The steps descended into stygian blackness. His breath quickened. To his intense relief, a sudden glow reflected off the walls ahead-Tenbury had unshipped a hand light. So, the man didn't see in the dark like a werewolf, good. At the fourth landing, the scrape of a heavy door being shoved open was followed by loss of the reflected light. Miles sped his steps, put out his hands, and found the handle. He opened this door more cautiously, turning sideways to slide through the gap and easing it closed with the minimum sound.
The bobbing light receded to his right; he turned after it, thinking of will-o'-the-wisps luring unwary travelers to their doom. As he followed, he became aware of tiny twinkles dancing in the corners of his vision like floating fireflies, adding to the night-swamp effect. He blinked, and they resolved into scattered indicator lights, green for all's-well, tacking randomly up the corridor walls on either side.
Reluctantly, Miles reached out and let his hand trace across the now-familiar bumps of closely-set banks of cryo-drawers. Except these were not abandoned and cleared, but working, or a portion of them were. Well insulated, the drawer faces were at room temperature-there was no danger of his skin freezing to the surface and trapping him in a growing cocoon of icicle-glass, really. He drew in his hands anyway, making his way down the center of the corridor by witch-light.
He stopped short as, at the end of the corridor, another door opened. Ordinary office-lab-living-quarters glare temporarily blasted his eyes, making a nimbus around a hairy head that fortunately did not turn around. The door shut, and Miles was plunged into blackness once more. As his night vision came slowly back the dense dark was relieved, if that was the word, by the scattered green specks. He could just make out his corpse-light sleeves.
So, he hadn't found the pumping station or the electrical transformers. He'd found the deeper secret of this place-working cryochambers. A number of mysteries fell neatly into place.
Suze and companions were running a secret cryocorp. No-a cryo-cooperative. And, unless he missed his guess, unlicensed, untaxed, and uninspected. Clandestine, off the books in every way.
Kibou-daini-a whole planet so obsessed with cheating death that even the street people managed to scavenge hope.
Which beat living, and dying, in a cardboard box all to flinders, Miles had to admit. He opened his mouth in what might have been a silent laugh. And I thought I'd pulled some audacious stunts in my time… How the hell Suze and whatever helpers she'd suborned had managed to palm an entire facility, back when this place was being decommissioned and stripped, its patrons shifted to the elegant new Cryopolis on the west end, gaudy with its floodlit pyramids, was a tale Miles was suddenly dying to hear.
Bad choice of phrase, my Lord Auditor.
Less than a third of the cryo-drawers in this corridor sported those glow-worm lights, and how many other corridors might there be? Plenty of room for more customers. And, because his mind worked that way, he considered how easy murder by cryo-drawer would be. The ultimate shell game, one live body hidden among hundreds of dead ones. Asphyxiation would come quickly in the sealed black box, even without the freezing, and no one would know where to look till much too late…?
It's nothing I haven't undergone before.
It was curious how much that reflection didn't help.
He stepped forward to the end door, raised his hand to touch the cool metal surface, and just stood there for a minute. Then, curling his fingers into a fist, he knocked.
The creak of a chair. The door opened partway, and a hairy face thrust through. "Yah?"
"Tenbury-san?"
"Just Tenbury. What did you want?"
"To ask a few questions, if I may."
Beneath shaggy brows, dark brown eyes narrowed. "Did you talk to Suze?"
"Jin took me to see her this morning, yes."
Tenbury's lips pursed amid their thatch. "Oh. All right." The door swung wide.
Miles did not correct the misperception that Suze had therefore gated him into this covert community, but slipped inside at once.
The room was part office, part control chamber for the banks of cryo-drawers, and part living space, or so the unmade bedroll by one wall and the piles of personal junk suggested. Beyond, another door stood open on what might be some sort of repairs facility. Miles glimpsed workbenches and racks of tools in its shadows. There was only one station chair, by which Miles guessed this Tenbury was less sociable than Suze, but the custodian politely gestured his guest into it and leaned against a control console. Miles would have preferred it the other way around, so as not to risk a crick in his neck, nor the embarrassment of swinging his short legs above the floor. But he dared not impede the useful exchange he'd started, so he sat and half-smiled upward.
Tenbury cocked his head, and echoed the cook's observation. "You look too young for us. You sick or something?"
Miles repeated the reply that had seemed to work before: "I have an incurable seizure disorder."
Tenbury winced in sympathy, but said, "You'd do better to go back to the docs. Off-planet, maybe."
"I have. It was costly." Miles turned out his empty pockets as if to demonstrate.
"That why you ended up here? Broke, are you?"
"In a sense." It wasn't as if Miles was trying to beat a fast-penta interrogation through excessive literalism, yet he found himself oddly reluctant to lie outright to this man. "It's more complicated than that."
"Yah, it always is.'
"Can you show me what I might be getting into? If I stayed here, that is?"
The hairy eyebrows jerked up. "You've nothing to worry about with my work. Come on, and you'll see."
Tenbury led through his shop, which seemed half-engineeering-half-medical. Dismantled freezer parts lay strewn across a workbench. "I keep a portion of the chambers usable by cannibalizing the others," Tenbury explained.
Miles encouraged the tech to expand upon the arcana of his craft with much the same noises he'd used on Yani, to better effect. When Miles had absorbed as much about how cryochambers were built as he could stand, he asked, "But won't you run out of parts?"
"Not for a while yet. This facility was originally set up to serve twenty thousand patrons. In twenty years, we've only accumulated about a ten-percent occupancy. I admit we started much smaller, back when. We can go for decades yet. Till I'm gone, for sure."
"And what then? Who are you relying on for your revivals?"
"We don't need anyone to do the revivals, yet. Anyway, they're much trickier."
Indeed. "Who does the cryoprep, then?"
"Plant nurse. You'll meet her sooner or later. She's real good, and she has an apprentice, Ako, too. I need to get myself a couple of youngsters like that, I guess."
Miles didn't marvel at this. Emergency cryoprep was a common enough medical procedure that even he had learned it, at least theoretically, as part of military field-aid. Under nonemergency conditions there were doubtless more refinements, resulting in less cryo-amnesia and other unwanted side-effects, after. Less trauma to start with left less trauma to recover from, but to choose to go down to that darkness in cold blood, so to speak, while still breathing… "It's still frightening to think about," he said honestly.
"For most folks, it's a last choice, not a first one. We all come to it in time, though. No one wants to go of a coronary in the night and not-wake-up warm and rotting. Safer not to wait too long." Tenbury's lips twisted. "Although some of the corps are trying to increase market share these days by encouraging folks to freeze early. I'm not sure if the math works out."