Cryoburn b-17 Read online

  Cryoburn

  ( Barrayar - 17 )

  Lois Mcmaster Bujold

  Miles Vorkosigan is back!

  Kibou-daini is a planet obsessed with cheating death. Barrayaran Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan can hardly disapprove-he's been cheating death his whole life, on the theory that turnabout is fair play. But when a Kibou-daini cryocorp-an immortal company whose job it is to shepherd its all-too-mortal frozen patrons into an unknown future-attempts to expand its franchise into the Barrayaran Empire, Emperor Gregor dispatches his top troubleshooter Miles to check it out.

  On Kibou-daini, Miles discovers generational conflict over money and resources is heating up, even as refugees displaced in time skew the meaning of generation past repair. Here he finds a young boy with a passion for pets and a dangerous secret, a Snow White trapped in an icy coffin who burns to re-write her own tale, and a mysterious crone who is the very embodiment of the warning Don't mess with the secretary. Bribery, corruption, conspiracy, kidnapping-something is rotten on Kibou-daini, and it isn't due to power outages in the Cryocombs. And Miles is in the middle-of trouble!

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Cryoburn

  Chapter One

  Angels were falling all over the place.

  Miles blinked, trying to resolve the golden streaks sleeting through his vision into mere retinal flashes, but they stubbornly persisted as tiny, distinct figures, faces dismayed, mouths round. He heard their wavering cries like the whistle of fireworks from far off, the echoes buffeted by hillsides.

  Ah, terrific. Auditory hallucinations, too.

  Granted the visions seemed more dangerous, in his current addled state. If he could see things that were not there, it was also quite possible for him to not see things that were there, like stairwells, or broken gaps in this corridor floor. Or balcony railings, but wouldn’t he feel those, pressing against his chest? Not that he could see anything in this pitch darkness—not even his hands, reaching uncertainly before him. His heart was beating too fast, rushing in his ears like muffled surf, his dry mouth gasping. He had to slow down. He scowled at the tumbling angels, peeved. If they were going to glow like that, they might at least illuminate his surroundings for him, like little celestial grav-lights, but no. Nothing so helpful.

  He stumbled, and his hand banged against something hollow-sounding—had that bit of wall shifted? He snatched his arms in, wrapping them around himself, trembling. I’m just cold, yeah, that’s it. Which had to be from the power of suggestion, since he was sweating.

  Hesitantly, he stretched out again and felt along the corridor wall. He began to move forward more slowly, fingers lightly passing over the faint lines and ripples of drawer edges and handle-locks, rank after rank of them, stacked high beyond his reach. Behind each drawer-face, a frozen corpse: stiff, silent, waiting in mad hope. A hundred corpses to every thirty steps or so, thousands more around each corner, hundreds of thousands in this lost labyrinth. No—millions.

  That part, unfortunately, was not a hallucination.

  The Cryocombs, they called this place, rumored to wind for kilometers beneath the city. The tidy blocks of new mausoleums on the city’s western fringe, zoned as the Cryopolis, did not account for all the older facilities scattered around and underneath the town going back as much as a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, some still operational, some cleared and abandoned. Some abandoned without being cleared? Miles’s ears strained, trying to detect a reassuring hum of refrigeration machinery beyond the blood-surf and the angels’ cries. Now, there was a nightmare for him—all those banks of drawers bumping under his fingertips concealing not frozen hope, but warm rotting death.

  It would be stupid to run.

  The angels kept sleeting. Miles refused to let what was left of his mind be diverted in an attempt to count them, even by a statistically valid sampling-and-multiplication method. Miles had done such a back-of-the-napkin rough calculation when he’d first arrived here on Kibou-daini, what, just five days ago? Seems longer. If the cryo-corpses were stacked up along the corridors at a density, on average, of a hundred per ten meters, that made for ten thousand along each kilometer of corridor. One hundred kilometers of corridors for every million frozen dead. Therefore, something between a hundred and fifty and two hundred kilometers of cryo-corridors tucked around this town somewhere.

  I am so lost.

  His hands were scraped and throbbing, his trouser knees torn and damp. With blood? There had been crawlspaces and ducts, hadn’t there? Yes, what had seemed like kilometers of them, too. And more ordinary utility tunnels, lit by ceiling tubes and not lined with centuries of mortality. His weary legs stumbled, and he froze—um, stopped—once more, to be sure of his balance. He wished fiercely for his cane, gone astray in the scuffle earlier—how many hours ago, now?—he could be using it like a blind man on Old Earth or Barrayar’s own Time of Isolation, tapping in front of his feet for those so-vividly-imagined gaps in the floor.

  His would-be kidnappers hadn’t roughed him up too badly in the botched snatch, relying instead on a hypospray of sedative to keep their captive under control. Too bad it had been in the same class of sedatives to which Miles was violently allergic—or even, judging by his present symptoms, the identical drug. Expecting a drowsy deadweight, they’d instead found themselves struggling with a maniacal little screaming man. This suggested his snatchers hadn’t known everything about him, a somewhat reassuring thought.

  Or even anything about him. You bastards are on the top of Imperial Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan’s very own shit list now, you bet. But under what name? Only five days on this benighted world, and already total strangers are trying to kill me. Sadly, it wasn’t even a record. He wished he knew who they’d been. He wished he were back home in the Barrayaran Empire, where the dread title of Imperial Auditor actually meant something to people. I wish those wretched angels would stop shrieking at me.

  “Flights of angels,” he muttered in experimental incantation, “sing me to my rest.”

  The angels declined to form up into a ball like a will-o’-the-wisp and lead him onward out of this place. So much for his dim hope that his subconscious had been keeping track of his direction while the rest of his mind was out, and would now produce some neat inspiration in dramatic form. Onward. One foot in front of the other, wasn’t that the grownup way of solving problems? Surely he ought to be a grownup at his age.

  He wondered if he was going in circles.

  His trailing hand wavered through black air across a narrow cross-corridor, made for access to the banks’ supporting machinery, which he ignored. Later, another. He’d been suckered into exploring down too many of those already, which was part of how he’d got so hideously turned around. Go straight or, if his corridor dead-ended, right, as much as possible, that was his new rule.

  But then his bumping fingers crossed something that was not a bank of cryo-drawers, and he stopped abruptly. He felt around without turning, because turning, he’d discovered, destroyed what little orientation he still possessed. Yes, a door! If only it wasn’t another utility closet. If only it was unlocked, for a change.

  Unlocked, yes! Miles hissed through his teeth and pulled. Hinges creaked with corrosion. It seemed to weigh a ton, but the bloody thing moved! He stuck an experimental foot through the gap and felt around. A floor, not a drop—if his senses weren’t lying, again. He had nothing with which to prop open the door; he hoped he might find it again if this proved another dead end. Carefully, he knelt on all fours and eased through, feeling in front of him.

  Not another closet. Stairs, emergency stairs! He seemed to be on a landing in front of the door. To his right, steps went up, cool and gritty under his sore hand. To his left, down. Which way? He had to run out of
up sooner, surely. It was probably a delusion, if a powerful one, that he might go down forever. This maze could not descend to the planet’s magma, after all. The heat would thaw the dead.

  There was a railing, not too wobbly, but he started up on all fours anyway, patting each riser to be sure the step was all there before trusting his weight to it. A reversal of direction, more painful climbing. Another turning at another landing—he tried its door, which was also unlocked, but did not enter it. Not unless or until he ran out of stairs would he let himself be forced back in there with those endless ranks of corpses. He tried to keep count of the flights, but lost track after a few turnings. He heard himself whimpering under his breath in time with the angel ululations, and forced himself to silence. Oh God, was that a faint gray glow overhead? Real light, or just another mirage?

  He knew it for real light when he saw the pale glimmer of his hands, the white ghosts of his shirtsleeves. He hadn’t become disembodied in the dark after all, huh.

  On the next landing he found a door with a real window, a dirty square pane as wide as his two stretched hands. He craned his neck and peered out, blinking against the grayness that seemed bright as fire, making his dark-staring eyes water. Oh gods and little fishes let it not be locked…

  He shoved, then gasped relief as the door moved. It didn’t creak as loudly as the one below. Could be a roof. Be careful. He crawled again, out into free air at last.

  Not a roof; a broad alley at ground level. One hand upon the rough stucco wall behind him, Miles clambered to his feet and squinted up at slate gray clouds, a spitting mist, and lowering dusk. All luminous beyond joy.

  The structure from which he’d just emerged rose only one more storey, but opposite it another building rose higher. It seemed to have no doors on this side, nor lower windows, but above, dark panes gleamed silver in the diffuse light. None were broken, yet the windows had an empty, haunted look, like the eyes of an abandoned woman. It seemed a vaguely industrial block, no shops or houses in sight. No lights, security or otherwise. Warehouses, or a deserted factory? A chill wind blew a plastic flimsy skittering along the cracked pavement, a bit of bright trash more solid than all the wailing angels in the world. Or in his head. Whichever.

  He was still, he judged, in the Territorial Prefecture capital of Northbridge, or Kitahashi, as every place on this planet seemed to boast two interchangeable names, to ensure the confusion of tourists no doubt. Because to have arrived at any other urban area this size, he would have had to walk over a hundred kilometers underground in a straight line, and while he would buy the hundred kilometers, considering how his feet felt right now, the straight line part was right out. He might even be ironically close to his downtown starting point, but on the whole, he thought not.

  With one hand trailing over the scabrous stucco, partly to hold himself upright and partly from what was by now grim superstitious habit, Miles turned—right—and stumbled up the alley to its first cross-corri—corner. The pavement was cold. His captors had taken away his shoes early on; his socks were in tatters, and possibly also his skin, but his feet were too numb to register pain.

  His hand crossed a faded graffiti, sprayed in some red paint and then imperfectly rubbed out, Burn The Dead. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that slogan since he’d come downside: once on an underpass wall on the way from the shuttleport, where a cleaning crew was already at work effacing it; more frequently down in the utility tunnels, where no tourists were expected to venture. On Barrayar, people burned offerings for the dead, but Miles suspected that wasn’t the meaning here. The mysterious phrase had been high on his list of items to investigate further, before it had all gone sideways… yesterday? This morning?

  Turning the corner into another unlit street or access road, which was bounded on the opposite side by a dilapidated chain-link fence, Miles hesitated. Looming out of the gathering gloom and angel-rain were two figures walking side-by-side. Miles blinked rapidly, trying to resolve them, then wished he hadn’t.

  The one on the right was a Tau Cetan beaded lizard, as tall, or short, as himself. Its skin rippled with variegated colored scales, maroon, yellow, black, ivory-white in the collar around its throat and down its belly, but rather than progressing in toadlike hops, it walked upright, which was a clue. A real Tau Cetan beaded lizard, squatting, might come up nearly to Miles’s waist, so it wasn’t exceptionally large for its species. But it also carried sacks swinging from its hands, definitely not real beaded lizard behavior.

  Its taller companion… well. A six-foot-tall butterbug was definitely a creature out of his own nightmares, and not anyone else’s. Looking rather like a giant cockroach, with a pale pulsing abdomen, folded brown wing carapaces, and bobbing head, it nonetheless strode along on two sticklike hind legs and also swung cloth sacks from its front claws. Its middle legs wavered in and out of existence uncertainly, as if Miles’s brain could not decide exactly how to scale up the repulsive thing.

  As the pair approached him and slowed, staring, Miles took a firmer grip on the nearest supporting wall, and essayed cautiously, “Hello?”

  The butterbug turned its insectile head and studied him in turn. “Stay back, Jin,” it advised its shorter companion. “He looks like some sort of druggie, stumbled in here. Lookkit his eyes.” Its mandibles and questing palps wiggled as it spoke, its male voice sounding aged and querulous.

  Miles wanted to explain that while he was certainly drugged, he was no addict, but getting the distinction across seemed too much of a challenge. He tried a big reassuring smile, instead. His hallucinations recoiled.

  “Hey,” said Miles, annoyed. “I can’t look nearly as bad to you as you look to me. Deal with it.” Perhaps he had wandered into some talking animal story like the ones he’d read, over and over, in the nursery to Sasha and little Hellion. Except the creatures encountered in such tales were normally furrier, he thought. Why couldn’t his chemically-enchanted neurons have spat out giant kittens?

  He put on his most austere diplomat’s tones, and said, “I beg your pardon, but I seem to have lost my way.” Also my wallet, my wristcom, half my clothes, my bodyguard, and my mind. And—his hand felt around his neck—his Auditor’s seal-ring on its chain. Not that any of its overrides or other tricks would work on this world’s com-net, but Armsman Roic might at least have tracked him by its ping. If Roic was still alive. He’d been upright when Miles had last seen him, when they’d been separated by the panicking mob.

  A fragment of broken stone pressed into his foot, and he shifted. If his eye could pick out the difference between pebbles and glass and plastic on the pavement, why couldn’t it tell the difference between people and huge insects? “It was giant cicadas the last time I had a reaction this bad,” he told the butterbug. “A giant butterbug is actually sort of reassuring. No one else’s brain on this planet would generate butterbugs, except maybe Roic’s, so I know exactly where you’re coming from. Judging from the decor around here, the locals’d probably go for some jackal-headed fellow, or maybe a hawk-man. In a white lab coat.” Miles realized he’d spoken aloud when the pair backed up another step. What, were his eyes flashing celestial light? Or glowing feral red?

  “Just leave, Jin,” the butterbug told its lizard companion, tugging on its arm. “Don’t talk to him. Walk away slowly.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to help him?” A much younger voice; Miles couldn’t judge if it was a boy’s or a girl’s.

  “Yes, you should!” said Miles. “With all these angels in my eyes I can’t even tell where I’m stepping. And I lost my shoes. The bad guys took them away from me.”

  “Come on, Jin!” said the butterbug. “We got to get these bags of findings back to the secretaries before dark, or they’ll be mad at us.”

  Miles tried to decide if that last remark would have made any more sense to his normal brain. Perhaps not.

  “Where are you trying to get to?” asked the lizard with the young voice, resisting its companion’s pull.

  “I…�
�� don’t know, Miles realized. Back was not an option till the drug had cleared his system and he’d garnered some notion of who his enemies were—if he returned to the cryonics conference, assuming it was still going on after all the disruptions, he might just be rushing back into their arms. Home was definitely on the list, and up till yesterday at the top, but then things had grown… interesting. Still, if his enemies had just wanted him dead, they’d had plenty of chances. Some hope there… “I don’t know yet,” he confessed.

  The elderly butterbug said in disgust, “Then we can’t very well send you there, can we? Come on, Jin!”

  Miles licked dry lips, or tried to. No, don’t leave me! In a smaller voice, he said, “I’m very thirsty. Can you at least tell me where I might find the nearest drinking water?” How long had he been lost underground? The water-clock of his bladder was not reliable—he might well have pissed in a corner to relieve himself somewhere along his random route. His thirst suggested he’d been wandering something between ten hours and twenty, though. He almost hoped for the latter, as it meant the drug should start clearing soon.

  The lizard, Jin, said slowly, “I could bring you some.”

  “No, Jin!”

  The lizard jerked its arm back. “You can’t tell me what to do, Yani! You’re not my parents!” Its voice went jagged on that last.

  “Come along. The custodian is waiting to close up!”

  Reluctantly, with a backward glance over its brightly-patterned shoulder, the lizard allowed itself to be dragged away up the darkening street.

  Miles sank down, spine against the building wall, and sighed in exhaustion and despair. He opened his mouth to the thickening mist, but it did not relieve his thirst. The chill of the pavement and the wall bit through his thin clothing—just his shirt and gray trousers, pockets emptied, his belt also taken. It was going to get colder as night fell. This access road was unlighted. But at least the urban sky would hold a steady apricot glow, better than the endless dark below ground. Miles wondered how cold he would have to grow before he crawled back inside the shelter of that last door. A hell of a lot colder than this. And he hated cold.