"Same here!" Hugh shouts back, scanning the environment. "Stow it for now, we'll sort it later!"

Davis grabs Dunamis by the back of his shirt, hauls him to his feet and pushes him in front of him as he runs into the control booth. "Tell the nice man the gate code for the gateship," Davis tells Dunamis. He looks over at Onas. "I appreciate operational security as much as the next guy, but the next time you plan to start a firefight and massacre civilians, let us know, alright?"

Davis leans out of the door of the control hut, and waves for Swims-the-Black to come over. "I need to know if One-Ton's DNA is on file anywhere. If it is, we need to clean this scene before we get out of here." Davis sighs. "Dammit. I'm sorry he's dead. There's going to be...words about this gun fight once we get out of here."

Angel grunts, utterly unsatisfied with the current weapon of choice, but resists the familiar call of the SCAR. He rises, sighting down the beam rifle as the team, and the rebels recover.

"Ever get that feeling Sir, like you've gone and toppled one crappy third world warlord, and replaced him with the same goddamned asshole but with a different color sash?"

"Politics and war make strange bedfellows," Hugh says, still waiting for the next hammer to drop. "They'd better have a damn good reason for starting an alpha strike without telling us."

Onas has got the vox logs up on the holoscreen. The footage of your entrance and the few seconds' worth of gunfire before the surveillance tower was taken down was definitely recorded, but no alerts have sent locally. The system's waiting for a new portal so it can shunt its update up to a larger nexus.

"No!" Onas blurts at Davis. "Engage the portal manually! This records gate codes; the gates themselves do not!" He registers Davis' other complaint, looks out the one-way transparent wall at the mop-up, and realizes what Davis is talking about. "Talk later, dial now. I'm slagging this console."

Swims walks carefully towards the hut, wincing as the last two engineers are executed. By the Whiirr's body language before he starts signing, Davis can tell One-Ton's corpse is going to need cleanup.

"Yes, when we were boarded those months ago, they updated our records. I can do it, you just get us out of here."

"Right," Davis says, grabbing Dunamis again. "You heard them, let's get out of here." He runs Dunamis over to the gate. "You know what to do, dial us in and get us out of here." Davis looks over his shoulder at the scene behind him for a second. "I know things look hectic right now, but you remember the deal? You don't screw with me, I won't screw with you. I keep my promises, Dunamis."

"I got it," Dunamis replies. He braces himself against one of the awning supports in order to reach the higher-up glyphs on the artifact.

Onas' stinger screams inside the hut. He apparently takes his environmental damage seriously.

The men and women covering the commotion around the Gate notice a small speck gliding in just over the domed rooftops. It's a Turai assault drone and it's jinking in an evasive pattern while trying to get closer. You're not worried it'll recognize you - Jonnoperest's jammer torcs plus the physical disguises see to that - but drones have always signaled the onset of reinforcements.

It's a long ways off and moving erratically, but a few of the rebels decide it's better to shoot it now than let its twin-linked stingers get within range. Ahaz, Aq, and Haj fire but their shots lance past the device.

A few Yoman colonists are getting too curious for their own good. A door cycles open across the dusty plaza but Swalni warning-shots the dwelling, shouting "Get back inside!" The door shuts amidst the clearing smoke.

"Arketta, Ngawai, Mellish, I need cover for Dunamis over here!" Davis shouts, and gets into a screening position for Dunamis as he finishes punching in the gate code.

Angel frowns as the resistance fighters shots miss, going to one knee and propping the beam rifle against the ruins of the gate, firing at the incoming skimmer.

Luis joins Angel in opening fire on the drone.

whap whap whap whap whap BOOM!

Angel and Luis plaster the air around the little drone with fire until Angel lands a shot that sends the machine into a downward spiral. Luis turns the smoke trail into a fireworks display.

Without the drone guiding them in, a half-dozen spear-bombs, presumably launched at long range by the remainder of the Turai Quad, start falling off course. Staccato BAMs and BOOMs accompany steadily rising smoke plumes from the nearby dwellings.

Dunamis finally gets his code locked in and the Gateway flashes open, revealing a sterile steel starship interior.

"Got it!" he shouts. The Apprehender dives through.

The team hustles through the portal in twos and threes. The Gateship air is cold, dry, and stale. The hum of the massive vessel's interior vibrates up through your feet. Luis, Angel, and Davis cover everyone's exit, then Swims-the-Black carries One-Ton's corpse through. Oskell does the same with Knut. Any identifying bits have been handlanced into glass and ashes.

Luis shuts down the Gateway with a sigh of relief. The light from Todaki's suns fades, leaving behind the dim glow of the Gateship promenade. A control trench full of readouts and a few crashers runs in a crescent around the Gateway platform. The star map imposed over the navigation console shows the absolute vastness of interstellar space.

For those who can grasp just how far away you are from anything, it's disconcerting bordering on terror.

The team's only spent a minute on the Gateship - cleaning any wounds, stowing the heavy gear, and checking weapons - and you realize that 15 minutes have passed in the world.

Luis is hit by both a profound sense of smallness, and a profound sense of, well, pride is the best word. Not arrogance, not by a long shot, but satisfaction in his own performance and reactions. Five years ago, he was a seat-warmer in a classroom, slowly discovering college wasn't right for him as he bounced through the University of New Hampshire's engineering, computer science, and pre-med programs. Three, and he was the over-educated grunt who'd joined up to figure out what he wanted to do with himself, on the outs from his family for not "living up to his potential." One year ago, he was one of the first Earth-residents (Earthers? Terrans? Gotta figure that out) to face a possible threat to his home on a planet not his own. And now...now, here he is, joining forces with rebel groups against Imperial oppressors--he can't help thinking Mom (with all her hell raising back in her college days) would b thrilled to hear what her son's been up to, and that all the family'd be thrilled to hear about him becoming a space pilot. But will they? It's a question he's had to deal with, with all the runing-for-your-life and vague plans for brilliant strategic victories. Looking at the map on the nav station and realizing just how far from home and anything else they all are, the casualty list keeps running through his head--Junior, Green, Taylor, Kilgore. Will he and the rest of the team bite it before they get the chance to tell thier families? War always takes a price, but this is a war most of the country back home doesn't even know is going on, or that the places it's occuring in even exist. He makes a mental note to talk to Swims and the rebels about, well, arrangments.

However, before he can get any farther in the routine of post-battle and site-securing stuff he's been doing as he reminices, Luis is jolted out of his thoughts as his mind makes a devastating connection--the glowing gliphs of their names next to their faces, on Imperial networks and the other two names on the casualty list: Greene and Junior. If we could do for our guy with our science what we did, did what we tried to do for Greene...stick? He's got to tell Hugh. He may have figured out the source of that little security breach.

Hugh's last through the gate. Even on the seemingly quiet ship, he's got his beam rifle ready.

"Sarge, Angel, I want a full sweep of this place."

After making sure they're not in any immediate danger, he turns to the rebels.

"Perhaps you could explain to me now what the fuck we just did."

"Witnesses," Onas says. "Witnesses who saw several of us up close, who conversed with us on Aikoro, witnesses that needed to be silenced lest they render the sacrifice of comrades and ship useless. A distasteful but necessary course of action. Our torcs have blocked our faces from their machine surveillance and anyone who saw us during the fight would've been too worried about finding cover to point us out. This way, noone knows it was us, the Imperium has noone to interrogate, and noone even saw that it was a ship on the other side of the Todaki portal."

Hugh considers that for a moment.

"Can't say I entirely disagree," Hugh concedes, nodding grimly. "But a) let's not make a habit of it and b) if we do that again, we're going to need a little heads-up. Got that?"

"As I said, it was not my first choice," Onas replies. "Had we time to feel them out, they could have perhaps proven a useful asset. But panicked people turn towards authority and that I could not allow."

Angel immediately ditches the beam rifle in favor of his SCAR once they're through to the gateship, pacing around the area to make sure that the small band they've picked up is indeed alone.

"Looks clear Sir. And that's one hell of a view."

With Hugh formally expressing the group's collective outrage, Davis gets out of the "yell at Onas" line with an angry glare and gets down to business. "Could you and Mellish keep an eye on Dunamis? Don't want him letting people know we've been here," he tells Ngawai, then motions Jon to come over to him and cracks open his laptop. "Alright, now that we're someplace where we don't have to worry about getting shot, what do you know about the Repository of Benevolent Spirits and the Cortex? Security systems, layout, how they store the data, backups, anything at all."

Angel and Semo clear the bridge/command deck of the Gateship. There's a very basic shipchef and three uncomfortable bunks in a small compartment aft of the gateroom. Semo finds a well-stocked maintenance locker on the next level down whose contents are quite frankly over his head. Probably meant for fixing broken Gateships. The two Deltas figure with decades-long trips, the Gateships need human attention from time to time but they're not meant for a standing crew, hence the basic amenities.

A small locker area with a half-dozen spacesuits lies below that. A massive blast door leads to a lift as well as a maintenance/emergency hatch with in turn leads to a ladder. The air's much colder inside the hatch but no less stale.

The ladder goes down to an iris hatch 10 feet below. A handy diagram on the wall explains that the ladder basically descends over 50 stories (with iris hatches and some secondary tunnels leading off of it) to the main engineering section. The orbital Gate this ship is transporting rests in between command and engineering.

The lift seems the better option if one wanted to get down there without killing themselves.

---

"Sure," Ngawai replies, standing close to Kon. The balding Apprehender looks glad to be alive.

The golden-eyed Bashakran attends Davis, listening to his questions.

"Let me start with the data. The Cortex, as far as I know, should be on high-cap modules, about yay big (he makes a shape about the size of a beer fridge). I don't know how many there'll be; count on hundreds. Now, I thought we weren't worrying about making off with anything, we were just going to break the Cortex wide open and flood every Gate with the max-security intel? For that, we need access. The majority of Keepers who work at the ROBS have read-only access. They scan incoming data and flag it if there's something of interest. The Sagacious Keepers or Abbots have access we can use, but that'll just start us off with the basics. From that point it's all data-banditry, and if I'm going in there I'm going to need whatever help you can give me."

"I've been in the Imperial City," Onas offers. "Perhaps I can offer insight to their physical security. Firstly, we could perhaps enter Napai's star system through the long-range orbitals. They use those gates for general civilian travel, but even then you need codes. They are not too difficult to come by, however. We'd have to use their space elevators to descend to the planet - there's no chance we would get codes allowing us to proceed to the surface without some sort of check-in. At that point we would be dependent on your stealth weapons... look, getting in is much easier than getting out. When I was there, I was not doing what we plan on doing. I don't know if the drones inside the City have neutron beamers as it's rumored. I don't know how many Turai there are, and I certainly would not like our chances should we draw the attention of the Alef-Ka-"

"I know some drones deep in the palace fire lethal radiation rather than stingers," Swims-the-Black chimes in. One-Ton's body has been carefully wrapped up next to Knut's. "The Jade Caretakers protect the Emperor and its Avatars, not the Repository of Benevolent Spirits. That place is a labyrinthine hell of slaves and their Truthseeker watchdogs. We will have to kill a great number of people. Some will deserve it, some will not, and some will know our intentions before we attack. We must be decisive and we must not fail to gain access to the data you seek."

"If you are feeling... saucy, there is a possible escape route within the Court of Heavenly Purity itself. The Black Gate."

"I think not, my shaggy comrade," Onas says. "It takes no code and opens no portal except to darkness. None return."

"A chance of oblivion, or certain death at the hands of the Alef-ka, the Avatar, and legions of Turai?" Swims counters.