Thellant paused and inspected himself. His back was totally charcoaled, the rest of his naturally dark skin mottled with still darker patches, as if bruised all over, and hard metallic masses pushed against it from the inside. Also his electromagnetic linkages to the substructure hazed the air around him with energy spillover. He began to make cosmetic alterations: withdrawing the tech deeper inside him, repairing the damage to his human façade. Eventually he stood unflawed, with a skin tone like that of his healthy negro ancestor, no fat on his body, his musculature less flabby than at any time since his youth. He reached up, peeled the dead Dracocorp aug from behind his ear and cast it aside. Moving on, he searched for and eventually found a suitable corpse, which he stripped of clothing to replace his own damaged garments. However, he did not yet feel ready to break his link to the main substructure. First he needed to learn the disposition of Coloron’s forces.
The dracomen were nearer now: five of them just a mile to his right and three levels above. He already knew how fast they could move and felt them to be too close, so took the first exit to his left and headed down one level. Other dracomen occupied levels far above and some far to his left and higher still. What lay ahead, outside of the current purview of the substructure, he did not know. He would take as straight a line as possible, lose himself in the general population, find a way to escape. Now was the time to make the break.
It was so hard to cut himself off, almost like fighting an addiction. The electromagnetic transceivers inside him fought against his will like rebellious adolescents, and would only cut his connection when he physically used the structure inside himself to sever their power. Even then they tried to reconnect themselves until he killed each one remaining inside him. Thereafter came an agonizing hammer of withdrawal, dullness of mind, blurring of his senses. Stubbornly he fought this too and tracked down its root causes. These feelings he experienced were a human thing. It seemed that his breaking of contact with the main substructure had pushed much of his awareness back into his organic brain and out of the grain-sized computers lodged inside him. He forced awareness back, regained clarity and enforced a straight neurochemical reprogramming of his organic brain, and filled it with nanofibre control systems. This achieved, he realized how he was no longer that petty being Thellant N’komo, but something else entire.
The hologram displayed a section of the arcology, transparent, shimmering four feet off the floor like something fashioned of glass. In this, a handsbreadth away from one ragged edge of the circular trench cut down into the arcology, appeared a blinking red dot. Surrounding this, and closing in, were twenty-one green dots. The red dot the bad guy and the green the good guys, supposing Scar and the other twenty dracomen could be described as good.
‘He just broke with the main substructure,’ said Thorn, relaying a message from the HK program routed through Jack. ‘The HK can’t track him any longer.’
Scar replied, ‘Closing now on his last location.’
‘Jack,’ enquired Thorn, ‘does the HK have any idea of his intentions?’
The AI replied, ‘Escape from the arcology—he knows it will be destroyed.’
‘He’s heading outside then,’ said Thorn, ‘but which way?’
Jack replied, ‘He avoids dracomen, apparently. He must be aware of how ineffective Jain tech is against them.’
‘That’s good. If we can locate him we can probably shepherd him the way we want.’ Thorn looked up from the hologram to the screen wall of the projection room—presently divided into many subscreens displaying multiple views inside and outside the arcology. ‘Coloron, he may have changed his face, but then again that might not even have occurred to him. Are you searching?’
‘I am not searching,’ that AI replied.
The screen wall flickered, became a single view into a concourse along which crowds trudged. A frame picked out one individual in the crowd, focused in.
‘Thellant N’komo,’ Coloron informed him.
‘Racial type through choice?’ wondered Thorn, eyeing the tall negro.
Coloron replied, ‘Twenty years ago he traced one line of his ancestry back to one of the negroid races, then had himself cosmetically altered. It was his contention that he must look like those ancestors of his who, in the seventeenth century, were transported as slaves to Jamaica to cut sugar cane, because he feels he is a slave to the likes of me.’ The AI paused, then continued, ‘He was a very wealthy slave, however, and there seemed a notable lack of whips, chains and endless grinding labour in his enslavement.’
Thorn grinned to himself: it just went to show that even big-fuck planetary AIs were not above sarcasm. ‘Scar, he’s moving along Brallatsia Concourse, with the crowd heading for exit Fifty-two—ground level.’ He glanced at the hologram. Most of the green dots began moving, very fast.
‘Don’t crowd him,’ said agent Thorn. ‘We don’t want him to do anything drastic…. Uh, Coloron, you’ve got him targeted?’
‘I have,’ the AI replied.
‘Another reason not to crowd him,’ Thorn added.
How many would die, he wondered, if the AI fired its orbital particle cannon right now? Certainly few of that crowd in the concourse would survive, for the firestorm would blast all the way along to exit fifty-two itself. There were also thousands jammed into the levels above and below this one.
‘Should we try and clear some of the people beyond the exit?’ he asked.The death rate would be lower outside—perhaps less than ten thousand.
‘Inadvisable,’ said Coloron.
‘Agreed,’Thorn admitted. ‘We do that and he’ll probably guess what’s happening.’ It still did not make him feel great about risking tens of thousands of lives just to capture this one individual.
‘Dammit.’ He picked up his weapon and headed off to join the dracomen. Overseeing the operation here just gave him too much time to think of the consequences of it going wrong.
‘Keep moving. Keep moving. Food, drink and accommodation will be supplied outside. Rescue personnel one mile ahead of you. If you require assistance…’
Thellant tuned out these continual announcements. He felt angry. As the surrounding mass of humanity jostled him it took him an effort of will not to simply kill all those about him. But the moment he did something like that he would reveal himself and he doubted even the proximity of so many innocent citizens would prevent him becoming a viable target, so he kept his head down and kept shuffling along. An AG platform hovered above and drones buzzed through the air like head-sized wingless bluebottles. An occasional AG ambulance sped high overhead, after picking up the injured or those just collapsing from plain exhaustion. The bars and shops on either side were completely empty but, every hundred yards or so, temporary drinking fountains had been installed. He supposed the comfort offered by them was deliberately limited because Coloron did not want any delays to the exodus. The AI clearly wanted to get as many inhabitants as possible outside in the shortest period of time.
Inside him the Jain tech lay quiescent, but he knew it would be spotted if he came under direct scan. It seemed, however, they did not perform scanning here as back at the main line. Another AI calculation no doubt: the minimal delay for scanning individuals would accumulate into something untenable for just the tens of thousands surrounding him, let alone the millions presently departing the arcology.
It took five hours for him to traverse the six miles of concourse to the arcology edge. Here, shops, bars, and the walls behind had been torn out either side of Exit 52 to widen it to the full breadth of the concourse. When he finally stepped outside night had fallen, and the sky glittered with stars and orbiting ships. He looked to either side into the seething mass of humanity and saw drop-shaft exits from the levels above and below also spewing a steady stream of inhabitants. AG transports regularly departed like bees from a hive, depositing their passengers some distance ahead, then returning for more. Thellant trudged on, adjusting his eyes to night vision, then ramping up the magnification as he scanned his surroundings. Presently he could not see much ahead, since he walked upslope, but to his left, two miles away, he focused in on one AG platform and saw that it held a human and a dracoman, and to his right over by 51—a larger exit—there seemed a heavy concentration of drones. It seemed he was in absolutely the right place.