Catalyst

by S. J. Kincaid

  But it didn’t change his memory of the hurt on her face in that moment of betrayal. He wondered how much he’d have to harm the people he cared about before they were finally safe.

  Then he heard the door slide open and grew aware of the thin blond woman gliding back into the room. “Well, I must say, you surprised me, Mr. Raines.”

  “Did I?”

  Frayne rested her hand on the back of the chair across from his but made no move to sit. “I’ll allow your father to retain liberty of movement. His conversations will be monitored. He’ll be watched. Sometimes he’ll have a tail, sometimes he won’t. He’ll be informed of these conditions to encourage him to keep himself in line . . . though I suspect you may have done enough to ensure that yourself.”

  Tom laughed softly, feeling bitter. It was a roundabout way to say he’d just alienated his father so totally, the man wouldn’t ever want him back—much less go to the trouble of taking on the military for him.

  Frayne pressed on her ear, tilting her head to the side. Tom knew she was hearing instructions from somewhere. Her icy eyes moved to his. “It appears an officer has arrived to escort you back to the Pentagonal Spire. You’re free to go.”

  Tom raised himself up, bone weary. “Listen,” he said, “do you really have to spy on my dad? He’s nobody. He’s not gonna do anything. Trust me, you’d know already if he was gonna go out there and cause problems.”

  “If your father has nothing to hide,” Frayne said, “then he has no reason to worry about being under surveillance. It’s as simple as that.”

  Tom let out a breath and felt some last shred of hope recede. There simply wasn’t a word he could say to reason with someone who thought like Irene Frayne.

  THE RETURN JOURNEY to the Pentagonal Spire felt endless, even though the Interstice could sweep them across the country at five thousand miles an hour. Tom had been surprised to find Lieutenant James Blackburn waiting there by the vactrain, his arms folded over his wide chest, his scarred face tense beneath his short-cropped dark hair.

  They hadn’t been face-to-face since Tom destroyed every skyboard in the Western Hemisphere in the name of the ghost in the machine. He could tell with one glance at Blackburn’s thunderous expression that he’d already traced it back to Tom.

  It was probably the reason he’d come personally.

  Tom was not looking forward to being trapped in a tiny little vactrain with him for several minutes. The air felt electric with tension as Tom settled across from him and the metallic car shot off down the dark tube. Blackburn watched him in an unsettling manner as though trying to psyche him out. Tom stared back defiantly, his jaw throbbing from clenching it.

  Finally, Blackburn spoke, though his tone was carefully controlled. “Should I bother asking why?”

  “Why, what?”

  “You know why what. Why the monumentally stupid and shockingly public gesture just before vacation? You might as well have waved a red flag at Joseph Vengerov to please come find you. You exposed what you can do to the entire world. That. Why, Raines?”

  Tom let out a breath. “Okay, first off, Vengerov already knew there was someone like me out there. I found that out at Obsidian Corp.”

  Blackburn stared at him. “So you chose to paint a virtual target on yourself to make it easier for him to track you down?”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I know you’re stuck cleaning up after me again.” Tom eyed Blackburn warily, knowing he had another reason to be upset about increased scrutiny of the Pentagonal Spire. He’d seen Blackburn murder Heather Akron, even though Blackburn didn’t know he was there. Blackburn had things of his own to cover up. “I guess we’re kind of tied together in this.”

  “How true,” Blackburn said. “we are bound together by this secret of yours. And I’ve made a decision: I can’t let things continue the way they’ve been going. Time and again, you screw up. You make poor decisions. I can’t trust you. It’s as simple as that.”

  It was all the warning Tom got.

  Words flashed before his vision: Session expired. Immobility sequence initiated.

  “Hey!” Tom bellowed as he lost all feeling below his chest and tumbled off his seat to the floor. Blackburn strode calmly toward him, tapping his forearm keyboard.

  Tom knew one thing: he had to defend himself. He tore back his sleeve, his mind racing frantically through the programs still stored on his processor after the war games—but Blackburn’s heavy foot descended on his arm, crushing it to the floor. He tore the keyboard away from Tom and flung it aside.

  “You’ve become my biggest liability. I’ve had it. We’re not playing this game anymore where you make a mess, I fix it, you make another mess, I fix it again.”

  Tom tried to activate a thought interface and send Blackburn a virus that way, but Function unavailable blinked in his vision center. He wanted to scream out in frustration.

  “I’ve been thinking about this since I found out about your ability.” Blackburn pulled out a neural wire from the front pocket of his uniform. “That stunt with the skyboards made up my mind. Call it the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  “What are you doing?” Tom demanded.

  Blackburn shook his head and whipped out a neural chip, attaching it to one end of the wire. “Trusting you to be careful would be downright stupid. There’s too much hinging on what I’m trying to do.”

  He reached down, and all Tom knew was, he had to get away.

  “No!” He seized Blackburn’s wrists, trying to force his arms away, desperation giving him strength. But Blackburn had full use of his body, Tom did not, and Blackburn pinned Tom’s wrists together and forced his head down.

  He kept Tom in that awkward position as he maneuvered the wire into his brain stem access port.

  “GET OFF ME! GET AWAY!” Tom said, his vision dimming, a stream of code flowing into his processor.

  “It’s too late. Just relax.” Blackburn settled into the seat next to Tom, and if he hadn’t lost strength in his limbs, he would’ve punched him. “I would’ve slipped this into your download stream in the Pentagonal Spire, but circumstances have changed there. I have to do it this way.”

  Tom couldn’t believe this was happening. Someone was reprogramming him again. “I’ll make you sorry for this,” Tom promised him even though he couldn’t imagine how. His voice shook. “You can’t control my mind—”

  “I’m not trying to control your mind, Raines.”

  Tom forced his eyelids back open.

  “I’m creating a link between our processors,” Blackburn said. He pointed at his temple, then at Tom’s. “With a thought, I’ll be able to access your sensory receptors and see exactly what you’re doing anytime I want to.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I’m just like the NSA only I’m looking from the inside out, rather than outside in.”

  “Great, so every time I use the bathroom, you’re gonna see it?”

  “No,” Blackburn said. “I won’t watch you twenty-four hours a day. Only when I choose to tune in. It’s like turning on a television and checking a specific channel. I’ll have the capability all the time, but that doesn’t mean I’ll watch it all the time.”

  Tom watched the code streaming behind his eyelids. Blackburn had him at a total disadvantage right now; he didn’t need Tom’s good opinion. There was no reason to lie to him. Tom couldn’t change the outcome, even if Blackburn had outright said he was seizing control of his mind like Dalton had. Tom believed what he said.

  It didn’t make him feel any better about this.

  “This neural link,” Blackburn explained, “will let me see through your eyes whenever I’m wondering what you’re up to, and hear through your ears when I want to eavesdrop on you. I’m not a fan of routine surveillance, Tom, but you’ve absolutely necessitated it with your actions. This way you’re never going to surprise me again. The next time you plan to pull a stunt like the one with the skyboards, I’ll be in a position to look at what you’re doing
and intervene. Frankly, you’re lucky this is all I’m doing after the trouble you’ve caused me.”

  Tom was suddenly chilled, remembering Heather’s face the moment before the transition chamber to the vactrain decompressed. Blackburn had done worse to people. Far worse.

  He heaved in breath, trying to calm himself. “You’re not going to kill me, then.”

  Blackburn shot him a startled look. “Of course not.”

  Tom’s gaze riveted to Blackburn’s forearm keyboard, his every muscle knotted with anxiety. “What now? What are you doing?”

  “Now, I’m removing this time segment from your memory and looping the first few minutes of our ride through the vactube so you can live in blissful ignorance.”

  “No. No! Wait. No, wait, come on. I won’t tell anyone, okay? We can work something out. Maybe this link is a good thing. I won’t try to undo it.” He threw out every lie he could. He’d say anything to stop Blackburn from erasing his memory of this.

  “You’re right, you won’t try to undo it because you won’t remember it.”

  Rage boiled through Tom. He felt like his searing fury could burn a message right into his heart, where Blackburn could never hope to wipe it away, a warning to watch for this, to stop him. Surely if he was this enraged, the next time he looked at Blackburn, he’d know something was wrong.

  Somehow. He’d remember. He’d remember . . . he wouldn’t forget this, he wouldn’t forget this . . .

  TOM FOUND HIMSELF sitting there in the vactrain, feeling strange for a moment, feeling like he’d missed something, and when he looked over at Blackburn, he found Blackburn gazing at him intently from the seat across from his.

  “What?” Tom said.

  Blackburn shook his head, studying his face. “Nothing. Is something wrong?”

  “No.” Tom felt disturbed. He looked away, faintly puzzled by his own reaction, by the way he felt like adrenaline sizzled through his veins, his heart pounding.

  Maybe he was on edge because of the way Blackburn had been staring thunderously at him the whole ride. Weird that Blackburn hadn’t even said anything to him—not even about the skyboards. He looked down and realized his forearm keyboard had slipped right off his arm and to the floor. Huh. Tom must not have fastened it on well. He lifted it up and wrapped it back around his arm.

  “You haven’t asked me about the skyboards,” Tom finally blurted, feeling like he was going to explode. “Why haven’t you?”

  Blackburn rubbed the bridge of his nose. After a moment, he opened his eyes. “So, Raines, why the monumentally stupid and shockingly public gesture just before vacation?”

  It might have been Tom’s imagination, but it didn’t sound to him like Blackburn cared all that much about the answer.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT WAS DISCONCERTING to return from break in the middle of the afternoon. Tom had missed the critical first week in Upper Company due to the incident over vacation.

  The Pentagonal Spire he returned to was not the one he’d left.

  It began as soon as he parted ways with Blackburn and reached the elevators. Walton Covner stood there alone. He snapped rigidly to attention.

  Tom nodded to him. “Hey, Walt.”

  “Report for duty, Raines.”

  Tom stopped, staring at him. “What?”

  Walton’s dark eyes flickered to his. He said in a low voice, “You have to salute, call me sir, and report for duty.”

  “You don’t outrank me. We’re both Uppers.”

  “I was promoted before you, so sorry, man, you’ve gotta report for duty and salute me.”

  “We’re not supposed to salute. We’re civilians.” Tom peered at him suspiciously. Walton tried to screw with his head a lot. “Are you messing with me?”

  “Alas, no.” Walton sighed. “Sometimes humor cannot fit into one’s circumstances, Raines. At least, according to Antony J. Mezilo.”

  Tom’s neural processor identified him as a four-star general. “What about General Mezilo?”

  “Marsh is out. Mezilo runs the Spire now. We have all the regular classes—and between them, marches, drills, and exercise.”

  “No. Why?” Tom cried. That sounded terrible to him.

  “Because Akron and Ramirez went AWOL. Apparently we have a discipline problem that needs to be corrected by torturing us.”

  The elevator dinged.

  “Quickly, come on,” Walton urged, snapping into a salute. “Report for duty.”

  Confused, Tom dropped his duffel bag, snapped to attention, and saluted, and Walton saluted back. “Trainee Raines reports to Trainee Covner as ordered.”

  “Actually, we’re cadets now,” Walton whispered.

  “What?”

  “General Mezilo wants us called cadets. He thinks it’ll put us in a more military state of mind. Just go with it.”

  “Cadet Raines reports to Cadet Covner as ordered,” Tom said as a soldier stepped out of the elevator. His neural processor identified him as Second Lieutenant Miles Ellis of the marines.

  Following Walton’s cue, Tom snapped into another salute when the soldier halted before them. The whole situation was perplexing to him, because the officers manning the installation usually ignored the trainees. The trainees were civilians, after all, in the custody of the military but not a part of it beyond a few formalities. But Lieutenant Ellis rounded on Walton and demanded, “The phonetic alphabet. Go!”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Walton bellowed, uneasiness creeping in his eyes as the soldier drew so close they were almost nose to nose. He shouted out, “Alfa, bravo, Charlie, delta, echo . . .”

  Tom watched it all, standing at attention, a sense of unreality washing over him like he’d stumbled into some strange new land where he didn’t know the language. And all throughout Walton’s recitation, the soldier reprimanded him for looking away from him, for leaning back, for the slightest indication Walton had faltered.

  “Why are you looking at the wall? Is there something interesting on the wall, trainee? Why aren’t you looking at me?”

  Walton finished, “Xray, Yankee, Zulu, sir.”

  When Ellis was satisfied, he turned on Tom and barked, “You aren’t in uniform!”

  “I just came back—” Tom began.

  “I didn’t ask you a question. You don’t have permission to speak!” Ellis sounded genuinely outraged.

  “I was explaining where I was.”

  “From now on, you speak only when asked a question.”

  Tom threw a disbelieving look at Walton. “Is this for real?”

  Ellis shoved his face right into Tom’s, his garlic breath flaring out. “Do not address him. You address me. What is your name, cadet?”

  “Tom Raines.”

  “Your full name, cadet!”

  “Thomas Andrew Raines, sir.”

  Ellis’s face was so close to his, Tom could see the pores of his nose and the twitching of his nostrils. Having a grown man’s face thrust up against his, the smell of garlic wafting like a furnace from his mouth as he demanded increasingly absurd levels of respect was just . . . just . . .

  Tom pressed his lips tightly shut as they began to twitch, trying to hold back the laugher fighting its way up his throat.

  Ellis’s eyes were so close to his. “Are your lips twitching, cadet? Are you trying not to laugh?”

  “No, sir.”

  But then Tom swore, he swore, Ellis’s lips twitched just for a second. That did it. Tom’s self-control dissolved and laughter began pouring from his lips. Walton’s eyes widened, and Tom knew he’d made a huge mistake. He started laughing harder, until his whole body was rocking with it, and each shout by Ellis made it funnier.

  TOM’S ARMS AND chest were sore before Calisthenics even began. Ellis went on to demand Tom recite something called “The Man in the Area,” which Tom didn’t know off th
e top of his head, so he had been assigned push-ups, several penalty hours, and forced to run up and down the stairs until the situation stopped seeming funny.

  But Calisthenics was trickier now, too, mostly because there were no simulated enemies and nothing to distract or make exercise entertaining—just people running through rows of tires, crawling under stretches of barbed wire, scaling the walls, being yelled at by various drill sergeants while they frantically completed various exercises.

  Tom caught up to the other Uppers, and he was immediately set upon by Sergeant Dana Erskine of the army. Two miles and two hundred push-ups and sit-ups later, he finally found himself standing breathlessly next to Vik, waiting in line for his chance at a test of endurance by some pull-up bars.

  “Has it been like this all week?” Tom asked him, gasping for air.

  Hey, Tom. The words were net-sent to him by Vik using a thought interface. We’re not supposed to talk. Erskine will give you more push-ups.

  Tom hated thought interfaces, so he spoke staring straight ahead, through mostly closed lips. “So is Marsh totally gone?”

  Vik sighed. He’s still functioning in an “advisory” capacity, but it’s all Mezilo now. He’s old-school. He thinks we have a discipline problem, so he’s added an intensive regimen of marches, drills, and order. You’re lucky to have missed the first week. Speaking of which, you okay? Vik’s eyebrows flickered up briefly at the last question, but that unfortunately attracted the attention of Sergeant Erskine and got them both another fifty sit-ups.

  “Great. We’ll talk at dinner,” Tom mumbled to Vik as the did them, side by side.

  Nope. Can’t talk at dinner.

  “What?” Tom blurted, which attracted Sergeant Erskine’s attention again. He said hastily, as the drill sergeant charged over, “How can we not talk at dinner?”