Catalyst

by S. J. Kincaid

  Everything ignoble and base about his time with Vengerov took on a new meaning, acquired a new importance, because at least it was him. At least it hadn’t been her. He wasn’t here because he’d been discovered, because he’d been beaten.

  He was here because he’d taken her place. He’d averted fate. He became the ghost in the machine to keep Vengerov away from her, and it had worked, it had worked. Thank God it had worked.

  And he would spend a thousand years alone in space, and die a thousand wretched, miserable deaths, before he would ever, ever give her up.

  He met Vengerov’s eyes. “I won’t be Vanya for you ever again.”

  He couldn’t shut his ears to a crackle of bones snapping.

  Despair wrenched through him, terrible and crushing, but he forced himself to look at Vengerov, all the hatred in his heart pouring bitter and acrid through him.

  The Russian oligarch seemed at a loss for a moment because Tom wasn’t falling apart. Obviously he had a new dilemma: he couldn’t force Tom back into the enclosure with a program when his processor was in read-only mode, he couldn’t use the restraining node to force compliance anymore, and Vanya wasn’t there.

  Tom waited for Vengerov to come at him, to try to physically force him inside the enclosure. Adrenaline surged through him. Starvation and inactivity may have left him weak as a child, but he felt ready to tear the world to pieces.

  Vengerov did not approach. Tom could almost see the computer in his head calculating the likelihood he’d end up damaged if he engaged Tom physically, and determining that wasn’t the optimal course of action. Vengerov turned idly toward the window instead and thrust aside the curtains, giving Tom a good, long look at empty space and dead suborbitals that might as well be on the other side of the galaxy for how far removed Tom was from them.

  “I require very little of you now,” he noted, the stars casting a light sheen over his pale hair. “The bulk of my work is done. There’s no reason I can’t have you confined in the enclosure for years to come.”

  “If you don’t need me, why don’t you just kill me?”

  Vengerov turned negligibly, surprise on his face. “Few people reach the heights I have through carelessness or waste. I’ve invested a good deal of time and effort into training Vanya and I intend to reap a maximum return on that investment.” He tossed Ushanka to the floor before Tom. “Stay out here with your dead rabbit, if you wish. Your allies still have no means of locating you. Not even the other ghost in the machine, not once the internet hub leaves with me. You will still be here when I return with a new restraining node and a census device. Then I’ll cull the identity of the other ghost out of you, though I must say, I already have theories.”

  Tom stared at Ushanka’s body, anguish in his heart.

  “After that, I assure you, you will go back in your enclosure. I suspect if you spend enough time in the dark, all by your lonesome, my Vanya will return. This is merely a bump on our road, not a dead end.”

  Then Vengerov’s calm footsteps moved away, the door sliding open and then closing, locking again. Tom stared at the body, knowing he had to stop this. Whatever it took. He had to stop it.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  HE LISTENED TO Vengerov’s ship detaching, departing, lightly jostling the entire capsule. In his arms, Ushanka grew stiff and cold, and Tom stared for a while through the open curtains at the distant stars. He knew it took millions of years for the light to reach him. He wondered how many of them were still there, how many had burned out long before. The brief diagram Medusa had sent him of this ship told him this was the only window—the only one—on the entire ship. They had to be in close orbit around Earth, otherwise Vengerov couldn’t come visit the way he did.

  Tom would give anything to see it one last time.

  He knew Vengerov would force Medusa’s identity out of him when he got back. The census device would tear apart whatever was left of his mind, and at some point, it would find what Vengerov wanted.

  He wouldn’t let that happen.

  What are you going to do about it? he imagined Medusa saying, and for a moment he could almost see her, he was so desperate for it. He could envision her with her arms folded, a challenging glint in her eyes.

  “I’m not letting him win,” Tom vowed.

  Medusa’s smile was broad and ferocious. “Then don’t.”

  Resolve formed like a cold, hard marble in his chest. He set Ushanka down gently in the enclosure and tucked the covers over her, and then contemplated his options. There was a distant prickling in his awareness, always there, his fingers—remotely connected to his neural processor but not attached to his hands. On the days Vengerov let him wear them, he always had them out already. He never showed Tom where they were hiding.

  And suddenly Yuri was the one watching Tom. “Thomas, you can do this. Think of a way. I believe in you.”

  Tom found himself thinking of finger racing.

  Yuri smiled and nodded. “Yes. You see?”

  “Of course!” Tom said, breaking into laughter.

  He mentally ordered the fingers to flex, then to drum the surface wherever they were. He followed the thumping sound until he reached the corner of the room. He stomped the floor, kicked at the wall—and the section of wall swung open, revealing a compartment. Tom plucked them up one by one between his longest stubs, then grasped them between his lips and clumsily screwed them onto his hands.

  A sense of accomplishment burst through him, heady and triumphant. He had his fingers. Surely he could do anything from here.

  But he had to act quickly. Before Vengerov returned. What? What? He had no weapons. He had nothing.

  It was Wyatt he pictured then, kneeling next to him on the floor. “You have a weapon.”

  Tom found himself remembering it.

  I’m the only one in here? he’d asked Vengerov.

  Yes, Vengerov had replied. You and a single Praetorian.

  Wyatt smiled wickedly at him as he got it, as he remembered her using the firing mechanism on the Praetorian at Milton Manor. He had a weapon. He had to get to it. He had to get out of this room.

  The next part was trickier. Tom used his teeth to tear the fake skin off one of his fingers, and then meticulously shredded the rubber to expose the wiring. He’d lost all his downloaded knowledge of technology when Vengerov removed it, but he still had his memories of practical experiences. Like that sudden frost in New Mexico where Neil broke them into an empty car so they wouldn’t freeze. He remembered Neil shorting out the locks.

  “You can do this, Tommy. Don’t shock yourself,” Neil told him, standing there with him now.

  “I won’t,” Tom assured him, letting his dad watch him strip the wires from the control panel. Then with a spark and fizzle, he shorted the locking mechanism out.

  “That’s my boy,” Neil said proudly.

  The Praetorian was in the hallway beyond the door. It lit to life and sped over toward him.

  Tom smiled savagely, because this machine couldn’t kill him. With a roar of fury, he seized its curved metal neck in both hands and wrenched it forward, flinging a leg over it to hold it between his thighs. Warning shocks vibrated up the metal neck of the machine, never enough to harm him, just enough to make his muscles lock briefly, but Tom was wild with the desire to destroy it and took turns holding it with his arms and legs. The machine wasn’t programmed to harm him, so it never used its sheer power to force him off.

  Tom jammed the door back shut and wrenched the neck over and over against it, throwing his entire body weight against it, until reason broke through the vindictive pleasure he was taking in wrenching at it.

  “Gormless Cretin,” Vik rebuked, smacking his forehead. He stood across from Tom, peering over the head of the Praetorian. “Think. We’ve actually done this before.”

  They had! To
m laughed wildly. “Man, I’m an idiot.” He stripped out the control chip. The machine went dead.

  “That’s more like it,” Vik told him.

  Remembering how Yuri had splintered off the firing mechanism at Milton Manor, Tom set about kicking at that next. Vik, Wyatt, and Yuri were all there now, watching, urging him on when he got frustrated with how much strength he’d lost. Soon he was able to turn to them with a flourish, the weapon in his hand, a huge grin on his lips.

  “You know that charge won’t last long,” Wyatt told him.

  “Make it count,” Vik said.

  “I’ll kill him with it,” Tom vowed.

  And then Blackburn was there, shaking his head. “That won’t work, Raines. You know it won’t.”

  Tom’s teeth ground together. He couldn’t kill Vengerov with it. He couldn’t shoot him. Even if Medusa had shorted out the restraining node, and Tom now could move however he liked, there was still that fail-safe encoded in his processor preventing him from killing Vengerov. Preventing anyone.

  His eyes strayed to the window.

  “I blow it out,” Tom said. “I wait until he’s in here, then I shoot it.”

  “What if the fail-safe won’t let you?” Wyatt pointed out. “You’re killing him indirectly, but you’re still trying to kill him.”

  “You don’t know the fail-safe covers indirect murder.”

  “What if he can tell without even boarding the ship that you’ve disabled the Praetorian?” Wyatt pressed. “What if that door had a silent alarm? He’s had time to prepare. He might return with an odorless gas to slip into the ventilation system, any number of other means to incapacitate you without even coming near you. Maybe he won’t come himself. Maybe he’ll send his personnel to take care of it. Then you’ve lost your one and only chance.”

  Tom began shaking. “You’re right. It won’t work.”

  It was Medusa at his side now, her steady black eyes boring into his. “There’s still a way out. You know what it is.”

  And Tom knew what it was. He found himself looking at the suborbitals floating against the blackness of space.

  There.

  Those were his only chance.

  “I’m insane for even thinking about this,” Tom remarked calmly.

  “Well, you are talking to imaginary friends,” Vik pointed out. “Literally.”

  Tom laughed. “Yeah. That doesn’t help my case.”

  “But you know what you need to do,” Vik said, his eyes gleaming.

  Tom looked at Vik, then Wyatt, Yuri, Medusa, his father, and Blackburn. They all waited expectantly. He missed them all so much it hurt. Even Blackburn.

  Tom nodded. He knew what he had to do. “I’m coming home.”

  THE MINUTES WERE ticking by, the moment of Vengerov’s return growing dangerously closer. Tom’s friends stayed with him as he walked down the hallway, navigating the shifts in gravity until he reached the other capsule. It was identical in size to the room Tom had been inside, but this one was bare—with no window. Tom left the doors open to maximize the air flow, and then returned to the room where his enclosure was. He tore the mirror off the bathroom wall and then stood in front of the window, gazing at the deactivated suborbitals that seemed to be so far away.

  When he needed them the most, his friends weren’t there anymore, because he couldn’t fool himself into thinking he was anything but totally alone right now, facing a near-certain death in a terribly cruel way.

  But he looked once back at the room, the wretched room with the awful enclosure where he’d spend the rest of his days if he backed out now, and the last doubts deserted him. He’d told Frayne once that he’d take a near certainty of destruction over a guarantee of continued existence with no choices.

  It was time to follow through on that.

  Vengerov had removed every knowledge download from Tom’s neural processor, but Tom still knew what to expect. He’d read a lot about vacuum exposure after . . . after seeing what happened to Heather. Some morbid part of his brain had wanted to know more information than the snippets of generalized knowledge in his processor. It came in handy now. He’d read it himself rather than downloaded it. Vengerov hadn’t been able to take it with the rest of his knowledge downloads.

  If he was somewhere that repressurized within ninety seconds, he’d recover. If he blew all the air out of his lungs first, he’d stay conscious a lot longer than if he didn’t. Fifteen seconds. Maybe thirty.

  It occurred to him that the temperature would be absolute zero, but there would be nothing to conduct the heat away from him, and asphyxiation would kill him long before he lost any other body parts to cold. Tom smiled grimly. It figured he’d ended up the one place even colder than Antarctica.

  He imagined Medusa there with him again. Yaolan. Wearing her most dangerous smile, and Tom knew she would never be afraid to do this.

  “You know,” Tom said, needing to tell her this, “the first time I saw you, I was . . . I know I was kind of surprised you were ugly.” There was no use lying. “I’d built up this fantasy girl in my mind and I hadn’t imagined that, but it never mattered. Medusa, the real you . . . Yaolan, the real you is a thousand times more amazing than that fantasy girl ever could have been. A million.”

  “If I weren’t scarred,” she mused, “you’d probably have no chance with me.”

  Tom laughed. “Yeah. Everyone else would see you like I do. I’d have to fight for you.”

  “You have to do it, anyway.” She smiled at him. “I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

  “I love you,” Tom told her.

  “Prove it.”

  Tom hiked up the bathroom mirror in one arm, raised the firing mechanism of the Praetorian. For a moment he trembled, sick with fear.

  “Don’t be a coward, just GO!” Medusa shouted at him.

  Tom blew all the air out of his lungs and fired the energy beam at the window.

  The response was shockingly immediate, the window rupturing outward, all the air in the room slamming against his back, hurtling him forward, his brain screaming an instinctive warning as he hurled out of the safe confines of the capsule into the unforgiving void of space.

  The first few seconds were critical, the only seconds he had the air at his back, propelling him, and his neural processor ran through rapid calculations about how to position his body to receive the momentum at the proper angle to drive him toward his target. More air seeped from his lungs, more air than he thought he had, like he was continuously exhaling. His lungs were actively pulling oxygen from his bloodstream, expelling it into the vacuum. Dead silence enveloped him, punctuated only by the thunder of his own heart drumming louder and louder.

  His every square millimeter of skin began straining. His heart was the only sound, pounding in his tight eardrums. As the great black void opened around him, he twisted his head to see another sight on the other side of the capsule—Earth. The planet, so large and vibrant with life, half in shadow, the incredible glare of the sun so much more powerful out here where Tom hurtled away from them both.

  His hands were already stiffening, freezing and swelling at the same time, but not his cybernetic fingers. They operated perfectly in the void, and Medusa’s diagram of the capsule told him exactly where to aim. Tom’s laser flared out, the last of its charge soaring through space, drilling into the oxygen tanks of the capsule. A flower of fire swelled at the other end of the laser beam, turning to steam, and Tom positioned the back of the bathroom mirror to buffer him from the heat as the force slammed him, buffeting him forward. His processor ran through the last furious adjustments and then he was away from it, hurtling through the void.

  The seconds ticked by as he felt the saliva in his mouth beginning to sizzle, to boil, as the sunlight unfiltered by atmosphere scorched his skin, his clothing. His body tingled all over with the oxygen forcing itself out of his bloodstream and dumping itself into his lungs. The suborbitals loomed cold and dead against the black void and too far away. Blackness pressed in. As
his thoughts dimmed, fear flooded Tom because he had to be conscious when he reached them. He had to or he’d die. His heart was thunder in his ears, hand stretched out desperately as the skin of his arms bloated, blood expanding in his veins. A sensation of unbearable pressure consumed him, pressing him, trying to explode him from the inside. His cybernetic fingers would function even after the rest of him grew paralyzed and swollen if he could only stay conscious enough to use them. His vision began to tunnel and he fought, fought with desperation.

  But even if he got inside, even if he popped the hatch open . . .

  Even then the suborbital might not repressurize automatically.

  And then he’d be dead. He’d be dead. And the blackness was truly closing now, clouding his brain, only his neural processor awake, running calculations, alert.

  “Tom?”

  The voice, an impossibility, sounded in his ear, and dimly Tom wondered why Blackburn had come back and yet none of his friends from the capsule had, but everything was tunneling in, blackening, the suborbitals too far, too far . . .

  “Tom, what are you . . . My God.”

  Darkness crushed him.

  THE FIRST THING he grew aware of was the pain all over, in his limbs, in his face. And then Blackburn’s voice in his ear.

  “. . . if you can hear me, say something.”

  Tom groaned. His lungs ached. He tried to move.

  “No, just stay there.”

  Tom was floating, and his eyes were foggy as he forced them open. Panic and confusion tangled inside him, and he kicked at the air. Suddenly Blackburn resolved into view, and waved for Tom to hold still. “Stop trying to move. Relax.”

  Tom stopped, the man standing fixed to the floor in zero gravity the only thing he could see clearly in the blurry world.

  “Don’t try to move,” Blackburn repeated. “I imagine you’re not feeling so great.” He shook his head. “I never would have suggested this escape plan, but you got far enough away from whatever was jamming our signal. I suppose I should congratulate you for that.”