Catalyst

by S. J. Kincaid

  “Go to hell!” Tom shouted.

  I’ve missed this, Vengerov thought. You are such an efficient shortcut. We bypass hours of work in seconds.

  “I hate you,” Tom cried, his fists clenched so hard his hands throbbed, fury seething through him.

  But Vengerov forced them through the network to the next hub, and then the next. On and on they went, Vengerov checking to see which ones were under attack, and scrambling his machines to defend those, then checking the next hub.

  Why haven’t your friends tried to break the connection? Vengerov wondered. They must know something is wrong . . . unless they’re dead.

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Tom. He hadn’t realized while trapped with Vengerov in his own mind, interfacing this system, Vik, Wyatt, and Yuri might have been killed.

  Vengerov tried to force his eyes open to see, but this time, Tom was the one fighting to keep them closed. It was the first moment Tom felt doubt touch Joseph Vengerov. The first time ever.

  With a push of his thoughts, Vengerov forced Tom’s eyes open, and then he saw with Tom’s eyes Wyatt tugging the neural wire out of Tom’s access port. “Is it done?” she whispered to Tom. “Did he take you to a bunch of them?”

  What? Vengerov thought.

  Tom couldn’t help it. He couldn’t. He started laughing, and with a surge of vindictive glee, he said aloud, “You want to tell him or should I?”

  The other person connected to his mind reared up, making his presence known to Vengerov. Lieutenant Blackburn’s voice chided in Tom’s ear, “Really, Joseph. You could have taken the time to check your actual security cameras instead of relying on the sensory perception of a kid whose brain I’m linked to.”

  Suspicion crashed over Vengerov, and with a flicker of thought, he dragged Tom back to the first internet hub, where he’d spotted Medusa’s incoming attack and deployed his machines there in defense.

  Tom wasn’t afraid, and he wasn’t resisting, because Blackburn had promised him this moment and it was so sweet experiencing Vengerov’s anxiety, gazing through the external surveillance cameras outside the Amsterdam internet hub. Through Tom’s vision center, Vengerov saw his ships soaring in to engage Medusa’s . . .

  And then Blackburn stopped manipulating Tom’s vision center, removing the illusion of attacking ships, giving Vengerov a long look at the way there were no ships attacking the hub, only Vengerov’s ships prepared to defend it.

  Tom felt Vengerov’s mind making sense of it, realizing Tom’s vision center had been tricked into seeing an attack on all his hubs—and he had believed it.

  For once, Tom tried to stay connected to Vengerov for as long as possible, glad to experience along with Vengerov the moment he realized he’d scattered the bulk of his aerial firepower throughout the world to defend against an illusory attack, all because of a deception in Tom’s vision center. He no longer had the advantage of overwhelming force ready for instant deployment anywhere in the world. His ships were spread thin, far from the Spire, the Citadel.

  Tom got to experience along with him the next realization: that he’d led Tom from internet hub to hub, and even though he’d deleted the decoy virus from Tom’s neural processor, Wyatt had been feeding something else into Tom’s neural processor.

  Tom laughed out loud and didn’t fight as Vengerov frantically searched the Amsterdam hub and located the new piece of malware Wyatt had installed there.

  The programs had been transmitted to all the Austere-grade processors connected with that hub. Vengerov accessed the video file of a beaming Elliot Ramirez, a message that adjusted to the dominant language of the person watching it.

  Tom had seen Elliot record it. He knew what it said.

  “Hello! You may know me as Elliot Ramirez, former US Intrasolar Combatant.” Elliot nodded solemnly. “You’re probably very confused right now about what this message is doing in your mind. You’re probably wondering why you’re suddenly sure someone has implanted a computer in your brain without your consent. You are not crazy, and everyone around you is seeing the same thing you are. The truth is, there has been a computer implanted in your brain. A neural processor.”

  They’d thought Elliot recording it would be a good idea. He’d be a familiar face to most anyone in the world, anywhere.

  “I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” Elliot said, “and they’ll be answered in time, but for now, you are all needed. This computer was forced on you by Joseph Vengerov of Obsidian Corporation in an effort to control your mind, and there are people at this very moment working to free you. In order to do so, we need to find a vulnerability in our processor’s code so we can disable one particular function.”

  When Vengerov saw the function Elliot was referring to, shock flooded him, because he had to recognize it instantly as the fail-safe that stopped anyone with a Vigilant-grade neural processor from destroying him.

  Those with Austere-grade processors couldn’t break the law in the most literal sense. That stopped them from ever being a threat to him, from ever killing him. Those with Vigilant-grade processors weren’t a threat because of a single segment of source code.

  Nothing stopped those with Austere-grade processors from helping them disable that segment of source code. They couldn’t kill Vengerov themselves, but they could free up people with Vigilant-grade processors to do it.

  “If you can’t help us find a vulnerability in our code,” Elliot went on, “then help us spread this message to someone who can. We can’t get to all the internet hubs in the world, but you can transmit this to those you know. Instructions are in your processor. Send it to everyone you know, especially people in different geographic regions. Tell them to send it on as well. We are the greatest legion of minds this world has ever seen. We’ve given everyone working knowledge of Zorten II, so if you can locate any vulnerability that will let us modify one particular fail-safe function, send it to us—you know how, it’s in your processor—and we will bring this to an end.”

  Vengerov was stunned as Elliot’s message faded. Tom could feel it, could feel Vengerov’s mind racing over the implications of this. If someone located a vulnerability in the code that allowed them to disable the fail-safe—and with so many people working on it, someone inevitably would—then anyone with a Vigilant-grade neural processor would be a threat to him.

  He had to kill them all first.

  He’d destroy the Pentagonal Spire and the Sun Tzu Citadel and the Kremlin Complex and the trainees in Bombay . And the four in Obsidian Corp. . . . They must’ve anticipated he’d respond by killing those with Vigilant-grade processors, and that’s why they’d scrambled his forces, to buy time.

  Tom heard it all moving through his head, knowing it was all true, and then Blackburn’s voice reminded him, “Tom, where?”

  Tom didn’t have to wonder what he was asking. He shot through his connection to Vengerov’s mind before the other man could react, and for a moment he had a glimpse of the world through Vengerov’s eyes—seeing the vessel he was in, snatching one fleeting glimpse of the stars outside the nearest window.

  For a moment, all three men registered the importance of this—Vengerov, aware that Blackburn would be the first to receive the countercode, Blackburn glorying in seeing exactly where he would find Vengerov once he had it, Tom knowing this was about to end one way or another.

  Then Vengerov broke the connection and Tom found himself in the middle of Obsidian Corp. For a moment it was like he’d stumbled into a scene from hell, poison gas curling in the air around them, the alarm still shrilling earsplittingly loud, the overhead lights fizzling where they’d been blown out, fire licking up the walls, and shots thundering from Yuri’s machine gun as a small drone tore out of the cloudy air. Drifts of gas and smoke cleared, revealing the glint of more Praetorians and automated machines like a relentless horde pressing into the hallway, the splintered metal debris of the destroyed security bots littered across the shorted-out floors.

  “Enough?” Tom shouted to Blackbur
n, hoping he could hear it through the neural link. He was sure that glimpse of the stars and their position would be enough to tell him Vengerov’s coordinates.

  “Enough. Get out of there now,” Blackburn ordered.

  Just then, the ceiling burst, and a new wave of drones poured through in a great torrent of flashing metal. Tom used his neural wire and shot back into Obsidian Corp.’s system, ordering the Praetorians to engage them as their new targets. Then he and his friends sprinted away in their exosuits as Joseph Vengerov’s machines obliterated one another.

  Yaolan had flown in two Russo-Chinese ships to wait for them on the ice. As soon as Tom and Wyatt shot off, Vik and Yuri’s ship just ahead of them, Tom signaled Vik. Now, he net-sent.

  The Interstice hadn’t only been used as a distraction. They’d smuggled something very specific onto one of the vactrains: a hydrogen bomb now nestled under Obsidian Corp. From the other fleeing ship, Vik detonated it.

  The nuclear explosion was so far underground that no light reached the surface, only the flames that followed, bursting like a flower opening across the glaciers, and for a moment as they rose higher in the air, it loomed over the landscape like a burning cigarette butt. And then the glacial landscape of Antarctica caved in around the remains of Obsidian Corp., and Earth swallowed the last of the complex into its fiery depths.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  JOSEPH VENGEROV WAS out for blood. Vik and Yuri’s ship disappeared into the vivid sky over Antarctica, but Tom and Wyatt found themselves besieged by a hail of missiles from distant carriers controlled by Vengerov.

  Tom pinwheeled them out of a line of fire, only to find g-forces crushing them. Flying a clunky suborbital wasn’t nearly as easy as using his neural processor to steer a drone.

  “Get us higher,” Wyatt urged him, her breath coming in panicked gasps.

  Tom aimed them skyward. Vengerov had more armaments in orbit, so he dared not take them out of the atmosphere.

  “I don’t see Vik and Yuri,” Wyatt said.

  Tom tried not to think about that. Hopefully, that meant they were getting away. Hopefully Vengerov was concentrating firepower on him personally—one of the culprits directly responsible for spreading Zorten II to all the Austere-grade processors.

  Speaking of which . . .

  As the assault thinned out, Tom relinquished the controls to Wyatt to net-send Blackburn. Anyone reply yet?

  Through the neural link, an image flashed in his vision center, and awe swept over Tom, seeing the messages filter in from all over the world. Bangladesh, Japan, Brazil, Tennessee, Sudan . . .

  “Some claim they’ve not only found zero-day exploits, they’ve offered solutions to disabling the fail-safe. I’m testing the code on a virtual processor,” Blackburn’s voice said in his ear. “Whether any of them will show results, that’s up for question. Where are you?”

  Tom leaned over to peer out the window at the landscape far below them as they moved through the high atmosphere, just where the sky was beginning to drain from deepest blue to pitch-black.

  “Don’t try to come back here,” Blackburn warned him. “He’s concentrating his attack on the Spire and the Citadel.”

  He sent an image to Tom’s vision center, the mechanized drones Vengerov controlled converging outside the Spire. The drones Blackburn’s code had seized control of over the years were all active now, at the command of CamCos and Intrasolar cadets on the fourteenth floor, all rushing out to engage.

  For a moment, Tom watched the firefight begin right over the Pentagonal Spire, the heart of the US military, and he saw that this was a close matchup. If they hadn’t scattered Vengerov’s forces with the deception about the internet hubs, they would have descended on them with overwhelming firepower. They’d have no chance.

  At least now, the odds were even.

  And Tom and Wyatt would have no chance in this unarmed ship. “So we hide?” Tom asked.

  “Hide,” Blackburn agreed. “And . . . there it is.”

  Tom was focused inward, seeing Blackburn test the countercode again, hearing his dark, triumphant laugh when the code transmitted by someone in Argentina neutralized Vengerov’s self-preservation algorithm.

  “Is that it?” Tom breathed.

  “Yes. Have a present.”

  And then the code streamed straight into Tom’s processor, and a realization swept over him in a great, dizzying wave that if Joseph Vengerov were standing right in front of him, Tom could shoot him in the head—no algorithm holding him back.

  “Share it with everyone just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “You know what,” Blackburn said. “I can’t send a drone. That’s an entirely different fail-safe. This has to be done manually.”

  Tom knew Blackburn had a ship ready specifically for this instance, prepared to slip out while the other vessels were tied up in battle—and put to the test the theory he could kill Vengerov himself. But he might not make it. He might fail.

  “Make sure it’s not necessary,” Tom told him.

  Then the neural connection between them faded—all before Tom could wish him good luck. He looked at Wyatt, her worried profile pinched, and with a few taps on his forearm keyboard, he shared the code with her.

  They began their descent through a layer of clouds. “I think we lost them,” Wyatt said. She was silent a long moment, then, “Lieutenant Blackburn’s going himself, isn’t he? To kill Vengerov, I mean.”

  Tom thought of that ship waiting in readiness at the Pentagonal Spire. The missiles they’d loaded onto it the day before. “Yeah, he is. He’s been working for this since before we were born, Wyatt.”

  “It’s sad.”

  “What, Vengerov dying?” Tom said harshly. “He deserves worse than a few missiles.”

  “I mean, having nothing else. Living just to make sure someone else dies. All those years and never finding something else to make it all worthwhile.” She leaned her head against the window. “It’s sad.”

  There was nothing Tom could really say to that. “At least we made it—”

  But Wyatt saw something on her monitor that made her sit bolt upright. “INCOMING!”

  The world exploded.

  The air became a slab of concrete crushing him against his seat, his own shouts lost beneath the roar of the dying engine, under the shriek of splintering metal, the air roaring by them. His stomach was in his throat and Tom forced his eyes open against the pummeling wind to see the flames above them and the great, jagged gash ripped into the ceiling over their heads, sky swirling in a dizzying circle, a Centurion controlled by Vengerov twisting about to fire at them again.

  And he felt Wyatt’s hand locked on his, and his eyes rushed over to meet hers in the blinding instant as the rain forest below became a green blur swirling up toward them.

  With a superhuman effort made possible only by the exosuit he still wore, Tom forced his arm up, hooked a neural wire back into the slot, forced his consciousness into the dying system of the airplane, and fired their thrusters, fighting to slow them, fighting for one last chance. . . .

  Then the deafening rattle thundering in his eardrums, the abrupt impact, his head flying at the console before him . . .

  “TOM. TOM! TOM! TOM RAINES! WAKE UP!”

  He was choking. He was suffocating. Tom gagged on the water in his lungs, coughing, his throat twisting.

  “Tom. Tom, Tom, open your eyes.”

  He forced open his blurry, aching eyes to see the blood he was spitting out of his mouth.

  “Tom, focus. You need to move.”

  He looked over and saw Blackburn, leaning in to see him through the twisted wreckage. His head felt like it was being split open, the light drilling his eyes.

  “Listen to me.” Blackburn sounded worried. “Reach over and check Wyatt.”

  Tom�
�s head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. He cringed, pain sparkling down his neck as he looked over, and panic wrenched through him at the sight of Wyatt, sagging in her seat, dark hair streaming down before her inert body.

  “Wy—” He choked on the word, a terrible, racking cough gripping him again.

  “Her pulse. Feel her pulse, Tom. Is she alive?”

  Raising his arm hurt. His ribs felt like they were stabbing him. Tears of pain blurred his eyes, but his cybernetic fingers weren’t sensitive enough to detect a pulse.

  “Oh no, oh no, please . . .”

  “Quick. Ball up your fist and rub your knuckles over her collarbone,” Blackburn ordered.

  Tom did so, and Wyatt gave a pained moan but didn’t open her eyes. Tom laughed and it hurt him. “She’s alive! She’s alive!”

  “Listen. You need to get out of there. That exosuit is fried. Disconnect from it.”

  Now that Tom thought about it, it seemed to be dragging at him, resisting him when he moved. With shaky arms, he detached it from his neural access port. The suit sputtered, but finally expanded.

  Not all the way, just enough for him to wriggle painfully out of the places where the suit snared his joints. Moving out of it was another matter. Even lifting his right leg sent splinters of pain jamming up through him.

  Tom screamed out, and in response, Blackburn sent him some code. It flickered over his vision center, and the worst of the agony receded, even though every movement seemed to grind razors into his thigh.

  He fought to focus as Blackburn said, “Take off her exosuit, too. She’ll be too heavy to carry with that on.”

  “Carry?”

  “You can do it. You have to do it.”

  Tom’s hands felt rubbery, but he got Wyatt out. She moaned in pain with every movement, and he was terrified he was hurting her, but Blackburn snapped at him to hurry, to forget being gentle. “She’ll hurt a lot worse if you don’t get her out!”

  By the time Tom freed her, exhaustion made his limbs shake. He wanted to sleep. He wondered deliriously at the way Blackburn was just staring down at them.