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.” Then 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.