Luc twisted his head back, seeing bright lights shimmering overhead. <Aeschere. I need to know what— >
<There’ll be time for that later,> the medician scripted in reply, then turned to someone behind him. <Put him back under.>
<No, wait—>
Any further protests died on Luc’s lips.
There were several more such brief episodes of lucidity, each one slightly longer than the last, including one in which Luc found himself being questioned by a medician who never bothered to give his name. He showed Luc CogNet-mediated video of his extraction from the twisted wreckage of the cryogenic unit that had saved his life, but only just.
He couldn’t recognize the raw, burned slab of meat in the video, couldn’t connect it to himself. The medician allowed him to see himself through the eyes of lenses dotted around the recovery room. He was submerged in a fluorocarbon-rich gel, his body half-hidden amongst a tangle of sensor leads, his flesh burned and flayed. Shoals of tiny black things like tadpoles swarmed around his legs and lower back with apparent purpose, while his face had been reduced to little more than sheets of exposed muscle laid over the skull beneath.
The medician asked questions that Luc tried to answer, sticking to script-speak since Luc’s newly-grown throat and larynx hadn’t quite finished healing. He learned the cryo-unit had put most of its energy into protecting his head and brain once the temperature of the plasma began to push it beyond its operational parameters. As a result, many of Luc’s organs and muscles had been replaced using fast-track tissue work. Even so, the work was going fast, and it might only be another day or two before they were able to lift him out of the tank.
The medician departed, and Luc soon drifted back into a drug-induced sleep. A new dream came to him, disturbing because it felt more like a memory than anything else. He found himself staring into a convex mirror surrounded by folds of dark cloth, but instead of his own face, he saw that of Winchell Antonov reflected there. Antonov’s lips moved in silence, his expression full of bitter anger.
The rapidity with which they healed him was astonishing. Each time the medicians brought him back to consciousness, Luc found the pain was a little less than it had been, until finally it was reduced to not much more than a dull ache.
The Chief Medician had Luc decanted from his tank and moved to a room with an actual bed. His new skin felt ridiculously soft and delicate, as insubstantial as rice-paper origami that might come undone in the slightest breeze. The sensation of soft linens against his body was a wonder in itself.
It wasn’t long before he got his first visitors. Eleanor Jaq walked into the room, her lithe form wrapped in a SecInt uniform, long brown hair tucked into a small bun at the back of her head. The last time he’d seen her, she’d told him they were finished, and so her arrival was more than a little unexpected.
She wasn’t alone. Her companion was Isaak Lethe, SecInt’s Director of Operations, his brow marked by worry- lines. He took a seat to one side of Luc’s bed, the corners of his mouth jerking up in a half-smile as if this were the same as any other debriefing. Eleanor remained standing, her expression carefully neutral.
‘Mr Gabion,’ said Lethe. ‘You’re looking a lot better than you did when they first brought you in here.’
‘I’ve had better days,’ Luc croaked, his voice scraping like rusted razors. He tried to catch Eleanor’s eye, but she glanced away. ‘Just how long have I been here?’
‘You got back to Temur just a couple of days ago,’ Lethe replied. ‘Medician Merlino told me how much work they had to do on you.’
‘Apparently,’ said Luc, ‘they had to replace pretty much everything.’
‘They also rolled your age back about a half-decade or so. My understanding is that made things easier for them.’
‘You were lucky,’ said Eleanor, eyes finally settling on him. Her nostrils flared slightly, a sure sign she was still angry at him, despite everything he’d been through. ‘
‘I know you’re only just out of the tank, but I need to talk to you about what happened on Aeschere,’ said Lethe, his expression becoming apologetic. ‘I know you probably don’t feel ready for it.’
Luc shook his head. ‘It’s fine. What do you need to know?’
‘Sandoz Command are facing questions over how they managed to lose an entire Clan on what should have been a straightforward operation. And it’s not like we can ask Marroqui or any of the rest of them what happened.’
‘Why not? They’ll be re-instantiated, won’t they?’
‘Yes, and Karlmann Sandoz has already given the order to prep their clone bodies. Unfortunately, since the explosion that destroyed the complex left no trace of them . . .’ Lethe regarded him from beneath shaggy eyebrows.
Meaning, Luc guessed, that their instantiation lattices had also been destroyed. ‘So they won’t be able to reboot them from the point when they were actually killed,’ Luc finished for him. ‘I get it.’
‘Which makes you our only material witness to what happened down there,’ Lethe continued. ‘The version of Master Marroqui they’re about to shovel into a new body hasn’t even heard of you. That means at some point you’re going to find yourself standing in front of an investigative committee, possibly several of them. And they’re all going to ask difficult questions.’
‘And that’s why you’re here?’
Lethe smiled stiffly. ‘Actually, it concerns Antonov. You told a Sandoz investigator he was still alive when you reached the lowest level of the complex.’
