Catalyst

by Kincaid,S. J.

  “Can you come help me already?” Tom said to him. “I’m in bad shape.”

  Silence a long moment. Then, “You are. I can see that, but you have to do this yourself. And quickly—before the fire spreads to the jet fuel.”

  Fire. Fire? He smelled it. Fuel. Burning metal. Thick on the air. “Fire! There’s a fire.”

  “Concentrate on Wyatt. You can do this. You can save her.”

  Tom’s hands grew cold, but his mechanical fingers moved with the ease the rest of him could not, extricating her from her seat belt. Her head was ominously floppy, and Tom blearily remembered, “I can’t move her. What if I break her neck?”

  “She stays and she’s dead, anyway. You have to risk it.”

  Tom dragged her up and out of her exosuit, trying to shut out her whimpers of pain, and kicked at the door until his leg felt like lead, and then it tumbled open.

  He hesitated only a moment, seeing they were still ten feet off the ground, their ship lodged in the canopy of tree branches. He wrapped his arms tightly about her and flung them down, rolling as they hit the soft, mossy floor of the forest. Treetops loomed overhead, the air thick and humid, insects humming all about them, flora tangling about his legs.

  Through the glaring blue of the sky, peeking through the trees, Tom caught sight of it—the Centurion class drone that had shot them down, circling in the sky like a vulture. His stomach pinched with fear, seeing it twist about, trying to reacquire their position, finish them. And he had no weapons. No gun, no ship, no exosuit, even.

  “Get up,” Blackburn said. “You need to move to a safe distance.”

  “Where’s your ship?” Tom asked Blackburn, his head pounding, his voice thick and slurred. “Can we get out of here in your ship? Did you land very far away? Why aren’t you killing Vengerov right now, anyway?”

  Blackburn jumped down next to them, gesturing for Tom to get up, to pick her up. “I took a hit leaving the Spire. When I tried to fire off some missiles, my launcher malfunctioned. I couldn’t finish him.”

  “Wait, are you telling me you actually got close enough to off Vengerov, then you couldn’t do it?”

  “I was so close to his ship, I could have seen him through a window,” Blackburn said hollowly.

  “And that’s when you found out you didn’t have any weapons?” Despite everything, the absurd urge to laugh came over him. It was like Vengerov had rigged fate itself in his favor.

  “I just had the ship,” Blackburn said, his voice tense. “Then I saw you crash. There was no one else close enough to get here in time. Only me.”

  So he’d aborted his mission to kill Vengerov and come help. “You’ll get him later. You will. With a better ship. A better missile launcher. The whole world will help you next time.”

  “Get up and move, Tom.”

  Tom heaved Wyatt over his shoulder, and immediately needed to put her back down, but Blackburn snapped at him when he was about to do so.

  “Help will come. Right now, you need to move to a safe distance. Move!”

  Frustration ripped through Tom. He was hurting, he was so tired, he just wanted to sit, and it wasn’t like there was a safe distance. He could hear the roar of the Centurion mounting, getting closer. If it spotted the wreckage, if it found their heat signatures, there would be no safe distance. Those weapons would kill them easily.

  But Blackburn kept urging him forward, forward, until finally Tom’s strength gave out, and he sagged down against the damp, mossy bark of a tree, feeling like he was going to fall apart. Wyatt settled against him with a groan of pain, and he held her close, scared for her because she wasn’t waking up.

  “I can’t carry her any farther,” he told Blackburn, tears of exhaustion in his eyes. “We have to stop here.”

  “This is far enough.” Blackburn knelt before him. “Do exactly what I say. Focus on me.” He pointed two fingers at his eyes.

  But Tom couldn’t. The Centurion’s roar had grown deafening, its engine sending leaves skittering from overhanging trees. A shadow blocked out the sun as its circles grew narrow as it swept in, weapons glinting as they charged up and descended into firing range.

  “I’m really sorry you didn’t get your revenge,” Tom said. It sucked dying knowing Vengerov wasn’t going with them.

  “Tom, listen: you have to stay awake until someone finds you. You need to bind up your leg, and make sure neither of you bleed to death before help gets here.”

  Tom was confused, bleary. He didn’t see why it mattered if he stayed awake. They wouldn’t have time to bleed to death. They were about to be very dead, that ship overhead raising its weapons now, the thunder of its engine splitting the air.

  “Swear you’ll stay awake. You have to make this matter.”

  “I swear, okay? I swear!” And Tom screwed his eyes shut, his entire body a knot of tension in the moments before the weapons fired.

  Lips brushed his forehead. “Thank you.”

  A great roar filled the air, and Tom’s eyes snapped open in time to see another ship burst through the clouds overhead, fire flaring against its heat shields as it plunged like a falling star. Lightning-swift, it rammed into the Centurion. The two ships erupted in a great veil of flame and tumbled down to the earth, the blast making Tom’s ears throb as he hurled himself over Wyatt by instinct. When he raised his head, he saw the distant trees consumed in raging fire, fragments of burning metal raining down through the air.

  And then even that grew silent, the chirp and hum of insects mounted, and Tom raised himself to his feet, wired with adrenaline, heart thudding in his chest, his brain trying to make sense of what he’d seen. They were alive. They were saved.

  He laughed deliriously, shocked by it all, the sky bright and clear and free of danger above them. “Oh my God. Did you see that?” he said to Blackburn. “The Centurion was gonna fire and that other ship was like—kapow! Did you see . . .” He looked over where Blackburn had just been.

  Blackburn wasn’t there.

  Tom turned in a circle, searching the trees, his eyes scanning the jungle floor—the flora disturbed only by his own steps.

  Understanding crept over him.

  Blackburn had one single weapon in his arsenal: his ship.

  The air hung thick with the stench of burning metal, the trees flattened near their crash site. No one could have survived ejecting. Not at that velocity. Tom’s throat grew tight, a sense of loss opening like a chasm inside him.

  For the first time in two years, he was entirely alone in his own head.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  JUST LIKE THE megalomaniacs who savaged the world before him, Vengerov proved a coward in the end. When the Intrasolar cadets of both sides defeated his forces, and the code to disable his fail-safe seeped into all the processors, he disappeared.

  Where, no one knew. The one shot at killing him had been Blackburn, who’d set off early to strike Vengerov’s ship in space. Tom imagined sometimes what might have happened if by some fluke of fate, his missile launcher hadn’t been fried. Blackburn could’ve destroyed Vengerov’s ship, and then swung around and blasted away the drone about to kill Tom and Wyatt. But that hadn’t happened. In the end, Blackburn had a single ship at his disposal, and one target he could destroy. So he’d chosen to spend his life not on Vengerov’s destruction but rather saving two kids who’d been shot down in the Amazon.

  Tom stared at the burning trees knowing what had been sacrificed. Not life. Either way, Blackburn would have given it, ramming Vengerov’s ship or ramming the attacking drone. He’d sacrificed something far greater: the vendetta that had given his existence meaning. Grief flooded Tom’s heart, and he knew he’d made a promise he had to keep, his last promise to Blackburn. He kept it. He bound up the worst of Wyatt’s wounds and his own. He stayed awake, and when Vik and Yuri’s ship circled over th
eir position, he was alert enough to reply to their net-send, direct them down to his position. He was still conscious when Wyatt stirred in the suborbital, and woke to Yuri holding her, worry on his face.

  “We crashed?” she mumbled.

  “You were shot down,” Yuri said. “But we came back for you.”

  She smiled blearily. “I knew you would. I love you.”

  Tom saw Yuri’s face transform with startled delight, and even through the grief in his heart, the pain all over his body, he could close his eyes knowing some things were right with the world.

  He spent three weeks laid up in the Pentagonal Spire’s infirmary, and Wyatt far longer. The world transformed.

  With the silent war Vengerov had waged against the rest of humanity in the open, and the neural processors all public, every other secret began to hemorrhage into the public domain. Everyone learned of the way the Combatants of both sides united to destroy Vengerov’s fleet of automated machines. Everyone learned the intimate details of the computers that had been sneaked into their heads.

  By the time Tom got out of the infirmary, the worldwide backlash was in full swing, crashing down like a tsunami on the heads of the old elite. He saw evidence of it firsthand when he did something he’d dreaded and returned to Manhattan.

  The security guards who’d once protected the most expensive apartment buildings had all abandoned them. Windows were shattered, fearful eyes peeking out, watching for restive crowds and vandals.

  All of the repressed hostility toward the rest of the ruling class boiled up and consumed the world. People began compiling databases of information, lists of names, faces, and the crimes and misdeeds attached to them. They sent them to one another, translated into every language, uncensored by any governing body.

  Thanks to the neural processors, the predators of the old world had become the victims. Coalition executives were recognized on sight everywhere they went, even the men who’d paid good money for privacy over the years, who’d pulled strings only from behind the scenes.

  No one would sell them anything; their money was worthless. No one would guard their houses. People boycotted giving them the aid and comfort and assistance that came from an entire society of human beings. Tom heard stories of paramedics leaving them on the streets when they bled and mechanics sabotaging their cars, firefighters allowing their buildings to burn.

  They were exiles amid the society they’d tried to subjugate.

  When Tom entered his mom’s apartment, there was no power servicing it; someone must’ve seen that it was a residence of Dalton Prestwick, the CEO of Dominion Agra guilty of aiding and abetting the spread of the nanomachines. It was likely every electrician he’d called had refused to come and restore it. Maybe someone had even deliberately cut it off.

  Tom’s mother sat in the dark, facing toward the window. Far below her, the street crawled with cars, with human beings, with a world that had gone on, one that kept marching forward.

  “Mom.”

  She looked back at him, that blankness in her eyes, nothing animating her but that neural processor regulating the chemical processes in her brain. “Hello,” the machine in her head said to him, in perfect diction. “Thomas. My son. Why are you here?”

  Tom drew a shaky breath, searching her for any sign of the woman from his memories. They were so distant to him, that pretty, laughing girl who’d become a parent too young, who’d had so little time left to her.

  “I’m here to set you free.”

  She watched without interest as he drew the neural wire, and then he brushed aside her blond hair to click it into her brain stem access port. And then he clicked the other end into his own.

  Her blue eyes stayed fixed on him, blinking every fifteen seconds, as Tom interfaced with her processor, connecting with her mind, searching for something human there. But no emotion registered. No reaction. Tom felt a great pang of regret, and with a flicker of his thoughts, he shut her processor off.

  He caught her before she fell, and for a few heartbeats, there was no computer working in her head, and there was only whatever remained of his mother in there, her eyes clouded, staring into his as he carefully moved her back into her chair.

  “I loved you, I remember,” Tom told her, thinking of that girl again. “I think you loved me. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that before. And I’m sorry I couldn’t do this sooner. I was afraid.”

  For a moment more, she gazed at him, and then her eyes grew murky, the breath halting, whatever animating force that computer had forced into her neural tissue, finally releasing the last of its grip over a person who’d been destroyed long before.

  He laid her out gently and closed her eyes.

  A voice reached him from the depths of the apartment. “What have you done?”

  Tom didn’t turn to look at Dalton. “What I should have done a long time ago. She was a person once. She isn’t yours.”

  He turned and watched Dalton sag onto the floor, his eyes swimming with tears. “But I loved her. I’ve never loved anyone but her.”

  Tom stared down at him, thinking of what Dalton had loved. A woman who said whatever he programmed her to say, who did whatever he programmed her to do. It wasn’t love, not really. It was the same way Vengerov had regarded his creation, Vanya. It was a sense of possession. It was narcissism.

  But Tom felt a curious emptiness where he’d once hated Dalton. “I know you think that.”

  Dalton rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know what to do without her. I have nowhere to go. My wife left with the kids because the protesters wouldn’t leave us be. . . . People won’t even give me the slightest courtesy on the streets. I had the neural processor before any of them. I had no choice!”

  “Big shocker for you, wasn’t it?” Tom said dryly. “You were every bit a disposable puppet to Joseph Vengerov as the rest of us.”

  “People hiss at me on the street. Someone threw a bottle at my head. There were cops just standing there, pretending they hadn’t seen anything! I went to the hospital, but no one would treat me! The doctors and nurses walked past me like I was invisible. I tried hiring security, but they charged me everything I had, and then they disappeared, and every time I try to call my lawyer, his receptionist drops my calls. . . . Tom, you’re not cruel. The public sees you and your friends as heroes. . . . Please, Tom, I’ve taken care of your mother. I’ve loved her. Whatever you think of me, there has to be something I can do, somewhere I can go.”

  Tom considered him. “I know somewhere you can go.”

  Dalton followed him from the apartment, simpering with gratitude, trying to figure out what Tom had in mind. Tom grabbed them a taxi. Dalton hid his face so the man wouldn’t recognize him. He stopped thanking Tom when the taxi stopped at the address Tom had given—of a police station.

  “What is this?”

  “You want somewhere to go,” Tom said. “This is somewhere to go.”

  Dalton goggled at him. He’d obviously expected Tom to get him on an airplane or do something to smuggle him out of the country.

  “Turn yourself in,” Tom said. “Confess to everything you did at Dominion Agra. Start with the nanomachines, maybe the way you helped exploit people with less power than you, and go into detail about all the bribery and corruption of public officials. Tell them all of it.”

  “I’m not going to prison!”

  “Dalton,” Tom said, leaning forward, “anywhere you go, people are going to recognize you. Some will abuse you, and most will let them. No one will help you. This isn’t your world anymore.”

  “I know what they want,” Dalton said hysterically. “Those people out there want to steal everything I have! They’re jealous because I was successful and they weren’t!”

  “No,” Tom said flatly. “They’re not jealous. They never have been. Most of those people don’t care about your wealth, and they don’t want to steal it from you. If you’d earned it with some new idea or lots of hard work, not through cheating, bribery and sucking up to powerful
people, they’d actually admire you for your success. All they want is what they’ve always wanted, what they’ve been denied their whole lives—fairness.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes, it is. They want you to face the same consequences for your actions that they’ve faced for theirs. If you turn yourself in, you’ll get a trial, you’ll probably spend some time in prison, but you know what? People will be satisfied. You may even be able to come right out and live in society again afterward.” Tom shrugged. “Or you can walk away and take your chances on the streets, but you’re going to face justice in one form or another. It’s really your choice about whether you agree to play by the same rules the rest of us do, or whether you run into an angry mob somewhere.”

  “But . . . but . . .” Dalton sputtered.

  “We’re done,” Tom said. “Get out of the car or I’ll tell the driver who you are. Whatever you do from here, it’s not my problem.”

  And when Dalton stepped out, Tom yanked the door shut and left him to his fate. It wasn’t his concern what happened to Dalton Prestwick.

  Tom knew it was the last time he’d ever see him.

  THE MILITARY WAS shocked to learn Tom had been alive since his disappearance over the Christmas vacation a year and a half before.

  The public hearings were beginning, the world’s attempt to make sense over what had happened with Joseph Vengerov, the nanomachines, the Pentagonal Spire. The investigators heard enough from Tom’s friends to know he was connected with Joseph Vengerov’s actions somehow, so he found himself at the center of a whirlwind he wasn’t ready for. He couldn’t talk about it, explain it, and certainly couldn’t stand to expose all his memories with a census device.

  He wasn’t officially arrested, but Tom didn’t know a better term for it. The first soldiers who came to debrief him were frustrated. The next were threatening. Tom descended into a silence that was first mulish and stubborn, and then suddenly a silence he couldn’t break even if he tried as his sense of confinement set in.