Meantime, Yori considered what Flynn had just said, asking herself, thank who?
Sark’s Carrier cruised the System’s skies, hunting. The Command Program stood alone in thought, gazing out the broad pane of the bridge’s observation window. He knew that the key to the Solar Sailer lay in her need to use the network of transmission beams that divided those skies, but the beams constituted a tremendously complicated webwork covering much of the System. And Tron hadn’t been foolish enough to head directly for the Central Computer Area; the User Champion might be coming by any of a great number of possible routes. The Carrier must bear the major part of the responsibility for search and apprehension; Recos were too slow and short-range to be of much use. But: that Tron would come, Sark was positive.
And there was another possibility for intercepting the fugitives soon; Master Control was giving the transmission-beam network its attention, attempting to get a fix on the Sailer and interfere with her operation if possible. Sark repressed his impatience, his desire to come to a reckoning with Tron. He berated himself for not having had the User Champion brought before him on the Game Grid long ago, and slain him. But he’d always found Tron to be a curiosity, and so had increased the odds gradually, to find out precisely where the breaking point would come.
Except that instead of breaking down, Tron had broken out.
Sark’s lieutenant spoke from behind him, quiet and diffident. “Sir, what do you want done with the Tower Guardian, Dumont? Put him in with the others?”
“No, bit-brain,” the Command Program growled. He whirled on his subordinate with a brittle smile. “Prepare him for inquisition. I need a little relaxation.” The idea soothed him; punishing Dumont would be a pleasant diversion until he had Tron in hand. “But first, rez up the Carrier for pursuit.”
He considered his humbled lieutenant. The program might be loyal, but then again, it wouldn’t do to have his servants taking the initiative. Sark’s own status with the Master Control Program was too fragile right then to allow for possible rivals. “And one more thing,” he finished balefully. “Don’t think anymore. I do the thinking around here.”
The fear and foreboding in the lieutenant’s face reassured him. Quailed, the officer scurried off to do the Command Program’s bidding. Sark returned to his contemplations in a more positive frame of mind.
Flynn studied the Sailer with great interest, reveling in her. He recognized her, now that he’d had the leisure to, as a simulation for a videogame, one drawn from NASA concepts but operating, here in the System, on different principles from a true Solar Sailer’s. At any rate, Flynn was inclined to wager that it wasn’t photons pushing her along.
The transmission beam entered the wide muzzle of the receiver in the afterbody far astern, to emerge from the ship’s bow projector. In between, as far as Flynn could make out, it filled the gleaming metallic sails and drove the vessel at amazing speed, all in some invisible manner. The details of her construction were as fascinating as the Solar Sailer’s motive power. What, for example, was he to make of the free-floating steps between catwalk and bridge, which stayed conscientiously in place, hanging in the air, without benefit of support or bracing? Only that they’re not the weirdest things I’ve seen, he concluded, which he couldn’t have said until recently.
He turned to Tron, who sat next to Yori as she piloted, his arm around her shoulders. He still looked strangely at Flynn, uncertain what to think or say about some of the things he’d heard, or even what questions to ask. “What about our friend Sark?” Flynn asked.
Tron ruminated on that. “Probably decided not to pursue us,” he concluded. The Carrier could never overtake the Sailer; Sark’s probable move, if he was still extant, would be to mount guard over the Central Computer Area. And Sark had failed the Master Control Program, not once but several times; it might have lost patience with him. “Programs have a way of just… disappearing, here.”
“Not us, I hope,” Flynn offered, seriocomedic.
Tron shook his head and held up his disk. “Not with this.” It was shining in his hand as if impatient to perform its office. Tron looked to his mate and pilot. “I’m going to check on the beam connection, Yori. You two can keep a watch out for grid bugs.”
Tron paced forward along the slender catwalk that still seemed awfully insubstantial to Flynn, though he knew it to be amazingly sturdy. He gazed after Tron, asking himself what in the world a grid bug was, and hoping that the beam connection—to which he’d given no thought whatsoever until this moment—was healthy and sound. He sure didn’t want to see the Solar Sailer jump her fails, or whatever the term might be.
He looked to Yori. “You know the territory?”
She nodded. “A little.”
Flynn, scanning the terrain below, pointed to a region that was unlit, apparently blighted, its features all two-dimensional and meaningless. He pointed to it. “What’s wrong with that area?”
She rose up a little in the pilot’s seat, saw, and replied with sadness: “The MCP blasted it. There are very few Domains left with any power at all.”
He searched in all directions over the Game Sea, the expanse of liquid coming beneath the Sailer. With the exception of the blasted area, the Sea now stretched in all directions, phosphorescent, before them. It was lustrous, with breaking swells of multiple colors, horsetails of light, spray that resembled myriad stars. A strange, beautiful, mysterious place; he recalled the flatlands, the Factory Domain, the System as he’d seen it from high overhead on his descent, the stupendous megastructure of the Training Complex. The Electronic World was grotesque and menacing at times, but he couldn’t deny that it was beautiful, enthralling at others.
No man had ever seen a more bizarre place, or had a more fantastic adventure. But if all went well, if the light was green at the Central Computer Area and Tron’s disk worked out, Flynn supposed he’d be redigitized right away. With a million questions unanswered and the bulk of this cosmos unvisited, he would go home. It surprised him how much he regretted that part of it.
“They say there are creatures out on this sea,” Yori was telling him. “Huge grid-eaters, and data pirates.”
“Terrific,” Flynn opined wryly; maybe going directly home wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “Can’t wait to meet them.”
Yori had returned to her piloting. “Well, in any case, this beam can outpace anything on the Sea, including Sark’s Carrier.”
Thinking about interception courses rather than an aerial drag race, Flynn refrained from comment. The Game Sea, opalescent currents pulling colors this way and that through it, slid by underneath.
Tron stood on the very edge of the Sailer’s forebody, straddling the bow and the beam-emission device itself, the vomiting of power. He held his disk before him, looking down at it, summoning to mind the words of Alan-One, trying to fathom the secrets of its modifications.
The transmission beam issued from the Solar Sailer, beyond the limits of Tron’s vision. At varying distances and angles, other beams intersected it or ran by it in skew fashion, an exotic web of power and speed. Satisfied that the vessel’s beam connection was secure, he drew back, putting all his concentration into the cast. He released, and the disk skimmed out from the ship, up and up, until it was nearly lost to sight.
The disk spun and flew, strobing its power, guided by his throw and will, rising. Tron followed the cast, studied it, evaluated every aspect of it. He hoped that it would serve the purpose for which Alan-One had refurbished it, and that his throw, when the time came, would be fast and accurate. All that Flynn had said, all this talk of Users, Tron knew, he must set aside. He could afford to harbor no doubts, no ambivalence, when time came to use the disk. There must be only Warrior, weapon, and target.