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 computers 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.

---

Kylee 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.

Kylee 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 Kylee a knowing smile when Kylee asked if she could answer a call in the basement of Jonglerblok 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. 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.

Kylee 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 Kylee 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.”

She hit all the right subvocals, posture, aural cues. They were working stiffs in the unitards of building maintenance, should have totally been on her working-girl side, and Templa’s looks were more than cute enough to carry the sex appeal forwards.

They did hesitate, but only for a moment, before pulling back against the wall.

She’d have to pass them with the railing of the stairs on the other side.

There was something unnatural in the local mindscape; it had its hooks in both of the men, and was paying attention here.

She stepped past them, eyes drifting past lazily, body language trusting and tired... and naturally they both lunged at her with remarkably perfect timing.

She ducked so smoothly it looked choreographed. Her right hand, which did not hold a plastisealed bag of rats, came back glowing and smashed into the middle of the top man’s face with five fingers, drove in two inches, and the Sun Strike went off and blew out his brains as she heaved and sent him past her over the railing.

As she went down, her other foot came up. Normally, that wouldn’t be all that dangerous, but when a ki-enhanced foot gird in a new soulclaw snaps up, powered by the muscles of someone who could bench a truck, and hits you in the side of the head like an axe, welp, that was all she wrote.

She straightened up as he was knocked sideways across her back, head crunching like a popped egg, grabbed his leg, and heaved him after his friend.

Jump, circle, jump, circle, jump, get the fudgeouttaDodge...

She jumped, hit the far wall above the steps, ran along it, jumped again up the flight of stairs, repeated the zigzag bouncing ascension of the steps twice more, and was up from the third sub-basement to the main floor. She heaved the door open before they could seal it, and was in an access corridor away from the main doors on the east side, fifty yards from getting out.

Whatever was on alert was going to be momentarily confused by what had happened, and then had to coordinate a response.

Templa was already coordinating, inputting into her Band that she’d been jumped by two building maintenance workers and was getting out of Jonglerblok for her own self-protection. Kylee naturally began trotting at a controlled pace towards the doors.

She was barely past the corridor gates and into the main entryway when they slid shut behind her. Twenty yards to go. If they sealed the doors, she’d just blast them open.

She didn’t look like she was moving fast, but every stride was covering twice the distance that it looked like it was. She reflected that she really needed to get her Sword Knuckles outfitted with Teleport, it would make things so much easier.

“Hey, you, stop!” A group of men abruptly turned around as another wave of pspeech swept past, and she just ignored them as she made it to the doors, in time to see another cluster of men outside coming up to stop her.

She pulled out her stunner, and promptly shot the first two in the face, dodged the third and clouted him on the back of the head as he went by, and put her foot in the face of the fourth, clothes-lining him and dropping him to the ground. She shot him in the face before he could get up, then his buddy #3, and then very obviously trotted away as the men came racing out of the doors behind her.

She held a middle finger over her head as she drifted away, just for proper effect, and rapidly outpaced them without any effort, weaving through the people on the street. For some reason the wave of pspeech didn’t follow her out into the crowd, although many people were giving her strange looks as she passed by.

A van pulled up smoothly beside her, the side door opened, and she stepped in. As her features reverted to her own, Trembla slid into the front seat to satisfy any cameras, and the driver, Trembla’s Null Qwaggo, smoothly pulled away and into traffic.

“Okay, I did not expect that,” Kylee said, her eyes narrowed. -Hey, Doc Mick! I’m near Jonglerblok, four hundred kliks from home. Where is the nearest place I can go to get a black sanitized genetest done?-

The Mick had been quietly expanding his own brand of tough love medical care in all directions as the Green and Gold expanded, and was plugged into a lot of people and places. He was also getting out some genetic testers very quickly in the light of the news coming that they might have an alien infiltration.

-I’ve got nothing there,- he /admitted to her. -You have suspicions on something?-

-I just got to listen in on a non-human telepathic command wave in Jonglerblok, and had to kill two guys who ignored a full charm display.- Which honestly was pretty freaking mind-bending. Those guys literally should not have been ABLE to think bad things about her. They had to be hard-wired for obedience.

She held up her hand, which was still coated with blood and brains clinging to the glimmering psychic force on her hand.

Sticky Fingers...