Thorne’s teeth bared, but it nodded. They both galloped after the squad.
The double doors opened onto an enormous concrete-floored room, which obviously nearly filled the big building. Red– and green-painted catwalks ran around a girdered ceiling high above, festooned with looping cables of mysterious function. A few harsh pale lights shone down, casting multiple shadows. He blinked in the gloom and almost lowered his infra-red visor. It appeared to be an assembly area for large projects of some kind, though at the moment there seemed to be nothing in progress. Quinn and Mark hesitated, waiting for them to catch up despite Miles’s urgent gesture for them to hurry on. “What are you stopping for?” he barked in furious fear. He skidded to a halt beside them.
“Look out!” someone yelled. Quinn spun, raising her plasma arc, seeking aim. Mark’s mouth opened, the “o” foolishly echoing the circle of his gray hood around his face.
Miles saw the Bharaputran because they were looking square at each other, in that frozen moment. A team of brown-clad Bharaputran snipers, probably come up through the tunnels. They were scrambling along the girders, barely more prepared than the Dendarii they pursued. The Bharaputran had a hand-sized projectile weapon launcher of some kind pointed straight at him, its muzzle bright with flare.
Miles could not, of course, see the projectile, not even as it entered his chest. Only his chest, bursting outward like a flower, and a sound not heard but only felt, a hammer-blow launching him backward. Dark flowers bloomed too in his eyes, covering everyone.
He was astonished, not by how much he thought, for there was no time for thought, but by how much he felt, in the time it took for his last heartburst of blood to finish flowing through his brain. The chamber careening around him … pain beyond measure … rage, and outrage … and a vast regret, infinitesimal in duration, infinite in depth. Wait, I haven’t—
Chapter Seven
Mark was standing so close, the report of the exploding projectile was like a silence, pressing in his ears, obliterating all other sounds. It happened too fast for understanding, too fast to close the eyes and defend the mind against the sight. The little man who had been yelling and gesturing them onward fluttered backward like a gray rag, arms outflung, face contorted. A spray of blood spattered across Mark with stinging force, part of a wide half-circle of blood and tissue-bits. Quinn’s whole left side was scarlet.
So. You are not perfect, was his first absurd thought. This sudden absolute vulnerability shocked him unbearably. I didn’t think you could be hurt. Damn you, I didn’t think you could be—
Quinn was screaming, everyone was recoiling, only he stood still, paralyzed in his private, ear-stunned silence. Miles lay on the concrete with his chest blown out, open-mouthed, unmoving. That’s a dead man. He’d seen a dead man before, there was no mistaking it.
Quinn, her face wild, fired her plasma arc at the Bharaputrans, shot after shot, till hot ceiling fragments started to fall lethally back down around them, and a Dendarii knocked her weapon aside. “Taura, get them!” Quinn pointed upward with her free hand.
The monster sergeant fired a rappel-hook upward, which wrapped around a girder. She rose upon it at full acceleration, like a mad spider. Between the lights and the shadows, Mark could scarcely follow her progress, leaping at inhuman speed along the catwalks, until broken-necked Bharaputran security personnel began raining down. All their high-tech half-armor was no protection at all against those huge, enraged clawed hands. Three men fell in a welter of their own blood, their throats torn out, an insane bombardment; one Dendarii trooper, running across the chamber, was almost smashed beneath an enemy body. Modern warfare wasn’t supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells.
Quinn paid no attention, scarcely seeming to care about the results of her order. She knelt by Miles’s side, her shaking hands outspread, hesitating. Then they dove and pulled off Miles’s command helmet. She flung her own squad leader’s helmet to the floor and replaced it on her smooth gray hood with Miles’s. Her lips moved, establishing contact, checking channels. The helmet was undamaged, apparently. She yelled orders to perimeter-people, queries to the drop shuttle, and one other. “Norwood, get back here, get back here. Yes, bring it, bring it now. On the double, Norwood!” Her head swivelled away from Miles only long enough to shout, “Taura, get this building secured!” From above, the sergeant in turn bellowed orders to her scurrying troopers.
Quinn pulled a vibra-knife from her belt sheath and began cutting away Miles’s fatigues, ripping through belts and the nerve-disruptor shield-suit, tossing the bloody fragments aside. Mark looked up, following her glance, to see the medic with the float-pallet returning, hauling his burden across the concrete. The float-pallet counteracted gravity, but not mass; the inertia of the heavy cryo-chamber fought his attempts to run, and fought him again as he braked and lowered the pallet to the floor near his dead commander. Half a dozen confused clones followed the medic like baby ducks, clustering together and staring around in horror at the ghastly aftermath of the brief sharp firefight.
The medic looked back and forth from Miles’s body to the loaded cryo-chamber. “Captain Quinn, it’s no good. It won’t hold two.”
“The hell it’s not.” Quinn staggered to her feet, her voice grating like gravel. She seemed unaware of the tears running down her face, tracking pinkly through the spatter. “The hell it’s not.” She stared bleakly at the gleaming cryo-chamber. “Dump her.”
“Quinn, I can’t!”
“On my order. On my hands.”
“Quinn …” The medic’s voice was anguished. “Would he have ordered this?”
“He just lost his damn vote. All right.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll do it. You start prepping him.”
Teeth clenched, the medic moved to obey. He flipped open a door at the end of the chamber and removed a tray of equipment. It was all in disarray, having been used once already and hastily re-packed. He rolled out some big insulated bottles, keyed open the chamber. Its lid popped, breaking the seal, I rose. She reached within, unfastening things that Mark could not :. Did not wish to see. She hissed, as instantly-frozen skin tore from r hands, but reached again. With a grunt, she heaved a woman’s greenish, empurpled nude body from the chamber and laid it on the floor. It was the smashed-up bike-trooper, Phillipi. Thorne’s patrol, ring Bharaputran fire, had finally found her near her downed floater some two buildings away from her lost helmet. Broken back, broken limbs; she’d taken hours to die, against all the Green Squad medic’s heroic efforts to save her. Quinn looked up and saw Mark ring at her. Her face was ravaged.
“You, you useless … wrap her.” She pointed to Phillipi, then hurried around the cryo-chamber to where the Blue Squad medic now sit beside Miles.
Mark broke his paralysis at last, to scuttle around and find a thin foil heat wrap among the medical supplies. Frightened of the body, but too terrified by Quinn to disobey, he laid out the silver wrap and led the cold dead woman up in it. She was stiff and heavy, under his cringing touch.
He rose to hear the medic muttering, with his ungloved hands plunged deep into the gory mess that had been Miles Vorkosigan’s chest, “I can’t find an end. Where the hell’s an end? At least the damned aorta, something …”
’It’s been over four minutes,” snarled Quinn, pulled out her vibra-blade again, and cut Miles’s corpse’s throat, two neat slashes bracketing but not touching the windpipe. Her fingers scrabbled in the cut. The medic glanced up only to say, “Be sure you get the carotid and not the jugular.”
I’m trying. They’re not color-coded.” She found something pale and rubbery. She pulled tubing from the top of one of the insulated lines, and jammed its plastic end-nozzle into the presumed artery. She switched the power on; the tiny pump hummed, pushing translucent green-cryo-fluid through the transparent tubing. She pulled out a second piece of tubing from the jug and inserted it on the other side of Miles’s neck. Blood began to flow fr
om the slashed exit veins, over her hands, over everything; not spurting as from a heartbeat, but in steady, inhuman, mechanical fashion. It spread on the floor in a shimmering pool, then began to flow away across some subtle drain-slope, a little carmine creek. An impossible quantity of blood. The clustered clones were weeping. Mark’s own head throbbed, pain so great it darkened his vision.
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 lowes
t 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?
The trooper took a firing stance aimed back into the lift tube, but no Bharaputran followed them. They stood in a pocket of dark and quiet, shouts and shots echoing faintly down the tube from the battle overhead. This was a much smaller foyer, with only two exits. Dim low emergency lighting along the floor gave a falsely cozy sense of warmth.
“Hell,” said the medic, staring upward. “I think we’ve just cut ourselves off.”
“Not necessarily,” said Mark. Neither the medic nor the trooper were Green Squad, but Mark’s helmet of course had Green Squad programming. He called up the holomap, found their current location, And let the helmet’s computer sketch a route. “You can get there from this level, too. It’s a bit more roundabout, but you’re less likely encounter Bharaputrans for that very reason.”
“Let me see,” demanded the medic.
Half-reluctant, half-relieved, Mark gave his helmet up to him. The medic jammed it on his head, and studied the red line snaking through the 3-D schematic grid of the medical complex, projected before his eyes. Mark risked a darting glance up the lift tube. No Bararaputrans loomed overhead, and the sounds of combat were muffled, as if growing more distant. He ducked back to find the trooper looking at him, unsettling glints of his eyes gleaming through his visor. I’m not your damned Admiral. Mores the pity, eh? The trooper probably was of the opinion that the Bharaputrans had shot the wrong short man. Mark didn’t even need words to get that message. He ached.
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