Vortex

Tom was so excited, he managed to shower, dress, and get to the ninth floor by 0408. There, his neural processor informed him the battle for today would be in the Reaches.

Tom knew that the Reaches was that sector of the solar system that spanned from the point of Neptune’s closest orbit to the sun to the Kuiper Belt. It was so far from Earth that every strike in the Reaches had to be planned months in advance, and the side that went on the offensive almost always prevailed. The thing was, there was so much space out there that locating the enemy shipyards and satellites and mining platforms was the trickiest task of all.

The military worked with NASA to dispatch the armaments necessary for the battle—launching mobile cannons, satellites, and support drones to the site months in advance of a planned engagement. All the plans for strikes in the outer solar system in the next six months to a year were stored in the Vault on the Mezzanine floor of the Spire. The Combatants themselves, like the Middles flying along with them, woke up with the battle plans from the Vault downloaded in their processors the day they were due to attack. Though formal battle plans never survived contact with the enemy in traditional warfare, attacks in the Reaches were often so swift and destructive, the enemy had little chance to engage.

Soon, a handful of other Middles lucky enough to have their fly-alongs today trickled in. Wyatt was one of them. She looked sallow and grumpy, and didn’t return Tom’s excited greeting. Her scowl deepened when Heather sashayed over to collect Tom and lead him down the corridor.

Heather looped her arm through his. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Tom assured her.

“We’ll be using a limited thought interface for this fly-along. You’ll hear me, but you won’t hear the other CamCos.” They stopped outside the door to the Helix Command Center, a winding corridor connecting the ninth and tenth floors where the CamCos hooked into ships in space during battle. “If you have any questions, you can think them out and I may think back an answer to you. I’ll probably be too busy.”

“Got it,” Tom said.

Middles weren’t yet authorized for entrance into the Helix, but there were a series of cots that rolled right out of the wall on the ninth floor, outside the entrance, where they could interface for the purpose of the fly-alongs. The Middles were supposed to lie down on them while hooked into the system, sharing their CamCo’s sensory perceptions during the space battle.

Tom sprawled onto his cot, and Heather began typing authorization codes into her forearm keyboard so he could share her senses.

Tom’s stomach gave an excited flutter. “Good luck.”

She shook her head. “Luck’s not a part of it. If we lose a battle in the outer solar system, it’ll be because someone with logistics miscalculated half a year ago and didn’t plot the right course for the drones and weapons to reach the site of battle in time. Or because something’s gone wrong with the satellites and we can’t get real-time communication. Sometimes, it’s because NASA missed a pocket of dust, so the energy beams from the Promethean Arrays don’t reach us.”

Tom nodded. He knew from Tactics that Promethean Arrays were the devices in the Infernal Zone in close orbit around the sun. They collected energy with their solar panels, focused it in a concentrated beam, and shot it to other devices throughout the solar system. To launch battles in the Reaches, military logistics would send a command for hundreds of Promethean Arrays to shoot energy beams toward the outer solar system, and they’d do so anywhere from forty minutes to thirteen hours in advance, depending upon how far away the site of battle was going to be. The Indo-American vessels in the Reaches were all energy conductive, so when the beams hit, the vessels focused the energy into an atomic reaction. The resulting explosion propelled the ships to the site of battle.

“The point is,” Heather went on, “we’re not the ones who determine victory when it comes to the Reaches. The Promethean Arrays do.”

“Good luck, anyway,” Tom said.

Tom heard Elliot explaining something similar to Wyatt, his own Middle. “There’s not much spontaneity in the Reaches. This will be short. See you on the other side.”

Heather cast Tom a magnetic smile. “Later, Tom.”

He felt a jolt in the back of his neck, something hooking into his neural access port. . . .

And then he was walking through a corridor, blank white walls around him . . . or rather, Heather was, and he was seeing through her eyes. Weird. Where was this?

You’re not authorized to see the Helix yet, Heather thought to him, so this is all censored.

Heather smoothed her tunic, and Tom grew uncomfortably aware of her in that way he did quite often. He wondered why she’d leaked that stuff about the other CamCos when she could’ve gotten all the attention she wanted being herself, looking like herself. . . .

How do you know about that?

He’d forgotten she was tuned into his thoughts. Desperately, Tom thought, 1 . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 5 . . . Wyatt telling me about Heather . . . Wait. Wait, did I—

Enslow told you? There was nothing for a moment. How does she know?

Come on, Heather.

People are making such a big deal of this, Heather thought. Like the others wouldn’t have done it if they’d thought of it. Wait, I thought that. Tom, I was tricked. Those reporters tricked me. You have to know that, right? Silence, and, So was it Enslow who found out about it?

The Fibonacci sequence hadn’t worked, so Tom tried his own means of controlling his thoughts: Heather’s boobs. It worked. The subject consumed his mind and kept it away from Wyatt.

Heather thought, Boys are such idiots, and stopped prying.

He watched through her eyes as her hand plucked up a silvery metal star. Her slim fingers twisted a dial in the very center, and the points lit, projecting some sort of bright, thin white beams to form a glowing pentagon around the metal star. And then, Tom felt her hooking it into the back of her neck like a neural wire.

The flash of consciousness to the distant vessel was instantaneous. Quantum-entangled photons in the ship’s CPU instantly responded to the actions of their paired photons in the Spire’s CPU. The vessel’s sensors registered in Heather’s awareness like an extension of her own body, and since Tom was hooked in with her, he felt it, too. For a moment, Tom marveled at this, at how it all felt so much more vivid than the drone he’d interfaced with at Capitol Summit or even the way he’d interface and leap system to system himself. . . .

Tom?

He was vaguely aware of the jerk in his distant body, the awareness he’d been thinking about that and he wasn’t sure how much she heard with a limited thought interface. But even now she was hearing some of this, and Tom needed to stop thinking about it.

Tom, what are you— It’s starting.

The bright pulse of a Promethean Array’s electromagnetic beam streaked past. It was the warning pulse, which meant a second pulse was incoming. Heather’s ship burned away its tiny store of metallic hydrogen fuel to soar forward into position, and then the Promethean Array’s next beam hit the rear plates of her ship—and Tom felt a massive charge of intense but incredible heat as the nuclear reaction triggered, exploding against the back plate of the ship and launching them forward into the black canopy of space.

One by one, the other vessels positioned themselves behind Heather’s. The electromagnetic pulses hit them, triggering atomic reactions—and something else, too. The ships were conductive. They used energy as propulsion but also conducted it forward so the ships behind Heather’s accelerated and, at the same time, shot energy forward and caused her vessel to accelerate even faster. Tom was aware of Heather’s neural processor tracking how much energy the ship could tolerate, her ship in the lead of the cascade formation, the fastest.