Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (7 page)

“Don’t worry; you would’ve put the
pieces together in another few weeks. I had to know if I could trust you first,”
said the billionaire. “And I knew about your father. Your leaving him off the
application was one of the main reasons I picked you. I know a thing or two
about horrible fathers.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Zeiss. “Now
what?”

“Now the hard work starts,” Daniel
sighed. “Someone on this island is transmitting confidential information.”

“That should be impossible.”

“Yes. Jez designed the protocols
herself. Someone here’s also sabotaging the astronaut program. In your copious
free time, we’d like you to figure out who.”

When Red woke Monday morning, Risa was already gone to
class. She tried to shower, but the water was stone cold. “It takes a while to get
hot again. We heat with passive solar on the roof,” explained a girl from room
five.

Grumbling, the young pilot put on
her blue flight suit again so it would match her hair color. She locked the
door, put the thumb-sized camera on her dresser, and hit record. “Testing,
testing.”

When she played it back on the TV
screen, her voice was distorted and her face static-filled. “Oops.” She turned
off the media blocker in her goggles. “Logging session one: Red Benson. I’m
about to attend my first class. I’m so nervous. I haven’t seen Uncle Daniel in
ten years. We’ve both been through a lot since. They wouldn’t let me visit him
at the hospital because I was too young. I don’t know how damaged he was. I
know the shuttle incident made him worse. Geez. I hope he doesn’t blame me. If
I hadn’t wanted the elephant ears . . .” She swallowed hard, holding back the
tears. “End scene.”

The camera shut off.

She turned it back on again at the
checkout of the BX. Red had a pile of texts behind her as a backdrop. The
cashier was gone. “I just got all my books. Alien Tech alone has three.
Anti-terrorism has a reading list, plus a DVD collection. I’m having them
delivered to my room. Professor
Sorenson
should be a piece of cake. I
doubt there’s anything he can teach me about talents I don’t already know. Horvath
. . . I get the feeling she’s going to make my life hell. Well I give as good
as I get. End Scene.”

The next shot was Red jogging into
the Alien Tech amphitheater one minute after the starting bell. The other
fifty-nine freshmen and one sophomore were seated already. There was no Daniel,
only Zeiss. The TA wore a button-down shirt of blue Oxford cloth. “Any
questions?”

A student in front asked, “Why does
Professor Sorenson say the first few minutes on the artifact will be
world-changing?”

“With each of the twenty-seven
alien pages that led us to the Sirius artifact, we learn enough to keep our
scientists busy for decades. For each combination of pages, we discover more
than the sum of the two. Even with all the pages combined, we wouldn’t know
enough to build this spacecraft for a thousand years. Just walking in the front
door of the craft will give us access to alien techniques and technologies Earth
hasn’t even considered.”

“Why can’t we land today?” inquired
another.

“That’s another class. The short answer
is that the nations who refuse to join the collation have missiles aimed at the
artifact. If they can’t have the knowledge, no one can.”

“Then why are we here?”

“To be ready when an agreement is
reached. But even if that doesn’t happen, you’re the leaders of tomorrow. The
curriculum and competition sharpen each student to be the best in his or her
arena.”

On her goggles, Red entered a
caption for the lecture. “My first sermon in the crystal cathedral.”

When the questions were over, Zeiss
announced, “As promised, today’s class should be easy. Take out your tablets,
and connect to the class website, quiz one. There will be ten short-answer
questions; nothing too strenuous. You’ll have fifteen minutes. Afterward, we’ll
discuss the answers that people missed in open forum.”

Red was still taking her new school
tablet out of its case when he announced, “Begin.”

Her tablet had a large note stuck
to the front, “Charge for twelve hours before first use.”

She immediately raised her hand,
causing Zeiss to walk up and lean over. “Yes?” he whispered. When she showed
him the note, he sighed, “Here, use mine.”

As she typed the answers at
breakneck speed, Red failed to notice that they were appearing on the large,
overhead screen. Number four, one of the easiest questions, gave her fits. Some
feature of the pad kept blacking out her answer. On the last question, they
only provided a quarter inch for the answer, but she attached an answer file
that took her the remainder of the quiz to expound upon. A few early-finishers
were chuckling. After he called out the one-minute warning, she hit submit and
handed the pad back.

He punched a button and graded all
the submissions in a few seconds. “Not bad. Low score was 70 percent. The
average was 94. Excellent.”

The TA walked through a few obvious
answers. One boy claimed, “I had that.”

Zeiss brought it up on his pad and
said, “Ah . . . Spelling. I’ll give it to you this time, but you should know the
word aerospace for the final. Next, how can you tell a planetary orbits’
expert? The correct answers were increased hormonal activity and fixation with
curved geometry.” He brought up the wrong answers to check for spelling.

“Horny,” he announced. “Not
specific enough. That definition would encompass ninety percent of our student
body.” No one could see the name of the student, but everyone saw the red X.

When he read the other wrong
response, everyone laughed again. “Talk to him for five minutes and see if he
tries to teach me something.”

Zeiss winced. “I’m afraid that
anything they tried to teach you with that combination . . .”

Sojiro shot up a hand. “Sir, I read
ahead; the primary source material,
The Twenty-Seven Pages
, references increased
teaching ability.” He was looking at Red as he spoke. The Japanese artist knew
from the overhead that the answer had been hers. Zeiss did not.

“Half credit seems fair,” the TA
ruled, sending a note to the student. When the note came up on his own pad, he
missed a step. “Next question. About half of you who missed a problem tripped
up on this one. What is the most common failure mode for a deep quantum talent?
We accept coma or navel staring. Okay, one of you misspelled it naval. I’ll fix
the program to give you credit for that one. But drooling and funny farm are
unacceptable.

“Here’s an easy one. Who invented
the star drive? We have one with an answer missing.”

“Your pad was defective, sir. It
wouldn’t let me type the answer,” Red claimed.

Zeiss successfully tapped out, “Cassavettis
and Reuter.”

“No, sir. Reuter was long dead,
although the math was his. Cassavettis invented the Icarus field. PJ Smith
turned it into a propulsion system,” Red insisted.

“Who’s he?” asked Zeiss.

“The lead scientist for Fortune
Aerospace,” said a voice from the stage. The curtain rippled and the Professor
of record wheeled out. “The pad won’t allow company classified information to
be transmitted on the web. But she should have listed Dr. Reuter. Half credit.”
He locked eyes with the girl in the blue flight suit. “Next.”

Red didn’t dare extend her empathy
in a crowded room like this.

“Number ten. What do you do when a
person with the override page, a Rex, exhibits unstable or hostile behavior?
There were a lot of variations, and one person wrote
War and Peace
.”

Daniel stared at Red. “The only
answer I will accept from my students has three letters: r-u-n. Anything else
will get you and your rescuers dead. Delete the other answers.”

The sophomore repeating the class
called out, “But the long one was hilarious. The four B’s: Beg them to see
reason, Blind them, Break their arms, and . . .”

“If they still don’t listen, bury
them,” asserted Red. “Once Rexes go rogue, you have to put them down; it’s the
only safe way for everyone. That’s official UN policy.”

Several eyebrows went up at her
attitude. The mils in the back row nudged each other.

The professor replied in a cold
tone, “No. The first rule of this academy is preservation of life. While
alliterative, that answer does not reflect the goals of this institution. No
credit.”

So saying, Daniel spun his
wheelchair back through the curtain and out of sight.

“Any other questions? Good. Read
chapter thirteen for tomorrow and do the questions at the end.”

****

“You got an 80 percent,” said
Sojiro to Red as they walked to Anti-terrorism together. “That’s great for a
surprise quiz.”

“The professor sounded mad at me,”
Red said, her feelings hurt.

“Nah. He’s a teddy bear. I’ve seen
him explain the same idea five times to someone. This class isn’t a weed-out.
He really wants everyone to succeed; this is information we have to know cold
if we’re going to survive reading a page. You can’t look up the symptoms of
neuralgic breakdown in the middle of an episode.”

She blew out a sigh. “Maybe it’s
just me.”

“I hear you’re good at martial
arts. This next class should be a snap.”

“I hated all those people watching
me in Alien 101.”

“This one is small. They broke the
class up into three groups because only so many people can fit in the dojo at
once.”

“But I know Horvath’s going to bust
my balls about not having a charged computer pad.”

Sojiro pointed at the BX. “They
have rental pads. Grab one for the day.”

“Thanks. See you at the dojo!”

Five minutes after the bell, she
came in, smiling smugly, with a fully charged computer. People were already
seated, cross-legged on the mats. Today’s lesson, written on the board, was
first aid for terrorist attacks.

The guard ‘Grunt-Monkey’ stopped
her at the door, shouting, “Someone does not have respect for our time. How can
this person show us respect?”

Half the class chorused back, “Sing
us a song.”

Trina worked hard to suppress a
smile.

Red blinked and jerked back. “I had
to get a computer.”

“You had forty-seven-and-a-half
hours of your time to do that. This is
our
time. The rule is the same
for everyone. I was late once last semester. A song, if you will.”

In her panic, Red could only remember
one song, from the animated mermaid movie. Sojiro clapped but everyone else
booed her down. She almost cried, but wouldn’t give Trina the satisfaction.

“Sit,” said the instructor. “With
the second infraction, you wear the bucket on your head. With the third, what
happens, doorkeeper?”

“You get a new name tag, sir!”
snapped Grunt-Monkey.

“Correct. Now, the rest of these
freshmen have been donating their free time, three hours a week, to worthy
causes. It’s a time-honored tradition to pay back the upper classmen who will
be mentoring you and helping you through this maze of confusion. Since you are
the only freshmen not to sign up by yesterday’s deadline, you get what’s left.
You are the new cabana girl.”

“Pardon?”           

“After Extreme Environments class,
report to the pool area,” decreed Professor Horvath with a twinkle in her eye.
“You will hand out dry towels, pick up soiled ones, and generally make yourself
useful. You have until the end of the semester to complete your service hours—you’re
nine behind.”

Face burning with shame, Red sat
down in the back of the class and half-listened to the lecture on how to treat
burns, chemical inhalation, and improvised explosive shrapnel. She had to
concentrate on her breathing and didn’t use the rented computer once for notes.

Over lunch hour, she ran back to
her room, cooked lunch, and read everything she could about where they were at
in Extreme Environments. Herkemer was in her class and told her what to expect.
“Show up early in your insulated swimwear. I checked, and the pool’s cold
today.”

That meant she had to run back to
the BX and buy a scuba wet-suit. The suit was bright red, and a little too big
because they didn’t carry her size. Anything under 5’5” had to be special
ordered. She did, however, manage to get a matching arm holster for her
survival dagger.

Red still managed to line up
pool-side with her roommate a minute before class started. “This, I can do,”
she bragged.

“This class is just about
surviving, chica,” Risa whispered, pointing to an older man in the lifeguard
chair. Instructor Rogers was sipping a mug of coffee with the Navy Seal logo on
the side. “The instructor is a hardcore mil. Someone complained about eating
termites on the field trip and he made them do it twice. Smile and nod, got it?
By the way, your books arrived. They’re on your bed. We don’t have enough shelf
space for all of them. I don’t know why you didn’t just order e-books like
everyone else.”

“You have paper books!”

“For engineering diagrams and
tables. I need to lay them out when I’m doing the problems. They don’t show up
worth spit on those little screens, and I hate flipping back and forth.”

Merrick, the crew-cut she’d met on
the shooting range swaggered by, and sniffed, “I smell cherry.” He pointed to
the bright red suit and snorted.

Risa hissed, “Water off your back.
He’s a rescue diver who helps out.”

The mil grinned at Red. “Cherry, are
you a fag hag or are you ready for a real man?”

“If I have to choose, then the
first one,” said the new girl.

“The cherry says she wants to
complete her impact training and get it out of the way,” Merrick said loudly.
“How about it, sir? We still have the gear set up.”

Mr. Rogers nodded. “Better to get
it out of the way now. We’ve got two others who haven’t passed yet. You know
who you are. Suit up.”

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,”
joked one student.

Red and two others spent the next
twenty minutes getting fitted with bio-monitors, strapping into the cockpit
simulator, and loading the large fuselage into position. She video-logged the
whole experience. Toby, the young man beside her, was terrified. “This is my
third time. The first time, they put the dye in the water that turns violet
when it comes in contact with urine. I thought something went wrong with the crash
and I was bleeding to death.”

The tech performing their safety
check said, “The second time, he opened the cargo hatch by mistake and dumped a
hundred kilos of simulated spare parts on himself and another gentleman. The
other candidate refused to test with him again. Uh . . . miss, I don’t know if
this dagger is legal.”