Chapter 8
The heavy thud of an explosion echoed up the elevator shafts,
vibrating through the concrete floor beneath our feet.
The mercenaries had blown through the fire doors on the thirtieth floor,
their progress delayed but not stopped.
"They are adapting fast,"
Harper noted,
watching the camera feed as the men utilized small,
directional charges to breach the steel barricades.
"We have about eight minutes left,"
I calculated,
my hands moving rapidly over the terminal to initiate the server purge.
"Are you deleting the Guardian protocol,"
Harper asked,
alarmed by the prospect of destroying our life's work.
"No, I am compressing it,"
I explained,
monitoring the massive data transfer.
"I'm moving the entire core architecture onto a high-density,
encrypted solid-state drive."
I gestured to a small,
black metallic rectangle plugged into the side of the terminal.
It was a military-grade storage device,
capable of holding exabytes of information in a package the size of a deck of cards.
"If they destroy the physical servers here,
we can rebuild the network from this drive anywhere in the world."
"Provided we survive the night to plug it in,"
Harper pointed out,
her pragmatic realism cutting through the tension.
"We will survive,"
I said firmly,
the progress bar reaching one hundred percent.
I yanked the drive from the port,
slipping it into an inner pocket of my jacket.
"The servers are empty,"
I announced,
"just hollow shells of hardware."
Now,
we had to escape the forty-fifth floor before the strike team arrived.
"The roof,"
Harper suggested,
pointing toward the ceiling.
"There's an emergency helipad up there."
"There's no helicopter coming in this blackout,"
I argued,
shaking my head.
"And the roof leaves us completely exposed."
Instead,
I pulled up the architectural blueprints of the building's ventilation system.
"My father designed the HVAC shafts to be large enough for industrial maintenance drones,"
I explained,
tracing a path with my finger.
"The main return duct runs adjacent to the elevator shaft,
and it drops all the way down to the subterranean parking garage."
"We are going to crawl down forty-five floors in the dark,"
Harper asked,
her eyes widening in disbelief.
"It's a controlled vertical descent,
using the maintenance ladders built into the ductwork,"
I clarified,
already moving toward the large metallic grate in the corner of the office.
Another muffled explosion rocked the building,
this one much closer,
rattling the glass of the windows.
They had reached the fortieth floor.
"Let's move,"
I ordered,
grabbing a heavy flashlight from the emergency kit.
We pried the grate open,
the cold,
stale air of the ventilation system rushing out to greet us.
I climbed in first,
May you like
the darkness swallowing me whole,
with Harper right behind me.
