There's like, no particular reason I see to turn this into some kind of last stand. Yingzheng isn't important enough for Christos to sacrifice his life to kill, we've done what we can to try to limit Serafina's exposure to trouble within the Technocracy, and fighting won't really solve anything for Alice and there are quicker ways for her to kill herself. If we can make a clean break from Yingzheng it seems to me very likely that Christos can arrange for Serafina and Alice to get into the hands of his Void Engineer contacts and for them to use their dominant position on-scene to either get the Panopticon team wiped out in the chaos of the fighting in Mexico City or otherwise insure that any attempt to levy blame on Serafina falters for lack of evidence. The idea that death or defection are the only possible outcomes here strikes me as rather poorly supported and reasoned.
Christos has Entropy and Time, and he specifically said he doesn't have much time to talk. Given that he has a
lot of tools to get messages to people, the only thing that can really stop him from talking is being killed, and then murdering his ghost for good measure. I think also that the Void Engineers aren't going to stick their necks out for a Traditions master who is wanted for a
lot of counts of Reality Terrorism. Phone calls, sure. Actually getting into a shooting war with the Union secret police? Not unless they're planning on just starting that civil war right now.
There are two possibilities given the Control codes going on.
Either the General is calling the shots, or an Incarna made from NWO administrators is. The latter is going to have incarna-level abilities related to finding people and making their plans work. The former is not quite as
perfect but is far more flexible and can think far more creatively, up to and including literally using Reality Deviance.
I do not think "making a clean break from Yinzheng" is going to actually do more than put us into the crosshairs of
whatever the actual kill team is. Remember that they're here for Christos, and the last time they did that they literally brought two superfighters which made F-22s look like biplanes. They underestimated him. Panopticon is probably not going to make that mistake again, and they do have a
lot of materiel owing to inert Devices and the like being relatively easy to transit through the Dimensional Anomaly.
There's two possibilities here. Either Yinzheng's here to make us panic, at which point the proper way of doing things is to bull through her, or she, herself, is equipped to kill a strategic-level threat, which means that we're probably not going to be able to run nearly as fast as she's going to be able to catch up to us.
