A dark shape leaped from the van toward Leiber, who recoiled. Roic took a sweeping knee shot and brought the figure down in a muffled cry of astonishment and rage. A few swift paces, and Roic was in position to put his favorite low-stun immobilization into the back of the fellow’s neck, at can’t-miss range.
“Quick, help me toss him back into his van,” Roic told Leiber, who, puffing, nodded and complied.
Chief Financial Officer Akabane proved a local-looking sort—he might have been Raven’s middle-aged wicked uncle, if the Durona clone had owned any uncles of any description. Although Akabane did not look especially wicked at this point, just pale and limp. And, Roic hoped, defeated.
For all the days m’lord had been playing against the NewEgypt cabal, this was the first direct view Roic had gained of the enemy’s face, except for a few vid scans. It had all been action at a distance, like a space war. Or perhaps some bizarre mutant form of chess where the rules changed every two moves. M’lord’s formidable father, who’d once been a space admiral, might have felt at home, and m’lord had scarcely been given pause, but to Roic it felt strange and bloodless and removed, though he was very grateful for the bloodless part.
And then Roic wondered how m’lord’s sudden trail of chaos through their affairs, erupting out of seeming-nowhere, must have felt to the confused cryocorp men, who’d thought they’d had it all locked down. That was a vision to make a fellow smile, though it was a smile that made Leiber draw back in unease.
From the corner of his eye, Roic saw the lights of emergency vehicles turning into the street; they’d be through the gate in seconds. “Melt into the crowd and meet me back at the end door,” he told Leiber, and swiftly followed his own advice. Melting into this crowd proved a bit of a trick, as he was a head taller, as well as about a century younger, than anyone else around him. But there was plenty enough else going on right now that no one spared him much attention.
Leiber arrived a few paces behind him. “That’s it?” he asked.
Roic nodded. “M’lord will arrange the rest. Stunner tag’s over.” Roic took a moment’s modest satisfaction in his job performance. “It’s all words from here on. Which are not my department.” He added after a reflective pause: “Thankfully.”
Jin blinked open his eyes to discover himself staring at a ceiling—of the recovery room, he realized after turning his head. He touched his face, which was tingling, and scrunched his eyelids open and shut a few times, but he didn’t feel especially sick or dizzy. He didn’t feel especially good, either. Sort of blah, really. He seemed to be lying on one of the room’s several raised, narrow bed-tables, though it didn’t have any sheets, and its brittle old plastic felt nasty on his skin.
“Jin, are you all right?”
He sat up on one elbow to find his mother leaning over the side of the bed-table. She was wearing her filtering mask again, her robe all belted up tight, and her eyes searched him anxiously.
“I guess so.” He rubbed his face some more, then scrubbed his scalp where it still hurt from the hair-pulling.
Mina skipped to their mother’s side and looked up at him with great interest. “Armsman Roic shot you. I’d never seen anyone get shot for real before.”
Neither had Jin. It felt very strange to have been shot. For the first time, he wondered what it had really been like for Miles-san when he’d been shot with that needle-grenade. Of course, that was nothing like being merely stunned, Jin supposed, but that weird moment of looking into Armsman Roic’s unyielding face, and feeling so helpless and too late and that his world was being taken away from him by people he didn’t, couldn’t, control… He scowled, not liking that feeling much.
“It’s not broken,” came Raven-sensei’s voice, and, “You couldn’t prove it by me,” Vorlynkin’s voice returned.
Jin twisted around to find the pair of them at the next table over. Vorlynkin was sitting up with his legs dangling. His wide-sleeved coat was off, tossed aside, along with his undercoat, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. Raven-sensei stood in front of him, poking at his left arm, which Vorlynkin was holding rather defensively.
Vorlynkin’s face was all washed, and Nefertiti’s claw marks were now three thin red lines beneath a shiny layer of transparent plastic bandage. There was a lot of drying blood soaked on his shirt collar, though, and spattered elsewhere on his clothes, and Jin cringed in guilt for his new pet.
“You will have some magnificent bruises,” Raven-sensei continued.
“A crowbar will do that. I’m lucky I didn’t get my face bashed in.”
“Vorlynkin-san found more ninjas,” Mina confided to Jin. “They had a fight. Vorlynkin-san won.”
Vorlynkin looked over and smiled rather ruefully at her. “Fortunately for me, not ninjas. They were just a couple of borrowed thugs from the local chapter of the N.H.L.L. Finally trying to carry out their slogan, I suppose.”
“I thought they were all arrested after the conference kidnappings,” said Raven-sensei.
“That was an especially radical splinter group, apparently. Their organization is not very unified at the best of times, I gather.” Vorlynkin added to Jin, “I found the pair of them around the far end of the next building over from your hideout, trying to pry the door open and get down into the tunnels with more fire-starter. If they’d succeeded it would have been a major mess.”
Raven-sensei’s eyebrows lifted. “Would the arsonists even have gotten themselves out alive?”
“Hard to say. It seems awfully easy to get turned around down there. But the department was able to get the fire in the exchanger building under control quickly, once I’d told them it was asterzine. Ugly product, asterzine. You don’t want to put water on it, and it would have been a horrible surprise for the firefighters if they had. You can believe they’ll be going after the N.H.L.L. in the morning.”
Jin’s brow wrinkled. “Why a crowbar? The door around the next side after that is always left unlocked.”
Vorlynkin blinked, then laughed, then winced, touching his scratched face. “Just as well that none of us knew that, I suppose. After I confiscated the crowbar, I was able to hold them till the police arrived. Some of the firemen were more than eager to help. The pair fingered the NewEgypt security guards as having engaged them, evidently just to create a diversion for Dr. Leiber’s re-kidnapping, though I gather that some of the Liberators grew over-eager and exceeded their instructions. But it should lead back nicely to the senior men Lord Auditor Vorkosigan wished to target.”
Their mother rubbed her forehead, frown-lines deepening around her eyes. “If they don’t manage to suppress it all, again.”
“Not this time, I suspect,” said Vorlynkin, smiling at her in reassurance.
“Where’s Nefertiti?” asked Jin in sudden alarm.
Mina pointed at the desk built into the far wall, along with a lot of cupboards. From the shadows beneath came a mumbling sort of growl. “She’s hiding. Maybe you can get her to come out after she calms down. I tried some food, but I don’t think she’s hungry right now.”
Raven-sensei stepped around the tables to smile at Jin, peer into his eyes, thumb back his eyelids, and feel his pulse. “Headache? Nausea?”
“Not really.” Jin felt down his tingling face to find a strip of plastic bandage across his neck.
“Just a nick,” Raven-sensei assured him.
“My face is a little numb.”
“That’s normal. It’ll pass in another hour. If it doesn’t, let me know.” Raven-sensei paused and cleared his throat. “Lord Vorkosigan said to tell you when you woke up, those few minutes of delay you and Mina caused with those NewEgypt thugs made all the difference to us. The rescue party, as it turned out.”
“Oh,” said Mina, sounding pleased.
Raven-sensei nodded. “If they’d hustled you out of the building before we arrived, he said, it would have been a long stern chase—one of his military turns of phrase, that—meaning, we’d have had a hell of a time catching up with you. Although I imagine he would have, somehow. He, ah… tends to be persistent.”