39.
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.