Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold [0]
BAEN BOOKS by
LOIS McMASTER BUJOLD
The Vorkosigan Saga:
Shards of Honor
Barrayar
The Warrior's Apprentice
The Vor Game
Cetaganda
Borders of Infinity
Brothers in Arms
Mirror Dance
Memory
Komarr
A Civil Campaign
Diplomatic Immunity
Cryoburn
Falling Free
Ethan of Athos
Omnibus Editions:
Cordelia's Honor
Young Miles
Miles, Mystery & Mayhem
Miles Errant
Miles, Mutants & Microbes
Miles in Love
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BAEN BOOKS
The Vorkosigan Companion, edited by
Lillian Stewart Carl and John Helfers
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Lois McMaster Bujold
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3394-1
Cover art by David Seeley
First printing, November 2010
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
tk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
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