"Prepare to receive the body," he said.

On the side of the pod the orange square reverted to red as the semiAI reset itself. "Functioning," the pod announced. "Preparing for Koebe process. Please enter phenotype."

"Stupid fucking--" Chuang began but stopped himself. "Promote me," he said loudly, simultaneously reopening his comms channel.

"What?"

"Promote me," Navigator Chuang said fiercely, "while there's still time to save the Doctor."

Two decks above, Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei sighed. Sleeping with junior officers always produced these kinds of problems. "Madame," she said firmly. "You address me as madame."

"Promote me, madame." Chuang Tzu tried to put anger in his voice but it came out as petulance. He never had been any good at standing up to authority. "The pod won't--"

"Major," Lan Kuei said, "as of now."

Chuang Tzu dimmed his comms channel without signing out, a tiny act of rebellion, and turned to the pod.

"This is Major Commissar Chuang Tzu... Prepare to take a body," he told it. The semiAI would have to cope without a DNA reference for the flesh it was about to receive. Dr. Yuan was dying, the status light on her suit already down to a slow flicker.

The pod did as it was told.

In an ideal world, the pod would have had time to read Dr. Yuan's genotype, pre-plan fixes for any physical imperfections and replace all of the Doctor's blood with a mix of cryoprotectants, mainly glycerols. Only the SZ Loyal Prince was anything but an ideal world and Major Commissar Chuang Tzu wasn't sure he even knew what a genotype actually was.

On the breast of Dr. Yuan's uniform below a patch which showed cogs and ears of wheat framing a small rocket ship, a button alarm had started beeping.

"Chuang..."

"I know," he said.

Gripping his knife, the newly promoted navigator began to cut open Dr. Yuan's regulation tunic, trying not to notice one nipple becoming bare as he did so. The Doctor was impossibly beautiful, everyone agreed on that; at least they did back when there was an everyone to agree on anything.

"How's it going?" The voice in Chuang Tzu's ear was worried.

"Slowly," he admitted.

"Work faster," said Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei and was gone.

With the Doctor's tunic half open, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu gave up not looking and hacked at the cloth until he reached the waistband. This cut, he peeled the tunic from Dr. Yuan's torso and turned his attention to her trousers. There was a buckle, something elegant and strictly not regulation. Chuang Tzu cut this away without even noticing, keeping his hand between the dying woman's abdomen and the point of his blade, hesitating only when one knuckle brushed body hair.

All of this he did in zero gravity with one foot hooked under a wall handle and a thousand minor muscle adjustments every second to keep him steady. Beijing had chosen only swimmers for their deep-space missions and the navigator had swum every day as a child.

Yanking unsuccessfully at Dr. Yuan's trousers, the Major Commissar tugged again, only realizing on his third attempt that the doctor was still plumbed into a tiny waste unit attached to the back of her belt. It was smaller than standard and looked expensive, but then anything better than regulation looked expensive to Chuang Tzu.

"Disengage," he told the box.

Nothing happened.

"Do it," he ordered, which was pointless. All personal systems on the ship operated on owner order only. Not because that was all these systems could manage but because the original Commissar General believed in direct culpability. All ship-based systems, including personal ones, recorded all orders, which had to be direct.

That way, if something went wrong there was never any question as to whom could be held directly and unequivocally accountable.

"Major..."

The Colonel Commissar's voice was there again.

"Madame?"

"Your life readout."

The tiny diode below his breast badge now burned a dull orange. "Oxygen deprivation," said a readout on his wrist.

"What are you doing?"

"Preparing the Doctor for cryo."

"Still?" The Commissar Colonel sounded exasperated and, below that, she sounded scared. "What's the problem?"

"Dr. Yuan's wearing a waste box."

"Too bad." Lan Kuei's voice was cold. "Chill her down as she is. Then get yourself up here and renew your converter."

"Yes, madame." Chuang Tzu looked from the half-naked woman to the waiting pod, its lid open and ready. He knew that to freeze the Doctor as she was meant death. An event which would never intrude on Dr. Yuan's fragile consciousness. And this mattered to Commissar Major Chuang Tzu because it was his grandmother's belief that a death not met was no death at all.

Slicing up and around the top of each trouser leg, the Major Commissar removed both, then hacked up towards the Doctor's groin. When necessary he flipped the woman over, turning her this way and that, like an old-fashioned tailor shuffling cloth or a fish wife filleting carp.

Chuang Tzu worked quickly until all that remained was a floating box tethered directly into her spine. From the bottom of the box fed two narrow tubes, one entering her anus, the other splitting in two, the first catheter entering her bladder, the second her womb. Dr. Yuan's mistake had been to prepare herself for hibernation instead of cryo.

"Look at your light."

Chuang did. Orange, going on red.

"Is the doctor safely frozen?"

"Yes, madame."

"Then get yourself up here."

"On my way."

Sliding the Doctor's body into its pod, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu slammed the lid. All that remained to do was run the sequences necessary to chill it. "You know how to do this?" he asked the machine.

It lit for yes.

"Do it," he said.

The pod next door opened as ordered, lights dancing through a start-up sequence. Slots in the side revealed themselves and the snake-like tubes, which were really something else altogether, blurred into smoke and became familiar: clear tubes ending in long needles.

Chuang Tzu stripped effortlessly, hooking one foot under a handle to steady himself. The jacket he removed was an improvement on Kevlar, self-cleaning, airtight but willing to let his skin breathe in everything except vacuum.

"Major Commissar Chuang Tzu," he told the pod.

"Confirm."

The young Chinese officer put his hand on a ceramic plate and felt nothing as it lit briefly then darkened just as swiftly.

"Preparing for Koebe process."

"Proceed," he told the machine, pleased to discover that his voice was almost steady.

The needles were waiting for him. One entered his arm at the elbow, pumping in sedative, followed almost immediately by an anaesthetic. And then sleep came in a crash of waves and the smell of summer skies.

Major Commissar Chuang Tzu was swimming in a waterfall on the slopes above his grandfather's farm when the pod's first blade cut his throat, a small incision wide enough to take a tube. A second blade opened the femoral artery and pumping began, glycol entering his jugular as blood drained from his groin. Chuang Tzu's stomach was then pumped and his lower bowel flushed clean.

In all the process took three minutes.

And while Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei gave orders for the SZ Loyal Prince to draw closer to the nearest wall and wondered what had happened to the last remaining member of her crew, Chuang Tzu's pod reached the end of its preparations and flooded with liquid nitrogen, reducing its occupant to the fragility of glass.