Catalyst

by S. J. Kincaid

  “Nah, those are sparkles,” Vik said.

  “Why are my sparkle hands not hurting you?”

  Tom repressed his sniggers as he tore off the head of Wyatt’s character. “Because you’re only seeing sparkles because you’re doing the equivalent of pressing all the controls at once. See?” He imitated Yuri’s gesture, making his own character throw sparkles from his hands.

  Vik tried to take advantage of Tom’s sparkling to kill him, but Tom smashed his head in with one punch. Then he put Yuri out of his misery.

  Vik had made a joke of it for a while, going on gaming networks with Yuri’s face as his avatar, the screen name Sparklehands, and then upsetting many gamers by sparkling his hands at them while they tried to have serious battles. Tom liked to do it, too. They’d gotten Yuri’s loss record up to 0–998, and even found some internet message boards speculating on the mental impairment of the mysterious gamer Sparklehands.

  After Tom lost his fingers and began sucking in earnest at video games, he lost most of his enjoyment of the joke. But ever since returning to the Spire, those things that used to bother him seemed like nothing. So minor, it was almost laughable he’d cared once so much about them. The morning of the planned operation, they played the game in what was either a belated celebration of Tom’s seventeenth birthday, or an early celebration of his eighteenth birthday. Perhaps both.

  “At least if we die, we all made it official adulthood, give or take a few months,” Wyatt said.

  Vik laughed. “Way to bring up the mood, Evil Wench.”

  “Positive thinking is important,” Yuri said, even though he was scowling fiercely, his character sparkling away.

  “Thanks anyway,” Tom said with a grin.

  “I’ve gotta admit, I like having a chance at winning,” Vik said, punching Tom’s character several times. “You should’ve lost those fingers years earlier.”

  “Don’t speak too soon,” Tom said lightly, dodging his next blows. He was discovering to his surprise that he wasn’t as awful as he remembered. Maybe it had been a mental block all along. The human brain was a funny thing.

  Wyatt calmly executed the same kick maneuver over and over again. She didn’t like fighting games, but she played them because Tom and Vik did. Her strategy was always the same: perfect one power move and then use it continuously. It was an effective, if irritating, strategy.

  For his part, Yuri gave a frustrated growl. He was still sparkling.

  “As soon as Joseph Vengerov realizes what we’re doing, he’ll send everything he has at us,” Wyatt remarked, drop-kicking Vik’s character again and again. “This may be the last time we’re all still alive.”

  Vik groaned. “Again, way to elevate the mood, Evil Wench. Rule number one of gaming the morning before a suicidally stupid mission is not to bring up said suicidally stupid miss— No, Gormless One!”

  Tom laughed, his character triumphantly holding up Vik’s heart, which he’d torn right out of his chest. “What were you saying, Doctor? I think you need to kiss the ring.”

  “Only once you—” Vik began, but Tom had already torn off Yuri’s head, and then he broke Wyatt’s neck. With a grumble, Vik mimed kissing Tom’s invisible ring. They tossed down the wired gloves, and a sudden silence descended upon Vik’s bunk.

  For a moment, the four friends looked at one another, and Tom found himself wishing they could just stay here, frozen in this moment. The most important people in his world, and the only place he’d ever thought of as home.

  But time marched forward, even now. And there was no holding to a moment already past.

  Tom drew a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

  AS THEY HEADED out of the bunk, Tom said, “We’re off,” knowing Blackburn was probably checking in through the neural link.

  “Good luck,” Blackburn’s voice said in his ear.

  Then Tom reached into his pocket and popped on his remote access node. Medusa’s mind met his in the system. “It’s time.”

  Got it, Medusa replied.

  Tom nodded to Wyatt, and she pressed on her forearm keyboard, unleashing the computer virus she and Blackburn had written.

  The lights all dimmed in the Pentagonal Spire, and suddenly an emergency beacon flashed across everyone’s vision centers.

  Warning: Fission-fusion nuclear reactor is in active meltdown. Noncritical personnel must evacuate.

  They stepped out in the common room of the fourteenth floor to see the CamCos hastily waking up, scrambling to evacuate. No one could see them right now when all four of them were in stealth mode. Down the stairway they walked, soldiers and cadets rushing past them, their neural processors unconsciously steering them around the empty space some part of their brain could perceive was actually occupied, even though their conscious minds never got the message.

  As they passed familiar faces, Tom triggered the memory restoration in the cadets they trusted. He saw Walton Covner and Lyla Martin jerk to a halt on the stairs, the deleted memory rushing back to them along with the instructions they’d written for them.

  Follow the instructions in your processor. We have one shot. If we fail, get out of here, and get the other cadets to escape, too. Obsidian Corp. will send everything they have at the Pentagonal Spire. They’ll kill or reprogram every cadet inside.

  Tom watched them look at each other, then wheel around and rush back up to the stairs to the neural access ports on the twelfth floor. He saw Karl and Yosef dash up the stairs, too, and his heart swelled as more of the cadets who’d pledged to fight with them went to assume their positions. The meltdown warning was clearing the Spire of most every person likely to fight on Vengerov’s side—and locking them out so they couldn’t stop Tom’s allies once the plan was underway.

  Tom, Vik, Wyatt, and Yuri stole into the suborbital planes they’d appropriated and launched into the sky. He peered down to check on Blackburn’s ship, waiting in readiness in case they succeeded, and hoped suddenly that he’d see it land again.

  The Pentagon receded far below them as they rattled up into space for the too-brief trip to Antarctica. Tom was intent on steering, and in the next plane over, Vik and Yuri were following the same course.

  “This has to work,” Tom said, so softly Wyatt couldn’t hear him over the roar of the engine. “I can’t screw this up.”

  Someone could hear him, after all. “You won’t fail,” Blackburn’s voice said in his ear. “You’ll get back in one piece.”

  “I’m planning on it, sir.”

  “And, Tom, I’ll be there with you. You’re not alone this time.”

  Tom knew that. But he still had to swallow down a great lump of anxiety, knowing what lay ahead.

  THE SUBORBITAL SHOOK as they reentered the atmosphere, the jagged coastline of Antarctica shaking toward him. Twice, Tom had come here. He’d almost died both times. The third time was not going to be the charm.

  “Where do we land?” Wyatt said, her voice tense. “We’re going too fast.”

  “We have to go this fast,” Tom told her. “We come in slow, and we get destroyed. Trust me, we can pull this off.”

  “I know you can, but can Vik?” She threw a worried look out the window toward the other suborbital. They’d split up deliberately, because Tom and Wyatt were essential to the operation, and he was the best pilot. Vik was also a great pilot, but he and Yuri were there to help keep them alive.

  “We’ll be okay,” Tom assured her. “A minute from now, we’ll land in the middle of Obsidian Corp.” And it would take some time for Vengerov’s machines to flock to that sector of the building. Tom knew, because as soon as they launched, so did several of the vactrains in the Interstice—all heading toward Obsidian Corp.

  If they’d calculated everything correctly, then as of thirty seconds ago, Vengerov had received an alert that intruders were heading for Obsidian Corp. via the vactube. He’d probably already mobilized his machines to that sector of the building.

  That wasn’t where they were penetrating.

 
But when the complex swerved into sight, Wyatt tensed up. “Medusa didn’t come through. Oh no, Tom, she didn’t. The roof’s intact!”

  Tom scanned the surface as they jolted closer and closer, too fast to abort now. They didn’t have weapons to blast through themselves “Uh, uh, I don’t . . .”

  And then before their eyes, a series of missiles arced down out of the sky and blasted the roof open. Tom and Wyatt flinched instinctively as they sailed through the flames and careened into the complex, but their thrusters fired, propelling them upward when they would have crashed and burned, and Tom seized the controls and maneuvered them down through blasted open floor after floor, descending into the depths of Obsidian Corp., where it tunneled deep into the continent.

  They hit the ground with a ferocious jolt, and then Tom tore off his seat belt and scrambled into the aft compartment where they’d stashed the exosuits.

  Wyatt hastily jumped into hers, adjusting the gas mask, body armor, night vision goggles, centrifugal clamps, and optical camouflage. She jerked. “Oh, the boots! Don’t forget . . .”

  “I know!” Tom fumbled for his own pair of rubber-soled boots, a basic necessity for Obsidian Corp.’s electrically conductive floors.

  Last time, Joseph Vengerov’s complex hadn’t been prepared for human invaders. As Vengerov himself had put it, no one invaded “a building full of killing machines in the middle of Antarctica.” This time, a shrill alarm was already splitting the air and the Praetorians began splicing their lasers at them before Tom and Wyatt escaped the suborbital.

  Tom kicked an exosuited foot at the escape hatch, the enhanced strength breaking it off at the hinges and hurtling it into the nearest combat machine.

  He reached back and seized Wyatt’s arm, then flung her straight over the waiting arsenal of Praetorians, her body a faint ripple in the air. He leaped to the ceiling and clamped there as the machines fired at the space where he’d been. Before they could locate him, Tom shot at the sprinkler system, sending water flooding down from above. The machines and the exosuits were all waterproof, but the floor was not. It began to spark and crackle, and the machines connected with it abruptly halted, sparks blooming from them.

  “Okay?” Tom called to Wyatt, heart in his throat.

  “Okay,” her voice floated back. “I’m on the wall.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They moved like that, Tom hanging from the ceiling with his exosuit and centrifugal clamps, Wyatt on the wall with hers, the Praetorians that had assembled in the hallway beginning to burn on the floors. Overhead, an intercom flared to life, and Vik’s jovial voice piped over the speakers.

  “Attention, all Obsidian Corporation employees: please follow evacuation procedures immediately. We’ve brought more than enough vactrains to get you all out of here. If you don’t get well clear of this building ASAP, you’re going to die. We guarantee you that. Believe us, this is a friendly warning.” And with that, his voice faded away beneath the scream of klaxons.

  Vik’s warning must’ve worked, because as Wyatt and Tom proceeded, they saw that halls normally populated by Obsidian Corp.’s staff were totally empty. They didn’t have time to investigate further, because a flood of drones poured in from the burning tear in the building. Tom and Wyatt had been slower than they’d expected, and they were a heartbeat slower to draw their guns than they should’ve been—but Yuri and Vik appeared in the doorway at the other end of the corridor and blasted at the machines with their rocket launchers, flinging them out of air.

  Tom propelled himself forward to land with a great clang beside them. “Guys?” he said to the invisible space.

  “We’re here,” Vik said.

  Wyatt’s feet clanged beside them. “Here.”

  “Here,” Yuri said.

  They proceeded together down the corridor, sometimes taking shelter away from the floors, sometimes throwing themselves back down when new Praetorians swarmed in, the necks retracting so they could crawl up the walls. Tom and his friends had trained to fight like this since they were fourteen, and this was the first time they’d been able to use it in the real world. This visit to Obsidian Corp., they weren’t sneaking in—they were coming in full force. They shot the Praetorians straight off the walls.

  Even when a Praetorian flooded the corridor with fluorine gas, they were fine—their gas masks firmly in place. And then they reached a neural access port, Obsidian Corp.’s intranet primed and ready for access.

  “This isn’t the same one as last time,” Vik noted.

  “We burned the one from last time,” Tom shot back, preparing his neural wire. “This time we finish the job.”

  Yuri nodded. “It is good to be thorough.”

  “What if he’s deactivated it?” Wyatt said sharply. “He has to know we’re here to access his mainframe.”

  Tom shook his head. Vengerov would have theories about what they were up to, but, no, he wasn’t going to deactivate it, and Tom knew why. He couldn’t tell her. Tom was the reason Vengerov would leave it open.

  The thought shook him more than waves of automated drones intent on killing him had. “You guys have my back?” Tom said, his voice choked.

  “Always,” Vik said.

  Yuri clasped his shoulder, and Wyatt patted his head.

  Tom repressed a smile and reassured himself with one last glimpse of their shimmering forms leveling their guns, waiting for attack. Then he hooked in the neural wire and dove into the system.

  The response was breathtakingly immediate. It was like Tom was sucked down a vortex, his mind jolting into the wrong place, the place where he didn’t want to go ever again. And then there was another consciousness touching his, overcoming his, with a suddenness that made Tom gasp and grip the wall, his stomach clenching up in cold horror at the familiarity of it.

  Hello, Vanya.

  “No. No, no,” Tom moaned, trying to pull back out of the system.

  Stay right here.

  And his processor responded to the command like it was his own. Like it was more than his own. His own fears and terrors had reduced him to listening to this voice over his own, even now.

  Your trick with the Interstice may have pulled the bulk of my machines away, Vengerov noted, but I knew to wait in the system for you. And here you are, come back to me at last. I knew you would.

  Tom tried to tell himself Vengerov wasn’t actually there this time, that he was far away, that they were merely connected over the internet. But Vengerov had been waiting there in the system for him, and his neural processor, so used to yielding neural sovereignty to Vengerov, responded instantly to Vengerov’s test ping, and then the full-on invasion of his consciousness.

  The other mind gripping his felt like a fist, and Tom’s hand flew back instinctively to wrench out the neural wire, knowing this was a mistake, this was a terrible mistake. But Vengerov thought, Don’t do that, and Tom couldn’t, he couldn’t close his fingers.

  And it was like he was back there, and he felt like he was breathing through a straw, and Vengerov crooned in his mind again.

  What are your plans?

  “No,” Tom said out loud, straining to open his eyes, to see his friends. He could just make out the splutter of gunfire, his ears that suddenly felt so distant from him picking up the sounds of a renewed fight, more machines flooding in.

  Don’t look at them. They’ll be gone very soon and it will be you and me again. Just as it should be. Just as it will be again.

  “No. It won’t . . . I won’t l-l-let it . . .” He realized, horrified, that the stutter was creeping into his voice. Like Vanya. Just like Vanya, still at the edges of his mind.

  What are you up to? Vengerov’s thoughts blared again, bending, manipulating his mind, and Tom struggled against it, but Vengerov began to pluck out the fringes of his plan as Tom thought of it.

  The hubs they were going to destroy.

  The file they were going to use to infect the rest.

  Vengerov’s amusement was like a noxious poison. Let’s
see this file . . . His mind flipped through the files in Tom’s processor, and then he said, This one?

  It was a data file they’d written for the occasion. Medusa’s idea: the amendment to the legal code to compel those with Austere-grade processors to damage Obsidian Corp.

  Now that’s not very civilized. Surely you know my human employees are very extraneous. My machines could keep all our operations running without a hitch. Nonetheless, this would be very inconvenient. With that, Vengerov deleted it from Tom’s processor.

  “No!” Tom yelled out, reaching up again for the neural wire.

  Stop that, Vengerov rebuked sharply, and his voice reminded Tom of the hand clamping onto the back of his neck, the restraining node back in place. His brain remembered this too well, remembered the sense of total hopelessness that accompanied this feeling. He couldn’t breathe. He swore he’d fallen back into the enclosure somehow and he couldn’t breathe.

  He tried to look back, to see his friends as they shot anything coming toward them, but Vengerov forced his eyes shut, holding him hostage there alone with him trapped in his mind, threatening to plunge him back there, back to that terrible time.

  You were planning to plant this in my hubs, were you? But there must have been more to your plan than that.

  Then they were soaring through the internet together, Tom’s mind and Vengerov’s will coupled together again. They jolted into the surveillance camera outside one of Vengerov’s hubs in Amsterdam, where the first of the Combatant-controlled ships was soaring in to attack. He felt Vengerov’s laughter in his mind as he comprehended all of it, all of Medusa’s plan.

  Use Combatants to destroy some of the hubs controlling the Austere-grade processors, plant their malware in the remaining hubs, and turn Vengerov’s own Austere-grade-processor-infected people against him. With a flicker of his thoughts, Vengerov forced Tom through the internet to his own air defense, and together, they scrambled Vengerov’s machines to defend that hub.

  How convenient this is, Vengerov thought to Tom. You are simply sending every single drone outside my control in to attack my internet hubs. This saves me the trouble of tracking them down myself.