Insignia (22 page)

“Wholesome?” Tom echoed.

“And it helps that you’re not so runty now. I see they got that stuff off your face, too. You’re not a bad looking kid. Certainly not a mouthy little eyesore like that Nigel Mctwitchy kid.”

Tom thought of Nigel, with his perpetual tic, and tasted something sour in his mouth. If he ever helped out Dalton Prestwick with anything, he knew, he’d be betraying his father. And
himself
. He wanted nothing more than to laugh in Dalton’s face and see that look of smug superiority disappear. But he couldn’t treat Dalton like he counted for nothing. Not if he wanted to go anywhere here.

Not if he wanted to be in Camelot Company one day.

“Yeah, well, even if I make it to CamCo, it’s still a long way away,” Tom told him. “I’m not even thinking that far ahead.”

“Well, start.” Dalton tapped his temple beneath his gelled hair. “Prove to the world that you’re smarter than your old man.”

Tom drove his balled-up fists into his pockets. It was that or drive them into Dalton’s face.

Nearby in the crowd, Tom saw that the man Vengerov had parted ways with Yuri and was walking toward them. Vengerov snapped his fingers at Dalton as he strode past him. Dalton jumped and began straightening his tie. “I have to go, Tom, but think it over. You’ll hear from me again soon.”

Tom stood there, rooted in place, taking several deep breaths as Dalton’s footsteps echoed their way across the marble floor. His fists throbbed from the effort of keeping them jammed in his pockets.

He didn’t relax until he was sure Dalton Prestwick was gone. If he’d said one more thing about Neil, just one …

Well, Tom wouldn’t have a chance of making CamCo after punching a Dominion Agra exec right in the face.

O
NE
F
RIDAY IN
Applied Simulations, Elliot ran them through a meditation exercise where they visualized a white light interacting with what he called their “chakras.” Then he sat them in a circle.

“Now, we’ve focused in past simulations on playing offense. Hungry wolves attacking a moose. The Greek gods attacking the Norse gods. Terminators hunting Predators. But today we’re going to have a change of pace. The trickiest space battles don’t happen when we’re on the offensive. Our most important focus is on retaining the parts of the solar system we’ve already secured. There are mining platforms to defend, satellite hubs to protect, and shipyards to patrol, so we’re going to practice teamwork as a defensive measure. So I want you to prepare yourselves for being the attacked, the targets of aggression.”

The simulation cranked to life around them, and Tom found himself standing with a shield and a sword, guarding a massive walled city. The information stream in his neural processor outlined the scenario: this was the ancient city of Troy; they were in the middle of the Trojan War, defending themselves from the Greek army. The massive collection of enemy soldiers sprawled across the sandy ground beyond the city’s walls and crawling over the distant beaches like ants.

Tom’s first impulse was to climb down and engage outside the walls, but Elliot knew him by now, and anticipated it. “Tom. Defense. Remember?”

Tom’s eyes flipped over the sea of gleaming helmets, flashing swords, clanking armor, positioned at a careful distance. “But they’re not attacking. How do we play defense if there’s no offense?”

“This was a nine-year-long war,” Elliot countered. “The Trojans didn’t engage the Greeks every single day.”

“So we’re just going to stand here for three hours?”

“Consider it a lesson in patience.”

Elliot had cast himself as Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior, a prince who could move throughout the city at will. He’d made Tom a sentry and in that way confined him to the walls. Beamer was a sentry, too.

This was his revenge, Tom figured, for their Wednesday simulation. They’d been a school of piranhas. Beamer had decided to attract a nearby crocodile. He’d waggled his tail in hopes of getting eaten. (“Never died by croc before,” he told Tom afterward.) Tom saw Beamer eaten and decided to take a bite out of the croc’s vulnerable eye, and in the process of maneuvering, led it straight to Elliot. The older boy got gobbled in one bite.

On the bright side, Tom had managed to tear out one of the croc’s eyes and devour it before he got eaten, too.

Beamer shuffled his way over to Tom, his character soaked in sweat. “I’m so bored.” He dropped his heavy bronze shield with a mighty clang. “Want to commit suicide with me? We could stab each other on the count of three.”

“Nah. Mutual suicide’s too
Romeo and Juliet
for me. I’m going to wait until Elliot’s not looking and jump down to fight the Greeks.” Tom glanced over his shoulder, but Elliot—as Prince Hector—was watching them like a hawk from his chair in the shade.

Below, the Greek army had shifted. Tom leaned forward, intrigued, and watched a small detachment of men break away. They scurried to the wall and dodged spears and arrows as they piled some sacks at the base of the wall. He elbowed Beamer. “Look, they’re doing something down there. I think they’re going to attack.”

Beamer looked down with disinterest, then drew his sword. “Nah, looks more like they’re having a picnic in the shade. I’m going to off myself.”

“Don’t do it.
Don’t
. You have so much to live for,” Tom cried dramatically.

“I have to! Tell my girlfriend I love her!” Beamer cried, playing along. He raised his sword, blade flashing in the sunlight.

Tom waved. “Later, man.”

Beamer drove his sword into his own gut. His face changed. He grew deathly pale, his eyes boggled out, and he gave a shrill scream.

Tom watched his dramatics with a smirk. Sims weren’t like Calisthenics because it hurt dying in Applied Sims, but only a little, about as much as did a dull headache, just enough to give them a reason to try not to die. Not enough to stop Beamer from dying every chance he got. And certainly not
this
much.

“Oh, oh, OH GOD!” Beamer screamed, thrashing back to the ground. “OH GOD! This hurts!”

“Yeah,” Tom said lazily. “I’m not falling for it, Beamer.”

“Oh God, oh God, this hurts! It hurts, Tom!”

“Overdoing it, aren’t you, buddy?”

But Beamer was convulsing, blood blossoming out around his punctured gut. “Tom, Tom, help me!” He was sobbing. “Help me. Make it stop! This hurts!”

The smile died off Tom’s lips as Beamer wept. Cold tingles of uneasiness moved down Tom’s spine, because it dawned on him that Beamer wasn’t faking this. A fatal wound kicked you out of a simulation. Instantly. He wasn’t supposed to thrash. He was supposed to heal or vanish.

“Beamer, hey, you okay?”

It was a stupid question, he knew, but Tom wasn’t sure what to say when he dropped to the other boy’s side. Slick blood bubbled over the stones around his armored legs, and Beamer’s frantic eyes moved up to his. He tried speaking, gurgled something like “help,” and then doubled over with racking coughs. Blood splattered from his mouth.

Tom knelt there, frozen, his heart thumping in his ears. He couldn’t seem to move, like an icy hand clutched him in place. Footsteps clattered toward him, and a firm pair of dark hands grappled with Beamer’s thrashing body.

“What’s wrong?” Elliot demanded, taking charge.

“I don’t—we don’t know,” Tom stuttered.

“Beamer?” Elliot called, pinning Beamer’s shoulders. “Beamer? Stephen?”

Tom felt Beamer’s blood drying on his hands and watched Elliot asking Beamer what was the matter as though it wasn’t obvious. He heard Beamer gurgling, whimpering, and watched him twisting back and forth, trying escape the pain, escape the hands on him.

Then Elliot raised his gauntleted hand and waved his arm in a sequence—up and down, up and down, left and right, up and down. It was a series of muscular impulses designed to signal the neural processor and terminate any active simulations. Elliot’s brow furrowed, and he tried it again with his other arm. He dropped them both to his side, baffled. “I can’t turn off the sim.”

Beamer shrieked, and kept shrieking, and Tom looked between Elliot and Beamer. Elliot was waving both arms now like he was in a surreal dance, and Beamer kept giving these gurgling cries of pain, and the sim kept on going.

“I’ve got it,” Tom called. Of course! This would boot Beamer right out of the sim. He unsheathed his sword, and hacked off Beamer’s head.

Elliot scuttled to his feet with a shout, dark blood splashing over the stones around them.

“There,” Tom said, pleased with himself for the quick thinking.

Elliot stared at him, openmouthed.

The look on his face and the uncertainty of the moment flooded Tom with horror. He suddenly remembered some movie he’d seen where people died in a video game and then died in real life. It was just like this. He’d just killed Beamer in their malfunctioning sim, and what if it was a serious malfunction and he was dead in the training room, too?

“Oh God, he was really feeling pain,” Tom cried, the enormity of his mistake crashing over him. “You don’t think he really died, too, do you?”

“No,” Elliot said at once.

“I killed him. I killed Beamer!”

“Tom, the program messes up every few months. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times. People never die from sims.”

Tom stood there, breathless in the hot Trojan sun, gazing down at the headless body of his friend, still thinking of that movie. He couldn’t remember the name. He didn’t know why it mattered so much, but he couldn’t stop wondering what the name was. His whole body was shaking.

Elliot clasped his shoulder. “It’s fine. Beamer’s out of the sim and he’s fine. You did the right thing. You did not kill him. I’ll stop this sim, and you’ll see.” He waved his arm again, trying to end it, his brow furrowed.

“You’re really sure he’s not dead out there?” Tom asked again.

“Tom, I’m positive,” Elliot said with a laugh. “He’s okay.”

Tom just gazed up into the blue sky overhead, feeling the wind flapping through his hair. Relief crashed through him. He found himself laughing. “Wow. You know, I really freaked out for a second there,” he told Elliot, even though Elliot seemed to be preoccupied with the issue of the sim not responding to his command and turning itself off. “I seriously thought it. I seriously thought for a second that I’d killed Beam—”

And then the world exploded around them.

Tom felt like he was hurling through space, weightless. He couldn’t hear his own scream over the crashing in his ears. Stone scraped his hand, so he grasped whatever he could—and it tore off the skin of his fingers as he dragged himself to a halt. Black dust blotted out the sky, stung his lungs. It thinned just enough to reveal the broken walls of the city and Elliot coughing where he clung to the wall above him.

Tom’s arms stung as he slipped farther, and a glance below told him his legs were dangling down toward the flat plains. A firm hand gripped under his arm, and he knew it was Elliot. “Come on!”

Tom grabbed Elliot’s arm, and managed to hoist himself back up onto the remains of the wall. Shouts filled the air. The Greek army below them surged forward through the blown-out chunk of wall to claim Troy.

Elliot stared down, naked disbelief on his face. “That is
not
supposed to happen. There’s supposed to be a Trojan Horse, not an explosion.”

And then came the ping in both their brains:
Program integrity externally breached
.

Comprehension flooded Elliot’s face. “It’s an incursion.”

An incursion!

Suddenly it all made sense.

Suddenly it wasn’t scary. Tom looked down through the dust, blinking it out of his eyes as it stung his pupils, his brain suddenly thrumming with excitement. An
incursion
!

He’d heard of the Spire version of incursions. They’d happened more often three years ago, when the first batch of trainees joined the Intrasolar Forces. The Russo-Chinese hackers couldn’t penetrate too deeply into the Spire’s systems, but they could get into superficial, less secure areas such as the Applied Sims feeds. Russo-Chinese Combatants sometimes hacked into the American Applied Simulations channel and pranked them by playing the part of the enemy, even switching on the Indo-American pain receptors, because that was really the worst damage they could wreak.

In the first year of the program, it apparently happened every few months. None of the Indo-American trainees knew how to hack, so there was no reciprocation, and the Obsidian Corp. software consultants couldn’t write code for answering attacks due to private business agreements with the Russo-Chinese neural processor manufacturer, LM Lymer Fleet. That was one thing that changed once Blackburn arrived. The first incursion attempt on his watch, he sent something back, and no one knew what it was. He also upgraded the firewall. The incursions had stopped … until now. Maybe the Russo-Chinese victory near Neptune convinced them to try it again.

“There has to be a way to end this program,” Elliot insisted, still waving his arm in the command gesture.

But Tom didn’t want this to end. He gazed transfixed down at the field, knowing those weren’t virtual opponents. Those were real enemies. Enemies who had tampered with the program to make it as real as possible. Kept the pain sensations on. Blocked their escape.