by Mel Keegan
They both nodded, and Rusch breathed a heavy sigh. “Weimann accidents don’t happen very often, but when they do, it’s dirty.”
“We pulled a commercial freighter off the Bronowski Reef three, maybe four years ago,” Jazinsky said quietly as the lift opened opposite the Infirmary. “They’d been leaking fuel, coolant, the works, for a couple of days before we could get to them. Four crew, all alive … all a mess.”
“They lived?” Travers heard the hoarse edge of his own voice.
“Yeah.” Jazinsky rubbed her eyes tiredly.
“Brain damage?” Marin guessed. She nodded. “Repairable?”
“More or less.” She pushed away from the brushed steel wall, forcing her feet out of the lift and into the Infirmary’s bright lights. “Two of them didn’t remember their own names. A third had no memory of the event that drove them up on the Reef.” She gestured vaguely. “It all depends how bad the damage is, and where it is. Old memories are stored all over the brain. Nano rewires the mechanism, but sometimes the memories are wired right out of the loop. Bypassed.”
“Damn.” Travers met Marin’s eyes with a frown. “He might not remember who we ever were.”
“It’s possible.” As the women went ahead, Marin gave Travers his hand, and Neil took it. “Let Bill do his stuff. Time to grieve when there’s a reason to.” His grip tightened on Travers’s fingers. “You have no idea what was left of me, after the Argos. I looked a lot like Mick does right now. I was only one of scores of top-priority patients at Radley. They didn’t have the staff or resources to cope, so in the triage process the strongest of us were set aside, waiting for cryogen tanks to be brought in by Fleet tender. I should have been either treated or tanked two weeks before they got around to me, and in that time…” He shook his head, and his voice was a harsh rasp. “You drop weight fast, and I didn’t have Mick’s body mass to start with. You lie there in your own puke, and worse, while the nurses walk around you in hazmat suits, because the truth is, your own living body is a contamination risk.”
He was shaking visibly, and Travers took him by the shoulders. “Go back to the ops room. You don’t want to be here.”
But Marin seemed to catch himself by the scruff of the neck and drag himself together. His eyes were vast, dark, dilated. “Back on Velcastra, they’re raising a statue of Mick Vidal. The Resalq are venerating him as one of their own heroes. We owe him, Neil. We’re the best friends he had on this ship, and the truth is, he’s been in love with you since the Kiev.”
The words, stated so simply, were a body blow. Travers swallowed hard on a dry throat and took a deep breath. He lifted Marin’s left hand to his lips, kissed the open palm, let it go. “He said to me once, tell him the time and the place, and he’d be there and throw rice.”
“He would have done it.” Marin touched Travers’s face gently. “He’s a good guy. History is going to remember him, when it never even knew who we ever were.” He looked over Travers’s shoulder into the Infirmary, where Rusch had pulled a chair up closer to a treatment unit. “When Bill gets through with him, he’s going to need someone to be there for him.”
“Pick up the pieces,” Travers sighed.
Marin nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “If he remembers any of what happened … and who we are.” He lifted a brow at Travers. “You sure you want to go in there? Like Bill said, he won’t know you’re there.”
But Travers was sure. He caught Marin in a punishing embrace, pressed his face to Curtis’s hair, eyes squeezed shut for a long moment while he hunted within himself for both the willpower and the composure to do this. And then he let Marin go and summoned a faint, sad smile.
The Infirmary smelt sharply of the decontamination chemistry. Vidal lay in a meter-deep, transparent bath of the stuff, a slightly viscous, pale lemon and mildly effervescent liquid in which he was completely immersed, with hoses taped into place over mouth and nose. His skin had a scalded appearance after the high-pressure jets which had sloughed off its top layers; his facial and body hair were gone completely, and tubes and wires were tagged into his veins at elbows and wrists. A battery of machines surrounded him, and two drones were scanning without pause.
The data updated every twenty seconds on the screen behind the coffin-shaped tub, and Travers read it without comment. Like any spacer, he knew the safe levels. Vidal’s readings were still high, but the chemistry was working its alchemy, and when the body cavities were washed, those levels would reduce again. His organs were monitored individually, and every one showed red warnings. Liver, heart, lungs, kidneys were flashing critical.
“Damn,” Travers whispered. “He’s lucky to be alive.”
“Very,” Grant’s voice said from the console where he was still working on the nano. He was in baggy denims, a loud shirt, and his long fair hair was still rumpled, on end, after he had set aside the helmet. He was Lushi to the marrow of his bones, Travers knew, and comfortable inside his own skin, as Tonio Teniko would never be. Big, chocolate brown eyes looked from Travers to Marin and back, and then Grant glared at the tub, and the body immersed in it. “I’ve got him on full support right now, but shoot, I could wish I’d got to him earlier.” He slid back the chair and gestured into the threedee, where the designer nano were depicted in multicolored graphics. “These ’bots should sort him out in a few days. I’ll scan the major organs every four hours, but in a week I’d be hoping to deactivate the ’bots. Soon as I get them into him, there’s a brainscanner waiting for him.” He tapped his own cranium. “We’ll have a good look, a rummage around in there, see what we can do.”
On the other side of the tub, Alexis Rusch looked up for a moment from a face she could barely have recognized. “It’ll be ironic, don’t you think, if he’s feted and celebrated as the greatest hero of the Zunshu War while he, himself, doesn’t remember a damn’ thing about it. Some propaganda fodder this is going to make! You know Bobby Liang and Alec Tarrant will be after him to fake it. They’ll brief him right up to the eyeballs and have him swear up and down he remembers it all.”
“He might remember,” Grant mused. “Sometimes they do. I spent my whole hitch on the Intrepid as a company medic, and I saw all kinds of weird shit. I had one case who irradiated himself – the idiot used to carry a Hi-Tex .60 caliber round in his shirt pocket like a rabbit’s foot, thought it brought him good luck.”
The armor-piercing rounds were tipped with a fuel pellet which accelerated the explosion caused by impact, and they were supposed to be handled by the company’s master gunner, in full marines armor. Marin whistled at the sheer stupidity of keeping a round in an ordinary pocket, and Grant went on,
“You can imagine what fun it was, decontaminating the fool. His brain was like noodle soup, because he’d had the round right on top of the carotid artery for a month before he fell on his stupid face and they wheeled him into the Infirmary, wondering if he’d come down with some kind of plague! We ran a scanner over him, and jumped back half a meter. I made some smart remark about wearing a lead-lined jockstrap.” He gave Travers a wink. “Give it a chance … the human brain’s an amazing place. The Resalq brain is bigger, more complex, and they know a lot more than we do yet, about wiring around bad zones.”
He was right, and Travers accepted the advice without question. He gave the nano one glance, and then steeled himself and turned his attention to the body in the tub. The fluid fizzed and bubbled, seeming almost to seethe, though he knew it was exactly at body temperature. Vidal’s readings were half a percent lower than the last time Travers had looked at the screen, and the organs, though they were ruined, showed no measurable deterioration.
His bones were right beneath the skin – the cheekbones and jaw were too sharp, ribs protruded, knees and elbows, fingers and shins, showed the skeletal structure, since muscle and flesh had gone. If it were not for the Delta Dragons tattoo on his cheek and the open-headed ankh on his chest, Travers might have argued that the man only bore a resemblance to Michael Vidal; but the truth of his eyes conf
irmed what he had known by instinct.
“What happened to you?” he whispered. “And what about your copilot? What happened to Big Jo Queneau?”
It was Jazinsky who answered, when Marin remained silent, intent on the comatose and drifting body. “By the looks of this,” she said from Infirmary’s annex, where freight was stacked and several cryogen tanks were stored against the potential for accident which bedeviled any working industrial ship, “this might be Queneau. See?”
The data was scrolling through a flatscreen at her elbow, and Travers made out enough to know Jazinsky had managed to get detailed readings off one of the ancient tanks. The occupant was tall as a Pakrani, female – and alive. Contamination levels were acceptably low.
“If we can crack these tanks without incident,” Jazinsky was saying, “the pair of them should revive nicely. I can’t get decent readings off the other tank yet, but Queneau – if it is Queneau – is definitely underweight by a wide margin. She was a big girl, before. She outmuscled me, and that’s unusual. Now, she’s a rail.” She frowned across at Vidal. “They’ve been living rough, starving, for a long time.”
“How long?” Rusch wondered.
“Hard to tell,” Jazinsky said slowly. “People drop kilos at different rates. It’s all about an individual’s metabolism, as well as the working and living conditions. Intense cold, plus hard physical labor, plus short rations … a month, certainly. Perhaps several months. We’ll know more when we get Queneau out of here, even if Mick doesn’t remember.”
A fist had taken Travers by the gut and twisted. He was about to ask Grant how long before the nano would be infused, but before he could speak the Lushi rolled his chair over to the end of the bench and collected a gray metal cylinder the size of a pepper mill.
This, he brought to the tub and deliberately connected it to the IV. “Now he’s cooking. I’m going to break for coffee before I set up the scanners. Anybody want to join me?”
Neither Rusch nor Jazinsky answered. Rusch was too preoccupied with the collection of bones in the tub to even hear, and Jazinsky was listening to the AI as Etienne worked a careful probe deeper into the old cryotanks. Grant stretched until his spine crackled, and beckoned Travers and Marin to the office in the opposite corner.
The lights crackled on over a desk that was a litter of handies, obscure equipment, spent mugs and beer cans. Without a qualm, Grant ignored it all and fetched fresh coffee and donuts from the ’chef parked in the corner between the threedee and a spare diagnostic bank. He sat on the corner of the desk and looked up at Travers and Marin with a curious expression.
“What?” Marin prompted as Travers went to the ’chef for coffee.
For a moment Grant hesitated. “The boss asked me to sign on with the Lai’a expedition. He’s commanding it. The Wastrel will be standing by Doc Sherratt’s ships, with Tully and Greenstein and Cassals, and the rest of the lads looking after her. You mind if I ask … are you guys signing on?”
The question had been dogging Travers, haunting him. Now, he gave Marin a level, speculative look, and Marin said softly, “I have a strong feeling we will. I’ve never seen Mark Sherratt so consumed by any project, and after what we’ve just seen, I don’t think there’s any doubt he’ll be aboard, like Dario and the others.”
“And Bravo Company?” Grant looked at his chrono. “I’m supposed to be meeting them – dinner, beer, folgen – but I’m going to get caught up here. The scans are easy … interpreting them is something else.” He frowned up at Travers. “Have you talked to Fargo and the rest?”
But Travers could only shake his head. “They were thrashing it out between them, the last time I talked to them. But I know what they’re thinking. They’re still soldiers, and the fight’s out there, where the Zunshu are, not back in the Deep Sky, where the key colonies are already seeded with weapons to defend them when Fleet gets here.” He tried the coffee, and was reminded of the brew served up by the Bravo Company ’chef, years ago. “You know more than we do, Bill. In fact, if you’re playing folgen with them tonight, give us a buzz, tell us which way they’re going.”
Grant fed the last chunk of donut into his mouth and washed it down with a large swig of coffee. “If I ever get out of here.” He hesitated and dropped his voice. “I hate to admit it, but I’ll have to take Doc Sherratt up on the offer. I can scan Major Vidal’s brain – that’s not the problem. Knowing what I’m seeing isn’t so easy. It’ll be tomorrow, earliest, before I know what’s going on inside his skull. Look, Neil, why don’t you get out of here, leave me and the drones to do the necessary.”
“All right.” Marin’s hand landed on the Lushi’s shoulder, gave him a squeeze there. “Buzz us immediately if anything happens. Doesn’t matter what time it is.”
“You mean, if he’s going to check out permanently?” Grant looked up out of wide, cynical eyes. “No chance of that, when I’ve got him on full support. The brain won’t get any worse now, but I won’t know how to configure the nano till I can make sense of the scans.”
The empty mugs dropped into the chute under the ’chef. Travers stopped, halfway to the door, to frown at Vidal. “When he woke for a minute before you induced coma, did he say anything?”
“Was he aware?” Marin added. “Did he know where he was, did he recognize you?”
“I don’t know,” Grant said carefully. “Maybe. It’s difficult to be sure, and I don’t want to get your hopes up. I’ll buzz you, the second I know anything definite myself. Good enough?”
It would have to be, and Travers knew he could ask no more. He was still frowning over Vidal’s gaunt face and the xylophone of ribs in his chest when Marin took him by the arm and steered him toward the door. They were a step outside when Jazinsky’s voice stopped them.
“Tully, are you back aboard? I’m going to need some support hardware in here before I can even try to crack these tanks. One of them isn’t too bad, but the other is going to be a bitch.”
Ice water seemed to race through Travers’s veins. Without a word he and Marin turned back and joined her in the annex, where she had set up a worklight over the old cryotanks.
Over the loop, Ingersol’s voice sounded tired. “What do you need? I got back aboard three minutes ago. Just got out of the armor, and I’m running with sweat here. I was going to take a shower – do I have the time?”
“I’ll stand upwind,” Jazinsky said with brittle humor. “Get in here, Tull. I’m getting low-power warnings on one of the tanks. If we don’t rig an external source PDQ he’ll be flatlining, and history is never going to forgive us.”
He? Then the bad tank was not the one holding Jo Queneau. Travers and Marin shared a glance, but it was Alexis Rusch on her feet, calling into the technicians’ loop. “Tech crew to the Infirmary, asap. Bring up a power coupler.”
“My department, Colonel,” Ingersol said loudly.
“My seven-times great-grand-uncle,” Rusch retorted, “and one of the icons of the whole goddamned Deep Sky. Move your ass, Ingersol.”
“I’m hustling,” he grumbled. “Barb, how low is low-power, and how fast is it dropping?”
She was playing a handy over the bulk of the tank. “It’s at a fraction over thirty percent, and it’s dropping quite fast. Up to ten minutes ago it was stable. Twenty more minutes, and we’ll be into major problems.”
Ingersol was already marshalling his people. “Clear enough space for the tech crew,” he told Jazinsky. “What kind of sockets are you seeing?”
“God alone knows,” she said honestly. “Old. I never worked with anything like this.”
“Universal couplers,” Ingersol said, panting a little as if he were jogging. “Three minutes, Barb. Keep an eye on the piece of junk, and keep me updated.”
At a word from Grant the lights came up right across the Infirmary. Rusch and Jazinsky hovered over the malfunctioning tank, and Travers was keenly aware of who was inside it. The most critical stages of cryosleep were the entry and extraction phases. When a modern tank bo
ttomed out at ten percent power, it automatically initiated retrieval to salvage the life of the occupant, but Jazinsky had no knowledge of standard operating procedures on tanks so old – and if the retrieval mechanism should be faulty, the attempted auto-extraction could end badly.
“You need a spare pair of hands?” Marin was asking as the lights brightened.
“Maybe.” Jazinsky gestured at the bench, a stack of chairs, crates of equipment. “Can you shove these out of the way? Tully’s going to need space. Damn.” Her eyes were still on the handy. “Tull, she’s losing power faster, the longer we stand here chatting. Forget what I said about twenty minutes. Call it twelve.”
“We’re on our way up,” Ingersol said grimly. “Ops room?”
“Here.” Vaurien was monitoring every word.
“Looking for Doc Sherratt,” Ingersol panted.
“I’m coming to you,” Mark’s voice said softly, with deceptive calm.
“You, uh, you’re old,” Tully said apologetically. “Sorry, man, but you were around when these tanks were brand new. You might know what you’re looking at, when you peer into the guts of them.”
“I might,” Mark cautioned. “But this is human tech. I had little to do with human machinery till much later. “You need me to bring anything?”
As he spoke, the wide cage was opening on the freight elevator opposite the Infirmary’s door, and Travers watched Ingersol and two technicians hurry out of the car, propelling a laden Arago sled before them. He recognized a big power cell, several meters of coiled conduit, and the fist-sized casing of a flexible coupler which would extrude itself into the mechanism and morph to fit.
“How’s she look?” Ingersol called without preamble.
“Eighteen percent,” Jazinsky informed him. “Make it quick, Tully.”
He was already configuring the probe-like adapter, and Travers looked over his shoulder, reading the numbers as they balanced out on the handy. Current was a major issue; the power cell was delivering more than the old tank cold handle, and pumping it too fast.