Catalyst

Hi, Ivan. I guess you’ll have noticed by now that you have absolutely no control over your space suit and you’re drifting aimlessly. I wanted to give you a decision. Just like the decisions you gave me. You could go and face trial, or you could decide not to go to trial

“I help Tom on all his vengeance crusades.”

“Eat,” Vengerov said. “I know you’re famished. It’s been quite a while.”
“I’m not giving up my mind for a piece of pizza.”

“We’ve instructed the media to keep it quiet. The last thing we need is another batch of domestic terrorists inspired to act. A caterer laced all the champagne glasses at a lobbying event with ricin. There are fifty people—two US senators among them—dying in Washington ICUs as we speak. A lone-wolf terrorist smeared a culture of bacterial meningitis on the buttons of the members-only elevators in the congressional office buildings. This ghost in the machine threatens to destabilize the power structure of this society—”
“So what?” Tom cut in.
“Excuse me?”
“You still haven’t given me one reason I should give a damn. Yeah, it sucks that people are dying, but these aren’t innocent little lambs. The power structure of a society is supposed to serve the people who live in it, but these people own our parks and our roads and our schools, and what does someone like my dad get? He gets jailed for speaking up against them in public and threatened with indefinite detention whenever someone like you decides he’s getting inconvenient. Am I supposed to be sorry some scumbag executives are getting some vigilante justice? Maybe if I stab myself in the gut, I can force out a tear or two. Maybe.

It was Tom’s turn. He felt blood rush up into his cheeks because he’d never been comfortable with this stuff. “Me, too, you guys. I mean, I, uh, you know.” Their eyes seemed to be boring into him. “You’re my family, okay?” Then he started laughing. He couldn’t help it. “We’re going to cringe over this later if we survive.”

“I don’t believe in an afterlife,” Yuri said suddenly, gazing pensively toward the window. “I believe this is all we have. These minutes, right here.”

Do something other than fixate on the white whale of yours.

Even though Tom wasn’t in the same room as the enemy cadets, and they were physically across the world from one another, mentally even farther apart—there was a slow, cold realization that seemed to come over everyone of something very ominous happening right here. They were all human beings in the end, living on one planet together—and right now a massive asteroid was missing perilously close to their common doorstep

“Just because you’d use stealth mode to see naked people, doesn’t mean other people would,” Wyatt informed him.
“I would,” Tom said, mouth full.
Wyatt scowled. “Just because you and Tom would use it for that, doesn’t mean other people would.”

Ah, and did this member of No Such Agency actually read the law?