Kingmaker (16 page)

The boy looks up at Alexei for a moment, then back at Fielding.

“What about my vote?” he says.

“Pardon me?”

“My vote. The Thirty-first Amendment says you can take away my vote.”

“I was under the impression that you’re still a minor.”

“I am, but for when I turn eighteen.”

“Andre, it’s important to understand that we don’t take anyone’s vote away. The Thirty-first Amendment simply states that employees can entrust their votes to their employers who then cast those votes in a manner consistent with their employees’ best interests. That’s all.”

“I think what he’s asking,” Alexei interjects, “is whether or not his contract will contain a suffrage clause.”

“Transfer of suffrage is standard in all Pearl Knight employment contracts,” Fielding says, “however exceptions can be made for certain
candidates. Andre, if voting is something you feel strongly about, I’m sure we can work something out.”

“It is,” the boy says.

“Understood,” the man says. “Does that mean you’re interested?”

The boy turns and looks out through the glass. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

“Mr. Fielding,” Alexei says, “is there a place Dre and I can talk in private for a few minutes?”

“Absolutely,” Fielding says. “You two stay here and talk as long as you want. I’ll meet you up in the lobby when you’re ready. Pearl will make sure you find your way.”

“Thank you.”

Fielding pats the boy’s shoulder on his way past. The elevator has not moved so Fielding doesn’t have to wait. When the portal’s blades have fully constricted, Alexei turns to the boy.

“What are you thinking, Dre?”

“I don’t know,” the boy says. He is still looking at the machinery outside the tube. “Me and you had a plan. There are millions of people out there who need our help—people who are probably my ancestors. I don’t want to just walk away from that.”

“That’s over for now,” Alexei says. “The reality is that there’s nothing for you to walk away from anymore.”

“Why’s it gotta be over?” Dre asks. “Maybe I can make as much money doing this as I would have if I’d won the tournament.”

“I imagine you’ll eventually make a lot more,” Alexei says, “but that’s not money we can use. Not now. You have to understand that the moment you walked into this building, it became impossible for you to help me. You heard what Fielding just said. He already knows you’re from West Baltimore, and he probably even knows the exact neighborhood if not the exact house you grew up in. You’re not anonymous anymore, which means you need to be very careful about your decisions. The best thing for you to do at this point is take the job and use the money to help yourself and to help your family back home.”

“But I owe you.”

“Dre,” Alexei says. He waits for the boy to turn, then kneels on the glass walkway to look him in the eye. “Listen to me. You don’t owe anybody
anything. Do you understand? Don’t ever forget that. The only person on this planet you owe anything to is yourself.”

“But I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“I didn’t bring you here to work for me,” Alexei tells the boy. “I brought you here because I believed that you were capable of doing something amazing, and I still believe that. In fact, I believe that now more than ever. Don’t let this opportunity go, Dre. You can still make your mark on the world.”

“How am I supposed to do that working here?”

Alexei stands again and smiles down at the boy. “That I don’t know, Andre,” he says, “but something tells me that when the time comes, you’ll figure it out.”

Dre’s first mission is, as expected, classified, and naturally is to be conducted from an undisclosed location. His hair is short now, having been shaved almost bald during training (he was extremely self-conscious until Ki confessed to preferring it short), and he is wearing one of the five custom-tailored flight suits and pairs of boots he was issued after pilot school graduation. It is early, and Dre has been instructed not to eat, so he and Alexei do not have breakfast together, though Alexei is waiting for the boy in the kitchen. They walk together through the house to the garage, and right up to the door of Dre’s graduation present: the bright crimson Cherry Brilliance. Alexei shakes Dre’s hand, wishes him luck, and then watches the boy vanish as the glass dome brightens to full opacity.

Before Dre could begin his pilot training, he was required to pass a series of evaluations. The physical requirements were all straightforward, though one exception had to be made. PKS pilots are expected to have perfect vision in both eyes, and had Dre submitted an application as opposed to having been recruited, his resume would not have even made it past the initial prerequisite filters. The solution—which Fielding himself both proposed and signed off on—was simply to postpone Dre’s final perception test by one year. There is no stipulation that a pilot’s eyes have to be uncorrected, so Dre’s file states that his vision is to be retested once his ocular therapy is complete.

The rest of the evaluations were psychological and primarily designed to ensure that recruits were mentally sound and capable of functioning
under high levels of stress. The final test determined the boy’s ability to obtain the necessary security clearances; it attempted to detect signs of influence by foreign governments and/or domestic enemies through interviews conducted under magnetic resonance spectroscopic observation.

Once the boy was cleared, his pilot training took place in two primary locations: classwork and simulator exercises were held in what was once an Air Force space and missile command center in El Segundo, California, and all of his field training was conducted from a series of bases at the edge of the Mojave Desert in Indian Springs, Nevada. The facilities in the desert gave Dre hands-on experience with every mech, drone, and ordnance currently in use by PKS in a wide variety of geographical contexts, including wide open plains, mountains, dozens of square blocks of replicated urban environments, and hundreds of acres of tropical rain forest, frozen tundra, and savanna grassland. The more exotic environments were contained beneath close to a million ballistic glass panels set into sprawling carbon nanotube space frames which, together, constituted by far the largest and most complex enclosed ecological systems on the planet. All four months of Dre’s training focused almost exclusively on procedures, weapons systems, and maneuvers; more mundane topics like geopolitics, national security strategy, and even the finer points of the chain of command were to be learned on the job and on an as-needed basis.

At LAX, Dre is picked up by an unmarked aircraft of a design he has never seen before. It is an amalgamation of a luxury jet and a stealth fighter with a dramatic, triangular, blended-wing configuration built around a short, gently flowing fuselage. It reminds the boy of what you might get if you tried to lengthen an exotic sports car into a limousine. The pilot enters the cockpit from the top while Dre boards via portable passenger steps. The inside is furnished like a small sailboat with a tiny kitchen, cushioned benches around a table, a few screens, and a closet-sized lavatory. There are no windows, but after the whine of the aircraft’s single engine reaches its maximum pitch, Dre does not need to see outside to know that they are taking off in a perfectly vertical orientation.

The boy is hungry and eats the high-protein meal of steak, eggs, and fortified milk which is waiting for him in a glass cabinet in the galley. The plane slows after about ninety minutes, and Dre is momentarily alarmed by the sounds he hears from above him until he realizes that they are
probably just engaged in an aerial refueling maneuver. They accelerate back to their previous speed and continue for roughly two more hours before slowing again. This time it is not to refuel, but to drop into a controlled vertical descent. Their total flight time is just under three and half hours—plenty of time, Dre knows, for such an aircraft to have covered several thousands of miles in any given direction.

The tilting and listing of the plane during its descent transitions into a much wider-scale sway upon touchdown, and Dre realizes that they are not on tarmac but rather have landed on some sort of a ship. He is not entirely surprised since the only reason to incur the additional expense and complication of an aircraft capable of vertical takeoff and landing is to either reach small clearings in forested regions, or to land on a ship without an arresting wire to absorb the energy of a traditional landing. He is provided with a short ladder rather than steps, and when he looks around from the deck, he sees that he is on something he can only describe as a combination aircraft carrier and yacht. He sees two more planes similar to his, and two small white helicopters with shrouded tail rotors and prominent twin engines, but there isn’t room for much else. The winds are strong and salty, and Dre sees no hint of land as he checks as much of the horizon as he can before being ushered below.

He is led down two metal staircases by a single unarmed man in a black uniform—cargo pants, commando sweater, and a beret—whose body language is not so much threatening as it is insistent. The routine seems designed to allow the boy to take in as little as possible, to discourage him from asking even a single question, and to keep him so off-balance and distracted that he doesn’t have time to wonder what the hell he has gotten himself into.

There is a hatch in the floor at the bottom of the stairs and Dre can tell from the levers and gaskets that it leads to a separate vessel. He is invited to descend the rungs welded to the inside of the passage and into the dim red lighting which he knows from his training is designed to preserve night vision in a darkened environment. The green glow in his prosthetic eye is more prominent below than it was topside. A woman awaits him at the foot of the ladder and greets him with a surprisingly warm smile.

“Good morning, Andre.” The woman offers her hand and Dre takes it with just enough hesitancy to betray his surprise at the lack of military formality. “I’m Commander Helvenston. Are you ready for your first day?”

The boy can hear the hatch being sealed above their heads. The woman in front of him is wearing a blue T-shirt, oceanic digital camouflage pants, high black boots, and a sizable sidearm—probably loaded with frangible rounds incapable of piercing a plated hull. Her cap has the profile of a long sleek submarine stitched across the forehead along with the words “P.K. Megalodon” in yellow above.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Great. Follow me. I’ll show you to your console.”

The floor is a soft rubberized material which provides their boots with a firm grip. As the vessel begins to dive, both Dre and the woman in front of him reach for the rails lining the narrow passage. The woman speaks without turning.

“Have you ever been on a submarine before?”

From the back, Dre can see that the woman’s hair is actually cut short as opposed to just being tucked up beneath her cap. “No, ma’am.”

Helvenston stops. She checks the dense black dive watch strapped to her wrist. It’s the same model issued to Dre and consists of a compression-proof, silicon oil-filled titanium case, a carbon fiber dial, tritium tubes which create permanent radioluminescence for effective visibility in all lighting conditions, a chip-scale cesium module that measures time down to a millionth of a second (and calibrates with all Pearl Knight wireless networks), and a Kevlar-weave cuff with a Velcro shroud that can be used to obscure the illumination and keep the six-millimeter-thick synthetic sapphire crystal from flashing in the moonlight. Dre’s Patek Philippe Nautilus is being given the day off and now rests on the nightstand beside his bed.

“We don’t have time for an actual tour, but I can give you a quick virtual one. Would you like that?”

The boy does his best to sound professional and even a tad dispassionate—to not come across as a little kid on his first tour of an underwater war machine. “Yes, ma’am. If we have time.”

She turns to the panel above the rail. “Pearl, show me a real-time schematic of the P.K.
Megalodon
.”

The voice is the same one Dre first heard in the elevator with Alexei and Fielding four months ago, and has since gotten to know quite well. “Yes, Commander.”

The panel shows a three-dimensional lateral cutaway of the
Megalodon
. Helvenston holds her hand up in front of the panel and pauses. After
the diagram pulses once indicating a lock, it rotates and tilts in perfect synchronization with her hand. When she has found an angle she likes, she opens her fingers and the image zooms. As more of the hull cuts away, Dre notices that the image is not static; he can see dozens of icons indicative of rank moving throughout the vessel, each with a tiny callout hovering above.

“This is us,” Helvenston says. The image is no longer locked to her hand so she can point. The two icons are about a third of the way back from the nose of the sub and are labeled “CDR Helvenston” and “LT Strasser.” Dre wonders if their watches are exchanging more information with the network than just time synchronization markers.

“This is the hatch you just climbed down. Up here, we have our retractable masts, which is how you’ll be talking to the Mercury drones above us. This is the boat’s command and control center, and right below it is the remote command and control center where you’ll be working. Then we have the main sonar sphere, vertical launch tubes, horizontal torpedo tubes, the lockout trunk for staging special forces, and finally the reactor compartment, hydrogen fuel cells, engine room, and ballast tanks. Aside from a few rudders and the propulsor ducts, that’s about it.”

Dre points to a series of dark protrusions along the vessel’s hull. “What are these?”

“Those are part of our sonar array and AACS, or Active Acoustic Cloaking System. The
Megalodon
is a stealth sub. Any sound waves that reach us, we absorb, analyze, digitally re-create, then rebroadcast from the opposite side of the hull after an appropriate time delay. Our acoustic signature is usually anywhere from completely nonexistent to, at worst, that of a small school of fish.”