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The technician's confession dropped the command room to freezing.
Yvette Caldwell, normally even-tempered even under pressure, let her expression go cold.
"A problem of this magnitude with the contingency system, and no one raised it until now?"
The technician had no answer.
The silence in the room curdled.
"How much time," Ethan said.
He had already moved past the question of blame. Blame could be assigned later, at length, by people whose careers depended on it. The only thing that mattered in the next several minutes was whether the situation could be salvaged at all.
The senior technician checked the temperature trend on the display.
"At the current rate of increase, roughly five minutes. After that, the conventional lines reach their automatic thermal-cutoff threshold and shut down to prevent permanent damage. When they cut off, the entire city of Ashford goes dark."
Five minutes.
Ethan turned to Yvette, who was watching him with an expression of tightly-controlled worry.
"Don't worry," he said. "Leave it to me."
And then, in front of the entire command room, Ethan walked to the window, opened it, and jumped out.
The command room erupted.
He had just thrown himself out of a window on the thirtieth floor.
This was not a stunt in some action film. This was three hundred meters of open air. Serum enhancement or not, a fall from this height was not survivable. Several of the staff lunged toward the window on pure reflex. Yvette, who had seen her Chairman do a number of inexplicable things over the past months, brought one hand to her mouth, and for one terrible second could not understand what he had just done.
Three hundred meters up, Ethan fell.
The wind tore past him. The street rushed upward. By any ordinary accounting, this was the end.
There was no fear in him at all.
"J.A.R.V.I.S. Activate Mark VII."
The watch on his wrist flashed red.
"Yes, sir."
In Underground Laboratory One, fifty meters beneath the city, the red-and-gold flight pod that had been racked along the laboratory wall came alive. It launched from its cradle, shot down the deployment tunnel, surfaced through the concealed aperture in the wasteland, and tore into the sky toward the Larkspur Avenue tower at a speed that left a thin contrail behind it.
In the headquarters building, the staff who had crowded to the windows watched their Chairman plummeting toward the ground and could not bear to keep looking. Hands went over mouths. Several people turned away.
Ethan passed the fifteenth floor.
And then, in the sky, a man-sized flying object closed on him at impossible speed.
The object's trajectory was not random. It was tracking the falling man with absolute precision. In the space of a heartbeat, the flight pod arrived directly above Ethan and matched his descent velocity exactly, falling alongside him toward the street below.
A red light swept out from the center of the pod. It passed over the watch on Ethan's wrist, and the entire device seemed to come alive.
Then, under the disbelieving gaze of everyone watching from the tower, the flying device unfolded in midair. Plating articulated outward. A chest assembly opened and wrapped around his torso. Arms extended and sheathed his arms. Leg components locked into place around his legs.
It was not until the Mark VII had enclosed half of Ethan's body that the New Future personnel at the windows finally understood what they were watching.
It was armor.
It was a suit of powered armor, assembling itself around their Chairman in freefall.
The infrared armor that had walked through the Aurelian Republic. The portable armor deployed beneath the Southern Sea. And now a flight pod that launched itself across a city to catch a falling man and become his armor in the air. One man, and the number of forms his powered armor could take seemed to have no limit.
At the eighth floor, the deployment completed.
The faceplate snapped shut. The new-energy reactor in the chest plate flared to life, and the entire suit activated at once.
"Sir. Mark VII deployed."
Twin columns of flame erupted from the boot thrusters. Ethan's descent arrested hard, a few meters above the street. He hung there for an instant, then reoriented and shot upward and outward, climbing away from the tower at full power.
The newly-deployed armor, carrying the entire night's hopes with it, rose into the sky and vanished.
In the command room, Yvette Caldwell's hands were clenched white.
"Junior Brother," she said quietly, to a window that no longer held him. "Whether New Future survives tonight is on you now."
Two to three hundred meters up, the Mark VII ran at full power.
Under normal circumstances, Ethan would never fly at full speed at this altitude. The airspace over a populated region was full of drones and civilian helicopters running legitimate missions. At full speed, even Ethan's reflexes might not register a sudden obstacle in time. And a collision, while survivable for him inside the armor, would kill any pilot he struck.
But the circumstances were not normal. The situation was urgent, and J.A.R.V.I.S. was tracking every aircraft, drone, and obstacle in the corridor ahead, feeding Ethan continuous proximity warnings. He could fly at speeds he would otherwise never risk, because J.A.R.V.I.S. was watching the sky for him.
"Sir. Destination coordinates locked. Approximately two hundred kilometers. Estimated transit time, two minutes."
Ethan watched the figures fluctuate on the holographic display inside the helmet and felt the anxiety building under his sternum.
"J.A.R.V.I.S. Pull up the detailed operating procedure for the high-voltage circuit breaker reset."
He had thoroughly internalized the breaker systems during the transmission-line research. But the situation did not permit any margin for a remembered detail being slightly wrong. He would review the full procedure once more on the way.
"Yes, sir."
J.A.R.V.I.S. retrieved the documentation and went silent.
For an agonizingly long two minutes, Ethan crossed the distance.
The destination was a coastal facility, and it was the most important single node in the entire Hidden Dragon program.
It was the energy conversion hub.
Here, the effectively limitless output of the seabed reactor array was converted into grid-compatible electrical power and distributed outward to the surrounding cities. Every watt that fed Ashford and, soon, the rest of the Eastern Region passed through this facility. Its importance was beyond dispute, which was why the Republic had stationed military personnel to guard it. The mobile regiment of the Northridge Province Military Region had drawn the assignment.
At this moment, the regiment's commanding officer, Colonel Bram Tolliver, stared at the detection equipment, every readout flashing red.
"Has there been any word from the cabinet or from New Future."
The communications officer beside him was sweating.
"The cabinet still doesn't have a clear picture of what happened, sir. New Future says someone is already en route to solve the problem."
"Solve it," Tolliver said, and then, uncharacteristically for a normally even-tempered officer, he swore. "Solve it how. For two hundred kilometers in every direction, it's wasteland or open sea. By the time New Future gets anyone out here, this will be over. The city will already be dark."
The command tent went quiet. The colonel's frustration was understood by everyone present, because everyone present understood the stakes.
If the Hidden Dragon program succeeded, the burden it would lift from the Republic was almost incalculable. How many special accommodations had the state extended to New Future Technology Energy to bring the program to this point? And now, after the hardest part, the reactors themselves, had performed flawlessly, the entire effort was going to be undone by a failure in the transmission circuits. The waste of it was enough to make a hardened officer want to put his fist through something.
"The technical team," Tolliver said. "Where are they. Is there genuinely nothing that can be done."
The stationed technicians shook their heads, helpless.
"Colonel Tolliver. The only available method is to bring Chairman Mercer's new high-capacity lines online. But there are two problems, and the first one is fatal on its own. Set aside, for a moment, the question of whether the new lines can even withstand this load and maintain a stable supply. We cannot answer that, because we cannot get to the point of testing it."
"Why not."
"Because no one can reset the high-voltage breaker to switch the supply path over to the new lines."
"Why can't they."
"The voltage, sir." The technician shook his head with the powerlessness of a man stating a physical law. "The voltage at the breaker assembly is too high. It has gone catastrophically past anything human equipment can handle. The highest-grade insulating suit we possess is rated for situations below ten thousand volts. The voltage at the breaker has far exceeded that figure. Anyone who steps within a hundred meters of the assembly in its current state will be killed instantly. The overflowing electrical arc at those potentials would roast a human being before they got close enough to touch anything. The breaker is, right now, inside an absolute forbidden zone. No living person can approach it."
The command tent fell silent.
The one action that could save the city was an action that would kill any human who attempted it.
And then, from outside the tent, one of the perimeter sentries shouted.
Something was descending out of the night sky, trailing fire, directly toward the forbidden zone.