As Mildred’s life signs plummeted, her personal physicianas well as her best professional colleaguehad 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 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 amazedusually 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.
“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-laid plans of mice and men.”