Chapter 15: Fire in the Server Room

Hôtel des Bergues was a Gilded Age fortress, its lobby a gaudy splendor against the high-tech hunt that had led them to its doorstep. But Sabe did not usher Anton in the flashy main entrance. He ushered them down a service corridor, his gaze on a map of the building's pipes and ductwork illuminating his phone.

"Anywhere except a guest suite," Sabe breathed, his breath misting in the cool night air. "They pay top credits for a long-term rent on an annexe sub-level. Originally designed for storage of archives. He's fitted it out as a lab."

A lab to what?" Anton barked, his tone strained. The near-kiss was a fire in his mind, its energy redirected now into a cold, biting focus. "The prototype is code. A line of code.".

"Code that needs to be hidden, isolated space in order to be used as a weapon," Sabe answered, stopping in front of an empty, reinforced steel door. He removed a magnetic keycard from his wallet, blank and unlabeled. "He's not just hiding it. He's combining it. Preparing it for resale."

The lock snapped over with a solid clunk. The door yawned open to reveal, instead of some plush corridor, a concrete stairway that plunged into the gloom, its only light from the cold, jerky glare of fluorescent strips. The mood changed in a second, the Geneva freshness lost and gained the acrid, metallic scent of re-cycled air and ozone.

They descended into the belly of the complex. The silence was profound, broken only by the hum of distant generators and their own resounds. There, at the bottom, was yet another door, a keypad door that had a biometric scanner.

"This is it," Sabe said, his hands already flying on a hand-held terminal hooked into the keypad. "The server room. The core."

"Can you bypass it?" Anton asked, his gaze fixed on the locked door, behind which his brother and stolen inheritance waited.

"The system is in lockdown. He knows we're in here." Sabe furrowed his brow, deep in thought. "I can initiate an emergency override. Fire drill. It will open the door but also trigger a building-wide alarm. We'll have five minutes, possibly less, before security teams descend upon us."

"Do it," Anton commanded without hesitation. Stealth time was through.

Sabe nodded, triggered a final sequence, and a wailing, insistent Klaxon echoed. Red lights flared down the corridor. With a hiss of compressed air, the huge door released. Sabe drew a small, black pistol from a shoulder holster, his movements smooth and entirely serene. "Stay behind me."

He opened the door.

The room there was not as Anton had imagined. Cold, white, air-conditioned space, much larger than his whole London penthouse, walls lined with great server racks that formed quiet, black canyons, their hundreds of LED lights blinking like a row of captive stars. But at the far end, frantic, evil life filled the space.

Marcus was confronted by a central console, a silver, custom-built device that was the room's obvious center. Wires ran from it into open server bays. And at his side, silver, military-grade thermite charge against the console housing, was Evelyn Voss.

Her usually impeccable posture was gone, replaced instead by a wild-eyed sense of urgency. "Stop right there, Anton!" she shouted over the blaring alarm.

Marcus spun around, a sneer tugging at his lip. He appeared older, tougher than in the photo in his file, his charisma spoiled into a bitter-edged cynicism. "Big brother. Finally come down to slum it in the basement? I'm flattered."

"Marcus," Anton's voice was ominously soft, his gaze fixed on the thermite charge. "Evelyn. This is pathetic, even for you. Blowing it up accomplishes nothing."

"It earns me the satisfaction of watching you lose everything!" Marcus snarled, his restraint melting. "You, and Father's precious company! You think this is about money?" This is about watching your neat, controlled world burn to ashes!"

The transaction is completed, Anton," Evelyn said, her voice stronger, with a chilly, corporate conviction. "The buyer has the master code. These machines hold the sole existing development copies, the proof of concept. When they're destroyed, your prototype is out there, and you have nothing to recover or recreate.".

Sabe kept his gun trained on them, but the aiming was bad. Evelyn was half-hidden behind a stack of servers, and the thermite was live. One misstep and it would be finished.

"A buyer," Anton grumbled, his mind working, seeking the leverage, the flaw in their alliance. "Who? Who did you stupidly sell it to?"

"People who understand the true power," Evelyn explained, her finger inches from the trigger on the charge. "Not the little power of a boardroom, but real, global influence."

It was when Anton caught the acrid, bitter scent cutting through the ozone. Not the smell of burning electronics, but smoke. A thin, grey tendril was unwinding from the end of a server rack behind Marcus.

Marcus caught his gazing and his sneer widened. "Contingency plan. The thermite is for the core console. The rest. Well, a faulty server rack can overheat. Catastrophically.".

He tilted his head, and Anton saw it now—a small, explosive bomb nestled in the wires, its timer already down to thirty seconds. He hadn't just been preparing to blow the core; he was going to burn the entire room down, destroy everything.

"The fire suppression system…"

"Disabled," declared Marcus, his voice oozing triumph. "This is a clean burn."

"Someone," Anton said, a raw urgency entering his voice.

Sabe didn't hesitate. He shifted his target from Marcus to the server rack holding the incendiary device and shot twice. The shots were sharp in the small space. Sparks erupted, and the device flared, its timer convulsing. But it wouldn't stop.

The rounds broke the standoff. Evelyn, wild-eyed, shoved the thermite charge into the core console and detonated it. A blinding, magnesium-white light followed by a scalding hiss spewed forth as the thermite ignited, incandescent at thousands of degrees, burning through metal and silicon in a spatter of hot sparks.

Meanwhile, the pyrotechnic device on the rack detonated. It was not the contained burn Marcus had provided. Fire, fueled by plastic wiring and insulation, blazed into life, engulfing the rack in a matter of seconds. The fire, oxygen-deprived for a moment, then flared wildly, licking its way up towards the ceiling tiles.

"Time to go!" Marcus yelled, grabbing Evelyn's arm. They were racing towards the fire door at the rear of the lab, slamming a massive door shut behind them. Anton heard the distinct click of a lock being clicked into place.

The room was in the process of being turned into an inferno. The fire, with the optimal fuel of billions of dollars' worth of sensitive electronics, lapped outward at ghastly velocity. Black, toxic smoke, thick with the bitter odor of plastic and chemicals blazing, began to roll, filling the cavernous area. The strobe lights and the fire produced a hellish, dizzying strobe effect.

"Anton!" Sabe coughed, pulling his shirt collar up over his nose and mouth. The front door they'd entered stood open, but it was twenty feet away, across a path rapidly being consumed by fire and filled with smoke. "We have to move, now!"

But Anton stood frozen, staring at the central console, now a slag heap of molten metal, and the fire consuming the server racks—the last remnants of his life's labor, his father's legacy, going to ash and smoke.

"The backups." he gasped out, the smoke stinging in his eyes. "That's all.".

Sabe didn't think. He didn't argue. He acted. He slid his gun into its holster, clamped his hand around Anton's lapel of his costly suit jacket, and physically pulled him back from the dying center of his kingdom.

"Move!" Sabe roared, his voice gruff with smoke and power.

The shock of physical force broke Anton's paralysis. Sabe half-dragged, half-pushed him down the canyon of the server racks. A sprinkler head above them exploded in the heat, discharging not water, but a pointless, fine spray of coolant. A chunk of burning ceiling, its integrity weakened by fire, collapsed before them, showering them with burning debris and shattered acoustic tiles.

Sabe swerved, pulling Anton down a narrower aisle. It was sweltering, a physical wall crashing into them. The air scorched Anton's lungs with each ragged breath. The world narrowed to the infernal roar of orange, the urgent blackness of suffocating smoke, and the metallic grip of Sabatine's hand on his bicep dissolved.

A piece of glass from an observation booth burst in the heat, raining shrapnel down their course. Sabe spun around, positioning himself between Anton and the rain of points, bracing himself on his back and shoulders. Anton heard him let out a grunt of pain, but his grip did not loosen.

"There!" Sabe yelled, pointing toward the square of open doorway now seen through veils of smoke. It was a mile away.

They moved awkwardly, bumping over fallen cables, their vision blurred, lungs burned. The Klaxon was a muffled, inconsequential sound under the din of the fire. The moment they moved across the doorway, a second blast from deeper in the lab sent a shock wave of heat and pressure that shoved them through.

They spilled onto the concrete hall, piling up in a mass. Sabe sprang to his feet, kicking the massive fire door shut behind them, trapping the fire within. The metal door reddened almost at once.

For a while, they just lay on the cold concrete floor, gasping, choking, the cold, fresh air of the corridor a blessing. Anton rolled over onto his back, his suit torn and blackened with smoke, his hands scraped and bleeding. He looked at Sabe.

Sabe leaned against the wall, his chest heaving. His dark hair clung to his forehead with sweat and coolant, his blackened face smudged with black. Pieces of glass glittered on the shoulders of his jacket. In the bright fluorescent light of the corridor, he seemed to be an avenging angel from a hellish heaven fallen.

The cacophony of sirens moaned in the distance, quickly approaching.

“You’re bleeding,” Anton croaked, pushing himself up on an elbow.

Sabe waved a dismissive hand, still trying to catch his breath. “It’s nothing. Glass.” He looked at Anton, his stormy eyes reflecting the hell they’d just escaped. “The prototype… I’m sorry, Anton.”

Anton followed his vision to the locked, heat-emitting door. Behind it, his legacy was being reduced to base elements: ash, carbon, silicon. The loss was an emptiness that had a physical presence in him. But regarding Sabe—the dirt on his face, the piece of glass in his jacket, the unyielding purpose in his eyes even now—a feeling of uneasy, impossible clarity settled upon him.

He had lost the prototype. Backups were gone. His company must have been ruined.

But Sabatine Stalker had pulled him through flames and shards. He had leaped in front of him. He had given up Anton's life for the mission, for the reward.

Anton Rogers, the fortress maker, had just witnessed his grandest fortress burn to the ground. And as the ashes smoldered, he stood before the sole thing fire couldn't claim.

"You saved my life," Anton breathed, his voice low but firm.

Sabe met his gaze, the specter of the abandoned kiss hanging in the air between them, now mixed with smoke and survival. He nodded once, slowly.

"I said I would."

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