Once I partied for myself, now I partied for the Emperor. It is a surprising  fact that dancing and drinking are often necessary tools of the trade when blending in with almost all strata of Imperial Society. The attendees at the charity gala probably wouldn’t have appreciated the fact that they essentially went in for the same entertainment as mutants and underhivers at Pound bars, only with more violins. But appreciated or not I had been to both places and everywhere in between. I was able to dance with considerably more abandon than the rest of the company, even more conservative dances pushed to the point of scandal with exaggerated hip movement and passionate embraces. It reminded me a lot of dancing on the mess table on the Caledonia just after I had joined Hadrian’s band, though then of course I had been dancing alone. Hadrian too revealed hidden depths. The Inquisition actually trains its operatives in most aspect of high culture, but he had also seen the full gamut of Imperial society and not just on Pacitus. Some of the young crowd were able to keep up but the old and augmented were left behind. For me it was as though we were the only people in the room, dancing just for each other and the half scandalized glances were from some other, lesser reality. 


The champagne glass in my hand we refilled many times between dances, and though I was asked several times by the younger men I danced only with Hadrian, an attitude almost as scandalous as the dances themselves. Despite the steady stream of liquor, I did not become drunk. Every few dances I paused to apply an ivory and gold stim injector to the inside of my wrist. To the assembled gathering it no doubt looked like simple drug use, angelum or pax, popular party drugs. In Fact it had been loaded with a cocktail of drugs which neutralize the effects of alcohol, a standard piece of kit for Inquisitors who need to keep their minds sharp and heads level while undercover in places that required a high ethanol diet. You could drink as much as you liked with no worse effect than a slight lemony taste in the back of your throat If anyone noticed a lack of drunkenness it was easily explained by my party girl personal, Hadrian was more abstemious even though the Naval penchant for drink was the stuff of jokes throughout the Imperium.


Periodically throughout the night, auctions of sorts were held. The various glitteratti vied with each other to spend more on this orphanage or that scholam. Sometimes there were titles for sale, mostly things like the freedom of the city or other honors which wealthy socialites liked to collect but had little practical effect on the Imperium writ large. Several pieces of art were also sold, including some rather magnificent illuminated manuscripts containing the sayings of Saint Agripina, allegedly related on her deathbed. Given the size of the tomes I figure it had to be a rather drawn out death. Hadrian bid on some of the items, especially a rather splendid pair of pearl inlaid dueling pistols but he was inevitably swamped by other bidders. It seemed that our display of wantonness with the dancing had shown up the local nobs and they wanted to make sure that this uncoth upstart and his bimbo were outclassed in at least one area. That made me smile as given that we were cut off from our funds we could ill afford the prices being asked, and at least the local charities were benefiting from the snobbery. Assuming any of the wealth actually trickled down that far of course. In my experience there is never a shortage of bureaucrats willing to extract a ‘fee’ as money moves from one place to the next. 


It happened just before the final dance. By then I was rather distracted and was forming certain designs on the body of my dance partner, half convinced that nothing of note would happen despite Hadrian’s certainty to the contrary. I was just finishing a particularly energetic round when there was a sudden surge in the artificial canals that had been set up around the dance floor. Men with large rubber masks, rebreathers with huge round eyes like gas rebreathers burst from the water. There was a collective gasp by those who witnessed it directly which spread like falling dominos through the crowd. Hadrian, who had been in the process of dipping me by my waist, dropped me without ceremony and dived behind a planter box. Gun fire erupted through the crowd as our attackers, dressed in soaking body armor, came out of the canals, rose scented water streaming from their battle gear. 


I rolled to the side, miraculously avoiding the legs of panicking dancers. A rather fat baroness who had been scowling at me took a las bolt to the chest and fell screaming, rubies from her golden necklace clattering down like hail. I got behind a marble bench that held finger food as las fire stitched across the floor in sparkling ricochets. I pulled a small deringer from my gater belt and popped up in time to see another group of attackers clambering up onto one of the faux islands, unslinging las guns. I thrust out my hand and summoned my Will. 

“Drop them,” I commanded, my empowered words cutting through the spreading chaos like a templem bell. Every single person in the vast hall who still had a drink dropped it in a shattering avalanche of glass. Unfortunately not one single attacker so much as flinched and I dropped back behind the bench a heart beat before a blizzard of las fire ripped across the top, showering me with burning finger sandwiches and pieces of tableware. I didn’t bother trying to shout a warning across the room to Hadrian, no doubt he wouldn’t be able to hear, and he didn’t need to, the fact that my psykanna had failed would be as obvious to him as it was to me. I scrambled along a few feet and popped around the side. Three men were charging my position, literally blasting apart a pair of waiters who had frozen in place between us. I fired all four rounds of the deringer. It was a tiny weapon, but very powerful, its capacitor fed las lens able to take far more punishment than a las gun which might expect years of continuous service. The knee of the lead man exploded, spattering the white uniformed corpses of the staff with even more blood. He went down in a heap, screaming and tripping his companions. I tossed the pistol, I had no time to reload it and no ammunition either, and snatched up a knife that was smeared with some kind of cake. Leaping to my feet I darted away through the crowd, heading towards where I had last seen Hadrian and trying to avoid being trampled by the gaudily dressed nobility of Pacitus.