There was enough light pouring in from the buildings across the way that it was easy to see in general. Not enough that you’d want to be doing any detail-oriented work, but I could navigate the desk-made corridors just fine. She rushed into one of the offices and snatched a still-powered laptop from the desk. She pulled open a couple of desk drawers, annoyed when she didn’t find what she wanted.
“What’d you need?”
“Wireless is out.” Oh right. “We need a fiber cable.”
I looked around at the desks nearby, but none of them had anything other than power cables running out of them. I noticed something. They were all bodiless units. Just heads.
“Hey, these are just head terminals. There’s probably a server room on this floor.”
I climbed up onto the desk, noticing the conduits for each desk cluster ran up into the drop ceiling. I punched one of the boards out and looked up into it. A large, distinctly colored pipe ran to the far end of the floor and turned right. Looking down, there was a hallway where it turned. I pointed.
“That way.”
Marine took off without me and I climbed down from the desk, wanting to jog after her but mostly just doing a noodle walk. My legs were just completely dead. I got to the server room behind her. It was uncomfortably warm, the dormant servers having quickly overpowered the cool left in the room when the air conditioners shut off. This was really not helping me. First aerobic exercise, now a warm room? I decided that I understood the plight of those who lived among the harsh deserts. I was their honorary brother now. I had been chased by the cheetah and scorched by the sun. We were as one tribe.
“Floor number ninety-nine. The whole thing is his office. It’s on closed-circuit power. Along with the basements and a few other things.”
“Typical, really. He doesn’t understand how hard it is for us men of the sands.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Shut up. What?”
She shook off the distraction. “There are two elevators that run to the office. Can you run?”
I had flashbacks to my time in the Serengeti and the Gobi. They were lean times, harsh.
“Laze, stop being a moron. Can you run?”
“I mean, technically, yeah.”
“Good. I’m calling them both. We’re going to the far one in case they know where we called them from.”
“Super.”
She got up, tucking the laptop under her arm. “Ready?”
“No?”
“Good.”
She jogged to the door and looked out of it before breaking into a sprint. I did my best to keep up with her, convincing my brain not to worry about the pain in my lungs by focusing on the slight shimmer of sweat on Marine’s skin. She could sweat. I mean, that was just a ton of work to make something like that. Why would you even do it? Did she have stink makers too? Artificial ass funk? Or was it like a delightful rose garden?
I thought about the specifics of that for longer than most men would be proud of. But I knew I wasn’t most men. And when times got tough, I got… also tough? Forget it.
We were at the elevator. I could hear it moving somewhere inside the giant shaft. Marine bounced up and down impatiently watching the lights. There were no numbers on the thing, and really, it was fairly discreet to begin with. The sort of thing a real prick would step out of, hoping to terrify everyone in the office. “Oh no, Jericho’s on the floor.” Jesus, I bet he jerked off to it.
The door made no dinging noise, it just slid open, revealing a marble floor and blue lighting, reflected in the mirrors on the wall of the thing. We got in. There was a number pad with all the floors and a dedicated button for the executive office. Marine pressed the button, readying the laptop. The doors closed and I stepped close to her, both of us staring at the keypad.
“No code?”
She narrowed her eyes at the thing. “I… guess not? Did they think it was that secure? There was a code to call it. But it got sent in plaintext. It was an old system. No lateral movement.”
Whatever was happening, the numbers on the counter inside the elevator were climbing, and the inertia certainly made it feel as though the readout was accurate. It was a fast climb, at that. Unnervingly fast. The sort of feeling that really makes you consider the sanity of ever having invented elevators.
The elevator shuddered as it slowed down, preparing to stop. I got a sudden dump of adrenaline and the pain in my legs just disappeared. My brain started running through survival scenarios. I’d push Marine out of the way if there were guards waiting. I’d run out and tackle Jericho if he was there. I’d probably piss myself in most of those situations as my bladder was entirely full at this point. The door dinged and I crouched into my action pose, ready for whatever. But there was nothing. A well-lit room. More a house, almost. There was a kitchen immediately outside and to the right. A sofa and a fireplace past that. All of them modern and stark and basically the sort of thing you’d expect a guy who called himself Jericho to own.
I walked out ahead of Marine and looked around. It was quiet, and there was no real indication that anyone was home. We walked the various rooms until we found one that looked like Jericho’s office. The door to it didn’t have a lock. Or a scanner. In fact, it operated on a motion sensor.
“Eggshell security, yeah?”
Marine nodded, a disbelieving look on her face. “Are they really that confident? I guess there should be a half dozen other things that stopped us from getting here.” She walked into his office, her attention returning to the reason we were there. The building beside brightened as lights came back to life inside the Vircore tower. They’d managed to
