Back the signals soared to Earth, jolting in the mainframe of the Sun Tzu Citadel, the stronghold of Russo-Chinese trainees. Tom began following the pipelines from one directory to another to another until finally the Russo-Chinese Combatant IPs flickered through his consciousness. He recognized Medusa’s IP and deposited a message he’d prepared in her net-send: I want to talk to you.

Tom lingered in the Citadel’s systems for a timeless period that he later realized was less than twenty seconds, and her mind appeared on the system.

A shock jolted through his body, knocking him off the bed. The words STAY AWAY burned across his vision center before fading out.

Tom lay there, breathless, a bit stung by the rejection, but then determination surged through him. The only thing left to do was try, try again.

HIS NEXT OPPORTUNITY to contact Medusa came even sooner than he expected: during his first fly-along with Heather Akron.

Heather probably wouldn’t have been Tom’s first choice, not just because she was in disgrace for smearing the other CamCos to the press but also because he’d had this lingering mistrust of her ever since she handed him over to Karl Marsters to get beaten up his first week at the Spire. His own disgrace meant he probably wasn’t Heather’s first choice, either.

However, now they had to be a team. Tom was woken by a ping at 0400 one morning, informing him to report to the Helix to meet Heather for a fly-along by 0430. It was his first chance to see a battle in person . . . sort of.

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.