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Horatio taps his goggles to darken them, then draws his welding wand along the metal carapace. Sparks sing from the tip of the wand, bursting like fireworks in an ancient film. Slowly, the casing seals away wire and silicon and steel and flesh.
He is better at it than he was a week ago.
They'd dumped Yorick's body out of cryo to make room for new corpses--jettisoned him from the station, funeral pod and all, and perhaps it had been the exposure that had made his flesh too delicate to work; he'd blinked once when he'd woken and then screamed, screamed all three point eight minutes that he survived rehabilitation. When Horatio had sawed open the metal casing, he found that the flesh had blistered and withered under the welding wand and left the bones bare.
The first iteration of the rehab unit had proved less than successful. Horatio had folded Yorick up in the blastglass funeral pod and then ejected him. "I'm sorry," he had said, although he knew rationally that it made no difference whether he was sorry.
Horatio redrafted and redesigned. Rehab unit version 2.0, he said into the recorder at his jaw. Improved insulation and cooling system.
Horatio had learned to request pods from cryo without arousing suspicion. He learned to fill out the forms for requisitioning particular bodies (and approval came easy when all nearest of kin were deceased), and he found that once he'd gone through the proper channels the cryo labs even delivered.
The rehabilitation of Laertes went flawlessly. The casing sealed with no damage to the flesh; the enervation proceeded precisely according to Horatio's designs; the biofilters removed the poison from his blood; the sedatives kept him from panicking initially. "Where am I?" he asked--he was groggy, limbs heavy with metal and sleep. "Where's prince Hamlet?"
"He's in cryo," said Horatio quietly, and he wished he could say any other thing.
"And Ophelia--" He broke off, looking away.
Neither had to say it--there was nothing to be done for a person who had fallen or jumped into space. The body had been beyond recovery or repair.
Laertes's eyes fell on his heavy arm, and he brought it up before his eyes. Horatio had braced it only a little, most of the mechanisms geared more toward reviving and sustaining life rather than propping a failing structure; the flesh showed almost everywhere. "What have you done to me, Horatio?" Laertes snarled. "What am I?"
"A rehabilitated cybernetic organism," answered Horatio. A cyborg.
"Very well," said Laertes--and he had reached under his chestplate and torn its guts out.
Horatio can still remember his livid face, cheeks flushed with pain. I wanted to be dead, damn you--damn you, Horatio--
Laertes's corpse had joined his sister's, torn to pieces among the stars.
Horatio waits for the metal to cool, then runs a systems diagnostic. The mainframe functions; the biofilters are processing; all wires are tight and in place. The cooling system has kept the flesh safe in its shell.
He presses a dry kiss to Hamlet's lips. They are cool and still beneath his own.
"Time is 2300," he whispers into his recorder. "Initiating rehabilitation for unit 2.1."
Although he has never been a religious man, he finds that he is praying.