"Something other than actual loyalty, I presume."

(Throughout the Basement there are screens displaying natural landscapes in place of windows. It's a small mitigation of the psychological toll of living underground.)

"That He could have his fun, and I could have mine."

She Disintegrates the cryo pod, Alters Self to look racially dath ilani, and Teleports to a semi-remote location in an Exceptional Natural Area that she saw on one of those screens.

She attempts a Gate once per round until Security arrives.

—a ninth-circle cleric can keep Basement Security busy for a while. Not forever.

She lets herself be taken alive. It's better than being cryopreserved, which will probably prevent her soul from reaching Asmodeus. She can try her escape again when she gets new spells tomorrow.

She can't, actually, get new spells here.

Eventually her Gate goes through.

She lands in a self-isolation room in the Basement and starts keying in pre-arranged codes, a minimum-bandwidth channel intended to communicate the necessary information while minimizing the risk of any hostile superintelligences affecting dath ilan through her. The codes roughly correspond to 'conceptualmagic, economicmagic, multiple unaligned superintelligences, multiple putatively aligned superintelligences, multiple very serious s-risks and x-risks, my continued participation is required'. Then she lays down on the room's small bed and sedates herself. If she hadn't keyed that her continued participation was required, the system would have begun the cryo process automatically.

It is impossible to describe in any reasonable amount of time the level of alarm that this generates in dath ilan. It breaks their previously calibrated alert scale entirely. The prior probability assigned to encountering this many problems this bad simultaneously was so low that they have not actually considered the possibility all that seriously.

But this is dath ilan, and they do not panic just because they run out of numbers to describe how urgent the situation is. Across Civilization contingency plans for each declared Exception go into effect. It will strain Civilization's resources to their limit to execute all of them simultaneously. But this is dath ilan, and if they are going to die, they will at least die with dignity, fighting for their lives with all their intelligence and strength.

When she has been roused from sedation and her mental integrity has been fully checked, and she's been briefed and debriefed, she asks if she can talk to Aspexia before they put her into cryonic suspension.

She's an agent of a hostile superintelligence.

"I know. I'm going on ice as soon as I'm no longer needed for interworld transit, and of course we would wait until then, but I wonder if there's something of the Light left in her that only I can reach."

There is not.

They're laid to rest side by side, in the cryo vault beneath the Basement of the World, in hope of a resurrection that seems like it will come soon if it comes at all.