Lois Bujold - Mirror Dance

Quinn kept the pumps going till what came out ran greenish-clear.

The medic meanwhile had apparently found the ends he was looking and attached two more tubes. More blood, mixed with cryo-fluid, welled up and spilled from the wound. The creek became a river.

The medic pulled Miles’s boots and socks off, and ran sensors over his paling feet. “Almost there … damn, we’re nearly dry.” He hastened to his jug, which had switched itself off and was blinking a red indicator light.

“I used all I had,” said Quinn.

“It’s probably enough. They were both small people. Clamp those ends—” He tossed her something glittering, which she snatched out of the air. They bent over the little body. “Into the chamber, then,” said the medic. Quinn cradled the head, the medic took the torso and hips. The arms and legs dangled down. “He’s light …” They swung their stripped burden hastily into the cryo-chamber, leaving the blood-soaked uniform on the floor in a sodden heap. Quinn left the medic to make the last connections and turned away blind-eyed, talking to her helmet. She did not look down at the long silver package at her feet.

Thorne appeared, crossing the chamber at a jog. Where had it been? Thorne caught Quinn’s eye, and with a jerk of its head at the dead Bharaputrans reported, “They came up through the tunnels, all right. I have the exits secured, for now.” Thorne glowered bleakly at the cryo-chamber. The hermaphrodite looked suddenly … middle-aged. Old.

Quinn acknowledge this with a nod. “Key to Channel 9-C. We got trouble outside.”

A kind of dreary curiosity winkled through Mark’s numb shock. He turned his own headset back on. He’d had it helplessly and hopelessly turned off for hours, ever since Thorne had snatched back its command. He followed the captains’ transmissions.

The Blue and Orange Squad perimeter teams were under heavy pressure from beefed-up Bharaputran security forces. Quinn’s delay in this building was drawing Bharaputrans like flies to carrion, with a buzzing excitement. With over two-thirds of the clones now packed aboard the shuttle, the enemy had stopped directing heavy fire toward it, but airborne reinforcements were gathering fast, hovering like vultures. Quinn and company were in imminent danger of being surrounded and cut off.

“Got to be another way,” muttered Quinn. She switched channels. “Lieutenant Kimura, how’s it going with you? Resistance still soft?”

“It’s hardened up beautifully. I kinda got my hands full right now, Quinnie.” Kimura’s thin, weirdly cheerful voice came back cut by a wash of static indicating plasma fire and the activation of his plasma mirror field. “We’ve achieved our objective and are pulling out now. Trying to. Chat later, huh?” More static.

“Which objective? Take care of your damn shuttle, y’hear, boy? You may yet have to come for us. Report to me the second you’re back in the air.”

“Right.” A slight pause. “Why isn’t the Admiral on this channel, Quinnie?”

Quinn’s eyes squeezed shut in pain. “He’s … temporarily out of contact. Move it, Kimura!”

Kimura’s reply, whatever it was, broke up in another wash of static. A program regarding Kimura and his objective was loaded in Mark’s helmet, but the lieutenant seemed to be transmitting from somewhere other than the medical complex. A feint? If so, Kimura wasn’t drawing nearly enough enemy troops away from them. Sergeant Framingham’s sentinel, from the drop shuttle, broke in urging Quinn to hurry, almost simultaneously with an Orange Squad perimeter team reporting themselves forced off another vantage point.

“Could the shuttle land on top of this building and pick us up?” Quinn inquired, gazing at the girders overhead. Thorne frowned, following her eyes. “I think it would cave in the roof.”

“Hell. Other ideas?”

“Down,” said Mark suddenly. Both Dendarii jerked, catching themselves from flattening to the floor as they realized what he meant, through the tunnels. The Bharaputrans got in, we can get back out.”

“It’s a blind warren,” objected Quinn.

“I have a map,” said Mark. “All of Green Squad does, loaded programs. Green Squad can lead.”

Why didn’t you say so earlier?” snapped Quinn, illogically ignoring fact that there had hardly been an earlier.

Thorne nodded confirmation, and began hastily tracing through its net’s holovid map. “Can do. There’s a route—puts us up inside a building beyond your shuttle, Quinn. Bharaputran defenses are — there, and all facing the other way. And their superior numbers ’t help them, down below.”

Quinn stared down. “I hate dirt. I want vacuum, and elbow room, right, let’s do it. Sergeant Taura!”

A flurry of organization, a few more doors blown away, and the party was on the march once more, down a lift tube and into utility tunnels. Troopers scouted ahead of the main group. Taura and half a dozen clones carry Phillipi’s wrapped body, laid across the metal bars she’d torn from the catwalk railings. As if the bike-trooper still had some forlorn hope of preservation and revival. Mark found himself pacing beside the cryo-chamber on its float pallet, tugged along by the anxious medic. He glanced from the corner is eye through the transparent cover. His progenitor lay open-tried, pale and gray-lipped and still. Frost formed feathers along seals, and a blast of waste heat flowed from the refrigeration unit’s motor. It would burn like a bonfire on an enemy’s infra-red sensor. Mark shivered, and crouched in the heat. He was hungry, and terribly cold. Damn you, Miles Vorkosigan. There was so much I wanted to say to you, and now you’re not listening.

The straight tunnel they were traversing passed under another building, giving way through double doors to a wide foyer full of multiple cross-connections; several lift tubes, emergency stairs, other tunnels, and utility closets. All the doors were opened or blown open by the point-men looking for Bharaputran resistance. The air was pungent with smoke and the harsh lingering tang from plasma arc fire. Unfortunately, at this juncture the point men found what they were looking for.

The lights went out. Dendarii helmet visors snapped shut all around Mark, as they switched to infra-red. He followed suit, and stared disoriented into a world drained of color. His helmet crackled with voice communications stepping on each other as two point-men came running backwards into the foyer from separate corridors, firing plasma arcs that blared blindingly on his heat-enhanced vision. Four half-armored Bharaputran security personnel swung out of a lift tube, cutting Quinn’s column in half. So confined was the confusion, they found themselves fighting hand-to-hand. Mark was knocked down by accident by a swinging Dendarii, and crouched near the float-pallet.

“This isn’t shielded,” the medic groaned, slapping the cryo-chamber as arcs of fire whipped by close overhead. “One square hit, and …”

“Into the lift tube, then,” yelled Mark at him. The medic nodded, and swung the pallet around into the nearest dark opening free of Bharaputrans. The lift-tube was switched off, or the conflicting grav fields might have blown circuits on both tube and pallet. The medic scrambled aboard the cryo-chamber as if it were a horse, and began to sink from sight. Another trooper followed, hand over hand down the emergency ladder on the tube’s interior. Plasma arc fire struck Mark three times in rapid succession, as he scrambled to his feet, knocking him down again. His mirror-field shed a roar of blue crackles as he rolled toward the tube through waves of heat. He swung down the ladder after the trooper, out of the line of fire.

But not for long. A Bharaputran helmet flashed above them in the entrance, then plasma arc fire followed them downward with a glare like lightning in the tube. The trooper helped the medic yank and heave the float-pallet out of this sudden shooting gallery and through the lowest entrance, and ducked after. Mark scrambled in their wake, feeling like a human torch, netted and entwined with racketing blue incandescence. How many shots had that been? He’d lost count. How many more could his shielding take before it gave way and burned out?