Vortex

  Tom felt a bit sheepish as Yuri walked away, because obviously the big Russian kid thought Tom needed an encouraging shoulder pat. This really must be bad. As he and Vik launched into playing some games, the images blurred before his eyes.

  “You’re in poor form tonight, Doctor,” Vik noted.

  “I’m winning.”

  “Poor form for you. Hey, you’re not really depressed, are you?” He sounded awkward just asking it. Tom shook his head.

  “No, man. I’m good.”

  “I figured. You’ll come back from this, Doctor. You always do.”

  But later, when he was alone again, Tom stared up at those five reasons he was so, so screwed. He desperately wanted to be proud of it like Vik said, but the smile on his face made him feel like some sort of demented gargoyle, and the knot in his stomach was made of pure dread.

  TOM WASN’T LOOKING forward to General Marsh’s reaction to his disgrace. His stomach plummeted when the summons appeared in his vision center. This meeting would not bode well for him. He was sure Marsh regretted recruiting him, wasting time on him. His legs felt like lead the entire walk up to the twelfth-floor observation deck, where General Marsh waited.

  The night air was chilly, and Tom shivered a bit when he stepped out and snapped to attention. Marsh waved for him to be at ease, so Tom settled there, resigned to his fate.

  “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  Marsh beckoned him forward. “Do you know I have a grandson your age, Mr. Raines?”

  Tom hesitated, then joined him by the railing. “I didn’t know that.”

  “A little younger than you, but he’s a good kid. Very smart. If he’d been born at a different time, there’s no knowing what he could’ve gone on to be.” Marsh nodded up at the sky. “What do you see up there?”

  “Uh, the moon, sir.” In the clear skies around Washington, DC, it looked stark, vivid, and full, and with a proper telescope, Tom was sure Chinese equipment could even be seen.

  “Not the moon. That is Russo-Chinese territory and the end of this war.” Marsh jabbed his finger up at the rounded rock. “While we were busy shoveling money hand over fist to Wyndham Harks, gutting our schools and bombing people in deserts for Nobridis, the Chinese were busy training up millions of scientists, building their space program, and claiming the most strategically vital territory in a war we weren’t fighting yet. Whoever holds the moon holds the solar system, Mr. Raines, and whoever holds the solar system holds the future of humanity.”

  He waved his stubby finger like he could point out the equipment, the weapons, the armaments.

  “It’s their perfect, low-gravity launching pad, but there’s more. They could turn around tomorrow and destroy every one of our ships as they approach Earth. If they wanted to, they could probably turn those weapons outward and rotate around and around our planet, taking potshots at all our other bases in the solar system. This war could all be over in a few days.”

  “They signed that treaty,” Tom said, remembering it from Tactics. “They agreed to a neutral zone.”

  “What’s a treaty? It’s a piece of paper. An agreement means nothing in itself. It’s the power to force others to comply with that agreement—that’s all that counts. That’s the sham of this whole thing.”

  Marsh leaned his elbows on the railing, his face bathed in moonlight.

  “The fact is, son, we fight the Chinese because they’re letting us fight this. They hold that final punch because this war isn’t ultimately about China winning the solar system. It’s not about America. It’s not about any countries. It’s about those men and women you met on those meet and greets.”

  Tom was a bit relieved, because he’d come here expecting to be bawled out, but Marsh seemed more introspective than angry. “Yeah, I know that, sir. And I know I screwed up with them.”

  “I know why you find those people contemptible. So do I. They want a crack at all those resources in space, yes, but do you know what they want even more, Raines? They want a war that never ends. That’s why we’ve got that moon up there the Chinese aren’t putting in to play. That moon ends the gravy train and everyone knows it. You know what I’d do if I ran this boat?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “I’d muster our forces, feign an assault on the shipyards near the Gauntlet—”

  Tom recognized the term for the intensive free-fire zone, encircling the neutral zone. It was a hazardous, combat-intense stretch of space that had to be survived to get home free to the safe haven around Earth.

  “And then, Raines, I’d assault the Chinese fortifications on the moon. Sneak attack, and let history call me a backstabber. I’d destroy every single piece of equipment they’ve got. Find anything they’ve got beneath the surface, blow those up, too. Scar that beautiful, rocky face, but, by God, I’d take that advantage for our side. And then I’d use it. I wouldn’t fight with one hand tied behind my back, and they wouldn’t do it anymore, either. Someone would win, and someone would lose.” He was silent a moment. “You know why I’d never get put in charge?”

  “Because you’d blow up the moon?” Tom guessed.

  “Because I would end the war. That’s what destruction does. This war ends, then so do the taxpayer-funded contracts, the drumbeats in the media, the nice Combatant faces, and the patriotic cause to lull the civilians and shame the dissenters. The other thing that comes to an end is all the justification for why this country’s run the way it is. People will wonder why their paychecks are still getting halved to pay off the men who own their utility companies, their roads, their national parks. They’ll wonder why they’ve got to work eighty-hour weeks to support the folks who took their houses and destroyed the middle-class jobs. There’s not going to be an enemy to point a finger at anymore. People will see the real problem.”

  “Or a new enemy can get created. A new war could get started,” Tom pointed out, remembering what Neil always said on this subject.

  Marsh rubbed his fingers over his chin, still gazing up at the moon. “You know, when I was a cadet, there were thirty thousand drones in US skies. Now there are thirty million. People protested by the thousands against the brand-new, all-US firewall. Now, the DHS dispatches a drone or two, fires a microwave weapon into the crowd, and no one will stick around when they feel that burning sensation. All these changes were done because someone cried wolf. Over and over. But you know how that story ends?”

  Tom shook his head. He wasn’t sure what Marsh was talking about or where a wolf had come into this converstion.

  “It ends when the boy meets a real wolf and no one comes to help him. . . . The thing I fear is, it may already be too late. There are too many drones, there is too much surveillance. Sometimes I think that even if the game ended today, it would be too late to get back the country we once had. The world’s enough of a prison for the rest of us that it won’t matter to our elite if no one comes running to fight the next wolf—we may not matter enough to make a difference now.”

  Tom watched the dark trees swaying in the distance, thinking of his own spot on the terror watch list. So that’s the sort of thing Marsh meant by “crying wolf.” Apparently, he was a wolf now.

  “The security state is an iron fist,” Marsh said, “and it is closing around our throats. When I look at my grandson, I try to imagine his future, and I don’t see one. Those executives you met are part of an elite club, and my grandson will never be a part of it. Exosuits and drones and neural processors are the beginning of the end for the rest of us. In a few years, that club won’t need soldiers, they won’t need farmers, they won’t need those of us who have stayed useful to them. In fact, even now, if you had any idea what sort of next-generation neural processors Joseph Vengerov’s trying to get in here, to prepare for the general population . . . it sends a shudder down my spine. The vast majority of human beings are becoming obsolete, and this security state means we can be treated that way without repercussion. I was a part of this, son, and I owe it to my grandson, to my kids, to do what
I can to tip back the scales in favor of the rest of us. But I have to do it now. And I need your help.”

  Tom eyed him uncertainly. “Sir?”

  “I told you why I recruited you, Raines: we need a different sort of Combatant. We need someone with that instinct to win wars, not just win public support. I can’t beat these people”—he gestured vaguely toward Washington, DC—“but I can nudge them. I need one very effective fighter up there, someone who can win us some ground and whet those executives’ appetites with the spoils of victory, not just the spoils they’ve looted from the public. Show them real victory, and maybe that’ll give me the leverage I need to obtain more Combatants of the type I want, the type that wins wars. I get enough of those, and we can move on that moon. We end this war on our terms, and there’s no telling what’ll happen from there. That means I’m going to need you to do your part and fix the situation with those CEOs.”

  Tom gazed out at the trees. Easier said than done.

  “I don’t care what you think of them. All that matters is, you have an objective—and that’s to get into space. Anything you do from here, Raines, should be oriented toward that objective.”

  “You don’t understand, sir. The companies banned me.”

  Marsh’s eyes flashed to his. “Have you really done everything you can do, Tom? Have you? I know you’re sharp. I wouldn’t be talking to you about this sort of thing if you didn’t have a brain in your head. There’s a reason I’m putting my confidence in you, son: it’s because I know you’ll come through. I know you’ll find a way.”

  Tom wondered why Marsh knew that. Tom didn’t know it himself.

  “You’re going to get one of those companies to put up a few billion sponsoring you, and you’re going to be a Combatant. I believe that to my bones. I expect nothing less of you, Middle.”

  TOM STILL FELT a bit odd when he walked into his bunk later. He’d expected . . . he wasn’t sure. He’d expected to be yelled at, at the very least, or maybe for Marsh to tell him what a failure he’d been.

  Tom stood there in the darkness with the Gormless Cretin statue and the scroll displaying the five “would nots.”

  Marsh had such utter confidence that he’d fix this. There was no reason for it, really. For a moment, the stress grew too overwhelming. Tom closed his eyes, feeling like the entire world was spinning about him, and he was a singularity at the center, absorbing more and more expectation until it was impossible, impossible to escape the crushing mass of it. He knew he couldn’t do it. He’d disappoint Marsh, he’d screw up, and he’d get sucked into that vortex because he was sure Marsh would give up on him, and he’d be done for, he’d be crushed.

  Then he thought of Medusa.

  He opened his eyes.

  Medusa!

  She flared through his brain, and it was like he’d discovered some passage through that vortex, freeing him on the other side. The weight slid away from him like it had never been there, and he understood that there was a way. There had to be a way.

  Medusa had no sponsor. She had none, but she was in space. So it was possible.

  Tom felt something hard and relentless grow inside him, and he looked up at those evaluations, determination surging through him. Sure, he knew she didn’t want him to contact her again, and he knew she’d threatened to blast him if he drew too much attention to them . . . but he’d never been good at heeding threats.

  And then, typing rapidly on his forearm keyboard, he deleted the scroll of failures and gave the statue a massive, deadly sword instead. His fight wasn’t over yet.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IN THE PAST, Tom had used a message board to get in contact with Medusa. Now that he knew she was like him, he didn’t need to. He stretched out on his bed, hooked in, and resorted to his old standby pipeline to the Sun Tzu Citadel: he interfaced with the massive current of power in the Pentagonal Spire’s central processor. He traced the pathway of zeros and ones he’d followed several times before.

  His consciousness jolted into some satellites ringing Earth, with their electronic sensors. It took him effort to focus, to grab on to the next pipeline of signals, and jolt into the satellites ringing Mercury with its palladium mines.

  Back the signals soared to Earth, jolting in the mainframe of the Sun Tzu Citadel, the stronghold of Russo-Chinese trainees. Tom began following the pipelines from one directory to another to another until finally the Russo-Chinese Combatant IPs flickered through his consciousness. He recognized Medusa’s IP and deposited a message he’d prepared in her net-send: I want to talk to you.

  Tom lingered in the Citadel’s systems for a timeless period that he later realized was less than twenty seconds, and her mind appeared on the system.

  A shock jolted through his body, knocking him off the bed. The words STAY AWAY burned across his vision center before fading out.

  Tom lay there, breathless, a bit stung by the rejection, but then determination surged through him. The only thing left to do was try, try again.

  HIS NEXT OPPORTUNITY to contact Medusa came even sooner than he expected: during his first fly-along with Heather Akron.

  Heather probably wouldn’t have been Tom’s first choice, not just because she was in disgrace for smearing the other CamCos to the press but also because he’d had this lingering mistrust of her ever since she handed him over to Karl Marsters to get beaten up his first week at the Spire. His own disgrace meant he probably wasn’t Heather’s first choice, either.

  However, now they had to be a team. Tom was woken by a ping at 0400 one morning, informing him to report to the Helix to meet Heather for a fly-along by 0430. It was his first chance to see a battle in person . . . sort of.

  Tom was so excited, he managed to shower, dress, and get to the ninth floor by 0408. There, his neural processor informed him the battle for today would be in the Reaches.

  Tom knew that the Reaches was that sector of the solar system that spanned from the point of Neptune’s closest orbit to the sun to the Kuiper Belt. It was so far from Earth that every strike in the Reaches had to be planned months in advance, and the side that went on the offensive almost always prevailed. The thing was, there was so much space out there that locating the enemy shipyards and satellites and mining platforms was the trickiest task of all.

  The military worked with NASA to dispatch the armaments necessary for the battle—launching mobile cannons, satellites, and support drones to the site months in advance of a planned engagement. All the plans for strikes in the outer solar system in the next six months to a year were stored in the Vault on the Mezzanine floor of the Spire. The Combatants themselves, like the Middles flying along with them, woke up with the battle plans from the Vault downloaded in their processors the day they were due to attack. Though formal battle plans never survived contact with the enemy in traditional warfare, attacks in the Reaches were often so swift and destructive, the enemy had little chance to engage.

  Soon, a handful of other Middles lucky enough to have their fly-alongs today trickled in. Wyatt was one of them. She looked sallow and grumpy, and didn’t return Tom’s excited greeting. Her scowl deepened when Heather sashayed over to collect Tom and lead him down the corridor.

  Heather looped her arm through his. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Tom assured her.

  “We’ll be using a limited thought interface for this fly-along. You’ll hear me, but you won’t hear the other CamCos.” They stopped outside the door to the Helix Command Center, a winding corridor connecting the ninth and tenth floors where the CamCos hooked into ships in space during battle. “If you have any questions, you can think them out and I may think back an answer to you. I’ll probably be too busy.”

  “Got it,” Tom said.

  Middles weren’t yet authorized for entrance into the Helix, but there were a series of cots that rolled right out of the wall on the ninth floor, outside the entrance, where they could interface for the purpose of the fly-alongs. The Middles were supposed to lie down on them while hooked i
nto the system, sharing their CamCo’s sensory perceptions during the space battle.

  Tom sprawled onto his cot, and Heather began typing authorization codes into her forearm keyboard so he could share her senses.

  Tom’s stomach gave an excited flutter. “Good luck.”

  She shook her head. “Luck’s not a part of it. If we lose a battle in the outer solar system, it’ll be because someone with logistics miscalculated half a year ago and didn’t plot the right course for the drones and weapons to reach the site of battle in time. Or because something’s gone wrong with the satellites and we can’t get real-time communication. Sometimes, it’s because NASA missed a pocket of dust, so the energy beams from the Promethean Arrays don’t reach us.”

  Tom nodded. He knew from Tactics that Promethean Arrays were the devices in the Infernal Zone in close orbit around the sun. They collected energy with their solar panels, focused it in a concentrated beam, and shot it to other devices throughout the solar system. To launch battles in the Reaches, military logistics would send a command for hundreds of Promethean Arrays to shoot energy beams toward the outer solar system, and they’d do so anywhere from forty minutes to thirteen hours in advance, depending upon how far away the site of battle was going to be. The Indo-American vessels in the Reaches were all energy conductive, so when the beams hit, the vessels focused the energy into an atomic reaction. The resulting explosion propelled the ships to the site of battle.

  “The point is,” Heather went on, “we’re not the ones who determine victory when it comes to the Reaches. The Promethean Arrays do.”

  “Good luck, anyway,” Tom said.

  Tom heard Elliot explaining something similar to Wyatt, his own Middle. “There’s not much spontaneity in the Reaches. This will be short. See you on the other side.”

  Heather cast Tom a magnetic smile. “Later, Tom.”

  He felt a jolt in the back of his neck, something hooking into his neural access port. . . .

  And then he was walking through a corridor, blank white walls around him . . . or rather, Heather was, and he was seeing through her eyes. Weird. Where was this?