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As Mildred's life signs plummeted, her personal physician as well as her best
professional colleague had chosen to take the step of placing the then dying Dr.
Wyeth in cryo suspension in order to save the woman's life. In an ironic twist,
some of the tech used to preserve her fading vital signs had been invented by
Mildred herself, but the sleeping physician was in no condition to appreciate the
irony.
When Ryan and company had reawakened the woman from her deep sleep, her
life-threatening symptoms and coma had miraculously vanished during the long
years she'd been under. "Must've been like a healing trance," she'd later decided.
"I'm not getting any sort of vibe, lover," Krysty finally said, putting her hands to
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her forehead and massaging her temples. "Usually with freezies, I get a strange,
creepy-crawly feeling. Alive, but not alive. Dead, but not dead. A suspended-in-
limbo, hovering sensation."
"Trapped between two worlds," Doc whispered. "Sleeping, but not breathing."
"I don't have the poetry you do, but yeah, exactly," she agreed.
"And this time?" Ryan asked, already knowing the answer.
Krysty shook her head to the left and right. "Nothing."
"Then they're all chilled," J.B. said. "Literally and figuratively," he added
laconically.
"Not necessarily," Mildred mused, who had been examining the cylinders with a
careful eye from her vantage point behind the glass wall. She was now sitting at a
comp station and rapidly typing in commands. She was amazed usually these
systems were encrypted and required a series of passwords to enter, but for some
unknown reason, she was being provided full access to the information stored
within.
"There's a dozen freeze tubes in there, Mildred. I can tell from here none of them
are operational," Ryan said firmly. "The liquid displays are all off-line and blank.
And all of them have red malfunction signs glowing across the tops of the pods."
"Just give me a minute," Mildred said softly. She slid across the polished floor in
the wheeled desk chair, checking a panel marked Coolants Input. The readouts
were all blank, matching those on the canisters and coffinlike tubes. She flicked a
switch, once, twice, before pounding a fist against the inert panel in protest.
"Dammit," she said in a tight voice.
J.B. had been carefully squinting down over her shoulder and peering at the cryo
controls.
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"Don't see an emergency-mass-release box," he said. "Course, I still can't see
much of anything without my specs. Point it out to me and I'll blow the sec locks.
See about doing a quick meltdown in here."
"There isn't a mass release for this setup, J.B." Mildred replied tiredly. "This isn't
a redoubt, remember? Some military technology is here, but not enough. This has
the smell of a bought-and-paid-for kind of deal. There are no secrets hidden here
to require locks. In case of an emergency, you just hit that red button and there's a
quick coolant drain and shutdown. Or if you're at a computer like I'm sitting at,
you just enter the correct computer command and it also engages the primary
release."
"So, go ahead and do it," J.B. urged.
Mildred looked sadly at the controls. "There's no need. Krysty's right, as far as I
can tell."
"Sorry, Mildred," the redhead said.
"I'm being irrational, I know, but I feel a kinship to many of these freezies," the
physician continued. "Would've been nice to find another batch alive, safe. But if
there are no vitals, I'd be wasting a lot of time we don't really have. Takes hours to
do a cryo-chamber drain and hours more to resuscitate, and there's no rushing the
process. Those stickies could have friends, and we don't want to get caught down
here a second time."
J.B. took one of Mildred's hands and squeezed it tight. "Millie, those people in
those chambers died over a hundred years ago. Not a damn thing could be done
for them then, or now."
"Any idea who they were?" Ryan asked.
Mildred went back and starting tapping keys on the keyboard. "From what I can
tell, this place was designed with one purpose in mind. Preserve some of the finest
leadership and military minds until the conflict was over. It's not the worst plan I
ever heard, but as usual the x-factor came stomping in and trod all over the best-
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laid plans of mice and men."
Mildred stood, gesturing toward the units housed inside the glassed-in area.
"At some point in time, the power here must've gone off-line. I'd say it happened
within days after the bombs fell. Could've been a fluke, but my guess is a techie
took particular offense at being left behind to die in the brave new world once the
bombs actually started falling, and he or she sabotaged the chambers. Once the
damage was done, he turned the systems back on to cover his actions, or perhaps a
fail-safe device came online and reactivated. Either way, the end result was the
same. I suppose, in retrospect, I should be grateful the same thing didn't happen to
me."
"Hell of a way to die," Ryan said, peering inside the sterile room. "You think
you're going to take a long nap and pull a cheat and, boom, you die a second time
in your sleep."
"Well, no matter how you look at it, half of them were dead the minute the war
broke out," Mildred replied enigmatically. Ryan turned to look at her. "How so?"
"Doc, you were asking about those smaller containers, the barrel-shaped ones?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]