“That’s the plug we’re using. We’re going in the front.”
Well, I was wrong. “Won’t they lock that down?”
Marine shook her head. “The opposite.” Her voice was a little shaky, but it seemed like it was more from excitement than fear. “WorldGov ordinances don’t allow it. Any floors accessible to the exterior have to unlock and unlatch everything in the event of a fire or blackout.”
“Well, we’ll definitely have one of those.”
“Yeah…” She pulled the blotto box from the metal container. “We’ll definitely have something. Ready to maybe die?”
“Might as well,” I said, with a surprising lack of sarcasm. I was starting to like it all the more I lived with it. The robot hand, the near death experiences. Maybe not as a weekly sort of outing.
She put the metal box down on the ground and walked over to the wall outlet. I stayed close, watching with way too much interest as she plugged it in. Immediately there was a buzzing noise from the sphere and heat started pouring out the vents. A few sharp beeps sounded the start of the timer The Earle had mentioned. We both scurried away from it, making ridiculous “please don’t explode” faces. The kind where you dig your chin into your neck and go all wide-eyed.
Neither of us had any sort of timer, but Marine was walking toward the front of the building with considerable purpose.
“How will we know how long it’s going to take?”
“I don’t know. But they might post guards at the doors when it pops.”
“Smart, smart. So wait, we’re going in while they can see us?”
“I don’t see much alternative. They’re going to know we’re in anyway. Only the bottom two floors will unlock.”
She had clearly given this more thought than I had. “Yeah, right. So we go in the front.” I pretended to be on the same page but I was scrambling through possibilities to catch up. The elevators would be out, almost definitely. And even if they were on backups we couldn’t afford to wait for them in a lobby full of Virsec goons. “The stairs.”
She nodded wordlessly as we came around the front of the building. There were at least a dozen SWAT type guards waiting in the lobby, weirdly at the far side. This was likely a fair sign that their facial recognition cameras had seen us approaching. Maybe they had beanbag guns. I heard those weren’t so bad. And I had a robot hand so maybe it was fine.
“So where are the stairs?”
Marine was already halfway through the door and had ignored my question. I kept in close behind her, not letting the door even come close to closing. If we got separated this whole thing was going to go bad for one of us at least. The door shut behind us and I heard an extra metal clicking noise. We were locked in. For a few seconds anyway.
“Hey! It’s the butt guy!”
Oh man. This is instantly less badass than I had hoped. They were all laughing. Marine laughed. The secretary laughed. I was the butt guy. Fuck me. I changed my mind, this sucks. All of this sucks.
“Hey! Butt guy! We’re really gonna do it this time.”
They all laughed harder. At him promising to fuck my butt. See, this is the class of people you get when you run a shady company full of poorly trained police goons. They were still laughing when the lights died all around us. It went pitch dark. I assumed they were all shouting to one another but any sounds that might have been happening were drowned under a disturbing, ear numbing moan.
I couldn’t see anything in the immediate black. I felt a warm, soft hand grab mine and reasoned that it was either Marine or a guard with religious attention to moisturizing. Assuming the former, I went with her when she tugged me toward where the guards had been. Flashlights began to click on as guns came from holsters but they were shined at where we had been and against the walls. We’d headed directly through the center of their mass and were beyond them by the time they had decided to scan the side walls.
We came to a jerking stop against the doorway leading to the stairs and I ran into Marine’s back. The door came open and we went into a red-lit stairway.
“How high up are we going?”
“No idea, just run.”
She started up the stairs and I kept behind her for, and I’m very proud of this, four flights. She had started to pull away from me and that’s bullshit because she’s a robot and that’s cheating.
“Hey!” I wheezed the words more than said them. “Slow… slow.” I kept clambering up steps.
She’d been checking the doors at every landing, all of them open. We were nearing the eleventh floor when she finally decided that we’d done enough climbing. Good for me, because there were about ninety-six floors left to go and I was going to die if she even suggested that we climb all the way.
She pushed into the floor proper and it was laid out basically the same as the one we’d imagined we were sneaking into the day before. It really baffled me trying to think of what people could possibly use so many floors for. It was my understanding that Vircore had two headquarters, so I guess if they were running half the world from each of them, they really needed plenty of leg room for their workers to get up and cackle maniacally while wringing their hands. That seems like the bulk of what their employees did aside from staring at people being carried through the office. That and make untoward comments about violating handsome mens’ butts.
“What are we thinking? Jericho has the thing?”
She was walking past doors, looking into each office. “If he doesn’t, I’ll be surprised. But I don’t know which floor it’s on. Or
