“This is all about money, then.”
“It’s always about money, son. War is expensive. We cut costs wherever we can. That’s why all our shipyards are in space. That’s why Combatants need sponsors. The fact is, the only people in this country who can afford to pay taxes to support the military are the very people powerful enough to avoid paying them. As for the resources we win in space? We’re lucky to see a dime. We haven’t even seized Mercury yet, and Senator Bixby’s promised first drilling rights to Nobridis. That’s why I need Lieutenant Blackburn. He does everything Obsidian did, and he does it for an officer’s salary. Not only that, but he does it better. And the best part is, Joseph Vengerov could throw his entire fortune at him, and Blackburn would still turn down a job with Obsidian Corp., because they were the ones behind the neural processors. In fact, Lieutenant Blackburn had only one condition when he came to the Spire: he wanted to teach the trainees how to program with Zorten II.”
“He came here just for that?”
“That’s all he wants. That’s why I stuck my neck out to get him on my staff. If he quits on me, or worse, follows through on his threat, every assurance I gave the Defense Committee gets discredited and so do I.”
“I don’t believe it.” Tom’s voice shook. Blackburn had to have some other reason. He was twisted and evil and …
“It’s true, Tom.” Marsh raised an open palm in the air. “He wants you to learn. Look what happened to him with his own processor.”
“Yeah, I know it drove him crazy.”
“More than that. All three adults who survived the neural processors reacted in different ways. The other two had serious problems, but they were either lucid or lucid most of the time. Major Blackburn was never lucid.”
“Major,” Tom repeated.
“He was a major in the US Army. First in his class at West Point, in fact. Once he got the processor, he had that psychotic break, but he refused to believe he was sick, and he wasn’t responding to medication. Obsidian Corp. stepped forward and offered to take custody of the survivors. It was their project, so they were willing to foot the expense of treating them with their own therapies. The other two survivors went willingly. Major Blackburn did not. He escaped their custody and disappeared right off the grid, and I’ll tell you, Tom, that’s not an easy feat in an age of universal surveillance. He even retrieved his family.”
Tom opened and closed his mouth. “Lieutenant Blackburn has a family.”
“Major Blackburn did,” Marsh corrected. “A wife, two kids, a house in Wyoming. We stationed soldiers at their home, waiting for him to show, and he still got them right out from under our noses. We heard nothing for years, and then one day out of the blue, his wife tipped us off. She’d realized by then that he’d lost his mind. He was paranoid, erratic, and she was afraid of him. She let us know that he’d taken the family and holed up in a compound outside Roanoke, Texas.”
Roanoke. The word sent a chill through Tom. “So what happened?”
Marsh tapped his fingers on his desk. “He was armed to the teeth. His wife knew when we came to retrieve the processor, Major Blackburn might turn it into a bloodbath. She was willing to stay near him during the siege to keep us informed of his movements, if we were willing to smuggle out the children before the shooting began. On the day of the operation, she was able to slip the children out back where we had a team waiting to transport them out of harm’s way. And when that team drove from the house, they found out the hard way that Major Blackburn had rigged the surrounding area with land mines.”
Tom was stunned into silence, realizing it. It took him several seconds to speak. “His kids were in the car?”
“Yes.”
“He blew up his own kids.”
“Yes, Tom.”
Tom couldn’t get his head around to that.
“When we did finally move in, Major Blackburn didn’t put up a fight,” Marsh said. “As far gone as he was, even he understood what had happened. And even after he’d fixed his own neural processor, it was years before he was able to gain the slightest freedom of movement—he’d proven that dangerous. So you appreciate now, I hope, just how far out I had to stick my neck to get him in here. The army would never have had him back. Their boys drove that car onto that land mine. So James Blackburn’s now with my branch, and he’s my responsibility. He goes down, I go down, and he knows it.”
Tom’s head throbbed. “So I’m done.” The implications of all this sank like a lead weight in his gut. “He has one over you, so if I stay, Blackburn’s going to drive me out of my mind with the census device and you can’t stop him. I have to quit.”
“There’s one other way. It can’t come through me, but if he received an order directly from the senators on the Defense Committee to back down, he would have to leave you be. If you want them to step in for you, Tom, you have to become too valuable to let go. And you have to do it somewhere public enough to make an impression on them.”
Tom sat up, his insides twisted into knots of anxiety, apprehension. Hope clawed its frantic way up from the murky depths where he’d banished it. His palms and forehead pricked with sweat.
“How? General, I’ll do anything.”
“You’re coming with me to the Capitol Summit. You’ll be the one to proxy for Elliot. You’ll be the one to beat Medusa.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TOM SPRINTED ACROSS the Calisthenics Arena and caught up to Vik midway through the Battle of Gettysburg. His roommate lifted his bayonet to impale him, then realized who it was and lowered it again.
“Tom! Hey, man. You done being disappeared now?”
“Not yet. Run faster.”
“Aah,” Vik agreed. The Confederates in Pickett’s Charge were nearly upon them.
They picked up the pace, sprinting through the grass. In front of them, the Union soldiers fired at their position. The two armies pressed in on them like a steel trap springing shut.
“So where have you been?” Vik screamed the words to be heard over the booming cannons. “You should hear the rumors about you, man. I’m talking alien abductions and secret CIA mind-control experiments here.”
“Basement.” Tom couldn’t say much more than that. Not because it was classified, but more because he was out of breath. Two days, no sleep, little food or water, and constant neural culling had left him a wreck.
Olivia had offered to write him an excuse for Calisthenics, but Tom didn’t know how much time he had left at the Spire. He wanted to spend as much of it with his friends as he could.
Now the sky turned black above them, and the dead Confederate and Union soldiers rose and revealed themselves to be zombies, descending upon the trainees for a bloodbath. Tom used his bayonet to behead one, but a pair of Union zombies seized him and tore his throat out.
Session expired. Immobility sequence initiated. Tom’s body went numb below the chest. He dropped to the grass.
Vik dropped dead on the grass next to him. “So tell me everything,” he shouted over the roar of gunfire.
“You never die in Calisthenics.”
“I pulled a Beamer and suicided.”
Pulled a Beamer. Tom sighed, a bleak mood sinking over him as the zombies trampled his body to get at the rest of the trainees. He had to beat Medusa or he’d be the one pulling a Beamer—booted out of the program, getting the neural processor phased out of his brain.