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.Clearly impossible, even disregarding the unlikely manoeuvres required to match our velocity and position undetected.I chewed on my lip, aware that each second of indecision counted against Janos.For my own defence, Katia would permit me access to a weapon, provided of course that the existence of the intruder was proven.Alternatively, I might best confront the situation by not confronting it.I could perform surgery on Janos without straying into those regions of the ship that the intruder had apparently claimed as its haunt.In a day or so, therefore, this ordeal might be over, and I could re-enter reefersleep.The most faceless, inhuman entities I would have to contend with upon my next revival would be Solpace Axis customs officials.Let them worry about the unseen extra passenger.Hadn’t the shadow permitted me safe slumber so far?I chuckled, though to my ears it sounded more like a death-rattle.I was still frightened, but for once my hands had stopped playing arpeggios on the keys of an invisible piano.I absorbed myself in technical eidetics outlining the medical systems Katia and I were about to employ.The gleaming semirobotic tools were the culmination of Yellowstone’s surgical sciences.Even so, they would undoubtedly appear crude by Earthside standards.This dichotomy galled me.Even if Janos would necessarily worsen by the time we arrived, how could we be certain that we were not reducing his chances with our outdated medical intervention? Perhaps Earth would have accelerated so far beyond our capabilities that the equation was no longer balanced in our favour.Yet Katia would have weighed the issue minutely before selecting the appropriate course of action.Perhaps, then, it was best simply to silence one’s qualms and do whatever was required.Drones assisted me in carrying the medical machinery into the crew reefer room, where my five colleagues lay in frozen sleep.I wore a facemask and a gloved jumpsuit, inwoven with a heating circuit.Katia would lower the room’s temperature before slightly increasing Janos’s own.“Ready, Uri?” she asked.“Let’s start.”So we commenced, my eyes constantly flicking to the open reefer I hoped soon to re-enter.The room rapidly chilled, lights burning frigid blue from the overheads.Janos’s reefer cracked open with a gasp of release cold.I looked at Janos, still and white and somehow distant.Let that distance remain, I prayed.After all, we were about to open his head.Katia, in fact, had already performed some preliminary surgery.The skull had been exposed, skin pulled back as if framing the white pistil of a flesh-leaved flower.Slender probes entered the scalp via drilled holes, trailing glowing coloured cables into a matrix of input points in the domed head of the reefer.The work was angstrom-precise, rendered with a robot’s deadening perfection.I had been briefed: those cables were substituting for the cybernetic implants within his brain that had fallen victim to the Melding Plague.“When you have the top of the skull free you should feed it back along the cables,” Katia told me.“It’s crucial that we don’t lose cyber-interface with Janos.”I prepped the mechanical bone-saw.“Why? What use is he to us?”“There are good reasons.If you’re still interested we can discuss it after the operation.”The saw hummed into life, the rotary tip glinting evilly.Katia vectored the blade down, smoothly gnawing into the pale bone.Little blood oozed free but the sound struck an unpleasant resonance with me.Katia made three expert circumferential passes, then retracted.I took a deep breath, then placed gloved fingers on the top of Janos’s head.The scalp felt loose, like half of a chocolate egg.I eased the section of skull free with a wet sucking slurp, exposing the damp pinkish mass of dura and gyrus, snuggling in the lower bowl of the skull.I took special care to maintain the integrity of the connections as I separated the bonework.For a while, humbled, I could only stand in awe of this fantastic organ, easily the most complex, alien thing my eyes had ever gazed on.And yet it managed to look so disappointingly vegetable.“Husband, we must proceed,” warned Katia
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