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"He's dead, though," Gaunt said.

"Technically. But I ran a full blood-scrub on him after the accident, pumped him full of cryoprotectant. We don't have any spare slots here, but they can put him back in a box on the operations rig."

"My box," Gaunt said. "The one I was in."

"There are other slots," Da Silva corrected. "Gimenez going back in doesn't preclude you following him, if that's what you want."

"If Gimenez was so unhappy, why didn't you just let him go back into the box earlier?"

"Not the way it works," Clausen said. "He made his choice. Afterwards, we put a lot of time and energy into bringing him up to speed, making him mesh with the team. You think we were going to willingly throw all that expenditure away, just because he changed his mind?"

"He never stopped pulling his weight," Nero said. "Say what you will about Gimenez but he didn't let the team down. And what happened to him down on eight was an accident."

"I never doubted it," Da Silva said. "He was a good guy. It's just a shame he couldn't make the adjustment."

"Maybe it'll work out for him now," Nero said. "One-way ticket to the future. Done his caretaker stint, so the next time he's revived, it'll be because we finally got through this shit. It'll be because we won the war, and we can all wake up again. They'll find a way to fix him up, I'm sure. And if they can't, they'll just put him under again until they have the means."

"Sounds like he got a good deal out of it in the end," Gaunt said.

"The only good deal is being alive," Nero replied. "That's what we're doing now, all of us. Whatever happens, we're alive, we're breathing, we're having conscious thoughts. We're not frozen bodies stacked in boxes, merely existing from one instant to the next." She gave a shrug. "My fifty cents, that's all. You want to go back in the box, let someone else shoulder the burden, don't let me talk you out of it." Then she looked at Da Silva. "You gonna be all right here on your own, until I'm straightened out?"

"Someone comes up I can't deal with, I'll let you know," Da Silva said.

Nero and Da Silva went through a checklist, Nero making sure her replacement knew everything he needed to, and then they made their farewells. Gaunt couldn't tell how long they were going to be leaving Da Silva alone out here, whether it was weeks or months. He seemed resigned to his fate, as if this kind of solitary duty was something they were all expected to do now and then. Given that there had been two people on duty here until Gimenez's death, Gaunt wondered why they didn't just thaw out another sleeper so that Da Silva wouldn't have to work on his own while Nero's hand was healing.

Then, no more than half an hour after his arrival, they were back in the helicopter again, powering back to the operations rig. The weather had worsened in the meantime, the seas lashing even higher against the rigs' legs, and the horizon was now obscured behind curtains of storming rain, broken only by the flash of lightning.

"This was bad timing," he heard Nero say. "Maybe you should have let me stew until this system had passed. It's not like Gimenez couldn't wait."

"We were already overdue on the extraction," Clausen said. "If the weather clamps down, this might be our last chance for days."

"They tried to push one through yesterday, I heard."

"Out in Echo field. Partial coalescence."

"Did you see it?"

"Only on the monitors. Close enough for me."

"We should put guns on the rigs."

"And where would the manpower come from, exactly? We're just barely holding on as it is, without adding more shit to worry about."

The two women were sitting up front; Gaunt was in the back with Gimenez's foil-wrapped corpse for company. They had folded back one seat to make room for the stretchered form.

"I don't really have a choice, do I," he said.

"Course you have a choice," Nero answered.

"I mean, morally. I've seen what it's like for you people. You're stretched to breaking point just keeping this operation from falling apart. Why don't you wake up more sleepers?"

"Hey, that's a good