School for Sidekicks (20 page)

“I don't know,” I replied equally quietly. “But is there any chance you guys could get me down?”

Blindmark shook his head and tapped the robot on the biceps. “This is a Mark IX attack drone, designed to spar with heavyweights like Captain Commanding or Burnish. Short of disassembly, none of us is going to get it to let go of anything it doesn't want to.”

“I don't understand,” Backflash said as she walked in through the same door that Ivanova had used. “It shouldn't have reacted like that at all.”

Ivanova's hair flared wildly, but she took a deep breath and spoke calmly. “Again, I ask: Why is it that you are interfering in my carefully calibrated training schedule? None of these children should even be in the same room with a Mark IX, much less one programmed to simulate the powers and temperament of Spartanicus. They are still untrained—fragile. They could have been hurt or even killed.”

Backflash ignored Ivanova in favor of the combat drone. “Chest port open,” she ordered, and the whole front of its torso swung to one side. “Skull port as well.” The face flipped up and out of the way, exposing a sensor array. “Oh, and drop the boy.”

It did, and I landed hard on my shoulders before flopping onto my back. I ought to have seen it coming and rolled out of the fall, but I'd been so busy twisting around to look into the thing's chest cavity that I simply didn't have time to react. Before I could even try to get up, Ivanova was there, kneeling beside me.

She put one hand firmly on my chest. “Your foot, I heard the break on my monitor. How is it?”

I wiggled my toes, and found that the pain had faded, though my boot felt a bit tight. Quite possibly that had to do with the increasingly familiar sensation of scabweb wrapping my injuries. “My healing mojo kicked in, I'll be fine.”

“That is good.” She caught my hand and pulled me to my feet as she returned to her own. “We will discuss your actions in the session tomorrow.” She swung a hand around to take the others in. “All of your actions. Given the circumstances and the surprise, you did … not badly. But that is for later. For now, you are free to use the rest of the hour however you might like. I need to have words with Madame Backflash.”

The director of OSIRIS was neck deep in the chest of the Mark IX, and had been mumbling to herself the whole time. Things like, “Shouldn't have reacted like that. Not in the programming. Why not simulated lethal force? Some sort of feedback loop with the preserved imprint from Bittersharp? Self-connect to the newsweb? It makes no sense.”

Professor Ivanova broke in then, tapping her on the shoulder. “What makes no sense, Madame Director, is your interfering in a training sequence without at least warning me.”

Backflash pulled her head out of the bot's chest. “Don't be silly, Irina. It makes perfect sense. If you'd known about it, your reactions might have given something away to the trainees, and I wanted total surprise. I've been working on the Spartanicus emulator on and off for years, and it's a rare opportunity for me to spring it unanticipated on someone who's actually faced off with him and lived. I couldn't pass it up. The risk of permanent injury or fatalities was acceptably low given the potential rewards.”

Ivanova took a deep breath like a woman about to start shouting, then paused and looked over at us. “Did I not tell you all that you were free?”

I nodded and saw several of the others doing the same. “You did.”

“So, be free. Fly away. Shoo. Do whatever you want as long as it is not here.” She pointed firmly at the exit and this time waited to see us start moving before she returned part of her attention to Backflash.

I wanted to drag my feet and listen in some more, but it was quite clear that we'd be in trouble if we hung around even one minute longer.

“What was that about?” NightHowl asked as we went through the door.

I shrugged. “Beyond what we overheard? Who knows.”

We turned left, still in a loose group, passing down another of the moon base's endless corridors. This one had heavy blast doors spaced out along both sides, each leading into another of the school's battle simulators. Several of them were designed to provide unusual environments, including the tank, which allowed for various combinations of underwater and boat fights.

“We've only got about twenty minutes of free time,” said Emberdown. “That's barely enough time for a real vid. So, what do we do with ourselves?”

I'd been idly watching the occupancy lights on the sim rooms as we passed them. Red for in use, dangerous, do not enter. Yellow for occupied, limited entry. Green for available. Now I had an awesome idea.

“What about that?” I pointed at a particularly large door ahead on the right, its green light shining away. It was the low-grav simulator, which was one of the only places where the tiny moon's gravity acted the way it ought to. “Speedslick could run and grab us a volleyball or something.”

I'd barely finished speaking when Jeda blurred away down the corridor, the greens and golds of his costume flickering now and then as his powers hiccupped and he briefly slowed.

“I don't know,” said Emberdown. “We're not really supposed to use the sims without permission.”

NightHowl rolled her eyes. “Did Professor Ivanova tell us we could do whatever we want, or did she not?”

“That's good enough for me,” said Blurshift, unlocking the vault-style door latch. “I'm in.”

Emberdown looked at Blindmark, but the other older student shrugged. “Why not? We do sort of have permission. I think that's enough to keep us out of real trouble as long as nobody gets hurt.”

“All right.” Emberdown sighed. “But let's try to be careful, okay?”

“Of course,” replied NightHowl. “I'm the soul of caution. Now, how do you get the holo-projectors to cycle random environments?”

Thirty seconds later we were playing a sort of mishmash of dodgeball, tag, and kill the quarterback in very low gravity on what looked like the surface of Earth's moon. Two minutes after that, the environment shifted to something that could have come straight out of the Colliding Galaxies vid franchise complete with starfighter flybys. And, two minutes after
that
, we were duking it out in what could best be described as a miniature Tokyo scaled as though we were all two hundred feet tall.

Totally awesome!

*   *   *

The next afternoon, when we arrived for Professor Ivanova's class, I asked her, “What happened yesterday with the Spartanicus simulation?”

Her hair flared for a moment and she said something in gutter Russian under her breath, then she shrugged. “According to our director, I am not needing to know. So, we will talk about what you did right and what you did wrong, and then we will not talk about it anymore to spare my blood pressure. Start with your approach. Emberdown, you begin. How could you have done better yesterday?”

“Not dying without so much as laying eyeballs on my killer?” she said glumly.

Ivanova frowned. “Well, yes, this is truth. But it is not all the truth. You died in part because you were not paying proper attention. None of you were; I will show you.” She waved her hand and a miniature version of the scene from yesterday sprang up in holographic projection.

“Here is the cityscape. As you are walking along the street, do you see where Spartanicus entered?”

“No,” said Emberdown. “I
still
don't see … wait. On top of that skyway! No wonder I missed him.”

Professor Ivanova nodded. “Now you see why I always, always tell you to keep an eye on the sky. You cannot trust that Hoods will approach you on your level. Not even the ones who don't fly. Blindmark, what should you and Emberdown have done differently yesterday?”

“Besides keeping an eye out upward? To start with, I should have kept shifting my focus. It's fatiguing to keep jumping eyeballs, but it gives me a much better chance of spotting someone coming in. I know it wouldn't have worked on the Mark IX since it doesn't actually have eyes, but in a real-world situation, I might even hop into an enemy's point of view by chance, and that'd come in very handy.”

“Good, what else? You and Emberdown made one critical mistake none of the others did.”

“Don't freeze,” he said harshly. “I should have grabbed a piece of cover like NightHowl and Meerkat or faded instead of simply standing there like an idiot.”

“Excellent.” She turned to Emberdown. “Why did you two freeze where the others did not?”

Emberdown raked her fingers nervously across the top of her short afro. “Honestly?”

Ivanova quirked an eyebrow. “Of course.”

“Too much time in the sims, I think. The young 'uns are only just getting their first experience in the battle simulations. They don't know what should and shouldn't be there. That green flash freaked me out. It's Spartanicus's signature attack, and I knew that you wouldn't throw the heaviest of heavyweight Hoods at a team with four first years in it. So I didn't know what was going on, and instead of reacting to an attack, I stood there like an idiot trying to figure out what was up with the sim.”

Ivanova turned her gaze on Blindmark.

“That's me, too, though with less thinking and more panicking,” he said, his voice small. “Honestly, it's embarrassing to get shown up by a bunch of rookies like that.”

“Any conclusions?” she asked, widening the question to include all of us.

I raised my hand cautiously.

“Meerkat?”

“Sims ought to have a wider range of scenarios? You know, to throw in more unexpected stuff.” It sounded kind of feeble when I said it out loud.

“Yes, they ought, though that's not what I was thinking. Anyone else?”

Blurshift spoke up. “More real-world training? Get out of the sims and into the field.”

“Very good,” said Ivanova. “Also, you did the best of any of the group yesterday. Your shifting powers are not strong enough for full-on transformation into other shapes, but you made excellent use of what you had, first blending into the crowd and then working your way closer to Spartanicus under cover of camouflage. Much smarter than what Meerkat pulled.”

She turned a very hard look on me. “What you did was brave, but stupid. Very, very stupid. You could have died yesterday, and not merely in simulation. A Mark IX is too dangerous to be loosed on any of you. Though you had no way of knowing that was what you faced, you all made a huge mistake yesterday and I will be marking most of you D-minus for Unscheduled Extra-Credit Sim Spartanicus-Alpha. All except for Meerkat, who gets an F.”

“What!” I couldn't help myself. “Why?”

Ivanova's face went as grim as I had ever seen it. “Because yesterday, in simulation, you committed suicide. D-minus for the group, for not doing what you should have done the second you saw Spartanicus—run away! F for the foolishness of attacking him without the slightest hint of a plan. I will
not
see my students throw their lives away.”

“But—” I began, but Ivanova's hair flared and she made a sharp chopping motion that made me bite off my argument.

“No buts. Yesterday you did something stupid by needlessly charging someone who could kill you as easily as slapping a mosquito. You chose to pursue conflict in a no-win situation. Do not repeat your mistake by arguing with your teacher. Unless perhaps you would like to add detention to your F? Understood?”

I nodded. I didn't like it, but I did it.

 

16

The Foxman Theme

Then, it was Friday morning, and I hadn't heard another thing from Foxman, or from Mike
about
Foxman. I was beginning to think I'd been dumped as a sidekick. But, as Combat with Dinnerware finished up, Mike waved at me to stay after.

“I had a little chat with Rand this morning,” said Mike. “He says he'll have the
Flying Fox
waiting to pick you up at OSIRIS headquarters at four thirty.” Mike frowned. “I might have yelled a bit, and I don't think he much approved, since he sounded like five miles of bad road.”

His frown deepened. “I know that he's reformed himself, but I'm still not entirely comfortable about handing you over for an entire weekend. On the other hand, I don't know what else to do if we're going to salvage your chances at becoming a Mask.” Mike sighed. “He did seem on top of things the day he asked for you to come intern with him, but I just don't know.”

“I'll be all right,” I promised.

Honestly, Foxman wasn't nearly as hard to deal with as figuring out what do about my parents. I still didn't know what to say in my e-mail to them, and with each passing day it got harder. Now I had to figure out how to explain why it had taken me so long to get back to them in addition to what to say to Mom's e-mails to me. Things had gotten so bad on that front that even opening my e-mail program made me want to barf. It was much easier to simply pretend everything was fine at home and not deal with it, except when I remembered. And then it wasn't.

“Evan, are you all right?” Mike asked, leaning forward.

“Yeah, I'm fine. Shouldn't have eaten so much for breakfast is all. It'll get better in a bit.”

“Ah, I see.” His eyes met mine. I could tell he didn't believe me, but he didn't push it. “Make sure you remember to bring your uniform along when you head for OSIRIS. Oh, and your laptop and a couple changes of clothing, since you'll be staying through Sunday evening. Rand and I put together a schedule and duties list for your internship when we had our little chat. I'll write it up and get it e-mailed to you when I'm done with classes this afternoon.”

I flinched when he said the word
e-mail
but I don't think he noticed. “Thanks, Mike, I really appreciate it. Is there anything else you need to talk to me about?”