Corporate Lobby

[Vogel]

By now it was clear there was precious little he could do to actually infiltrate the organization; the time he'd spent creating his cover, and building up the fake shipping company, vessels included, was entirely for naught.

But if he was going to going to get anything out of this, now was the time. And why not go out with a bang?

With Heliox' cameras, and presumably security devices, all locked onto him, he realized that what he was about to do was a gamble of the biggest sort. But in his business, gambling with your life was all part of the game, and so far he'd been winning.

Stepping up to the evidently panic-stricken man strapped to the chair, the so-called businessman named Gerald Hayes brought the knife to bear and laid the point of it against the hostage's neck.

With the quick flick of his wrist, he jammed the knife into the bag and ripped it upwards, unsure of what face he'd find underneath...

---

Eight hundred meters away in a skylane, a jet-black fighter craft idly followed the arduous flow of traffic.

An onboard computer, in fact a sentience, was sifting through an endless stream of communications traffic and all manner of electrical emissions, seeking out a single, low-complexity message nearly indistinguishable from the background noise.

And there it was.

It began deciphering the basic message within a nanosecond; its source was from a remote-controlled coffee machine on the eightieth floor of the OCULUS headquarters building, which in turn had received an impulse from the nearest electrical outlet, which stemmed from a wireless neural-net router on the five-hundred and tenth floor, which had received an ultra-low power command from a certain man's watch on the one thousand-nine hundred and ninety-eighth floor.

In the end, it was a simple statement: Yes.

Twin panels on the fighter's nose split open, revealing a glowing red strobe, moving back and forth from left to right. The ship reared up and out of the skylane traffic and spun to face the towering OCULUS building in the distance.

Preliminary scans had revealed the internal structure and all of its components, their compositions and densities, save for a chunk of space that was deliberately shielded from such prying methods; the area just so happened to be on the border of, if not at, the location of the fighter's pilot.

The sentience compared the scan data with information regarding its own composition and structure before putting both into a calculation which accounted for everything from wind drift to the most minute loss of engine power at any point.

The calculation was satisfactory.

Its engines roared to life; had the other ships been exposed to the elements their drivers would have been deafened.

And so it flew, in a direct collision course with the building's 1998th floor, accelerating to exactly seventy-one point zero-nine-nine-eight meters per second.