Catalyst

by Kincaid,S. J.

  The ships ran out of armaments and hurtled straight into the asteroid. Tom could see its orbit was shallower now; it was no longer plunging in a fatal death drop straight toward the planet, but when his processor ran the calculations, he knew it was still going to hit. The atmosphere wouldn’t burn enough away.

  And then when Tom jumped to another satellite, his mind met hers.

  Medusa!

  Through a haze of electronic signals, he felt her there, right there, with him. For a moment, he was blinded by a mingle of anxiety and hope, because they were all going to die, they were going to die, and he didn’t know how to fix it, but if anyone could, she could—and something about Medusa seemed to respond to that thought.

  Thanks for the vote of confidence. I mean it. Tom, it’s not over.

  What can we do? Tom asked.

  There are thousands of nuclear missiles on the surface of the planet. I have access to the missile defense systems of every single country. No firewalls and no safety controls can keep me out. I can blow the asteroid into smaller pieces once it penetrates the atmosphere.

  It won’t work, Tom thought. I heard our generals talking about it. Medusa, they can’t mobilize them fast enough.

  They can’t. But I can. I know where they are and I can access, aim, and launch them near simultaneously all across the world. I’ll be fast enough. I’ll break it up into fragments small enough to burn up in the atmosphere.

  Let me help!

  It would take too long to show you where they are or show you how to use them. You have to trust me. This is life or death for me, too.

  Tom realized she’d been interfacing for years before he had, she’d explored exhaustively where he hadn’t bothered. She could do this. She believed she could do this, and if she thought so, then he thought so.

  His mind raced over the implications. A series of high-atmosphere nuclear explosions would still kill millions of people. Maybe billions. The fragments would still hit, would still kill everyone near the impact zones—but not everyone. Not everyone. If she broke it up enough, and the atmosphere did its job of burning the smallest fragments up, there was a chance they wouldn’t go the way of the dinosaurs.

  They both still might die. One or the other of them might, depending on where the asteroid entered orbit. Tom thought quickly, Yaolan, I . . .

  Tom, if there’s an impact where you are, or where I am, I want you to know I don’t hate you for what you did. You’re one of the only people who’s ever tried to do something like that for me. Thank you.

  A sudden longing and sentimentality overcame him. I wish we’d had time. I wish you’d been closer. I wish I’d held you just once in person, no avatars. . . .

  Stop, Tom.

  No time, I know. I know.

  No, you’re getting exceedingly cheesy. Let’s meet the apocalypse with some dignity. It was great knowing you.

  It was excellent knowing you, too. His terror receded as amusement swept over him, and then that was it. Medusa slipped out of the satellite, he knew there was nothing more he could do. He pulled out his neural wire and stood up in the room, aware that the next few minutes would determine everything and it was totally out of his hands.

  He found his feet, walking as if in a trance. Yuri was there now, holding Wyatt. Vik and Lyla had disappeared somewhere.

  “Thomas,” Yuri greeted. “Let us stay together, the three of us.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said numbly.

  They walked down together up to the fourteenth floor so they could gaze out the massive windowed walls at the sky from the CamCo floor and watch the world come to an end.

  Vik joined them soon, a bit breathless.

  “Where’s Lyla?” Tom asked him.

  “Calling her parents. I figured I should be here. Remember that bet we made once?”

  Tom knew that bet. “You two . . .”

  Vik grinned and sang tauntingly, “I beat you.”

  Lucky bastard! “Imminent asteroid strike has to be cheating.”

  “Lyla initiated it, not me.”

  It made sense that people facing the apocalypse jumped into things they normally wouldn’t do. “I’ll pay you in a few hours,” Tom grumbled.

  “We’re going to be dead in a few hours,” Vik complained.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “You two are bad people,” Wyatt said. Then she realized it. “My parents!” She threw Yuri an urgent glance. He rubbed her shoulder. “I forgot to call them.”

  “‘Bad people’ made you think of your parents?” Vik wondered.

  “I could not get through to mine,” Yuri told her.

  “I tried to call mine, too. Lines are jammed,” Vik said. “Everyone in the place is trying to call family. All the soldiers, too. Lyla’s going to try again, but I’m not hopeful.”

  Tom thought of Neil with a sick, swooping feeling. He wouldn’t call him, even if he could. He loved him, he wanted to tell him, but he didn’t want Neil to see the fear on his face. It would be better for his dad not to see the end coming.

  It killed Tom that the last thing they’d done was fight.

  “If we are all about to be dying soon,” Yuri said to them, “I wish to know something.”

  They looked at him.

  His earnest blue eyes roved over them. “Was that you three who burned Obsidian Corp. and destroyed the transmitter? Did you do that for me?”

  Tom, Vik, and Wyatt looked at one another. There was no reason to lie.

  “Yeah, that was us,” Vik said.

  Yuri grew misty-eyed. “You risked your lives for me.” He drew Wyatt very close. “I would never have asked this of you, but I cannot thank you enough. I wish we had more time for me to be thanking you.”

  “Next life, man,” Vik said. They all looked at him, and he shrugged. “Okay, it’s out: I believe in reincarnation. Always have. It makes sense to me—matter and energy are never destroyed, just converted, right? I’m just not sure where we’ll reincarnate to without life on Earth.”

  “Aliens?” Wyatt suggested.

  Vik laughed softly. “You don’t believe in aliens.”

  “Of course there are aliens. This isn’t the end of life in the universe. It would be ludicrous to even suggest complex life hasn’t evolved somewhere else in the universe.” She nodded, as though convincing herself. “And even after we’re gone, our radio waves will reach someone, maybe decades after this. Maybe centuries from now, someone will find the Voyager probes and realize we existed.” Then she sagged down. “I hope, at least. I can’t believe there are eight point eight billion stars out there likely to have Earth-like planets, and we never even tried to get to one of them. Why didn’t we work harder to discover faster-than-light technology? It was so shortsighted of us to all stay on the same planet. Now all of humanity might go extinct together.”

  Vik stretched out his legs. “On the bright side . . .”

  “There’s a bright side?” Wyatt exclaimed.

  “I can tell you this without too much mockery in the future: I had this stupid crush on you when I first came here.”

  His distraction worked instantly. Wyatt’s eyes swung to his. “What?”

  “What?” Yuri said.

  “You always made fun of me. You called me Man Hands!” Wyatt pointed out.

  “Come on, don’t you know how I tick?” Vik grinned. “You were this annoying, prickly math dork who took everything so seriously. You’d get upset and remind me of some . . . some hyperactive little squirrel. Oh, and, Yuri, don’t worry, man, I swear not to spend the last minutes of my life putting the moves on your girlfriend.”

  “Then I shall not spend them punching you like I did Thomas.”

  Tom laughed.

  “What?” Vik exclaimed. “Why’d you slug Tom?”

  “I kissed Wyatt,” Tom said.

  “It was so embarrassing,” Wyatt said with a laugh.

  “What? Why? How?” Vik sputtered.

  “Long story,” Tom answered. They didn’t have time for any
long stories.

  Vik started laughing and clapped him on the back. “Traitors! No one told me. To think of all the ways I could’ve mocked you two, and now I’ve learned of it only minutes before we all die! Why, God, why? This is the most unfair thing ever.”

  He oofed as Tom and Wyatt both elbowed him.

  “I don’t believe in an afterlife,” Yuri said suddenly, gazing pensively toward the window. “I believe this is all we have. These minutes, right here.”

  They fell into silence, suddenly sobered. Tom couldn’t concentrate or reflect or even figure out what he believed about life and death and other profound things like that. He wasn’t resigned to death here.

  “And I have no regrets.” Yuri’s arm tightened around Wyatt. He gazed down at her, stroking her hair with his hand. “I am happy to have had so much in this time. It means more, that this is all we have, these last moments. And I have had a chance to fall in love.”

  Wyatt’s eyes widened. Yuri held her gaze, big hand cupping her cheek. “You do know I love you, do you not?”

  She nodded shakily. “And, Yuri, I . . .” Her words choked off. She couldn’t seem to manage anything. She tightened her arms around him, like she was trying to seal them together.

  “And such friends,” Yuri said, his gaze moving to Tom and Vik now. “I feel great privilege for having known you. You are the best friends I have ever had.”

  “I love you, too, man,” Vik pledged. He slung his arm around Tom. “All of you guys.”

  It was Tom’s turn. He felt blood rush up into his cheeks because he’d never been comfortable with this stuff. “Me, too, you guys. I mean, I, uh, you know.” Their eyes seemed to be boring into him. “You’re my family, okay?” Then he started laughing. He couldn’t help it. “We’re going to cringe over this later if we survive.”

  Yuri and Wyatt exchanged a glance.

  “Thomas, you realize we are not going to survive,” Yuri said softly, his eyes filled with compassion.

  “We can’t possibly, man,” Vik said, tightening the arm around his shoulder. “This is game over. None of our planetary defenses can hold off an asteroid this large. We might get off a few nukes, but that’s all. This type of thing wiped out the dinosaurs. I mean, sure, maybe some of the important people are in their bunkers, but the rest of us . . .”

  Tom looked from one unnaturally calm face to another, people resigned to a death they could do nothing to stop. He hadn’t told them what he knew. Death wasn’t a certainty at all. He knew there was the slimmest chance, just the slimmest one, that Medusa would come through—and he was clinging to that with ferocious claws. He suddenly couldn’t keep this to himself.

  “I saw what they were doing in space,” Tom said steadily. “Trust me, they’ve done a lot of damage already, they’ve broken the asteroid up into a much smaller fragment. It’s got a lot of ice, it’s not made of iron, and whatever knocked it out of orbit hit it in a way that didn’t put too much momentum behind it. And as soon as it enters our atmosphere, some more will burn away—”

  “Not enough,” Wyatt said.

  “Yeah, but Medusa’s also gonna hit it with everything we’ve got. Every nuke she can fire. It’ll spread some fallout, but she might be able to bust it up before it explodes over the ground. She can do it faster than anyone else.”

  “Wait, what?” Vik said, shaking his head.

  “Tom, what are you—” Wyatt began.

  Tom suddenly decided to forget secrecy. He had nothing to lose. “I know you think I’m making this stuff up, but I’m not. I have this ability, you guys. It’s . . . it’s not like a superpower. I think it’s something about my processor, but I can go in machines. I can control them all like they’re designed for neural processors. Any machine that’s got an internet connection and enough bandwidth, basically.”

  They all three stared at him, and for the first time since they learned of their imminent doom, there was no fear on their faces. Tom felt a strange, giddy sense of liberation, unburdening himself, even if it might mean nothing soon.

  “Medusa can do it, too. It’s how I’ve been talking to her. We can both enter each other’s systems without anyone detecting us. Like, directly enter, go right through firewalls. That’s why I can tell you I know what I’m talking about when I say there’s a chance someone might stop Cruithne: I was inside the satellites, I saw what was happening, and I talked to Medusa. She’s got a plan.”

  They all stared at him.

  Tom gave a half-hysterical laugh. “And while I’m being honest, I might as well tell you, I blew up the skyboards, too. I’m the ghost in the machine. Me.”

  They all three gaped at him. None of them was looking out the window when a chunk of the asteroid streaked bright across the sky, and the enormous roar of it exploding before it hit the ground sent them all hurtling down to the floor, clutching each other, terrified, eyes squeezed shut.

  And then the rumbling beneath them died down, and all that was left was the sound of their harsh breathing, the feel of their arms around each other—and outside the sunlight still cutting through the clear blue atmosphere.

  It wasn’t the end of the world.

  The sky did not choke with ash. No wave of boiling ocean swept over Earth.

  Armageddon had been averted.

  But not without cost.

  That evening, as the shell-shocked cadets all trickled into the mess hall, where stunned soldiers also milled about, the emergency screens along the walls were on, every news station focusing upon the various impact craters. Over and over, the image replayed Medusa’s heroic rescue of the planet, the high-atmosphere nuclear explosions that lit up the sky, one after the other after the other.

  Most of the chunks of debris burned up in the atmosphere. Many still hit. Many exploded just above ground, and still devastated landscape. The fallout spread over Earth, contaminated whole countries.

  But they were alive.

  And then Joseph Vengerov appeared on the news and claimed credit for the nuclear impacts.

  There wasn’t enough hatred in Tom’s heart to encompass how much he loathed the man on the screens in the mess hall, even as everyone else blazed with pride and applauded the oligarch who’d supposedly saved Earth.

  Tom could’ve driven his fist through every screen showing Vengerov’s smiling face. The bastard knew he could get away with claiming credit, because the alternative was that the ghost in the machine stepped forward and admitted to doing it him or herself. So the formerly disgraced CEO smiled and graciously answered questions, his eyes flashing in silent challenge at the screen—like he was inwardly laughing at the person out there who’d truly saved the world.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ALL THROUGH THE day, news of the impact and fallout sites trickled in.

  Karl Marsters went pale as a sheet when a live view of Chicago appeared on the screen. Lyla Martin slung her arm around him and patted his shoulder. Everyone murmured when they saw footage of the fragment breaking up over Maryland, the explosion everyone in the Spire had heard as it happened and that flattened several coastal communities. Jennifer Nguyen screamed when the graphic of Vietnam was displayed. Iman pulled her in a hug and then led her from the mess hall.

  Tom listened as well, rigid with anxiety at each new report trickling in, even though he didn’t even know where his father was right now, and he didn’t have any way to know whether his dad could’ve been affected. There was an impact in Colorado, and one off the Gulf of Mexico that sent a tsunami into the coast. A smaller fragment exploded over New Mexico and wiped out everything within thirty miles.

  That’s the one Tom worried about. That one. Neil went there sometimes. Every time he thought of it, every time he thought of his uncertainty over his dad, he felt like he was going to throw up. He tried not to.

  The high-altitude nuclear deto
nations acted like EMPs, knocking out power over whole swaths of countries. Nuclear plants were in danger of catastrophic meltdowns, and there were fires raging unchecked. Pilots began mobilizing across the world to search for survivors, to bring in humanitarian aid to all the devastated locations.

  The United States finally felt the impact of all the money that had been funneled from its public infrastructure, the privatization of its roads, its hospitals, its disaster relief. Neglected roads couldn’t handle the strain of emergency vehicles evacuating people. Fires burned unchecked over cities because too few people had been trained to respond, and those unmanned drones used for surveillance and breaking up raucous crowds weren’t designed for humanitarian efforts. Local water utilities were in disrepair, and pipes burst under the strain. Companies that owned roads tried to enforce their tolls even on first responders, and Harbinger its fees on water, until the angry crowds began breaking into their headquarters, frightening the executives into feeling sudden gushes of concern for their fellow humans—and giving a free pass for the sake of relief efforts.

  At first, the massive number of humanitarian planes and helicopters clogged the sky, causing a dangerous situation with the thirty million unmanned drones still dispersed over the country—most of which were designed for surveillance, few of which were actually useful in a natural disaster. After several collisions, even the unmanned drones had to be landed. The angry crowds ensured that, too.

  It seemed even the Coalition executives quailed in the face of the sort of unified public spirit roused by an extreme natural disaster. The only company that was untouchable, the only ones who were golden, no matter their actions, were those who worked for Obsidian Corp., and Joseph Vengerov himself.

  Only Tom and his friends knew he was claiming credit for something Medusa had done.

  Saving the planet won him forgiveness of all sins. The Coalition companies that had attacked him days before over his faulty machines, over the attacks that conveniently spared his own executives, now lauded him publicly. They dared not do anything else. In one widely publicized speech, Vengerov stood atop a pile of debris, ringed by first responders, and spoke of the his company’s determination to ensure something like this never happened again. He concluded by holding up a flag, a Coalition of Multinationals flag.