‘Keep it,’ Stanton said, and the trolley rolled off almost jauntily.

First his own injury. Inside the car Stanton loaded the injector, rolled up his sleeve, and applied the device to his forearm. In seconds that arm was just a cold, numb lump. With his other hand he pulled it from his pocket and laboriously splinted it. For good measure he slapped another patch on the bicep. Once he was sure that broken bone could not move, he reached across and turned Pelter’s head towards him. He hissed between his teeth at what he was seeing, and reached for the can of synthiskin. When he finished covering that side of the Separatist’s head, he pulled the patches from the man’s neck and applied a stick-on dressing over the whole mess. Nothing more he could do about it, really. Pelter needed some serious reconstruction. This done, Stanton stabbed the tube from one of the saline packets into a vein in Pelter’s lower arm, tilted it until the air bubbled up out of the pipe to the surface of the saline, and then squeezed the packet to inject the liquid. When that packet was empty he stuck the other one to the roof of the AGC, connected up a long tube and stabbed that in too. He shot a cocktail of drugs the manufacturers would have warned against directly into Pelter’s throat. Within a minute the man gasped, opened his eyes and sat forwards.

‘How long?’ he croaked.

‘About an hour,’ Stanton told him.

‘Well, get moving. We may already be too late.’

Pelter studied the drip and the tube, and anger flashed across his features. He seemed about to tear the tube out, but then the anger faded and he sat back.

‘That was risky, John,’ he said.

Stanton nodded as he engaged power, then lifted the cup control of the car. With a deep hum it rose into the air. He thumbed the guide ball in the cup and the vehicle slid forwards over the park. Pelter was silent for a moment. When he spoke again it was through gritted teeth.

‘We’ll have to be ready to move quick. Even if the withdrawal isn’t refused, a Polity AI’ll be on it soon after,’ he said.

Stanton nodded again. The pain was returning to his arm and he wanted it bone-welded sooner rather than later. He thumbed the ball further forward and swung the AGC fast round the edge of the arcology. Here. The arcade was just a side-shoot from the main complex. He brought the car down to a second park at the centre of a complex of singular buildings. Here the wealthier corporations had their bases built specifically for them. They did not need to rent space from the arcology.

‘If an AI is on it now, we won’t get out of here,’ he said.