Jin was staring; Miles wondered how disturbing this process was to the boy, or if he'd seen it before.  It was disturbing to Miles, and he'd done it before, or had it done to him.  Maybe the more unsettling for that?  For the first time, he wondered how much the news of his own encounter with the needle-grenade had felt like history repeats to his father, if it had triggered unwelcome old memories of the Princess-and-Countess Olivia's messy death.  I must apologize to him for that, when next we meet.

"It almost seems too simple," Miles murmured to Raven.

Raven said, "The complexity lies in the cryo-preservation fluid, which has a whole pharmaceutical facility behind it.  Or so one trusts.  Where are you getting your cryo-fluid, Madame Tanaka?"

The medtech's old mouth set in a flat smile.  "The concentrate falls off the back of a few loading docks of hospitals here in town.  They discard their outdated supplies a couple of times a year.  We distill our own water to reconstitute it."

Miles's brows rose.  "Is that, um . . . all right?  Medically?"

Raven shrugged.  "If the use-by dating is fairly conservative, yes."

It was not, Miles supposed, a choice between discarded fluid and fresh, but between discarded and none.  He was reminded again that this place was a parasite operation, clinging to the underbelly of a more functional economy, without which it could not continue to exist.  Granted, if its host economy functioned rather better, it wouldn't need to exist.

Medical sensors blinked timing lights.  Ako withdrew the tubes and sealed the entry and exit incisions with plastic bandage, and carefully lathered the skin with ointment.   She and Medtech Tanaka horsed the body into a sort of plastic body-glove, then joined forces Tenbury to shift it all onto the float pallet, where Tenbury covered it more corpselike with a sheet.  He guided the pallet out the door.  "Want to help me, Jin?" Tenbury asked hopefully over his shoulder.  Jin, planting his feet, doggedly shook his head.  Tenbury sighed and trundled his burden away.

Ako turned to the cleanup process, Raven leaned against a counter, and Miles found a stool to perch upon.  While the medtech folded her arms and listened dubiously, Miles embarked on much the same pitch as he'd presented to Madame Suze, heavy on the implication that Suze had sent them over here with her full blessing.  Since Tanaka seemed susceptible to the boy, Miles also unleashed Jin for a judicious blast of heartfelt imploring.

As a result, her frown at the end seemed more technical than political.  "We haven't had most of that section open for years.  A lot of the equipment that wasn't stripped out when the place was decommissioned went later."

Palmed and pawned or sold, Miles presumed.

"But I do maintain . . . huh.  I think we'll have to go up and take a look around."