Chapter 32
"Go! Go!" Artemis shouted to the other tributes. "The disk will prevent the Gamemakers from sending anything to keep us in here, but I'm not sure how long until they figure out how to bypass it!"
They all jumped onto the plates, which had not long ago lifted them up into this very arena. Marius, the largest, strongest, and surprisingly gentlest of the eight able-bodied tributes, carried the wounded and subconscious Iris bridal-style. Everyone else had their weapons in hand, which had been Julius's idea. "They might be expecting us," he had pointed out. "We'll show them that we're not about to go down without a fight."
"But only fight if they attack first," Artemis had replied. "I didn't go through all of this trouble just to have you guys get killed by the rebels instead."
Artemis checked one last time that everyone was on a plate. Petronius, check. Cornelius, check. Julius, check. Cynthia, check. A very guilty-looking Lucius who had just gotten another quick but effective verbal beatdown from Cynthia, check. Marius and Iris, check. And Caius… He met her eyes as she glanced his way, nodded once when their gazes locked, and said, "Check."
Artemis forced a smile, and then looked down at her control disk. She couldn't keep her anxious voice from wobbling a bit as she said, "Control disk, activate. Code: liber. Confirm." The screen lit up, and she continued: "Voice command: launch plate escape sequence three-point-oh, confirm."
Two counted seconds passed, then the plates under their feet abruptly started to descend. All of the tributes, save Artemis whose control disk illuminated the space, were soon immersed in blackness as they were carried down, down, down. And Artemis herself was occupied with her control disk as she carefully manipulated each icon on the glowing screen. Such a command as the one she was about to commence with was too complicated to use in the basic voice control, so she had to do it manually, and before her plate reached the Launch Room.
Now! She tapped the confirm icon just as her plate stopped its descent, and the door slid open to reveal several dozen armed rebel guards, none of whom looked very happy. Their guns were locked on her as she calmly stepped out of the tube, and one of them barked, "Put down the control disk and hold your hands over your head."
Artemis did so. But after she had placed it on the ground, and when she looked up, all of the guards saw the smile on her face. It was the smile of a wolf, and anyone who had met her before would know that something was very not right about the picture.
At that moment, the world above exploded.
It shook every Launch Room below with the force of a good-sized earthquake, but nothing was damaged. Except for the arena, that is. Because at that moment, everything, and by everything I mean everything, that was controlled by the holoboards of the Control Room in the Capitol, immediately exploded. All the cameras, all the land mines, all the hidden traps, all the force fields, all electronic items that were connected to the Control Room simultaneously exploded, therefore destroying the entire arena.
"And that," said Artemis Gossamer as she stood up straight and brushed off her clothes, "is what I was doing in the Control Room the night before the Games began."
The Control Room, the Capitol
To them, it seemed as if everything inexplicably shut down. All of the holoboards, all of the screens, all of the tablets. Everything. Beetee was on it immediately, with a virus scanner in one hand and a scrambler in the other. And within a minute, he came up with the diagnosis: "Virus. A bad one."
"That's it?" bellowed Plutarch Heavensbee. "Just a virus?"
"Not just a virus," replied Beetee. "A bad virus."
"I can see that, Captain Obvious," said the Head Gamemaker through gritted teeth. "What happened with that aforementioned bad virus?"
"It seems," said Beetee, pushing his glasses up his nose, "that the virus is manipulated by an outside source. 'Bad' is an understatement, actually –– this is a very high level virus. It is connected to, like I said before, an outside source, and I think we all know what source that is."
"Artemis's control disk. Which you gave back to her."
"Precisely, and that word applies to both fragmented sentences."
If Plutarch hadn't been preoccupied, he would have interrogated Beetee as to how, why, when, et cetera he gave Artemis back her disk. But he didn't. "So how is it connected?"
"I have determined that this is what she was doing in the Control Room the night that the disk was taken from her –– " here he pushed up his glasses again " –– the soldiers who found her said that she had only the disk on her personage, but not long ago I found a small chip connected to an inlet inside system 9. It had no apparent purpose, so I extracted it. I believe it was the device on which the virus was carried, and so connected to both the control disk and the holoboards in such a way that it would jump to each piece of technology controlled by us, at the same time allowing Artemis to do what she wished with that virus."
"And what does that virus do?"
Beetee gestured to the wall of black screens. "Apparently, it makes things explode."
Ex-PLOOOOS-ions! HAHAHA!
...what...?