And m'lord promptly topped—of course—Roic's tale with a hair-curling story of the appalling extent of the Cryocombs beneath the city, and of how m'lord had stumbled on a bootleg freezing operation run by, apparently, Kibou street geezers.  Raven seemed less impressed by the bootleg cryonics—he was Jacksonian, after all.  As near as Roic could tell, everything on Jackson's Whole was done illegally.  Or, more precisely, lawlessly.

"Fragile and doomed," was Raven's succinct opinion of Madame Suze's on-going operation.  "I'm astonished she's gotten away with so much for so long."

"Mm, maybe not.  It's clandestine, but it doesn't really rock the cryocorps' boat.  Everyone here being in the same boat, after all."  M'lord rubbed his chin and squinted red-rimmed eyes that glinted a trifle too brightly.  "Then we come to this woman Lisa Sato, and her group."

"Your little zookeeper's frozen mama?" said Roic.

"Yep.  The N.H.L.L. is allowed to run its length, Suze's operation is overlooked, but Sato's seemingly much more reasonable and legal group is broken up, at considerable trouble and expense.  All that ambient noise, and yet only one voice is silenced."  M'lord gestured to the secured comconsole, now dark.  "I've spent the past several hours doing some digging—"

And as a former ImpSec galactic operative, this sort of digging was meat and drink to m'lord, Roic reflected.

"—and in just that time, I've turned up anomalies galore.  Lisa Sato was not the only member of her group to come to a bad end.  Two others were frozen after supposedly-unsuccessful treatments for medical conditions that should not have been fatal, another died in an accident, and yet another was ruled a suicide of the fell-or-jumped sort.  Even at the time, brows were raised, and quite a few people were offended, but the aftershocks were drowned out in the news by a flood of trivial sex scandals.  What does this suggest to you?"

"That Lisa Sato's group was getting ready to rock somebody's boat pretty hard," said Roic slowly.

Raven nodded concurrence.  "How?"

"That, interestingly, does not turn up in the public record.  Nor even in the less-public records.  Somebody did a first-class job on the cleanup, there, even if they weren't able to make it completely invisible.  That now heads my list of shiny new questions—just what got cleaned up, a year and a half ago?"

Roic frowned.  "Very riveting, m'lord, but . . . what has this got t' do with Barrayar's interests?"

M'lord cleared his throat.  "It is far too early to say," he said primly.

Roic, glumly, read that as, I haven't made up a reason yet, but give me time.  Was m'lord going all quixotic on account of that orphan boy?  Emperor Gregor himself had warned Roic about m'lord's tendency to expensive knight-errantry, in one of their rare private conversations.  From the Imperial sigh that had accompanied this, it had been unclear if Gregor actually expected Roic to restrain m'lord, or not.