Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [217]
"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.
Quinn keyed open the chamber. Its lid popped, breaking the seal, and rose. She reached within, unfastening things that Mark could not see. Did not wish to see. She hissed, as instantly-frozen skin tore from her 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, daring Bharaputran fire, had finally found her near her downed float-bike 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 staring 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 knelt 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 rolled 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-knife 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 jugs, and jammed its plastic end-nozzle into the presumed artery. She switched the power on; the tiny pump hummed, pushing lucent greenish 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 from the slashed exit veins, over her hands, over everything; not spurting as from a heartbeat, but in a steady, inhuman, mechanical fashion. It spread on the floor in a shimmering pool, then began to flow away across some subtle drainage-slope, a little carmine creek. An impossible quantity of blood. The clustered clones were weeping. Mark's own head throbbed, pain so bad 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 for, 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?