Chapter 172

  Alexander leaned against the alley wall. Tonight he wore comfortable clothes, armor, gauntlet, and his black leather duster over the top. The drones hovered quietly behind him, ready to spring into action once ordered. Droney knew both the plan and the timing windows for each phase.

  Alexander pulled up the System interface with a thought. The clock showed two minutes and thirty-three seconds until midnight.

  The armored transport facility waited across the street. SecureCore Manhattan Central. He detected twenty-eight trucks inside, though only twenty-four were operational. The others languished in maintenance bays with stripped engines.

  Alexander had mapped every camera within six blocks half an hour ago. Given them instructions. They would see nothing tonight except empty streets or normal traffic patterns. The feeds would show a quiet Sunday evening in Manhattan, just another forgettable night in a city that never truly slept.

  He focused on tracking the single bioelectric signature inside the facility. A night guard on patrol, currently making his rounds through the loading bays. It was the first hiccup in his plan. He hadn’t expected a glorified parking garage to be guarded at night.

  The man’s signature marked him as a normal human. No powers. No augments. Just an average guy pulling a night shift and probably looking forward to a break.

  Alexander cycled Electrokinesis into his Core, then pushed the power throughout his body. His physical senses sharpened. Powered senses surged outward, washing over every device and bioelectric signature as far as he could reach.

  Two minutes until midnight.

  He pushed off the wall. The drones lifted silently as he crossed the street, spreading out into the night, their sensors sweeping the surroundings for anything that his powers might miss.

  The heavy security gate responded to his Technopathy before he reached it. Alarms disabled. Locks disengaged. Activity triggers intended to notify distant tracking systems didn’t fire.

  The gate slid open on well-maintained tracks, barely making a sound.

  Alexander strode through.

  The guard was halfway across the main bay, flashlight sweeping from left to right, when the gate came to a stop, letting out a dull rumbling. Loud enough to alert the man, who spun, light advancing across the ground before coming to a stop on Alexander.

  Alexander reached out with Metallokinesis. The guard’s belt buckle yanked forward first, followed by his watch, the metal buttons on his jacket, and the credit chit in his pocket. The man jerked toward Alexander with a startled yelp, flashlight clattering to the concrete.

  Alexander caught him with his cybernetic left, fingers closing around the guard’s shoulder. Electrokinesis surged down his arm in a controlled discharge. The man’s eyes rolled back as the targeted current overrode his nervous system.

  “Well, can’t risk you waking up and calling this in,” Alexander said. “So I guess you’re coming with me.”

  He released his grip. The guard’s unconscious body rose into the air, drifting alongside him as he moved deeper into the facility.

  Bay doors began spinning up, automated systems responding to his commands. One by one, the barriers lifted, revealing rows of armored hover trucks.

  Alexander pushed into the onboard computers one by one, overriding tracking equipment and lockout protocols. Twenty-four truck engines hummed to life across the facility, responding to his Will. They began pulling forward, forming up into a neat convoy with machine precision.

  Alexander reached the lead truck and pulled himself up into the driver’s seat. The guard floated through the passenger door, settling into the seat. Droney beeped once, then rose into position above the truck.

  The convoy began rolling. Alexander checked the time again. Thirty-five seconds until midnight. The timing was perfect.

  The unconscious guard slumped forward as the truck slowed into the turn departing the facility.

  “Let me get that for you.” Alexander reached over and buckled him in, then adjusted the man’s posture, resting his head against the window. “There we go. Get some rest.”

  The convoy moved swiftly through Manhattan’s empty streets, slowing only to take turns. Traffic lights shifted to green as they approached each intersection, the city’s automated systems responding to instructions Alexander had embedded earlier. Red lights bloomed for blocks around them, creating controlled flow patterns that directed what little civilian traffic existed this late away from their route.

  The armored trucks moving through Manhattan at midnight should have drawn attention. Instead, they were ghosts in the machine, invisible to the systems meant to track them. The cameras saw nothing. The traffic algorithms optimized around them. Tracking devices reported they hadn’t even left the facility.

  Alexander leaned forward, scanning the rooftops visible through the windshield. Augustus was up there somewhere. Keeping pace with the convoy, but maintaining his distance unless things turned bad.

  After he’d explained the plan, Augustus had been amused but more than willing to remain on standby, allowing Alexander his fun. They’d spent a few hours going over details, mapping the main and backup routes through the city, working out ideal emergency portal exits and what they’d do if things turned exciting.

  The proverbial clock struck midnight.

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  Alexander smiled.

  Across Manhattan, vehicles would be activating. Racing hover bikes. Luxury cars. Powering up in their showrooms. On sales lots. Engines humming to life. Doors and shutters opening to allow an exodus of automated machinery.

  And the alarms. Wave after wave of them cascading across the city. Store security systems triggering in sequence, pulling attention in five different directions away from his actual operation. Carefully orchestrated chaos that would spread through the night.

  The heroes would be scrambling now. Those on patrol redirected as facial recognition systems reported Machine God sightings across the city. Other heroes would be woken up to support them. Even more to deal with the sudden and shocking crime spree rocking Manhattan.

  AEGIS would come alive despite the hour, rushing to understand what was happening and where they needed to be.

  The convoy continued on, heading toward the one target that mattered most.

  Two blocks from NYPMEX, Alexander spotted movement ahead. A small group stumbled out of a side street, four people in their twenties weaving slightly as they walked. One of them pointed at the approaching trucks.

  They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, staring.

  One pulled out a phone. The flash went off, bright enough to light the entire street for an instant.

  Alexander tracked the device through his senses. Considered disabling it, but decided against it. Let them have their photo. It was proof they’d witnessed history.

  The trucks rolled past. By the time that photo reached anyone who cared, he’d be long gone.

  The NYPMEX building rose ahead, a block-sized fortress of reinforced concrete and steel. The main entrances sat at street level, but Alexander’s target lay beneath. He turned the convoy toward the vehicle access ramp on the building’s north side.

  The ramp descended at a steep angle, wide enough for two trucks to travel side by side. Concrete walls rose on either side as they dropped below street level, the city’s ambient light fading behind them.

  Alexander’s senses pushed ahead, mapping what waited below. A guard booth sat to the left of the ramp’s terminus. Beyond that, a massive reinforced bulkhead sealed the entrance to the underground vaults.

  The guard inside the booth noticed the approaching convoy. He jumped to his feet, staring through the booth’s reinforced windows at the descending trucks.

  Alexander reached out with Technopathy. The guard’s comm equipment died instantly. Radio, phone, tablet, all of it going dark.

  Then Alexander frowned.

  The System. He couldn’t stop the man from sending a message through the System if he thought of it.

  Alexander reached out with Metallokinesis instead. The guard’s belt buckle yanked him forward. His face slammed into the reinforced glass with a dull thunk. Alexander pulled again. The man’s head bounced off the window a second time.

  Alexander squinted through his windshield as the lead truck pulled alongside the booth. The guard hung motionless, unconscious and pressed against the glass.

  Good enough.

  Alexander glanced at his passenger, still slumped against the window. He opened the guard booth door with a thought and floated the second guard out, maneuvering the unconscious man through the air and into the truck’s cab.

  Getting both of them into the passenger seat took some creative positioning. Alexander settled the booth guard on top, propping him against the first man’s shoulder. They ended up wedged together in an awkward embrace, both heads lolling to the side.

  He couldn’t risk leaving them outside. There was no way of knowing how long they’d remain unconscious.

  They’d have a story to tell when they woke up. Assuming they remembered any of it.

  Alexander turned his attention to the reinforced barrier.

  His senses washed over the massive barrier. There were overlapping security systems, supported by several redundancies. Physical mechanisms designed to lock in place if anything triggered. Reporting systems meant to alert the security team inside when the bulkhead opened. Failsafes within failsafes.

  He traced the systems carefully, following the connections. The bulkhead couldn’t even be opened from the guard booth. Everything was controlled from within the facility itself.

  Alexander pushed his senses further into the concrete, trying to map what lay beyond. The material was dense. Over a meter thick, reinforced concrete with layered metal plating throughout its structure. His Technopathy could reach the mechanisms embedded in the bulkhead itself, but nothing past that.

  It was quite impressive.

  Alexander ordered the systems to continue reporting that the security door remained closed. Then he commanded it to open. Metallokinesis pulsed outward at the same time, wrapping around the redundant mechanical failsafes, holding them in place and preventing the physical locks from engaging as the bulkhead rose without the appropriate secondary signal checks.

  The massive barrier groaned. Hydraulics activated deep within the structure. The barrier began to rise, concrete and steel lifting with ponderous weight.

  Within seconds, a gap appeared at the bottom. Alexander’s senses surged beneath immediately, tracing the space beyond.

  And found fifty feet of reinforced corridor stretched ahead, ending at a second bulkhead. The airlock between them was a fortress. Cameras mounted in every corner, with overlapping fields of view. Scanners built into the walls. Motion detectors formed a grid across the entire space. Temperature monitoring. Chemical sniffers. Pressure monitors. Mag-locks embedded in the floor panels.

  In the ceiling he found foam dispensers and gas deployment systems. Non-lethal countermeasures set to flood the entire chamber if triggered.

  Blast shielding lined the interior surfaces of both bulkheads and the airlock walls themselves. The whole thing was designed to contain explosions.

  Alexander had to admit it was impressive work.

  It was both security checkpoint and inescapable trap. Get someone inside, seal both doors, deploy countermeasures, and wait for the intruders to pass out or suffocate.

  Alexander seized control of all the devices as quickly as he detected them, and even then was almost a heartbeat too slow. Motion detection and atmospheric pressure monitoring had already picked up changes in their readings. Thankfully, they were required to perform secondary verification before triggering an alert.

  He commanded them to freeze their readings. Disabled the cameras, setting them to loop a single second of empty footage repeatedly. Locked scanners at baseline. Chemical detection sensors continued to report nothing unusual. The mag-locks remained dormant. Foam and gas defenses stayed sealed in their housings.

  The first bulkhead ground to a stop at full height.

  Fifty feet ahead, the second barrier waited.

  Alexander reached out and ordered its systems to continue reporting normally.

  Commanded the hydraulics to engage. Seized failsafes.

  The second barrier began to rise. Beyond, the path continued downward into darkness, lit only by dim lights on either side every thirty feet.

  Two reinforced barriers that were designed never to open simultaneously. One had to be sealed before the other could move. Basic airlock protocol that was meant to prevent exactly what he was doing.

  Now both stood open, creating a path for Alexander to descend into the security vaults of the New York Precious Metals Exchange.

  The armored transports moved deeper.

  “Let the borrowing begin.”

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