Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (23 page)

“Both conclusions accepted,” said
Trina softly.

“Five: Trust me on this; the
artifact is a ship so big that it has its own self-contained bio-system.”

“So?”

“This, and what we know about the
slow acceleration to light speed, implies that any voyage it takes will last a
long time—years.”

“Okay.”

He closed his eyes. “Six—we can’t
even tell the UN this yet—the field membranes around the artifact appear to be
one-way.”

“Once she gets in, she’s not coming
out for years,” Trina deduced.

“Seven: this fact won’t dissuade
her from going. Therefore . . .” he said dramatically.

Trina put her face in her hands. “
Scheiße
.
We need to train the high-risk pregnancy specialist to go with her on the trip.”

“Give the lady a Mountain Dew.
They’re in the fridge by your feet. However, it’s bigger than that. We need to
change the whole boy-girl balance of the team or they’ll kill each other before
they return. Since Red doesn’t get along well with other women, I have to make
sure the men on her team are willing to override her. The matchmaking was the
hard
part. I don’t know if anyone is going to bite.”

Voice muffled by her hands, the
billionaire’s wife said, “You’ve got to be exhausted, trying to stay one step
ahead of her. I just handled her for half a semester and I could sleep for a
week. This is worse than Jez.”

“I have a plan, but it’s evil. I’ll
need you to pretend you don’t know about it.”

“Does this have to do with your
visit to that uberskank Mori?”

He nodded. “All I had to do was
mention Red has a roadmap to build a superior team. By the end of the year,
Kaguya will have the list and be recruiting from it.”

Trina barks a laugh. “Mira will
turn purple and tunnel through the floor, just like Rumpelstiltskin.”

“It took all my nerve to stand in
front of her mother and casually mention the list. I was afraid the woman was
going to tear off my head and eat me right there like a mantis. I also felt bad
about using Kaguya like this. She really did help us out.”

“That’s all you feel bad about,
Machiavelli?”

“I didn’t betray our team; I can’t disclose
a single name or their recruiting plans, because the team won’t tell me—it’s
too secret to share with the adults. I needed a way Red would listen to me.”

“When Kaguya destroys her plan,
Mira will come to you, begging for help. Meanwhile, Mori will owe you, too,”
Trina said with admiration. “I’ll help on one condition: we reimburse you for
the French girl’s tuition.”

He handed her a banker’s business
card with a number at the bottom. “Only if you do it through my new Swiss
savings account; otherwise, Red will connect the dots and pressure you to talk.”

“She tracks your paychecks?”

“Someone does. It’s all passive,
but any activity through corporate generates traffic.”

She nodded. “How did you plan all
this?”

“I had a lot of free time on my
hands. I had to plot something to stay busy. My biggest worry is that the two ladies
have a physical confrontation, or worse, talk to each other like adults. In
that case, my goose is
foie gras
.”

“No worries about the mature part.
I’ll prevent her from ever getting close to Kaguya.”

“How?”

“We’re about to sign off on Mori
getting the page she’s been wanting for years—Empathy.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“The UN doesn’t count Collective
Unconscious, so with Simplification, she’d only have two talents.”

“I meant her with Empathy. Men are
already putty in her hands.”

“Her father can’t be put off
forever. That was his condition when he donated our datacenter.”

“Why will that keep the two apart?”

“Because Empaths with Collective
Unconscious can differentiate auras at close range and tell what someone’s
talents are. Red would lose her secret identity, so she’ll steer clear to avoid
the risk.”

“Damn, I thought I was evil.”

“I’m a mother, it’s my job.”
Hugging him, she said, “Welcome home. Don’t stay up too late.”

As she walked away, his face grew
serious. “Trina, could you do me a personal favor?”

“Yes, Z?”

“Don’t meet with me alone ever
again. I can’t stand to hear people talk about you like they do. It’s not
right, and I don’t like to be angry.”

“Of course, dear.”

Zeiss waded through data on every transmission made from the
island since it had been built, trying to find the spies, but he had no luck.

Sojiro was granted access to the
Mind-Machine Interface page early, just so he could help. The first three days
after reading the page, the artist slept in deep theta state. The supper club,
Trina, and Daniel took turns waiting by his bed. When he awoke, Sojiro’s mentor
from the UN cyber-infiltrator forces performed exercises with him under
hypnosis. Then the UN specialist taught him how to move his prosthetic finger
like a real one.

The day after, Sojiro progressed to
remotely painting on other people’s computer pads. By the end of the week, the
artist was swimming through raw data like a fish. Red and Zeiss were permitted
to escort him home from the clinic.

The artist joked, “I’m glad it’s
just club members today. When every blond member of the faculty showed up at my
bedside at once, the nurses started calling you the Aryan League.”

Red snorted.

“Nurse Betsy hinted that you
haven’t been back for your annual
physical
,” Sojiro told Zeiss with a
smile.

“Shut up. How does the page feel?”
the TA asked.

“Why would anyone code any other
way?” Sojiro wondered.

Red smiled, “I feel the same way
about math. But Mr. Rules wants me to learn it the slow way first.”

The TA narrowed his eyes at the
short girl with metallic-red streaks in her hair. “I’m trying to make you a
more-rounded human being.” Making sure no one else was around, he hissed, “That
talent you lean on as a crutch burns a little more of your life each time you
use it.”

“Jealous,” she accused.

Zeiss took a deep breath. “I’m
concerned for the continued sanity and humanity of a very good friend. You’d
hand these pages out to everyone in the world like candy.”

“I miss candy,” Red mourned.

“He’s right,” Sojiro defended
Zeiss. “Before I could read this page, I spent weeks learning NCIF (pronounced
unsafe
),
the abstract computer language created by the cyber-infiltrator force.”

Red cocked her head at the Japanese
man. “It’s weird. Whenever you plug in to the net, I can’t feel you anymore.
Your aura disappears.”

“I do,” Sojiro explained. “It’s
like when Daniel-san hops Out of Body. The two pages are adjoining.”

“Your practice code was a work of
art,” Red noted. “You sign each one like a painting!”

“I have to. It’s hypno-trained in.
I have to sign everything I do.”

“Why?”

“So they can tell if I go rogue,
like Virus did.”

“Then learn not to sign your code.”

“If I do that, it’s an admission to
criminal intent.”

“Are there a lot of rules?”

“Hundreds,” the artist sighed.

Zeiss blurted, “I’m sorry, Sojiro;
I never meant to shackle you this way.”

“No, Z. You’ve freed me to be what
I was meant to be.”

****

The supper club had a special
Wednesday meal to meet the new candidate, Yvette. The group was buzzing as they
set the table in the simulator room. Risa yelled, “You’re supposed to be
helping, not hacking.”

Sojiro lay motionless on a hospital
gurney with wires streaming from electrodes on his forehead. Zeiss concentrated
on the monitors and waved the comment away.

“The new, high-speed data grinder
he’s programming will find the terrorist communications. We’re almost there. I
can sense it.”

“You said that an hour ago,
junkie,” Red joked. She was wearing her serious-black jumpsuit, a sign that she
wasn’t going to make the Yvette interview easy. “You make fun of me being
addicted to quantum computation. You’re worse with this spy hunting.”

The TA wore a Now and Zen brand T-shirt
that read, ‘I can only please one person a day. Today isn’t your day.’

“In order to get a food waiver
after the last fiasco in here,” Zeiss stressed, glaring at Herk, “I had to use
this room to demonstrate progress on a
faculty
project. Twenty minutes.”
Even with the enormous power of the island datacenter, the task of mining the
data for his latest idea had taken weeks. Just unpacking the data set to
continue the task took over an hour.

“He can quit any time he wants,”
Herk ribbed as he adjusted the borrowed picnic table.

“Compromise,” Zeiss offered. After
a few button pushes, three walls became a beautiful hillside in the Alps with a
fairytale castle in the distance The closest wall still churned with data
models being sorted and analyzed by the unmoving artist.

A butterfly fluttered off the
picnic site, turned the corner, and got sucked into the vortex of the data
grinder.

The woman standing in the doorway
shrieked when she saw the butterfly shredded on the screen.

“Oops,” said Zeiss. The other men
snickered as he struggled to recover. He ran over to shake the woman’s hand. She
gave him a bottle of wine, which he passed to Auckland. She had short,
feathered hair, freckles, and bright-blue eyes. She wore a denim over-shirt,
white shell, khaki shorts, and hiking boots for the virtual hike. Her legs were
thick, tanned, and muscular. “Hi, you’re early. Don’t mind this; it’s just a
little experiment.”

“This must be how Dr. Frankenstein
started,” Yvette joked.

The other men on the team lined up
to shake her hand. When Herk lingered a tad longer than he should have, Risa
cleared her throat. “He’s my boyfriend.”

From the surprised look on Herk’s
face, the announcement was news to him. He didn’t object, but he did furrow his
brow and blink a few times. Red left the room saying, “I have to watch the
microwaves.”

“Don’t mind her,” Zeiss whispered.
“Strong women threaten her.”

“I heard that!” shouted Red from
the other room.

Risa tapped her foot and the TA
blurted, “I’ll make dessert in a minute.”

“Hopefully not in the laboratory,”
Yvette said.

Toby laughed the loudest and
shouted, “Good one.”

“You’ll have to excuse our
botanist; Toby finally qualified at the range with the big guns today.”

“Sounds fun,” Yvette said.

“He used up all my ammo. I was
saving those tracers and explosive tips for a special occasion,” complained
Red, returning with hot vegetable dishes. “Sweet potatoes with marshmallows for
you, Herk. Cauliflower mashed potatoes for you, Risa.” Then she grabbed another
couple plastic pouches from the cooler and another couple empty plates.

“No more low cal. I wanted the
mushroom gravy and risotto again,” Auckland bellyached as he handed their guest
a glass of her own wine.

“I’ll take one of those, she smells
good,” Toby said. “The wine, I meant the wine.”

Sojiro sat up suddenly and announced,
“Porn.”

“What?” asked Zeiss, embarrassed by
all his friends at once. Park, the Korean drive scientist, hid in the corner,
too afraid to speak.

The programmer explained, “The
number of people on the island goes down by about 10 percent over the year, but
the amount of porn and photos in general stays almost constant.”

“So?”

“The extra photos have to be a
message conduit,” Sojiro concluded.

Zeiss ordered, “Cross-reference the
photos we found on the known spies and people we suspended.”

Risa pushed the off button on his
pad. “People before data.”

“Fine,” Zeiss agreed. “But somebody
tell me how you use photos to hide a message.”

Red spoke up. “You change pixels
just a little. It only shows up when you compare it against the original. The
filters won’t catch them. I’ve used the technique before.”

“What for?” asked Zeiss. Then he
erased the question from an imaginary blackboard. “I don’t want to know. Just
tell me how to tell which pictures are carriers.”

Red shrugged. “I can tell by
looking at them, anyone with Simplification can. Show me.”

The TA blinked. “Um . . . in
addition to the fact that you’re underage, there’s nothing you can say to
induce me to show those photos to a lady.”

“Fine, then show them to Kaguya,”
Red said snidely.

Risa made hissing sounds like a
cat.

“
Every
woman deserves to be
treated like a lady,” Zeiss asserted.

“Humph,” Red disagreed.

“Funny you should mention her,”
said Sojiro, peeling off electrode pads and unclipping his chest monitor. “Our
suspects all had a lot of her glamour fan photos.”

Green said, “Big deal, so do I.”

“Bring those pictures up,” ordered
the TA.

The wall filled with hundreds of
glamour shots of the Japanese voice sculptor. Herk swallowed. “That’s so
R-rated, it’s almost X.”

“Wow,” said the visiting nurse.
“This is who you had a dinner date with after me?”

“It wasn’t a date; it was damage
control. She wanted to bring disciplinary charges against Red for repeated
damage to her clothing,” Zeiss ad-libbed.

“I can see her concern,” laughed
Yvette. “There’s not much left.”

Red tapped a few spots on the wall,
and red boxes appeared around those photos. “Check those to start with. You’ll
need the digital originals to compare against.”

“Where would I get those?” asked
Zeiss.

“I’m not old enough to know that,”
Red said, turning to leave the room with her nose in the air.

Zeiss rubbed his forehead. “Green,
go ask Kaguya nicely for originals of these three shots. Tell her I sent you and
butter her up a little. Stop by the BX and buy a rose or something on the club
account.”

“Yes, sir!” the team navigator said
with a salute as he trotted off.

“I have to make some dessert and
smooth some ruffled feathers,” Zeiss said, excusing himself.

When he was gone, the nurse asked,
“Are your meetings always this exciting?”

Risa smiled. “It’s not quite
body-heat powered cell phones, but we do okay.”

Yvette hinted, “Your adviser said
he couldn’t talk about some of your work on the team; it was too secret.”

The Latina shrugged. “It’ll all
come out in academic papers eventually. Right now, Red is taking navigation
class with Z. Normal homework bores her, so he gives her extra-credit
problems.”

The botanist offered the new woman
some tortilla chips as he explained, “But what you have to watch out for with Z
is whatever he assigns, you really need to do. He plans everything. I was
taking this computer class with Red and I was just scraping by. I asked him for
help and he told me to work every question at the end of every chapter in the
hardback book in the library. There were about five questions I couldn’t
answer, so I went to the prof. The teacher answered me, and one of those
questions ended up on the final. I was the only one to get it right. That pissed
Red off.”

“So Conrad knew the professor took
the questions from the chapter summaries? Big deal,” the new woman said.

Herk shook his head. “No. The prof
was upset at people walking out of his three-hour final early. Red walked out
of the midterm after thirty minutes. He wanted a hard-assed question to
separate the men from the boys. When Toby showed him the five questions our
study group couldn’t answer, the guy figured nobody in the class could either. So
the professor used a variation on one of them as his time sponge.” The Polish
bomb tech took a swig of his beer bottle.

“Is Herr Doctor Professor Zeiss
seeing anyone?” Yvette asked, idly. “The nurses at the clinic mentioned another
professor.”

“He’s not a PhD yet,” Risa
clarified.

“A formality. He told me he’s essentially
finished his dissertation, but I get the impression that he’s delaying for
someone special.”

“No,” Sojiro said. “Z’s a lone
wolf.”

“Really? Seeing him interact with
Red, it’s more like they’re an old married couple.” Yvette took a sip of her
wine. “He’s a little, how you say, henpecked.”

Herk sprayed beer from his mouth.

Risa whooped. “Don’t tell
Red
that!”

“She kind of treats her whole team
like that,” Auckland said. “Z just puts up with it the best.”

“He’d take a bullet for any one of
us,” said Herk.

“She’s the leader?” Yvette said,
puzzled. “I didn’t think the official training for this was for another year.”

“Red doesn’t like to follow rules,”
explained Toby. “Hang around long enough and you’ll see. But she’s
really
good at finding ways around obstacles.”

“What about me?” inquired the girl under
discussion as she came back with steaming plates.

Yvette saw the plates and burst
out, “
Non, non, non
! Tell me you did not microwave this wonderful cream
sauce.”

“I had to, it was frozen,” Red explained.
“How else do you reheat it?”

“With a sauce pan and a
beet
of milk. Let me get my pans.”

“You brought pans with you?” asked
Risa.

“I brought all my cooking gear.
However, Z bought me a special locking case he insisted I use,” the nurse
explained.

“An evidence locker?” asked Herk.

“
Oui
.”

“You’re a gourmet chef?” asked Red,
incredulous.

“It’s a hobby, nothing formal. But
I make a good sauce.”

Sojiro laughed. “Z wanted to
impress Yvette by taking her out to the best restaurant in Lyon, and it’s run
by her uncle.”

“The Cordon Bleu?” Red inquired,
looking at the others on the team to see if they thought it was a coincidence.

“
Oui
.”

“Do you happen to have a
clearance?” Red pressed.

Auckland nodded. “She works with
families from Interpol HQ and several EU heads of state.”

“Sneaky bastard,” Red muttered.

Taking another sip of her wine to
cover her smile, Yvette said, “Speaking of this sneaky person, what did he give
you
for an extra-credit assignment?”