Fiction - Bad Day.

She reached up and took of the helmet. The man standing before her glared at her with a look of outrage. "How dare you challenge my orders!" he roared. Thyra dropped the helped. The man's expression turned to puzzlement. "You are not my wife," he said in a tone of disgust.

"No, I am not," she answered. She dropped the helmet out of her right hand as her left reached around behind her back to the pistol secured there. "And you are about to have a very bad day, Maxwell Colliers, unless you can answer this question," Thyra continued. Maxwell's haughty expression of offended pride returned.

"You, woman, do not have the capacity to know what you are saying," he said, "Leave my office."

"Where is Zanzibar?" Thyra demanded. Maxwell scoffed and made a shooing gesture.

"You've wasted enough of my time with your games," he said, "Go back to the security officer's suite. Eliot Zanzibar is of no concern to you. Continue and you'll be sent off world on your next assignment." Thyra drew her pistol as Maxwell leaned to the side and moved to push the silent panic button under his desk.

"Eliot Zanzibar is the chemist who can reverse this plague," Thyra retorted, "You had him kidnapped. Release him and you'll live." Maxwell pushed the button. Thyra fired her pistol. It wasn't the elegant, high energy weapons that were issued to the Xenogen security agents. It was actually rather primative with its gunpowder propelled projectile. It did its job magnificently, however, as it punched through the wood verneer of the desktop and the electronics of the call button. As a result, the button was rendered useless and Maxwell had a bullet lodge itself in his hand.

Maxwell screamed. "The fuck is wrong with you?" Maxwell shouted. Thyra readied to fire the next round.

"Zanzibar," Thyra demanded.

Maxwell knew that his screaming and the gunshot wasn't going to be heard by anyone else. His office suite took up an entire floor and everything was automated for convenience. Thus, he was alone with this woman and her dangerously crude weapon. He gripped his left wrist as hard as he could to slow the flow of blood. With great effort, he resisted the urge to continue screaming. His face was pale and a fine sheen of sweat arose, but he managed to speak in something that resembled a calm tone, "Zanzibar is on his way to Anchorport. His lab has been removed," Maxwell said, "I expect he will be reaching his destination in the hour. His work was unauthorized. He has been reassigned."

Thyra fired off a second shot. It slammed into Maxwell's left shoulder, hitting him hard enough that he rocked back in his chair. "You're lying to me, Colliers. Now where is Eliot?" Thyra demanded. Maxwell looked at Thyra's face. Her complexion betrayed her sub-Saharan heritage but he could see something of a European lineage in her ice blue eyes. Thyra's expression was something like that of an avenging goddess, filled with wrath but also curiously serene. For a moment, he wondered if he should offer her a position within the Enyo program. Even though she was on Xenogen property, she managed to make her way through at least five levels of security to reach his office. It meant she had a terrible talent for doing very bad things.

Thyra's third shot hit him in his right shoulder. He screamed. The queer distance from the pain that came with shock was ripped away from him at the insult of the third shot. He felt as though someone had plunged a red hot poker into his left hand and shoulders. His ears rang with the noise of the gunfire. "I have already killed your wife," Thyra said, "Which you should have figured out by the fact that I am in her uniform. I have killed three of your security agents on the level immediately below us. I expect that they are running around looking for someone else at the moment, though, because of the image scrambler I used on your cameras when I hacked the system through her uplink." Thyra raised her right arm, turning it so that he could see that the touch pad had been forced open with wires plugged into it. It was an inelegant mess but Maxwell couldn't really focus on that.

His pain was too great for that. The dull realization that the angry black woman standing before him might actually kill him somehow made its way through the pain. Maxwell tried to reject it but when Thyra walked up closer and moved her pistol so that it was pointed squarely between his eyes, he couldn't. "Where is my brother?" Thyra demanded, "Answer me and you'll die quick. Don't and I'm just going to hurt you, really badly. And then I'll let you bleed out while I rifle through your console."

"You can't do that," Maxwell said, smiling despite his pain, "It's keyed to my bio markers. You can't get into the system with out me."

Thyra squeezed the trigger. As the top of Maxwell's head blew off, she said, "I don't need you alive for that, fucker."