Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (27 page)

“On it.”

The two men came at the
photographer from opposite sides, and he bolted toward the TA. Zeiss tackled
him into the pool. Herk fished the man out while Zeiss pocketed the camera’s memory
card.

Red had almost reached Lou’s keg
when Zeiss caught up to her. He wrapped her in a towel and said, “You need to
see Professor Sorenson, now!”

“Your friendship is the only reason
your arm is still attached,” Red said through gritted teeth. As he guided her,
she complained, “You’re embarrassing me.”

“You’re embarrassing yourself,” he
countered. When he got to the patio in front of Daniel and Trina, Zeiss gesture
to the girl and hissed, “This is not appropriate!”

“I shaved,” Red said, opening the
towel to show Trina.

Daniel turned his head, refusing to
get involved in what was clearly a girl issue. Zeiss couldn’t move his eyes.
They were glued to the bikini line where she was pointing. After an
embarrassing delay, he waved the camera memory card, “The whole world will
think so if she keeps this exhibitionism up.”

“You’re right,” Trina said sternly.
“Young lady, you need to carry your media fogger at all times.”

“I meant this lack of a suit,”
whispered Zeiss.

“Did you borrow that from my
closet?” asked Trina.

The billionaire risked a glance.
“This is wrong on so many levels. That’s the suit from Cancun. I thought it was
ripped.”

“Good memories. I had it fixed.”
Trina shrugged.

“There’s no room for a fogger,” Red
objected.

Trina explained, “It’s built into
the big gold tag hanging off the side.”

“I wondered why you needed a big T
on your suit.”

“It was a joke, so people could
tell me from my sisters.”

“Hush,” Daniel jumped in.

“That explains why the top is a
little loose,” Zeiss mumbled.

Red growled him. “First you don’t
like the food and now there’s not enough of it?”

“I only meant stealing from a
teacher is a serious charge,” the TA fumbled.

“Borrowing,” Red insisted. “She
gave me access to her wardrobe. You know that.”

“So, no charges are being brought,”
summarized Daniel. “She’s eighteen now, legal for everything here. There’s not
a thing we can do to stop her.”

Zeiss knew that; he’d somehow
chosen to forget it.

“Thank you.” The young woman
stormed off to find Lou before the first contest.

“I’m heading back to the island on
the next shuttle,” fumed Zeiss.

“Whoa,” said Daniel. “I can’t jump
into the pool, and our martial-arts instructor is on-call for security. Someone
has to keep an eye on these kids so they don’t drown.”

“I have to
watch
?” asked an
outraged Zeiss.

“You signed up for it,” insisted
the billionaire. “That’s an order.”

The first contest was a suggestive
one. The man ate a plate of pie off the woman’s lap, and then the woman had to
eat a banana. Red wanted to be Lou’s partner, but couldn’t bring herself to
touch contaminated food. (The cake was under armed guard, locked in a freezer.)

Zeiss approached his sister’s
friend, Vanessa, for a favor. “Congratulations on getting the cover this year.
You earned it. Seventeen hours for one shot; I couldn’t imagine.”

The model smiled, flattered.
“Trying to get back into my good graces?”

“No, I have a student who’s having a
bad time. He went through survival training and things went terribly wrong. He
was the only one of his team to make it.”

She was a little suspicious at
first. “So you just throw your ex his way?”

“Not at all. Llewellyn’s Welsh,
from a good family. I remember your grandparents were from Wales. I thought you might have something in common. He’s the one over there trying to convince that
girl that a banana won’t hurt her.”

“He’s cute!” the model exclaimed.
“He seems to have a lot of friends already.”

“I asked the other pilots to look
out for him, but all he talked about earlier was burying the pain in alcohol.”

“Poor baby. I’ve got this.” Vanessa
snatched Lou for the contest before anyone knew what happened. They won first
place. She also paired with him for the co-ed water chicken fight. Lou strode
over to the TA while teams were getting in the water. “Dude, you are a god. I
don’t know how you did it, but I owe you big-time.”

“Just treat her like a lady, not a
Kleenex,” Zeiss insisted. “She’s my sister’s best friend.”

Red was arguing with Risa. “Let me
use Herk; I need to take that lingerie tramp down a notch.”

Risa wasn’t having any of it. “I
called him first. Take Z, he’s the tallest one here.”

The thought of her legs around his
neck made Zeiss sit down. “No,” he asserted. Then his mouth betrayed him. “Not
unless she wears my shirt and hat, too.”

Red shouted, “I have SPF 50, Mister
Safety. Back off!”

She eventually badgered Auckland into being her horse because he had the most experience with sports.

Zeiss put on sunglasses and
pretended to chat with his sister while he watched every flirt and giggle in
the pool. When the twisting in his stomach produced an audible growl, Claire
asked, “Are you okay, Conrad?”

“I’m going to hell,” her brother
muttered, taking another swig of his beer.

“The trick is to enjoy it. I do,”
Claire countered in German. “Oh! I’ll be right back; that man over there is a
movie producer!” She trotted off to meet a bigwig from Fortune Multimedia, and
Zeiss knew he wouldn’t see her again for the rest of this visit.

Red won the chicken fight by
resorting to martial arts and nearly breaking Vanessa’s nose. While the model
iced the bruise, Lou yelled at Red. “Watch it; she’s delicate. Not everybody
chews wing wreckage and spits nails like you.”

Daniel canceled the cake for the
afternoon, not wanting to draw more attention to the young woman’s erratic
behavior. Zeiss asked Kaguya Mori to start her set early and provide a
distraction. “Please,” he begged. “Do what you do best and get everybody
looking at you.”

The Japanese heiress smiled.
“Because you asked so nicely.”

For her first number, she did a
cover of “Genie in a Bottle”, staring at Zeiss during the refrain. Red picked
up the suggestive moves and began to hit on the pilot next to Lou in order to
make him jealous. Zeiss had to take off his hat to cover his lap.

“This is not going to end well,”
Herk muttered in his ear.

“I’ve got to go,” the TA stammered,
unable to tear his eyes away from the gyrations. “Have Sonrisa fly cover for
her. Red’s missing certain pack instincts that most women have. I don’t want
her hurt.”

After returning to the almost-abandoned Academy on one of
the shuttle boats, Zeiss went to the secure level. Since he’d effectively quit
by leaving against orders, he drafted a formal resignation letter and printed
it. Aside from a few paragraphs of polishing, his dissertation was finished as
well. He’d only been delaying to maintain his cover. That job was over, so he
printed the tome off as well.

As he collated the pages, he came
across the camera memory card. “I guess I need to look at this to see what the
security breaches were.”

Bringing the photos up on the
projection screen, he felt the breath knocked out of him again. He zoomed in on
the girl’s face. His hand hovered over the delete button, but somehow it hit
print again by mistake.

He wiped the memory card after
that. “Maybe it’s the blonde hair,” he said to the whales.

Pulling up another photo from
classroom security logs of Red concentrating by a whiteboard, he felt the same
pang. “Nope. I’m a pervert who’s going to hell.”

He printed that photo, too, before
deleting it. Reasoning that the enemy agents had the same access to security
footage that he did, Mira’s cover ID wasn’t safe as long as any pictures of her
remained in the system for comparison. He used Sojiro’s facial-search algorithm
to locate more footage. At Christmas, her face lit the room brighter than the
tree when she tasted his chocolate mousse. Print.

“What are you doing?” he railed at
himself.

He put the photos into an envelope
addressed to Trina. Zeiss placed a note inside. “Someone she loves should have
these.”

He set the interface to locate and
then scrub images on automatic. The last thing he dropped inside the envelope was
his access badge for this level. Hands shaking, he sealed it shut. “I have to
be strong. I’ll go to Oxford and forget all about her.”

He knew he wouldn’t be safe until the
photos were out of his hands, so he ran to Professor Horvath’s room and slid
the envelope under the door. When the crinkling stopped, he sat on the floor,
relieved that the temptation was gone. He left his dissertation and resignation
in Professor Sorenson’s inbox.

Just after lights-out, Zeiss
strolled slowly back to his pod for his last night on the island.

When he walked into his office, he smelled
cherry hair shampoo. He opened his bedroom door in the dark, savoring the scent
he was sure was just his sex-starved imagination. To himself, he chuckled, “You
deviant.”

He almost dropped his keys when Red
whimpered, “I deserve that. I’ve been a spoiled brat and it’d serve me right if
you spanked me. You were right.”

By the light of his surge protector
and screen saver, he could see Mira in her white bathrobe. The ghostly glow was
so unreal, he asked, “Why are you back early?”

She had been sent home early for
fighting. But instead of dwelling on her own flaws, Mira slid the robe down to
reveal a shoulder so red that it was almost purple. “I’m so hot it hurts!”

His breath shuddered. “I can get
you relief, but I can’t let students be seen in my room.”

“Then don’t turn on the light,” she
suggested.

He tossed his utility belt on the
table and pulled out a massive bottle of burn gel. “This is what you need. I
know this is your first experience with this kind of thing, so I’ll try to be
gentle.”

She dropped the robe on the floor
as she darted into his bedroom and laid facedown on his bed. “Hurry. Rub it in!”

Under his breath, Zeiss whispered
in German, “If I’m going to hell, I might as well have a few minutes in heaven
first.”

The young woman moaned loudly when
he squirted the aloe gel on her back and caressed it in.

“Shh, use the pillow or you’ll wake
my neighbors,” Zeiss begged.

****

The girl’s voice was distorted, and
Dolan could see nothing on the micro-cam other than the TA’s utility belt and
the robe on the video screen. The student operating the bug turned to his
roommate. “Booty call! He is so busted. I’m posting this live to the website.”

“Sure, but they’ll take that down
soon,” said his friend. “We need witnesses. Since I did the weather
announcements this past hurricane season, I know how to hook it straight to the
PA speakers.”

****

Zeiss sat, shirtless, in the cement
security cell under the airport, his face haggard in the harsh fluorescent
lighting. He shivered in the air conditioning. Taggart sat across the desk from
him, with his back to the two-way mirror. The commander said, “Let’s go over
this again. Tell me about the banking records we found on your desk. There’s a
large Swiss account in your name.”

“I’m from Switzerland, this is not illegal,” Zeiss explained. “In my family, it’s expected. The money is from
my work here.”

“The account was created during
your extended vacation last year and gets irregular contributions.”

“My bonuses. I have to hide them
from my students. They watch me.”

“I wonder why. You had an awful lot
of pornography on your hard drive.”

“That was research, approved by
Professor Horvath.”

“Yeah. She was removed from this
investigation because of allegations you slept with her during your Isolation
Chamber experience.”

“She broke in after I fell asleep .
. . to talk to me.”

“Hey, I can’t fault you for that.
If she paid me a midnight visit, I wouldn’t put up a fight either. You’re both
adults. Tell me what the female student was doing in your room.”

“I was . . . helping her.”

“Uh-huh. Why you?”

“Because I’m always prepared for
these things. She knows that. I take care of her,” Zeiss said lightly. Then he
addressed the mirror. “That didn’t come out right.”

“An innocent sunburn?”

“Yes. You can test my hands for
residue.”

“We didn’t find a bottle.”

“I gave it to the young lady.”

“I’ll bet you did,” said the security
commander, chuckling. “What was she wearing when she came in for this alleged
medical treatment?”

“Her robe.”

“And?”

“Just her bikini,” he whispered,
visualizing the clothing in question—and what it had failed to cover.

“That narrows it down,” the officer
said, tapping a pencil on his report. “Why didn’t she go to the clinic?”

The man being questioned
fish-mouthed for a time, deciding on, “She doesn’t like doctors. They have too
many rules and tests.”

“Convenient. We can’t seem to find
any trace of her.”

“It’s gentleman’s duty to protect—”

“Yes, I know. You sent her out your
roof escape hatch into the agro pod next door. No one saw a thing.”

Zeiss smiled at this
acknowledgement.

The commander raised his voice in
irritation. “When you heard my men pounding on your door, you put your sheets
and shirt in your burn safe and hit the ignite button. The device is ruined,
but so is the evidence. Why?”

“It’s my property. I can do with it
what I wish,” Zeiss insisted. “You should be arresting the students who bugged
my office and posted that private conversation.”

“Kid, if that’s what you call a
conversation, women are going to be lining up to chat with you.” Taggart played
a segment of moans while Zeiss shifted uncomfortably. The pitch went up
noticeably as the girl expressed ecstasy. There were garbled pleas for him to
continue. “My God, what were you doing to that girl? The boys will give you
four-star treatment here in the brig if you just share your technique.”

“Blowing on the aloe gel. It made
her shiver. I wanted her to feel better.”

“Right.”

Next, Zeiss’s voice came over the play-back
speaker. “You’ll like this. Just to prove I’m a full-service masseur.”

The girl wailed and then chanted,
“Thank you,” as she cried.

Taggart raised an eyebrow. Zeiss
was trying to hide an erection. “I think that was when I did the tops of her
feet. You pretend the toes are little champagne corks.”

The commander slammed his hand down
on the stop button. “Thirty minutes of this garbage, and then she says ‘Turn me
over and do my front?’ You honesty expect me to believe this was innocent?”

“Tha . . . that’s when I gave her
the bottle and opened my hatch and stepped out for some cool air. Then I heard
her over the PA and told her to get out. I had no idea security was on the way.”

“Why leave at that moment?”

Zeiss writhed in the chair. They
kept battering him with the same questions in different variations. This time,
his answer changed. “Because I have feelings for her.”

The commander nodded. “Did you give
her grades for sex?”

“No!”

“Then give us a name.”

“I should be punished. She’s an
innocent in this.”

“I don’t think so. Nobody other
than a spy would have this high-grade of media distorter. Your voice comes
through fine; only hers is unrecognizable. She’s been playing you,” Taggart
insisted.

“No. If her name gets associated
with this, her cover . . . name is ruined.”

“More truth slips out the more
tired you get. Information has been leaking out of this academy for years. Sex
is involved. Your investigation pointed to as much. This infiltrating vixen got
to you. You’re in major trouble.”

“I resigned before the incident.
The school has no recourse.”

“Forget the school. After that
video hit YouTube, Oxford has dropped you as well.”

Zeiss lowered his face into his
hands.

The commander pressed. “That
underwear model made it go viral when she posted, ‘You animal, this reminds me
of when you swallowed my belly button ring.’”

“I thought it was an earring,” he
corrected.

“Irrelevant! Everyone in the
school—Hell, everyone in the UN—knows why you took that sweet young thing into
your room. Do you deny it?”

“No.”

“Finally, some honesty. If we
hadn’t arrived to surprise you?”

“I would have done anything she
wanted, but she never asked for classified information.”

Taggart fast-forwarded to Zeiss offering,
“Maybe it would be cooler for you to sleep in the sublevel.”

The commander dropped his final
card on the table. “After you gave her your badge, someone erased days of
security footage.”

“That was me,” Zeiss insisted.

“Including course notes?”

“What?”

“Images from the first week of
Intro to Alien Technology class. Come on. Just give us a name and you can go
back to your old life.”

Zeiss went through the slides used
on the first week, a day at a time. “The
Time
magazine cover?”

“A foreign worm removed it. We
don’t know why. I like you, we all do. We can still keep you out of prison if
you give me her name.”

The former TA trembled as he put
the pieces together. It all made sense in hindsight—Miracle Redemption Hollis,
hidden from cameras since birth. She’d been raised by Jezebel’s assistant.
“Trina.”

“What?” asked the commander, hoping
for a breakthrough.

“Erase every record of this
interrogation, clear the observation room, and call Professor Horvath
immediately.” The former assistant began reciting board-level override codes.

“You can’t just—”

Zeiss bellowed, interrupting, “I’m
a traitor. By the end of the day, I’m probably going to be shot and dropped off
the stern into the ocean. Unless you want to join me, do it now!”

An hour later, Trina strode into
the room and sat on the table in her martial-arts uniform. “Your note to me in
the envelope sounded rather . . . suicidal. Would you care to explain that?”

He ignored her question and
whispered, “If you can’t kill me yourself, give me an empty gun and let me run
up on deck. The others will.”

Coolly, Trina asked, “Why do you
think we
should
shoot you, Conrad?”

He looked at the mirror. “I can’t
say here. Outside the Academy, I’d be questioned and broken. I know that now.
The information I carry must be protected at all costs.”

Softy, she said, “We’re alone now.
You can tell me. Who was the student?”

“The most important person in the
world,” he replied. They locked eyes and she knew exactly who he was referring
to—Mira.

“Did you
do
something to
her?”

“Never. Listen to the tape and talk
to her. The whole sunburn incident is a big misunderstanding.”

“Ach. I know she’s burned; the girl
came into my room this morning begging me to slather her with this huge bottle
of aloe and blow on it.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling them
and they won’t believe me!”

She closed her eyes and bit her
lower lip until the urge to smile or laugh subsided. “Audio: off. I wouldn’t
have believed you myself if it hadn’t happened to me. I kept worrying that
someone was going to turn
me
in to the dean, and I raised her.”

Trina put her arm around the distraught
young man as she asked, “If this is a simple misunderstanding, then what did
you do that’s so horrible?”

“I accidentally found out
who
she was, who her mother was. She won’t be safe until you kill me.”

“Shh. We’re not going to let that
happen, Conrad. We’ll find a way. You’re family.” He collapsed, sobbing, into
her chest. She stroked his hair and whispered nothings until his breathing
stabilized.

“Those photos were very nice,” she
said. “They captured Mira’s nature perfectly.”

He nodded. “I want . . . wanted
them for myself but didn’t dare keep them.”

“Because people would see that you
love her,” she stated softly.

“How could I not?”

Trina smiled and kissed him on the
forehead. “Does she know?”

Zeiss shook his head.

“We’ll figure that out, too. She’s
a little slow with social things. Be patient; she’s worth the wait.”