Cryoburn-ARC (24 page)

He unshipped his own hand light and trotted off.

Raven issued Roic a pair of insulated medical gloves, donned a pair himself, and bent to unseal the long bag. The figure revealed seemed a slender little old woman, clad in a sort of plastic caul that clung to her shape. What with the translucent protective ointment heavily slathered on her skin and the frost that instantly began to form on the exposed plastic surface, her helpless nakedness had at least a decent veiling. Roic turned on his own hand light an instant before the corridor lights, and all the little green lights on the drawers, went black. There having proved no way to open a single drawer without setting off some indicator in the central control room, the next best thing had seemed to give the same flicker to five thousand or so drawers at once.

"Ready," said Raven.

Roic tapped the button on the unlocking device; to his relief, the drawer lock opened easily. He slid the long drawer out like opening some dreadful filing cabinet.

Inside was another female figure, also in its caul, which also frosted swiftly. Roic frowned to see that the plastic wrappings weren't quite identical—these seemed to be browner and reinforced with some sort of netting. But, bracing himself, he slid his hands under and lifted her out. Even with the gloves, she seemed to suck the warmth from him in a swift tide. He set her gently on the floor, Raven checked the name tag attached to the outside of the wrappings, and he and Raven between them lifted her replacement into the drawer. The drawer slid shut with a smooth click.

M'lord's hand light flickered at the corridor corner, and he peered around; Roic waved all's-well, and he nodded and ducked away again. By the time Roic and Raven inserted their prize into the bag and sealed it up again, the lights flashed back on. Roic reached up and carefully unsealed the unlocking device, and hid it back in m'lord's kit. He then began re-stacking concealing boxes, wondering how soon a tech crew would arrive to check out their brief power failure.

M'lord returned, and murmured, "Go, go." His eyes seemed as bright as any of the indicator lights, and Roic realized how much he was
enjoying
this caper.
I'm glad one of us is
. Raven seemed as amiable as ever, as if he indulged in this sort of chicanery every day, which Roic knew very well he did not. Roic swallowed and prepared to sprint as the hum of lift tube doors and the echo of voices drifted up the hall that radiated from the central stack, but they turned onto the outer ring before any shouts of
Hey, you there!
could find them.

A short stroll, and they were back at the underground double doors. M'lord paused to lock them again, and call Johannes on his wristcom. The lieutenant was opening the rear of the lift van as they arrived outside. The pallet-load of "supplies" disappeared soundlessly within. Roic still didn't breathe easily till the van turned out the gates and joined the flow of afternoon traffic.

M'lord checked his wristcom. "Sixteen minutes," he said, in a satisfied tone.

Raven had taken the front seat again with Johannes, which made all kinds of sense since the pair of them were by far the most normal-looking, by local standards. Johannes drove sedately but not too sedately, just as instructed. With the back seats folded down to make a cargo space, Roic crouched opposite Madame Sato's body bag from m'lord, alert to reach out and prevent it shifting should Johannes make any sudden turns. Roic had been assured that the cryo-solution and protective ointments kept cryo-corpses slightly pliable, not brittle, and that despite their temperature they wouldn't shatter like an ice cube thrown to the pavement at an accidental blow. But still.

They rode in silence for a few minutes, which Roic broke at last, low-voiced: "All this makes me think about Sergeant Taura. All these other folks got to die in some hope for their future, why
not
her? We were all right there at the Durona clinic, everything was in place for it, it wouldn't have cost much
.
.
."

Taura was one of the mercs from m'lord's old ImpSec covert ops days, before the needle-grenade and cryorevival damage had put him out of that business for good. Like Raven and the rest of the Durona cloned siblings, she was a product of Jacksonian genetic engineering; unlike them, she was a sole survivor, in her case of a failed prototype batch of supposed super-soldiers. She had escaped to m'lord's merc troop, where the super-soldier part had actually worked, m'lord testified. But her creators had built in a fail-safe mechanism for their genetic prototypes; Taura would have been dead of old age at twenty-standard without the medical intervention that the Dendarii medics and later the Duronas had supplied her. Roic had met her twice, desperately memorably, the first time when she'd attended m'lord's wedding, the second when m'lord and Roic had traveled to Escobar to attend her last days in the Durona hospice.

M'lord sighed. "I, you, Rowan, and Raven all tried to talk her into it. If her Dendarii insurance hadn't covered it, I'd have popped for it out of pocket, not that the Duronas would have let me. They still figure they owed her and all the Dendarii mercs involved for their escape from Jackson's Whole. But Taura wasn't having it at any price."

What, wake up, still a freak, in some strange place and time, with all my friends gone?
Taura had said to the protesting Roic, in that terribly-wrong-for-her thready voice.
But you could make new friends!
was an argument that had failed to move her, in the exhaustion of her failing metabolism.

Roic made a helpless gesture. "You could have overridden her. After she was too far gone to tell, ordered her cryoprepped." God knew m'lord was capable of riding over any number of other people's wills.

M'lord shrugged, face sobered in the shared memory. "That would have been for our benefit, then. Not for hers. But Taura chose fire over ice. That, at least, I had no trouble understanding. High temperature cremation leaves no DNA."

She'd been indifferent to where her ashes would be scattered, except
not Jackson's Whole,
so m'lord had provided a burial plot for her urn in his own family cemetery at Vorkosigan Surleau, overlooking the long lake, a task m'lord and Roic had seen to personally.

"Nobody," muttered Roic, "should die of old age at thirty-standard." Certainly not such a blazing spirit as Taura's had been.

M'lord looked meditative. "If the Duronas' or anybody else's anti-aging research ever succeeds, I wonder if death at three hundred or five hundred will come to seem as outrageous?"

"Or two thousand," said Roic, trying to imagine it. Some few Betans and Cetagandans actually made it to almost two centuries, Roic had heard, but their healths had been genetically guaranteed before conception. For random folks alive and afoot already, not a help.

"Not two thousand, probably," said m'lord. "Some actuarially-minded wag once calculated that if all the medical causes of death were removed, the average person would still only make it to about eight hundred-standard before encountering some fatal accident. I suppose that means that some would slab themselves at eighteen and some at eighteen hundred, but it would still be the same game in the end. Just set to a new equilibrium."

"Makes you wonder about the Refusers."

"Indeed. If the God they posit waited billions of years for them to be born, a few hundred extra years till they die should hardly make a difference to Him." M'lord stared off into some sort of twisty m'lord mind-space. "All the worry people expend over not existing after they die, yet nary a one ever seems to spare a moment to worry about not having existed before they were conceived. Or at all. After all, one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed."

Since there didn't seem an answer to this that didn't make Roic's head hurt trying to think about, he kept silent. They turned in past the sagging chain link gates of Madame Suze's facility at last.

It took many hours to bring Lisa Sato's core temperature up from deep-cryonic to just below freezing. Miles sent Johannes back to the consulate, and, as the night wore on, took turn-about with Roic napping in a makeshift bunk in a room opposite Raven's cobbled-together revival lab, set up on the third floor of the old patron intake building. Raven and Medtech Tanaka, too, took the night watch in shifts. Dawn of the new day brought the start of the critical procedures: the flushing of the old cryo-fluid, the swift replacement with what to Miles seemed vats of new synthetic blood. The skin of the supine figure on the procedure table went from clay gray to an encouraging warm ivory with the transfusion. The cryo-fluid gurgled away down the drain.

If they'd had the time and equipment, not to mention a starter-sample from the patient, whole blood identical to the original's could have been grown. The synthetic blood lacked the unique white cells the patient's own body produced, so the revived person would have to be in isolation for an indeterminate time following, till her own marrow began to refill the immunity gaps. Miles had been kept asleep through that phase, Raven told him, but then, he'd had a lot more trauma, surgical and otherwise, to heal from. Ako had spent all last evening cleaning and readying the isolation booth.

Raven was maddeningly vague about how soon his patient might be questioned, and made it clear that her children had priority as her first visitors. Miles didn't argue with that; he couldn't think of anything better to motivate the woman to fight her way to her full faculties.

Miles was anxious to offer help, but as they approached the point of no return in the procedures, Raven sat him down at a distance on a stool with a face mask across his mouth. The memorystick around the edges molded to his skin in a flexible but efficient seal, and the electropores even filtered viruses. Still, Miles wasn't entirely sure if it was only to block germs. So he bit his tongue rather than shrieking when Raven muttered, "Damn it
.
.
.
that's not right."

"What's not right?" Miles asked, as Raven and the medtech busied themselves about the table and didn't answer.

"There's no electrical latency in the brain," Raven said, just before Miles started to repeat his question, louder. "It should be coming up by now.
.
.
.
Tanaka, let's try a good old-fashioned shot of shock, here."

Lisa Sato's head bore something resembling a swimming cap, studded with electronics and sensors, tight to the dark hair plastered flat with cryo-gel. Raven did something to his control screen, and the cap made a snapping noise that made Miles jump and almost topple off his stool. Raven scowled at his readouts. His gloved hand went out, almost unconsciously it seemed to Miles, to massage his patient's limp hand.

"Close that drain," Raven said, abruptly and inexplicably, and the medtech hurried to comply. He stepped back a pace. "This isn't working."

The bottom fell out of Miles's stomach in a sickening lurch. "Raven, you can't stop."
My God, we can't afford to botch this one. Those poor kids are waiting for us to deliver their mother back to them. I promised
.
.
.

"Miles, I've done over seven thousand revivals. I don't need to spend the next half hour jumping on this poor woman's corpse to know she's gone. Her brain is slush, on a micro-level." Raven sighed and turned away from the table, peeling down his mask and drawing off his gloves. "I know a bad prep when I see one, and that was a bad prep. This wasn't my fault. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could
ever
have done." Raven was far too controlled a man to throw his gloves across the room and swear, but he hardly needed to; Miles could read his emotions in his set face, the more fierce for the sharp contrast with his usual easy-going cheer.

"Murdered
.
.
.
do you think?"

"Things can go wrong without someone intending them, you know. In fact, that's the statistical norm. Though not around you, I suppose."

"But not, I think, in this case."

Raven's lips flattened. "Yeah. I can do an autopsy, in a bit, here." When he had recovered his tone of mind, presumably. "Find out exactly what kind of bad prep this was. There are a number of choices. I thought there was something odd about the viscosity of that return fluid
.
.
." He paused. "Let me rephrase that. I bloody insist on the autopsy. I want to know exactly how I was set up for this failure. Because
I don't like being set up like this
."

"Amen," growled Miles. He slipped off his chair, jerked down his mask, and approached the table with its mute burden. The blood pump was still keeping the skin hopefully flushed, deceptive promise. Absently, Raven reached out and switched it off. The silence hurt.

How was he going to explain this to Jin and Mina? Because Miles knew that would have to be his next task. In his rush and his arrogance, he had taken away their hope
.
.
.
no, he'd only taken away their
false
hope. This ending was apparently inevitable, however and whenever it was arrived at, now or later, by his hand or another's. The reflection didn't console him much.

I will get you justice
.
.
.
no. He wasn't in a position to make any such pledges to them. And
I will try
sounded too weak, mere preamble to another adult put-off. But guilt fueled his rage against his—their—unknown enemy as nothing else could. How odd, how suspect. How futile.