"Noted," puffs Miles. Every few rungs he pauses to run his hands up and down the walls within reach, looking for another panel.

It takes a lot of climbing before he finds one, set in the opposite side of the column from the one far below them. On leaning over, he discovers that he doesn't have the reach to press both of its buttons, at least not and stay on the ladder.

"Bugger," he mutters. "Asterion? You have nice long arms. I found us a panel but I can't get it open. If I move up out of your way, can you get at the release catches? And, uh, try not to drop the panel. It'd be a good idea for us to put it back when we're done exploring, and I don't fancy trying to haul it up the ladder from the bottom of this hole."

Miles slips out of the opening in the side of the column, and starts inspecting the room on the other side. Asterion's description was accurate, as far as it went. The door, made of glass, seems to lead to a hallway crowded with vid pickups. He spots a red-and-black guard at the end of the hall, and creeps backward away from the door. No good that way. Are there any exits his recruit-trainee might have missed?

There are not. There's a refrigerator at the back of the long room, and a row of three enormous walk-in freezers with polished metal doors. Miles gets on tiptoe to peer through the square glass viewport in the front of one. Blackness. He contemplates turning on a light.

Asterion emerges silently from the column, and on his own initiative also replaces this panel.

"Find anything?" he asks in a whisper.

"Those freezers. I think I'm going to indulge my curiosity," he says, and goes over to the control panel to turn on the interior light in one of the freezers.

Then he looks inside.

Clear plastic drawers containing clear plastic trays, stacked in tall cabinets, rows and rows and rows and endless rows of them. Everything neatly labelled. And the individual articles arranged on these trays are... some kind of frozen samples.

Tissue samples, perhaps?

"My god," he breathes, stunned. "This must be it. Ryoval's treasure chamber - the black heart of his black art - look in there, Asterion." He moves aside. "See all those little frozen sticks? Tissue samples. What Baron Ryoval uses to cook up his bio-slaves. Every little tidbit of flesh he's begged, bought, borrowed, or stolen in the last century, neatly labelled and waiting to be used on his next project. Its value is incalculable."

Miles grins back, hardly even minding the fangs, and turns off the freezer's interior light. Then he starts tracing optic cables and inventorying lab drawers.

In short order, he has the monitor feed from the freezers spliced so that one freezer delivers its output to an optical data recorder while its neighbour covers for its absence via a splitter cable. He sits very still for a minute or two, letting the recorder do its work. Then he fusses with the arrangement again until the data recorder is broadcasting its loop of quiescent freezer inactivity on all three of the monitor channels, and the live feeds from the freezers hang loose.

"And now that the monitors are well and truly buggered... come here," he says, beckoning Asterion to the first freezer. "Time for your very first tactics lesson. There's the temperature dial. Turn it up, gentle as can be, until it hits maximum. Then do the other two."

"The lesson," Miles whispers, "is that sometimes you can do far more damage with far less force, if you apply it intelligently. Now c'mon. I think I saw some industrial cutters in one of those drawers. I'll take those and this hand light," he hefts the small light he used to see his work when he was jiggering all those data cables, "and we'll go back down and see if they help us get anywhere. Maybe there's a door I missed on the way up this column, or one of the other columns leads to a less heavily guarded potential exit, or I can use these cutters to get past the grille on that duct we tried the first time."

He retrieves the cutters, pops the panel off the column, and descends with the hand light clipped to his shirt collar.

There are no more panels on the way down. Miles climbs down past the subbasement to give Asterion room to open the panel there, then emerges and starts pacing, considering his options. His feet are cold.

"Back into the duct first, I think," he declares. "It's easier to see out that grille than it would be if we started trying panels again. Less risk of popping out of a hole only to find we've surprised a guard squadron on break."

Miles wriggles grilleward, and peers out to verify that the storage room beyond is quite deserted before he gets to work with his borrowed cutters. The grille yields to moderate pressure. Miles descends carefully into the storage room, where he pokes around a little. The night is still reasonably young, and he misses his boots.

His boots are lost to him, but he does find a musty old bin of spare House Ryoval guard uniforms. All much too big for him and much too small for Asterion, but Miles filches several pairs of warm black socks, donning two layers and stuffing the rest in his pockets; on reflection, he also puts on the smallest available combination of red tunic and black trousers and red-lined black jacket, rolling up everything that needs rolling up so the trousers don't drag on the floor and the sleeves don't fall over his hands. A few more minutes of searching turn up a second bin containing boots, from which he again takes the smallest. Adding a third layer of socks gets them to stay on his feet with adequate stability. Then he bundles up the biggest available size of everything, on the theory that some of it might fit his new recruit-trainee at least well enough to be worth trying, and packs all the bins away as close as possible to the condition in which he found them.

Thusly equipped, he creeps out into the hallway and explores a little more. There at the end of the hall, a hatch that strongly resembles the one Miles was thrown down not too many hours ago; he notes its position but doesn't try to open it just yet. First he wants to see what other useful articles he might plunder from this basement.

A second storage room contains mainly spare glassware. Miles is not yet desperate enough to filch a couple of test tubes for use as improvised weapons, but he does pick up a handful of styluses and a small stack of sticky-notes from a bin of office supplies. In a pinch, they'll make better lockpicking devices than his bare hands. Likewise the two pairs of gloves, light and heavy - if he could find any that might accomodate Asterion's enormous hands and talonlike fingernails, he'd grab them, but they don't seem to stock the appropriate size. Speaking of lab gear, though, is that a drawer full of lab coats? Why yes! Miles grabs biggest and smallest in those too. Beggars can be choosers, if they're willing to steal...

The next few storage rooms he tries contain more office supplies, legions of spare data cables, and a bin of defunct small electronics. Miles pockets a few rolls of cable and a couple of dead widgets - a wristcom and a chrono - plus a small tool-case he finds next to the widget bin. It should make a much better lockpick than a bunch of styluses. Pity there aren't any working hand lights around with which to augment his extremely limited supply.

Now thoroughly laden, he goes back to the subbasement hatch and opens it up. It's one of the ones with no handle. For convenience's sake, he jams it open with a spare stylus before he descends.

"Asterion?" he calls, as loudly as he dares, which isn't very. "You still down here?"