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]

Miles wriggles grilleward, and peers out to verify that the storage room beyond is quite deserted before he gets to work with his borrowed cutters. The grille yields to moderate pressure. Miles descends carefully into the storage room, where he pokes around a little. The night is still reasonably young, and he misses his boots.

His boots are lost to him, but he does find a musty old bin of spare House Ryoval guard uniforms. All much too big for him and much too small for Asterion, but Miles filches several pairs of warm black socks, donning two layers and stuffing the rest in his pockets; on reflection, he also puts on the smallest available combination of red tunic and black trousers and red-lined black jacket, rolling up everything that needs rolling up so the trousers don't drag on the floor and the sleeves don't fall over his hands. A few more minutes of searching turn up a second bin containing boots, from which he again takes the smallest. Adding a third layer of socks gets them to stay on his feet with adequate stability. Then he bundles up the biggest available size of everything, on the theory that some of it might fit his new recruit-trainee at least well enough to be worth trying, and packs all the bins away as close as possible to the condition in which he found them.

Thusly equipped, he creeps out into the hallway and explores a little more. There at the end of the hall, a hatch that strongly resembles the one Miles was thrown down not too many hours ago; he notes its position but doesn't try to open it just yet. First he wants to see what other useful articles he might plunder from this basement.

A second storage room contains mainly spare glassware. Miles is not yet desperate enough to filch a couple of test tubes for use as improvised weapons, but he does pick up a handful of styluses and a small stack of sticky-notes from a bin of office supplies. In a pinch, they'll make better lockpicking devices than his bare hands. Likewise the two pairs of gloves, light and heavy - if he could find any that might accomodate Asterion's enormous hands and talonlike fingernails, he'd grab them, but they don't seem to stock the appropriate size. Speaking of lab gear, though, is that a drawer full of lab coats? Why yes! Miles grabs biggest and smallest in those too. Beggars can be choosers, if they're willing to steal...

The next few storage rooms he tries contain more office supplies, legions of spare data cables, and a bin of defunct small electronics. Miles pockets a few rolls of cable and a couple of dead widgets - a wristcom and a chrono - plus a small tool-case he finds next to the widget bin. It should make a much better lockpick than a bunch of styluses. Pity there aren't any working hand lights around with which to augment his extremely limited supply.

Now thoroughly laden, he goes back to the subbasement hatch and opens it up. It's one of the ones with no handle. For convenience's sake, he jams it open with a spare stylus before he descends.

"Asterion?" he calls, as loudly as he dares, which isn't very. "You still down here?"

[ofthestars]

He appears at the sound of his name, like some kind of enormous fairy.

"Yeah. Did you find a way out?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I found a way... back in," he says. "And some extra clothes that you might be able to squeeze into." He hands Asterion the big bundle. "Now to decide whether we go for the twenty-seven-K trek through the snow, or steal a vehicle."

[ofthestars]

"I could carry you twenty-seven kilometers through the snow," Asterion predicts. "Which way's easier to track?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Could you carry me twenty-seven kilometers through the snow faster than I could keep up myself? ...Probably," he answers his own question. "All right. I think... advantage goes to the long walk, because people leave tracks in snow, but stolen vehicles are likely to be missed faster than prisoners vanished out of an unmonitored sub-basement, and most instruments are better at finding vehicles than people. I just wish I'd been able to find some spare cash, any spare cash..." He glances back at the jammed hatch in an agony of temptation. "I don't fancy having to barter for comm access with a couple pocketloads of miscellaneous basement junk, but neither do I fancy nipping up there for another look around and stumbling on a guard come down to check on us or replace a lost boot or something."

[ofthestars]

"I could come with you," Asterion suggests. "Those guards don't go around in groups big enough to take me down."

[thisvorlunatic]

"It only takes one hit with a nerve disruptor," says Miles. "They're probably under orders not to kill you - or me, for that matter - but we don't know that for sure. And you're not as easily hidden as I am - can't tuck you into small corners..." But he's wavering. "All right, you can come up for a quick look around. But if we see any guards before they see us, we at least try hiding, all right?"

[ofthestars]

"Sure," he allows.

[thisvorlunatic]

Up the ladder and through the hatch they go, then. Miles takes Asterion on a quick tour of the rooms he's already searched, then proceeds through neighbouring corridors.

There is a lot more basement junk to be had.

But finally, just as Miles is about to give up, they come upon a room that appears to be the dumping ground for at least half the building's waste chutes. Miles vaguely recalls that these chutes are disused now, having been replaced by a new set that all terminate in a ground-floor room - he made a note of it when studying the map because the older chutes (a) are wide enough to admit him and (b) don't lead to an incinerator. Apparently, though, there's a difference between disused and unused. Several of the openings have piles of junk accumulated beneath them. Miles puts on his heavy gloves, exchanges his slightly-overlarge security uniform jacket for a slightly-overlarge lab coat, and goes hunting. People throw out all kinds of things.

[ofthestars]

Asterion watches in fascination.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles sorts through the piles of junk, uttering an occasional 'Ha' as he retrieves this or that tidbit - the kind of person who throws their trash down the wrong hole is the kind of person who is likely to throw away something more valuable than they would if they were paying attention. And indeed, he scrounges a little loose change here and there, but the real windfall is when he finds a lab coat with one arm burned away and fifteen Betan dollars in the pocket.

"That should do us," he declares, glancing back at Asterion. "Now let's go back and see if I can't get that vehicle entrance open, the one at the bottom of the slope. I'm guessing it'll be our least guarded option."

[ofthestars]

Back they go.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Confusion to the enemy," Miles murmurs as he removes the stylus jamming the hatch open and lets it fall firmly shut behind them.

With his scavenged tools, the control panel for the vehicle entrance is only a moderate challenge. He lets Asterion watch - a little exposure to practical skills can hardly do the kid any harm - and then pauses so they can both don all their layers before he makes the final manipulation that causes the door to rise. As soon as it's up high enough for Asterion to wriggle under, Miles disconnects his widgetry and rolls under it himself as it slowly creaks downward.

[ofthestars]

Outside is a ramp leading up to an area of bare snow-sprinkled ground, mainly rocks and hard-packed dirt with a few sad spiky weeds. There are no vehicles or even any tracks visible, just an expanse of frosted tarmac that spreads out from the ramp and trails a black arm away toward a locked gate in the wall.

"Where to?" murmurs Asterion.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Over the wall," Miles whispers back, pointing. "You'll have to boost me up. Then we wander through the woods until I get my bearings."

[ofthestars]

Asterion nods. Over they go. They don't see anyone on the way, nor do any guards come boiling out of the building to chase them down.

[thisvorlunatic]

Then there are woods. It takes much less wandering than advertised for Miles to get oriented and point out the appropriate direction.

[ofthestars]

At which point, Asterion scoops him up and sets off.

It takes him somewhat less than two hours to cover the ground between the biolab complex and the nearest settlement.

[thisvorlunatic]

And then it is Miles's job to find them a commercial comconsole booth that is open at this hour, and call the Ariel for a pickup.

He does both those things. (He makes sure not to show or mention Asterion on the vid call, since someone somewhere is almost certainly monitoring it and will eventually report its contents to Ryoval. Confusion to the enemy.)

[whyexit]

"Admiral!" exclaims Thorne, when it answers. "What in God's name - well, I guess that puts paid to the ransom discussion, I'll string them along a bit more for cover while a shuttle goes to fetch you, shall I?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"That would be just perfect, thank you."

[whyexit]

"Right. Do you want the shuttle where you're calling from or a rendezvous somewhere else?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"If you can land a shuttle in commercial parking, by all means do so, and I'll meet you there. I feel that the residents of this town would be alarmed by a full-on emergency pickup in the middle of the street."

[whyexit]

"Dispatching," chirps Thorne, "and then operation Screw It He's Not Worth That Much Money Watch Us Innocently Saunter is go." It salutes.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles chuckles. "All right. See you soon."

He cuts the com and goes to wait for rescue.