Blackburn was in a thunderous mood because of all the chaos. The programs were maliciously playful enough to make him suspect one of the trainees, but according to Wyatt, Blackburn also thought that might be a ploy, too, to throw off suspicion from someone else. It wasn’t a stretch to guess who had motive to see Blackburn fired. Obsidian Corp. had already put out feelers with the Senate Defense Committee, seeking a return to their old role of software writing at the Pentagonal Spire—citing the recent software issues as evidence it was necessary.

Blackburn began watching Tom more than usual, like he suspected him of having some hand in the breaches. Then again, Tom wondered uneasily if Blackburn had an idea of what he’d been up to. Medusa still hadn’t responded to him, so he tried annoying her by returning to the Citadel’s systems and planting the Gnomes virus right into her neural processor. Then he headed to Calisthenics. They went through the usual routine for Monday morning, with Blackburn guiding them through marching drills and an exercise where they reached down with exosuited hands and picked objects up, then put them back down.

Tom spent the whole time thinking of Medusa as Vik smashed a cantaloupe between his metal fingers, and Blackburn said, “Congratulations, Ashwan, you set off that bomb. Now you’re dust.”

Then they got to experiment with metallic instruments that looked like irons for pressing clothes. They were called centrifugal clamps. One flip of a button, and the internal centrifuge activated, adhering the clamp to any nearby surface. Wyatt used them to climb all the way up a wall, then she got stuck, since she was too anxious to climb back down, even with a half-dozen people below her ready to catch her. Tom started climbing up to give her a piggyback ride down, but Blackburn ordered him to the ground. Then he started after her. Blackburn reached her side at the top of the wall, spoke quietly to her, and they started down side by side, one clamp at a time.

Tom was the last to stash his exosuit at the end of Calisthenics. Most trainees lowered the hanger, stepped onto it with the exosuit, then climbed out. Tom usually skipped the lowering-the-hanger part and jumped on top of it while it was still high, then took the suit off. Whenever he caught him, Blackburn gave him a weekend of restricted libs and scut work detail—cleaning around the Spire—but Tom did it, anyway.

Just as Tom popped his exosuit off today, a surprising thing happened: one of the suits came to life on its own, and two metal, exoskeletal hands shot down, seized him by the upper arms, and hoisted him up into the air. Tom gasped in shock, legs kicking out wildly, and words flared before his vision.

WHY DO I KEEP SEEING ANGRY GNOMES?