Chapter 384 - Far Future Ch. 94- Sticky Fingers (1/2)

The guards with their jetpacks and anti-grav swore as she plunged off the mile-high Spire in a power dive. The extra two hundred kilos of goodies in her Masspack helped her velocity nicely, as did the air splitting before her Diamond Vajra. They might have jets, but they still had to deal with air resistance!

Under the pulse of her ki, the compressed, folded cloth running up the sides of her body from ankle to wrist flared out into a wingsuit, and her plunge became a sliding glide through the air at 300+ kph.

She knew their vehicular backup was on the way and would be on station within seconds. They might not be able to track her electronically, which was no doubt causing massive consternation amongst them, but Eyeball 1.0 still worked fine, if pissing off their computer-aided gunnery to no end.

They barreled after her, and yeah, the power armor helped, but humans are not aerodynamic, and her Diamond Vajra effectively made her frictionless. They couldn't close on her, and there was this little problem of banners, poles, walkways, illegal cable links and bridges, and also the minor issue of skyroads and pedways that had to dodge or be dodged on the way down.

She was invisible to the evasion algorithms of the traffic, which meant the aircars, speeders, hovertrucks, and skimmers simply wouldn't notice her to dodge her. Ergo, Kylee go splat if she wasn't good.

Good thing she was that good!

She spun around and through everything, the world cycling by at 1/20th the speed a normal person would perceive it at. Everything within sixty feet of her she absolutely knew the presence of, missing nothing. Tracking, predicting, altering course, reading the airflow and obstructions with equal panache as her hunters had to take a much more convoluted route through everything, and fell further behind.

And there it was, a sinkhole that had recently opened up into the undercity, cordoned off and awaiting the maintenance crews that would fill it up. The automated flashers notified the comps in the vehicles and automatically adjusted traffic flow around the hole, but the hole was open, and that was all she needed.

She snapped the wings tight again, doing a somersault as she flared with drag and her glide became a precise plummet right down the center of that ten-meter wide hole.

Her boots pulsed with energy, tossed her mass in every direction, and she became effectively a feather for the last foot of her descent, feet coming down to within a half-inch of fragments of plascrete, lightfoot kicking in once more... and she was off down a maintenance tunnel to the left before her pursuers could get an eyelock on her once again.

They'd be cursing and swearing, but all of the cameras here were on false inputs for the next five minutes, so they wouldn't be able to patch in and see doors opening and closing. Plus, she was moving at sixty miles an hour or faster on straightaways, which meant the number of alternate courses she could take was increasing exponentially, especially if she chose to go down even further into the belly of the undercity. They couldn't possibly maneuver that bulky armor through the doors and tight tunnels with any speed, she had her escape route long planned and covered... and her body temp was exactly at air temp, so they couldn't track her that way.

It was even worse when she took a route that wouldn't be on any city database.

---

Kaylee opened up the plug of cement, dove smoothly through it, reached back to yank it shut on its concealed hinges, and slid forwards on all fours through the rough tunnel dug through the ubiquitous plascrete into the maintenance tunnels around one of the many decaying old bloks that housed so many hundreds of thousands of people. From there, it was a matter of pushing aside a rack of tools quietly, sliding it all shut, and she was basically free and clear.

Kaylee drew a set of working clothes out of her Masspack, putting them on quickly. As she did, her face rippled slightly, and her hair changed color from blue-black to spiffy pink-blonde, with a unique cut.

Templa Hassidra was a young Beacon psion, registered as a Termite, although her skills were now significantly past the personal calls stage. Still, she had just given Kaylee a knowing smile when Kaylee asked if she could answer a call in the basement of Junglerblok about such and such time, and then dim-shift out when nobody was watching on cue... for a small fee, of course.

The two dead rats... well, what passed on Janus III for rats, they were half-scaled and had bigger teeth... were taken out of the locker which, by the dust on it, had not been opened in years, and she moved to the door, made sure no one was close by, and the sensor to indicate activity that had burned out decades earlier was still inert.

This had probably been a smuggling route for a drug gang coming into Jonglerblok, being run through the maintenance crew. There'd been news of a drug war twenty-odd years ago, where part of the maintenance crew had died, and knowledge of that very illegal access cut into the substrata maintenance tunnels of the city had probably died with them. Mika Rantha had noticed the tunnel when doing a lived-line stroll to expand The Map, and hey, it was finally becoming useful.

Kaylee held her bag of rats in hand as she walked down the maintenance corridor and headed for the stairwell out of here.

Templa had warned her that they had tried to keep spotters on her while she did her inspection, so Kaylee was not surprised when she opened the door to the way out, and saw two men standing there on the landing above, looking irritated.

”You!” the first one shouted down at her. ”Where did you go?”

”Corridor, back room, following a piss trail. Nest in a pile of old uniforms. You want me to show it to you, or you just want to look at the little darlings before they bred?” She held up the package as she started up the stairs, voice bored and tired.

And then she heard some telepathy go by. That wasn't particularly unusual, as psions could be quite messy about forming telepathic links if they didn't think anyone could listen in... but hearing it in a language and style that wasn't human most definitely was not standard at all.

Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly as the two men focused on her, and she let her Brand suppression drop and her full Charisma come up singing, even as it was meant to do nothing overt.

”Out of the way, boys,” she yawned, waving them aside when they didn't respond to her question. ”I'm tired, this barely pays for dinner, and it's been a long day.”