Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

Suze looked away as he buttoned up again. “Old age,” she said, “is slower than a grenade, but a lot more thorough.”

“This is unfortunately true,” said Raven, “though I may have a few aids for that as well. What I would suggest is that Madame Suze, here, draw up a list of half a dozen or so candidates, and let me triage them for the maximum chance of medical success. This should produce the most satisfactory result all round.”

“Mm,” she said. Her hand crept up and rubbed her chest, over her heart. “Hm.”

Jin, unable to contain himself any longer, burst out, “Please, Suze-san! Let them!”

The caterpillar eyebrows climbed. “What’s it to you, boy?”

Jin pressed his lips together and looked imploringly at Miles.

“Are you sure you want to know?” Miles inquired.

Suze was shrewd enough to hesitate a long moment before her curiosity overcame her better judgment. “Yah.”

Miles opened his hand to Jin, who cried, “Miles-san promised to get my mother back!”

Suze’s face pinched in horror. “Oh, and you think you aren’t going to draw attention, mister galactic investigator? Lisa Sato was all about attention!”

“We may draw some eventually, but not to you,” Miles said smoothly. “As soon as her recovery permits, we’ll remove her to the Barrayaran consulate and reunite her with both her children. No link to this place.”

“You think so? Those that froze her will sure enough want to find out who unfroze her! Which will drop them right back in my lap, which isn’t big enough to hold them, I promise you!”

“Yes, but the first thing they’ll run into is me. I plan…” Miles hesitated. He didn’t exactly have a plan, yet. More of a stab in the dark. He still wasn’t sure what his blade would connect with…

“What?” demanded Suze.

“I plan to give them other worries.” He glanced at Raven. “Much depends on Madame Sato, both on what she has to say and how soon she can say it. I had rather severe cryo-amnesia, myself. Which lingered uncomfortably.”

“I remember that,” said Raven. “Uncomfortable it may have been, but it didn’t really last that long. We were just pressed for time, back then. Madame Sato—well, I can’t give any guarantees at this point.”

Miles nodded understanding, both of what was said and what was unsaid, and turned again to Suze. “I need one more favor. I’d like to borrow a cryo-corpse.”

“ What, ” Suze began in a towering tone, which weakened to, “…kind?”

“Female, about fifty kilos. As young as you have available. Anything else, Raven?”

Raven shook his head. “That should do it.”

“We undertake not to damage her in any way that would compromise her future revival,” Miles went on, hoping he didn’t sound too airy.

“That a guarantee, galactic?”

“It won’t be wholly under my control, but if things go my way, she should be all right.” I hope . “In any covert operation, people… take their chances.”

Raven winced—ah, maybe not the best parallel to draw, after the chest display.

“When?”

“Soon. Possibly tonight, no later than tomorrow night.”

Suze’s nostrils flared in a long, indrawn breath of doubt.

Miles held up a pair of fingers. “ Two cryorevivals of your choice.”

Suze turned her head and made a throwing-away gesture. “Go see the plant medtech. Vristi Tanaka. Jin will show you the way. If you can talk her into going along with all this nonsense, though I suppose you will… Talk, talk, talk. Makes me tired.”

Miles rose quickly, so as not to outwear his welcome or her decision. “Thank you, Madame Suze. I promise you…” you won’t regret this was too big a diplomacy to push past even his teeth. “…it will be interesting,” he finished.

Suze’s snort sent them on their way.

The infirmary turned out to be on the second floor of the facility’s old patron intake building. Jin led Miles and Raven through double doors to a corridor with some two or three rooms apparently furbished up for action, judging from the fresh medical smell. They found Tenbury lingering outside of one of them, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, a narrow float pallet grounded at his feet.

“Jin!” he said, looking pleased. “They said you’d got lost!” He looked somewhat less pleased at Miles. “You again.” His brow wrinkled at Raven.

“We came to see Tanaka-san,” Jin explained. “It’s important.”

“She’s busy right now”—Tenbury jerked a thumb at the room beyond—“but they should be done soon.”

Raven craned his neck to peer through a narrow glass window in the door. “Ah, cryoprep in progress? I’d like to see that.”

“Raven-sensei’s a doctor. From Escobar,” Jin began. Tenbury looked perturbed, and began to speak. Miles cut the debate short by simply knocking.

The knock was answered by a frowning woman, brown skin like old leather, spare of build and with straight white hair where Suze was stout and frizzy, but of a like age, Miles judged, and without the alcohol fumes. Her face lightened when she saw Jin.

“Ah, you’re found, Jin! And who have your creatures savaged now, and can it wait?”

“No one, Tanaka-san. But it’s kind of urgent. Suze-san sent us over.”

Miles let Jin run through his introductions, at which the boy was becoming nicely practiced. He picked up: “We’ve made arrangements with Madame Suze to use your facilities for a private cryorevival, if they meet Dr. Durona’s needs. May we come in?”

“Huh!” she said, and gave way, staring at Raven. Miles wondered if he’d rumpled Raven’s clothes, mussed his neat hair, and doused him with gin if he would have seemed less out of place, here, less alarming to these people. Too late.

On a table standing out from the far wall lay the naked body of a frail old man, detained, Miles thought, at the border crossing between life and death. A sheet draped across his middle lent him a scrap of dignity, as much as one could have when given over to plastic tubes and the will or whim of others. A cold-blanket wrapped around his skull sped the chilling of his brain. A tube from a tank above, divided partway down, ran a clear liquid into both carotid arteries. A wider tube, from a vein in his thigh, ran a dark pink color to a knee-height tub with a drain, with a trickle of water from a spout above to keep things flowing. Judging from the paleness of the skin and nails, and the color of the murky exit fluid, the old body was almost wholly perfused with cryo-solution.

Ako hovered, closely supervising the process; she’d evidently overheard something through the doorway, because she looked up and said excitedly, “A doctor? We’re getting a real doctor?”

Miles waved down this hope, before it could grow big and bite. “Just visiting. We’ll explain it all when you’re finished, here.”

Jin was staring; Miles wondered how disturbing this process was to the boy, or if he’d seen it before. It was disturbing to Miles, and he’d done it before, or had it done to him. Maybe the more unsettling for that? For the first time, he wondered how much the news of his own encounter with the needle-grenade had felt like history repeats to his father, if it had triggered unwelcome old memories of the Princess-and-Countess Olivia’s messy death. I must apologize to him for that, when next we meet .

“It almost seems too simple,” Miles murmured to Raven.

Raven said, “The complexity lies in the cryo-preservation fluid, which has a whole pharmaceutical facility behind it. Or so one trusts. Where are you getting your cryo-fluid, Madame Tanaka?”

The medtech’s old mouth set in a flat smile. “The concentrate falls off the back of a few loading docks of hospitals here in town. They discard their outdated supplies a couple of times a year. We distill our own water to reconstitute it.”