The rest of it took barely fifteen minutes. The surgeon laser-cauterized the tiny arterioles that fed the chip with blood and kept its deteriorating organic parts alive, and swiftly burnt through the cilia-like array of neural connectors, finer than spider silk, across the chip's surface. The most delicate surgical hand-tractor lifted the chip neatly from its matrix. The surgeon dropped it into a dish of solution held out for it by the anxious Dr. Avakli, hovering nearby.

Avakli and his tech headed for the door, hustling the dead chip off to the lab. Avakli paused and glanced back at Miles, as if they'd expected him to follow it. "Are you coming, my lord?" Avakli inquired.

"No. I'll see you later. Carry on, Admiral."

Miles was barely able to interpret what he was seeing on the monitors, but at least he could read Dr. Ruibal, attending to Illyan's physiological state alongside the surgeon; Ruibal was attentive but relaxed. No emergencies yet, then.

The surgeon fitted the sliver of skull back into its place with biotic glue, and closed the incision and cleaned it. Nothing but a neat, thin red line showed on the pale scalp; Zap the Cat had left gorier-looking scratches on human flesh than this.

The surgeon stood, and stretched. "That's it, then. He's all yours, Dr. Ruibal."

"That was . . . simpler than I had anticipated," Miles commented.

"Several orders of magnitude simpler than installing it must have been," agreed the surgeon. "I had a horrible few minutes, when I first looked at the map of the thing, thinking that I was going to have to go in and remove all those neural connectors from their other ends, throughout the brain, until I realized they could just be left in situ."

"There won't be any consequences from leaving them all in there?"

"No. They'll just sit there, inert and harmless. Like any other sort of cut wire, there's no circuit now. Nothing flows."

The anesthetist inquired of Dr. Ruibal and the surgeon, "Are you ready for me to administer the antagonist now?"

Ruibal took a deep breath. "Yes. Wake him up. Let's find out what we've done."

A hiss of a hypospray; the anesthetist watched Illyan's quickening breathing, then at a nod from the surgeon removed the tubes from Illyan's mouth, and loosened the head-restraints. A little more color warmed Illyan's pale features, the death-warmed-over look of unconsciousness fading.

Illyan's brown eyes opened; he squinted, and his gaze flicked from face to face. He moistened his dry lips.

"Miles?" he husked. "Where the hell am I? What are you doing here?"

Miles's heart sank, momentarily, at this instant replay of the opening of most of Illyan's conversations of the last four days. But Illyan's gaze, though uncertain, remained steady on his face.

Miles shouldered forward through the medical mob, who gave way to him. "Simon. You're in surgery at ImpSec HQ. Your eidetic memory chip broke down, irreparably. We've just removed it entirely."

"Oh." Illyan frowned.