Vortex
You’re not authorized to see the Helix yet, Heather thought to him, so this is all censored.
Heather smoothed her tunic, and Tom grew uncomfortably aware of her in that way he did quite often. He wondered why she’d leaked that stuff about the other CamCos when she could’ve gotten all the attention she wanted being herself, looking like herself. . . .
How do you know about that?
He’d forgotten she was tuned into his thoughts. Desperately, Tom thought, 1 . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 5 . . . Wyatt telling me about Heather . . . Wait. Wait, did I—
Enslow told you? There was nothing for a moment. How does she know?
Come on, Heather.
People are making such a big deal of this, Heather thought. Like the others wouldn’t have done it if they’d thought of it. Wait, I thought that. Tom, I was tricked. Those reporters tricked me. You have to know that, right? Silence, and, So was it Enslow who found out about it?
The Fibonacci sequence hadn’t worked, so Tom tried his own means of controlling his thoughts: Heather’s boobs. It worked. The subject consumed his mind and kept it away from Wyatt.
Heather thought, Boys are such idiots, and stopped prying.
He watched through her eyes as her hand plucked up a silvery metal star. Her slim fingers twisted a dial in the very center, and the points lit, projecting some sort of bright, thin white beams to form a glowing pentagon around the metal star. And then, Tom felt her hooking it into the back of her neck like a neural wire.
The flash of consciousness to the distant vessel was instantaneous. Quantum-entangled photons in the ship’s CPU instantly responded to the actions of their paired photons in the Spire’s CPU. The vessel’s sensors registered in Heather’s awareness like an extension of her own body, and since Tom was hooked in with her, he felt it, too. For a moment, Tom marveled at this, at how it all felt so much more vivid than the drone he’d interfaced with at Capitol Summit or even the way he’d interface and leap system to system himself. . . .
Tom?
He was vaguely aware of the jerk in his distant body, the awareness he’d been thinking about that and he wasn’t sure how much she heard with a limited thought interface. But even now she was hearing some of this, and Tom needed to stop thinking about it.
Tom, what are you— It’s starting.
The bright pulse of a Promethean Array’s electromagnetic beam streaked past. It was the warning pulse, which meant a second pulse was incoming. Heather’s ship burned away its tiny store of metallic hydrogen fuel to soar forward into position, and then the Promethean Array’s next beam hit the rear plates of her ship—and Tom felt a massive charge of intense but incredible heat as the nuclear reaction triggered, exploding against the back plate of the ship and launching them forward into the black canopy of space.
One by one, the other vessels positioned themselves behind Heather’s. The electromagnetic pulses hit them, triggering atomic reactions—and something else, too. The ships were conductive. They used energy as propulsion but also conducted it forward so the ships behind Heather’s accelerated and, at the same time, shot energy forward and caused her vessel to accelerate even faster. Tom was aware of Heather’s neural processor tracking how much energy the ship could tolerate, her ship in the lead of the cascade formation, the fastest.
One command of Heather’s thoughts, and the vessel shifted out of acceleration mode, so instead of triggering atomic reactions, the energy directly charged her own electromagnetic weapons. Then she dispersed some of the incoming energy by firing it at the distant weapons launched by NASA six months before, on their own intercept course. They were so far away, the camera eye of the ship couldn’t detect them, but Heather’s processor knew exactly where they would be in space and tagged them at the right spot to nudge them on their final course toward the battle. She really did have the most important role in the battle, Tom realized.
And then as they neared the Russo-Chinese shipyard, she shifted the pendulous weight of the vessel so they began to spiral toward the battle site, first large circles, then smaller ones, their momentum slowing down and down. Her sensors began to read the shipyard, began to detect the incoming automated weapons, and a retinue of Indian vessels began to cascade in to join the attack as well. The shipyard rolled into sight as the asteroid it was carved into rotated toward them.
This is when I do as much damage as possible before I become flack, she thought sourly to Tom, blasting with her weapons at the shipyard, maneuvering into the right position—and the first Russo-Chinese automated weapons came to life and targeted her. Heather had timed it right, though. As her ship was blasted apart, the debris became kinetic weapons of their own—spiraling out and crashing into the shipyard, missing the incoming American forces.
Tom was eager to see more, so as he was jolted back into his body, he tore straight back out of it, back into the Spire’s processor core, and followed the pipeline of signals currently lighting up the Pentagonal Spire’s systems, trying to find his way through the flashing data back into the battle. . . .
And then with a jolt, he found himself gazing through the sensors of Elliot Ramirez’s ship. Far away from the battle, still, and definitely too far to even pick anything up on his sensors.
We’re a bit slower than the others. . . . Elliot was explaining to Wyatt as they rotated in large, languid loops toward the shipyard.
Yeah. That was a way of putting it. How boring, being the rear.
To his alarm, Elliot thought, I’m sorry to bore you, Wyatt. It will be better once we’re fighting in the inner solar system.
Tom leaped out of Elliot’s ship swiftly, back into the processor core, and ventured into the storm of activity again.
This time, he found himself in Karl Marsters’s ship.
Explosions are pretty, Karl was thinking as he spliced through the reactor core of the Russo-Chinese shipyard. I like making stuff explode.
Tom thought about what an idiot Karl was.
Idiot? You’ll see an idiot when I beat your face in, Giuseppe! Now stop thinking. You’re ruining my concentration! Karl thought at his Middle.
Tom shot through the stream of data away from Karl, back into his own body. Much as he’d love to mess with Karl or the others, it was too risky venturing through the thought streams, leaking his own thoughts.
But there were other ways to get there. Automatic armaments, satellites, all that machinery not meant for a neural processor.
Those machines accessible to his processor.
He shot from system to system in the Pentagonal Spire. Finally as the battle was winding down, he jolted into one of the Indo-American automated weapons, not designed for a direct neural interface.
This weapon was spiraling off course. Soon it would be too far away, no use to the battle. Tom seized control of it and used its sensors to monitor the battle. Then he couldn’t resist: he fired some shots. He targeted the Russo-Chinese Combatants very deliberately, trying not to betray the human consciousness behind the weapon. One short jolt of his particle beam clipped a ship and knocked it off course, veering it right into the path of Yosef Saide, who blasted it to pieces. Another shot, Tom fired in the path of an enemy vessel; its automated system veered to the side, forcing the ship behind it to slow, giving Indo-American Combatants more than enough time to blast it apart with their own weapons.
He was able to see through its electromagnetic sensors the way the Russo-Chinese automated drones began to shift course, beginning to take on a life of their own as human Combatants hooked in to respond to the American assault. Tom began to search for her, for that one person.
That’s how, through a hail of flak, streaks of particle beams, and explosions, Tom finally clapped electronic eyes on Medusa again.
Not Medusa herself, of course, but Medusa’s consciousness inhabiting some Russo-Chinese vessels. He saw Medusa’s ships glinting with sunlight, veering to confront the Indo-American vessels. Three . . . four . . . five of them, all in her control, all engaging di
fferent enemies.
Tom couldn’t help it. He couldn’t. He aimed the last bit of energy of the half-crippled weapon at Medusa and blasted at her, slashing the beam through space in an elaborate M. It was the closest thing to a “hi” he could muster.
Medusa responded with the fury of every single automated weapon in his proximity, all wheeling around, inexplicably abandoning their preprogrammed attack patterns and blasting at him.
Tom jolted back into himself as his weapon was destroyed, an ecstatic laugh bubbling on his lips. He’d missed her.
He soared back out of his body, seizing control of one automated weapon after another. One was a particle cannon, sparking with its last moments of existence. He burned a single thruster to insert it into the path of the Russo-Chinese Combatant he knew as Blinder. As soon as Blinder exploded, Medusa destroyed Tom’s cannon.
Tom zoomed back up into space, returning to the battle. Next, he seized a fully functional Indo-American weapon, and located Sturmovik, an annoying Russian Combatant who always charged straight forward, never maneuvering, never taking evasive action, firing at targets as they neared and trusting the other Russo-Chinese Combatants to do the work of protecting him. Tom found the lack of imagination aggravating whenever he saw feeds of the battles.
Now he parodied Sturmovik’s strategy by seizing control of a mobile artillery unit and mimicked Sturmovik with it—flying the mobile gun straight at Sturmovik’s ship. Sturmovik didn’t turn; it didn’t turn. They were on a collision course. At the last minute, Sturmovik seemed to realize no one was saving him here, and he tried to feint, but Tom’s weapon tore straight into his hull.
Medusa blasted him to pieces again, and this time before Tom could dive back into the system and return to the battle, his neural wire popped out and his eyes shot open. He found Heather standing over his cot.
“Normally I’d have several more drones up there, ready for me to interface with,” Heather said, as Tom squinted against the brightness. “But, as you know, I’ve had some reputation issues lately, and Wyndham Harks only footed the bill for one drone this time. Now . . .” She smiled coyly. “Check your chronometer, Tom.”
“Why . . .” Tom sat up blearily, then he went still when he saw the time on his internal chronometer. He began flipping from frame to frame of his memory, cross-referencing them with the time stamps, and realized from the moment Heather’s ship reached the site of battle, to the moment of his final obliteration, a mere thirty seconds had passed.
Tom gaped at the time in shock.
No wonder. No wonder Combatants needed neural processors. There wasn’t a human being on Earth who could keep up with that sort of speed.
“Wow,” Tom murmured. “We’re superhuman. We’re actually superhuman.”
Heather winked. “Puts it into perspective, right?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE MALFUNCTIONS HAD spread outside the simulation chambers. A few high-ranking generals came for a status update with General Marsh, and the trainees they passed reacted as if to some terrible stench—clutching their hands over their noses and running away. As more trainees reacted to the high-ranking generals the same way, Marsh signaled Blackburn, who isolated the exotic computer virus before it spread through the entire system. Nevertheless, the generals were disgruntled over it, and it became a black eye for General Marsh—and for Blackburn himself, especially when he couldn’t find the source of the virus.
Blackburn was in a thunderous mood because of all the chaos. The programs were maliciously playful enough to make him suspect one of the trainees, but according to Wyatt, Blackburn also thought that might be a ploy, too, to throw off suspicion from someone else. It wasn’t a stretch to guess who had motive to see Blackburn fired. Obsidian Corp. had already put out feelers with the Senate Defense Committee, seeking a return to their old role of software writing at the Pentagonal Spire—citing the recent software issues as evidence it was necessary.
Blackburn began watching Tom more than usual, like he suspected him of having some hand in the breaches. Then again, Tom wondered uneasily if Blackburn had an idea of what he’d been up to. Medusa still hadn’t responded to him, so he tried annoying her by returning to the Citadel’s systems and planting the Gnomes virus right into her neural processor. Then he headed to Calisthenics. They went through the usual routine for Monday morning, with Blackburn guiding them through marching drills and an exercise where they reached down with exosuited hands and picked objects up, then put them back down.
Tom spent the whole time thinking of Medusa as Vik smashed a cantaloupe between his metal fingers, and Blackburn said, “Congratulations, Ashwan, you set off that bomb. Now you’re dust.”
Then they got to experiment with metallic instruments that looked like irons for pressing clothes. They were called centrifugal clamps. One flip of a button, and the internal centrifuge activated, adhering the clamp to any nearby surface. Wyatt used them to climb all the way up a wall, then she got stuck, since she was too anxious to climb back down, even with a half-dozen people below her ready to catch her. Tom started climbing up to give her a piggyback ride down, but Blackburn ordered him to the ground. Then he started after her. Blackburn reached her side at the top of the wall, spoke quietly to her, and they started down side by side, one clamp at a time.
Tom was the last to stash his exosuit at the end of Calisthenics. Most trainees lowered the hanger, stepped onto it with the exosuit, then climbed out. Tom usually skipped the lowering-the-hanger part and jumped on top of it while it was still high, then took the suit off. Whenever he caught him, Blackburn gave him a weekend of restricted libs and scut work detail—cleaning around the Spire—but Tom did it, anyway.
Just as Tom popped his exosuit off today, a surprising thing happened: one of the suits came to life on its own, and two metal, exoskeletal hands shot down, seized him by the upper arms, and hoisted him up into the air. Tom gasped in shock, legs kicking out wildly, and words flared before his vision.
WHY DO I KEEP SEEING ANGRY GNOMES?
Tom managed a grin where he was dangling, his initial worry about an AI doomsday scenario fading away, replaced by glee that he’d finally gotten his reply. “You’re here! It’s so great you’re here!” he said to the air.
STOP sending gnomes. I mean it!
Tom laughed, giddy. The hand wasn’t crushing him, just giving him a scare. “Medusa, meet me online.”
I do not want to talk to you. Stop trying to contact me.
“Online. Once. Only once. Hear me out.”
No. You don’t know what you’re doing, Mordred. Stay out of our system. If I see gnomes again, I will come back here and kill you.
“Nah, I don’t think so. You might kill me one day, but it won’t be over gnomes.”
You underestimate how annoying it is seeing them everywhere!
“No,” Tom said honestly. “I know exactly how annoying it is. But I still believe you won’t kill me over it. People kill over money and power and love, but no one kills over gnomes.”
I AM NOT JOKING!
“Neither am I. Meet me. Come talk to me, and I’ll leave you alone.”
The machine drew him up closer, so he was staring into the empty space where eyes might’ve been. You promise me one thing. Swear it to me: you won’t interface with the Citadel’s systems again. Then I’ll come.
“I swear,” Tom said.
The machine released him so abruptly, he tumbled right off the hanger and smacked to the floor. Tom pulled himself to his feet, eyes on the exosuit, but it had gone totally immobile. Medusa had left the system as quickly as she’d come.
TOM’S NEXT FLY-ALONG with Heather was supposed to be an easy mission, a milk run. It was the rare day when Vik, Tom, and Wyatt all had their fly-alongs together. A handful of American Combatants and India-based Combatants were guarding harvesters, those ships that collected hydrocarbons from the atmospheres of gaseous bodies such as the atmospheres of Jupiter’s moons.
Heather took advantage of the oppo
rtunity to pry into Tom’s thoughts.
I’m ninety-nine percent sure Enslow is the one who told Marsh what I was doing. You can tell me if it was. I want to know, she thought to him as they did a slingshot around Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.
Can’t you get over it? Tom wondered.
She ruined my career, Heather almost snarled back in his thoughts.
Heather ruined her own career, he couldn’t help thinking. Wyatt just noticed what was happening. Then he winced at what his thoughts had betrayed.
Heather thought, Ha! So it was Enslow! I’ll destroy her for this.
No, you won’t, Tom thought. Wyatt may seem like a wimp, but, trust me, you don’t wanna mess with her.
They were both distracted when the harvesters ahead of them stumbled into a Russo-Chinese minefield. The Combatants snapped into action, firing their thrusters to place themselves between the mines and the harvesters. The mines locked onto their vessels and accelerated toward them, so the CamCos veered toward Europa’s surface, until gravity tore the mines down to burst against the massive ice layer.
Tom found himself gazing at that moon. Along with the underground of Mars, it was one of these spots in the solar system suspected of harboring microscopic life. Just suspected, though. Since they were both such strategically valuable, resource-rich territories, the Coalition shut down any efforts to actually test the territories for life. After all, it would be way too inconvenient, dealing with massive public protest if somehow the war eradicated the only life found to exist elsewhere in the solar system.
They completed their slingshot around Europa, launching straight toward Jupiter to catch up with the harvesters.
We’ll slingshot around Jupiter again to get some momentum for the return trip to the talons, Heather thought.
Right, Tom thought, mind flickering to those magnetized talons there to serve as collection points for spent drones to await refueling and future use.