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

[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.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles clings to the back of the float-chair and cackles wildly.

Unfortunately for him, the back of the float-chair is not really designed for this sort of thing. Caution and determination have kept him in place so far; now, just as his laughter begins to calm, he slips. His cramped fingers are too slow to catch him. The force-screen makes a sound like a dropped wasp's nest when he hits it - a crackling thump and a rising angry buzz. And everywhere he touches the surface is one continuous painful shock until he breaks contact. He yelps and tries to climb back up onto the chair, but only manages to roll underneath it, his feet kicking the power pack at the back while his hands flail for purchase on the footrest and his head bumps the undercarriage in his efforts to keep his face off the buzzing force-screen.

[isthisart]

"Nadina," says Linyabel, trying to reach under the chair. "Help -"

Eventually, between the two of them, Linyabel manages to pick him up and - hold him, without having to lose all three of them the bubble's protection. She can't really put him down; there's nowhere to put him. He's sort of tucked under her arm.

[thisvorlunatic]

Hopefully she won't mind if he just sort of groans a bit and then clings to her.

It is around this time that a spot on the door begins to glow.

[isthisart]

Linyabel doesn't mind.

The door bursts inward in a spray of molten plastic and metal, and in comes ghem-Colonel Benin, and a thoroughly armed squad behind him.

Kety's people spontaneously decide in favor of surrender.

Vorreedi steps in behind Benin. Ivan is there, too, shifting anxiously.

"Good evening, haut Kety," says Benin, bowing cordially. "By the personal order of Emperor Fletchir Giaja, it is my duty to arrest you and ghem-General Naru both upon the serious charge of treason to the Empire. And," he adds, smiling, "complicity in the murder of the Imperial Servitor the Ba Lura."

Linyabel relaxes considerably, though not enough to drop Miles, and she doesn't take down the force screen until the arrests are all complete. Then she takes it down to let Nadina out and rearrange Miles more comfortably on the chair's arm, her own arm around him to steady him there.

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles decides that he is totally willing to keep leaning on Linyabel until such time as she tells him to get lost or somebody picks him up and hauls him bodily away.

[middlingalong]

Of all the things Ivan could be having a reaction to, the sight of Miles perched on the arm of a haut-lady's float-chair with her arm around him appears to be the most pressing, but he doesn't formulate an immediate verbal comment.

Kety growls, "Congratulations, Lord Vorpatril. I hope you may be fortunate enough to survive your victory."

"Huh?" says Ivan.

The arrestees are marched away before anyone elaborates.

"Miles," says Ivan, sighing, "are you all right?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Wurgh," says Miles, then clears his throat and tries again. "F-fell onto the inside of the force-screen. The ladies hauled me off it. I'll be fine. I'm not entirely looking forward to the next time I have to walk, but luckily there's this float-chair..."