Lois Bujold - Cryoburn

They turned in at the next connecting spoke; m’lord’s lips moved as he counted off side branches, then set in a smile as the core stack hove into view. Another pause, while m’lord weaseled his way into a locked electrical access panel, did some careful counting, and nodded. They then went out another spoke and turned right into one of the corridors, this one completed, dimly lit with utility lighting and lined with loaded cryo-drawers.

“This doesn’t look so fancy,” Roic murmured.

“These are the cheap seats,” said m’lord. “If you want to be filed away behind faux mahogany and brass fittings—or gold, I’m told—NewEgypt can supply, on the upper levels.”

Even down here, a lot of the drawers had small holders set in the walls beside them for odd little personal offerings, including tiny bottles of wine, wrapped snacks, or burned-down stubs of incense sticks. Most common were flowers, mostly plastic or silk but sometimes real ones—some fresh, some brown and drooping sadly from their dried-out water tubes.

“Here,” said m’lord, stopping abruptly. He craned his neck at a drawer at the top of the stack. “Read off the number, Raven.”

Raven recited a long alphanumeric string, twice.

M’lord checked carefully against the data on his wristcom. “This is it.”

The disguising boxes then found another use, as m’lord filched one to boost him to a convenient height to examine the drawer lock and attach his ImpSec-special door opener to it. “All right,” he murmured, climbing back down. “When the lights go out, make the switch.”

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.