Inside the executive boardroom of the ApexBio Central Tower in Sector 1, sixty floors above the manicured gardens of the high-born quarter, the silence was choking.
Across a twenty-foot curved table of polished black quartz, twelve senior vice presidents, corporate legal directors, and genetic patent master builders sat frozen, their faces lit up by the wild crimson strobe of the global financial tracking data monitors.
On the master market ticker, the stock valuation of the ApexBio Trade group was in total free-fall.
-42.8%... -54.2%... -68.9% [TRADING HALTED BY FEDERAL REGULATOR].
“The Eurasian Bastion has just issued a formal diplomatic communique,” a junior vice president stammered. His fingers shook so wildly that he dropped his light-projected metal pen onto the quartz table. “General Borodin has ended all nineteen corporate supply contracts with immediate effect. They’re seizing the ApexBio warehouses in Moscow and Vladivostok under wartime nationalization decrees.”
“The Pan-African Shield has canceled their bio-supply order tenders,” another director whispered. Her face was pale as parchment. “They’re requisitioning town sulfur stockpiles and distributing the Vance formula to every agricultural cooperative from Cairo to the Cape. Our projected Q4 revenues... Seventy-four billion credits in proprietary cryo-serum sales... Have been fully erased.”
At the head of the table, Judith Brandt didn’t look at the financial readouts.
