By now it was clear there was precious little he could do to actually infiltrate the organization; the time he'd spent creating his cover, and building up the fake shipping company, vessels included, was entirely for naught.
But if he was going to going to get anything out of this, now was the time. And why not go out with a bang?
With Heliox' cameras, and presumably security devices, all locked onto him, he realized that what he was about to do was a gamble of the biggest sort. But in his business, gambling with your life was all part of the game, and so far he'd been winning.
Stepping up to the evidently panic-stricken man strapped to the chair, the so-called businessman named Gerald Hayes brought the knife to bear and laid the point of it against the hostage's neck.
With the quick flick of his wrist, he jammed the knife into the bag and ripped it upwards, unsure of what face he'd find underneath...
---
Eight hundred meters away in a skylane, a jet-black fighter craft idly followed the arduous flow of traffic.
An onboard computer, in fact a sentience, was sifting through an endless stream of communications traffic and all manner of electrical emissions, seeking out a single, low-complexity message nearly indistinguishable from the background noise.
And there it was.
It began deciphering the basic message within a nanosecond; its source was from a remote-controlled coffee machine on the eightieth floor of the OCULUS headquarters building, which in turn had received an impulse from the nearest electrical outlet, which stemmed from a wireless neural-net router on the five-hundred and tenth floor, which had received an ultra-low power command from a certain man's watch on the one thousand-nine hundred and ninety-eighth floor.
In the end, it was a simple statement: Yes.
Twin panels on the fighter's nose split open, revealing a glowing red strobe, moving back and forth from left to right. The ship reared up and out of the skylane traffic and spun to face the towering OCULUS building in the distance.
Preliminary scans had revealed the internal structure and all of its components, their compositions and densities, save for a chunk of space that was deliberately shielded from such prying methods; the area just so happened to be on the border of, if not at, the location of the fighter's pilot.
The sentience compared the scan data with information regarding its own composition and structure before putting both into a calculation which accounted for everything from wind drift to the most minute loss of engine power at any point.
The calculation was satisfactory.
Its engines roared to life; had the other ships been exposed to the elements their drivers would have been deafened.
And so it flew, in a direct collision course with the building's 1998th floor, accelerating to exactly seventy-one point zero-nine-nine-eight meters per second.
The man in the chair gasped as the bag was suddenly opened and he could see
HELP ME! Get me out of here!
[color=#FFFFFF]The man was screaming. Roy's face twisted through the video feed
I told you to stab him in the chest not...
[color=#FFFFFF]A little red button on a command console to the side of Roys desk was flashing red.
Whats this? You brought company?
[color=#FFFFFF]WARNING: Unknown vessel has breached the no fly zone.
Its a shame Mr. Hayes, I thought we had a understanding of one another. Its so hard to find good employee's these days.
[color=#FFFFFF]Roy smiled. He leaned over and pushed a blue button on the console next to his desk.
No worries then, I will just deal with you like the others. I have a little present I've been wanting to test out. You will never see what lies within my facility, but the last thing you will see is what guards it!
[color=#FFFFFF]Roy began laughing
Now, I have places to be, my guard shall deal with you. Oh! And watch the NetDread outside! Shattered, take care of him. Good bye Mr. Hayes...
[color=#FFFFFF]The screen flickered, and shut off. The lights came on. The distant lights in the background were not just lights, but beings. The room was surrounded by twisted metal creatures. They started moving in toward the center of the room. The man in the chair was sobbing.
Please! Cut my bindings, get me out of here!
[color=#FFFFFF]
----------------------------------------------
Outside, the building adjacent to the corporate office shook, there were seven hangar bay doors located on it. A red light located just above one of them turned blue, reminiscent of the blue button Roy had just pushed. The hangar door opened. The ground shook like a small earthquick. Inside the darkness of the hangar three red lights light up. A large mass of metal stepped out and into the light. Nearby street citizens fled in fear at the sight of the mass hulk. The street was completely deserted. The name of this massive hulk? The NetDread, a creation of Roy Heliox. The NetDread approached the corporate building and looked up toward the sky.
"Don't worry, pal," the man shouted as he swung around and began hacking at the straps, "Just hold on and..."
Hold on? They'd need to do more than that.
"... Hold on tight!"
---
Some state of alert had been set across the entire skyscraper; a torrent of new transmissions, new security measures firing up, all coincided with the appearance of a rather large and undeniably hostile robot outside at ground level, which had all but burst from an adjoining building.
The sentience found it quite grotesque.
However, circumstances had changed; the robot below now represented a direct threat, and there was no telling how much time the ship's pilot would have now that the building's systems were on full alert.
The carefully crafted calculation was immediately discarded, and even as the fighter accelerated to the speed of sound, it was attempting to find another adequate solution, when there was simply no time. But risk was all part of the business.
Clad in a molecular bonded shell, the black ship bolted across the distance between itself and the building. It would cover the distance faster than the robot below could bring any ranged weapons to bear, but on impact...
---
The bound man's first hand came free, just in time for him to look over his shoulder.
"Hold-?"
All at once there was madness; the shrill screaming of metal being torn to pieces, of shattering glass, of horrified screams coming from floors below, of the rush of air, and heat, and most importantly of all the sight of a big, black aerospace fighter literally plowing through the wall.
It came through quicker than the eye could blink, launching ejecta at deadly velocities. The man in the chair had already been dragged to the floor by his rescuer, still partially strapped to it, as the world ended above their heads.
The roars of thrusters and anti-gravity units drowned out all other sounds as the fighter skid sideways for twenty more feet, using every available means to slow itself from sonic speeds.
The spray of debris shot into the encroaching robots like a hail of bullets, cutting down several by sheer weight of impact. Several more were batted into the nearest wall by the skidding fighter's wingtips, and the rest had been showered with a coating of dust and paint chips.
His back and hair virtually white from the building pieces which had been blown over top of him, the so-called Gerald Hayes looked up from the floor at the strobing light on the fighter's nose.
"Now!"
As he got to his feet and began hauling the man, and his chair, after him, the fighter glowed blue for a moment before letting loose an electrical discharge of drastic proportions.
Anything in the immediate area that wasn't shielded in the same fashion as a military space vehicle was instantly overloaded and burst into a hail of sparks and fire.
The sudden impact of the ship plowing through the walls sent several of the Shattered into the wall, spraying them with debris and rubble. A single bot toward the corner of the room looked at the ship, and then the bots that had just impacted with the wall. This bot was different, he was larger, a commander perhaps? The robot let out a shriek, and a few others rose to their feet with increased aggression. They all charge full force at the ship and Mr. Hayes. Then, a small wave of a EMP blast flew through the building bursting the lights, and the screens within the room, and hitting the robots. The robots slowed down as the wave flew past them, their red glowing eyes flicking and stopping. Then, they flickered again, their arms started to move, their eyes pulsed with a red glowing light. They starting picking up speed running toward the spaceship, and Mr. Hayes. The lighting in the room was pitch black save for the new skylight, and the flashes of the electricity from the bursted electronics. The light put out a strobe effect, flashing from the darkness and the red glow of the Shattered, and the built-in backup lighting.The man that was bound in the chair screamed.
[color=#33CCFF]Hurry! Hurry! Their not like the others, their human under all that metal! We have to get out of here!