Vortex (11 page)

Tom did a double take. Vik was speaking in a slightly strange, jocular tone, like someone pretending to be an old English baron.

She turned languidly and surveyed Vik over her champagne glass. “Why, thank you. I take it you know my name already. And yours is?”

“Vikram Ashwan. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.” He shook her hand, still speaking in that strange, lofty way. All he needed was a monocle.

Alana turned her expectant gaze on Tom.

“Thomas Raines.” He offered a hand.

“Oh.” Her limp hand shook his. “I’ve heard some very interesting things about you.”

Vik caught his eye and gave a subtle nod, reminding him of the phrases he’d learned.

Tom turned to her and said, “You stagger me with your knowledge.”

Alana’s forehead wrinkled. Vik rapped on the window to draw her attention away from Tom, and they got to talking about the massive factories stretching to the horizon below them and the way Epicenter was one of the few companies that still used human labor in factories. Tom chimed in occasionally with “I agree” and “Right you are.”

And then Alana said something to Vik that grabbed his attention, with a sudden, electric-sharp focus.

“. . . so cost-effective because we rely entirely on convict labor.”

“Convicts, eh?” Vik said. “Ah, putting ruffians to fine use.”

“Yes, we actually get paid by various governments to keep them. You see, you hire labor, and they have expectations, they agitate. You use convicts, and you can pretty much dictate the terms of their work to them, not to mention the local workers revise their salary expectations quite a bit. If we need a work order completed in thirty-six hours, convicts will complete it in thirty-six hours with no whining. They know better than to complain.” And sudddenly, her smile no longer looked so pretty to Tom.

He began thinking of Neil, Neil getting dragged off, clapped in prison. “But,” he said, “what happens when their sentences are up?”

Alana tittered, enjoying her rapt audience. “Let’s just say, once we’ve trained them for their jobs, we try to get a good return on that investment. There are always reasons to extend a prison sentence. It’s most cost-effective to maintain at least a ninety-percent occupancy rate, so we have to be creative.” She sipped her champagne.

Tom felt the blood buzzing up in his head, and he wasn’t even aware of Vik trying to catch his eye, frantically shaking his head. “So they’re your slaves.”

She lowered her glass. “Slaves? They’re
criminals
. Society doesn’t need people like them. We’re doing the world a favor, keeping them here.”

Tom gazed at the executive, champagne in her hand, a massive slave labor camp below her, and his thoughts were back on his dad, rage scorching him. Neil had brawled with those cops in the train station and gotten himself a month in jail. Epicenter could’ve rented him. He could’ve been flown over here and gotten his sentence extended and extended, and Tom never would’ve seen him again.

“You know what I think would be doing the world a favor?” Tom said to her, anger beating under his skin. “If you threw a big party in here, invited over everyone else who thinks there’s something okay with what you’re doing, and just blew yourselves up together.
That
is my idea of doing the world a favor.”

“I
T WASN’T
ACTUALLY
a bomb threat,” Tom was still arguing to his friends later as the Interstice swept them toward Sacramento, California. He rubbed at his wrists, sore from the handcuffs he’d been stuck wearing for the interrogation by Epicenter security. He was so sick of wearing handcuffs. “I said that it would be nice if someone who
wasn’t me
blew them up, but that’s all. No one would’ve thought twice about it if I weren’t technically a known terrorist.”

His friends gaped at him. They’d done it most of the ride.

“I should’ve agreed to be Walton’s twin brother,” Tom lamented, slouching back in his seat.

Vik sighed. “Tom, this is painful, physically and psychologically
painful
for me to say, but I think Wyatt was right.”

“Really?” Wyatt said, surprised.

“Just say nothing at Matchett-Reddy,” Vik urged him. “Not a word. And Evil Wench, no gloating. In fact, not a word from you.”

Wyatt smiled wickedly. “I was right, Vik was wrong. Ha-ha!”

Yuri kissed the top of her head.

Vik groaned. “That qualifies as gloating and saying a word.”

“Actually, it was gloating and saying six words,” Wyatt corrected him.

“And two ‘ha’s,’” Yuri agreed, gazing at her adoringly. Then he turned to Tom. “I am in agreement with them. You must endeavor not to speak this time, Thomas. Nod in greeting, but that is all. Then perhaps, you should conceal yourself somewhere where no one will be finding you. I will come and retrieve you from this hiding place before we are due to depart.”

“Got it,” Tom groused, slumping back in his seat. He couldn’t believe this had happened. In the course of mere hours, any shot he had at a future in the Intrasolar Forces had been whittled to the caprice of some executives at Matchett-Reddy.

This one was do or die.

The Interstice took them as far as the capitol building in Sacramento, California, and they were shuffled into helicopters and flown over a vast, sprawling wilderness. They landed on a rocky cliffside, and Tom stepped out with the others to behold a greeting party of high-level Matchett-Reddy executives and their sponsored Combatants, Lea Styron and Mason Meekins, both Hannibals.

Tom made sure to seal his lips and nod in a manly way as he shook hands. Then he clasped the hand of the last executive in the greeting line.

Tom’s heart stopped for a moment, he swore it.

Oh. Oh . . .

He realized it. Matchett-Reddy was doomed. It had been doomed since he’d stuck the police on a naked leecher in Las Vegas.

He met the familiar gaze of Hank Bloombury, and recognition sparked in the bald man’s face. “You!”

“Me,” Tom said.

“It’s you!” Bloombury said again.

“It’s him,” Vik said, unasked, from where he was standing at Tom’s side. Then, confused, “What’s happening?”

“Huh?” said Wyatt, on Vik’s other side.

“I know you,” Bloombury insisted. “
You
were the one who called the police on me last week! My lawyer subpoenaed a surveillance feed of it! You knew who I was”—his finger jabbed Tom’s chest—“but you told them I was a crazy, perverted, drug-dealing terrorist!”

Tom grew aware of Wyatt clapping her hand over her mouth, Vik’s incredulous face like he didn’t know whether to laugh or be horrified, and Yuri, gazing grimly. His mind raced over his options. He could play dumb, or he could apologize.

But all Tom could think about was that cop clubbing his father, about the way Hank almost got away with it, about the way he must’ve gotten away with stuff like that so many times before.

Tom wasn’t sorry. He wasn’t. And he wasn’t delusional, either—he knew he was done for. There was no coming back from this, so he decided to embrace the moment. He flashed a broad, apologetic grin.

“Good to see you again,” Tom said to him. “I didn’t recognize you at first, but then again, you’re not naked and shrieking like a frightened little girl today. So, make any new friends in jail?”

T
OM DIDN’T BOTHER
going into the mansion for the party. While the others shook hands and schmoozed, he trudged out through the trees and bypassed the stately house of the CEO of Matchett-Reddy, Sigurdur Vitol. Then he crested a ridge and gazed upon the view seen every day by those inside the mansion.

Tom’s breath caught. A massive valley stretched out below him. He stared and stared, gazing over the rolling green fields ringed by trees, cut through by sparkling rivers. The jagged, rocky mountains had silvery waterfalls streaking down them. The immensity of the place made Tom feel strange, like he’d slipped into a VR sim and hadn’t realized it. He gazed at one of the mountains that resembled a vertical wall and another that resembled a flattened half circle.

He kept staring and staring at the waterfalls, the trees, the mountains. He’d never seen something so magnificent, so beautiful. Surely a place like this couldn’t actually exist.

There was a rock jutting out like a platform. When Tom got his head on straight, he headed out onto it and stood there, feeling like he was astride the entire world, a breathtaking drop below. The sun was beginning to dip over the horizon, casting a golden haze over all the cliffs, when footsteps crunched up behind him, and Elliot’s voice drifted to his ears. “Yosemite Valley’s really something, isn’t it?”

Tom glanced back at him. So he’d fixed the mess at Nobridis and caught up with them. “I can’t believe this is what Sigurdur Vitol wakes up to every single morning.” He couldn’t get his head around that.

He remembered the only time he’d seen something near as amazing as this. He’d been little, and he and Neil were having trouble getting a ride; the only person they ran into worked as a miner for Nobridis. Neil made a rash decision to take advantage of their in and get free admission to the Grand Canyon.

Hours passed as the sun crept across the jagged rocks, the rivers so far below they were stringy blue lines. Even with all the Nobridis uranium mines and drilling platforms, Tom had never seen anywhere like it. Neil had been ranting about what he called “piratization,” but Tom remembered how even he fell silent when the sun began to set, setting the canyon awash with brilliant orange and red light.

But this place . . .

Tom tried to imagine what Neil would do if he could ever see this. His dad would . . . He’d . . .

And then with a flash of bitterness, Tom realized there was no point wondering. Neil would never get to see this. Some guy owned it and used it as his backyard. This was one more wonder of the planet shut off to people like his dad.

“Sigurdur doesn’t live up here.” Elliot was pointing below them. “See that mansion right there over Vernal Falls? It’s the lower waterfall of the paired ones.”

Tom saw the silvery waterfalls streaming down the cliff, one atop the other, a mansion straddling the second one.

“That’s actually Sigurdur Vitol’s house. Milton Manor. He has an entire floor of clear glass and you can see the waterfall rushing beneath it. Come here early in the year, and it’s mind-blowing. No one actually lives full-time up here on Glacier Point. This place is for corporate receptions.”

“This is wrong,” Tom said, half to himself. The wind whipped through his hair, a ferocious anger boiling up inside him. His dad would die and never even get a chance to see something Sigurdur Vitol probably took for granted. “This shouldn’t be some guy’s property. Everyone should be allowed to come see this.”

“This used to be Yosemite National Park. We sold it after the Great Global Collapse to repay our debts.”

Tom’s fists clenched. “You mean Wyndham Harks’s debts! The debts those people
ran up and stuck on the rest of us.” He’d figured it out seeing that wall of government officials at Wyndham Harks.
Their
people were in the government. So when Reuben Lloyd bought up other companies, bought fancy rugs, and couldn’t pay his bills—the government he controlled volunteered the public to pay his bills for them. Then when the public went broke, people like Sigurdur Vitol swooped in like vultures and took stuff the public owned, stuff of real value—like this place. Like Yosemite.

Tom shook his head in disgust. Those executives had done that, they’d gotten away with it, and today they marched in Tom and the others and demanded
respect
from them, like they were actually owed something from them. After taking all this, they wanted even more.

“I hear you’ve had an interesting day,” Elliot remarked.

Tom jerked his head impatiently. “Yeah, I kind of blew it. With Matchett-Reddy, for sure.” He was silent a moment, then had to admit, “And at Epicenter. And at Wyndham Harks. I’m sorry about that mess at Nobridis, by the way. I hope that wasn’t a huge pain for you to fix.”

The last beams of the sun were disappearing over the distant cliffs now. Elliot said quietly, “I’m glad we’re not seeing Obsidian Corp. today. I suppose you had some antics ready for them, too?”

“No need for the visit.” Tom wheeled around and calmly strode from the rock. “Joe Vengerov and I already know each other. We’re not on good terms.”

“Is this funny to you?” There was unexpected heat in Elliot’s voice.

Tom hadn’t realized there was a twisted smile plastered on his face. It was sort of automatic, since Elliot looked a bit angry—so unlike Elliot.

“Come on, man, I know I kind of torpedoed things today—”

“Torpedoed? Tom, this wasn’t a torpedo hit. This was the Hindenburg disaster! There are five CEOs who sponsor Indo-American Combatants, and you have successfully alienated every single one of them, most of them within mere hours of each other! Take Nobridis. It was easy, Tom. It was so easy. All you had to do was bow and leave the room. The prince didn’t even want to speak to any of you. That was all and it would have been done.”

Heat rushed through Tom. “I don’t bow to people! Okay, maybe if I’m about to fight a samurai warrior or a kung fu master, and we’re
mutually
bowing to show respect for each other, maybe then, but that’s it. No unilateral bowing.”

Elliot groaned. “You have so much pride. I hope that’s a big comfort to you, because that’s the only comfort you’re going to have if you keep this up. You had an advantage after Capitol Summit. People knew you, they knew you were a winner. They
wanted
to like you. But that advantage means nothing if you plan to go ahead and burn every bridge in front of you. I don’t even pretend to know why you flooded the Beringer Club, but if you thought—”

“Yeah, you don’t know,” Tom cut in. “You know nothing about the Beringer Club. So maybe it’s not your business. Those Dominion Agra guys had it coming. That’s all that matters.”

“Yes, yes, and this Matchett-Reddy executive also had whatever you did to him coming. Tell me this: When Hank Bloombury recognized you, what did you say to him?”