The turrets did not hesitate.
They had power. They had sensors. And neither Proxy nor Nyx carried anything resembling a corporate authentication tag in their cyberware.
The math was simple enough that even a machine could be smug about it. In under a second, both barrels aimed aimed at them, and the whole room abruptly reclassified itself as a place that rejected visitors.
Rounds punched through the open door and buried themselves in the far wall.
Proxy was still at the management console.
He was in the middle of deciding what the correct response to that situation might be when Nyx decided the matter for both of them.
She wrapped an arm around him from behind and removed them from the console in one continuous motion. Her legs drove the movement, her implants contributing something difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore, and the maneuver contained exactly zero gentleness.
She had his full weight and crossed the room without losing speed.
They hit the floor behind the far capacitor bank together in what I can only describe as a nice crash. Her body landed between him and the doorway. He got a mouthful of dust and the sudden, convincing impression that she had done this sort of thing before.
She stayed over him for half a second, arm still across him, amber eyes checking the doorway while her breathing remained steady.
Then she sat back, still between him and the door, and allowed him to sit up.
Meanwhile the turrets continued their professional interest in the doorframe.
She crouched with the SMG ready, tracking the angle on the near turret with the patient gaze of someone who already knew what to do. Her eyes still had that cold amber light, the targeting overlay active.
Mostly to herself, and mostly to the doorway, she said, "These bitches in the wall. Nobody touches them for years and this is the first thing they do when they wake up."
Proxy looked at the back of her head.
"They're automated systems," he said. "They don't have opinions about it."
"He brings you back to life," she said quietly to the doorway, "and this is how you repay him. You ungrateful bitch-ass tin cans."
She shifted her feet.
Proxy recognized that motion immediately.
In practical terms, she was about to go through that doorway low and fast and trust her reflex implants to carry her past the turrets gunfire before it could hit her.
In theoretical terms, that plan likely ended with her getting mauled in a corridor.
Which was unacceptable.
So he moved first.
He wrapped both arms around her from behind, across her chest, and pulled her back against him. Her back met his front.
In most meaningful ways she was stronger than him, which both of them knew, but she had not been expecting it. Surprise consumed the half-second she would have needed to redirect her momentum.
She stopped.
She went very still.
Then slowly she turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder.
The amber in her eyes was doing something complicated. The targeting outline that had locked her pupils since the turrets opened fire collided with the inconvenient fact that his arms were around her.
Her rage faltered.
The line of her mouth softened.
Her shoulders, which had been set forward with intent, lowered gradually.
She looked at his face with an expression caught between two different versions of herself. The one that had almost gone through that doorway. And the one that existed when she was close to him.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
"Wait," he said.
"Mm?" she replied.
It was not exactly agreement, but it was also not resistance. Her focus drifted slightly, her gaze sliding from his face to somewhere approximate in the room, the way it tended to do when she stopped actively tracking the environment.
He held her another second, just long enough to make sure the intent had drained out of her legs.
Then he loosened his grip slightly and turned his attention back to the deck.
The building's full network was alive inside his connection.
He extended his reach into the corridor's architecture and found the turrets almost immediately. Two active nodes broadcasting telemetry, security status, target acquisition.
He moved toward them.
The wall met him cleanly.
It was a military-grade partition embedded inside the building's infrastructure. A neat digital barricade protected by credentials set by some corporate security and never touched again.
He could see the turrets. He could read their status.
But without authentication he did not possess, and had no realistic way of obtaining, the partition would not let him affect them.
Nyx had mostly resettled by then. She moved beside him again, close, two fingers lightly gripping his sleeve. The amber in her eyes lingered faintly but was fading.
"Can you turn them off?" she asked.
"No. Their security systems are sealed away from the rest of the building. I can't get through it."
She looked at the doorway.
Then back at him.
"Then I go through fast."
"No."
"If I move for the wall on the far-"
"A turret round goes through your augmented muscle and through the wall behind you," he said. "No."
She considered this with impatience.
"So what are you looking at?" she asked.
"The power lines."
He located them in the conduit management system. Two distribution feeds ran through the basement ceiling into the corridor walls and terminated at the turret batteries.
The turrets themselves were untouchable within their sealed system.
Their power supply, however, belonged to the building's general infrastructure.
And he happened to be standing next to the system that controlled it.
"I have a plan, to mess up with their power system."
She processed that.
"You're going to fry them."
"More or less," he said. "Their thermal limits sure won't be able to contain this."
A short pause followed.
"Are they going to blow up?" she asked.
"A little. Don't raise your head."
She made a small sound. He chose to interpret it as acceptance rather than excitement.
He went to work.
The safety cutoffs in the conduit management system were the first obstacle. He found them, informed them politely that their function had been reassigned, and isolated the two feed lines running to the corridor housings.
Then he began pushing load through them.
The numbers in his feed climbed.
Through the network he could read the turrets' thermal telemetry rising alongside them.
The first turret reached that point at forty-one seconds.
A sharp, contained detonation.
The split along its primary seam.
The barrel assembly slammed sideways into the opposite wall.
A flash of orange flared through the doorway, followed immediately by the smell of burnt composite and scorched metal.
The second turret detonated four seconds later.
Slightly louder.
The first unit's failure had spiked the shared conduit, and the second turret had already been running hot before it reached its own limit.
Then the corridor fell silent.
Then the smell drifted in.
Nyx looked through the doorway at the ruined remains of two corporate defense systems and said, with complete and unmistakable warmth, "That was wonderful."
Proxy looked at the same doorway.
He had just forced a power surge through a building's infrastructure and triggered two explosions inside a load-bearing corridor.
The solution had worked.
And it was still the least elegant thing he had done all day.
"It was loud," he said.
"It was wonderful," she repeated, giving no indication she had heard the first part.
"It was loud," he said, "which means the two figures I saw on the cameras in the east corridor heard it too. Which means we have a short window before someone with a weapon follows the sound down here and finds the generator I just turned on."
He was already moving toward the doorway, stepping over pieces of the nearest housing.
"We move."
She followed him, stepping lightly around a scorched barrel assembly like someone who had already dismissed the entire situation as resolved.
"I like how you solve things in very interesting ways," she said.
"I solve things in whatever way works."
"That's what I said."
He stepped into the corridor and reached into the substation's power gate through the deck. He located the gate, rewrote its access credentials into something that had not existed a moment earlier, and cut the room's network visibility away from the building grid.
As they cleared the area he physically sealed the substation door.
Then the stairwell landing door above it.
Then the first-floor fire door after that.
Each lock went dark behind them, keyed only to the credentials he had just created, invisible to anyone scanning the building's systems.
The power stayed on.
The cameras remained live in his feed.
Somewhere below them the generator continued its quiet hum.
He was already watching the east corridor through the camera feeds as they moved up through the building.
The two figures were still there.
They had stopped, reoriented, and were now moving toward the basement stairs.
Four minutes, he estimated.
Maybe five.
"Where are we going?" Nyx asked, still holding his sleeve.
Proxy had been studying the building layout through the cameras from the moment the network came alive.
One room in particular had stood out earlier. It was the right room.
"I'll show you," he said, and lead the way.