Insignia (45 page)

And then Blackburn actually stepped out of the room and left them alone, like he was so confident in his threat he didn’t have to bother staying to enforce it.

“General!” Tom said, desperate. “Please, General, come on …”

Marsh heaved a great sigh and turned around. “I’m afraid what you just saw, Tom, was my hands being tied.”

Tom stared at him in naked disbelief. Marsh walked out of the room, leaving Tom there, strapped to the chair. Minutes dragged by as Tom stared into the emptiness of the room, feeling numb and alone.

He heard Blackburn’s slow, deliberate footsteps and closed his eyes, because he couldn’t stand to see him. Blackburn didn’t flip the census device back on right away. First he unstrapped one of Tom’s arms and gave him water, but Tom’s arm shook too hard to hold it. So Blackburn strapped it down and held the glass for him.

A wild thought occurred to Tom. The longer he was drinking water, the longer he’d have before the culling started again. So he asked for more, and then more. Even when his stomach felt like it was going to burst, he pleaded for more.

“Enough. You’ll make yourself sick,” Blackburn said finally, refusing to give him another glass.

That
did it.
Make yourself sick …
It was suddenly the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. Tom started laughing. The wild, hysterical laughter rocked his whole body. He laughed until his stomach hurt, until tears streamed from his eyes, until he actually was sick, and even after that he couldn’t stop laughing until the beams were back on and boring into his head.

Blackburn stood there watching him, rubbing his palm over his mouth over and over, and ripping Tom’s mind apart.

T
OM FOUND HIMSELF
locked in a small cell that looked onto the census device. He stood in the middle of the room, overstimulated by the humming electric light overhead, by the bright bite of its rays, by the pounding in his head, images swimming like ghosts in his vision. He resorted to the only thing that seemed to unify his brain again—his fist crashing against the wall over and over again, until the pain exploding in his knuckles mounted in his awareness and the blood smeared on the walls connected him with his vision center again.

Then someone slipped through the door, and a gentle but firm hand clasped his wrist. Olivia Ossare gripped his arm and urged him to sit down on the bed, offering him a glass of water. Tom gulped it greedily, only half aware of Olivia inspecting the damage to his bloody knuckles. He felt so strange, so strange, like he was about to explode out of his skin.

He wasn’t aware of slumping back against the granite wall, but he drifted to himself when he felt her fingers threading in his hair again. Tom pressed his eyes closed even tighter, because even if he didn’t quite understand why her touch was so soothing, he had this strong suspicion opening his eyes would make it stop.

“I think,” Tom confessed when he could finally speak, feeling flat and empty, “I’m up for option B.” He couldn’t take much more of this. “Please find my father. Please get me out of here.”

“Tom,” she whispered, “I already have.”

B
LACKBURN COULDN’T LAY
a finger or a use single device on him now that Tom’s father was suing to remove him from the Spire. When Olivia arrived with the military police, Blackburn stood there in the middle of the dark Census Chamber, following Tom with his eyes as he was led from the room. Now Tom slouched in Olivia’s office, listening to her argue over legal issues with General Marsh and a military lawyer. The words were over his head. He didn’t want to hear them.

He knew what this meant. A gradual phaseout of the neural processor. Removal from the Spire. Going back to living with Neil.

He’d never betray Yuri or Wyatt then. Blackburn could never again pillage his mind with the census device. He’d hold on to his sanity.

Maybe.

Maybe.

There was a part of Tom that wanted to pound his head against the desk in front of him. He couldn’t bear the thought of going back to his old life. Not after all this. Not after what he had here. And it killed him to think of how Dalton had won. Dalton had maneuvered him right out of the Spire. It was so much worse, getting the world and then having it taken away. It would’ve been better if he’d never come here.

“May I speak to him alone?” Marsh asked Olivia.

Olivia looked at Tom. “It’s up to you.”

Tom shrugged a shoulder. It wasn’t until the lawyer and Ms. Ossare were both out of the room that he raised his eyes to General Marsh and gazed upon him with open loathing. The guy with his hands tied.

“Why didn’t you give me the screening tests or the psych tests like everyone else?” Tom’s voice shook with fury. “Blackburn thinks I’m part of some conspiracy because I didn’t have the tests everyone else did! Why didn’t you just give them to me and stop this from happening?”

“To be honest, son, I didn’t get you psych tested because I didn’t think you’d pass.”

“I’M NOT DERANGED!”
Tom screamed, knowing how deranged he sounded.

“Easy, Tom.” Marsh rose and circled around Olivia’s desk, examining an ink blot framed on her wall. “The truth is, I didn’t search you out through official channels. You were a side project of mine. After all, I don’t go personally to retrieve most recruits.”

Tom stared hard at Marsh’s tired reflection in the glass pane over the ink blot.

“I was looking for something very different. You’ve seen Camelot Company in action. Those kids are the best this country has to offer. Well-rounded, bright, personable.”

“Like
Karl Marsters
?”

“Well, most of them.” Marsh dipped his head, conceding that. “They’re America’s straight shooters who will get somewhere in life. That’s who we recruit. That’s the type of kid we usually attract.”

“Unlike me.”

Here it was again, that issue Tom had wondered about from the very start. He knew how strange it was that Marsh would recruit him, of all people in the country. He’d ignored the wrongness of it. And only now, now that it was about to implode, was Marsh answering him. Tom wanted to tear him apart for it.

“Unlike you,” Marsh agreed. “Do you remember the scenario with the tank, Tom? The one I ran you through at the Dusty Squanto? There are several steps involved there. The testee first has to decide to go for the tank directly, rather than the antitank guns. And then comes the critical next step, the one most of our trainees in the Spire fail.”

“What?” Tom asked miserably.

“They get the hatch open and drop inside. That’s when they screw up. They drop into the tank and find the operator in the process of dying from exposure to the Martian atmosphere.”

“And then they kill the guy.”

Marsh shook his head. “That’s not what most trainees do. It would be easy if they could simply shoot the man, but it’s not possible with an iono-sulfuric rifle in a closed space. So they count on the man dying on his own. They don’t take into account the backup systems in the tank: the autosealing hatch, the pressurizers, and the operator’s hidden weapon. The operator recovers, and he kills the test taker. The only one here in the Spire who passed that phase was you.”

“I didn’t even know about those backup systems.”

“You bludgeoned the man before it even became an issue. You won the scenario. You beat a dying man to death. You did something the others flinched from.”

“It was just a video game, though.”

“It’s the instinct it reveals. That’s what I was looking for.”

“You can’t tell me Karl Marsters would flinch from bludgeoning a dying guy.”

“Karl Marsters didn’t go for the tank. That was the problem. I ran thousands of teenagers through that scenario. I found plenty who would bludgeon that operator—plenty with that killer instinct—but invariably, they failed to go directly for the tank because they failed to anticipate the best move for their opponent. Those cruel enough to bludgeon a dying man never had the same capacity to foresee the moves the operator was going to make. You not only passed, you nailed it on the first try. I thought you would. That’s why I honed in on you.”

So that’s why Marsh hadn’t helped him. The thought stung him. He’d had these high expectations, and Tom hadn’t lived up to them. “I must’ve been a huge disappointment to you.”

“Not at all. You have poor impulse control, and you’re too arrogant for your own good. You’re also shaping up into exactly what I wanted to find. Exactly the type of Combatant we’ve been lacking.”

Tom remembered something Elliot had said, something Nigel had said. About how they were looking for someone different. “You want vicious.”

“Yes, Tom.” Marsh leaned toward him, eyes intent. “Vicious. Ruthless, but only when you need to be. Someone who strikes when they know it will hurt. Someone who lands the lethal blow. Those are the people who win wars. Those are the people who take down the Medusas of this world. Look at Achilles—he wasn’t toppled by a warrior who was stronger than him, faster, better. He was felled by an arrow to the weak spot in his armor. You have an eye for those weak spots. You could be something. You could take down the other side’s best. I was willing to risk recruiting you through unofficial channels. And if you were as good as I hoped …”

“It would be your icing on the cake?” Tom mocked.

“Don’t mouth off. I’m your senior officer until the day you walk out of the Spire, Plebe.”

“So seniority matters now?” Rage ignited in his chest. “It didn’t in the Census Chamber! Lieutenant Blackburn got away with threatening you!”

“That’s a very different matter.”

“How?”

“Because he knows I can’t afford to lose him. He does something invaluable around here, and he does it for very cheap.”

Tom blinked. “The programming?”

“Obsidian Corp. built your processors. They used to handle all your software, too. Because they were the only ones who wrote Zorten II, they charged us through the roof for it. We tried cutting costs by training our own people, but Obsidian Corp. always hired them away. We tried to force our officers to finish their terms of service, but soon we’d get the angry calls from senators on behalf of Obsidian ordering us to let the programmers resign. To add insult to injury, Joseph Vengerov always turned around and tried to lease our own programmers back to us as consultants. It wasn’t financially sustainable. Lieutenant Blackburn
is
.”

“This is all about money, then.”

“It’s always about money, son. War is expensive. We cut costs wherever we can. That’s why all our shipyards are in space. That’s why Combatants need sponsors. The fact is, the only people in this country who can afford to pay taxes to support the military are the very people powerful enough to avoid paying them. As for the resources we win in space? We’re lucky to see a dime. We haven’t even seized Mercury yet, and Senator Bixby’s promised first drilling rights to Nobridis. That’s why I need Lieutenant Blackburn. He does everything Obsidian did, and he does it for an officer’s salary. Not only that, but he does it better. And the best part is, Joseph Vengerov could throw his entire fortune at him, and Blackburn would still turn down a job with Obsidian Corp., because
they
were the ones behind the neural processors. In fact, Lieutenant Blackburn had only one condition when he came to the Spire: he wanted to teach the trainees how to program with Zorten II.”

“He came here just for that?”

“That’s all he wants. That’s why I stuck my neck out to get him on my staff. If he quits on me, or worse, follows through on his threat, every assurance I gave the Defense Committee gets discredited and so do I.”

“I don’t believe it.” Tom’s voice shook. Blackburn had to have some other reason. He was twisted and evil and …

“It’s true, Tom.” Marsh raised an open palm in the air. “He wants you to learn. Look what happened to him with his own processor.”

“Yeah, I know it drove him crazy.”

“More than that. All three adults who survived the neural processors reacted in different ways. The other two had serious problems, but they were either lucid or lucid most of the time. Major Blackburn was never lucid.”

“Major,” Tom repeated.

“He was a major in the US Army. First in his class at West Point, in fact. Once he got the processor, he had that psychotic break, but he refused to believe he was sick, and he wasn’t responding to medication. Obsidian Corp. stepped forward and offered to take custody of the survivors. It was their project, so they were willing to foot the expense of treating them with their own therapies. The other two survivors went willingly. Major Blackburn did not. He escaped their custody and disappeared right off the grid, and I’ll tell you, Tom, that’s not an easy feat in an age of universal surveillance. He even retrieved his family.”

Tom opened and closed his mouth. “Lieutenant Blackburn has a family.”

“
Major
Blackburn did,” Marsh corrected. “A wife, two kids, a house in Wyoming. We stationed soldiers at their home, waiting for him to show, and he still got them right out from under our noses. We heard nothing for years, and then one day out of the blue, his wife tipped us off. She’d realized by then that he’d lost his mind. He was paranoid, erratic, and she was afraid of him. She let us know that he’d taken the family and holed up in a compound outside Roanoke, Texas.”