Miles now wished he'd brought them along, even though he was still nervy from his prior failure.  "Yes, Jin and Mina are safe at the Barrayaran consulate."  He added after a moment, when she still didn't seem to know whether to parse this as a comfort or a threat, "Jin has all his creatures there, even Gyre-the-Falcon and your old cat, so he's content for now.  Mina is pretty much sticking with Jin."  This familiar reference to the traveling zoo would convince her of his veracity, he hoped.

"The Barrayaran consulate!  Why?"  She swallowed again.  "Who are you?  Why are you here?"  She didn't add, Why am I here? but Miles thought it was implied.

"What do you remember?"

Her lips clamped shut.

Miles tried again.  "The last thing Jin and Mina remember of you is your arrest by the Northbridge municipal police, eighteen months back.  Two days ago, my people and I found you frozen in a portable cryochamber in Dr. Seiichiro Leiber's townhouse basement.  I'm now trying to close that eighteen-month memory gap.  For both of us, I suppose."

That last plainly shocked her; her stare at him shifted from fear and misplaced anger to sheer bewilderment.  "What?"

Miles sighed, hitching himself up on the stool at the end of her bed.  An Auditor was supposed to listen, not talk—one of Gregor's wee jokes, was that?—but this woman had earned her briefing.  Besides, it was quite likely that Lisa Sato didn't know enough about Barrayar to point to it on a wormhole map.  "I expect I had better begin at the beginning.  I'm a galactic.  My official job title is Imperial Auditor.  That's a high-level government investigator for the Barrayaran Imperium.  You no doubt wonder what I'm doing on Kibou-daini."  Miles wondered himself, some moments.  "I was originally sent to check out a smelly situation with a large WhiteChrys company franchise on Komarr—that's the second planet of our empire—"  As succinctly as he could, he explained the WhiteChrys scam with the Komarran planetary voting shares, including his successful bribery sting.  For the first time, she looked faintly cheered.

"Yes, hit them where they keep their hearts, in their wallets," she murmured with satisfaction.  "Although WhiteChrys isn't even the worst of the corps."

"Hold that thought, we'll come back to it.  Now I need to explain how I met your son Jin, and found this place . . ." Necessarily, he backed up to his attendance at the cryo-conference, and the attack upon it by the N.H.L.L.

"Those murderous idiots!" said Lisa Sato, her voice hearteningly enlivened with scorn for someone other than Miles.