Vortex

  Minutes later, duffel bag slung over shoulder, Tom walked into the Spire’s lobby. He paused beneath the massive golden eagle with its outstretched wings, then set off down the corridor to the Patton mess hall.

  There, he saw returning trainees, a handful of newly promoted CamCo Combatants, and a dazed-looking new plebe with spiky, short-shorn red hair. She was sitting by herself next to the elevator and mournfully brushing her palm over her scalp. His neural processor immediately pulled up her profile information:

  NAME: Madison Andrews

  RANK: USIF, Grade III Plebe, Genghis Division

  ORIGIN: Connell, Utah

  ACHIEVEMENTS: Chairman of the Utah Federation Young Debater’s Society, member of the Fairness in Voting Youth Committee

  IP: 2053:db7:lj71::369:ll3:6e8

  SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-3

  Tom caught her eye and flashed her a grin. “Don’t worry. Hair grows way faster than it did before the processor.”

  She offered him a shaky smile, and he headed onward toward the massive oil painting of General Patton. There he found what he was looking for. Even though it had only been two weeks, Tom felt a rush of joy at seeing Vikram Ashwan, his best friend. Vik launched himself up from the bench where he’d been waiting; strode over to Tom; and they dropped their bags on the floor between them with simultaneous, decisive thumps.

  “Tom,” Vik announced, his dark eyes dancing crazily, “we are no longer plebes.”

  “We are no longer plebes.”

  Vik gave a solemn nod. “It is time.”

  THE ELEVATOR DOOR parted to admit them to the plebe common room on the fifth floor. Tom and Vik stalked out. They saw all the suddenly nervous plebes, then he and Vik did what they’d been waiting to do since coming to the Spire.

  “All of you,” Vik shouted, “GET OUT!”

  Tom started running around at the plebes, waving his arms in a shooing gesture. “Move, move, move!”

  The plebes jumped to their feet and scrambled out of their own common room, scurrying through the doors of their divisions.

  Tom and Vik slumped down, satisfied, into the now-empty chairs. Tom reflected fondly upon the times he, as a plebe, had been booted from the plebe common room by older trainees. It gave him an incredible sense of accomplishment, realizing he was no longer at the bottom of the Spire’s food chain.

  Vik rubbed his hands together wickedly. “So . . .”

  “So?” Tom said eagerly, hoping Vik had some awesome idea about what to do now that they had the place to themselves.

  They sat there a few seconds.

  “I don’t have any ideas about what we should do now,” Vik finally confessed.

  “Yeah, my thinking only went as far as booting the plebes out.”

  “I want to go stick my bags upstairs. The plebes will come back as soon as we’re gone. Maybe we can kick them out again later once we’ve figured out something we want to do in here.”

  They retrieved their bags, then headed up to the Middle Company floor and into the door with the sword, marked ALEXANDER DIVISION. As they started down the corridor, something astounding happened: they received their assignment to their new bunk. Or rather, bunks.

  Tom and Vik realized it when they started off in opposite directions down the hallway. Tom stopped and whirled around. Vik stopped, too, and raised an eyebrow at him.

  They had different bunks.

  “This can’t be right,” Tom blurted.

  “It happens.”

  Tom stood there, rooted in place. Vik had been his roommate since his arrival at the Pentagonal Spire. He was the first trainee Tom met after his neural processor was installed. It had never occurred to him that they might get split up.

  “I’m just down the corridor, Tom.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Tom made sure to laugh, too, even though it sounded strange to his ears. “Whatever. You know. See you.” He started off again, but the change threw him a lot more than he wanted to let on. Tom did not like change.

  He was almost at his door when Vik’s earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. “Vik?”

  He reached Vik’s doorway as Vik was backing out of it. “Tom,” he breathed, “it’s an abomination.”

  Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too.

  Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik’s bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt’s solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW?

  Tom began to laugh.

  “She didn’t do it to the bunk,” Vik insisted. “She must’ve done something to our processors.”

  That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved.

  He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik’s more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that time Vik got a computer virus that convinced him he was a sheep, and he’d crawled around on his hands and knees chewing on plants in the arboretum. Another was Vik gaping in dismay as Wyatt won the war games.

  “My hands do not look like that.” Vik jabbed a finger at the statue and its abnormally tiny hands. Wyatt had relentlessly mocked Vik for having small, delicate hands ever since Tom had informed her it was the proper way to counter one of Vik’s nicknames for her, “Man Hands.” Vik had mostly abandoned that nickname for “Evil Wench,” and Tom suspected it was due to the delicate-hands gibe.

  Just then, Vik’s new roommate bustled into the bunk.

  He was a tall, slim guy with curly black hair and a pointy look to his face. Tom had seen him around, and he called up his profile from memory:

  NAME: Giuseppe Nichols

  RANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Alexander Division

  ORIGIN: New York, NY

  ACHIEVEMENTS: Runner-up, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition

  IP: 2053:db7:lj71::291:ll3:6e8

  SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4

  Giuseppe must’ve been able to see the bunk template, too, because he stuttered to a stop, staring up at the statue. “Did you really program a giant statue of yourself into your bunk template? That’s so narcissistic.”

  Tom smothered his laughter. “Wow. He already has your number, man.”

  Vik shot him a look of death as Tom backed out of the bunk.

  AS IT TURNED out, Tom had no assigned roommate of his own. He’d never had his own bunk before, not by himself. He spent about twenty minutes sitting in there, trying to figure out what to do with all the new space, wondering what he’d do if Giuseppe replaced him as Vik’s best friend somehow.

  Tom grew annoyed with himself and headed downstairs to the Middle Company primer meeting. As he stepped into the Lafayette Room, he delved into his pocket for his neural wire and upgrade chip. Row after row of benches filled the lecture hall, leading to a massive stage with a podium, a US flag, and a flag with the logos of the Coalition companies that were aligned with Indo-American interests: Epicenter Manufacturing; Obsidian Corp.; Wyndham Harks; Matchett-Reddy; Nobridis, Inc.; and Tom’s least favorite of all, Dominion Agra.

  He glared at that one as he took his place in the row before the stage, where Wyatt Enslow was already waiting.

  “Tom, you didn’t brush your hair today,” she greeted him.

  “Nice to see you, too. How was break?”

  But Wyatt was too distressed by the messy hair iss
ue to answer him. “General Marsh won’t be happy if he sees you. He might yell.”

  “We should wait and see.”

  “Tom, no! Yuri didn’t even get promoted with us, but he brushed his hair today. I saw him.”

  “Maybe that’s why he didn’t get promoted with us. He brushes his hair too much.”

  Wyatt frowned, genuinely perplexed. They both knew Yuri hadn’t gotten promoted because he was suspected of being a Russian spy and consequently had a lower security clearance than everyone else.

  Tom surrendered. “Fine. Okay. Happy?” He pawed at his head, but he was clearly messing it up even more, since Wyatt reached up to claw at his head, too.

  “No, you have to smooth down this right here. . . .”

  “Ow!” Tom exclaimed as she tugged. “Don’t pull it out!”

  Vik swept over to his place beside them. “Enslow, stop assaulting Tom.”

  “I’m not assaulting Tom.” Wyatt smiled wickedly at Vik. “Speaking of assaults, how did you like your bunk?”

  “Glorious,” Vik said dangerously. “I am going to retaliate, you realize. After all, I’m not Tom. I am far from terrible at programming.”

  Tom realized Vik was mocking him. “Hey!”

  “I can actually write a program every so often,” Vik went on, “a program with no nulls, no infinite loops.”

  “I can write programs.”

  “He means programs that actually work,” Wyatt told Tom helpfully. It wasn’t an intentional insult; it was more the Wyatt-type of insult she tended to do by accident. A lot.

  Then the stern-faced, older general Terry Marsh assumed the podium on the stage. His blue eyes surveyed them over his bulbous nose, and all the new Middles lapsed into silence.

  “Trainees.” Everyone snapped to attention at the sound of Marsh’s voice. “First of all, congratulations on your promotions. You are one step closer to Camelot Company. Hook into your neural chips and prepare to download your upgrades.”

  Everyone connected neural wires between their brain stem access ports and the chips they received at their promotion ceremony. Code flashed before Tom’s vision, and an executable file installed itself in his neural processor. A password prompt appeared in the center of his vision.

  Marsh pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket, and propped a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “It says here the password to activate the programs is ‘I can see everything twice! Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four, sixty-six.’”

  Tom thought it out, and code whirled before his vision and abruptly ceased. Content unpacked flashed across his vision center. Tom braced himself for the mental confusion that tended to follow a binge download of too much data without enough processing time, but he found his head completely clear.

  Marsh nodded crisply, seeing that they were all done. “You’ll notice there wasn’t much to that upgrade. There’s a simple reason: Lieutenant Blackburn installed the upgrades before you left for vacation. This password unlocked them. Now, trainees, take a moment to look at the map of the installation and chuck those chips into this bin here for reuse.” He kicked a small box out from behind the podium. All the new Middles tossed their upgrade chips into the container. None missed.

  Then Tom called up a map of the Pentagonal Spire in his neural processor. The familiar blueprint of the installation glowed across his vision center, showing fifteen floors of chrome and steel launching up from the dead center of the old Pentagon, but when he zoomed in to gaze inside the building, Tom found himself shaking his head. That couldn’t be right.

  The Spire had changed. The Calisthenics Arena encircling the interiors of the second, third, and fourth floors now contained a massive room labeled ARMORY.

  That wasn’t possible. He’d seen the upper floor of the Calisthenics Arena dozens of times. There was no armory there. He was sure of it.

  And then he looked over the other new sections: entire wings for military regulars stationed in the Spire, an observation deck on the twelfth floor, sections of wall containing power relays or processor parts, and below the basement level of the Spire, there was a brand-new floor labeled Mezzanine.

  Wait. He couldn’t have overlooked an entire floor for the last six months!

  “You’ll notice there are new areas to the Spire,” Marsh noted. “These aren’t actually new. They were always there. Your eyes saw them, your ears heard about them, but we blocked them from your conscious brain—rendered them in a sort of stealth mode in your processor. Certain sensitive personnel are also locked out of your processors. As plebes, you hadn’t earned liberty of these areas of the installation. Now you have. This is a sign of our confidence in you.”

  Tom found his eyes straying over the Mezzanine, seeing the passageway leading to the fission-fusion reactor. So that’s where that was. Another passage led to something labeled INTERSTICE.

  “You Middles may not all progress,” Marsh said, “and you may not all become Combatants, but you didn’t wash out as plebes and get those processors removed, so congratulations, you’re already a step ahead. You got promoted as plebes because you didn’t prove yourselves unsuitable for life here. You will get promoted as Middles if, and only if, we think you belong in Upper Company.”

  Wyatt raised her hand, then dropped it quickly, remembering this wasn’t like a classroom. At Marsh’s nod, she blurted, “Sir, if we’ve had areas blocked from our processors, how do we know there aren’t other things in the installation we can’t see?”

  Sniggering from the other side of the room. General Marsh gave a stern head shake, then said to Wyatt severely, “If there are, Ms. Enslow, you will find out in due time when we decide we want you to see them.”

  Wyatt fell silent.

  Then Marsh went on, “You’ll all have your first meet and greets with Coalition executives this Friday. Even those of you who don’t become Combatants down the road will find this a useful networking opportunity if you play your cards right.”

  Tom’s thoughts flickered to Dominion Agra. He’d flooded sewage on their entire executive board, so that was one company that would never sponsor him. He could use this chance to make a better impression with the other companies.

  As soon as they were dismissed, Tom’s mind turned back to that armory. His gaze shot to Vik’s. Tom could see the same eager spark in his eyes.

  “Guns?” Vik asked him, obviously ready to go to the armory right away.

  “Weapons,” Tom agreed.

  They realized only when they neared the door that Wyatt wasn’t with them.

  “Wyatt?” Tom called to Vik.

  Vik spun around, looked behind them, then answered that question with a single name. “Blackburn.”

  One word, but it was enough to send an unpleasant jolt through Tom’s body like he’d been shocked by another Taser. His gaze swung around to see Wyatt and Lieutenant James Blackburn. Tom’s heart began thumping, adrenaline and hostility surging through him as he saw the large, hard-faced lieutenant with close-cropped hair and a scarred cheek leaning over Wyatt, saying something to her. He wasn’t sure when Blackburn had slipped into the Lafayette Room, but he’d obviously called Wyatt over for a quick talk by the opposite doorway.

  Tom’s vision tunneled into a single focus point.

  This was the man who’d tried to rip his brain apart. Tom’s every survival instinct began blaring an alarm. Blackburn and Wyatt had had a falling out of sorts when Blackburn thought she’d hacked his personnel file and told people private things the trainees weren’t supposed to know about him.

  Now they were talking again. Tom’s head spun. When had this happened? How had he missed it? Blackburn reached down and clasped Wyatt’s shoulder with a big hand. Tom didn’t like this. Not at all.

  Vik lightly whapped the back of his head. “Doctor, guns!”

  “Right, Doctor.” Tom grinned at his fellow Doctor of Doom. They weren’t real doctors, of course, but they’d called each other this ever since the war games. “Weapons.”

  It was har
d to force himself toward the door when all he wanted to do was charge over and shove his worst enemy away from one of his best friends.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT WAS GLORIOUS.

  The armory stood like some miniature fortress in the middle of the track, obstacles, climbing walls, and shallow pools. When they crossed through the door into the armory’s depths, they found themselves in a narrow corridor. Each step carried them past racks dangling armor and other accessories such as optical camouflage suits to render a soldier invisible. There were guns of all types, some that Tom’s neural processor identified, some it would not. At the end of the hall, a massive platform rested at shoulder height on top of it. Tom and Vik saw row after row of aluminum-and-steel machines that resembled exoskeletons, like a small army of headless androids ready to go all artificial-intelligence-doomsday scenario on them.

  Tom and Vik gazed up in mute reverence, vaguely aware of other newly promoted Middles walking in, exclaiming over the sight, then leaving again. Soon no one else remained, leaving them to contemplate the wonders around them. Tom wanted to test shoot every one of the guns, don all the armor, and go all out against an alien invasion, or maybe against those metal skeleton things.

  Vik gingerly lifted a small cylinder that resembled some sort of handheld cannon. “Look at this.”

  “I’m not sure what that sucker is, but I’m going to call him ‘Big Bob,’” Tom said approvingly.

  “Your head could fit in the muzzle of this thing,” Vik said, awestruck. “Seriously. Come on and let’s see.”

  “I’m not sticking my head in a cannon thing. Stick your own head in.”

  “I have highly temperamental hair. It’ll get nestlike. You don’t care when your hair gets nestlike, Tom. You can’t possibly.”

  Tom wasn’t listening, because he was reaching out to pick up another intriguing weapon of terrible death. His neural processor informed him it was a miniature electromagnetic pulser. For some reason, the knowledge this thing could fry a neural processor made it all the more exciting for him. Visions of firing it at Karl Marsters danced through his head.