Angus leads Milos out of the Ease-n-Sleaze complex and out onto the main walkways of Billingate's cruise. As they are surrounded by people going to and fro, Angus informs Milos that no guards or wires are nearby, so they can talk freely about Nick's message. Milos tells Angus Nick found out the Bill keeps people in cells deep within his command complex. Angus knows where those cells are, having once been detained there by the Bill, but he doesn't explain this to Milos. Milos reminds Angus he hasn't heard how they can rescue Davies from his cell, stating they can't just ask for him to be released. Angus suddenly gets information from an internal datalink on how they can rescue Davies, information made available after Milos says ask for him.
Angus doesn't tell Milos what he has learned, because as a revenge for Milos' torments Angus doesn't want Milos to have any reassurances. He just tells Milos to stay very close to him, to hide behind him if someone shoots at them, and to keep silent. Milos obeys as they get into a series of elevators. Angus activates the jamming field when they they are out of the range of any bugeyes. Then, when an elevator he and Milos are riding becomes emptied of other passengers, he disables the elevator alarm with one of his built-in lasers.Triggered by Milos' words--or the proximity of a crisis--this database informed him that his EM prostheses had capabilities he'd never suspected. They weren't simply able to identify wires and bugeyes; read alarms and locks; analyze technological enhancements. Properly coded, they could also emit jamming devices. He could glitch a monitor until it recorded nothing but distortion, if he got close enough to it.
Or--
Suddenly his excitement became so intense that he forgot Milos and the cruise, Warden Dios and Morn Hyland. The world around him seemed to vanish in discovery.
Or he could bend light.
Not over a large area, of course. His power supply wasn't adequate for that. But he could surround himself with a radiant curve, an electromagnetically induced refraction wave in the visible spectrum, which would make him effectively indistinguishable to most optical monitors. Human eyes would always be able to see him. But neurologic and electronic encoding were fundamentally different, vulnerable to different kinds of distortion. And because the Bill's bugeyes were designed to function over distance under uncertain lighting conditions, they received wider bandwidths--with less accuracy. They would record Angus as nothing more than a slight opalescent ripple in the image, like a blur on the bugeye's lens.
The ripple could still be tracked. An intensive computer analysis of the recordings could follow it as it moved. But first it had to be noticed: someone in Operations--or in the Bill's command complex---had to see it and worry about it. And that might never happen. No one on Thanatos Minor had any reason to suspect that Angus carried this kind of jamming equipment--that he or anyone else could carry it.
Light-bending fields were known, of course, but they weren't common: their emitters were too bulky, and required too much power, to be effectively portable. And even where the size and power consumption of the equipment weren't a problem, the fields themselves remained too small and immobile to have much practical application. By welding these emitters into Angus, Hashi Lebwohl had accomplished a miracle of miniaturization.
Lebwohl and Dios had left him defenseless in the path of madness; he hated and feared them. But that didn't prevent him from experiencing a strange, amazed exultation which bordered on gratitude at their technical abilities. When they'd taken his freedom away, they'd made him into something wonderful.
Angus and Milos then head down to the level of the cells, and Angus quickly shoots both cyborg guards. However, Angus doesn't shoot the transmitters of the guards, so as not to alarm the computers monitoring the Bill's surveillance system. He and Milos open the cell that was being guarded, and come face to face with young Davies Hyland. It's obvious at once to Angus and Milos that Davies is the offspring of Morn AND Angus, and Angus realizes Nick omitted this information as a shock for them. As soon as Davies sees Angus, he punches him in the face.
A pretty exciting chapter for me to read, always. And the first time through I was highly curious to read how Angus and Davies would react to each other.