Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (13 page)

When Mira wandered to the kitchen
for a break, Smith followed. So the others in the next room couldn’t hear it,
he said, “You’re a great kid and I appreciate the math help you’ve been giving
the theory guys. But you’re not looking so hot. In fact, if you were one of my
kids, I’d admit you for suicide watch.” That got a reaction. “I know the stare.
Your parents pulled me out of a dark place and gave me a job, the best ever.
Anything I can do? I mean
anything
.”

She could feel his sincerity.

“You can’t tell anyone else,” Mira
insisted.

He agreed. That’s when the whole
plot spilled out. He didn’t interrupt; he just listened until she was finished.

Smith replied, “I’ll do it. You sign
the authorizations M R Hollis. That’s ambiguous enough that they’ll think your
dad signed them before he died—his last request. Amy will push them through as
a tribute. I’ll need to tell her some of it.”

Mira nodded.

“Could you do me a favor?” asked
PJ. “Mary, my second girl, is about your age. There’s an exclusive finishing
school she’s dying to attend, but my blood’s not blue enough. If we’re going to
fool Rebecca, she could take your place in Paris.”

“That’s not a favor, it’s a gift,”
she insisted. “And it’s too dangerous.”

“Mary’s had high security her whole
life, just like you. But I think the stakes are high enough that we have to
risk it, for all our sakes.”

“Do you think we have a chance?”

He smiled. “There’s a reason your
father named you Miracle.”

Sunday night, at 0400, security knocked on Zeiss’s door.
Commander Taggart himself stood in front of the peephole. “Yes, sir?” said the
TA in plaid bottoms and a T-shirt that displayed ‘and God said’ followed by the
equations for ‘let there be light’.

“Mr. Z, did you reserve a
simulation room for the entire day and night?”

The teacher wiped his face. “Yeah.
Um . . . in case Auckland’s roommate locked him out again. What’s wrong?”

“There’s an enormous power drain
coming from the area. The computations have pulled in nearly every machine we
have. The air conditioners are spiking and the costs aren’t covered by the
fifty dollar deposit.”

He was awake now. “Shut it down.”

“We can’t get in, sir. It’s sealed
under a security level so high I can’t even read the level,” said the head
guard, polite but unhappy. “We were going to use the fire-safety override but
we wanted to come to you first since your department is paying for it.”

“I know who it must be. I’ll take
care of it right away.”

As the two men jogged to the
simulation room that had been their cinema, Zeiss asked, “Out of curiosity, how
many money are we talking for the compute time?”

“Each hour it’s racking up more
than I make in a month, sir.”

The TA ran the rest of the way.
When he reached the door, Zeiss badged in and told the guard, “Wait out here,
please.” He left the door ajar.

“Miss Benson?” he said politely. When
she didn’t reply, he yelled, “Red!”

Startled, she raised her goggles
up. “What are you doing here?” After a pause, she added, “in your pajamas.”

“Suspend,” he called. As the room’s
nominal owner, the room obeyed. “What’s so important that you stayed up all
night?”

She wavered a little, lack of sleep
catching up. “After the party, I felt guilty that I hadn’t done anything on the
project in weeks. We need another person this semester if we’re going to make
the deadline. I thought I’d bring up the new interface Sojiro built for me.”

“Are you okay, Red?”

“Yes. A little stressed, that’s
all.”

“You don’t need to figure this out
tonight,” he said trying to sooth her. “All you
need
to do is eat,
sleep, and not piss off Professor Horvath.”

She nodded. “But I can’t sleep. And
this problem is big.”

He sighed. “If I look at your
problem and tell you something that you haven’t found on your own tonight, will
you agree to go to bed?”

Red handed him the VR goggles. “I
don’t see how.”

He smiled. When he put them on, the
complexity took him aback. “You’re modeling over a dozen dimensions, each in
its own color.”

“Twenty-seven,” she admitted,
obviously woozy.

He stepped to the door and told the
commander, “Her blood sugar’s a little low. Could you please go up and get a
juice for her from the vending machine?” When Taggart raised an eyebrow, Zeiss
admitted, “I need five minutes alone to talk her down. She’s doing a
high-security thesis.”

“Roger.”

“Video surveillance: on. Audio: off,”
Zeiss ordered the room. He left the video on to protect both their reputations.

“The nodes are crew members?” he
guessed when they were alone. She nodded. “The techniques are dazzling. You’re
using what you learned from the Calabi Yau space modeling, but you’ve got an
unbounded factorial.”

“The simulation gets a little
slow.”

“Hah. You used up every computer on
the island and my department’s discretionary budget. This is why you need a
more solid grounding in the basics. First let me prove to you that you’re David
against Goliath. These combinatorics get big fast. Say you’re choosing twenty-seven
people from the sixty freshmen left?”

“Eighteen,” she corrected. When he
appeared puzzled, she remembered, “You can’t repeat that number! It’s above
board-level, it’s whale-level secret.”

“Fine, eighteen, but you’re going
to sleep at the clinic until you see Dr. Marsh.”

“I’m fine!”

“That wasn’t a negotiation,” he
underscored. Zeiss took the silent glare as acknowledgment and continued. “Just
that value is . . .” his mental signature went silent for a few seconds as he
calculated, “about ten to the fifteenth power possibilities.”

“It can’t be that big,” she gasped
and clicked the real answer out on her pad. “Nine times ten to the fourteen.
Are you sure you’re not a quantum talent?”

He shook his head. “I’m just good
at what I do. But your Goliath is even bigger, yes? You then match a different
page to each of the eighteen.”

She was already clicking numbers on
the calculator. “There are only about five million of those combinations. It’s
not so bad.”

“Multiply those values together.
Pretend your brilliant interface could search through a million combinations a
second,” he said generously. “How many years would it take to go through every
combination by brute force?”

She wouldn’t believe it unless she
did the math herself. Even then, she slapped the side of the pad. “A billion
years?”

He nodded. “To be fair, if you used
a thousand state-of-the-art computers, you could get it done in a million or
so. Do you see my point? And what you want is even bigger. The combinations of
individual paragraphs—”

Red collapsed to the floor in
defeat, hands over her face. “Make it stop.”

He knelt and whispered, “I’m
trying. But first you had to admit that your approach wasn’t going to work.
Yes? The trick to taming giants is to catch them when they’re little.”

“Now you’re just messing with me.”

“No. Turn the telescope around, and
anything can look tiny. It’s all how you view the problem. David only needed
one little river stone for Goliath.”

“And one each for his brothers,” grumbled
Red. Zeiss seemed surprised that she knew the story that well. “How do I shrink
it?”

“Critical path analysis. If you
were trying to pack for one of your Saturday exercises, how would you start?”

“Biggest weapon first.”

“And the last thing you put in is
the sun screen.”

She blushed a little at this. Her
nose had been red and flaky for days. “The little bottle can fit in anywhere
around the edges.”

“Now, apply that to the mission.
Start with constraints, not possibilities.”

She rolled her eyes. “The limit is
two separate pages per person. Collective unconscious doesn’t count; they treat
it like VD. Multiple paragraphs on the same page are okay; however, only about
one in ten people can manage that feat. Only one in a hundred can master a
whole page.”

“Stop!” Zeiss insisted. “You’re
exploding again, not limiting.”

“My brain has a flat tire,” she
whimpered. “Can you just tell me the answer and not make me discover it?”

“Mission requirements: you need one
trained psychiatrist to monitor the group for page decay. He’ll be the one with
Ethics so he won’t talk about what you tell him and so the sponsors can trust
him to follow the rules. Yes? With almost any mental page, the person chooses a
second mental. Therapists lean toward Empathy.”

She uncurled as he lectured. “How
do you know all this?”

“Professor Sorenson is training me
to take over the Alien Intro class so he can concentrate on the advanced
students. I’ve read his notes,” the TA pointed out.

“Wait,” she said, hitting record on
her pad.

He repeated the description of the
first mission candidate, then added, “A doctor is also required; this person
comes in with advanced biochemistry for the genetic pages. Since you need
organic biochemistry to understand protein folding, they could be the same
person. Since you already have Auckland for one slot and Toby for the other,
this frees you further. I presume that you won’t be replacing any of the six
members you’ve already chosen?”

She shook her head, a bit awed by
how it was falling into place.

“We’ll leave those specialties as
an exercise for the student and move on to the bridge crew. The navigator will
have the Red Giants page or Ideal Planets, and Quantum Computing. Hollis proved
that when she saved the crew of moon base. The copilot could be a gravity sensor
technician with knowledge of strange attractors for keeping track of
relativistic position and speed.”

“You know about the copilot stuff
from that paper you did,” she exclaimed. “I’ll be pilot and commander. That’s
half the team already.”

“More. You’ll need a scout. Those
have Out of Body or Mind-Machine Interface. You’ll need an Override page for
rescue and repair.”

Red hugged him. “Thank, you’re a
genius. A whale-level genius,” she proclaimed.

Taggart walked in on this display
of exuberance, forcing Zeiss to explain, “I showed her where she slipped a
decimal point.”

“More like fifteen. Now I can
sleep,” she said. When she tried to stand up, she swayed.

“To the clinic,” ordered Zeiss.

After they delivered her, Red fell
asleep before the TA completed the forms. As he left, the commander whispered,
“You remind me of this cartoon I saw once. It’s this big bulldog who has an
itty bitty kitten crawl on his back, fluff it up, and go to sleep.”

Zeiss gave him a colorful
suggestion what he could do with the analogy or any other early morning student
emergency in the future.

Taggart chuckled. “You want to grab
some breakfast, on me?”

“I have to get up in an hour and
start Monday. It’s my busiest day.” The TA grimaced. “Sure. I’d appreciate
that. At some point, I need to find a certain Japanese artist and squeeze him
till he talks.”

The TA went to Sorenson’s pod a few
minutes early that day. He noted Professor Solomon doing Tai Chi with a few
other staff members in the faculty quad, and waved.

Pressing the button on Daniel’s
door, Zeiss said, “Boss, I have a situation report on our special project.” The
couple buzzed him in.

The young instructor started to
describe Red’s bizarre all-nighter, and Daniel burst out laughing. “Just like
her mother.”

“So this obsessive-manic swing is
normal?”

“As we taper her off the
suppressants, yes,” Trina said, coming from the bedroom. She had on a long
shirt, but no bottoms. Zeiss caught a glimpse of her fantastically toned legs
before turning away. Daniel communicated something to her with a glance, and
she ducked back to the bedroom for pants as she concluded, “Unfortunately, the
most we can do is keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t hurt herself too
badly while she tests her new limits.”

“Sorry,” Daniel whispered. “We’ve
started to think of you as family. In here, we don’t always follow social
convention.”

Zeiss waved the apology away. “I’m
intruding. I just thought you needed to know. Can’t we just stop Red from . . .?”
The billionaire laughed even louder. The TA smiled. “You’re right, what was I
thinking?”

“You did a great job on your first
night mania. A natural,” said Daniel.

Trina was reading a medical report
on her pad. “Mira’s experiencing leg cramps, but otherwise fine.”

“Growing pains,” her husband
replied. “Maybe next time she’ll think twice.”

The three left the residence
together.

The Ethiopian almost choked on his
water when he saw Horvath, the head of counter-terrorism, walking beside Zeiss.
He departed soon after, walking to the bench at make-out point. As a female
student jogged past on her morning run, she stopped to tie her laces. He
hissed, “Last night’s power spike must have been a search for
us
. It
started right after the transmission. It’s a good thing I pulled the plug. Get
eyes on that Swiss huntsman, and bring me every minute of video we have since
he’s been on the island. I need to know who else is involved.” She jogged away
without acknowledging.

Enemy agents couldn’t bug Zeiss’s bedroom because it was
locked too well. They tried to put spyware on his pad, but he scrubbed it so
frequently that their efforts came to nothing. They had to settle for a laser
microphone and a team of observers.

Zeiss didn’t get to talk to Sojiro
until lunch. It was a chance meeting outside the dining hall. The artist asked,
“What’s your favorite dessert?”

“Huh?” the TA replied, caught off
guard.

“Our favorite kung fu fighter wants
to know.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Angel food cake.”

The student nodded. The agent
following them whispered, “They’ve exchanged countersigns.”

Zeiss complimented, “Great job on
that search interface.”

“She told you about it?” asked the
Japanese student.

“I’m cleared to board-level,” the
TA said. “About project eighteen . . .”

“She’d kill me and scrub the whole
team if I said a word.”

“Right, I just wanted to warn you,
she has a few refinements to make based on the test run. Stop by the clinic and
see her.”

Soon after Sojiro walked into Red’s
room, Trina snuck out the back. The man with the microphone whispered,
“Confirmed, Sojiro is working for Searcher.”

For the rest of the week, a team
followed Zeiss. His routine bored them silly. His call sign became, “The Monk.”
He was always working or locked in his cloister cell.

During the report, the observer
told Solomon, “Today he did only one thing differently; he wore black pants.
The camera in his office picked up an email title: confirmation for specialized
satellite imaging. It didn’t say where or what. He doesn’t read the good stuff
in unsecured areas.”

“You’re wasting your time. He’s a
machine. He won’t make another mistake this soon. I’ll review the tapes. Switch
to the Japanese boy.”

That Saturday, Red picked up an
angel food mix during her practice flight. Late Sunday afternoon, she whisked
it together in a plastic bowl. Sojiro, helping to decipher the Asian
instructions, said, “I think it says glass or metal bowl.”

“That’s stupid,” countered Red.
“How’s a cake going to know what kind of bowl I mixed it in? I bought the right
cooking pan like Risa told me. What could go wrong?”

Herkemer rigged a solar oven for
them on the patio. The surveillance team took a lot of photos of the device.
The cake, when Red took it out, was flat and rubbery.

Sojiro spotted Zeiss at a distance
and ran to intercept him. The Japanese student whispered, “You don’t like angel
food. Your new favorite is pancakes.”

“How’s the search going?” asked
Zeiss.

“The boss thought you made the
problem too easy. She’s expanded the parameters to cover all the students. It’s
going to take me weeks to handle the increased complexity in my code.”

“You’ll manage it. She’ll find her
man by the end of the semester and everyone will be happy.”

Meanwhile, Red felt terrible about
the ruined cake. First she blamed the foreign instructions, then Herkemer’s
makeshift device. Eventually, Risa explained that the physical properties of
plastic prevented bubbles from forming.

Red only managed to keep from
crying when Zeiss said, “Pancakes? That’s my favorite food of all time! But we
need whipped cream.”

Herk fist bumped him and Sojiro
when the ladies went inside.

“How’s the outlook for the rest of
the semester?” asked the TA.

“Smooth sailing, except the Extreme
Environments final,” said the bomb technician. “I checked out the equipment
they’re loading.”

“Isn’t that cheating?” asked Sojiro.
Toby used the distraction to hide his piece of rubber cake behind a low-water
shrub.

“In the military, we call it
recon,” said Herkemer. “Only idiots choose their gear blind. Anyway, me and the
two ladies will be hip-deep in snow for two days. They’re going to make it
brutal because there are more freshmen than normal this year. Anyone know about
winter survival?”

Zeiss snorted. “In my country, they
teach this in grade school. Don’t they have winter in Poland?”

“I’m with Herk,” said the artist.
“If it’s cold, stay inside. I’m glad I had my test before class started—ocean
survival. We were in a raft and had to conserve water, but I had plenty of fish
and seaweed to eat.”

“I’m a city boy; if I get cold, I
take a bus or call a cab. They don’t have to send dogs to find my body,” said
the Polish man.

“No wonder you guys never won a
war,” the TA quipped.

Herk had him in a headlock when the
girls came back out. Sojiro was trying to tickle him, but it wasn’t working.
“I’m trained to resist questioning,” Zeiss claimed.

“Let him go,” Risa ordered.

The guys stood up straight, hands
at their sides. Herkemer said, “Z just volunteered to tell us about winter
survival.”

“Getting through this is about
shelter and calories—both heat and food. We’ll start with the basics of digging
a snow cave,” the TA began. “Say this cake is a snow bank.”

****

As soon as he could arrange it, Dr.
Solomon ran into Rogers at the restaurant. “I hear you are going behind God’s
back for the final.”

“That’s confidential,” said the
ex-Seal.

“I only mention it because your
assistants were complaining about being overloaded with students.” When the
survival teacher grunted assent, the Ethiopian continued rhythmically. “If you
had need, my
good
friend, Mr. Z, is very skilled at winter travel. He
has hiked many times in the Alps, once on a rescue party,” the spy lied.

“Why isn’t he here talking?”

“Apart from his modesty, he could
not undertake such a worthy venture unless the idea came from his Professor
Sorenson.”

The agent could see the other
instructor’s wheel turning. Rogers said, “The professor owes me one. We’ll see.
Much obliged, Johannes.”

****

A few mornings later, in the gym
changing room, Daniel told Zeiss, “I know we’ve put you under a lot of
pressure, but something new has Trina worried.”

“Orbital lasers?”

“No. Those, we can handle. It’s a
female thing.”

“About this high?” the TA asked,
placing a hand in front of his nipples. “With attitude twice as tall?”

“Yeah, her,” Daniel said shyly. “I
need a big favor. We’d like you to go along on the emergency shadow crew to
monitor her team. If anything goes wrong, I need you to personally do the
extraction.”

“I . . . of course, sir. Who’ll
look after you?”

“I’ll be fine for a few days. Finals
week is slow. I’ll see you get hazard pay and a bonus.”

“You don’t have to. I have friends
on that campout. But they have to agree for me to intervene, because accepting
assistance means they drop from the program and fail.”

Daniel stared at him. “This is more
important that the program.”

“Sir, no offense, but I have at least
three oaths pulling me in different directions. I need a good reason to bend
the others.”

The billionaire gazed over his
shoulder. “You can’t let on I told you to either of them.”

“Who?”

“Trina raised Red until she was
six.” The secret was harder to force out than Daniel anticipated. The deception
of a good friend was even more difficult. “If anything happens to that girl on
your ‘campout’, I’m sleeping in your room.”

So many things made sense now to
Zeiss. The women had a history. The TA nodded. “I’ll walk the line, sir. If she
doesn’t come back, I don’t either.”

“Good man.”

“In the meantime, I need your
people to vet Sojiro for me; third-year clearance should be enough.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you everything, but
if you want Red to stop triggering alarms all over the place, I need a student
helper. He has crazy computer skills, and if I help him, he might tell me about
a few of her schemes before they wake me up in the middle of the night.”

Daniel snorted. “Consider it done.”