Insignia

by S. J. Kincaid

  Tom stared hard at Marsh’s tired reflection in the glass pane over the ink blot.

  “I was looking for something very different. You’ve seen Camelot Company in action. Those kids are the best this country has to offer. Well-rounded, bright, personable.”

  “Like Karl Marsters?”

  “Well, most of them.” Marsh dipped his head, conceding that. “They’re America’s straight shooters who will get somewhere in life. That’s who we recruit. That’s the type of kid we usually attract.”

  “Unlike me.”

  Here it was again, that issue Tom had wondered about from the very start. He knew how strange it was that Marsh would recruit him, of all people in the country. He’d ignored the wrongness of it. And only now, now that it was about to implode, was Marsh answering him. Tom wanted to tear him apart for it.

  “Unlike you,” Marsh agreed. “Do you remember the scenario with the tank, Tom? The one I ran you through at the Dusty Squanto? There are several steps involved there. The testee first has to decide to go for the tank directly, rather than the antitank guns. And then comes the critical next step, the one most of our trainees in the Spire fail.”

  “What?” Tom asked miserably.

  “They get the hatch open and drop inside. That’s when they screw up. They drop into the tank and find the operator in the process of dying from exposure to the Martian atmosphere.”

  “And then they kill the guy.”

  Marsh shook his head. “That’s not what most trainees do. It would be easy if they could simply shoot the man, but it’s not possible with an iono-sulfuric rifle in a closed space. So they count on the man dying on his own. They don’t take into account the backup systems in the tank: the autosealing hatch, the pressurizers, and the operator’s hidden weapon. The operator recovers, and he kills the test taker. The only one here in the Spire who passed that phase was you.”

  “I didn’t even know about those backup systems.”

  “You bludgeoned the man before it even became an issue. You won the scenario. You beat a dying man to death. You did something the others flinched from.”

  “It was just a video game, though.”

  “It’s the instinct it reveals. That’s what I was looking for.”

  “You can’t tell me Karl Marsters would flinch from bludgeoning a dying guy.”

  “Karl Marsters didn’t go for the tank. That was the problem. I ran thousands of teenagers through that scenario. I found plenty who would bludgeon that operator—plenty with that killer instinct—but invariably, they failed to go directly for the tank because they failed to anticipate the best move for their opponent. Those cruel enough to bludgeon a dying man never had the same capacity to foresee the moves the operator was going to make. You not only passed, you nailed it on the first try. I thought you would. That’s why I honed in on you.”

  So that’s why Marsh hadn’t helped him. The thought stung him. He’d had these high expectations, and Tom hadn’t lived up to them. “I must’ve been a huge disappointment to you.”

  “Not at all. You have poor impulse control, and you’re too arrogant for your own good. You’re also shaping up into exactly what I wanted to find. Exactly the type of Combatant we’ve been lacking.”

  Tom remembered something Elliot had said, something Nigel had said. About how they were looking for someone different. Someone . . . “You want vicious.”

  “Yes, Tom.” Marsh leaned toward him, eyes intent. “Vicious. Ruthless—but only when you need to be. Someone who strikes when they know it will hurt. Someone who lands the lethal blow. Those are the people who win wars. Those are the people who take down the Medusas of this world. Look at Achilles—he wasn’t toppled by a warrior who was stronger than him, faster, better. He was felled by an arrow to the weak spot in his armor. You have an eye for those weak spots. You could be something. You could take down the other side’s best. I was willing to risk recruiting you through unofficial channels. And if you were as good as I hoped . . .”

  “It would be your icing on the cake?” Tom mocked.

  “Don’t mouth off. I’m your senior officer until the day you walk out of the Spire, Plebe.”

  “So seniority matters now?” Rage ignited in his chest. “It didn’t in the Census Chamber! Lieutenant Blackburn got away with threatening you!”

  “That’s a very different matter.”

  “How?”

  “Because he knows I can’t afford to lose him. He does something invaluable around here, and he does it for very cheap.”

  Tom blinked. “The programming?”

  “Obsidian Corp. built your processors, Tom. They used to handle all your software, too. Because they were the only ones who wrote Zorten II, they charged us through the roof for it. We tried cutting costs by training our own people, but Obsidian Corp. always hired them away. We tried to force our officers to finish their terms of service, but soon we’d get the angry calls from senators on behalf of Obsidian ordering us to let the programmers resign. To add insult to injury, Joseph Vengerov always turned around and tried to lease our own programmers back to us as consultants. It wasn’t financially sustainable. Lieutenant Blackburn is.”

  “This is all about money, then.”

  “It’s always about money, son. War is expensive. We cut costs wherever we can. That’s why all our shipyards are in space. That’s why Combatants need sponsors. The fact is, the only people in this country who can afford to pay taxes to support the military are the very people powerful enough to avoid paying them. As for the resources we win in space? We’re lucky to see a dime. We haven’t even seized Mercury yet, and Senator Bixby’s promised first drilling rights to Nobridis. That’s why I need Lieutenant Blackburn. He does everything Obsidian did, and he does it for an officer’s salary. Not only that, but he does it better. And the best part is, Joseph Vengerov could throw his entire fortune at him, and Blackburn would still turn down a job with Obsidian Corp.—because they were the ones behind the neural processors. In fact, Lieutenant Blackburn had only one condition when he came to the Spire: he wanted to teach the trainees how to program with Zorten II.”

  “He came here just for that?”

  “That’s all he wants. That’s why I stuck my neck out to get him on my staff. If he quits on me, or worse, follows through on his threat, every assurance I gave the Defense Committee gets discredited and so do I.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Tom’s voice shook. Blackburn had to have some other reason. He was twisted and evil and . . .

  “It’s true, Tom.” Marsh raised an open palm in the air. “He wants you to learn. Look what happened to him with his own processor.”

  “Yeah, I know it drove him crazy.”

  “More than that. All three adults who survived the neural processors reacted in different ways. The other two had serious problems, but they were either lucid or lucid most of the time. Major Blackburn was never lucid.”

  “Major,” Tom repeated.

  “He was a major in the US Army. First in his class at West Point, in fact. Once he got the processor, he had that psychotic break, but he refused to believe he was sick, and he wasn’t responding to medication. Obsidian Corp. stepped forward and offered to take custody of the survivors. It was their project, so they were willing to foot the expense of treating them with their own therapies. The other two survivors went willingly. Major Blackburn did not. He escaped their custody and disappeared right off the grid, and I’ll tell you, Tom, that’s not an easy feat in an age of universal surveillance. He even retrieved his family.”

  Tom opened and closed his mouth. “Lieutenant Blackburn has a family.”

  “Major Blackburn did,” Marsh corrected. “A wife, two kids, a house in Wyoming. We stationed soldiers at their home, waiting for him to show, and he still got them right out from under our noses. We heard nothing for years, and then one day out of the blue, his wife tipped us off. She’d realized by then that he’d lost his mind. He was paranoid, erratic, and she was afraid of him. She let us
know that he’d taken the family and holed up in a compound outside Roanoke, Texas.”

  Roanoke. The word sent a chill through Tom. “So what happened?”

  Marsh tapped his fingers on his desk. “He was armed to the teeth. His wife knew when we came to retrieve the processor, Major Blackburn might turn it into a bloodbath. She was willing to stay near him during the siege to keep us informed of his movements, if we were willing to smuggle out the children before the shooting began. On the day of the operation, she was able to slip the children out back where we had a team waiting to transport them out of harm’s way. And when that team drove from the house, well . . . they found out the hard way that Major Blackburn had rigged the surrounding area with land mines.”

  Tom was stunned into silence, realizing it. It took him several seconds to speak. “His kids were in the car?”

  “Yes.”

  “He blew up his own kids.”

  “Yes, Tom.”

  Tom couldn’t get his head around to that.

  “When we did finally move in, Major Blackburn didn’t put up a fight,” Marsh said. “As far gone as he was, even he understood what had happened. And even after he’d fixed his own neural processor, it was years before he was able to gain the slightest freedom of movement—he’d proven that dangerous. So you appreciate now, I hope, just how far out I had to stick my neck to get him in here. The army would never have had him back. Their boys drove that car onto that land mine. So James Blackburn’s now with my branch, and he’s my responsibility. He goes down, I go down, and he knows it.”

  Tom’s head throbbed. “So I’m done.” The implications of all this sank like a lead weight in his gut. “He has one over you, so if I stay, Blackburn’s going to drive me out of my mind with the census device and you can’t stop him. I have to quit.”

  “There’s one other way. It can’t come through me, but if he received an order directly from the senators on the Defense Committee to back down, he would have to leave you be. If you want them to step in for you, Tom, you have to become too valuable to let go. And you have to do it somewhere public enough to make an impression on them.”

  Tom sat up, his insides twisted into knots of anxiety, apprehension. Hope clawed its frantic way up from the murky depths where he’d banished it. His palms and forehead pricked with sweat.

  “How? General, I’ll do anything.”

  “You’re coming with me to the Capitol Summit. You’ll be the one to proxy for Elliot. You’ll be the one to beat Medusa.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  TOM SPRINTED ACROSS the Calisthenics Arena and caught up to Vik midway through the Battle of Gettysburg. His roommate lifted his bayonet to impale him, then realized who it was and lowered it again.

  “Tom! Hey, man. You done being disappeared now?”

  “Not yet. Run faster.”

  “Aah,” Vik agreed. The Confederates in Pickett’s Charge were nearly upon them.

  They picked up the pace, charging through the grass. In front of them, the Union soldiers fired at their position. The two armies pressed in on them like a steel trap springing shut.

  “So where have you been?” Vik screamed the words to be heard over the booming canons. “You should hear the rumors about you, man. I’m talking alien abductions and secret CIA mind-control experiments here.”

  “Basement.” Tom couldn’t say much more than that. Not because it was classified, but more because he was out of breath. Two days, no sleep, little food or water, and constant neural culling had left him a wreck.

  Olivia had offered to write him an excuse for Calisthenics, but Tom didn’t know how much time he had left at the Spire. He wanted to spend as much of it with his friends as he could.

  Now the sky turned black above them, and the dead Confederate and Union soldiers rose and revealed themselves to be vampires, descending upon the trainees for a bloodbath. Tom used his bayonet to stake one, but a pair of Union vampires seized him and tore his throat out with their fangs.

  Session expired. Immobility sequence initiated. Tom’s body went numb below the chest. He dropped to the grass.

  Vik dropped dead on the grass next to him. “So tell me everything,” he shouted over the roar of gunfire.

  “You never die in Calisthenics.”

  “I pulled a Beamer and suicided.”

  Pulled a Beamer. Tom sighed, a bleak mood sinking over him as the vampires trampled his body to get at the rest of the trainees. He had to beat Medusa or he’d be the one pulling a Beamer—out of the program, getting the neural processor phased out of his brain.

  “Well, Tom?”

  “It’s a long story.” And he didn’t want to talk about it. He really didn’t.

  But Vik insisted. “This is a long battle. Come on. Talk.”

  Worn boots scrunched the grass next to Tom’s head, and a familiar voice rang out: “Timothy.”

  Tom opened his mouth to ask why he was going back to the wrong name—then remembered that Vik didn’t know Yuri was unscrambled. So he settled with, “Hey, man.”

  “Tom was going to explain who disappeared him,” Vik said. “Drop dead with us.”

  “Very well.” Yuri tossed aside his musket so the nearest vampire could come kill him.

  But he miscalculated his death. The vampire pounced on his large back, tore out his throat, and his immobility sequence engaged. Yuri dropped like a falling tree—and landed sidelong across Tom and Vik’s stomachs, knocking the breath out of them.

  “Oof!” Tom struggled against the weight. “Yuri, did you have to land right on top of us?”

  “I am sorry, Tim. I’ll try to drag myself over.” Yuri clawed at the grass, hauling his immobile body inch by painstaking inch, but his progress was sluggish.

  “Wyatt, help us!” Vik shouted .

  Nearby, Wyatt dodged a vampire—which killed a plebe behind her—and staggered over to them. “Tom, you’re back!” A big grin broke over her face. “We thought you fell down a hole and died somewhere.”

  “Close. I was with Blackburn. Hey, can you drag your boyfriend’s body off us before we suffocate?”

  Yuri said apologetically, “My very great muscle mass makes me heavy.”

  She tugged at Yuri’s arm, dragged him to the side—far enough to relieve them of the worst of the weight. Then a vampire got her from behind, and Wyatt dropped across Yuri, her weight making up for the few inches she’d dragged him. Tom and Vik both groaned.

  “Sorry,” Wyatt said. “At least we can hear each other. Where have you been?”

  “Census device.” Tom shoved at Yuri’s immobile mass, but it wasn’t going to budge again now that Wyatt was on top of him. “Blackburn thought I was the leak. I have this internet friend in China. It looked bad. Actually, the friend’s Medusa.”

  Stunned silence. Tom turned back to see the other three dead trainees gaping at him. That, more than anything, reminded Tom how stupid he’d been to befriend Medusa in the first place.

  “Look,” he said, “I was curious about seeing Medusa again after the incursion. We played games and she killed me a lot and stuff. Oh, and, Vik—Medusa is a girl. Yeah, I found that out, too.”

  “A girl?” Wyatt said, frowning. “Like a girlfriend girl?”

  Tom’s cheeks flushed. “No. I mean . . .” He still wasn’t sure what to say to that. “No!” He considered that kiss. “Well . . . maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “How long has this been going on?” she mumbled.

  “Not so long.”

  “You never told us.”

  “So? Why’s it such a big deal?”

  “It’s not,” Wyatt said. “I don’t care.”

  “Good.” Tom was distracted then. A new Machiavelli plebe with stubbled hair ran past with Jenny Nguyen. The new girl, whom his processor identified as Iman Attar, pointed at them. “Why are they a
ll lying on top of each other?”

  Jenny glanced their way, then urged her onward. Her voice drifted their way, “Alexander boys are weird. That kid Vikram sat next to me the other day in the planetarium . . .”

  Vik groaned and clamped his hands over his face. Intrigued, Tom raised his head up to see. Wyatt and Yuri did so as well.

  “. . . and Vikram said, ‘Uh-oh, looks like you have spicy Indian on your lips.’”

  “That’s your great line?” Tom burst into his first laughter in days.

  “Shut up,” Vik muttered.

  Jenny’s voice reached them over the screams and the gunfire. “I was like, ‘You’re creepy,’ and got up to leave, and then he head-butted me.”

  The girls moved off. Utter silence hung in the air for a taut moment. Tom gaped at Vik. Wyatt’s lips were tightly pressed together like she was straining not to react.

  “Well?” Vik said. “Just get it out of the way.”

  “We’re not going to laugh at you, Vik,” Tom assured him. “I have bigger things to worry about right now”—his voice started shaking with suppressed laughter—“so it doesn’t matter if you’re a SPICY INDIAN.”

  Yuri and Wyatt broke into laughter, and Tom threw his head back, cackling helplessly. And for a few wonderful moments, it felt like the census device never happened and he had no cares in the world.

  “Thanks, everyone. You’re good friends,” Vik grumbled.

  “And I can’t believe you head-butted her after we saw that happen with Wyatt!”

  “It’s surprisingly easy to do, Tom!”

  “Yeah, maybe when a girl’s desperate to run away from you.”

  “Do not take her rejection personally, Viktor,” Yuri said gently. “Maybe she has a phobia of spicy Indians.”

  Vik raised up his arm and thwapped Yuri, then Tom. Tom kept laughing. Vik aimed a better swing.

  “Vik,” Wyatt objected. “Stop thrashing. You’re getting spicy Indian on us.”