The glyphs are still blue.

The symbols representing the status of the Napai team's half-Quad, or Sept, remain a peacful muted blue as Davis, Stanhill, Angel, Arketta, Ngawai, Jonnoperest (who lets out a loud sigh of relief), and Swims-the-Black traverse the gulf between Atea's Gateway and the concourse at one of the Imperial arcology planet Hedion's many Gateports. The wall of sound hits the group like a tsunami, but the traffic-flow drones barking orders, throngs of people waiting for their depatures, and the metallic whines of Kansat skimmers far above pale compared to the seizure-inducing visual display. Holograms are everywhere, advertising, exhorting, and commanding. There are people here wearing every style of clothing imaginable and who range from amphibious to zebra-striped. A cluster of Cyllan encounter suits float by and are immediately dwarfed in their strangeness by a pair of rail-thin triple-jointed squamous humans with opposable tails intertwined in a loving gesture as they walk.

But the glyphs are still blue. Jonnoperest's codes are working, and the team is blending in as just another part of the Imperial war machine. Later on, the cyborged Bashakran will have to take an active role in maintaining the illusion, but right now, among the hordes of civilians and with no scrutiny directed towards them, the team is safe.

Swims adjusts the heavy equipment bag slung across his back. The Whiirr, dressed in purple and light chrome carapace as a Turai warrior-slave, shifts gradually from shade to shade as even the weary space traveler is overwhelmed for a moment.

The Turai armor worn by the rest of the group automatically detects a better grade of air than the rebel worldship's atmosphere; the backpacks whir and hum as the environmental controls swap out the storage units.

*Keep moving,* Arketta sends over the team's encrypted voxes. *We'll take a quick walk, make sure Jonno's work is good. We have a little time to waste before the portal to Napai opens.*

Wandering in brazen as day into enemy territory is still a...new...feeling to Angel.

'Fly casual' he thinks to himself as he falls in line with the rest of the team, trying to pull off the 'of course I'm supposed to be here' look.

And I thought Shorja market on Saturday was hectic... Davis looks around for an out of the way place to stand and watch for trouble, some place that forces anyone trying to look at him too closely to be visible to him. He sees a food vendor, grilling some kind of meat in an alcove between two shops that looks like it might do the trick. *I'm gonna grab a bite to eat before we make the jump,* Davis voxes, reaching into his Imperial-issue kit bag for lats. *Anyone care to join me?*

"Hell, why not. Nothing like intestinal parasites to help you blend with the locals."

The meat's served by a glowering man with dry, cracked bone plating instead of hair and cooked by a weathered drone. It tastes like buttery ham. The Hedion arcology stretches up above them, starscraper-tall buildings blending into a dull gray blur.

The passersby give the team a wide berth. They eat in relative silence, anxious stomach butterflies churning the charred meat while Jonnoperest double-checks his ECM.

"Get ready," Arketta whispers across the suit-voxes. "Look - the Napai departure's queueing." With that, the ex-Turai strides off towards the front of the line. She meets no resistance.

"Heh. Falls back into it pretty quick, doesn't she?" Ngawai mentions as she, too, falls into step for the Gateway. The artifact's glyphs are protected from manual access by a thin transparent screen which bathes the boarding platform a pale blue with their gradual activations.

"Part of what makes her so good for this mission. All the better to get planetside with," Davis tells Ngawai as the team lines up.

As the glyphs slowly flash on, one after another, Davis mentally runs down the checklist of what to say and how to act once they walk through the gate, while resisting the urge to fiddle with his sidearm, then speaks into the encrypted vox channel. "Well, this is it, last chance to back out. Anyone think we should head back now, leave something on the stove?" he asks half-jokingly.

Angel chuckles.

"Shit boss, left the gas on. And I gotta pee. Can we pull the ill-advised planetary invasion over?"

"Don't make me separate you two," Arketta quips as she steps across the thres-

-hold and into the Napai Second Equatorial Elevator Transport Array. The team's suits refrain from cycling their internal atmo feeds this time. The nexus of the space elevator orbital reads similarly to any one of the number of Gateports the team has been in thus far - open, curved spaces, holographic scheduling, flitting security drones and here and there a glimpse of chrome Turai or orange-and-black Kansat officers. Propaganda displays show beauty shots of the elevator. It's a glinting silver thread leading down to a twinkling blue-lit sprawl. The Imperial City is visible from space - a congregation of light, cold and distant at the base of the beanstalk.

"Luis, gonna need your help here," Jonnoperest says. "They've made some minor changes to their protocols, I'll need you to adapt to their frequencies before our IFF gets filtered from their lists."

Angel checks what he can see of the beanstalk's security versus the intel the team got from their rebel contacts. Luis' computer work is vital right now - although the elevator bottoms out a convenient distance from the Imperial City, its protection is such that fighting their way in from the elevator would be impossible. There's an Orwellian omnipresence to the electronic surveillance that makes the panopticon on Aikoro look lazy and slow by comparison.

"Yes, (insert relevant rank)" Luis responds, having to catch himself to avoid dropping the basic-ground responses of the Army instead of those of the Imperium, already pulling up the relevant data in his suit's HUD (making a mental note to get something like this for movies--surround sound and widescreen included).

OOC:I seem to recall there being a HUD in the suit helmet. If there's not, Luis'll adapt as appropriate.

Angel looks around as they enter another dazzling spaceport entry, making a quick visual check of the physical resistance without moving his head, just shifting from one foot to the other like the slightly bored foot soldier he is.

After all, no sense in making it obvious he's checking the place out.

Luis' helmet comes to life as he taps out commands on his vox. Jonnoperest is there beside him, a friendly phantom keeping watch over encroaching blue security tendrils. Luis turns his attention towards the tendrils' source, an armored steel overwatch node beaming out encrypted update messages faster than Luis' handheld can track.

Jonno pushes Luis into a nearby data thicket as a tendril gets too close for comfort. Angel sees one of the surveillance drones linger for a long, long second on the group, but it passes by.

Luis reaches out and grabs some of the tendril's slime, smearing it over his face and neck. He's got what he needs from the drone's tightband query - Stanhill convulses and morphs into a tendril. He snakes out and wraps around one of the searching tentacles and follows it back into the nexus. A flash of blue, and the team's IFFs are added into the authoritative source for the space elevator.

Luis sighs as the team walks up a gentle incline. He'll have to do it all over again once they hit ground and probably a handful more times just to set foot in the Palace.

The elevator orbital isn't a huge facility, and fairly soon the team comes to the departure ring. The elevator shell sheaths five massive dropcars with a reentry time of about 45-50 minutes. Arketta and Ngawai play their roles, ordering other passengers out and ushering the team into a dropcar all by themselves.

Davis flicks his helmet over so he can view the cybernetic action going on with Luis and Jonno and watches, since there's a good chance he's going to have to be joining in soon enough, and any pointers he could pick up might be a big help.

After Luis' little magic trick gets them into the into the elevator dropcar, Davis unslings his beam rifle and takes a seat. "So, that's step one, now for steps two through eighty. Arketta, Swims, Ngawai, any idea what we can expect once we hit the ground? And Jonno, we're gonna need to clear an IFF path as far into the Repository as we can so we can just walk right in. Any idea how long it would take to get the hack done?"

"It's less of a hack and more of a-" Jonno begins to explain but a near-deafening clunk and a rumble that reaches up and grabs your very lungs stops him mid-sentence. Ever so gradually, the dropcar begins to move. Displays flicker on, showing an exterior view of the Imperial Motherworld. The terminator is about to pass over the Palace and render it in grays and greens rather than the soft blue glow of night.

"It's more of a duel, not a hack," Jonno explains. "An ongoing process. Luis, myself, and probably you too are going to need to keep our subterfuge fluid in order to evade electronic detection."

Swims looks at the holographs of the oncoming Napai with what you now know to be apprehension before speaking. "Napai'i tend to be important people, and if they are not, then they see themselves as such nonetheless. Do not expect to cow the average human like we have done up to now. There is good news; Turai are everpresent, and as long as our ECM holds, we should have little problem navigating the Palace. The Imperium has traded their intuition, their eyes and ears, for weapon sensors, auth-codes, and surveillance drones. And thus far it seems we have the upper hand there." The Whiirr nods to Angel, knowing full well the Delta has seen the Imperium's technology fail them.

The dropcar ride is a smooth one, but then it would be - it simply wouldn't do for affluent Imperial citizens to endure a roller coaster ride like a starfreighter's crashers. Still, the space elevator is a security necessity, distancing a Gateway far enough from the Emperor while still remaining accessible for the morass of traffic such a central city sees.

Jonnoperest shows the team how to position the holodisplays, and soon the group is conducting an impromptu orbital scan of the Imperial City as well as any near-orbit landmarks they might happen to spot. Napai's sprawl appears to be well-integrated into the planet's natural surroundings. Short, broad tree-like plants dot the walks and rooftops of the multicolored buildings. Fields of blue-green grass sweep across pathways and flocks of avians - Akwhelas, the condor-sized Imperial symbol - glide lazily on thermals.

Out in the black, Luis spots a massive edifice, some sort of orbital fortress built around a space Gateway. The 500-foot ring is just a pinhole against the station's bulk. Resolving the holofeed even further, Luis makes out drydocks for Needleships and figures he must be looking at the Akwhela's Eye, the Pentagon of the Imperium. He watches the fortress swallow an entire Needleship. The vessel, battle-damaged and trailing a glittering contrail of debris, limps into a hangar that must be twice the Needle's width.

Not too long after, the sky above lightens from black to the sleepy blue of daybreak. Napai's star, more distant but hotter than Sol, creeps over the horizon below the dropcar. The shuddering rumble returns as the car starts gently applying its brakes. Pulsing energy from the floor, felt but not seen, buffers the massive deceleration into gentle pressure.

*Welcome, honored travelers, to the Napai Second Equatorial Gateport. While NSEG is pleased you have chosen to grace us with your custom, we do ask that you comply with our protocols and the suggestions of any Imperial authorities. The following items and/or actions are prohibited during your stay on Napai-*

The audio cuts out with a brief squeak. Arketta nods to Jonnoperest. "Thank you."

Davis nods at Jonno. "You'll have to tell me what to do and when to do it, but I'm ready."

Davis smiles at Swims-the-Black's description of Napai'i. "Typical Washington Beltway types, I've dealt with them before," he says after Swims descibes the Napai'i attitude. "Just act impressed and make them feel like they're some sort of big shot because they're from the capital. At least you won't have to buy them some soy-whip monstrosity from Starbucks."

The ride the rest of the way down is amazing, but Davis discovers the holodisplays don't have a high enough resolution to get good ground intel before they touch down. Once they touch down, he gets a laugh out of Jonno killing the advisory recording. "Damn, it'd be nice to know what laws we're breaking just by being here," he says to Jonno.

"Don't worry, those laws won't be around much longer," Jonnoperest says, gathering his gear and exiting the dropcar.

The Napai sun is rising behind the gray and gold bulk of the Palace arcology dome when the team exits the multi-level elevator base. The people, the buildings, even the weather of this meticulously-tailored planet revels in the combined wealth of a thousand worlds. It is a gleaming pristine paradise, a decadent monument to the raping of planets and subjugation of freedoms.

The team walks down the golden road, flanked by trees that shift their butter-smooth branches to maintain a soft shade over the pedestrians below. The thirty-three statues of Vidas Lam and his Emperor Clones lead the way from the elevator footprint through the edifices of the Stewardship and Bureaucracy to the Imperial Palace itself.

Luis dips his virtual toes into an obsidian pond, submitting the team's credentials for Palace access. The black sheen of the surface ripples with inviting warmth. The codes are accepted. Operation Checkmate begins in earnest.

Angel tags yet another ensconced drone on his HUD records. It's their first day of recon and he, Arketta, and Ngawai are patrolling the halls as just another Trin of loyal Turai. The layout of the Palace is simple for citizens and immensely labyrinthine for any location requiring authorized access. Angel sees many a visiting lord-mercator accompanied by either human or drone guides, as well as the subtle attention paid to any deviations from schedule. Those mercators and ravilars that stray off their path never see the Turai shadowing them, but through the security network the Imperial soldiers have eyes and ears on the entire interior.

---

Davis has a line on a Cyllan Lightdancer who seems to be happy to help the CIA agent with some tests. It's strange to see such an alien creature respond with such a familiar mercenary attitude; enough lats and the jellyfish alien, shrouded in a finely-painted encounter shell, agrees to try to read the team's intentions through a variety of obfuscations. Davis' best idea is simply shielding the team's helmets with a sort of Faraday cage. The Cyllan claims to be unable to "see" the team's brain activity, and even though it can still tell where they are through other means, the Repository should be crowded enough that the Imperial Truthseekers will not notice the discrepancy.

---

During one of Luis, Jonnoperest, and Davis' cautious forays into the Palace's network, Luis spots some sort of glinting light deep in the murky water of the Palace's countermeasures. He takes his virtual self deeper, exhaling slowly and allowing himself to naturally flow along the currents of information. Davis sees it too, finally - a congregation of the golden fish that the trio has identified as security drones circles around something even deeper in the dark lake. The fish-drones, as always, venture out in random patrols, but the singular grouping is new to even Jonnoperest. They're still too far away to tell what it is that the fish are protecting/jailing/hiding, and the trio's thin silver line linking them back to their secure nexus doesn't seem as sturdy as when it's wrapped tightly around their waist.

You've unspooled a lot to get down this deep. Do you venture farther?

Luis draws another deep breath, but then hesitates. He's not sure how much farther in he can go, and this is supposed to just be the recon section of the mission. If this part goes pear-shaped, the main mission here or even the Boronai stirike could be compromised. Something about the whole thing just seems dangerous. He lets out the breath slowly, and looks around at the other members of the group, seeking confirmation.

"Jonno," Davis virtually whispers, "do you think you two can get closer if I head back? If it's the Cortex they're guarding, any info we get on it, especially in here, is valuable. If it's some big bad thing in there, we need to know about it too. If lightening the load on the nexus lets you two get closer, I'll disconnect now."

"We're sharing the beam, no need to bail," Jonno replies. "But we're gonna need a better crash than this tightbeam..."

---

Angel didn't figure on testing his surveillance recon so soon. His cloak renders him in the same gilded piping and steel curvature as the Palace corridors as he skulks through to where the Bashakran told him. Riviera flattens against the wall as a three-man patrol walks by, idly chatting about some noblewoman's more interesting proclivities.

With the patrol gone, Angel's free to re-time his movements with his notes on the camera-drones' patterns. He makes it to the maintenance hatch cleverly worked into the bas-relief of the hallway. A quick spin of Jonnoperest's multitool releases the hatch and Angel plugs in the hardline broadcaster. Then the hatch gets replaced and the Delta operator slinks back to the team's quarters by way of the autochefs, the side access to the main promenade, and a short but treacherous climb from one balcony down to the one below.

---

Luis, Stanhill, and Jonnoperest feel the water grow cold and the pressure squeeze tighter as soon as Angel plants the bug. The mysterious network hub grows suddenly larger - no, no, they're shrinking down, shrinking small enough to try and squeeze through the shield of surveillance fish-drones. Luis cautiously glides closer.

The first thing you notice is that, like a school of Earth fish, the golden security fish all move as one. They move as one - and their very human eyes betray the presence of a sentient operator. Davis and Luis spot the tiny threads connecting each fish to the interior of their sphere, and with a burst of speed Luis ducks between two drones' peripherals and follows a thread inside.

The glinting threads coalesce into bundles of wire, which are braided into rope, which gets sheathed in cable, all twisting and spiraling into a great glass bubble. Inside the bubble is an equally monstrous glass avian, old and proud. It moves slightly and its jade-green human eyes pass over Luis, Davis, and Jonno, but it doesn't appear to spot them. They have yet to alter any systems.

"I... I think that's Him. This must be the bulk of the Palace's drone network," Jonnoperest guesses. "They don't have an operator sitting at a security station - they're wired directly into the Emperor!"

Davis hovers there for a moment, in shock and then in thought. "Jonno," Davis says slowly, "can we do anything to this right now, can we get through the firewalls here? Or do we have to come back later? Can we come back later?"