Insignia (38 page)

“Go, you two,” Blackburn said. “You get a five-minute head start.”

Tom didn’t move. Neither did Nigel. Five minutes was nothing. Nothing.

Blackburn looked directly at Tom again. “Or is the challenge too much for you?”

Blood roared up into Tom’s head. Oh, that was
it
.

“Don’t fall for it,” Vik warned in an undertone.

Yeah, he knew Blackburn was just goading him. But the accusation that Tom wasn’t getting up to fight because he was afraid just wasn’t something he’d let stand. He was going to prove Blackburn wrong. Prove them all wrong.

Tom leaped to his feet, ignoring Blackburn’s ferocious smile, and headed toward the front. “Come on, Nigel. Let’s get out of here.”

Nigel Harrison’s face twitched. “Ten minutes or it’s no deal. Sir.”

Blackburn waved his hand. “You can take fifteen, even.” His tone said,
It will make no difference
.

Tom knew it wouldn’t, but he bolted for the doors. This time Nigel followed.

T
OM RACED DOWN
the corridor to the elevator. “This is what I figure, Nigel … Nigel!”

He realized suddenly he was alone. The slim, black-haired boy was following him at a maddeningly slow pace, his pale face blank. Tom rushed back to his side, and matched his steps.

“This is what I think.” Tom practically hopped in place, fighting the urge to sprint, knowing he needed the other kid cooperating if they were going to win this sucker. “We should pick somewhere secure where we can control who gets in, like the Census Chamber, and then we make a stand. We can do it. We can stomp them all.”

“No, we can’t,” Nigel said.

“You and me, we’re going to be like those three hundred Spartans, okay? This is our glorious moment where we take on a vastly superior enemy force and win. Ever played that game, Sparta 300?” He fought the urge to grab Nigel’s arm and hoist him over his shoulder to move him faster.

“You’re such a child,” Nigel muttered. “You and your dumb friend, Vik. Life isn’t a stupid video game. Do you realize that? And seriously, who calls themselves the Doctor Dooms? You stole that from
The Fantastic Four
.”

Tom pounded on the button for the elevator. “First of all, we’re Doctors
of
Doom—there’s an ‘of’ and it’s
plural
. Second of all, that doesn’t have anything to do with the here and now.”

The elevator doors slid open. Nigel slumped back against the wall, wasting precious time that Tom knew they couldn’t afford to lose if they were going to have a chance of surviving the class period.

“Come on. Come on, Nigel! We’ve gotta go somewhere we can defend ourselves.”

Nigel fixed him with cold, blue eyes. “Is it true you blew up the Beringer Club?”

“You know about that?” Tom said, startled.

“Dominion Agra did the whole song and dance with me, too,” Nigel said. “They acted like they were going to sponsor me, let me come to the club when I wanted to, then nixed my nomination to Camelot Company and banned me from the premises. So did you do it?”

“I didn’t blow up the Beringer Club. I just flooded it with sewage. With the Dominion execs in there.”

Nigel studied him, then his mouth quirked. He slid past Tom into the elevator, hit B for basement. “I’ll work with you. And I know how we can win this.”

“Let’s do it, man.” Tom offered him a high five, but Nigel just shot his raised hand a slicing look, and Tom dropped it to his side.

They emerged from the elevator. Tom started for the Census Chamber, but Nigel didn’t follow. Tom found the small boy standing instead before the Spire’s primary processor: a refrigerator-sized computer chip swamped by wires, blasted on both sides by cooling hoses. “First, let’s disable the tracking system so they can’t find our GPS signals, and—”

An idea crept into Tom’s brain. “Wait. No, keep it on. The internal GPS system is the first thing they’ll access once they start hunting us, don’t you see?”

Nigel looked at him, catching onto the idea. “So we plant a Trojan there.”

“Exactly.”

Nigel darted over to a computer fixed to the wall, began typing away at the keyboard. “I’ve got the perfect one.” A strange gleam appeared in his eyes. “It’s my own creation. Grand Mal Seizure.”

“You’re joking, right?” Tom said. But Nigel was still typing. Tom grabbed Nigel’s skinny arm before he could execute the command. “You can’t plant that virus. That’s a serious medical problem.”

“So?”

“People die of seizures. You could kill someone.”

Nigel’s smirk was nasty. “I know.” He reached for the keyboard again.

This time, Tom shoved him away from it. Nigel crashed against the wall. He righted himself, staring at Tom like he had just betrayed him somehow.

“What’s the matter with you?” Tom bellowed. “Do you think Marsh will let us get away with doing something like that?”

“I wouldn’t use it on CamCo. That’s all Marsh cares about.” Nigel’s blue eyes glowed fanatically. “I’ll just use it on the others, the dead weight, and let Blackburn fix it later. He’ll know better than to mess with us again after that, and so will the rest of them.” His voice shook with hatred. “Don’t you get it? Neither of us have a chance to be Camelot Company now. Dominion Agra is going to blackball you for what you did, and I got nixed because of this defective neural processor.”

“Defective?”

“I didn’t have this twitch before,” Nigel railed. “It’s a hardware problem with my neural processor. They’d have to cut open my head again to fix it, so General Marsh has just decided for me that it’s too much of a risk even if
I’m
willing to do it. It ruins everything! I can’t get to CamCo because companies think I’d look bad on camera. And Marsh just thinks it’s fine and great. He even told me, ‘Son, you can just do something else for the military. Not everyone’s Combatant material.’ But I don’t want to do something else. I want
this
. And now you’re in the same situation. You can’t be CamCo, either. So let’s go for it another way.”

“What, by wiping out the competition?”

“No, we show Marsh we’re ruthless.” Nigel’s fist clenched in the air, gripping something only he saw. “Don’t you see? Look at the Russo-Chinese Combatants. Medusa doesn’t have a corporate sponsor, but Medusa is a Combatant anyway because he’s just that good. We can be like that. They’re looking for people who are different, who aren’t mediocre like the rest. We’ll show them we’re so deadly, the military
has
to make us CamCo even without sponsors!”

“Not this way.” Tom planted himself between Nigel and the keyboard. “I have friends here.”

Nigel’s face twitched, his expression like a storm cloud. “Good for you.”

“I wasn’t saying you don’t—”

“I don’t,” Nigel hissed. “I don’t have friends here.”

Gee, I wonder why
, Tom thought, but he just said, “Okay, so maybe you don’t, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you hurt mine.”

“What reality do you live in?” Spit flew from Nigel’s mouth. “In a few minutes, your so-called friends are going to be hunting you down. Your friends helped you mess with the entire board of Dominion Agra. That’s one of the chief companies in the Coalition of Multinationals, do you get that? Those are some of the most powerful people in the world, and you swamped them in sewage! If you had
real
friends, they’d have told you that you’re an idiot for even thinking about doing that!”

Tom bristled, indignant. “My friends do tell me I’m an idiot. All the time!”

“Fine, Raines. Play it your way.”

Tom didn’t trust him. He turned to the keyboard himself, careful to block Nigel’s path to it, trying to call up from his memory Frequent Noisome Farts. He’d stick that in the tracking system, and maybe the others in the Spire wouldn’t be so quick to search for them if a few of them came down with some major flatulence.

“That’s really an impressive firewall you’ve got,” Nigel remarked from behind him. “Enslow make that for you?”

Tom ignored him. He was laboring to type in the correct source code.

“Impressive,” Nigel went on, “but flawed. You should’ve sided with me. You might’ve stood a chance.”

Tom whirled around, saw him raising his forearm keyboard. He leaped forward, but not in time. The virus initiated and his head thrashed back and slammed into something hard. His vision blurred into darkness.

T
OM AWOKE LYING
on the stage of the Lafayette Room, pain drilling behind his eyes. He gazed at the empty rows of benches, blurring in and out of his vision.

He tried to push himself up, but found his wrists pinned against his chest. “Hey!” he yelled out, fighting to free himself. He could feel something bunched up against the back of his head, too, and the front of it slipped down over his face, and blinded him.

Blackburn yanked the uniform tunic off his head. “Calm down,” he ordered.

“Let me go!” Tom cried.

“I’m freeing you right now. Stay calm.”

He reached behind Tom and tugged at something—and the constriction loosened around him. He saw then that his bonds were all made of uniform tunics.

“You were thrashing,” Blackburn explained.

Tom jolted to his feet. The movement made his stomach turn. “What happened?” He swallowed against the dry ache in his throat. “Who won?”

“I’ve been dismantling Mr. Harrison’s program. It seems he took you out before anyone else could get to you. You were one of the two foxes, so he won the competition.”

Tom hadn’t even thought of attacking Nigel and winning that way.

“What did he get me with?” Tom rubbed at his head. “Grand Mal Seizure?”

“No. Who would program something like that? He hit you with a nasty variation of Nigel Harrison. Your twitching manifested itself as a sustained thrashing, and you knocked yourself unconscious.”

Tom laughed, his head whirling. His legs felt a bit funny beneath him. “You’re kidding. Nigel Harrison Nigel Harrisoned me?”

“That’s right.” Blackburn sounded annoyed. “And if he’d written a self-termination sequence, I would’ve given him a day off. Since I was stuck dismantling it, I revoked his victory.”

Tom’s eyes riveted on a smear of blood on the stage below him. He raised a shaky hand to the side of his head and pressed the stinging bump gingerly.

“Don’t poke at it,” Blackburn warned, plucking Tom’s hand away.

Yeah, like he cared. Tom ripped out of his grip and jumped down from the stage. The floor gave way beneath him, and he tumbled to the ground.

“Graceful.” A thump of boots behind him, and then a large hand seized the back of his tunic and hauled him to his feet.

“Let me go. Stay away from me!”

Blackburn steered him jerkily down the aisle. “You have a head injury, Raines. You’re going to the infirmary.”

“I’m great. I’m perfect. Let go!”

He turned Tom around and clasped his shoulders. “You were unconscious for fifteen minutes, Raines. Your pupils are uneven. You need to see a doctor.”

Tom felt awkward, seeing him this close, hearing him actually speak softly. He turned his head away. “So you got what you wanted, huh? This was bad for my health.”

Blackburn considered him. “No. This went too far. Come on.”

Tom stopped trying to break away from him. Blackburn remained silent the rest of the trip to the infirmary.

Tom swayed dizzily when Blackburn delivered him to Nurse Chang, who urged him into one of the beds and flashed a penlight in his eyes. Then Tom pressed his cheek against the mattress, and it felt solid and calm when his head was so jumbled. He was suddenly glad to be here. He didn’t feel like delighting Karl by puking all over himself in the middle of the mess hall.

“Stay awake, Mr. Raines,” Nurse Chang ordered.

Tom forced his eyes back open, watching the bedside table blur in and out. He felt so sick. The lights were too bright. He didn’t like that Blackburn was still there, standing over him. He tried to shut out the sound of his voice as he asked, “How long do you expect he’ll be here? I should inform General Marsh.”

“I’ll let you know after his CT, but he’s young. Something that would floor you or me for a few weeks, they can shake off in days.”

“You don’t need to tell me. Two boys, one year apart. There were more than enough trips to the ER.” He was silent a long moment. “Just keep me informed.”

Heavy footsteps, and then the hiss of a door sliding open and closed again. Like some dark cloud had dissolved, Tom was finally able to relax, certain Blackburn was finally gone.

A
FTER A COUPLE
days, Tom was allowed to leave the infirmary, but he was ordered to remain on bed rest. That’s why his GPS signal was situated in his bunk, while he hung out in the VR parlor of the Pentagon City Mall.

He’d spent all Saturday morning fighting Medusa in Pirate Wars. He was the leader of the Black Flag pirate fleet, and she was Ching Shih, the Chinese pirate queen leading the Red Flag Fleet. Despite the low, persistent headache left over from his concussion, Tom fought valiantly and managed to board her ship. Just as he set about massacring her crew, he noticed Medusa’s dark head bobbing in the water beyond the ship, her huge grin filled with expectation.