Tron

14

THE HORIZON HAD broken; Flynn knew that expectation that comes near the end of a long journey.

“We’ll reach the end of the Game Sea soon,” Yori announced, still at the helm. Her endurance there, her calm control and expertise, had not surprised him so much as reminded him of Lora. Yori exhibited that same commitment to see a thing-through, to do what she was doing as well as it could be done, and leave no room for criticism. She had that same drive to settle for nothing less than excellence, and to settle for that only when perfection wasn’t possible. Flynn, watching her, recalled all that Lora had meant to him.

Then he turned and watched Tron, who strode aft down the catwalk. Flynn thought about his disk cast from the bow, the precision and exuberance of it. Despite all he’d learned, Flynn knew that Tron had an affinity for the disk which he, Flynn, could only guess at. Am I seeing Alan Bradley? Flynn asked himself, looking at the gleaming User Champion, other-worldly Warrior in electronic armor. I understand him. And Dillinger too, but in a different way, and Gibbs. And Lora; most of all, Lora.

Flynn looked to the horizon once more; they were nearing the Central Computer Area, the MCP, and some final resolution—victory or death. Flynn decided that he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He’d come to ENCOM to settle a score in the first place; now he grinned fiercely at the Central Computer Area, where the Master Control Program waited. C’mon out and fight!

The Sailer abruptly trembled under them, the first disturbance in her swift maiden voyage. The transmission beam was suddenly brighter, louder, more powerful. The Sailer fought her helm as if she’d come into a squall, her sails cracking. The transmission beam intensified.

Flynn heard running boots on the catwalk and saw Tron charge aft, his face transformed with concern for Yori. Tron didn’t bother with a second glance at the transmission beam; he’d seen that it was operating under some guidance. This was no malfunction, but a subversion of the beam; the MCP had taken control of it. Perhaps Master Control had devoted the staggering amount of time and attention necessary to monitor the entire webwork and locate the Sailer. Or—Tron had time for a single searing jolt of guilt—perhaps the MCP had detected his hurl of the disk.

Profitless to consider that now. Tron bounded past Flynn, who was regaining his balance, and was at Yori’s side. The transmission beam had risen to a terrifying pitch that nearly drowned out his voice as he shouted to ask her if she was all right. She was, but that was only an instant’s relief.

“What’s happening?” Flynn hollered over the tumult of the beam and the Sailer’s answering tossing and rocking. All of them clutched for handholds to keep from being pitched overboard.

“Power surge!” Yori yelled back. “From the MCP!” She was doing her best to bring the vessel under control. For a moment, Flynn was convinced that he was watching Lora, not an alter ego or simulacrum, but her.

Tron steadied her and took in their situation, the insane gyrations of bow and stern, the thrumming of the four lines and the undulations of the great sails. The vessel bucked again and he gripped Yori, shouting over the furor, “We have to get off this beam!”

She’d scanned the readouts, and told him without quaver, “I can’t! There’s no junction due for at least seven or eight nanoseconds!”

The word junction caught Flynn’s ear as he struggled aft to join them. The Sailer must get off the booby-trapped beam and onto another. He searched, then pointed. “There’s another beam!” It glittered in the distance, their salvation. They’d sailed the beam on which they now rode all the way from the Factory Domain, and he’d never seen what transferral entailed. Flynn hoped it was no big deal: Got a long way to fall, he reminded himseli..

“It’s too far!” Yori hollered back. Which means, Flynn surmised, that the Sailer’ll either drop out of the sky, explode, or be held fast until the Good Ship Sark shows up.

He knew a sudden hatred of a scheme of things that could end their mission so. But we won! he nearly cried aloud. Survived that coliseum, the tanks, the Recos, the Reds! Tron and Yori were close together, she gathered in by the long, muscular arm, both of them resigned.

The game was over, Flynn was concluding, just as an idea occurred to him and his mind finished, barring the unpredictable Kevin Flynn!

Tron saw Flynn drag himself upright and spring toward the Sailer’s bow, tossed from rail to rail as he ran. Something in his attitude stopped the User Champion from yelling to him to stay where he was and hold on. The assertion that Flynn was a User was something Tron found easy to doubt at times, but not now. He knew the sudden hope that had come to him in duels on the Game Grid, when he’d thought himself about to die but had found a means to live and win instead. Following Flynn’s progress forward, he felt what other User-Believers had felt when they’d watched Tron fight.

“Flynn!” he shouted, but the other kept moving. “What are you doing?” Flynn went on, giving no sign of having heard.

He came to the free-standing steps of the ship’s forebody, suppressing his conviction that things like steps had no business hanging in midair, ascending them three at a time. Racing up the companionway, he staggered between the masts and out onto the bow, nearly losing his balance and slipping overboard.

The sails strained and cracked as if before a gale. He teetered past one of the three long antennae that radiated from the hull, now swinging crazily. Through his mind passed all that he knew of his new phantasmagorical World, the behavior of energy there, and what passed for matter. He summoned up memories of his own amazing feats, the sensations when he’d stolen the aura of the downed Red and unconsciously liberated power in the dismantled Reco. He narrowed his concentration to those things; they must guide him now.

He made his way out onto the prow, stopping just short of jutting flanges that guarded the beam-emission aperture like teeth. Flynn readied his will, thought about power, and concentrated on the flow of energy beneath him.

Tron, watching from the helmsman’s station, arm around Yori, suddenly understood what Flynn had in mind. The insane audacity of it, and the remote possibility that Flynn might be able to bring it off, made him exclaim, “The beam connection!”

Flynn lay full length on the deck, angling his shoulder around to the gap between the bases of two flanges. The beam flared and sizzled, an outgushing of energy like the lurid mouth of Hell. He rummaged within himself for whatever dormant resource it had been that had permitted him to do the things he had. He extended an arm into the path of the beam. It was not disintegrated; he watched his own splayed fingers within the raging outpouring of power. And he found that he knew precisely what to do.

He thrust his entire arm into the transmission beam as if it were a medium no more dangerous than water. Tron and Yori hiked themselves higher in their seats, trying to see. Flynn pointed his free arm at the other transmission beam he’d spied in the distance. Knowledge came, and control.

From his arm a ray of intolerably bright light projected, nothing less than another transmission beam. It struck and melted with the one in the distance, an improvised link. Flynn felt as if he were about to blow apart, his electronic physiology barely able to cope with the tremendous forces. Tron, and Yori watched him, a figure out of a fable, doing a deed without precedent.

“He’s creating a junction!” shouted Tron over the din. “Quick; transfer to the other beam!”

Yori resumed her piloting at once. Flynn lay, partially within the beam, slumped and limp. If it hadn’t been for his extended arm, Tron would have thought him dead.

The Solar Sailer jarred and came around, slowly at first, then with gathering velocity, riding Flynn’s impromptu junction toward safety, swinging free of the beam sabotaged by Master Control. Tron tried not to think what would happen if Flynn suddenly de-rezzed.

But in moments the Sailer, under Yori’s helmsmanship, had reached the safe beam and was on a new course, out of danger. Somewhere, Tron thought, the MCP and its slave programs must be very surprised.

Tron ran forward, Yori close behind. He took the forward companionway in two long bounds and was out onto the sloping bow. Flynn lay where he’d been, arm no longer raised. Tron carefully dragged him from the path of the beam emitted from the Sailer’s bow, and picked him up. Then he was carrying Flynn back toward the bridge.

Tron set him down gently on the deck, and he and Yori bent over Flynn anxiously, unsure what to do.

But just then Flynn’s eyes blinked open. He raised his head, groggy and weak. “Did we make it?”

They sighed their tremendous relief. “Yes,” grinned Tron.

Flynn produced a thin, exhausted smile. “Hoo-ray for our side!” Then his head lolled once more; he lost consciousness again. And the transmission beam drove the Solar Sailer on her perilous course toward rendezvous with Master Control.

In time they came to the end of the Game Sea. The colorific ocean halted as its swells confronted a barrier wall so high that it blocked the Sailer’s way, so wide that Tron and Yori could see no end to it. But the transmission beam carried them into a gap in the barrier, and over the Central Computer Area.

They were still in the vessel’s bridge area, midships. Yori sat with Flynn’s head cradled in her lap, watching him. She and Tron could do little for him. She now believed Flynn’s claims, she found, even though they seemed impossible and ran counter to everything she knew. His performance on the bow had left no room for doubt.

Yori watched him carefully for any sign of energy loss or instability, or the appearance of scan lines. “Is he de-rezzing?” she solicited Tron’s opinion.

“No,” posited Tron, who knelt nearby. “But I couldn’t tell you why.” There’d been sufficient power in that beam to destroy a thousand programs. Tron, too, found it difficult not to credit Flynn’s story now that it had been substantiated so spectacularly.

Flynn stirred out of his senselessness by degrees, finding himself held by Yori, an altogether agreeable situation except that he felt like he’d just spent three days locked inside a cement mixer. Segments of it came back to him as he smiled up at her, thinking it was Lora who cradled his head. Then he remembered everything, and realized that this radiant woman was not the one who’d left him. “Oh, Mommy!” he groaned.

He looked around dizzily. Still here, he concluded, no two ways about that! Its always a pleasure to wake up alive. “You guys feelin’ okay?” he inquired.

Are we—Tron threw his head back and laughed at the nonchalance of it. Yori gave Flynn a fond look, finding that she valued something irreverent and humorous in him. Flynn was not like Tron, but he was stubbornly wry, bravely funny, strong in his own way.

“We are fine,” she assured him. “We’re worried about you.”

Flynn groped himself, still woozy, checking his person for damage and, to his surprise, finding none. “All in one piece,” he reported. “Guess I’m still with you.”

He sat up and regretted it at once; wincing with pain, he held his head. “Man! Tell the guy with the jackhammer to lay off, will ya?”

Tron chuckled; Flynn seemed all right, apart from that monster headache and strange turn of speech. “How did you do that, Flynn?” he asked, meaning the beam junction.

Flynn looked down at his brilliant Electronic World body, pondering. It had been energy manipulating energy, but the explanation was more complicated than that. A great deal of it had been the instinctive use of the altered structure of his body and the faculties with which he’d been invested by the digitization of that enormously complicated System, his former body.

“Elementary physics,” he ad-libbed vaguely. “A beam of energy can always be diverted.” He hiked himself up and glanced around curiously, seeking to change the subject. “Are we there yet?”

Yori answered, “Almost. I just have to adjust our course at the next junction.” She began to rise. “I’d better go check the instruments.” She gently slid away from him, lithe and marvelous to see.

The Sailer wove among the gigantic canyons of the Central Computer Area, staying at low altitude to avoid detection. The Electronic landscape had a nonlinear, almost weathered look locally. Flynn watched shining palisades, delineated in light and color, roll by to either side. Some time had passed since they’d entered the area, without sign of pursuit. Tron had begun to hope that, in suddenly leaving the transport beam as they had, they’d convinced Sark and the MCP that they’d been destroyed or met their end in a crash.

But that hope vanished an instant later; the Carrier came full speed out of a side canyon just as the Sailer crossed its course.

“Sark!” Tron shouted, even as Yori dove for the controls in a useless effort to avert collision. Flynn wondered wildly what he could possibly do now. The Solar Sailer mounted no weapons, and there was no time or room to maneuver away from the Carrier. Before they could react, the gigantic warship rammed them.

A projecting edge of the Carrier’s bow structure sliced into the Sailer as if into a toy. The catwalk was sheared in two, and the great metallic sails collapsed and tore, their masts broken like matchsticks. Her hull moaned and shrieked as if in torment; pieces of the Sailer flew loose to fall, spinning madly.

Yori turned and called Tron’s name as Tron, halfway along the catwalk, off to try some last tactic, vanished overboard, knocked from the craft by the collision. They heard his brief cry, “Flynn!” fading as he fell. Yori and Flynn were thrown against one another and flung to the deck.

Flynn could do nothing but hold Yori and try to keep her from falling too. Given time, he might have been able to summon up his strange abilities, but there was none. He clutched frantically at some wreckage, clinging to Yori, unable to do anything else. The gaping maw of an open hold or hangar in the Carrier’s bow raced toward them.

Half of the Sailer’s forebody dropped away. The remainder of it, a last island of flotsam bearing Flynn and Yori, was swallowed up by the Carrier a moment later.