Escape Velocity

Down on the street, the NYPD Captain stared at Miller. The rain was coming down in sheets, slicking the asphalt.

"We can't just cut the grid to a 100-story financial center," the Captain shouted over the sirens. "We need authorization from the Mayor's office. The servers in there hold billions—"

Miller didn't blink. He didn't even stop walking. He strolled right past the Captain, stepping up to the massive, reinforced ConEdison subterranean junction box embedded in the sidewalk outside the tower's main entrance.

He didn't ask for a key. He didn't call for a breaching tool.

Miller reached under his trench coat, drew his Thompson submachine gun, and fired a concentrated, deafening three-round burst directly into the heavy steel locking mechanism.

The padlock shattered into jagged shrapnel. Miller kicked the heavy iron doors open, exposing the primary high-voltage relays for the Obsidian Tower. He looked back at the terrified city engineer standing by the Mobile Command Unit.

"I didn't ask for permission," Miller drawled, the cigarette still dangling from his lips.

He reached his leather-gloved hands into the junction box, grabbed the primary breaker levers, and violently wrenched them down.

A massive shower of blue sparks erupted from the grate. The low, heavy hum of the skyscraper instantly stopped.

High above, the Obsidian Tower died in an instant. The main breakers were severed. A cascading blackout swallowed all 1,400 feet of the building, plunging the corridors into suffocating darkness.

Inside the 90th-floor ventilation shaft, Zero’s HUD flashed yellow. OXYGEN: 38%.

He could hear them below him. Obsidian’s elite Private Military Contractors. They hadn't listened to Miller. They weren't waiting on the street. Heavily armored boots marched in perfect tactical synchronization. Sweeping lasers cut through the dark. Worse, Zero’s suit detected active thermal sweeps. They were looking for his body heat, and the vents offered zero insulation.

He couldn't sneak past them. He had to blind them.

Zero kicked out a lateral grate and dropped silently into the 90th-floor UPS Hub—the Uninterruptible Power Supply room. It was a cavernous space filled with towering racks of high-density lithium-ion batteries, whining at maximum capacity to keep the isolated local servers alive.

Zero raised his right wrist. The electric-blue blade of the Arc Cutter ignited.

He didn't hesitate. He drove the superheated plasma blade directly into the primary liquid coolant manifold, dragging it across the heavy copper busbars connecting the battery arrays. He deliberately crossed the polarities.

Lithium doesn't just burn; it violently erupts.

The thermal runaway was instantaneous. The first battery cell exploded with a blinding white flash, immediately igniting the cells around it. A shockwave of pure, blistering heat threw Zero backward against a concrete pillar.

Within ten seconds, the entire hub was a raging inferno of chemical fire. The temperature in the room spiked past 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Thick, toxic black smoke began billowing down the corridors.

Outside the hub, the PMC tactical team stopped dead in their tracks. Their thermal goggles, designed to pick up a human body, were instantly washed out by a blinding wall of white-hot ambient temperature. They were completely blind.

Zero moved into the corridor, enveloped in the toxic black smoke. His HUD flashed violently. ENVIRONMENT HAZARDOUS. FILTRATION MAXIMUM. OXYGEN: 14%... 12%...

The fire was spreading faster than he anticipated. The heat was so intense the light-absorbing synthetic weave of his Void Suit began to singe and warp. The ceiling sprinklers engaged, raining water down onto the chemical fire, turning the hallway into a boiling, pressurized steam room.

Two blinded PMC guards stumbled through the smoke, coughing through their respirators, swinging their rifles wildly.

Zero didn't shoot. He didn't have a gun. He flowed through the steam like a shadow.

He stepped inside the guard's blind spot, grabbing the barrel of the M4 and twisting it upward. With his free hand, he drove a devastating palm strike into the filter of the man’s gas mask, shattering the plastic and knocking him unconscious. The second guard turned toward the sound, firing a blind, deafening burst into the smoke.

Zero dropped into a slide, sweeping the man’s legs out from under him. As the guard hit the floor, Zero locked a heavy knee onto his chest and ripped the radio from his tactical vest, plunging back into the fire before the man could recover.

OXYGEN: 6%... 4%.

Zero’s vision began to edge with static. The Ledger Chip felt heavy against his chest. His muscles burned, screaming for air. He was a ghost, but he was still human, and his lungs were failing.

He tapped his earpiece, isolating a micro-burst encrypted frequency. "Shark. The exit vector is on fire. I am suffocating."

High above the city, miles away, The Shark’s voice cracked through the static. "I’m overriding the automated flight path of an experimental prototype from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A 'BEE' class eVTOL. Unmanned. It’s burning its rotors out to get to you, but you have exactly thirty seconds before the fire consumes that floor. Get to the glass."

Zero hit the perimeter wall, throwing his shoulder against the reinforced storm glass of the 90th floor. Behind him, a massive secondary explosion rocked the battery hub, sending a wall of flame rolling down the corridor directly toward him.

He pulled four micro-explosive charges from his belt and slapped them onto the corners of the window frame. He didn't wait for the timer. He charged the glass, crossing his arms over his chest, and triggered the detonator.

The glass shattered outward into a million diamonds just as the fire licked his heels.

Zero leaped into the freezing abyss.

He was in total freefall, plummeting past the 89th... 88th... 87th floors. The freezing wind tore at his melted suit, forcing precious air back into his starving lungs.

Below him, the Manhattan skyline was a blur of neon and fog. Then, he saw it.

A sleek, white-and-blue eVTOL, branded with "BEE", came screaming through the concrete canyons, its electric rotors whining as it banked aggressively around the World Trade Center.

The eVTOL banked hard, matching his trajectory, and flared its rotors to catch the air. It drifted perfectly into his fall path. Zero reached out, his muscles screaming against the violent G-force, and locked his gloved hands around the steel landing gear.

The jolt nearly tore his arms from their sockets, but his grip held. He hung suspended over the glowing grid of the city, leaving the burning Obsidian Tower behind him.

"NYPD Air One to Command. We have a visual. Suspect is airborne, hanging from an unregistered drone craft. Engaging."

Two police helicopters surged from the cloud cover, their massive searchlights snapping on. The blinding white beams pinned Zero against the hull of the eVTOL.

"Shark, I am illuminated," Zero grunted, the wind ripping the words from his throat. "Evasive maneuvers."

The BEE pitched violently to the right, diving between two skyscrapers. The police choppers banked after it, the thunder of their rotors echoing off the glass. Bullets from an aerial marksman began to spark against the eVTOL's carbon-fiber hull.

Zero swung like a pendulum, his boots scraping against the side of the aircraft. He managed to pull his chest up, grabbing the handle of the side door. He wrenched it open and hauled his upper body inside the cabin.

He was almost in. He was almost a ghost again.

On the adjacent roof of the 85th floor, NYPD didn't flinch as the chase tore across his field of vision. The helicopters were erratic. The eVTOL was violently unpredictable.

But The Surgeon didn't watch the chaos. He watched the rhythm.

The eVTOL banked left. Pause. Banked right. Pause.

He didn't aim at Zero. He aimed at the front-right rotor housing of the fleeing aircraft. The gap between the spinning blades and the motor was exactly two inches. The window of opportunity was 0.4 seconds.

Inhale for four. Exhale for four. Mushin.

CRACK.

The bullet left the barrel at 2,800 feet per second. It crossed the three-hundred-yard gap, threaded the needle between the spinning blades, and obliterated the eVTOL’s primary stabilization motor.

The white-and-blue drone shuddered violently. A massive shower of sparks erupted from the right wing.

Inside the cabin, Zero was violently thrown backward as the aircraft instantly lost its lift matrix. The eVTOL spiraled out of control, banking sharply back toward the Obsidian Tower.

There was no time to brace. No time to jump.

The disabled craft careened through the night sky and smashed directly into the 82nd floor of the Obsidian Tower. The explosion of shattered glass, burning lithium, and twisted titanium lit up the entire Manhattan skyline.

Down on the street, Detective Miller lowered his Thompson submachine gun and watched the fireball bloom high above. He took a slow drag of his cigarette.

"Well," Miller drawled, the cherry of his smoke burning bright red in the dark. "That's one way to mop the floor."