He tried to twist and evade her sensors, but she whipped around and cut back into his path. He looked at the data coming from the Indo-American satellite grid again, searching for space junk he could use as a weapon. He located the remains of an orbiting space telescope he could use to damage her. But when he tried to force her toward it using the wake of his own engine, she neatly evaded the trap by dropping toward the upper atmosphere, using gravity to propel her out of harm’s way, and Tom almost careened into it himself.
He was aware of his heart slamming in his body, shocked by the near miss. The Russo-Chinese satellite grid must’ve been more comprehensive than the Indo-American grid. Medusa seemed to know every floating piece of debris in the area, where to find it, where to steer him, where not to get maneuvered herself.
He felt his distant body, his teeth grinding in frustration, because he would kill right now for access to the Russo-Chinese satellites so he could see what she was seeing.
And it occurred to him that he could have it.
Maybe one cheat wasn’t so bad.
Tom headed farther from the old satellite they were chasing, then he took a chance. Wyatt’s virus was gone, but he concentrated on his neural processor, buzzing in his head, only half aware of how to do this. He sensed his processor’s connection to the internet, and then let his brain do the work for him. Those bolts of electricity joined with the signals of his brain, the signals of his neural processor. He snapped from his own flesh. Both the vessel he controlled and the body he owned grew distant and cold as he groped frantically through the internet toward that Russo-Chinese satellite subsystem he knew had to exist.
His consciousness jolted into an old, clunky satellite with primitive thermal sensors. He couldn’t see Medusa, couldn’t orient himself, so he jumped to the next one.
Then it happened.
His brain melded to the satellite, or tried to, and encountered another mind reaching for the same one. Another consciousness, another set of neural impulses free-floating in space, maneuvering outside the scope of a physical body.
Tom snapped back with shock into his vessel, and he stared with his vessel’s sensors toward Medusa’s vessel in space, shaken to the core of his being. He had a sense, an unsettling sense, that she was doing the exact same thing.
Medusa messaged him. You’re like me.
Tom couldn’t think for a full second, so stunned it was like his brain and his neural processor had gone totally silent. Then, We’re the same, he messaged her.
And it all made sense.
Medusa was extraordinary, because she was extraordinary. She accessed satellites. She could delve into the Indo-American systems just like the Russo-Chinese systems. She could enter machines the way he could. She could see ahead because she could see ahead where other Combatants could not. She could even interface with the ships around hers, the ones connected to the internet but not connected to her brain, because she was just like Tom. She had the same ability he did.
As though the realization galvanized her, Medusa bombarded him with an artillery of space debris, ignoring the satellite altogether—as though she’d realized Tom was more of a threat than she’d ever supposed. Tom evaded the trash—old satellites, chunks of rock—much more easily now, attuned to the same satellite system she was, using the same advantage she was using, the Russo-Chinese and Indo-American satellites relaying information straight into his neural processor.
Medusa suddenly decelerated, forcing him downward toward a hunk of granite orbiting the Earth. Tom steered so quickly to evade it, he sent his vessel hurtling in an uncontrollable circle. But his sensors picked up something else, then—the satellite. The very one they were out to collect, jolting straight into his electromagnetic sensor sight. He deployed his clamps and seized it as he rocketed past, dragging it down with him toward the vast blue sphere of the Earth.
Medusa charged after him as he descended into the atmosphere of the planet, heat shields lighting up on all sides of his vessel, around the satellite. Tom sped up his descent as much as he dared, knowing that if he went too fast, he’d burn up the satellite and his ship with it.
Medusa grew dangerous now, truly dangerous. Out for blood the same way Tom had been when she held the satellite. She hurtled toward him, and he knew now this would be a fight to avoid mutual destruction. She shot straight toward him, threatening him with a collision. Tom swung downward to avoid it, found himself accelerating too quickly, the heat sensors lighting up madly in his vessel. He decelerated but still plunged off course, trapped by gravity, well away from Washington, DC, and was torn down toward a chaotic mass of storm clouds.
Medusa retreated just as Tom’s vessel plunged into the eye of the storm. Black clouds enveloped him, lightning crashing around him. Turbulence pounded his vessel on all sides. He adjusted course, dodging the thunderheads, the flashing of lightning that would end this in an instant, and then tried to tap back into the Russo-Chinese satellite system to orient himself—
And found Medusa’s consciousness waiting there for his, inhabiting the satellites. She struck at him like lightning, ripping him out of the satellite systems and into the vast miasma of the internet. Chaos rocketed Tom as his brain zinged through the tangle of connections among billions of machines, Medusa dragging him down some unknown pathway.
New connections flashed through him. Tom jerked suddenly into the neural processor of Elliot Ramirez.
Tom could see the Rotunda through Elliot’s eyes, too, and feel his shock when Medusa planted a command into his brain from the inside. Elliot stopped pretending to control the ships and his body began twirling and dipping like he was ice-skating in the middle of the Rotunda. Across from him, Svetlana Moriakova gaped at his pirouettes, his leaps, then dissolved into laughter.
So Tom focused on Svetlana with Elliot’s eyes, her IP address scrolling across Elliot’s vision center. That sent him lurching into her processor, and he ordered her to open her lips to scream, “I’ll eat your souls! And bathe in your blood!” He felt her cheeks heating up and saw through her eyes the spectators glancing at one another, puzzled by the strange behavior of the two young people.
And then with a thought of his vessel, Tom snapped back into it. One last violent jolt, and his ship freed itself from the grip of the storm. He felt Medusa’s consciousness following him, grappling for control of his ship. He felt her mind trying to access the clamps, trying to get him to release the satellite—to drop it into the ocean, destroy it, before he could win.
A thought crawled into Tom’s brain. If Medusa could access Elliot’s neural processor, and he could access Svetlana’s, why couldn’t he access hers? He abandoned the fight for the clamps and made for her ship. Just as he interfaced with it, Medusa moved her consciousness to defend it.
But Tom didn’t access her ship. It was a feint.
He delved instead into the connection between her ship and some neural processor somewhere, Medusa’s processor transmitting from somewhere on Earth. He pursued it and found himself interfacing with a network based in Washington, DC, even. His consciousness interfaced with the network, brushing past the security measures of the Chinese embassy, and there he found himself in the surveillance subsystem, dancing between various rooms inside the embassy. Then he found a private one, with a girl hooked in with a neural wire into an interface port. He gazed through the security cameras, his human brain making sense of what the cameras were seeing.