Vortex (30 page)

Then he saw the exultant, wild faces on all sides of him and he understood that the battle had lost its meaning as a showcase skirmish between countries. People were exulting in a victory of a different sort.

They’d seen
Elliot Ramirez
destroying all the Coalition skyboards.

T
OM THREADED HIS
way through the crowd. Usually, there’d be a speech going on about now. The winning side always marched out Elliot Ramirez and Svetlana Moriakova right away to say something about patriotism and fighting the good fight, always with a phalanx of the major executives and world power players about them behind that protective glass.

This year, there was a delay. Tom wondered how Elliot would be instructed to explain “his” actions. The Coalition would definitely have to take advantage of his popularity to defuse the explosive crowd somehow.

And then Heather burst out of the crowd. Tom let her catch up to him, rather amused as she descended on him and slapped him. Hard.

“Nice to see you, too,” Tom said, tasting blood.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” she cried.

“Yeah.” His voice dropped so only she could hear him. “
I
did nothing, Heather.
You
blasted all the skyboards, at least as far as the Coalition is concerned. What a gesture. I’d almost call it revolutionary. They are not gonna like that.”

“You think this is a joke? I’ll destroy you for this!”

Tom had no illusions. He knew she’d follow through on her threat, but he’d chosen to walk into this with both eyes wide open. “Fine.” He flashed her a savage grin. “Give it a shot. Hey, it’s worked out for you so well this far, messing with me, why not go for the kicker? I’ll tell you, whatever happens from here, I’m always going to look back on the way you were so proud about having me by the throat, and then I’ll remember how I decimated your career. I’ll be honest, Heather. The memory’s gonna make me laugh.”

And with that, Tom left her tearful and shaking with rage in the middle of the crowd. Then a voice boomed over the distant loudspeaker, announcing that Elliot was ready to speak, and Tom slowed. He whirled around and peered at the massive screen, where Elliot had assumed the podium, his expression grave.

Tom knew why: the end of Heather’s career meant the end of Elliot’s hopes she’d take his place on that stage.

“My fellow Americans.” At the sound of Elliot’s voice, loud and echoing from various speakers, the crowd fell silent. “You may have noticed the mishap that occured with the skyboards during the fight.”

He cast a glance back at the men and women sheltered behind the missileproof glass with him on the steps of the Capitol—CEOs, their pet government officials, their security guards. . . .

Something flickered across Elliot’s face as he turned back to the crowd. “I’m supposed to come up here and blame a group of hackers for tampering with my ship, but that’s not the truth.”

Tom gave a startled jerk. He peered at Elliot intently.

“The truth is, the destruction of those skyboards was completely intentional. In fact—” he drew a deep breath “—it was me. I did it. I destroyed them all.” Elliot let the words sit there, a smile playing across his lips as murmuring filled the air.

Tom saw Reuben Lloyd and Sigurdur Vitol exchange a glance from where they loomed behind Elliot. This was obviously not in the script.

“You see, I’m owning up to what I did up there,” Elliot went on, “because, let’s face it—” he pointed behind him at the CEOs “—everyone hates skyboards except the men and women on this stage. They’re light pollution. They hang in our skies year after year. They’re a blight that overwhelmingly afflicts underprivileged areas, like my former neighborhood back in Los Angeles. They’re a desecration of our public skies for the sake of private profits. The only reason they were allowed in orbit in the first place was because they were supposed to be temporary, but the companies never cleared them, and the regulators who were supposed to crack down on them for that refused to lift a finger—because they all hope to get a job with these same companies.”

One of the government officials moved to take the microphone from Elliot, but then Elliot did the astonishing—he unlatched a door in the missileproof wall and slipped out to stand in front of it. None of the CEOs behind him dared to do something like that. They shoved the glass barrier closed immediately. Elliot stood before the crowd, defenseless, microphone in hand.

“What you saw tonight was me registering my formal objection to this situation,” Elliot said. “That’s why I destroyed those skyboards.”

A roar of approval swelled from the crowd. Tom knew the sound techs could’ve cut off Elliot’s microphone by now if they’d wanted to, and they’d probably been told to do it. Maybe they had no real motivation to make Elliot stop either.

“In fact,” Elliot went on, “this is my last act as an Intrasolar Combatant. I believe this is the proper moment to tender my resignation to the military. A friend told me once that compromise with someone who won’t give an inch in return, well, that’s no different than surrendering to them. My friend was right.”

Tom’s jaw dropped.

“The truth is,” Elliot said, “I’ve surrendered for too long, and today I’m through.” He turned slightly to address the Indo-American CEOs while still facing the crowd, ever the showman. “Thanks for everything, ladies, gentlemen, but associating with you any longer would tarnish me. If you don’t like that—” he waved to the roaring crowd “—take it up with my friends here.”

And with that, Elliot jumped right into the crowd, into the protection of fifty thousand people and straight out of the Coalition’s control.

Even as the White House press secretary hurried forward with another microphone and tried to calm the crowd, the roar of approval for Elliot drowned out her voice. It was like the crowd had become a single, living beast that utterly overwhelmed the most influential power players standing on the stage.

As the scene unfolded, the screen cut out. Tom squinted until he made out the Coalition CEOs, tiny figures cowering behind their shelter of protective glass, and below them, Elliot Ramirez borne by a ring of supporters like a massive tidal wave. Tom could see unmanned drones soaring in from the distance. At the periphery of the crowd, he glimpsed riot cops preparing microwave weapons to disperse the mass of people, and automated patrollers powering up, ready to deploy tear gas. The men and women on the stage were already being hustled away for their own protection.

For a moment, with the crowd stirring about him, and the CEOs fleeing, Tom felt like he was back on the suborbital, gazing down at the planet and perceiving just how tiny one human being was—even these men. For all their power and influence, the executives on that stage were as fragile and easily ruptured as any other human being.

And he realized that General Marsh had only been half right. The security state was tightening its grip on their throats, but there was one thing driving it:
fear
. The oligarchs were deathly afraid. They’d snared the rest of their species in a trap of security and surveillance because that was the only way to protect themselves from the natural consequences of seizing everything and reducing the vast majority of people to bare subsistence. They’d doomed themselves with their greed, and all these measures, all these riot cops, all the isolated fortresses like Epicenter’s Tower or Sigurdur Vitol’s private national park, couldn’t protect them.

For all their power, none of those executives would be able to walk down a public street without bodyguards. None of them could have the simple freedom Elliot Ramirez did to stand before a massive body of people without fear of being torn apart. That missileproof glass might as well have been electrified fence and barbed wire. No one could fashion a prison so perfect, so complete, as the one the masters of humanity had created for themselves.

There was justice in the world. There was. And with that realization, something began to lift from Tom’s vision, like some dark haze had finally cleared away. He knew now that this didn’t have to be the world Neil hated, this didn’t have to be a world where the worst of humanity always won and everyone else surrendered to what couldn’t be stopped. There was nothing inevitable about the supremacy of sociopaths.

Vengerov may have gotten away with destroying Yuri, but that only meant one thing: someone hadn’t stepped up and made things right yet.

So Tom would do it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

W
HEN
T
OM RETURNED
to the Pentagonal Spire, he found Wyatt in the infirmary, sitting in the chair next to Yuri’s bed with her legs drawn up to her chest. Ever since she’d resumed talking—to Tom, at least—she’d finally started coming here again.

His gaze shifted to Yuri. The Russian boy seemed smaller now and far more fragile. Tom had an idea about what he could do for Yuri, an idea about how to get to that transmitter in Antarctica, but he couldn’t pull it off without help.

“Wyatt, I need a favor,” Tom said in a low voice. “There’s something I can’t do by myself, but you probably could.”

“There are a lot of things like that.”

“There was this one time when Heather Akron downloaded a memory segment from me. . . .”

“What segment?” Wyatt said.

He shook his head. “It’s not important. The thing is, it gave me an idea. There’s a specific time frame when I was stuck outside at Obsidian Corp. in January. Could you somehow do the same thing she did and get everyone’s memories of that time for me? Maybe during Applied Scrimmages?”

“Why?”

Tom hesitated. He wanted to create a mental map of sorts. If he accessed what everyone had seen at Obsidian Corp. that day, with all their photographic, perfectly detailed memories, he’d be able to put them all together into one image and create a comprehensive, three-dimensional layout of the place in his brain. Once he had that he could figure out how to break into Obsidian Corp. in person.

He couldn’t explain that to her without telling her what he planned to do, so he thought quickly of a lie. “Olivia Ossare wants me to do it. She thinks I’ll be able to make peace with what happened if I, uh, see it from another angle.”

She frowned. “Are you sure you want to do this? This won’t be like memories from a census device, Tom. They won’t be audiovisual. It’s a lot more intrusive. You’ll remember the actual experiences like they happened to you. It will be intense.”

“Look, no one else lost fingers that day, so I figure most everyone else had a better time than I did. I can handle it.”

A
N HOUR LATER,
they were in the last of the Middle training rooms on the thirteenth floor, and Wyatt was sprawled on the floor, accessing a processor right beneath a floor panel.

“The memories will feed directly to your processor in the middle of Applied Scrimmages,” Wyatt informed him. “Try to stay in the sim as long as possible without getting killed. They’ll only download into your processor as long as you’re hooked in.”

“Got it.” He pulled out the neural wire, and Wyatt was getting ready to shove the floor panel back in place when the door slid open and Vik strode in.

He halted inside the doorway, and Tom could see from the shock on his face that he hadn’t expected to see them. Wyatt sprang to her feet, startled.

“What are you guys doing here?” Vik said.

Tom threw Wyatt a swift glance. She was tense.

“Nothing,” Tom said brusquely. He stooped and shoved the floor panel back on.

“This obviously isn’t nothing,” Vik said, pointing at the floor.

“What are you doing here?” Tom threw back at him.

“I’m meeting Lyla. Her roommate hates me, and we wanted to go somewhere Giuseppe wouldn’t sit and watch us creepily,” Vik said. “Now your turn.”

Tom shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“I asked, so yeah, I want to know.”

“Why even bother?” Wyatt flared up. “You were mad when you knew about that other thing. Maybe you don’t want to know about this.”

Vik blinked, his thick eyebrows raised. “You’re talking again.”

“Yeah, she’s talking,” Tom said.

“I’m glad, that’s all,” Vik said. “Can’t I say I’m glad about that?”

“No,” Tom said, and suddenly, he was furious with Vik. He hadn’t even realized it until now, when anger, hot and vicious, ignited inside him. “You don’t get to say that to Wyatt, and you don’t get to ask what we’re up to.
You
dropped
us
, not the other way around.”

“It’s not like that,” Vik protested.

“Then what’s it like?”

The door slid open, and Lyla Martin strolled in. They lapsed into silence. For her part, Lyla shook her head and turned to Vik. “No way,” she told him. “We are not sharing the room with them.”

Tom nudged Wyatt, sending her a questioning glance. Was she done?

She nodded.

Tom turned to the standoffish Lyla, and the sheepish Vik. “Don’t worry. We’re outta here.”

Vik didn’t call after them.

S
INCE NEARLY FREEZING
to death, cold had become Tom’s least favorite thing in the world. When Yosef’s group hooked into the sim, and Tom found himself a Napoleonic soldier standing in the middle of the bitter winter in Russia, he cursed inwardly. His joints began to throb at the first nip of the icy wind, and that’s when Wyatt’s program kicked in and began bombarding him with memories from the other Middles.

The image of the Obsidian Corp. visit from Giuseppe’s point of view filled his vision, and Tom tumbled over into the snow, cold wetness seeping up his arms. He staggered upright, half-blind, and grew aware of the crackling of gunfire as they engaged today’s enemy group, even as his mind filled with images from January.

Giuseppe had obviously spent much of the tour daydreaming about some hotel in Paris he liked, because the images of Obsidian Corp. were intercut with those mental images.

A simulated Russian soldier rushed at Tom, and Tom narrowly managed to impale the guy on his bayonet before more of the memory washed over him. Giuseppe was admiring himself, straining to see his own face reflected in one of the large windows. Nearby, Giuseppe could see Blackburn with his large back to the Obsidian Corp. techs, shoulders curled protectively over the forearm keyboard he was tapping. Tom knew that must’ve been when he’d hacked Obsidian Corp.’s intranet and found his blackmail material.

In his own simulation, Tom staggered away from the main body of his group, figuring that he couldn’t focus on both fighting and the memories. He had to stay low, and worst-case scenario, someone would find and kill him. He sank against a wall inside a half-destroyed house, the boom of cannons rumbling like thunder in the distance, more memories rushing into his brain.

His neural processor automatically integrated the varying images of Obsidian Corp., stitching them together in a full mental map, matching up the time stamps. It was strange seeing things as if he’d been in several different places at once, like he’d had more eyes than his own. He could gaze around an entire image from a single time frame and see what many people had seen.

It grew stranger still seeing memory after memory from the time frame after he’d been stuck outside, when he could reference his own memories of the bitter cold. Everyone else had been on an innocuous tour. Some had noticed Blackburn hacking the intranet, some had not.

While Tom had been outside trying to stand up again, all the other trainees had been inside, taking turns petting a Bengal tiger named Kalkin, who was as domesticated as a house cat, complete with a neural processor of his own. . . .

While Tom had been lying on the snow, unconscious, Blackburn had finished his hacking, looked over the group, and said sharply, “Someone’s missing.” And then, “Raines. Where is he? Where is Tom Raines?” He looked at Vik.

Vik squirmed uneasily but did his best to look innocent.

Blackburn jabbed at his forearm keyboard and swore ferociously. “How did that kid get outside?”

And in every memory, Vik’s eyes grew very wide, terrible comprehension on his face.

It was Vik’s own memory that made something inside Tom go still. He noticed through Vik’s eyes that he’d left—right after Tom really had been cut off from the group. Vik said nothing, covering for him.

Then he felt Vik’s shock when he realized Tom had been outside this whole time. He saw Vik risk Blackburn’s wrath by staying after the other trainees were ordered home. He saw through Vik’s eyes when he was hauled in, felt Vik’s stomach plunge as he’d wondered if Tom was dead. He saw Vik’s mind calling up the memory of Tom’s near climb up the transmission pole, and his ears stung with the memory of Blackburn’s words, “You aren’t doing him any favors. . . .” He felt in his stomach Vik’s nauseating sense of guilt.

So when he’d finished downloading the last memory, Tom roused from his stupor and discovered he wasn’t alone in the simulation of the burned-out house. Vik was there, too, and he felt like he finally understood it all now. He knew why Vik had been so strange.

“Hey,” Tom called.

Vik turned. They were on opposing sides of this sim, but it didn’t seem to matter now. “Are you all right? I knew the minute the sim started you might not like this one. I lit a fire.”

“I’m okay.”

“Right.” He raised his eyebrows. “That’s why you’re here. In a swoon.”

“I wasn’t swooning. I was deeply in thought about something.”

“Sure you were, Tom.”

Tom staggered over to drop by the crackling flames, the heat washing over his skin, over his numbed hands. “That thing you asked earlier. You still wanna know what Wyatt and I were doing? Are you sure?”

Vik nodded. “Tell me.”

“I’m going to Obsidian Corp. to blow out the transmitter that’s connected to Yuri. No transmitter means Yuri’s not a security hazard anymore, which means there’s a case to give him a new processor. I’m going in person, Vik, so I’m getting every bit of data I can.”

Vik eyed him. “That’s insane.”

“And reckless and stupid, Vik. It’s literally a building full of killing machines in the middle of Antarctica. If you want to delete me telling you this as soon as Applied Scrimmages ends, I won’t blame you. But here it is. The truth. You wanted to know, and I owed it to you to tell you. Now you get the choice.”

For a moment, the only sound in the room with them was the crackling of the flames in the hearth. “This could save Yuri’s life,” Vik said, half in question.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it might give him a shot.”

“And even if I tell you this is a bad idea,” Vik added, “you’ll still go—and so will Wyatt, as soon as she figures out what you’re up to. So I lose three friends for the price of one.”

“Vik—”

“I’m in.”

“Really?” Tom said, astounded.

“Really, Doctor. You’ll have better odds if I help you.” A note of ferocity crept into Vik’s voice. “That’s my friend. Let’s save his life.”

R
EVEALING HIS TRUE
intentions to Vik meant revealing his true intentions to Wyatt. Tom had expected her to be horrified by the idea, but she lit up like he hadn’t seen her since Vengerov fried Yuri, eager for a chance to actually do
something
for Yuri. One glimpse at the mental map he’d put together of Obsidian Corp. using all the collected memories seemed to make up her mind.

“I think we can pull this off,” she told them.

As it turned out, Wyatt knew some secrets of her own, mainly about the contents of Blackburn’s databases. Apparently, he’d been amassing a trove of data about Obsidian Corp. over the years, from notes about the facility’s security systems to a database of hundreds of programming languages for various Obsidian Corp. machines.

“This is not normal,” Vik declared. “Someone doesn’t accumulate this stuff unless they’re planning something. What’s Blackburn up to?”

Tom was daunted by the computer languages. “There is no way I can work with one of these, much less a bunch of them.”

Wyatt nudged him. “Tom, it’s illegal for a computer to self-code. That means our neural processors can’t download and learn for us how to work Zorten II or Klondike, because those are neural processor languages. There’s nothing against downloading computer languages that don’t program processors. That’s not self-programming.”

A
N HOUR LATER,
Tom had written a complete program in the Bernays-6 language that controlled skyboards. He could program in it as easily as he could do mathematics now or speak a foreign language.

It was incredible.

It really made him understand for the first time what a big constraint it was that people with neural processors couldn’t simply work Zorten II so easily.

The best thing of all they discovered was in storage: a Praetorian left over from Obsidian Corp.’s stint in charge of the Spire. Wyatt tugged out its control chip and set out to practice some programs in the Praetorian-specific programming language, SE Janus.

Vik, meanwhile, set out to write Tom an embarrassing new bunk template. “If we’re going to perish on this venture, I want Tom to die knowing he has a humiliating wallpaper in his room,” he explained to them.

“You’re a good friend,” Tom told him.

“We’re not going to die.” Wyatt gave a big smile. “I really do think this could work. Obsidian Corp.’s completely oriented toward protecting against
mechanized
intruders. They have to worry about surveillance vehicles or small drones, but no one’s going to go in person to break into a building in the middle of Antarctica. It’s not a hospitable environment for humans to hang around and stroll on in, especially right now when it’s winter. Between that and the whole wing of motion-sensitive, electrified floors, they won’t expect anyone to come in person.”

Vik sat up abruptly, finger raised. “Quick question: How is this inhospitable-for-humans thing not a problem for us? Last I checked, we’re about ninety-nine point nine percent human. Except for Tom, who’s ninety-nine point eight percent . . . We can joke about that now, right?”

Tom flashed him a mechanized thumbs-up. “Joke away.”

As he spoke, he inspected the mental map again, pinpointing every location on the walls where he saw neural access ports. Since Obsidian Corp. had designed the neural processors, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised they were there. He wondered who used them.

“So how are we getting in?” Vik pressed. “We can’t exactly walk in from the outside. Tom almost froze to death in the
summer
.”

Confidence surged through Tom. “Simple. We go in the same way Obsidian Corp. staffers do: right through the front door.”