Cryoburn-ARC (39 page)

"Fire!" screamed the sphinx, all her fur on end, and her eyes like gilded saucers. "Fire! Foes! Fire!"

"We have to get out of this building, right now!" said Vorlynkin; Mina yelped as his hand tightened on hers. Vorlynkin lurched toward the towers. "Which stairs are farther from the fire?"

"Not that way!" said Jin. "There's an outside ladder drops down to the alley on the other side."

Vorlynkin nodded and ran, jerking Mina along with him; Jin grabbed up Nefertiti and ran after him. The sphinx struggled and hissed in his arms. Was there time to stuff her back into her carrier? Maybe not. Vorlynkin reached the opposite edge of the roof and found the steel staples.

"I have to go first, to let down the extension!" Jin yelled to Vorlynkin.

"Mina next," said Vorlynkin.

"I can't reach that far!" Mina sounded like she wanted to cry.

"I'll lower you over, and hold you till you get your grip," said Vorlynkin. "Go, Jin!"

"Who'll carry Nefertiti?"

Vorlynkin choked back something short, and said, "I will."

Jin dropped Nefertiti, hoping she wouldn't bolt away, vaulted over the parapet, and slapped down the rungs faster than he'd ever gone in his life. Unlatched the ladder, thumped at it, prayed it wouldn't stick or hang up. It rattled, then reached its full extension with a clang. "All right!" he called up.

Mina's kicking legs dangled over his head, then she found her footing and started down with no more than one scared meep. The rungs really were too far apart for her to reach comfortably. Above, Jin heard Vorlynkin swearing, and the scrunch of his footsteps, and the sphinx screaming, "Fire! Foes! Fire!" and, apparently confused in her vocabulary by the commotion, "Food!"

Vorlynkin yelped in pain, seemingly from some greater distance, and swore some more. Jin reached the ground and stretched up to catch Mina, whose sport shoes wavered in the air when she ran out of rungs before she ran out of space. "You're all right! Just let go!" She fell into him, knocking him to the ground; they both rolled, then scrambled to their feet and stared upward. At that point, Jin found out how well sphinxes could fly, when Nefertiti sailed over the parapet, wings flapping madly, and descended. She neither plummeted nor soared, but she did land right-side-up on all four paws like a cat, hard enough to grunt when her belly hit the ground, but not hard enough to break anything.

Vorlynkin's big dark shape finally swung out over the edge; he dropped the last two meters, hit with knees bending like the sphinx's, staggered, but didn't fall. Blood was running down his face from a deep triple scratch below his left eye.

"Jin!" Vorlynkin's voice was sharp and hard, brooking no debate. "Take Mina straight to your mother, and do what Dr. Durona tells you to. If this fire spreads, they may have to evacuate all the buildings in the complex." He raised his wristcom to his lips and began snapping connect-codes into it.

Jin dove for Nefertiti, who flapped away screeching.

"Leave the bloody animal!" Vorlynkin snarled over his shoulder, already starting away down the alley. "Both of you, run!"

Chapter Eighteen

Ted Fuwa, the old cryofacility's putative owner, turned out to be more or less what Miles had expected—a big, harried man in his late forties who looked as if he'd be more at home on a construction site than in a conference chamber, even one so strange as Madame Suze's quarters at midnight.

A less-expected presence was the consulate's local lawyer, an alert, composed, compact woman, with wiry salt-and-pepper hair, who stood barely taller than Miles himself. Kareen, Miles was unsurprised to learn, had persuaded her to come here after hours. Madame Xia stared back at him with at least as much covert interest, as the source of the increasingly bizarre stream of legal questions she'd been fielding for the past week or so from her formerly staid and routine client. Miles trusted she was having her accumulated curiosity satisfied tonight.

Miles missed Vorlynkin, told off to stay with Sato and her children, and Suze wasn't happy that Tanaka had been called away to deal with some medical crisis, so he supposed the shifting sides, however you counted them, were still evenly matched. Suze and Tenbury versus Mark and Kareen, Miles as unruly witness with Roic his silent partner, the attorney throwing in comments and questions now and then that gave everyone pause, and Fuwa versus everyone, although Miles wasted little sympathy on him.

Madame Suze folded her arms and stared hard at Mark. "You still have given me no guarantees whatsoever about future provisions for the poor."

"I'm not running a charity, you know," Mark returned, irritably.

"
I
am," snapped Suze.

"Yes, but for how much longer?" asked Mark. "Sooner or later, and more sooner than later, I think, it would be your turn to go downstairs. And you would lose control of this place in any case. Tenbury and Tanaka might hold things together for a while, but after that—what?"

"It's what
I
was waiting for," put in Fuwa, a bit mournfully. Suze shot him a scornful look and sat up straighter in her big chair, as if to imply he'd be waiting for a while yet. Miles was less sure. Suze's skin bore more than a little of that pallid slackness that was the harbinger of decline. One couldn't say she glowed with health, not even in her irate stress.

"If the Durona Group doesn't step in," said Mark, "the inevitable end game is that this place will go to the city or the Prefecture, or to Fuwa. And in either case, patron intake stops. The life of one person isn't
long
enough to see this venture out."

"Although that might change in the future," Kareen observed.

"Or cryofreezing will become obsolete technology, and this whole demographic mess Kibou has created for itself will be naturally swept away," said Mark.

"I'm not so sure of that," said Miles thoughtfully. "If people start getting frozen at eight hundred instead of eighty, the game will still go on, just set to a new equilibrium. Although at eight hundred, it's hard to guess how people will think. At twenty, I could not have imagined myself at almost-forty. I can't imagine eighty even now."

Suze snorted.

Mark shrugged. "That will be for them to decide, however many decades or centuries from now. I expect death will still be cheap and always available, doesn't take high tech."

"During the initial transition period," Kareen said, wrenching things back from this flight of speculation to the practical present, "treatment actually will be free, if the subject is willing to sign up for the experimental protocols and give the legal releases. And anyone coming in can give their own permissions." Not needing, this implied, any cooperation from Madame Suze and company. "I expect the Group will prefer to have a few more healthy live subjects to start on, before tackling the more difficult complications from death trauma and cryorevival. Although they'll certainly want data on those as well."

Suze growled. Tenbury scratched his beard.

Kareen regarded her fingernails, looked up, smiled. Miles wasn't sure if anyone else caught Mark's small gesture, two fingers held out and then curled once more atop his stomach. The pair had the good-cop-bad-cop routine down to an art, Miles thought with admiration, and it would be a naïve observer who concluded that all the bad-cop ideas came from Mark—or the good-cop ones from his partner, for that matter. Kareen continued serenely, "The Durona Group will be doing a lot of local hiring, if this goes through. For example, if you, Madame Suzuki, were to sign up for the first round of protocols, and they proved to work as well as we hope, the position of Director of Community Relations could be made open for you. Which would put you in place to work on these problems on an on-going basis, right from here. This is all too complex to be solved in a night, but that doesn't mean it's too complex to be solved ever."

"Buy me off with an empty title? Oh, as if I haven't seen how that works before!"

"What you make of it could be largely up to you," said Mark, sounding as if he didn't care one way or another. "But in three years, when all those chambers below stairs are emptied out, it may be a whole new situation, here. Employment would keep you in the center of things, with real input."

It wasn't the future Suze had set her mind to; Miles fancied he could hear her imagination creaking with the strain of change, like a gate almost rusted shut. Almost. She said querulously, "What about the rest of us?"

"Tenbury, I'd hire tonight," said Mark readily. "We'll be wanting a Director of Physical Plant first thing—the place certainly needs significant upgrades and repairs, starting from the laboratory core outward. We'll likely"—he flicked a glance at Fuwa—"need a local contractor. Medtech Tanaka as well, Raven vouches for her. The rest on a case-by-case basis. I do require competence. Certification can be arranged."

Suze glowered in suspicion. Tenbury raised his hairy eyebrows.

The lawyer, Madame Xia, put in smoothly, "By the tacit contracts argument, Ms. Suzuki is the tacit proxy holder for all who have been frozen here, and can give blanket protocol permissions for all who entered here under her care. I believe I can make this argument work for the city adjudicator, since the city doesn't want the liability for several thousand destitute cryo-corpses."

"Not even if the city could register their votes?" asked Miles. "Seems to me that would be enough to swing a city election, if not one on the Prefecture or planetary level."

"I think I could guarantee—or at least plausibly suggest—expensive legal challenges about that, which the adjudicator would not relish." The lawyer smiled quietly. "Unless disunity among the petitioners forces the matter to go before a judge, in which case I cannot guarantee the outcome, because at that point the issues will become public and political. I actually spend most of my working time keeping my clients
out
of court."

"Public and political sounds like a job for Madame Sato's group, or something like it," Miles said. "I regret that we didn't snatch the other two members of her committee while we were at it. We'd have them now." Although an attempt to carry off three cryo-corpses from NewEgypt's coffers would certainly have taken more time, and might have gone less luckily.

"Client confidentiality has certain limits, Lord Vorkosigan," Xia warned him. Kindly, he thought.

"Diplomatic immunity?"

"Works for you. Not for me. But in this event, with criminal charges certainly coming down on NewEgypt, there may be legal ways to wrench Mr. Kang and Ms. Khosla away from their captors. Subpoena them as witnesses, for starters."

Miles tilted his head in appreciation. "If one could keep them from being destroyed by NewEgypt
en route
."

"That would be an important consideration in designing the approach, yes."

Mark pointed. "Kareen, put her on retainer."

Xia smiled warily. "My plate at work is actually rather full. I was only able to come here tonight because it's after hours."

"Partner or employee?"

"Me? I'm one of three associates in the galactic business law department of my firm. We work under a partner."

"The Durona Group will certainly be needing full-time local legal advice," murmured Kareen. "Perhaps we should talk instead about salary
.
.
.
later."

Xia waved this away, provisionally. "In any case, Ms. Suzuki, I'd invite you to think about what is the better long-term practical result for your patrons. You serve one community; this technology has the potential to serve the planet. If the—"

An echoing boom from outside rattled the windows. Roic shot to his feet and peered into the night. "What t' hell
.
.
.
?"

"That sounded awfully close," said Xia uneasily.

"Was that
us
?" said Madame Suze. "Tenbury
.
.
."

"Could be the plastics fabricator next door," said Fuwa, joining Roic. "Though I can't think what they'd be doing over there at this hour. Or something from the street
.
.
.
collision?"

But with the municipal traffic control net here, collisions were vanishingly rare, Miles had thought.

"It's hard to tell the direction," said Tenbury, craning his neck as well.

"Go up on the roof and look," directed Madame Suze.

Tenbury was halfway out the door when Miles's wristcom chimed, emergency secured channel.
Vorlynkin. Not good
. Miles found himself on his feet without remembering standing up. "Vorkosigan here."

"Lord Auditor." Vorlynkin sounded winded. "An arson team—I counted four men—just put a fire bomb through a ground-floor window of the heat exchanger building. Asterzine, I think—it was a two-part liquid fire-starter, anyway."

"Call the local fire guards!"

"Already did, sir." The cadence of Vorlynkin's language was reverting to old military training, Miles noted in passing. "Police, too. They should be here in moments."

"Good man."

"I'm looking now to see if there are more intruders. Haven't spotted any so far. I'm fairly sure there's no one left in the exchanger building—can't speak to under it."