Daniel Suarez - Influx

She nodded. “Understood.”

“For what it’s worth, I think if anyone can do this, it’s you.” There was a pause. “Best of skill, my dear.”

Alexa divided her attention between the countdown and the diffraction scope. Nothing appeared outwardly any different about the building, although she knew that would be the case. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, her timer sounded, and she leapt from the building’s ledge, falling nearly thirty stories before activating her gravis and soaring around the left side of the Penobscot Building.

BTC headquarters came into view. She was about halfway down its height, and now she could see a glowing red reference dot on its side in her visor’s heads-up display. It marked the precise location where she needed to land. She was already on a level path to the dot, and she modulated her speed.

Slower. Then even slower.

Alexa glanced up at the top corners of the building. She knew there were spinning mirror housings there that could direct powerful lasers at her or anything else approaching the BTC. But her trust in Cotton’s mole appeared to have paid off since she hadn’t been vaporized. Yet.

Instead, she kept falling toward the bland, concrete cross-hatching that the building presented to the world—although she knew it was a freestanding shell. She’d actually never seen the diamond-aggregate nanorod structure underneath. It was estimated that the physical nanorod monolith of the BTC would last a million years without maintenance.

Alexa was only a hundred meters away now. It was very late at night, but as she glanced down at the rooftops of the shorter buildings between her and her target, she wondered what anyone witnessing this would think. She was still a good one hundred meters off the street, though. She looked up again and started to pull back on gravity. One quarter. One tenth. She started reversing the flow to bleed off momentum.

She was now within a few meters of the building’s false exterior—the fake windows and concrete columns. The red dot in her visor heads-up display was right in front of her. Very little wind. She alighted carefully onto a narrow ledge, grabbing hold of the cement columns to either side. She knew that just beyond this outer shell was an air gap of several centimeters—and then an EM plasma coursing over the surface of the diamond nanorods, themselves charged to hundreds of millions of volts. Very little could penetrate it, but as Jon Grady pointed out, gravity permeated the known universe.

She expanded her gravity mirror to its widest diameter—seven meters. They had estimated this would give her a good two-meter penetration of her own gravity field into the building, and if the red dot had marked the spot correctly, and the CAD plans had been accurate, that should be all that was necessary.

This was about as close as she was going to get. Alexa took another breath and prepared herself for what might follow this next fall. She mentally rehearsed the order that she’d have to engage her gravis controls. There’d be no second chance. After another moment, she pushed just an inch or so from the building’s facade and slammed her slide controller to one hundred percent gravity—straight up.

As Alexa fell, only an inch or two away from the building’s surface, glass and concrete raced past her cheek. Behind her, a bank of powerful multiton capacitors near the curtain wall should have fallen straight up along with her gravity field, slamming through the ceiling and across conduits that contained cabling that fed terawatts of electricity to the perimeter systems. That is, if their calculations were right…

She glanced between her feet as she heard a massive BOOM ten stories below. Incredibly a hole had blasted through the nanorod material and rippled through the concrete shell around it—scattering the concrete and glass like paper. A light brighter than the surface of the sun arced and crackled through the air. For a moment the entire downtown area was as bright as a sunny afternoon, replete with blue sky and clouds above. The light flickered on and off as if someone were riding the sun’s switch, and then a series of deafening booms pounded the air, shattering windows in the surrounding buildings hundreds of meters away. Another series of muffled booms in the interior of the BTC building rumbled ominously.

The shock wave raced after Alexa, stripping away the BTC’s facade as it came.

Alexa curved her direction of descent away from the building and fell away from it just as the glass disintegrated and the columns shattered. As she came out of a backward somersault and looked back, she noticed that the BTC headquarters building no longer looked like a boring 1960s building.

It looked like a forty-story black monolith from a Stanley Kubrick film, with a shimmering, translucent indigo-and-lavender energy field flowing over it. Suddenly the plasma field wavered, then winked out of existence, and she found herself staring at a smooth black rectangle, with concrete and glass debris still tumbling down onto the streets below. Car alarms wailed all over the city.

Cotton’s voice could barely be heard on her q-link. “That’s one scenario the AI designers hadn’t anticipated—total reversal of gravity. They’ve got a few work tickets now. Total perimeter defense failure.”

“I can see that, Cotton, thank you.”

“Triple redundant system failure. The hat trick.”

“There’s a curtain wall penetration from the blast around floor twenty.”

“I see it.”

“Way too hot, though. The entire facade on the north and south sides appears to have been stripped away in the blast.”

“That’s going to upset the greater Detroit tourism board.”

Alexa glanced around at thousands of blasted-out windowpanes in surrounding buildings. Glittering shards of safety glass were still plummeting down their sides like water in the reflected light of the BTC’s intense electrical fire. She shouted into her mike. “Get me my secondary target reference!”

“Right, my dear. Hang on.” A pause. “There.”

Alexa suddenly saw another red dot, this time just five floors below her and twenty floors above the electrical fire—which was still tearing at the fabric of reality and blacking out the optics on her visor’s autotint like a convention of welders. She could feel the heat from hundreds of meters away.

She lined up directly in front of the new reference dot about fifty meters away and drew her positron pistol. She pondered the setting, but then moved back another two hundred meters as she set it to full charge. “Breaching…”

Alexa aimed the pistol with both hands, and a millionth of a gram of antimatter shot down a laser-induced vacuum channel, impacting baryonic particles in the building’s surface and detonating the fabric of time-space with the force of ninety tons of TNT focused onto the head of a pin. Annihilating matter itself. Another blinding flash and a crack of thunder not unlike two mountains colliding as it blasted out any downtown windows left intact from the first blast.

The shock wave hit Alexa, sending her tumbling in midair. She immediately reversed gravity toward the epicenter of the blast. A piece of diamond aggregate howled past her like a Jet Ski–size bullet, boring a five-foot-wide hole through the middle of the Penobscot Building without so much as disturbing the surrounding masonry—and continuing to unknown consequences into the buildings beyond.

“What the hell did you just do?”

As glowing neon smoke cleared from the blast site, she could see a jagged five-yard opening blasted into the black surface of BTC headquarters. “I made myself a door. Proceeding to next objective…”