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  “I’ll handle Friday,” Tom assured him.

  And he would. Somehow. He was sure of it.

  After all, he had to. Those executives were his only shot at being a Combatant, his only shot at sponsorship for CamCo. He couldn’t screw it up—he couldn’t afford to.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE NEXT MORNING meal formation, Tom was far too pleased to learn that Vik and his new roommate, Giuseppe, weren’t getting along.

  “There is something seriously wrong with that kid. All he talks about are the hotels he’s stayed in,” Vik whispered hastily to Tom as they stood by their chairs at the Alexander male Middle table, waiting for their cue to snap to attention. “Plus, he collects antique boot buckles. He showed me a bunch of them. He made me look at them, and he talked about each one at length. . . . Do you know what’s so great about antique boot buckles?”

  “What?” Tom said as they all snapped to attention.

  “Nothing, Tom.” Vik shook his head vigorously. “Nothing is great about them.”

  Tom’s laugh split the dead hush as trainees marched in with the flag, so he muffled it quickly with a fake cough, then tried to appear neutral and stoic again as everyone darted glances his way, wondering who had penetrated the solemnity of morning meal formation.

  Evidently, Vik’s dislike of his new roommate was a mutual thing, because as Tom was stashing his tray on the conveyer belt, he overhead Giuseppe Nichols ranting to Jennifer Nguyen, “. . . and he actually programmed a giant statue of himself into our bunk template. Who does that?”

  Consequently, Giuseppe didn’t sit with them in Programming. The trainees from all levels gathered twice a week in the Lafayette Room so Lieutenant Blackburn could teach them how to write code for their own processors; the reason the class was so tedious was they had to use their human brains for it. The neural processor couldn’t do the work for them. There was a law against self-programming computers.

  Because human brains were needed, Tom knew he was hopeless at programming and didn’t really bother much with the class. He’d never been that great in school. So instead of concentrating, Tom kept searching for excuses not to focus on his work. He found his attention on Yuri, slumped over the bench in front of them, pretending to zone out like he was still scrambled. Wyatt had removed the program that used to hide classified information from Yuri, including all the names of his friends, but Yuri had to pretend to zone out whenever certain things were mentioned or whenever he was in Programming.

  While fake zoning out, Yuri still heard Blackburn’s lectures. Apparently he’d been learning from them, too, since he startled Tom by nudging him and net-sending: You made an error in your code. One of his blue eyes peeked at Tom.

  “How do you know?” Tom whispered, careful to turn his head toward Vik so no one would realize he was addressing Yuri. “You don’t even see what I’m writing.”

  Yuri typed again: I can discern what you are writing from the movement of your fingers. Look at line ten.

  Tom indulged him and scrolled back up the program.

  Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. He’d mistyped a segment of the code.

  I will show you the correct code, Yuri wrote, then crooked a finger at him. Tom sneaked a glance up toward Blackburn at the front of the room, and casually flopped his arm over his thigh to hang in Yuri’s direction, giving Yuri access to the keyboard. Yuri leaned toward him and his fingers began dancing over the keyboard now between their bodies and the back of the bench in front of theirs. He typed from memory, modifying Tom’s code.

  Sure enough, when Tom tried compiling it, it worked perfectly.

  Tom was tempted to be frustrated that Yuri was already way better than him at the Zorten II programming language and that was from being able to hear, not see, Blackburn’s lectures for a couple months . . . but he was too intrigued by the possibilities. Yuri could potentially be an awesome cheat.

  Tom was careful not to look at him. “Thanks, man,” he said softly. “Can you tell me what to write next?”

  Yuri wrote, Thomas, I will not do all your programming for you, or you will not learn.

  “What are you talking about, ‘or I will not learn’?” Tom murmured, head turned in the other direction like he was talking to Vik. “I won’t learn anyway. I suck at this stuff. And, hey, this way, you can actually get your work critiqued. You and me, Yuri, we can have a mutually beneficial arrangement. How about it, buddy?”

  Yuri seemed pleased with that, and he happily started doing Tom’s programming for him. Tom was extremely satisfied with this for a half hour or so. But then something alarming happened—Blackburn assigned them another algorithm and strolled down the aisle, straight toward them.

  “Get up, Raines.” Blackburn gestured for him to move. “I need access to Sysevich’s processor.”

  Tom felt a jerk of alarm. Yuri now had his eyes screwed shut. Had they been too obvious?

  “Why?”

  “What did we talk about yesterday, trainee?” Blackburn put emphasis on the last word.

  “Sir, why, sir?” Tom said more respectfully. He didn’t like this. At the lethal look Blackburn sent him, Tom realized he’d been given an order. He didn’t move, aghast at the very idea Blackburn was going to do something to Yuri’s processor and perhaps figure out Yuri wasn’t scrambled. He looked at Vik; and Vik’s lips were a thin line, his eyes dark hollows.

  Tom sprang to his feet and nearly tripped over Vik, trying to get past him into the aisle. There, he hovered, sweat prickling his palms, as Blackburn settled next to Yuri and seized the back of his neck, then shoved his hand down so he could hook a neural wire into his access port. He stuck the other end of the wire into a small, portable screen.

  Vik had stopped typing. His hands were balled into fists.

  Tom remembered vividly how unhappy Vik had been when he’d learned Tom and Wyatt had unscrambled Yuri. It was treason. Vik hadn’t even wanted to know about it.

  Relax, Tom net-sent him. Wyatt had to have thought of this, right?

  Vik drew a deep breath that lifted his shoulders, and seemed to hold it.

  Tom searched Blackburn’s face for any reactions. “What are you looking at? Sir?”

  “Not that it’s your business, Mr. Raines,” Blackburn said, gaze trained on the screen flashing text at a rate too fast for anyone without a neural processor to follow, “but Trainee Sysevich has a particular filtering program installed in his processor. Whenever he leaves the Pentagonal Spire, his processor switches to an alert mode. It logs any attempts that are made to tamper with his software. I would’ve run this scan as soon as he got back”—his eyes flashed to Tom’s—“if some trainee hadn’t been an idiot over break and created a cleanup job for me.”

  Tom felt a surge of hope. They’d tampered with Yuri’s software well before vacation, while he was at the Spire, so Blackburn shouldn’t pick up anything.

  And indeed, he didn’t. Blackburn tapped his forearm keyboard to shut off the scanning, then reached out to grab Yuri by the shoulder and pull him upright. “Carry on,” he ordered them, and headed back to the front

  Tom slumped into his seat, soaked with sweat. He gave a relieved laugh when he was sure Blackburn was out of earshot and elbowed Vik. “Hey, man, it’s okay. We’re good.”

  “Yeah, we’re good.” Vik slouched down in his seat. “This time.”

  TOM’S SKULL BEGAN to throb during lunch, but it had less to do with Blackburn’s scan of Yuri and more to do with Walton Covner’s attempt to mess with his head. Tom was halfway through his cheeseburger when Walton strode past him, trailing a group of tiny gnomes. Tom gaped at him. Walton caught his eye and pressed a finger to his lips.

  “No way,” Tom said flatly, shaking his head. “No, no, no. I was dying of dehydration, Walton, and that is the only reason I believed for a second that you had gnome minions. I’m never gonna buy it when I’m feeling fine!”

  Walton gave him a decisive nod. “Keep that up, Raines. The more people hear it, the more they’ll believe it.” T
hen he continued onward.

  Tom settled next to Wyatt and put his head on the table. She struck him several times, jolting his vision, and it wasn’t until Tom sat up, rubbing the back of his head, that he realized she’d been trying to pat his head comfortingly.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked him.

  He explained the gnome minion situation. She tapped a few buttons on his keyboard to give herself remote access to his processor, then she ran a flash scan. The words flickered before his eyes all the rest of lunch, and the results finally came when they were all gathered for Intermediate Tactics in MacArthur Hall, the planetarium on the fifteenth floor. Tom saw the scan complete, and straightened up from where he’d been gazing at the massive screen that curved overhead and the roof that could retract to reveal the sky.

  “Yes, you’ve got a virus.” Wyatt tapped on her forearm keyboard as she examined the results. “The program’s called Gnomes. Looks like it tampers with your vision center.”

  “Walton Covner,” Tom grumbled.

  “He must’ve slipped it into your homework feed.”

  “Can you block it out? I don’t wanna see gnomes all day.” He could see them even now, right across the room, hanging out near Walton.

  “I’ll patch your firewall tonight. You have to endure the gnomes in the meantime.”

  The tiny gnomes were obviously on to the fact that Tom was trying to get rid of them, because they began shaking their fists at him. Tom almost returned the gesture, then he caught himself and shoved his hands in his pockets instead. No. He refused to exchange angry fist shakes with nonexistent gnomes.

  Tom surveyed the crowd as Wyatt studied the program’s code again. Middle Company had the most trainees. It was a bottleneck, because it was unlikely to be breezed through in six months, the way many could change through plebe company, but it was also too late for most trainees to get a phased removal of the processor and wash out altogether. That fact was a comfort to Tom. After the initial six months or so, their brains grew more and more dependent on the processor to carry out vital functions. Tom figured that, whatever happened, his brain’s growing dependence at least ensured he’d never get threatened with removal of his processor again . . . well, not unless someone outright planned to kill him.

  The chatter died as Major Cromwell strode into the room. She reached the podium and leaned against it. “One of the weaknesses of this training program is the lack of experienced veterans,” she said in her hoarse voice. “You are the first generation with successfully implanted neural processors. The first generation to become Intrasolar Combatants. So we rely upon our current, active Combatants to assist with your training far more than we should. This is simply something we have to do because soldiers like me do not have the direct experience you require. One of these training exercises you need the Combatants for is the fly-along experience.”

  She typed something out on her podium keyboard, and immediately, an interactive illustration of the solar system popped up. Tom could see that it was split into the same zones Combatants sometimes referenced when they were discussing battles. The zones were partitioned according to their distance from the center of the solar system. The space between the sun and Mercury was labeled the Infernal Zone. The section from Mercury to the outer edge of the asteroid belt was marked the Prime. From Jupiter to Saturn was the Fallow, the closest orbit of Neptune through the Kuiper Belt was the Reaches, and a stray bit of text labeled the entire rest of the universe BEYOND SECTOR. The words acknowledged the unlikelihood that human beings would ever move beyond the confines of the solar system, and therefore, the rest of the universe’s utter irrelevance to the war.

  Tom felt a twinge, thinking of the constraint everyone had simply accepted, but then the image faded, a list of names appearing over it, some new Middles, some veteran Middles.

  “To begin the fly-along experience, you’ll work with the Combatants on some exercises in mental discipline,” Cromwell said. “The names up here will be today’s cohort to report to the Butler Room. The second group will stay for the lecture, and report downstairs on Thursday.”

  Tom sat up straighter, seeing his name on there. Wyatt’s was, as well. Vik slumped a bit in his seat, realizing he was stuck hearing the lecture.

  “Right now, those of you on this list will report to the Smedley D. Butler Conference Room on the twelfth floor. You’ll come back for the lecture on Thursday. Dismissed.”

  TOM AND THE rest of his group met the CamCos in the large briefing room. There was a large oil painting of General Butler, who’d foiled a fascist coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, and a long table covered with decagonal devices. The Middles sat down, and Elliot Ramirez strolled in. He grinned broadly, and then Heather Akron trailed in behind him and cleared her throat.

  The other CamCos striding inside sent her chilly looks, but Elliot dipped his head and gestured for her to take the lead.

  The beautiful brunette perched at the head of the table. “Some of you are new to Middle Company, so I’ll explain the basics of what we’re doing here.” Heather’s amber eyes glittered. There was a certain brittle gaiety to her smile. “These decagons are group internet relay chat nodes. They let you hook in and communicate with each other using a thought interface. That’s what we’re going to practice today.”

  Thought interface? Tom grew alarmed.

  “Why is Heather in charge?” Wyatt murmured. “I’m surprised they’re letting her, after . . .” She trailed off.

  Tom didn’t press her on the subject. Heather had caught his eye and winked, so Tom nodded back, knowing she’d probably wear that same dazzling, so-happy-to-see-you look on her face while she slipped him poison if she had to. . . . Still, there was something about her that got to him sometimes. He followed the sway of her body as she strolled around the table and picked up a decagon.

  “You may or may not know this, but there’s a function in your neural processors called net-send that allows you to send messages to each other, either by typing or using a thought interface. The net-send thought-interface function isn’t suitable for battle, though, because net-send directly captures the stray thoughts in your head. . . .”

  Tom slouched in his seat a bit, remembering thinking to Vik over net-send, How do steak boobs function? He wasn’t very good with thought interfaces. He had stuck to net-sending with his forearm keyboard ever since.

  “Plus, net-send has a lag time—microseconds, but that might as well be hours during space combat. These decagons, however, facilitate instantaneous group communication, and the messages sent are the dominant concerns in your head at any one time. There is no lag time. Before you do your fly-alongs with us, you need to gain some basic mental discipline so you can communicate the way we do during combat, and do so in an effective manner. Today, we’re going to have two to three CamCos at each decagon. You guys pair up, and let’s try this out together.”

  Tom and Wyatt paired up. The first decagon they reached was the one in front of Heather and Elliot. Tom’s stomach contracted as he watched Karl come over to join them.

  “Ready?” Elliot said, pulling out a neural wire. Then Heather raised her eyebrows, and he smiled. “Oh. Of course. Sorry, H. I know you need to take the lead.”

  “Why, thank you, Elliot.” Heather turned to Tom and Wyatt. “Stick your neural wires into the ports on the decagon, sit down, then hook in like you would to any other machine.”

  Tom dropped into one of the cushy chairs, aware of Karl still standing, glowering at him. He stuck his neural wire into a port on the decagon, then plugged the other end into the back of his neck, and the world grew utterly dark around him.

  I’m blind! He tried to say it, but his voice didn’t come out. Tom flailed out his arms to alert someone, terrible suspicions flying through his brain that this was some plot of Karl’s or even . . .

  Footsteps drew toward him, and Tom jumped when hands grabbed his shoulders.

  “Relax, Tom.” Heather’s breath tickled his ea
r. He felt her hands brush the back of his neck, sending goose bumps down his skin. He was disappointed when her fingers slid away. “We’ve programmed it to disable your eyesight and vocal cords while you’re hooked in. It’s to help focus your concentration these first few times. . . . Enslow, you look upset.” Her voice grew vaguely threatening, “Do you want to join Tom or would you rather sit this one out?”

  “I’ll do it,” Wyatt snapped, and Tom could see her name listed against the darkness in his vision.

  After another moment or two, Heather’s name appeared.

  Is this on? Tom and Wyatt both thought, and the words appeared right there before his eyes.

  Then Heather thought, I wonder which one of them will think something embarrassing first? The words scrolled across Tom’s vision.

  Don’t think about Heather’s boobs, Tom thought to himself, and to his mortification, the words appeared there.

  Yay, it wasn’t me! Wyatt thought. Then after the words appeared, she thought, Sorry, Tom.

  Tom. Wyatt. Try to focus, Heather thought. You can control your thoughts.

  Boobs, Wyatt thought. Aah! Where did that come from?

  It’s called word contagion, and it’s normal, Heather thought. You can break it by occupying your thoughts with something else. Try times tables.

  2 x 2 = 4, 4 x 4 = 16, 11 x 11 = 121 . . . Wyatt thought. This works. Send. I’m surprised she had good advice.

  Excuse me? Heather thought.

  Elliot’s name appeared in the IRC. Hello, everyone! Don’t worry, I’m here now! Just some technical difficulties. What did I miss?

  Riding in to save the day, Heather thought.

  Tom thought, Hi, Elliot. Send. Elliot’s an okay guy.

  At least Elliot won’t think about . . . Wait, I’m thinking this, Heather thought.

  Can someone tell us what we’re supposed to think about? Send, Wyatt thought.

  Looks like there’s a leadership deficit, Elliot thought. I came just in time.