Chapter 80 Eighty
I slid off the Sovereign, the soles of my boots hissing against the superheated glass of the Citadel’s roof. Above us, the night sky was painted a toxic, beautiful orange by the burning wreckage of the Aegis Destroyer. Ash drifted down like snow, settling on our leather vests and the chrome of our bikes.
But below us was where the real show was happening.
Through the two-foot-thick pane of reinforced smart-glass, we were looking directly down into the belly of the beast: the Executive Boardroom. It was a cavernous, sterile space of white marble and black mahogany. The twelve Directors of the Board the men and women who had turned Coldwater into a dystopian meat-grinder were huddled around the central table.
They were covered in dust from the impact of the airship, their bespoke suits ruined, their faces pale masks of absolute terror. They were staring up at us. To them, we weren't just a biker gang. We were the monsters that had just dropped the sky on their heads.
"Mia," Dax said, not looking away from the Chairman, who was standing at the head of the table, clutching a useless datapad. "Give me the mic."
I didn't need to look for a physical terminal. I knelt beside a maintenance conduit integrated into the roof's steel framing. I pulled the interface cable from my deck and jammed it raw into the optic bundle.
The Citadel’s mainframe was supposed to be an impenetrable fortress of ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics). In the original timeline, it had taken me a week to crack the outer firewall. Tonight, armed with the Origin-Code and the sheer momentum of our speedrun, it felt like pushing my hand through wet paper.
< OVERRIDE: EXECUTIVE AUDIO_ROUTING >
< MICROPHONE STATUS: LIVE >
"You're in," I said, looking up at Dax. "The whole room can hear you. Actually, the whole building can hear you."
Dax stepped forward, the heavy heels of his boots clacking against the smart-glass. He looked down at the Chairman. He didn't yell. He didn't need to. His voice, broadcasted through the Citadel's massive surround-sound PA system, was a low, vibrating rumble that shook the dust from the boardroom walls.
"Chairman," Dax said. "Consider this a hostile takeover."
Down below, the Chairman flinched, looking frantically around the room for the source of the voice before his eyes snapped back up to the skylight. He hit a button on the console in front of him, activating the two-way comms.
"Steele," the Chairman snarled, his voice trembling with a desperate attempt at authority. "You are committing corporate terrorism. The Vanguard security forces are already mobilizing from the lower levels. You have nowhere to run."
"I'm not running," Dax replied casually, resting his explosive-round rifle on his shoulder. "And your security forces are currently trying to put out the Aegis Destroyer we parked in your lobby. You have no drones. Your Black-Site is a crater. Your Titan-Sentinels are scrap."
Dax knelt down, bringing his face inches from the glass, staring directly into the Chairman's eyes.
"Your predictive algorithms failed," Dax whispered, the sound booming through the boardroom. "You spent twenty years building a script to control this city. But you forgot that every script has a glitch. We are the glitch. And we're hitting the delete key."
The Board of Directors began to panic. Two of them broke ranks, sprinting for the reinforced mahogany doors at the back of the room.
"Lock it," Dax muttered to me.
I smiled, tapping my deck. < DOOR_CONTROL: SEALED >
Down below, the Directors slammed into the doors, clawing at the biometric scanners. Red lights flashed. They were trapped in the tank.
"What do you want, Steele?" the Chairman demanded, his aristocratic facade finally cracking. "Credits? Territory? We can negotiate a sector "
"I don't want a sector," Dax interrupted, standing back up. "I want the whole server. I want you to surrender the encryption keys to the city's power grid, the neural-upload databanks, and the Red-Queen prototype."
The Chairman froze. The mention of the Red-Queen their ultimate, secret weapon that wasn't supposed to be operational for another five years drained the last drop of blood from his face.
"How do you know about the Queen?" the Chairman breathed, terrified. "That's deeply classified. That project doesn't even exist yet!"
"We're from the future, Chairman," I spoke into my own comms, my voice joining Dax's in the room below. "And frankly, your future sucks. So we're canceling it."
Dax looked at the Iron Wolves, who had formed a semi-circle around the skylight, their modified bikes humming with latent power. Tank was revving his trike, a massive grin splitting his bruised face. Reaper had his rifle trained on the glass. Sienna was adjusting her armored gloves.
"Time's up," Dax said into the comms. "We're coming in."
He cut the audio feed.
"Mia," Dax said, stepping back from the center of the glass. "This smart-glass is rated to withstand a direct missile strike. Explosive rounds will just bounce off."
"I know," I said, mounting the Sovereign and kicking up the kickstand. "But it's not rated for sub-ether displacement."
Dax grinned. He swung his leg over the Interceptor. "Wolves! Tight formation! We breach on my mark. Drop phase the millisecond we clear the glass. If you drop too late, you'll phase right through the floor and end up in the elevator shaft."
The twelve Iron Wolves lined their bikes up along the edge of the sloped roof, pointing the front tires directly at the center of the skylight.
"Rev 'em up!" Dax roared over the roar of the engines.
The air on the roof grew thick with the smell of burning rubber and ozone. The Origin-Code engines screamed, vibrating at a frequency that made the very air shimmer.
"Phase-Shift!"
Twelve thumbs hit twelve red switches.
The pack turned an iridescent, ghostly blue. We didn't wait. We dumped the clutches and surged forward.
We hit the smart-glass at fifty miles an hour.
There was no crash. No shattering. The glass simply didn't exist for us. We passed through the two-foot-thick molecular barrier like riding through a cold mist. The transition from the chaotic, burning night sky to the sterile, brightly lit boardroom was instantaneous.
"Drop!" Dax commanded.
I released the switch.
CRASH.
We materialized in mid-air, ten feet above the boardroom table. Gravity seized us violently.
Dax’s Interceptor landed dead-center on the massive, antique mahogany table, splintering the priceless wood into a million pieces. The heavy suspension groaned, but Dax absorbed the shock, keeping the bike upright.
I landed the Sovereign right beside him, the rear tire skidding across scattered datapads and crystal water glasses. Tank’s trike slammed down hard enough to crack the marble floor, shaking the room like an artillery shell.
The Iron Wolves fanned out instantly, forming a perimeter of heavy iron and lethal intent. Guns were drawn and leveled at the terrified Directors, who had thrown themselves against the walls, shielding their faces from the debris.
Dax killed his engine. The sudden silence in the room was deafening, broken only by the whimpering of the executives and the hiss of our cooling exhausts.
Dax stepped off his bike. He walked slowly across the ruined table, his heavy boots crunching on glass and wood. He stopped right at the edge, looking down at the Chairman, who had fallen backward out of his ergonomic chair and was scrambling across the floor.
Dax dropped off the table, landing softly in front of the man who had ordered the deaths of thousands in the original timeline.
He reached down, grabbed the Chairman by the lapels of his ruined bespoke suit, and hauled him to his feet.
"The keys," Dax demanded, his amber eyes burning with a cold, unrelenting fire. "Now."
The Chairman was trembling, but as he looked into Dax’s eyes, a strange, hysterical laugh bubbled up from his chest.
"You think you've won?" the Chairman choked out, blood trickling from a cut on his forehead. "You think you're saving the city, Steele?"
Dax narrowed his eyes. He didn't like the tone. "I'm saving it from you."
"We didn't build the Red-Queen to control the city," the Chairman spat, his fear giving way to a desperate, manic truth. "We built her to hide the city! To shield the grid!"
I froze, my hand hovering over my data-deck. A cold spike of dread drove itself into my stomach. I knew that logic. I had heard it before, in a golden room at the center of the universe.
"Hide it from what?" Dax growled, pressing the Chairman against the wall.
"From the signal," the Chairman whispered, his eyes wide and vacant. "The one we picked up from the Deep-Void. They're coming, Steele. The Architects are coming. And by destroying our defenses... you just left the front door wide open."
Dax looked back at me. The Speedrun was over.
We had broken the script, only to realize we had fast-forwarded straight to the apocalypse.