façade

[isthisart]

Linya gradually feels her way around being proper friends with Ekaterin, not wishing to wreck things with a premature "will you be my Second at my duplicate wedding" request. There is companionable gardening. There is, when Linya and Jocelyn make an unexpected sudden breakthrough in causing the nibs to behave, which holds when they fabricate a prototype and test it out, a fountain pen for Ekaterin. (In addition to Miles's and Count Vorkosigan's. And one for Emperor Gregor, which has got to be worth all the R&D in advertising alone.) When Miles's legs are more or less completely healed, they skip off to Vorkosigan Surleau for a few days and he teaches her to fly a lightflyer, which she enjoys very much and picks up very quickly. Linya writes Miles a song. (It has no words, she doesn't feel up to lyrics, but it is very pretty and slightly different every time she plays/sings it.) With the nibs handled and all the Barrayaran languages learned Linya spends more time reading textbooks and signs up for a university placement exam to see how far ahead into advanced classes on various things she can skip, and awaits her results.

And snuggles her tiny Barrayaran.

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

"Right," says Miles.

He begins an intensive search of the various available openings. The likeliest prospect, once Asterion has torn off the grille and delivered him into it, proves to be a bust; in one direction it splits into two smaller branches through which he could not hope to fit, and in the other direction, it ends in a grille that resists the strongest pressure he dare apply with his bare, fragile hands. His leg bones having recently been reinforced, he considers trying to kick it out, but doubts he could muster enough leverage in the awkward curve of the duct. Dejectedly, he inches back out again.

[ofthestars]

His recruit-trainee reaches up unasked to help him return safely to the ground.

"No good?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"No good," he confirms, shaking his head. "Need something else..." For lack of anything better to do, he starts pacing back toward the previous most likely duct, ruled out because Asterion's sharper night vision spotted that the passage above the grille was too flat to admit even so pre-squashed a human as Miles.

Something catches his eye on one of the larger, fancier support columns. He changes direction and heads toward it to inspect the groove in the near side.

"Does this look like a panel that comes off to you?" he mutters, half to himself. "It does to me..." He knocks on the side of the column and gets back a hollow echo. "Right..." A minute's careful prodding reveals a pair of recessed buttons on either side of the mysterious outline, which when he presses them simultaneously cause the outlined panel to pop off in his hands, nearly overbalancing him and a moment later nearly tumbling from his grip into the column's unlit depths.

[ofthestars]

Asterion catches it and helps him set it down outside the column, then regards him with a mildly impressed expression.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles grins, buoyed by his success.

"All right, you're the one who can see in the dark - want to poke your head in there and tell me what we're looking at?"

[ofthestars]

He leans into the opening - quite wide enough to admit him - and looks around.

"Ladder," he says. "No light inside. The ladder goes as far as I can see, up or down. What's the point of down? Is there more basement underneath us?"

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles looks up from examining the inner surface of the detached panel.

"It's a low-vibration support column - see the yellow goo around it, here, where it goes into the rock? Reduces friction. They can fill the inside with various kinds of goo if they want, to alter the density of the column. So it's hollow all the way down, however far it goes into the bedrock. And there might as well be a ladder in case some poor sod needs to make repairs... what interests me is, this panel here could be opened from the inside. I think it's worth climbing up to see if we can find any more of them, higher up where they might lead interesting places. I'll go first - I couldn't catch you if you fell off."

[ofthestars]

Asterion withdraws from the column to let Miles scramble in and start up the ladder, then follows him up.

After a little climbing, he reports, "Can't see a thing now unless I look down."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Noted," puffs Miles. Every few rungs he pauses to run his hands up and down the walls within reach, looking for another panel.

It takes a lot of climbing before he finds one, set in the opposite side of the column from the one far below them. On leaning over, he discovers that he doesn't have the reach to press both of its buttons, at least not and stay on the ladder.

"Bugger," he mutters. "Asterion? You have nice long arms. I found us a panel but I can't get it open. If I move up out of your way, can you get at the release catches? And, uh, try not to drop the panel. It'd be a good idea for us to put it back when we're done exploring, and I don't fancy trying to haul it up the ladder from the bottom of this hole."

[ofthestars]

"Sure," says Asterion. He waits until he hears Miles stop climbing again, then moves up and reaches over. The panel comes off easily, and he turns it carefully to push it through the opening and lay it on the floor of the dark but comparatively well-lit room.

[thisvorlunatic]

"What do you see out there?" whispers Miles.

[ofthestars]

Asterion pokes his head out, looks around, then retracts it and whispers back. "Big room, lots of little lights from displays and stuff. No people, no windows. One door."

[thisvorlunatic]

"All right, time to go exploring," murmurs Miles. "Can you get back down to the basement, put the panel back on, and come back up here? It seems to me that if we get out this way, it would be advantageous to make that as un-obvious as possible."

[ofthestars]

"Yeah," says Asterion. He starts climbing down the ladder again.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles slips out of the opening in the side of the column, and starts inspecting the room on the other side. Asterion's description was accurate, as far as it went. The door, made of glass, seems to lead to a hallway crowded with vid pickups. He spots a red-and-black guard at the end of the hall, and creeps backward away from the door. No good that way. Are there any exits his recruit-trainee might have missed?

There are not. There's a refrigerator at the back of the long room, and a row of three enormous walk-in freezers with polished metal doors. Miles gets on tiptoe to peer through the square glass viewport in the front of one. Blackness. He contemplates turning on a light.

[ofthestars]

Asterion emerges silently from the column, and on his own initiative also replaces this panel.

"Find anything?" he asks in a whisper.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I don't believe we can get out this way," Miles whispers back. "Damn. But there might be food in the refrigerator, if I know lab techs..." That was a twenty-four-hour ration bar, but this is an eight-foot-tall teenage boy with God knows what kind of accelerated metabolism. Miles peers into the fridge and extracts an illicitly stored sandwich accompanied in its rough paper package by a large pear. "Hungry?" He offers them to his companion with a conjuror's flourish.

[ofthestars]

"Not as hungry as usual," he says, but he still accepts and devours the stolen meal. "What were you looking at when I got here?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Those freezers. I think I'm going to indulge my curiosity," he says, and goes over to the control panel to turn on the interior light in one of the freezers.

Then he looks inside.

Clear plastic drawers containing clear plastic trays, stacked in tall cabinets, rows and rows and rows and endless rows of them. Everything neatly labelled. And the individual articles arranged on these trays are... some kind of frozen samples.

Tissue samples, perhaps?

"My god," he breathes, stunned. "This must be it. Ryoval's treasure chamber - the black heart of his black art - look in there, Asterion." He moves aside. "See all those little frozen sticks? Tissue samples. What Baron Ryoval uses to cook up his bio-slaves. Every little tidbit of flesh he's begged, bought, borrowed, or stolen in the last century, neatly labelled and waiting to be used on his next project. Its value is incalculable."

[ofthestars]

"We can't pick it up and carry it off," says the practical Asterion. "What's its value to us?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ha," says Miles. "Listen, have you met Ryoval?"

[ofthestars]

He nods.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Did you like him?"

[ofthestars]

"No."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Me neither," says Miles. "Did you know these freezers have a temperature control that goes up to two hundred degrees centigrade, to heat-sterilize the interior for cleaning and maintenance?"