Free Subterrene War 03: Chimera by T.C. McCarthy Page A

glittering crystal, red, blue, and green, and I froze, wondering if they’d already nabbed Ji but then decided that of the two of us, he was safer since the news was describing it as the act of one psychopath. I leaned against a wall as a group of Guardia Civil jogged by, their boots pounding on the street while their officer shouted something over his helmet speakers.
    Now what?
A flash of panic made my breath short, but soon the fear turned, shifted into an icy feeling that ran through my veins and refrigerated my mind so that the useless thoughts froze and fell out, leaving the logical options, the ones for which I had been trained. So far I had evaded capture. But the Guardia and Madrid’s police would be ready at checkpoints, waiting to find the person who matched the holo image, or if they had found any DNA, the sequence that fit. For now, my appearance would be hard to match given the fact that I was soaked and visibility in the rain was bad anyway. And there were things I could do about DNA, but by now they would have matched my description to my entry visa profile. This last possibility wasn’t a problem either, in theory, because itwas possible to counteract a visa match, involving a method that allowed me to adopt any one of ten identity chits I carried.
    But it would hurt like hell.
    My shoes slipped on the wet cobblestones when I ducked into an alley, and in the distance a dim blue light shone over a door. I took three steps down to it. The tired Spaniard manning the bar’s entrance smelled of tobacco, and he looked me up and down before waving me into a low-ceilinged chamber where white smoke obscured the far side of the room, and I leaned over to ask him in broken Spanish for the toilet. The guy pointed and I moved. Once inside a stall with the door locked, my duffel didn’t want to open until I nearly ripped the zipper off, reaching inside a concealed pocket to find my extra passport chits and a pair of special pens that hid things I’d hoped to avoid using—because there wouldn’t be any anesthesia. Both pens were microbot injectors: One would release a set of invisible automatons, programmed to arrange themselves under the skin of a finger where, if subjected to a skin prick, they would release DNA. The bots in the other pen would rearrange my retinal capillaries and alter their pattern. Both signatures would match the next passport. The finger injection wasn’t so bad, an instant of pain as the bots spread and pushed tissues aside, but I hoped that if asked for a sample, they would let me choose the digit because the wrong finger would end everything.
    My eyes were another issue entirely. I did both, one after another, and the pain almost made me pass out; my eye sockets burned from the inside and tears blinded me so that at first it wasn’t apparent that they consisted of blood instead of water, and although there was no screaming, someone in the next stall would have heard a soft moaning that no amount of effort could have prevented. When it was over, I could barely see.
    Then it was a matter of time. Someone came into the stall next to mine, and I waited, making sure that he sat down before I broke in—slamming my fist into his face, again and again, until he fell unconscious—and stripped him of his clothes. They were big but would have to do. Once I’d finished I dumped all of mine into the trash can, flushed my old passport chit down the toilet, and walked out. The new clothes weren’t a perfect solution, but if—in addition to a finger prick—they sampled my clothing, at least for a while the DNA would be someone else’s. Outside, I jumped into a cab and told the driver to head for the Atocha train station. The clock was ticking now; although my eyes would be altered forever, the microbots in my fingers had a half-life of two days.
    “British?” the cabbie asked.
    “American.”
    “Ah, we used to get a lot of Americans when the war was on, but now not so much.”
    “Yeah. I can