singing open the great gates

[middlingalong]

The following day, very little happens, except for Vorreedi mentioning that Yenaro has been arrested (by the civil police, for theft, on charges from a ghem-lord Miles has never heard of, as opposed to by Cetagandan security for treason).

Also, Ivan gets bored - with all the bodyguards Vorreedi now requires for them after the incident at the bioestheties exhibition, the possible spontaneity of going out with his ghem girlfriends is much reduced.

But the next day they get to attend the Singing Open of the Great Gates.

And oh, is there ever singing.

Comments

[isthisart]

"That, too," Linyabel agrees.

"No chance of his waking up before I get back, is there?" Kety asks.

"No. I dosed him very thoroughly."

"Hm. Please be more discreet, my love. We don't want excessive chemical residues left on autopsy. Though with lucky, there will not be enough left to autopsy."

"Of course," Linyabel agrees, making the face again when he calls her his love.

"Good."

"I'll await you," she adds coolly.

"Let me help you lay him out. It must be crowded in there."

"I'm using him for a footrest," she says, rolling her eyes but letting none of the exasperation into her voice. "I'm so comfortable - please let me enjoy my chair a little longer," eyeroll, "my love. It has been so long."

Kety is amused. "Soon enough, you shall have more privileges than the Empress ever had. And all the outworlders at your feet you may desire."

He nods at the bubble, and strides off.

Control panel rejigger. Hand down in lap again. "Thank you."

[thisvorlunatic]

"—Er? Oh," he says, catching up. "For clarium. Yeah. It's a tranquilizer."

[isthisart]

"Good to know. Mist the guard, finesse the door, get Nadina?" she says. "He'll probably take longer to yell that I'm not who he's expecting if you're hidden and give me more chance to get in with the drug."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Maybe we should've misted Kety," sighs Miles. "No, Kety probably has better reaction time than his goons. If he ducked we'd be screwed."

He climbs around back of the float-chair, clinging for dear life to the high graceful arch of its back while his boots find minimal-to-nonexistent traction on the base.

[isthisart]

Linyabel floats out of the empty cabin, and checks that the corridor is empty. She approaches the guard. "Servitor," she says, with all the hauteur she possesses.

"Haut." He nods respectfully, and when he's about to inhale to continue his utterance, she flicks her bubble off quick as a wink and sprays him in the face. Down he goes; the chair rocks. She seizes the guard's hand and presses it to the palm-lock without further ado.

And there's Nadina, sitting on a couch. Her arms and legs are free, if short several bolts of fancy cloth (she isn't nude, just - reduced, somewhat). She is attached to the floor only by her hair, and by the end of it at that, leaving her meters of room to move about. Linyabel eases the guard quietly to the floor and floats forward. "Haut Nadina, are you injured?" she asks, shucking a couple of layers of white mourning to transfer over for the sake of Nadina's dignity. She also offers over Vio's knife. "You're going to have to cut it."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles makes a quick inspection of the premises, then starts searching the guard's pockets for anything useful. Such as this vibra-knife, excellent, in case haut Nadina wants a finer cut than the mere sharp edge supplied by haut Vio. He returns to the two ladies with this prize.

[isthisart]

"I," says Nadina, atremble.

"We are under time pressure. Unless there's a key in this room?"

"Vio had it -"

"I took her belongings but none of them are a key. I can make the cut if you can't. And then we need to get the Great Key - do you know where he keeps it?"

"Yes, it's -" Nadina has the ordinary blade; Linyabel snatches the vibra-knife out of Mile's hand rather than risk Nadina refusing to give hers up, and slices off the end of Nadina's hair from the trap while she's distracted midsentence. "Oh -" Nadina tears up, but speaks on. "I - I can direct you."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles takes the opportunity to grab the guard's stunner, now that they are on their way out. He's a little dubious about loading three people onto that poor float-chair, but it's not like they have a better option. Up onto the back he goes.

[isthisart]

Linyabel gives the vibra-knife back to Miles, and boards the chair again. Nadina sits sort of across her lap, leaning awkwardly so that Linyabel can see to pilot. When Miles is clinging to the back again, there being no longer any room on the armrests, Linyabel brings up the bubble once more in sound suppression mode, and the chair lurches out the door. It makes a discontented whirring noise at the overload.

"Down this way, turn here," says Nadina. They pass a servitor, who bows, gets out of the way, and doesn't look over his shoulder at them when they've passed. Nadina has the end of her hair in her lap and she is looking disconsolately at the cut ends.

"Did Kety get you to say anything he ought not to know?" Linyabel asks her.

"No," says Nadina.

[thisvorlunatic]

"...He didn't just use fast-penta?"

[isthisart]

"It doesn't work on haut-women," explains Linyabel.

They go down a deck, down another corridor. And come to a door.

"This is it," says Nadina.

"Do people go in and out? If I knock will someone open the door?" Linyabel asks.

"Knocking may - you're pretending to be Vio?"

"Yes."

"Then - yes, try it, say you've brought me along to retry, maybe."

Linyabel checks for observers, spies none, and drops the bubble only long enough to rap on the door, then pulls it up again. "Shh -"

A pale man in Kety's livery who looks like he hasn't slept in a week opens the door, scans the bubble with some device for scanning bubbles, and says, "Yes, haut Vio?"

"I have brought the haut Nadina, to try again," says Linyabel.

"I don't think we're going to need her," says the man, "but you can talk to the general."

And just like that, they're in. Linyabel suppresses outgoing sound yet again.

The cipher lab is full of empty caffeinated beverages and commercial painkillers and assorted electronic equipment. Besides the man who let them in, there is another in the same uniform, and leaning over his shoulder, the general.

It's not Chilian; it's a younger man, wearing the Imperial Security uniform, though not in inspection-ready condition; they've all been shorting themselves on sleep, it would seem.

"All right," says the tech that the General is supervising, "start over with branch seven thousand, three hundred and six. Only seven hundred more to go, and we'll have it, I swear."

Linyabel's attention, however, is on a pile of eight Great Keys, or possibly mostly decoy Great Keys.

"Nadina. Which one is it?"

"I'm not sure," flitters Nadina.

"And it could be none of them," Linyabel mutters, "or we could seize them all and sort it out later."

[thisvorlunatic]

"No..." murmurs Miles. "I mean, yes, of course we grab them all, but - listen to that tech, they're still trying to get into the thing. Which means it can't be any of the ones in the pile. They'll have it somewhere in this room, hooked up to whatever they're using to try to crack it. I guess Lura couldn't get its hands on a copy of the opener seal."

He calculates. That guard's stunner is a weapon of strict last resort; fire it in here and alarms are bound to go off, alerting Kety and making any subsequent escape into a very tricky prospect indeed. But they have one officer and two techs to deal with: three enemies, and only one dose of knockout mist. And hell, Miles recognizes that officer. Ghem-General Naru, third-in-command among the Celestial Garden's Imperial security. No bloody wonder Kety's been able to make their security arrangements dance to his tune.

[isthisart]

"I have an opener seal," Linyabel says.

"Yes, Vio," says ghem-General Naru. "What is it now?" he asks cotemptuously.

"Shh," says Linyabel, and she allows sound, and says in tones of great offense, "Mind how you speak to me, sir."

Naru grimaces. "Being back in your bubble makes you proud again, I see. Enjoy it while it lasts. We'll have all of those damned bitches pried out of their little fortresses after this. Their days of being cloaked by the Emperor's blindness and stupidity are numbered, I assure you, haut Vio."

Linyabel closes the sound output, judging it safe to spend a minute or two being taken aback.

[thisvorlunatic]

"For God's sake keep that opener seal out of sight," says Miles. "They'd kill you for it in a hot second... do you think you can get ghem-General Naru there with the last dose of sleepy-juice? If you take him out I can see about the other two - try to threaten them into a nice quiet surrender, because if I fire a stunner in this room all hell will break loose."

[isthisart]

"I can try," Linyabel mutters. She readies the bulb, drops her force screen, lurches towards the General (who is still waiting for her reply to his denouncement), and - falls short when he startles back and yells a warning rather than staying put and breathing in.

Nadina makes for the heap of keys and scoops them all up.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Oh fuck," says Miles.

He leaps free of the float-chair, drops both techs with a stunner blast each, and grazes Naru with the third shot, slowing him down considerably. No time to hit him again - Miles follows the tangle of cables from the tech's comconsole until he finds the Great Key, pinned under the glare of a com light-beam, in a box shoved behind some other equipment. He snatches it away and dashes back to the float-chair to hand it to Linyabel, then turns and fires again at the groaning, lumbering Naru. The second shot downs him just fine.

[isthisart]

Linyabel takes the real Key, Nadina sits on her again with the fake Keys. "Get on, let's go -"

The door hisses open, and it wasn't her opening it.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles fires his stunner at whoever is coming through and hops back onto his rearward perch. "I'm on! Force-screen up!"

[isthisart]

Down goes a trooper; up goes the screen, protecting them all from massed stunner fire; but the door is rather blocked by more personnel, leaving them trapped.

Governor Kety strolls through the door, and palm-locks it. "Well, well," he says, almost serenely. "What have we here?"

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles growls under his breath. They have everything, he and Linyabel - the Key, Nadina - everything except an escape route. And Kety needs some way to extract them all from this bubble... but they know he has such a way, because he managed it with Nadina. There's no way the float-chair's puny comlink can reach all the way to the Star Creche from here. If only they could—get a signal out—

"Ah-ha," he mutters, craning around the back of the chair to address Linyabel's ear. "Listen - could you download the Great Key onto this chair? I just had a crazy brilliant idea."

[isthisart]

"...yes," says Linyabel, producing the key-opener ring and opening up the real Key in her hand. "The chair's comlink can't reach all the way planetside to get it back to the Star Creche, though."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Doesn't have to. We'll send it as a distress signal - there's a booster on the orbital transfer station, right next to this ship; I know the codes. Patch it through that, maximum emergency override, and it goes to every ship and station currently in the Eta Ceta star system. No damn good to any of them, of course, without the gene bank to go with it - but it'll get back to the Star Creche for sure. And I'd like to see Kety try to keep a lid on his little plot after that. Can you do it? And keep him out of the bubble long enough for all the information to get through?"

[isthisart]

"I don't know how he cracks the bubbles - Nadina? -"

"It'll take a while," Nadina says. "Half an hour last time, I assume they've changed the codes or he'd be through already."

"But - yes, I think this qualifies as an emergency -" Linyabel starts fussing with her various devices and the controls of the chair. "There. It's started."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles rattles off the codes for the distress booster.

[isthisart]

Linyabel applies them, and some more besides - "Lisbet gave me an Imperial override, thank you Lisbet - there."

Kety, meanwhile, is apparently ready to wait his half-hour to crack the bubble open again, but:

"Haut-governor," comes a nervous subordinate's voice. "We are experiencing a peculiar communication over emergency channels. An enormous data dump is being speed-loaded onto our systems. Some kind of coded gibberish, but it has exceeded the memory capacity of the receiver and is spilling over into other systems like a virus. It's marked with an Imperial override. The initial signal appears to be originating from our ship. Is this... something you intend?"

It is not something Kety intends. He swears. "No. Get ghem-General Naru and his people awake! We have to get this force-screen down now!"

There follow creative medical attempts to revive the stunned techs and general.