Catalyst

by S. J. Kincaid

  There was great symbolism in the version he chose, because it wasn’t the current version with only the Indo-American aligned companies—it was the old version, the original version from before World War Three. It was a crowded monstrosity of a flag. At the heart, stood the symbol of the United Nations. An inner ring displayed the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund logos. The outer ring at the edges of the flag displayed all twelve company logos, united together in their dominion over Earth.

  And suddenly, people could forgive Vengerov’s deception over LM Lymer Fleet and Obsidian Corp. So what if he’d been selling the same tech to both sides? So what if he’d secretly profited off both sides of the conflict? He considered himself a citizen of the world, not of any country. It wasn’t treason for a man to betray people who should feel privileged just to have someone like him in their midst. Owning companies on both sides was simply putting his money where his mouth was, where his heart was.

  Vengerov wasn’t a war profiteer, he was a humanitarian. He believed in unity.

  EVERY CADET ABOVE sixteen in the Spire was recruited for the search and rescue efforts. They were infinitely useful, after all, able to download all the skills of a paramedic in a night, able to pilot or fly or operate almost any vehicle in demand after a night’s download. And they didn’t need much sleep to function in top form. Some became medics overnight, others like Tom served as pilots. All the old, nonautomated vehicles were brought back into commission and deployed, and someone needed to steer them.

  A few of the larger, stronger cadets joined firefighting brigades and search and rescue squads. Tom helped move them to the sites where they were needed. All their orders were in their processors; Tom followed it all mindlessly like he was moving through a dream.

  One morning, he still felt like he was in a strange trance as he watched the sun rise over the devastated landscape of Indiana, his hand resting on the throttle, feet on the pedals of the helicopter. All the cadets old enough to help had been hastily given army fatigues, a temporary commission, and ordered to fly where told, wait, and return with new batches of injured, moaning survivors as the Red Cross rounded them up and packed them off for the various triage centers.

  He didn’t feel anything more than vague surprise Karl Marsters crossed the tarmac and climbed in next to him, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, grumbling about needing to catch a ride with him to the next site where he was assigned. Usually when Tom and Karl ran into each other, a mutual recognition of hostility passed between them, followed by something unpleasant and occasionally violent. Lately Tom had varied the routine and creeped Karl out by being civil to him, but it was a very one-sided civility and not entirely friendly.

  Today, everything was different. It was like none of that old stuff mattered. The Karl who’d forced Tom to bark like a dog, and the Tom who’d trapped Karl in sewage felt decades ago. None of their mutual hostility mattered in the face of the apocalyptic event they’d both survived.

  “You wanna fly?” Tom offered. It seemed like a gracious concession to him, since he vastly preferred being at the controls.

  Karl rubbed his eye with a thumb. “Not unless you’re tired.”

  Tom wasn’t. He opened the throttle and pulled the collective control, compressing the left pedal to lift them up into the air. Karl sagged back in his seat, gazing miserably out at the landscape below them.

  “Hey,” Tom said after a while, speaking loudly to be heard over the humming of the rotor, “Look, I’m sorry about Chicago.”

  Karl shifted in his seat, restive. “My sister’s there. At Loyola.”

  “Sorry.”

  The larger boy looked at him for the first time. “What about you? You hear from your family?”

  “There’s just my old man.” Tom felt that sensation like his stomach was turning over. “I haven’t heard anything, but I guess that’s expected. Lines are down most everywhere. There wasn’t too much in the Southwest, but if anyone gets out of stuff okay, it’s him.”

  “Hope you hear something.”

  “Thanks.”

  Karl stared down at the fires like smears against the landscape near Gary. He balled up his fist and smacked the dashboard. “We’re so close,” he said, teeth gritted. “I’d ditch and go myself if the roads weren’t all jammed.”

  Tom guessed what he was talking about. “Can’t you request they send you to the relief effort in Chicago?”

  “This is as close as I can get. They want me doing my job. They know I’d be gone in a second there to look for—” His voice broke off.

  Tom eyed him. Then he twisted the helicopter around, set off in another direction. Karl blinked over at him. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m accidentally flying off course.” He raised his eyebrows. “So if I’m off course and happen to land in Chicago instead of Gary, I don’t think anyone’s gonna blame you for looking into some personal business.”

  For a moment, the other boy just stared at him. “You’ll get a reprimand for this.”

  “Yeah, another one. I’ll survive somehow.”

  Karl settled back in his seat. Soon the remains of the taller buildings resolved into view, along with a smattering of burning buildings and abandoned cars choking the road alongside the lake.

  “You know where you wanna go?” Tom asked.

  “Drop me off downtown. I’ll figure it out from there. Since you’re off course and all.”

  Tom landed them on the beach by the lake. Karl popped open the door, and spun around to survey him in the purple early dawn light.

  “Raines,” he said, pointing a big finger, “you’re okay.”

  Tom nodded to him, and then when Karl was clear of the helicopter, he launched off into the air again.

  DAYS BLURRED INTO weeks. The final death count ticked up to 772 million. Instead of finding injured survivors trapped under ashen debris, in the burned or flattened zones, relief teams began finding bodies. Tom and the other cadets were going to be reassigned to their standard duties soon.

  Tom’s hours were filled with activity, and at nights when he closed his eyes, all the frantic, harried images of the day rushed behind his lids, like even his neural processor was struggling to make sense of everything that had taken place since finding that asteroid missing.

  Sometimes he saw the triage centers with the bloodied, chalk-white faces, the bodies that blurred before his eyes because there were so many of them, and torment gripped him at the very idea his dad might be one of them, out there somewhere, maybe hoping Tom would find him, hoping he’d help him. Tom stayed up late even after two days straight in the field, scrolling through the unorganized lists of survivors, flipping through surveillance footage—whatever surveillance was left—until his vision went double.

  And then one day, the unexpected happened.

  Tom was taking a lunch break, seated in the door of his helicopter, devouring a sandwich waiting for his next assignment, when a sleek hybrid airplane-helicopter glided down onto the landing strip before him. Tom reached up to hold his cap on, looking over its smooth lines admiringly. He hadn’t had a chance to fly one of those yet apart from in simulations. Then the door popped open and a lone figure emerged from its depths.

  The person moved toward him at a steady pace, a small woman wearing a standard set of fatigues with markings he didn’t recognize . . . obviously someone from another country aiding the relief effort.

  And then she drew closer and Tom’s heart stilled.

  He felt like he’d frozen up, like every molecule in his body had grown rigid, paralyzed, tense, just waiting for his brain to make sense of what his eyes were seeing, because it couldn’t possibly be—

  Her.

  It was her!

  Tom launched himself forward, leaping out of the helicopter, and started toward her, only to stop several feet away, just staring at the girl he’d never seen in person. Medusa’s black hair flapped in the breeze, her eyes like two dark crescents gazing up into his, th
e scarring of the left side of her face giving her a tense, disapproving look.

  “Medusa.” Tom couldn’t believe it. The word was a whisper.

  She studied him for a long moment. “So you’re real. I didn’t imagine you.”

  “Was that in question?”

  “I haven’t slept since Cruithne. Everything’s in question right now,” she said.

  She turned away to head back to her helicopter, but Tom bolted forward and grabbed her arm. “Wait!”

  “Don’t touch me,” she warned him.

  Tom let his hand slip from her arm. The cold morning air was crisp, billowing white clouds of breath puffing from his mouth. He wasn’t even shivering. He felt electrified all over, his brain blazing with wonder, disbelief. She was here. She was actually here. He’d touched her arm. Her real arm.

  “How did you even get here?”

  Medusa stared at him. She pointed back at her airplane.

  “Yeah, got that. I mean—how? Why?”

  “I tracked down your GPS signal. I was curious about how you would compare in person.” She threw a distracted glance around. “I suppose I should go now.”

  “Wait. Wait.”

  She looked at him curiously as Tom tried to form words.

  He finally came up with some. “Have you gone insane?”

  She had to have a GPS signal. Her military would register that she was in the United States. They’d think she flown off and defected. She had no excuse to be here. He charged toward her, and she didn’t shove him away when he clasped her small shoulders roughly.

  “Medusa, are you crazy? You flew over here just for a look? You’ll get tried for treason. They’ll think you defected! You have to go back now! Blame an instrument error or something. Anything. Just fly back right now!”

  But looking at her, at the strange distance in her dark eyes, Tom realized she hadn’t come because of idle curiosity. There was more to this.

  “What’s wrong?” he pressed.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you even hear me? You’re taking a huge risk here.”

  She closed her eyes heavily. “It doesn’t matter.” There was a strange flatness to her that Tom never saw through the surveillance cameras, never saw in simulations. It wasn’t like her. “None of it matters anymore. Look around. I’ve been at the Citadel.” Her gaze wandered somewhere far in the distance. “It seems like everyone lost someone. I had to stand there and pretend . . .”

  “Pretend what?” Tom demanded. “Pretend you didn’t save the planet?”

  She gripped her temples. “I’ve run through the scenario over and over again, and I’ve recalculated the trajectory of those missiles. I could have gotten the entire asteroid, Tom. I could have done better. If I’d been two seconds faster, that’s a hundred million people alive right there. These people died because of me.”

  Tom gaped at her. “But you got the asteroid.”

  “I read analyses on the internet. They all think it was Joseph Vengerov, but they’re saying he could have done a better job if—”

  “Stop doing this to yourself. Come here.” Tom pulled her up against him, ignoring the way she pushed at him. He knew she’d made a momentous decision that day, firing those nukes. The consequences numbered in billions of lives. She’d taken on the most nerve-racking, frightening task possible in averting a total apocalypse and he wasn’t going to let her do this to herself. “You saved the world. Don’t you get that? Why else do you think Vengerov is claiming credit? If some idiots are criticizing it, forget them. They’re morons!”

  “I could’ve done better—”

  “There’s no use thinking that. You can’t go back in time. Maybe you possibly, theoretically, by some quirk of luck or whatever might’ve saved more but you know, you could’ve saved a lot fewer people than you did. That’s for sure. That could’ve happened, too. You could’ve freaked out or frozen up. You could’ve panicked, and if you had, then who’d be left? A handful of rich people who had bunkers and the machines and supplies to ride out a nuclear winter. You did the right thing. Don’t doubt yourself.”

  “It’s not that easy.” She extricated herself from his grip. He expected her to leave him then, but she just sat on the ground, like she didn’t have the energy to move herself. “I feel like I can’t think.”

  “Yeah, well, not sleeping for a couple weeks can do that for you,” Tom said. He realized suddenly how much that had to be messing with her head. Medusa wouldn’t do something like this normally. She’d have better judgment. She wasn’t thinking clearly.

  He rubbed his head. Okay, he’d have to figure out how to cover for her. It felt like a great weight compressing his chest, pondering covering the tracks for someone else when he didn’t even know yet how much damage had been done.

  With a start, he suddenly realized what Blackburn had to feel, getting stuck doing this for him over and over again. So what would Blackburn do? Where would he start?

  “Your GPS signal,” Tom said. “Did you disguise your GPS signal?”

  “I think so,” she said, her voice faint, arms wrapped around her bent knees.

  “This is a yes or no question. No thinking.”

  Her black eyes moved up to his, a flash of anger in them that reassured him. “Yes.”

  Tom looked between her plane and his, his neural processor calling up the schematics for the Interstice. He was getting an idea about what to do here.

  She’d told him once to find someone who actually needed him. This time, she did, and he could see that clear as day. He was the only person who knew what she’d done, so he was the only person who could help fix this.

  He headed to his helicopter and set the auto navigation, then returned. “Come on. I’m taking you somewhere.”

  She shook her head.

  Tom sighed. “Okay. We’ll do it this way, then.” He leaned over and swept her up into his arms. He intended to be all manly and smooth, but it was trickier carrying a live human who was irritated with him than he thought it would be. He threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes instead and tromped off toward her hybrid plane.

  “What are you doing?” she complained. “There’s nothing wrong with my legs.”

  “Watch your head,” he told her as he lifted her through the door.

  But despite his best efforts, her head bumped the door-frame, and suddenly she cursed at him in Cantonese. Tom found himself smiling suddenly, because that was the most reassuring thing he’d heard since her arrival.

  It wasn’t until they were both sitting in her hybrid plane that it hit him: this girl across from him, so close he could feel the heat radiating from her body . . .

  This was Medusa. Here in person. It was actually Medusa.

  Orders blinked in Tom’s vision center. He responded that he had technical difficulties and was going to be delayed. Then he improvised a rerouter to ensure his GPS signal stayed in the Midwest where he was supposed to be. He could get onto the Interstice for the trip back.

  Then he launched them into the air in her own plane. She lapsed into a slumber next to him, all the sleep she’d missed since Cruithne catching up to her. Tom found his eyes straying to her, over and over again, as he tried to wrap his mind around the fact that she was real, she was here. He could see her chest rising and falling, the way a strand of her dark hair fluttered over her eyes. The scar tissue over one of her lids, and the other eyelid with a sweep of dark lashes. He wondered what had happened, how it must have hurt.

  She didn’t wake until well after he’d landed, when the humid breeze was stirring through the door of the helicopter, flung open to reveal the vivid sunset outside.

  “Come on,” Tom said, easing her out with him.

  Medusa rubbed at her eyes as they settled onto the ground, looking around, perplexed, at the stretch of jagged landscape, the lush trees sprawled out below, the ocean sparkling in the distance.

  “What do you think? Pretty, right?” Tom said.

  “Why did you take me here?�
�� Medusa wondered. “I didn’t come to sightsee.”

  “You know Cruithne was supposed to hit in the Pacific?” Tom said, voicing the words he’d thought of on his way over. His motivational pep talk. “Once it hit, it would’ve sent a massive wave of boiling water over this place. So look around and think about the fact that this place is only here because of you. And not just this place. All in all, there were way more people than seven hundred million about to die before you blew up Cruithne. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, get over it.”

  “Get over it?” Medusa echoed.

  “Yeah. Get over it. Don’t you know how ridiculous it is, kicking yourself for only saving ten and a half billion people? You’re a hero! Or heroine, whatever. I’d love to be the one who saved the world. I’d spend the rest of my life feeling way too proud of myself about it. I’d tell anyone who’d hear me that I saved the whole world, and forget hiding my ability. It would be worth risking Vengerov coming after me just for the bragging rights of saying I’m the one who saved the world.”

  For a moment, he swore, she almost smiled.

  “You actually get to legitimately say you saved the world,” Tom marveled. “Or you will be able to down the road when the ghost in the machine and all our secrets don’t matter anymore. You did it, so stop whining and accept the credit already for this amazing thing you did. So . . . that’s it. That’s what I have to say. Thinking about stuff you can’t change or fix anymore is stupid and pointless. You say you could’ve done it better, but you know you could have done infinitely worse. That’s what I brought you here, so you can see visible evidence of a place you saved.”

  Medusa frowned. “You could have shown me anything. Why are we in Hawaii?”

  “I figured this was closer to China so you have a quick flight home.” He flashed her a grin. “And I kind of wanted an excuse to see this place.”

  A smile twitched her lips.