‘Just keep going—I will tell you when to put it down.’

Trust Earth Central?

He checked his watch again. Thirty seconds more and he would put the damned thing down anyway and get out of there. Slowly the digits counted down.

‘Carefully place the bomb on the floor,’ EC told him, only seconds before he intended to anyway.

He squatted, followed instructions. The thing looked precarious propped up against the wall. Standing, he immediately opened that doorway that he, the only human being, could open. The bomb detonated shortly afterwards blowing a hole in the side of the station. No humans died.

- retroact ends -

Survival.

Thellant’s mind worked with a clarity he had never before experienced. The substructure now cut through the bedrock, from where Coloron’s forces had contained it, and was rapidly spreading through the rest of the arcology. Those people it now subsumed he could control completely, but he left them to some already established program integral to the Jain technology, which made them attack others to either kill or subsume them. Whether they managed to or not did not really concern him. Only the chaos they created really helped, for in the end he knew he could not win here. He was powerful, and potentially able to control this entire arcology, its population, even the whole planet, but that presupposed he would be left alone to achieve such control. Thellant knew the AIs would not allow the substructure to spread beyond this place, no matter the cost. Though it was part of him, because he retained much physical and mental integrity it was a part he could sacrifice and grow again elsewhere. He did not intend to be in this vicinity when the AIs incinerated the arcology.

Peering from the wreckage, Thellant observed the landscape of cooling rock and molten metal at the bottom of the trench. Looking through the substructure now rising in wall cavities, and spreading along ducts, optics and power lines on the other side, he saw Coloron’s forces pulling back—they knew their enemy to be out of containment now. For every ten yards gain he lost five yards to proton fire, but with hand weapons they could not destroy everything the substructure occupied.

What’s this?