The chamber held a lattice rather than a bomb, which is why the manual route demanded a core instead of a cutter. Stored load sat across nine frames in a ring, waiting for a verification key to release all nine at once.
Vell had ninety seconds and no intention of spending them on the route the Directorate had written. Venting four kilometers of stored load through his own core was the answer a technician would reach for, since a technician has one core available.
He had four transmitters in a case, a control-lattice imprint from a Wiretail cage, plus a graft filament pulled out of a shadow-cat. Every one of those was artificial Directorate material carrying the same field signature as the ring around him.
That was the whole idea, and it arrived at eleven seconds with nothing elegant about it. A vent path does not need to be a person, since the route asks only for compatible architecture on the receiving end.
