Apex

by Robert J. Crane

  “I’ll make you a new deal,” she said, thinking for only a millisecond before speaking, leading me to believe this was something she’d scripted out ahead of time. “When the day comes that you go to Revelen …” She kept talking, even though I opened my mouth to protest, “… and we all know it’s coming …” Her gaze got hard, furious, and I saw hints of the depths of anger within Cassidy, and it was … boundless. “I want to go, too.”

  “You could just buy a ticket tomorrow,” I said, shrugging. “It’s not like the country is under embargo. Airfare is like a thousand bucks, no obstacle for you.”

  She shook her head. “Going in that way? They’d see me coming a mile off.” She shut the laptop and leaned forward. “No. I just want you to tell me when you go—so I can come at them my own way.”

  My brow puckered as I frowned. “Why?”

  She smiled thinly. “Because when you go in everyone will be paying attention to you and the mess you’re making. They won’t have time to spare a thought for me.” She leaned back and opened her laptop once more.

  I tried to decide how to take that, and finally settled on pretending it was some kind of compliment. “You’ve got a deal,” I said and met her gaze over the gulf between us. Once upon a time, I would have said the distance between Cassidy and I was light-years. But now, looking at her as she typed, planning her revenge …

  It didn’t seem nearly so far.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Deltan Data Systems was an old building, constructed in the seventies but carefully maintained. It sat just off Highway 55 in the southern part of Minneapolis north of Richfield and the airport. It was a section of the city that was caught between degeneration and renewal, old houses being refurbished in some pockets and decaying in others.

  Here on the commercial strip, things followed the same path. Next door was a decaying strip mall that bordered Highway 55, and it had definitely seen some better days.

  Snow dotted the Deltan Data Systems’ parking lot, most of it pushed to one corner as plow trucks tended to do in the middle of winter, and I stood outside the running van, absorbing a little of the heat as Harry stared out at me, Eilish in the passenger seat next to him.

  “Are you sure about this?” Eilish asked. Harry looked like he might have wanted to ask but knew better.

  “I am sure of very little lately except that scotch is a foul yet tempting mistress who held the key to my heart,” I said, staring at the forbidding two-story across the parking lot. I felt a little bad about what I was about to do to Deltan Data Systems, but hopefully they’d backed up the hard drive elsewhere. And were, uhm … insured, I was going to say, except insurance didn’t tend to pay out for metahuman incidents.

  Alas. Maybe they had a stockpile of cash. Or could get FEMA assistance once this was over. Something to mitigate the prickle of my conscience, because it was unlikely the federal government would be totes cool with me transferring cash out of my bank account in the Caymans to cover the damage. Pretty sure they’d consider that money laundering or something.

  A flicker of light streaked across the sky, and I drew a breath. “Cassidy … drop the dime.”

  “Dime dropped,” she said. “I reported you as two blocks away in an email to the FBI from an anonymous account. They won’t catch it until tomorrow, but the NSA should already have it. Based on previous experience, your Terminator should be along in less than thirty minutes.”

  “All right, well, get clear,” I said, and slammed the van door as I started across the parking lot toward the building. “And Eilish—”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Eilish said, nodding at me like she was a rebellious teenager and I was her hopelessly square parent. “Go on. Try not to get your arse kicked too hard.”

  “That’s like my mantra,” I muttered as the van pulled out.

  Harry hadn’t said anything, and I hadn’t looked back at him.

  “No time to think about that now,” I said under my breath as I broke into a jog, avoiding slippage on icy portions of the blacktop and running up to the front doors.

  The building had a Plexiglas entryway, a vestibule to keep some of the winter cold out of the actual lobby, and I kicked in one wall as a streak of burning fire came in for a landing behind me. I stepped inside before he could follow, opening the interior door and leaving the Plexiglas lobby behind for the real one, a squarish affair with old white tile that looked like it would never be clean again.

  Deltan Data Systems looked about like I expected it would from Cassidy’s schematic drawings. She’d pulled the architectural blueprints, which told me exactly where I needed to go, fortunately—

  Because Stepane came flying in through the hole I’d made in the door outside and then proceeded to make one of his own through the interior doors. Plexiglas melted under his heat as he cruised through in hover mode. I sprinted around a corner out of the lobby.

  I found myself in a long hall and tried to recall the layout. I needed an alternate route; I was headed to a room at the end of the hallway, but if I ran straight, Stepane would catch me in the open with nowhere to run. I didn’t want to battle him in a long, empty hallway, without anything close at hand to batter his skull in with, and no way to stop him from burning me up.

  On the other hand, I had to put up a little fight before I ran, otherwise he might suspect he was walking into a massive trap. Which he totes was.

  I threw open a door and ran inside, leaping over a desk in a small cubicle farm within. I was two rooms away from my destination, and Stepane blasted the door off its hinges with a gust of wind so fierce that the damned thing would have decapitated me if I’d been right in front of it.

  “Nice try,” I said, like I was in control, and kicked loose a piece of cubicle wall at Stepane as I dodged up and over into the cube behind me and kicked loose the wall on that one, too. I could smell him burning his way through my distractions midair.

  He’d started a fire already. Damn. I’d been hoping to hold off on that until we were a little closer to my destination, but hey … when you play with fire, you better be prepared to suffer a third-degree or two.

  I vaulted and rolled over two more cubicles and then ran low down an aisle between two rows as Stepane blazed overhead. I snatched a stapler off a desk and hurled it at him over the walls with perfect accuracy. I heard him mutter a curse in some unfamiliar language as it melted and drizzled stainless steel through his fire shield.

  “This is how you prove your strength?” he asked, a little taunting. “By hiding like a mouse?”

  “More like a fox,” I muttered meta-low, so that he could hear me as if I were whispering, and in such a manner as to not give my position away.

  “You are a fool,” he said, “to challenge me in this way. My power is obvious, and we are outside your domain of dreams. If you could have killed me in there, you should have.”

  “But then I’d fear you physically like you fear Vlad, and I’m not a little punkass like you, so …” I whispered again, sneaking between the cubicle rows. I was headed for the back wall, and as I turned a corner, I got a glimpse of it— forbidding concrete block, and my next challenge.

  Because there was no door in this wall.

  I’d known that when I’d gone into this room, but I hadn’t realized it would be a concrete block wall dividing me from the next room. I’d figured drywall, which was a pretty easy thing to bust through. Smash on in, take out a few studs, boom, onward.

  A thump on the other side of the room, near the entrance, drew my attention for just a second. I didn’t dare stick my head up to look for fear of having it burned off by a blazing fireball.

  “What are you doing?” Stepane called to me from across the room. I frowned; he wasn’t anywhere near where that noise had come from. He seemed to be drifting that way, though.

  “Oh, man,” I muttered before I could stifle myself. I did say it very quietly, which was about all the brains I could claim in this situation. Also, I didn’t say, “Oh, shit,” which
was kinda what I was thinking.

  I needed a way through that wall, and fast, because things were about to heat up in here. The smell of smoke was already wafting through the room, but I had a suspicion that Stepane had stifled his fires after burning through those cubicle pieces, probably in an effort to keep the fire suppression systems in here from drowning him. Or not, since he could control water.

  Making a beeline for the back wall, I started trying to think of things I could use to bust through concrete. My fist seemed the ever-present option, but that’d do some damage to me in the process, and would make my later face-punching endeavors more difficult. I marked that as a last resort. The rolling chairs in this place seemed too flimsy, and I passed a rolling metal cart that held a printer, plugged into its very own power supply. Sadly, this was the best of my options so far.

  I didn’t really have an abundance of time to seek out better, because I could feel the heat from Stepane looming overhead and getting warmer. So I grabbed the cart, printer and all, and hurled it into the wall about fifteen feet away. Then, without waiting to see where it landed, I made a full-on, bent-over sprint across the nearest aisle and dove into a cubicle as far from impact as I could.

  The printer cart shattered against the block wall, sending a spray of chips through and leaving about a six-inch hole where one of the corners of the cart had hit. In terms of damage, it wasn’t enough to do much more than bury a hand through, and I was a little disappointed because I’d hoped for more.

  A glowing figure shot overhead, stopping at the wall. “Where are you?” Stepane asked, and I corked in a laugh because I didn’t want to answer his stupid question with an even stupider response that would instantly give away my position. He sounded pretty pissed, not that I cared. He was going to kill me if he caught me anyway, so why worry about offending him further?

  I debated throwing a whole cubicle at the wall, but with him hovering between me and the weakness I’d created in it—and thus the best target—I had a little time to search out an alternative. And also to hope he moved.

  Creeping out of the cubicle and away from him, I kept nice and low. With my head turned so I could look back over my shoulder, I moved parallel to the wall I wanted to go through, keeping in cover behind cubicles as I headed toward the aisle that moved from the door where I’d entered (across the room) toward the wall where I wanted to smash through, and behind which—through just one more wall after that—lay my destination.

  The server room.

  I glanced at the corner ahead, then looked behind me as I tiptoed, still bent double, out into the intersection of the aisles. Watching the glow of Stepane as he hovered, waiting for me to show myself, I chuckled a little inside. He should have been sweeping the aisle, watching for me everywhere—

  Something tickled in my brain, and I stiffened. A little warning stabbed into my subconscious, and I turned because I felt movement ahead, like something jerking out of the corner of my eye—

  And I got a momentary glance—enough to see the Terminator, leering at me, bent double just behind the corner of the intersection—before his punch caught me squarely in the chest and hurled me backward.

  The blow hurt, force spreading itself through my chest and launching me off the ground. I had enough presence of mind to tuck my knees against my chest and make like a cannonball as I flew through the air—

  I crashed through the wall, most of my momentum dispelled by the impact, and hit the one opposite—also concrete block—coming to a hard landing on my elbows and knees and sending a shock through my whole nervous system.

  “Yay,” I croaked, lying on my freaking face in the darkness as I heard movement in the room I’d left behind, “Made it through one wall.”

  And then I collapsed on the floor.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Idipped into unconsciousness for a few seconds, and when I came to, I heard an argument out in the cubicle farm, echoing through the Sienna-sized hole the Terminator had made by shooting me through six inches of concrete block.

  “She’s mine,” the Terminator said in that low rasp of his. Ominous. Foreboding. Totally a voice-over actor gone wrong.

  “I must kill her,” Stepane, the Predator, said, sounding pretty firm in his conviction.

  “Okay,” I said a little woozily, “you boys fight it out while I take a nap. I’ll battle the winner for the lifetime supply of dog food … or whatever crappy prize goes to the champion in this contest of fools.” I didn’t even have a dog anymore.

  “You are not my mission,” the Terminator said, and I heard him crack his knuckles, kinda like I did sometimes to intimidate people. “But you were involved in the Enterprise incident … some of my brothers in arms died there … which means I will have no compunction about getting knee deep in your ass. Stay out of my way, or I’ll make you my mission.”

  “Yeah … you tell him, Terminator,” I muttered, still woozy, but still awake enough to trash talk. “You … stomp him a new ass. Superspeed style.”

  “You seem strong,” Stepane said. “Perhaps I will simply fight you both tonight.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, and fell down on my face once again, promptly passing out.

  When I woke, the concrete wall in front of me was coming down, pieces of block shaking loose. I pushed myself to all fours, my body aching in places I didn’t even remember it could ache. I pushed to my feet and blinked as a fist shattered the wall in front of me. I gasped, jumping back in time to avoid a two-inch square piece of concrete that smashed into something behind me with resounding ring.

  I moved laterally in the narrow room, which was probably only ten feet wide but ran a good forty or so feet long, with a door that led out into that hallway where I’d entered, and which was sandwiched between the cubicle farm and the server room. The Predator and the Terminator were having their 80’s movie dream face-off among the cubicles, and judging by the fact that I’d seen the Terminator’s hand come smashing through the wall a moment ago, it looked like there was no clear winner yet.

  If somehow the Terminator came up aces in this little conflict, I was going to need to suss out a way to beat his ass to unconsciousness ASAP, which was well within my capabilities and kinda played to my strengths, given that my specialty was face-punching.

  On the other, if Stepane the Predator came out ahead … well, I still had the marginally more difficult Plan B, which my heart was set on, and all I needed to do was access the server room behind me with as little damage to the wall as possible and then … do one other thing.

  I looked around the room, recalling what it was for. It was the room with all the transformers and serious electrical wiring to support the server farm next door, as well as the rest of the building. One of the main power boxes lay just a few feet ahead of me, and I regarded it curiously for a moment—

  That ended when Stepane and the Terminator came crashing through the wall. The Terminator had three big pieces of cubicle wall in his hands as a shield between him and Stepane’s flames, and as he came through he shoved Stepane forward, sending him into the back wall of the power room with sheer brute force and speed. Stepane impacted and bounced, flames sputtering a little as the Terminator roared and flexed his mighty frame.

  Stepane burned through the cubicle pieces like they were nothing, and they stood just a few feet from each other, facing off like two bulls about to charge.

  I sidled over to the electrical panel and casually ripped the conduit wire I’d been eyeing before, tearing it loose of the power box. I carefully gripped it by the insulated part, then I tossed it like a spear at the Terminator as he started to raise his fist to go after Stepane again.

  The exposed wiring hit the Terminator just under the armpit and the reaction was immediate. He jerked and flailed, legs twitching as he did a dance that wouldn’t have looked much out of place on a headless chicken. Then the wire must have grounded out, because he stopped jerking after a few seconds and pitched over, landing in the rubble of the hole he’d made through the
wall.

  “Don’t think this will spare you from—” Stepane started to say, rising up again.

  I hit him with a lightning-fast kick that sent him into the wall, and he crashed through the blocks just a little. A second hit—swift enough that his flickering fire didn’t burn me—sent him tumbling through, and I leapt after him, trying to keep light on my feet as I moved past him and into the server room.

  Stepane rose again, hovering as I fished in my pockets and pulled out a handkerchief I’d borrowed from Harry (such a classic gentleman) and a lighter I’d picked up at a gas station on the way here. I casually lit the cloth on fire as he watched, probably wondering what the hell I was doing. “You know I control fire, yes?” I nodded, and he indicated the flaming handkerchief with one outstretched hand. “You think to battle me with … this?”

  “Oh, this isn’t for you,” I said, waving it in front of him, then raising it up and wafting the black smoke pouring off of it into the dark ceiling of the server room.

  A klaxon sounded, loud and furious, like a fire engine had been parked behind the dark servers behind us and now decided to turn its lights on and blare its horn.

  Stepane’s black eyes blinked from beneath the flame shield. Dawning realization that he’d been had trickled in, but he didn’t quite see how. “You know I can control water, too—” he started to say.

  Then the fire suppression system kicked in.

  “And that’d be totally advantage: you … if this room used water to suppress fire.” And I grinned.

  Halon 1301 flooded the server room, breaking the chain reaction that allowed combustion and fire. Tricky, interesting stuff, Halon—pretty much safe for humans to breathe, it still managed to defeat flames with ease. And preserve electronic equipment, which was why Deltan Data Systems had probably installed this kind of system. Sure, there were environmental concerns, which was why Halon 1301 systems were devilishly uncommon these days, but …

  Hey. It put out fires as easily as breathing.