Flynn watched the logic probe being brought down the corridor, an oblong, featureless package of disruptive power. It floated, suspended on an invisible supportive field of some type, passing the columns of troops, responding to the commands of some control mechanism or operator Flynn couldn’t see. It stopped before the door to the Inner Chamber, and he noticed that even Sark was careful to keep well clear of it.
The logic probe fired multicolored lightning. The backwash of it lit the corridor, making Flynn and the others shrink back and shield their eyes. The door shook and, in moments, began to de-rezz. Sark watched the procedure with an ardent, poisonous smile.
Tron gazed upward, waiting all his hopes pinned to the Communication Beam. All at once a voice filled the room, enormous, distorted, echoing like rolling thunder, familiar and yet alien.
TRON. TRON. LOCATION QUERY. LOCATION QUERY. CONFIRM.
He raised his voice to answer. “Confirmed, Alan-One,” he called into the sky, to his unseen User, whose voice sounded so much like his own and yet so unlike it.
THERE YOU ARE! LOOK, BEFORE WE GET CUT OFF AGAIN, I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU SOME NEW CODING SO YOU CAN GAIN ACCESS TO THE MEMORY CORE OF THE MASTER CONTROL.
Tron knew a surge of exultation. At his User’s instruction, images came into existence before him. A globe appeared, bound by grid lines that were wires of light, tiny sparks flashing at their intersections, a brighter sheen coming from its center.
WHEN YOU GET THERE, SEARCH ALL PASSWORD CODE SERIES—
The voice began to fade, obscured by static. “Wait!” Tron pleaded. “I can’t hear!” But the voice of Alan-One was gone. His hopes dashed, Tron stood numbly in the wash of the Beam.
Yori and Dumont watched as the great door de-rezzed before the irresistible onslaught of the logic probe.
“They’ll be inside soon,” she said, turning to Dumont, not knowing how she could apologize for the disaster. But she forgot that when she saw Tron standing in the doorway to the Communication Chamber. His stance was confident and erect; the purpose in him was plain. She knew at once that he hadn’t failed; Yori said softly, “Oh, thank the Users!”
Dumont rotated his pod to follow her gaze, and saw Tron. “The time for delaying is over,” the Guardian proclaimed. He was happy; he was as they had known him. Tron moved to his side with that strange, confident look, touching Dumont’s pod, unable to show his affection in the time they had.
“Farewell, Tron!” Dumont bade. “The Users are waiting; the New Order is about to begin!” It was curious, Yori thought, to hear the Guardian so buoyant after all this time.
Tron couldn’t delay long enough to tell the Guardian what had happened, and the certainty that Sark would interrogate Dumont made the telling too dangerous. So Tron said nothing and made only the gesture, to fortify Dumont against what was to come. Then he took Yori’s hand, leading her down the stairs. Dumont watched, speculating on what it had been that he had seen on Tron’s face. When they got to a small side door to the Inner Chamber, Dumont gave the command that opened it just long enough for them to slip through. Then Dumont was left alone, for the moment, to watch the larger door de-rezz and contemplate Tron and Yori, and to think of his own long life.
With a last burst of energy, the door dissipated in a swarm of millions of dots of light. Sark stepped through the breach, marching forward with files of Red Warriors and Memory Guards at his back, his face a tightly controlled fury. The Command Program was, the Guardian saw, at his most ruthless and dangerous.
“
“What program?” Dumont responded, pretending bewildered innocence. “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”
Any additional time he could purchase for Yori and Tron would be critical, Dumont knew; even the few seconds Sark might devote to remonstrating with him. But Sark only glared at the Guardian for a moment, fury undisguised. Seeing it, Dumont trembled within his pod.
“Take him,” Sark commanded in an even tone that was more frightening than a bellow. The lieutenant and Memory Guards moved forward.
They wended their way back to the Factory Complex, to the design and fabrication center where Yori had worked, attracting no notice from the apathetic programs they passed in the streets. Their first need would be transportation to get them to the MCP as quickly as possible, and Sark and the MCP controlled all conventional means of travel. But Yori had come up with a daring alternative.
And so they sprinted through Hangar 19. Above them, suspended in her berthing field, completed, was the Solar Sailer. She was an astoundingly beautiful vessel, speaking of freedom and speed even though stationary. Her forebody was shaped like an artillery shell, with an aperture for the ejection of the Transmission Beam that drove her, situated in her prow. From the waist of the forebody radiated eight sparlike masts securing the great sails that fanned out to either side like immense metallic wings. Three long, thin antennae were set around her bow aperture to maintain beam connection and emission.
A single slender catwalk ran aft, the forebody’s only connection to the midships. Midships was the bridge, a sort of rounded, bi-level quarterdeck. The Sailer’s afterbody, a bulky, heavily shielded segment, served two functions, mounting the reception aperture through which the transmission beam entered the craft, and securing the vessel’s rigging. Four long lines connected it to the deployed sails, its only connection to the rest of the ship. The Sailer suggested a dragonfly, delicate in appearance, perhaps 250 feet in length, afterbody included.
“This videogame ship—it’s very fast,” Yori told him. Tron considered the risks against the advantages. Riding transmission beams through the skies of the System would mean being sighted and pursued, and make them vulnerable to ground weapons as well, but they could take a roundabout course to minimize those dangers, and the craft’s speed would help. More, she was the quickest means of getting to the MCP. That decided him.
They went to the lift-platform. It levitated them into the air, carrying them upward and passing into the center of the midships bridge, becoming part of the vessel’s deck as it came to rest. They ran to the control console of the rounded bridge, and Yori bent over it worriedly, calling to mind all that she knew from her work in the Factory Domain, and finding it odd to draw on those torpid labor shifts.
Checking a map of the System, she examined the various transmission beams that crisscrossed its skies, the transfer points and origin fixes.
“It can take us across the Game Sea,” she concluded, “out of this Domain, back to the Central Computer.” Tron judged that that would be all he would need. Once in the Central Computer, he would follow Alan-One’s instructions and use his disk.
The reverberations of footsteps on the catwalk brought him around in alarm. A guard was charging at them.
Tron pulled Yori back out of the way just as the guard leaped up the free-standing steps to the bridge. He kicked the guard squarely in the middle; the program fell back just as a dozen more swarmed up onto the Sailer.
Tron moved forward a little to confront them, waiting, disk held ready, knowing that every cast had to count. He crouched, threw. The weapon sliced air and smashed into the massed guards, halting their advance and downing two of their number, whose auras gave way to that of the disk. Then the whirling plate of light was back in his hand again. Tron saw, from the corner of his eye, more guards running across the hangar floor toward the
