Reserved Seat
Devlin Blassingame stepped off the elevator onto the ninetieth floor, navigating the corporate stratosphere toward a closed-door reception. High-level lab coats would be mingling with C-suite suits. Such a mix could yield an unpredictable cocktail. Yet, Psyonic’s Chief of Executive Security anticipated nothing more dangerous than the standard punch-bowl politics celebrating their latest software launch. A couple of decades of perfunctory face time at these culture-seeding initiatives taught him the precise choreography required: suppress his naturally gruff composure, drape his scarred frame in a sport coat, sweep back his too-long dark hair, and maintain quiet, vigilant nodding.
Psyonic’s Quantum Core 8.0 starred on the event’s marketing displays. The corporate literature boasted of “non-intrusive causal abstractions.” Precisely the kind of tech-jargon designed to satisfy customers and investors alike while doing little for their CSO’s singular, heavy reality. His medieval mandate remained: prevent rival megacorps from poaching the biological capital of their eccentric engineers and ambitious executives.
Further up the corridor, the reception room door opened. Dr. Owen Goolsby, a pasty, overweight computer scientist, emerged, cradling his 3D coding helmet under his arm like a seasoned motor-circuit champ lumbering off a champagne-soaked podium. He held the helmet before him, flipped out the straps, and ran a hand inside the proprietary development rig. And likely the very machine that birthed PQC 8.0, colloquially known around these secure floors as Eight.
Behind him, a junior researcher framed herself in the open doorway, her pristine lab coat stark against the party’s ambient lighting. “Dr. Goolsby, you’re not abandoning the toast? We’re honoring you just as much as Eight.”
Goolsby ignored her during his oddly theatrical display for a man merely heading to the men’s room. He shifted a few steps and faced the esteemed boardroom across the hall. Then waited, standing before the very room that required this top floor to be one of the most highly secure in the Psyonic Building.
“Congratulations on the release launch, Doctor,” Devlin called out in his gravelly voice as he quickened his pace.
Both Goolsby and the tech locked eyes with the holster-wearing security chief hiking up the hallway. They saw him as stifling the “free market” of ambitious job-hoppers. The nosy junior researcher’s eyes widened. She ducked back into the lame festivities. Recognition also flashed across the doctor’s sweat-sheened face, followed by a spike of raw panic at the presence of Psyonic’s org-chart enforcer. Fear instantly hardened into desperate resolve. Goolsby shoved the helmet over his head, snapping the chin strap into place with a definitive click.
An implosion of shattering glass rattled the hallway, coming not from the party room celebration, but the supposedly empty corporate boardroom. The shockwave threw Devlin off balance as the shaking permeated the hallowed door, unsteadying the scientist as well. Goolsby’s visor whipped forward as he grabbed the locked-down handle, turned it easily, and pushed into the corporate throne room. The company’s overfed crown jewel vanished into the sound of interior-design devastation and the loud electric whine.
Devlin grabbed his lapel and pulled outward to make sure he wouldn’t have to repeat the command to the handheld jammed inside his coat pocket. “Ninetieth-Floor Breach!”
Drawing his taser mid-stride, he sprinted for the jammed-open doorway. The chief stopped just short of the high-velocity blowout venting into the hallway and dropped low as the deafening scream of electric jet turbines spooled to a crescendo. Reaching beneath the hem of his off-the-rack security blazer, he popped a pair of tactical earplugs from his standard-issue belt and jammed them home. He holstered the taser, swapping it for the heft of a handheld railgun, unofficially tucked in the back of his pants.
“I’ve never lost an executive.” Devlin peeked around the corner. “And I’m not about to start.”
A localized tornado churned the boardroom like Midwestern farmland. Its interior vortex pinned the ornate door to the wall. A wail of pressurized wind violently backdrafted into the hallway, carrying a slurry of glass, dust, and fancy drink coasters. Squinting against the maelstrom, he cursed his lack of tactical goggles as he surveyed the scene. Goolsby shuffled away, as if walking on air, out over a deployment ramp extending from the aft deck of an unmarked, stealth-black SkyBlade aerodyne.
Devlin aimed at the helmeted Goolsby, whose hands extended for balance on a rickety plank without handholds. The man stood dead center between two exhaust cones blasting torrents of depressurizing air into the space. Heavy leather chairs joined the unbolted conference table against the wall. The differential slipstream pulled Goolsby forward, forcing him down the temporary gangway faster than he wanted to walk, a distorted silhouette of Judas inside a wash of thermal haze.
Devlin planted his boots, resighted on the horizontal starboard turbine, and unleashed a single supersonic round.
The hyper-velocity slug whistled through the howling air to punch through an engine casing, rupturing the turbine sucking air out over Chicago’s Loop. The immediate drop in rearward thrust reoriented the dark airship’s pitch and roll. Goolsby fell inside the escape jet. The remaining fixtures left their posts and tore the room apart as the shifting pressure waves dragged Devlin into the room head-first to fall flat on his stomach.
Lucky him. As the railgun began its slow, high-pitched recharge cycle, the crippled SkyBlade aerodyne adapted. Its automated defense turrets panic-fired an erratic spray of countermeasures. Bullets punched a constellation of jagged holes through the disintegrating drywall and across the corridor. Devlin flattened to the carpet as a follow-up volley drilled into the party room, showering the hallway in ceiling bits.
The plane eased away. The two SkyBlade vertical-firing engines slowly reoriented to join the lone working horizontal one.
A prone Goolsby vanished behind a shutting hatch just before the craft surged forward into the open sky. The asymmetric shriek of the three remaining engines buffeted Devlin’s face and hands. Elbowing upward, he checked the railgun’s digital recharge meter as it crept upward with agonizing lethargy. As it approached the auto-fire full charge, he aimed out the missing floor-to-ceiling window, where natural Chicago wind at ninety stories replaced the artificial jet stream.
Three engines had been enough to extract the betrayer.
The SkyBlade cut and dove, weaving aggressively to present an unpredictable target as it accelerated, its avionics adjusting to one ruined engine with ease, searing across the skyline like a great alien bird escaping with her prey, out into an unknown atmosphere. Devlin fired a spiteful round, guessing at the apex of its bob-and-weave, but the charge traveled empty air. The unmarked black silhouette disappeared.
On his stomach, he buried his face in the debris-strewn carpet. In all those years of high-level asset protection, Devlin Blassingame had never lost an executive extraction. Until today. And right out from under his nose. “I’m finished.”
