Vortex (3 page)

He’d even get Karl Marsters.

No. No, wait. Maybe this was abusing his power. It probably was. So how about he only went after Karl once? After all, if he did the world-justice-vigilante stuff, he probably earned himself the right to follow up on a personal grudge
just once
.

At that moment, a loud roaring mounted in his ears, and with shocking swiftness, a black shape descended from the sky, blotting out the skyboards. Tom’s entire body grew rigid, and he stood there frozen in place, as one of the Centurion-grade drones used in outer space began to hover, right in front of his balcony.

It wasn’t a measly little police drone like the one he’d controlled. This wasn’t for surveilling individual suspects and subduing them; it wasn’t for breaking up crowds. This was built to blow things up in space. And it was close enough to touch.

Tom gaped at it, amazed. He’d never seen one of these suckers up close, not through his human eyes. The sharp, scythelike missile turrets curved toward him in open menace, their blackness stark against the skyboard light streaming about them. After a moment of looming there, the drone’s optical camouflaging activated, shimmering its mass into invisibility, leaving only one visible aspect: the pinpoint camera eye, glaring right at him. Optically camouflaged ships were only detectable when they moved—and only if a person knew to look for the telltale wavering of the air. The camera seemed to float in space.

Then the instant communication program in his neural processor activated, and words were net-sent right into his vision center:
I know about your drone, Mordred.

Tom was overjoyed, realizing who it was. If there was one person he’d want to share his triumph, it’d be Medusa. “You saw that?” he spoke, knowing she’d hear him. “Awesome. I’ve gotta admit it, though: yours is bigger. Where did you get this guy? I want one.”

Are you an idiot?

Tom blinked. That wasn’t the reply he’d expected. Or hoped for.

Unless you are actively trying to give us away, you need to stop messing around like this!

Tom ignored his sudden, sinking disappointment at her reaction and made a show of shrugging his shoulders. “I know you want to keep what we can do a secret. So do I, okay? But I had to do that thing yesterday. It was a matter of honor. I had to right a wrong. And honestly, Medusa, it’s kind of rich calling me a moron for using that drone when you flew in a Centurion right over Las Vegas, of all places.”

This Centurion was optically camouflaged when I flew it down. It disappeared off the grid years ago. No one will miss it. You tampered with the navigation of an active-duty police drone. Someone will notice. That is not acceptable.

“What, so I should do nothing, then?” Tom leaned forward, irritated. “I should wait until I’m a Combatant and use what we can do as a
cheat
like you do?”

The drone drew menacingly closer at the implication. Tom knew he’d made her mad, but he stood his ground.

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “This ability we’ve got—we could do anything. We could make the world better. We could be like . . .” He faltered a moment, knowing this would make him sound like a dumb eight-year-old, but it was the only word he could think of. “ . . . superheroes.”

This is not a comic book, Mordred. We are not untraceable, and we are not invincible. We only operate in safety now because no one knows to look for us. The next time you pull something this stupid, I will come back and make sure you can’t do it again.

“Like how? You’ll kill me?”

He’d thrown that out there carelessly. He hadn’t been serious.

Suddenly, the drone swept toward him, the optical camouflaging peeling up enough to reveal the guns Medusa was leveling at his head, and something triggered instinctively in Tom as the red laser–targeting scanners crept over him, the massive machine searing the air around him. He scrambled back until he hit the door to the balcony, and found himself plastered there, staring right down a gun barrel, his heart pounding furiously, cold sweat prickling all over his body. For a timeless moment, they were suspended like that, her missile turret leveled right at his head.

Satisfied she’d made her point, her drone gave a taunting wave of its body, and Medusa planted a gibe in his vision center:
That’s the idea.

Tom found himself vividly remembering the moment at Capitol Summit when he’d used her disfigurement just to win. They’d liked each other before that.

He’d changed everything.

“Would it help if I said I’m sorry?” Tom asked her. He wasn’t referring to what he’d done today.

No. Apologies are a waste of air, Mordred. Don’t do this again
.

And then her drone roared up and shrank away. Soon he couldn’t even see the drone’s telltale shimmer in the night sky, just a blinding ceiling of skyboards.

CHAPTER TWO

T
WO DAYS LATER,
the morning sky gathered a purple light as his plane tilted up its rudders, shifted into helicopter mode, and lowered itself onto the Pentagon. Tom stepped onto the roof below the chrome tower of the Pentagonal Spire.

Two armed marines approached, and he flipped his Challenge Coin out of his pocket, raising it up so they’d see the eagle insignia. “Thomas Raines, trainee, US Intrasolar Forces.” The coin flashed green as it simultaneously verified his voiceprint, his fingerprints, and his DNA. One final step, the sweep of a retina scanner, and Tom had officially confirmed his identity for access to the Pentagonal Spire. An elevator swept him into the Pentagon.

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.”

T
HE 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.

A
S 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 issue 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.”