Catalyst

by S. J. Kincaid

  “You’re starting to get it, aren’t you?” Tom said, growing sure of it. Maybe she’d just needed to sleep, maybe she’d needed to air her worst fears to someone . . . but Tom liked to think he’d had a hand in the smile that crept to her lips.

  The wind rippled through her dark hair. “I can’t believe you flew us all the way to Hawaii to tell me something you could have said hours ago.”

  “Yeah, but you needed sleep, Medusa. Plus then I wouldn’t have gotten to impress you with a surprise trip to Hawaii.”

  She peered at him, her veil of hair hiding that part of her face she never liked to show him. “You can call me Yaolan.”

  “Yaolan,” he murmured.

  And when she stepped toward him, Tom didn’t hesitate. He pulled her into his arms and dipped his head to hers, his lips pressing hers, parting them. Her fingers skimmed his sides, and Tom realized everything was better in person. Everything. No virtual reality could capture the feel of her body like magic in his grip, a chaos of sensations racing over his skin like he’d finally reached some point he’d been journeying to for years, never reaching it.

  Even though it went against his every instinct, his every cell and pore and molecule, he was the one who forced himself to step back. His voice sounded strained. “Ready to fly yourself back?”

  She searched his face. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No. Never.” Tom reached out and brushed aside the hair veiling her face, wondering how it was possible to feel drunk on someone’s presence. He felt like anything was possible around her, like his life meant more, like he meant more. She didn’t close her eyes. “I want to see you again. Not after we almost all die, not after an apocalypse, not after anything like that. But right now . . . Right now if I stay with you much longer, I’ll do something wrong.”

  She leaned her forehead against his chest, and Tom stroked her silky black hair. They didn’t need to say anything more. Tom felt for the first time in a long while like things were right in the world.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EVERYTHING INSIDE HIM seemed to be humming, thrumming with elation later when he returned to the Pentagonal Spire, such a strange sensation after the recent weeks of stark misery. He had to concentrate to stop himself from grinning stupidly, his thoughts filled with her, just her.

  She’d flown back to China but Tom had touched her, held her, the girl he’d obsessed over for years, and suddenly nothing felt impossible to him anymore. He hadn’t really felt this way since losing his fingers—this sense like he was totally free, invincible. Even with a world between them, he felt he could leap over the seas and transcend it all.

  What if I quit tomorrow?

  Tom had never had the thought before, but it spun into his head, fanciful, insane, and suddenly incredible, because he realized there was something else out there if he didn’t make it in the Intrasolar Forces. If he weren’t here at the Spire, there wouldn’t be any restrictions on his movement anymore, on who he talked to. Even if he worked for some Coalition company or another, he’d have the freedom of civilian life. Even if the countries were at war in space, that wouldn’t stop him from seeing her.

  The ideas spun in his mind until he reached the elevator, where the doors parted to reveal Lieutenant Blackburn.

  Before Tom could react, he seized Tom’s collar and yanked him inside.

  “Are you a fool? What were you thinking?”

  Tom’s eyes flew to his. “About what?”

  “You know what.”

  “I know I can’t stand here talking about it,” Tom reminded him.

  “Oh please, do you think I’d forget to block the surveillance?” The elevator jerked to a stop. “Again, have you lost your mind?”

  How had he found out so soon? Tom had redirected his GPS signal; Yaolan had redirected hers. He even had his cover story prepared.

  “There was a problem with fuel. My mistake—” He tried to shrug out of Blackburn’s grip, but the man’s fingers tightened on his arm.

  “News flash, Raines: you can’t just run off and meet your girlfriend from the enemy side!”

  “She came to me. I just took her back!”

  “After a stop-off in Hawaii?”

  “It’s between here and China, and she had to go back there anyway. Look, she blamed herself for what happened. For everyone who died. I couldn’t let her. She was saving us.”

  Blackburn’s face went very still. “That was her?”

  And for a moment, the world ground to a halt, blood roaring up in Tom’s ears as he realized he’d just revealed to Blackburn who the other ghost in the machine was. From the shock on Blackburn’s face, he’d come to the same realization, too.

  Knock him out, erase his memory of this . . .

  Tom didn’t even get to his forearm keyboard. Blackburn’s brutal grip descended on him, shoving Tom against the wall with breathtaking speed.

  “I am not going to hurt her,” Blackburn rasped in Tom’s ear.

  Tom seized Blackburn’s wrist and whirled around, using his whole body weight to unbalance Blackburn, driving him forward against the wall, the superior reflexes of youth for once overcoming Blackburn’s size advantage—and suddenly he was the one with the other man pinned. “You’re right. You’re not going to hurt her!”

  Blackburn probably could have pushed him off, but he didn’t try to fight him. “Listen to me. I am trying to help you. She has no reason to feel guilty. You can tell her that.”

  For a moment, silence descended between them, the only sound their rapid breathing.

  “What do you mean?” Tom said reluctantly.

  Blackburn looked back at him. “The next time you talk to her, tell her Cruithne was not her fault.”

  “I’ve told her that, but—”

  He looked back at Tom over his shoulder, his eyes two gray flints of steel. “Tell her it’s very easy for someone with the most well-stocked bunker money can buy, two multinational companies, and no regard for human life to knock an asteroid out of orbit.”

  Tom caught his breath. His grip slipped from Blackburn. “No way. No, it’s too . . . it’s too much, even for him.”

  “Why not?” Blackburn turned slowly, his gray eyes shining with an unsettling light. “Back in his twenties, one of his first acts of CEO of LM Lymer Fleet was to push the neutron bombing of the Middle East. He made a windfall off that contract. Do you honestly think a man with so little regard for human life in one part of the world sees people in other parts of the world differently? At the end of the day, whatever the nationality, whatever religion or creed or country we identify with, we’re all just the rabble to people like Vengerov. Excess and expendable human beings.”

  Tom swallowed. Blackburn was right. Someone who could visit such atrocities on people on the other side of the world could just as easily do it elsewhere.

  “His equipment failed to signal us when Cruithne was knocked out of orbit,” Blackburn went on. “He’s fully acquainted with the military capabilities of both sides. He knew we could damage the asteroid just enough to ensure this was a mass extinction event but not the end of all life on Earth. He has full access to every single machine in their arsenal. One command and Obsidian Corp.’s Promethean Arrays can fire at a target, redirect it. Or maybe a few of their Centurions can plant some hydrogen bombs in just the right spot to give an asteroid a good knock in the direction of his choosing.”

  “God . . .” Tom breathed, horrified. It all made a terrible sense.

  “Then again,” Blackburn mused darkly, “he could have used another asteroid like a cosmic game of billiards—that would’ve done the trick, too. Whatever the scenario, the net result is something that appeared to be a freak natural occurrence that happened right when the rest of the Coalition had turned on him, and it distracted everyone. The perfect way of taking the heat off his
company. And if he drew out the ghost in the machine in the process, all the better.”

  “I didn’t even try to cover my tracks.”

  Blackburn rubbed his palm over his hand. “Then maybe he did.”

  Tom found himself thinking of Vengerov’s gloating face on television as he claimed credit for saving the world, for what Medusa had done; and it took on a new significance, a new audacity. “He did this because of us.”

  “Us?”

  “If I hadn’t—” Tom broke off.

  Stayed silent. If he hadn’t stayed silent. If he’d reported Blackburn. Maybe the attacks on the executives would have stopped and Vengerov’s company wouldn’t have been going under. Then he wouldn’t have needed to do this to save them, and sacrifice seven hundred million people in the process.

  And then Tom realized what he was doing: Blackburn’s reaction to Vengerov wasn’t the problem. Vengerov was the real problem. Joseph Vengerov was willing to something like this in the first place. Joseph Vengerov needed to pay.

  Rage frothed up inside him. He grabbed Blackburn’s collar, his voice shaking with fury. “Why haven’t you killed him? After everything he’s done to you, to everyone . . . I know you’re capable of it. I know you killed Heather.”

  Shock transformed Blackburn’s face. His grip slacked.

  “Yeah, I’m a little more silent and subtle than a thermonuclear explosion after all,” Tom said, shoving him away. “I’ve kept secrets. I know why you did that. But what I don’t get is why Vengerov’s still alive.”

  “Because I can’t kill him,” Blackburn said.

  “What, you have a conscience when it comes to him?”

  Blackburn leaned over him, shadows on his face. “He deserves a fate worse than death, Raines, but, no, that’s not what stops me. None of us can kill him. There’s a fail-safe of sorts: a command hard-wired into our processors, even into his drones, prohibiting any of his machines from inflicting physical harm upon him.”

  Tom hadn’t expected that. “Why can’t you hack your own processor, then? You’re so good with machines. Can’t you reprogram that fail-safe?”

  “It’s not so easy. If I wanted to get into those sectors of code, I’d have to find a vulnerability so buried in the code, even Obsidian Corp. doesn’t know about it—and hasn’t devised a way to patch before I take advantage of it. It’s called a zero-day exploit.”

  “So . . . great. Let’s find one of these zero-day exploits. I’ll get Wyatt to look, too.”

  Blackburn barked an incredulous laugh. “You don’t listen in my class at all, do you, Raines? Finding a zero-day flaw is like winning the lottery. It’s valuable because nobody realizes it’s there, not even Obsidian Corp. You can sell zero-day information to governments or security companies for hundreds of millions of dollars because it’s that rare. If every competent programmer in the Spire spent the year studying our code full-time, I doubt we’d find one. We don’t have the resources.”

  This time, he started up the elevator, and Tom didn’t stop him.

  “If he goes down, it won’t be from a direct strike at our hands,” Blackburn concluded. “We have to wait until people have forgotten Cruithne, and then maybe the other Coalition executives will remember why they turned on him.”

  And Tom had a sudden suspicion—maybe the other ghost in the machine would give them reason to remember again, too.

  THAT NIGHT, TOM hooked in his neural wire to catch up on his own sleep. What seemed moments later, Vik yanked his neural wire out, and Tom found himself staring up at the three pale faces of his friends, crowded over his bed.

  Consciousness initiated. The time is 0145.

  “We need to talk,” Vik informed him.

  They slipped soundlessly through the darkened common room, and then into Wyatt’s bunk. “Tiny Spicy Vikram.”

  “Can’t you change that trigger phrase?” Vik complained, slumping onto Wyatt’s empty bed. Her roommate, Evelyn, was still conked out on her own bed. They were free be loud, since it was nearly impossible to wake someone with noise alone while their processors were hooked into the system.

  “This is not a priority right now, Vik,” Wyatt said.

  Tom felt Yuri take him by the shoulders and steer him over to the bed. “Sit.”

  It was a command. Tom sat.

  Vik slung an arm around his shoulders. “So . . .”

  “So?” Tom said, wary.

  Wyatt folded her arms. “The ghost in the machine.”

  “How?” Vik said.

  “Why?” Yuri said.

  “How?” Vik said again.

  “It can’t be you,” Wyatt insisted.

  “Seriously, how?” Vik said.

  “Thomas, this is very strange,” Yuri told him.

  “Answer our questions,” Wyatt said.

  Tom threw his hands over his face, dearly regretting his rash admission in the moments they thought they were about to die. “Those were a lot of partial questions, and some weren’t even questions.”

  “Start with ‘how,’” Vik said. “I said it a bunch of times. You owe me for all that effort of vocalizing a single syllable several times.”

  “Okay. Look, I’ve had this ability since I got my neural processor. From the moment of install, really. I can go through firewalls. It feels like I can enter machines, you know, interface with them. Like at Obsidian Corp. While I unloaded that search program into the system, I interfaced with the system myself to look for Yuri’s signal. Just in case I could find it faster.”

  Wyatt and Vik exchanged a look, like Tom had answered some question of theirs.

  “What do you mean, interface?” Wyatt said. “We all interface.”

  “Yeah, but everyone can do it only with machines designed for a neural interface. The ones I do aren’t.” Tom shrugged. “Like in the Beringer Club. Vik, the thing you told me about with the septic tank, but it didn’t work.”

  “What? But you—”

  “I made it work. I interfaced with the septic tank and gave it a command the same way we command drones. Hence, I got the same result—backed up sewage, flooded club, drenched executives. What I do also feels different from regular interfacing. It’s like . . . it’s like I’m inside the internet, moving through it. I can’t really explain.”

  “And Medusa does this, too,” Wyatt said, eyeing him dubiously.

  “Yeah. Only, I didn’t know about that until Capitol Summit. The first one. I tried to cheat by interfacing with some nearby satellites to see where she was, and she was already interfacing with them. Our minds were accessing the same machine at the same time.”

  Vik stared at him. “You can see through satellites.”

  “They’re machines, they’ve got enough bandwidth, they’re internet accessible, so yeah, I can. And Lieutenant Blackburn knows. He’s known since the census device. That’s the stuff he erased from the surveillance archives.” He looked at Wyatt. “When you found all those gaps in the footage from the census device, that’s what they were. Blackburn erased them to hide what I could do.”

  Wyatt sank onto the other bed, heedless of the unconscious Evelyn, whose head she nearly sat on. “Why can you do this?”

  “No idea,” Tom said.

  “Can you show us?” Yuri wondered. “I am finding this very difficult to grasp.”

  Tom nodded. “Sure. Look at that surveillance camera in the corner.” He hooked into Wyatt’s access port and interfaced with the surveillance system. He wagged the camera very deliberately at them, then snapped back into himself.

  His friends were staring at him now, wide-eyed. It was such a small thing, but they knew he shouldn’t have been able to do it. It was odd how much of a relief it was unburdening himself.

  At least, that’s what Tom thought until he realized Vik was sitting far from him on the bed now, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes haunted.

  “Oh my God, do you guys realize what this means?”

  Tom eyed him uneasily.

  “It means I’m the rig
ht-hand man of the most wanted fugitive in the world. It means I blew up a building with the world’s most dangerous terrorist! Tom, for God’s sake, do you realize we’re all going to prison when you get caught for what you’re doing?”

  “I won’t get caught,” Tom insisted.

  Wyatt knelt down in front of him. “Tom, you have got to stop killing all those CEOs and executives. It’s not funny anymore.”

  “Was it ever funny?” Vik wondered.

  She leaned over and whispered, “Of course not, but Tom might’ve thought it was funny.”

  Tom heard it anyway. He had good ears. He was offended. “I’m not a psychopath, Wyatt!”

  His friends looked at each other dubiously, as though urging one another not to aggravate the crazy psychopath.

  “Argh!” Tom groaned out, frustrated. “I’m really not a homicidal maniac, and I’m not killing the CEOs, either. That’s not me.” He couldn’t tell them who it really was—he wouldn’t. But he didn’t want them to think that was him.

  “It’s the ghost in the machine,” Wyatt pointed out. “You said that’s you.”

  “Ponder this: the ghost is anonymous. Anyone can say they’re the ghost in the machine. It’s like someone dressing up like Batman, okay? And saying they’re Batman, but that doesn’t make them Batman.”

  “What, you think you’re Batman now?” Vik said, and Tom shot him a sour look, because again, he was treating him like he was crazy. “Aw, give me a break, Tom. You have put me at serious risk of spending hard time in prison. I’m way too pretty for that.”

  Yuri rested a consoling hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you are not so lovely as you believe you are.”

  Vik shook his head morosely. “No, I am every bit as lovely as I think I am. Stop trying to make me feel better with your sweet, sweet lies.”

  Wyatt frowned at Tom. “Okay, so if someone else is the ghost, that means there are two people with your abilities. Oh, wait. No, three, if you count Medusa.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I don’t know. I only know the other ghost isn’t me and it’s not Medusa, either. It’s someone else saying they’re the ghost. They probably can’t do what Medusa and I can do.”