“Rick… what you’re doing is foolish,” I say for what feels like the hundredth time since Freida came into the exam room with her news. “Even Dr. Gordon says so.”

“I can’t miss this meeting,” Rick says, adjusting the knot on his tie. His hand is strong and steady, and if it wasn’t for the rolled up left sleeve on his arm connected to the IV bag hanging from the hook next to him, a quiet hum running from a pump that’s forcing his body to get pumped up, you wouldn’t know he’s dying. I don’t even want to know the contents of the bag, his second since we took off. “Your power of attorney doesn’t kick in until I’m comatose or dead. And without me there, Harvey can bully the rest of the board into supporting him. Once that’s done, it’d be too much damn work to turn the whole machine back around.”

“I understand,” I plead as a beep comes from the machine and Rick looks down. He removes his own IV needle, ignoring the trickle of blood until he can wipe himself up and put a bandage on it. “But why the drugs?”

“Because the board needs to see that I’m strong one last time to pass the torch to you,” Rick says, his eyes softening for a moment. “Su Lin, they need to see that you’re not just my wife, but that you have my strength. A shattered, dying man being rolled in a wheelchair into that board room would doom you to years of corporate bullshit infighting. I can’t saddle you with that.”

“We’re approaching Newark Airport,” Freida calls back over the intercom. “I’ve already got word the rental helicopter is warmed up and ready to go. It’ll land us right on the roof of the building.”

“Thank you Freida,” Rick says, pushing the call button on his arm rest. He switches off and looks at me, his eyes still soft. “I have to do this, Su Lin. Please, give me a few minutes to get my mind ready. The drugs are only half the story.”

I nod sadly and go to the back of the Panther, changing for my own role in the boardroom. The suit, with its masculine shirt, pants, and tie seems on one hand to slightly defeminize me, but the jacket pinches my rapidly expanding stomach, the wide cut making my breasts look bigger and somehow making me even more feminine. I strap on my five inch high heels to bring me taller than some of the men we’ll be meeting. My hair and makeup also walk that line between powerfully masculine and seductively feminine, and looking at myself in the mirror, I understand what Rick wants me to do. I just wish we didn’t have to do it.

Freida comes on again, we’re on final approach and I go back up front, sitting down and buckling myself in just as Rick comes out of the bathroom. His face is set, his eyes blazing with the power and fury that I’ve only seen glimpses over in our marriage, usually when he was challenging himself in the gym or dealing with Harvey. Only once have I seen that type of fire directed at me, the night Drew Washington tried to seduce me. It’s breathtaking, and at the same time sad as Rick sits down, buckling in. No amount of drugs or mental fortitude can hide the fact that he’s lost close to fifty pounds in the past three months, the sharpness of his jawline and the hollowness of his eyes baring testament that he’s fading.

We land, Rick walking on his own down the stairway and to the waiting car that’s going to take us to the heliport. Only someone who doesn’t know Rick would notice that he used the handrail for balance, but other than that he walks like a man on a mission. Freida, done up perfectly in her skirt and suit top to look like our assistant, sits beside us as the helicopter fires up. “The agenda for the meeting-”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rick says, cutting off Freida. “If the whole thing lasts longer than thirty minutes, I’m going to lose. I can’t keep this up longer than that.”

“What did you pump into you?” Freida asks. “I saw one of the bags, glucose. What else?”

“Stimulants, anti-inflammatory steroids, and a laundry list of shit that would get any doctor who prescribed it to me to lose their license,” Rick says. “I think there’s an adrenaline shot in there too. I sent Gordon a list of what I’m taking, asked him if it would kill me. He said the odds were… acceptable.”

His words just up my tension as we take the quick flight from Newark to New York City, circling and landing on top of the H-S building only twelve minutes after taking off. There isn’t enough time to let my nerves get the best of me as we step out, the New York weather striking me as somehow warm. I don’t know why I notice, maybe I’m just getting acclimated to Minnesota, or perhaps I’m just in shock about all this.

The elevator down from the roof is deathly quiet, and when the doors open Rick leads Freida and I out, striding powerfully and purposefully towards the boardroom. His secretary for the New York office comes out of nowhere it seems with a hundred questions, but he blows right by her, Freida giving the woman a firm shake of her head. This isn’t the time. Rick doesn’t have it.

Rick hits the doors to the boardroom like a Spartan phalanx crunching upon the enemy, blowing the oaken barriers open like they were made of tissue paper. The board, with Harvey standing at the front and already talking, all turn their heads towards the commotion.

“Harvey!” Rick bellows, his eyes burning. “What the fuck are you even thinking?”

“Rick, what are you…?” Harvey Stone asks, looking surprised. “You’re supposed to be-”

“Yes, I know exactly what you thought about me, you stupid, slimy son of a bitch,” Rick says, slamming his palms down on the table. Maybe the board doesn’t notice, but I know he’s doing it to stay stronger on his feet. “You thought you could take advantage of my supposed physical weakness in order to slip some shit by me. But that’s not going to happen.”

“You’re delusional Rick,” Harvey says, trying to take control again. “You’re a very sick man, very sick. And I think that the board will back me in saying that your bad decisions have cost this company billions. I’m invoking bylaw sixty six of the charter.”

I glance over at Freida, who leans over. “Bylaw sixty six says that a board member or shareholder’s voice can be nullified if they are found to be incompetent.”

I nod, keeping my silence as Rick smirks. “You have to get the rest of the board’s approval, Harvey. It takes a unanimous vote of the other board members to invoke sixty-six.”

“Look at you Rick. You’re thin as a rail. Your mind is in a bad place, very bad. And I know you won’t consider the Pentagon contracts simply because you have this delusion that your ideas can somehow become weapons of mass destruction.”

“Not could be, but easily are,” Rick says. He reaches inside his jacket pocket and withdraws a memory stick that he hands to Freida. “Plug this into the projector screens.”

Freida goes over to the wall and opens a port, tapping at her tablet and inserting the memory stick. She nods to Rick, while Harvey tries to act unconcerned. “Rick, if you’re going to show us some science fiction, at least make it good.”

“Actually, this comes from NASA and the Department of Energy,” Rick says. “Don’t worry Harvey, it’s short and uses small words, so you’ll be able to keep up.” The screen on the far wall flashes to life and I watch as a jar of gloop pops up on screen. “This is the capacitance gel that our energy division is using in computing.”

I watch as a man in a lab coat adds a squirt of chemical to the jar, then stirs it up before removing an amount about the size of a peanut on the table. He quickly leaves with the rest of the gel. Moments later, the gel explodes in a reaction strong enough to totally destroy the lab table and damage other metal panels that I now see are set up at various distances. The shot changes to show that what I took to be a lab is in fact a large concrete room, and the explosion knocked over metal panels up to fifty feet away.

“That was capacitance gel mixed with another simple compound and hit with a laser of a certain color,” Rick says. “Less than an ounce, and it created an explosion the equivalent of four sticks of dynamite. The NASA guys I talked to say that if that much was loaded into an old fashioned five hundred pound steel casing and rigged with a simple timer connected to LEDs of the right color, it’d match a mid-range nuclear bomb.”

The board watches the explosion again before one of them speaks up. “What’s stopping someone from mixing that up right now?”

“The compound and the frequency of light that NASA used. Only I have that data, and thankfully… I’m the only one who does,” Rick replies. “This isn’t a joke to me, or some game, or a grab for politics. I’m protecting this planet and this country by saying keep the Pentagon away from K-S tech. The Air Force doesn’t need another generation of supercruise stealth aircraft armed with missiles that could level a city the size of New York without even being detected until the blast wave hits.”

“What’s stopping someone else from developing the same thing?” one of the board asks, and Rick shrugs.

“Nothing. Except the hope that by then, the rest of the world will have caught up. A balance, and hopefully we won’t have megalomaniacal overgrown children with delusions of godhood at the switches.” Rick gestures, and I step forward. “Harvey is wrong. He always will be on this issue. Do not invoke Bylaw Sixty Six.”

Rick stands straight, and walks around the table to stare Harvey in the eye. Harvey tries to get up, and Rick pushes him back down into his chair, a feat I didn’t think he was still capable of. “Why you fucking punk!” Harvey thunders. “I’ll see you fired, you son of a bitch!”

“You keep forgetting Harvey, I don’t work for you,” Rick growls. “Now, I call for the vote.”

It doesn’t take long for the vote to go Rick’s way, with the first three votes saying they were siding with Rick. Only one other board member besides Harvey sided against Rick, and Rick nodded. “Good. Meeting adjourned. I don’t give a shit about the rest right now.”

Rick turns and heads for the door, leaving a sputtering, enraged Harvey behind him. “What are you doing? How do you-?”

“That’s what you get when you screw with people who are superior to you in every way,” Rick says, glaring over his shoulder before opening the door. “Don’t call another meeting Harvey on this. Or else I’ll be forced to take action myself.”