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

[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?"

[ofthestars]

Asterion gets the picture. He grins.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles grins back, hardly even minding the fangs, and turns off the freezer's interior light. Then he starts tracing optic cables and inventorying lab drawers.

In short order, he has the monitor feed from the freezers spliced so that one freezer delivers its output to an optical data recorder while its neighbour covers for its absence via a splitter cable. He sits very still for a minute or two, letting the recorder do its work. Then he fusses with the arrangement again until the data recorder is broadcasting its loop of quiescent freezer inactivity on all three of the monitor channels, and the live feeds from the freezers hang loose.

"And now that the monitors are well and truly buggered... come here," he says, beckoning Asterion to the first freezer. "Time for your very first tactics lesson. There's the temperature dial. Turn it up, gentle as can be, until it hits maximum. Then do the other two."

[ofthestars]

Asterion does as suggested, then looks down at Miles. "And the lesson...?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"The lesson," Miles whispers, "is that sometimes you can do far more damage with far less force, if you apply it intelligently. Now c'mon. I think I saw some industrial cutters in one of those drawers. I'll take those and this hand light," he hefts the small light he used to see his work when he was jiggering all those data cables, "and we'll go back down and see if they help us get anywhere. Maybe there's a door I missed on the way up this column, or one of the other columns leads to a less heavily guarded potential exit, or I can use these cutters to get past the grille on that duct we tried the first time."

He retrieves the cutters, pops the panel off the column, and descends with the hand light clipped to his shirt collar.

[ofthestars]

Asterion casts a thoughtful glance around the room before following Miles down, replacing the panel yet again on the way.

[thisvorlunatic]

There are no more panels on the way down. Miles climbs down past the subbasement to give Asterion room to open the panel there, then emerges and starts pacing, considering his options. His feet are cold.

"Back into the duct first, I think," he declares. "It's easier to see out that grille than it would be if we started trying panels again. Less risk of popping out of a hole only to find we've surprised a guard squadron on break."

[ofthestars]

"All right," says Asterion. He follows Miles to the duct and boosts him up into it.

[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.