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Two minutes and ten seconds was the amount of time required for the commandeered Wasp to rise to what MUNI 5-7 had calculated to be sufficient altitude, and then descend, screaming fury and hellfire, straight down into the roof of the Ziggurat, thirty-five yards behind Hi-5 and Hannah, directly over Oskar Delvaux's office.

When the explosions began, Delvaux looked up and marveled at the blossoming fiery detonations. He knew the strength of the rosy-pink, granite hard, XinCryst of which his ceiling and the Ziggurat were made, and he felt no fear for the first few seconds, but the salvo of cannon fire didn't stop. It continued for ten seconds in a thundering stream of ordinance that seemed to be coming from nowhere but straight up. Then, as he watched in profound relief, the incoming stream of explosives ceased to rain down. The last fireball cleared in less than a second, and though chunks had been blown off his transparent, doped XinCryst roof, he could see it was intact.

There was a crater, a pockmark on the surface with a sooty starburst that radiated outward for many yards, but there was no hole. The crater was still semi-transparent, and at first Delvaux thought what he saw was just a shadow, a result of refraction and diffusion of light in the scar above.

Within a half-second, he knew he was wrong.

The shadow grew with alarming speed, and within two more horror-filled seconds, it was clear that it was an aircraft of some kind, and it was being piloted straight down on a kamikaze path into the roof. Delvaux had almost one second more to attempt flight. He bolted to the side of his office only a moment before the Wasp made impact, showering the room with fast-moving chunks of the ceiling.

The wings tore off and the fuselage continued through to Delvaux's office. It was mostly pieces of drone by the time it burst through and penetrated in a cone of downward-flying, hot metal. It killed two of Delvaux's guards immediately. Delvaux was knocked backwards by flying chunks of XinCryst, and before he was thrown into the wall of his office, his flesh was torn by several whirling, spinning pieces of the blued metal fuselage.

MUNI 5-7 had been well aware of the effect the Wasp's impact would have, and the AI had directed the drone to a spot where it calculated there would be the greatest chance of survival for Alvin – behind him. The semi-circular ring of guards that stood behind Alvin were first knocked forward over Alvin's tiny body, and they were hunched over his form in a protective flesh and kevlar dome as the cone of hot, metal fragments showered down. The guards over Alvin were peppered with sharp metal and chunks of XinCryst. Two of them died instantly from shards that burrowed, spinning into their craniums, and scrambled their brains. Over five hundred pounds of flesh fell on Alvin, bleeding in great jets of purple spray, pinning his body to the floor and crushing the Louis chair underneath him. The remains of the padded chair did nothing to cushion Alvin's impact with the floor. When the guards fell on him, the entire front of his body became a massive bruise. One broken cheekbone. Three broken ribs. He was alive and wishing he wasn't.

Bonnie wasn't as lucky as Alvin. Nobody had bothered to strip her of her armor, so it offered some protection from the fragments that whirled towards her after Alvin's half-ring of guards absorbed the worst of the shrapnel. She and the four guards who surrounded her were hit mostly by chunks of XinCryst roof, a hail of bone breaking doped crystal. The standing guards got hit worse than she did. Several of them were struck in the head and one suffered a broken neck as his head was snapped back violently by a fast-moving piece the size of a beach ball. The others were knocked to the ground and thoroughly stunned by body blows. Some took shrapnel to the head, face, and chest, though none were killed outright. Two were able to remain semi-conscious, and one with a piece of shrapnel in his throat gurgled grotesquely next to Bonnie on the floor. Bonnie's left arm was broken, along with four ribs that made breathing painful. That was how she knew she was still alive.

Delvaux hadn't been hurt nearly as badly as Bonnie had hoped he was.

She saw him bloodied and limping towards the gold doors of his elevator. He bent down to pick up his pistol and fell forward to his knees, screaming in pain from the shard of blued metal that was pushed deeper into his knee by his fall. His Luger was in front of him, only inches away from where he'd fallen. He wasn't even looking at Bonnie. She could see him looking at Alvin, though.

Almost all of Alvin's little body, wrapped in Shelby's orange bedsheet, was under two apparently dead guards who were bleeding all over him, but Alvin's head was still exposed. His oversized melon-head would make a challenging ten meter pistol target for an explosion-shocked man wracked in pain, but Bonnie saw Delvaux thought he was up to the challenge. He was eying Alvin and lifting the double-action automatic off the floor in his left hand.

Bonnie had no idea whether it was a manifestation of a loyalty she truly felt, whether it was the loyal she just needed to be, or whether she simply didn't want Delvaux to get anything he wanted, and it didn't matter to her. She moved towards Alvin in a crawl that became a half-stumble that became a stagger. She heard her own weakened voice shouting as loudly as she could manage, with all the will of her being, “NO!” She'd never meant anything she'd said in her life as strongly as she meant that one word.

It was twenty feet or more from Bonnie's fallen body to Alvin's bloodied, blinking face pressed against the marble floor in the growing pools of blood. Bonnie didn't look at Delvaux or see the way his arm wavered left and right. She didn't know that he was right-handed. All Bonnie knew was that she was slow and lumbering, there were still ten feet between her and Alvin's head, and that her vision was turning red with pain.

Delvaux saw her. He thought about shooting her, but she wasn't coming for him, she was going to Alvin. First, he thought, the haan essen Buddha abomination, then the vervelokt traitor. He thought he'd steadied his aim enough for a shot, and he took it.

When she was just over half way there, the guard lying directly over Alvin's head looked like he spasmed, and then Bonnie heard the report of Delvaux's pistol. She stumbled another step, and the back of the guard's downward facing skull spit chunks of bone, brains, and hair. Delvaux missed again. Bonnie did her best to throw her body, but she couldn't push off the floor, and she just fell on her side – on her broken arm. Her head was a foot shy of Alvin's when she saw a bright flash that was everywhere, even in her still-patched emerald eye. She didn't hear that shot, but she felt it snap her head back when the light burst inside her skull. Her face was numb, and she saw a formless gray haze. She pulled herself forward blindly with her unbroken arm and felt another bullet hammer the broken ribs under her vest. The room was spinning, and there was a hot poker in her thigh. She heard that shot and felt her leg numbing. As the tingling and loss of feeling forced its way across her body, she wondered if she'd finally crawled far enough to block Delvaux from shooting Alvin. She decided that she must be blocking his shot because he was shooting her. She could hear the shots, but they sounded like firecrackers. Bonnie was in shock and losing feeling. Delvaux's bullets in her vest felt like being poked hard with a broomstick. The last one in her leg felt like a hot nail tugging at the cloth of her jeans.

She didn't feel like a traitor anymore, so somehow, she didn't mind the bullets.

Somehow, it was all okay.