Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [303]
What was missing, Mark realized after quite a while, were any synopses or finished analyses. He had received raw data only, in all its mass. On the whole, he decided he preferred it that way.
Mark read till his eyes were dry and aching, and his stomach gurgled with festering coffee. Time to break for lunch, he thought, when a guard knocked at his door.
"Lord Mark, your driver is here," the guard informed him politely.
Hell—it was time to break for dinner. The guard escorted him back through the building and delivered him to Pym. It was dark outside. My head hurts.
Doggedly, Mark returned the next morning and started again. And the next. And the next. More reports arrived. In fact, they were arriving faster than he could read them. The harder he worked, the more he was falling behind. Halfway through the fifth day he leaned back in his station chair and thought, This is crazy. Illyan was burying him. From the paralysis of ignorance, he had segued with surprising speed to the paralysis of information-glut. I've got to triage this crap, or I'll never get out of this repulsive building.
"Lies, lies, all lies," he muttered wildly to his comconsole. It seemed to blink and hum back at him, sly and demure.
With a decisive punch, he turned off the comconsole with its endless babble of voices and fountains of data, and sat for a while in darkness and silence, till his ears stopped ringing.
ImpSec hasn't. Hasn't found Miles. He didn't need all this data. Nobody did. He just needed one piece. Let's cut this down to size.
Start with a few explicit assumptions. One. Miles is recoverable.
Let ImpSec look for a rotted body, unmarked grave, or disintegration record all they wanted. Such a search was no use to him, even if successful. Especially if successful.
Only cryo-chambers, whether permanent storage banks or other portables, were of interest. Or—less likely, and notably less common—cryo-revival facilities. But logic put an upper cap on his optimism. If Miles had been successfully revived by friendly hands, the first thing he would do would be to report in. He hadn't, ergo: he was still frozen. Or, if revived, in too bad a shape to function. Or not in friendly hands. So. Where?
The Dendarii cryo-chamber had been found in the Hegen Hub. Well . . . so what? It had been sent there after it was emptied. Sinking down into his station chair with slitted eyes, Mark thought instead about the opposite end of the trail. Were his particular obsessions luring him into believing what he wanted to believe? No, dammit. To hell with the Hegen Hub. Miles never got off the planet. In one stroke, that eliminated over three-fourths of the trash-data clogging his view.
We look at Jackson's Whole reports only, then. Good. Then what?
How had ImpSec checked all the remaining possible destinations? Places without known motivations or connections with House Bharaputra? For the most part, ImpSec had simply asked, concealing their own identity but offering a substantial reward. All at least four weeks after the raid. A cold trail, so to speak. Quite a lot of time for someone to think about their surprise package. Time to hide it, if they were so inclined. So that, in those cases where ImpSec did a second and more complete pass, they were even more likely to come up empty.
Miles is in a place that ImpSec has already checked off, in the hands of someone with hidden motivations to be interested in him.
There were still hundreds of possibilities.
I need a connection. There has to be a connection.
ImpSec had torn apart Norwood's available Dendarii records down to the level of a word-by-word analysis. Nothing. But Norwood was medically trained. And he hadn't sent his beloved Admiral's cryo-chamber