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appetizer.
"For you, maybe," she wheezed. She was shaking. Miles began to see why Canaba
had dubbed his project a failure. Imagine trying to feed a whole army of such
appetites. Napoleon would quail. Maybe the raw-boned kid was still growing.
Daunting thought.
There was a refrigerator at the back of the lab. If he knew lab techs... ah,
ha. Indeed, in among the test tubes was a package with half a sandwich and a
large, if bruised, pear. He handed them to Taura. She looked vastly impressed,
as if he d conjured them from his sleeve by magic, and devoured them at once,
and grew less pale.
Miles foraged further for his troop. Alas, the only other organics in the
fridge were little covered dishes of gelatinous stuff with unpleasant
multi-colored fuzz growing in them. But there were three big shiny walk-in
wall freezers lined up in a row. Miles peered through a glass square in one
thick door, and risked pressing the wall pad that turned on the light inside.
Within were row on row on row of labelled drawers, full of clear plastic
trays. Frozen samples of some kind. Thousands - Miles looked again, and
calculated more carefully - hundreds of thousands. He glanced at the lighted
control panel by the freezer drawer. The temperature inside was that of liquid
nitrogen. Three freezers...
Millions of.... Miles sat down abruptly on the floor himself. "Taura, do you
know where we are?
" he whispered intensely.
"Sorry, no," she whispered back, creeping over.
"That was a rhetorical question. I know where we are."
"Where?"
"Ryoval s treasure chamber."
"What?"
"That," Miles jerked his thumb at the freezer, "is the baron s
hundred-year-old tissue collection. My God. Its value is almost incalculable.
Every unique, irreplaceable, mutant bizarre bit he s begged, bought, borrowed
or stolen for the last three-fourths of a century, all lined up in neat little
rows, waiting to be thawed and cultured and cooked up into some poor new
slave. This is the living heart of his whole human biologicals operation."
Miles sprang to his feet and pored over the control panels. His heart raced,
and he breathed open-mouthed, laughing silently, feeling almost like he was
about to pass out. "Oh, shit. Oh, God." He stopped, swallowed. Could it be
done? These freezers had to have an alarm system, monitors surely, piped up to
Security Ops at the very
least. Yes, there was a complex device for opening the door - that was fine,
he didn t want to open the door. He left it untouched.
It was systems readout he was after. If he could bugger up just one sensor....
Was the thing broadcast-output to several outside monitor locations, or did
they run an optic thread to just one? The lab benches supplied him with a
small hand light, and drawers and drawers of assorted tools and supplies.
Taura watched him in puzzlement as he darted here, there, taking inventory.
The freezer monitor was broadcast-output, inaccessible; could he hit it on the
input side? He levered off a smoke-dark plastic cover as silently as he could.
There, there
, the optic thread came out of the wall, pumping continuous information about
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the freezer s interior environment. It fit into a simple standard receiver
plug on the more daunting black box that controlled the door alarm. There d
been a whole drawer full of assorted optic threads with various ends and
Y-adaptors.... Out of the spaghetti-tangle he drew what he needed, discarding
several with broken ends or other damage. There were three optical data
recorders in the drawer. Two didn t work. The third did.
A quick festoon of optic thread, a swift unplugging and plugging, and he had
one freezer talking to two control boxes. He set the freed thread to talking
to the datacorder. He simply had to chance the blip during transfer. If anyone
checked they d find all seemed well again. He gave the datacorder several
minutes to develop a nice continuous replay loop, crouching very still with
even the tiny hand light extinguished. Taura waited with the patience of a
predator, making no noise.
One, two, three, and he set the datacorder to talking to all three control
boxes. The real thread plugs hung forlornly loose.
Would it work? There were no alarms going off, no thundering herd of irate
security troops....
"Taura, come here."
She loomed beside him, baffled.
"Have you ever met Baron Ryoval?" asked Miles.
"Yes, once... when he came to buy me."
"Did you like him?"
She gave him an are-you-out-of-your-mind? look.
"Yeah, I didn t much care for him either." Restrained murder, in point of
fact. He was now meltingly grateful for that restraint.
"Would you like to rip his lungs out, if you could?"
Her clawed hands clenched. "Try me!"
"Good!" He smiled cheerily. "I want to give you your first lesson in tactics."
He pointed. "See that control? The temperature in these freezers can be raised
to almost 200 degrees centigrade, for heat sterilization during cleaning. Give
me your finger. One finger. Gently. More gently than that." He guided her
hand. "The least possible pressure you can apply to the dial, and still
move...
Now the next," he pulled her to the next panel, "and the last." He exhaled,
still not quite able to believe it.
"And the lesson is," he breathed, "it s not how much force you use. It s where
you apply it."
He resisted the urge to scrawl something like
The Dwarf Strikes Back across the front of the freezer with a flow pen. The
longer the baron in his mortal rage took to figure out who to pursue, the
better. It would take several hours to bring all that mass in there from
liquid nitrogen temperature up to well-done
, but if no one came in till morning shift, the destruction would be absolute.
Miles glanced at the time on the wall digital. Dear God, he d spent a lot of
time in that basement. Well-spent, but still...
"Now," he said to Taura, who was still meditating on the dial, and her hand,
with her gold eyes glowing, "we have to get out of here. Now we really have to
get out of here." Lest her next tactics lesson turn out to be, Don t blow up
the bridge you re standing on, Miles allowed nervously.
Contemplating the door-locking mechanism more closely, plus what lay beyond -
among other things, the sound-activated wall-mounted monitors in the halls
featured automatic laser fire - Miles almost went to turn the freezer
temperatures back down.
His chip-driven Dendarii tools, now locked in the Security Ops office, might
barely have handled the complex circuitry in the pried-open control box. But
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