the lobby flanked by its two escorts.
Dr. Leiber blinked up with bleared eyes and groaned behind his plastic mask.
"What happened?" Roic asked, following along out the front doors. "Is it anything dangerous? Do you need any help?"
"Thanks, no," the tall one told him. "Everything's under control."
"So was it a heart attack?"
"We don't know, yet," said the tall one. "He just collapsed."
"Drugs? Is this a bad area? I just landed, myself." For once, Roic's not-from-around-here looks and accent worked in his favor. "I was about to check in at this place and sleep off the jump-lag, but now I'm not so sure."
The broad one scowled at him in irritation. "No, it's fine. Go check in." The pair swung the van doors wide and slid the pallet aboard, both climbing inside to secure it.
Roic stuck his head in after. "You sure?"
"Yes, it's safe," said the tall one, exasperated, from the windowless cargo area.
"Good," said Roic, pulled his stunner, and shot them both.
That would save some heavy lifting. And scuffling. Roic hated scuffles. Just because he was big didn't mean he liked getting hurt.