Chapter 14: The Countdown
Zigfried von Schroeder eyed his dear sister, trying to decide if he should allow her to continue hugging a boy he wasn't entirely convinced didn't have the plague. Though he still carried the deep ache of her betrayal, he would never wish to see Krisalyn pale and spasming as the blond boy, Joey, had been.
Seto Kaiba watched Joey as well, though Zigfried could not guess his thoughts. Perhaps he wished doom had befallen the boy. He seemed to wish doom upon everyone.
"Are your servers here on the ship?" Kaiba asked.
Zigfried answered automatically. "Ja, natürlich." Yes, of course. "A remote connection would be unreliable."
He could never speak clearly in a foreign language without sprinkling in his native tongue. His father said a businessman should be fluent and charming in all languages, most particularly English, Mandarin, and Japanese—because SchroederCorp did its most profitable business in those countries. Zigfried took the lessons, swallowed linguistic poisons and did his best to regurgitate them, but he remained convinced no fluent or charming words existed beyond his native tongue, and leaving German was like a breakup his heart would not accept.
Krisalyn pulled back from Joey at last, allowing Zigfried a little breath of relief.
Kaiba made a tch sound, turning away. When he started pressing keys at the control panel, Zigfried snapped to his senses.
"Bist du verrückt?" he demanded. Are you insane? "Everyone is now well—I sink—and zere are missiles approaching—"
"I'm aware of the missiles." Kaiba pointed at a corner of the largest screen just as a green clock appeared, counting down from ten minutes. "My jet has the fastest escape speed. The rest of you load up and get out of shrapnel range."
"Missiles what now?" said Joey, his voice shrill.
Zigfried left Krisalyn to explain it. He moved to stand beside Kaiba at the control panel, and even though all his plans had gone dreadfully awry, his fingers still itched to pull his enemy away from interacting with his virtual system. To what end? It would be destroyed in mere minutes. The clock was counting down.
In the end, all of Zigfried's creations went up in smoke at the hands of a Kaiba. The first time had caught him off guard, but he had walked himself into this.
It didn't sting any less.
"I am sorry," he said, because it needed to be said, because it itched inside him and came crawling out. He cleared his throat, turning away and glad of his long hair to hide his burning ears. "I did not mean zis danger to you or to your brozer. I meant only to expose ze truse."
"How noble," Kaiba drawled.
Because Zigfried deserved that, and because of impending missiles, he bit his tongue.
Kaiba's bodyguard returned, greeted by the reckless girl, Yori, and by Joey, who simply shouted, "Sunglasses!"
Kaiba turned for a brief moment. He and his bodyguard spoke volumes in silence, concluded by the guard saying, with thick emotion, "I lost him, Seto."
"So did I." Kaiba curled his fists, then returned to the keys.
Because no one else seemed to remember sanity, Zigfried stood tall and announced the need to leave at once, adding, "Unless you all wish to die krepieren." An ugly death.
The bodyguard asked about seats in his helicopter and informed him the little Kaiba brother had stolen theirs. At the moment, Zigfried thought Mokuba to be the smartest of their gathered lot for hightailing it out of the madness.
"I will take everyone!" he said. "Six seats, ja, just let us be gone."
Nine minutes and counting.
Even though Zigfried clung to sanity, even though no technology was worth his life or that of his sister, he could not help keeping an eye on the screens as Kaiba worked. The surly enemy had not announced his intention, but Zigfried saw it begin to unfold in lines of code across the screen.
First, he isolated functions, separating a player from the system. Noah Kaiba. Most of Zigfried's interactions had been with the mind of Gozaburo, not his son, and the few interactions with Noah had left him uneasy. In the programming, Noah appeared more like a bug than an intended feature. In virtual representation, he was no better. Zigfried had assumed some misfortune had befallen the boy during the process of uploading his mind—it was not an exact science, after all, digitizing a human being. He'd assumed Gozaburo kept his son because he could not bear to lose his flesh and blood, no matter how damaged. He realized now that he'd ascribed too much sentiment to the most terrifying mind he'd ever met.
"What are you doing to him?" Zigfried asked. The question emerged with hesitation, a touch of fear for a broken boy's sake.
Kaiba gave it no answer. After another moment of quick keystrokes, he'd revealed strings of hidden code, and Zigfried leaned in with wide eyes, struggling to read and comprehend as quickly as Kaiba apparently did.
There was code specific to Noah Kaiba, code restricting his functions, wrapped tightly like chains.
The boy was never a bug. He was a prisoner.
And while Zigfried's mind was still stumbling, processing the implications, Kaiba had already broken the chains.
A heavy realization settled across Zigfried, wilting his soul like a rose cut from its stem. Softly, he said, "You never stole my technology, did you? You were simply better zan I was."
Kaiba gave him one glance. It said nothing, but Zigfried already understood.
In the months he'd spent developing and testing his virtual system, he'd never realized what was wrong with Noah. After a single interaction, Kaiba not only understood, but he resolved the problem. Had Zigfried been locked inside the system and Kaiba stood at the controls, it seemed clear that he could have opened an exit, no matter what machinations Gozaburo employed. He was a programmer beyond what Zigfried imagined possible.
The turn of KaibaCorp from weapons to gaming, with unparalleled success in both areas, should have been impossible; it was what made the news so sensational, enchanted the investors and critics alike. Most people could not achieve the impossible without cheating, so Zigfried had assumed . . .
He had imagined himself in Kaiba's position and known he could not have achieved such success without going over someone's ear. Therefore, Kaiba must have cheated. Must have spied.
In return, Zigfried had cheated. Zigfried had spied.
Imagining the monster, he'd become one.
"Es tut mir Leid," he said. It brings me pain. The same words his own sister had spoken to him when she'd arrived. Kris had realized his wrong far before he had. "I am sorry, Kaiba. Deeply sorry. I was ze monster, not you."
Now, he had to pay the consequences.
Eight minutes and counting.
Zigfried moved from the control panel, leaving Kaiba to do whatever he saw fit with the virtual system.
"Quickly now," he said. "Everyone to ze helicopter."
Seto liked having something for his hands to do. Emotions—what was he supposed to do with those? His grief couldn't fix anything. His fear could only paralyze. His regret made it hard to breathe.
But his hands, they could accomplish things. As long as he didn't get stuck in his emotions, he could save Noah.
He could save Mokuba.
Distantly, he heard Roland's protest about staying, about two seats in the jet. Seto didn't have time to waste arguing, so he just snapped, "Go!"
His grief wanted to talk to a father figure who actually cared, to hear the possible comfort and encouragement Roland might give. His guilt wanted the man ten feet out the door already, where he couldn't see Seto's shoulders bowed under the weight of failure. His mind wanted his infernal emotions to stop cluttering his reasoning.
And his hands flew across the keys.
"I'll stay," Yori said. "I've got this."
Presumably, she meant her bracelet, and after its near-resurrection of Joey Wheeler, no one seemed inclined to argue with the item, not even Roland.
Silence at last. Seto noted it in the same distant way he'd noted the conversation.
Noah knew how to create a chat window. Presumably, he'd conversed with Zigfried a few times. In the bottom-left of the closest screen, a few words appeared, bright green and sickly.
Thank you, Seto. You have to run.
Seto didn't respond. That was an emotion box, and he was not engaging emotions at the moment. Not until Mokuba was safe again. He engaged only action boxes, his eyes skimming across lines of code, his fingers constantly in motion.
It was not enough to free Noah from Gozaburo's crippling code. Now he needed to ensure the boy would survive, which meant transferring him and the memory system to KaibaCorp servers. The trouble with that was exactly as Zigfried had highlighted earlier—remote connections and their inferiority. Even though Seto linked to his servers as fast as humanly possible, even though he broke the virtual system into smaller pieces he could store separately and reassemble later, even though he used every bit of his skill to speed the process, skill alone could only carry him so far. At the end of his commands, he was limited by hardware, by geographic distance, by factors outside his control. Things his hands couldn't fix.
Five minutes remaining on the missile clock. It sat as a threat in the corner of his vision.
Run, Seto, said Noah. I'm already dead. You're not.
He had no idea. It wasn't just about literal reincarnation; a life without Mokuba was the only true death Seto could imagine.
So his hands continued to work.
Seto abandoned peripheral functions of the system. He'd seen it, experienced how it functioned. He could rebuild it. He just needed enough to sustain Noah.
Unwisely, his mind divided itself. Part of it was remembering every ballistic missile Gozaburo had developed, taking the statistics of the deadliest ones, calculating the minimum safety distance and how quickly his jet could clear the ship.
At the same time, he found himself calculating how far Gozaburo could fly in one hour, two hours. How far he could run in Mokuba's body and where he might hide.
That way lay emotion.
Besides, there was only one place Gozaburo would go. KaibaCorp.
The uploads were all underway. Seto had stripped the system to its bare bones, just enough to function, to preserve Noah's mind. His fingers rested on the keyboard, twitching, with nothing left to do. Progress bars looked out at him from every screen, creeping at what seemed to be microscopic speeds. He watched percentages counting upward and a clock counting downward.
His last words to his brother had been telling him to let go. His last action had been rejecting a hug, rejecting Mokuba's I love you, even though his brother's love was the best thing that had happened to him in any lifetime.
Given two chances at life, he managed to be called a prodigy in both, to amaze everyone with his prowess and success. Just minutes earlier, Zigfried had stood beside him, talking about Seto's skill with jealousy shining in his eyes.
But Zigfried kept his sister safe. Zigfried spoke apologies with ease and sincerity.
Given two chances at life, Seto managed to succeed in everything except what mattered most. In the past, he'd failed Kisara. In the present, he'd failed Mokuba.
The progress bar that represented Noah's life ticked slowly upward. 83 percent. 84. 85.
The missile clock dropped to three minutes remaining.
"I don't mean to rush you," Yori said from behind him, "but you stopped moving. Also, it would take me longer to sing a pop song than it'll take for those missiles to hit."
Blasé wording, her specialty, but he could hear the fear in her voice.
There was nothing else he could do. Seto took a step backward, but his eyes lingered on the progress bar. He imagined something interrupting the connection, imagined it failing at 99 percent and ending an entire life over a single digit because he hadn't stayed to reset the interruption.
Mokuba wouldn't leave Noah's life to chance.
"Go," he said without turning. "The canopy's up, and there's a boarding ladder. Strap into the back seat. Give me thirty seconds."
89 percent.
90.
"If you aren't right behind me, Seto, so help me, I'll . . ."
She left the threat hanging, perhaps because she couldn't think of anything to fill the blank.
Or perhaps because there was no comfortable way to tease about murder when they both knew she'd already held a knife.
Seto's chest ached with the memory of his first death. That way lay more emotion. He flexed his hands.
"Thirty seconds," he said.
He heard her footsteps clatter up the stairs, and he was grateful for her decisiveness—the kind of decisiveness that plunges a dagger in someone's heart—when she might have hesitated. Hesitation wasted seconds, and every second mattered now. Seto's mind was using the seconds to calculate how many steps to the jet, how fast he could run, how much time remained in the upload. His eyes were using the seconds to watch a progress bar that seemed to be the most cautious of duelists, taking forever to decide a card, even longer to play it in slot.
94 percent.
95.
96.
There were monsters in Domino. Strange, how he hadn't remembered that until now, how he hadn't factored that in. If KaibaCorp headquarters came under attack, it would put the servers at risk. What if, after all this effort, a factor outside his control destroyed it all? He needed Noah to navigate and understand the system in a way Seto couldn't. He needed the system to pull Gozaburo's mind back out of Mokuba's body.
97 percent.
98.
99.
Seto's thirty seconds were up, but as he poised to run, the progress stalled. Just as he'd imagined, just as he'd feared. A single digit held a life ransom. Two lives, three lives, four lives—the entire Kaiba family, one patriarchal tyrant and his three imprisoned sons, all captured in the space between 99 and 100.
Seto lowered his hands to the controls, but the system hadn't hit an error. It was just a network delay. Outside his control. Nothing he could do.
Two minutes to missile impact.
He couldn't leave.
"If there are any gods out there," he whispered harshly, "do your job."
Seth would have been pious; Seto never would have offered the supplication at all. The dichotomy of his soul left him with irreverent hope given voice.
The green bar held frozen. Life on the edge of a cliff. Eternity in a fraction.
Until it tipped.
100 percent. Upload complete.
Seto bolted. He took the stairs three at a time, flying down the hallway in long strides, bursting through a doorway and onto the flat deck of the ship. Dusk had fallen, casting both sky and ocean in blue depths only lightened along the orange-tinged horizon. The stars flared brightly above, a dusting of white paint on the canvas. Somewhere among those stars, the first missile was falling. If Seto saw it, it would be too late.
Yori had strapped herself into the white jet, as promised, and she didn't bother with a quip upon seeing him. She just waved frantically for Seto to hurry, as if he wasn't already.
He dashed up the first steps of the ladder, heaved himself onto the edge of the cockpit, and kicked the ladder away. It toppled to the deck, out of the way of the wheels. He dropped into the pilot's seat and began engaging systems. The battery flipped to life. The canopy slid closed. The auxiliary power unit stirred into a high-pitched whine.
"Go faster!" Yori shouted.
"You want to fly it?" Seto shot back, pulling his throttles from detent. The temperature needles rotated leisurely, spiking the heat in his blood pressure faster than the heat in the engines. Then he heard the click of the ignitors.
The jet roared to life, an embodiment of the dragon he'd modeled it after.
Seto's mind offered him very unhelpful statistics about the number of aviation accidents that occurred during takeoff, about the humanity of a pilot and the effects of stress on a body. Luckily, given something to do once more, his hands never wavered. He pointed the nose of the jet straight down the carrier deck, engaged the thrusters, and guided the stabilizers. The jet shot forward; the force pressed him into his seat.
His stomach dropped when the wheels left the deck. As the jet climbed, the horizon line tilted in his view, diagonal in the sky, dividing deep blue water from star-dusted sky.
And from behind, he heard the missile impact. Like a crack of thunder right at his back, shaking his spine. Adjusting the jet's wing flaps, he rode the shockwave until it dissipated, and then it was just the rushing force of wind against the canopy, the deafening roar of the engines.
It was several more minutes before Seto finally relaxed. One-handed, he settled his headset across his ears, leaving them ringing in the sudden silence. He checked his navigation systems—relieved to see they'd reset after Zigfried's interference—and then he pointed them toward Domino City.
And all the monsters that awaited.
Note: My publisher just approved my next book, so I'm going to take a month hiatus to write the first draft of that, but I wanted to be sure we finished out this arc of CHp3 first. When I come back, we'll get the next arc of everyone back on the blimp-trust me, there's lot of exciting things to look forward to with Yuugi and Ryou, Anzu and Marik, and everyone else. Stay tuned, and thank you for your patience!