Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) (24 page)

“You wouldn’t be interested,” Red
asserted.

“Try me.”

Shrugging, the girl pulled out her
goggles and fed her homework problem to the black data wall. “I guess the information
in the exercises is public knowledge. Once you solve it, problem one shows that
it takes eight minutes for a missile to get from the enemy launchers to the
artifact if they’re armed and ready.

“Problem two demonstrates that, in
the best-case scenario, it takes
fifteen
minutes from the Lagrange point
to the artifact with matching velocities. I had to figure it three times
because Z kept telling me I come in too hot on the approach and can’t assume
gravity.”

“He knew you wouldn’t believe the
answer unless you worked it out for yourself,” said Risa.

Herk pointed his beer bottle. “The
implied question becomes: how do we get from the L point to the artifact before
they kill us?”

Red said, “Park, how much did you
say we could get out of the drive modifications you were planning?”

“20 percent.”

“That gets us to twelve minutes.
The question is: how do we get that extra four minutes?”

“It’s more than that,” the botanist
claimed. “We have to plan to disembark into the artifact before the missile
hits. Just landing isn’t good enough.”

Auckland poured himself a drink of
the wine in a jelly jar. “Mmm. Sweet.”

Herk shook his head. “Just piling
out takes under forty seconds. Plus time to open the artifact.”

Red said, “If you let me out first,
I can talk Sirius into letting me inside in under a minute.”

Yvette raised an eyebrow. Sojiro
nodded. “If she says she can do something, she can. I’ll help by activating the
controls remotely. I need to practice to build up my range.”

“Getting out of the craft, you risk
touching the drive fields. Boom,” said Park.

Herk winced. “He’s right. Emergency
shut-down drills for the Icarus generator take at least thirty minutes.”

Risa tapped her roommate’s pad,
found a schematic for the
Half-Pint
, and projected it on the screen as
well. “If we plant explosives, we can blow the two field generators and propel
them out of range.”

“We buy a one-way ticket,” said Auckland. “That’s rugged.”

“After we transmit the data, there’s
no reason to shoot at us,” Red reasoned. “A rescue mission can pick us up later.”

“Or we could land Sirius on the
moon,” theorized Toby.

“Then we have five minutes to make
up,” Red said, resigned to the task. “We just figure out a way to go almost
twice as fast.”

“Non,” said Yvette. “The real
problem is acceleration. Changing velocity this fast would make you into a
crepe. I would put the upper limit at five gs.”

Auckland nodded. “Good catch.”

Risa suggested, “We could wrap
everyone in a cocoon of Super-goo to reduce the effects.”

“It’ll slow down the exit even
more, but we’ll manage,” Herk agreed.

Everyone was staring at the screen
when Zeiss returned. “Ah! Nobody else gets to play with computers until after
the meal! You made me shut down.”

“They why did you give us the
problem?” demanded Red.

“So you could solve it in time to
give design changes to Smith’s team to incorporate into the next prototype.”

“You can do that?” asked the nurse,
impressed.

“Sure. We’re going to be
the
team. I could solve it in a couple minutes if Z would let me,” grumbled Red. “Dr.
Marsh said I could do it if Z supervised, and we have all the equipment right
here.”

Zeiss enforced the dictum. “Food
and conversation first.”

****

Green sent the voicemail, “I vote
yes on Yvette. Start without me,” and texted a web link for the fan photos.

The nurse got along well with the
team. They chatted as they prepared the meal together. At one point, she asked,
“What does Toby cook?”

Risa shook her head. “Nothing, but
he
always cleans up without a complaint.”

Herk, the target of this comment,
protested, “Who carried the picnic table, all the coolers, and those heavy
pans?”

“I hate cleaning,” Yvette
confessed.

“Me, too,” admitted Zeiss. “That’s
why I order pizza when it’s just me. Before we break up into groups, we all
need to vote.”

“One more question. I looked at
your file. Why did you get divorced?” asked Red.

“That’s kind of personal,” Zeiss
interrupted.

Yvette put down her empty glass,
and Toby filled it again. “We’re friends now. There’s not much to tell. I was
married to a charming medical student who discovered narcotics and lost his license.
The student loans were crushing on my salary and still he spent money faster
than I could earn it.”

“Sorry,” Red said sheepishly. “Any
other questions? All in favor?”

Everyone raised their hand, Red
last. Green never returned for the meal.

Zeiss announced, “Mr. Green’s proxy
makes it unanimous. She’s in.”

The girl in the flight suit glared
at the TA, “You knew this would happen.”

“You object?” asked Zeiss.

“No, damn you. No one could,” Red
complained. “She’s perfect.”

“Well, it’s official if Yvette
decides she can put up with us.”

“I could not decide otherwise,”
replied Yvette. “Mr. Zeiss is paying my salary for the year.”

Red raised an eyebrow.

“It was only fair; your skills are
in demand,” Zeiss insisted. “Please don’t let that sway you: the EU has agreed
to reimburse me if you pass your first year. The team will help you with your
classes regardless.”

Yvette pursed her lips. “If this
young lady can do half of what she brags, I will join. But she’ll need to prove
this with a demonstration.”

Zeiss held out his hand, “Give me
your badge.” Yvette did so, and he swiped it through his pad. “I do this so
often, security gave me write access. You’re now Sirius three clearance.”

The nurse furrowed her brow.

He restored the previous diagrams
on the fourth wall and then said to Red, “Get something to write with.”

“I need a grease pencil!” Red
shouted to the group. Yvette pulled out an eyebrow liner. “That’ll work.”

The girl clipped herself into the
monitors that Sojiro had used. “Gather everyone close. I’ll need your
brainpower.”

“Herk will need to stand guard in
the hall so that no one else wanders into the zone during the experiment,”
Zeiss ordered. “We don’t want you to spike.”

“Could I tap you, too, Z? Please?”
she batted her eyes. “You want her to join, don’t you?”

He looked embarrassed. “One minute.
No more. I’ll need to prepare. Auckland, you’re on monitor duty. If she hits
high-gamma, pull the plug. Sojiro, you film the experiment. Yvette, your job is
to help her relax and ease into a period of mandatory non-thought afterward.
She may have to breathe through some pain.”

“I do this frequently,” the nurse
admitted, smirking. “But why?”

“Strenuous mental talent activity
releases something like the lactic acid physical exertion does in the muscles.
Mira’s going to extend herself and borrow computing power from all of us. It
always causes a strain on the neural net of the linker.” Zeiss sat cross-legged
on the floor, and the girl stood in front of the problem wall. “Begin in one
minute.”

Sojiro nodded and labeled the
recording. At the one-minute mark, he said, “Go.”

Red’s tipped her head back and took
a deep breath. Her eyes darted around the wall as connections formed. Frantically,
she sketched formulae and drew a giant tetrahedron around the space ship.
Tensor mechanics matrices flew into existence.

“Thirty second mark, a few blue
flickers,” warned Auckland, the doctor at the monitors. He whispered to the
nurse. “I’ve never seen activity like this; it’s a mountain range.”

“Young’s constant for steel and
density?” Red asked.

Risa reeled off approximations.

“Not good enough,” Red complained,
scratching out numbers. “Kevlar?”

“Carbon nanotubes made in space,”
Risa suggested, reciting a new set of numbers.

“Fifteen,” said Auckland, counting
down.

Red’s borrowed eyebrow pencil
blurred so fast, she snapped off the tip. “Lip stick!”

The nurse handed her a tube and Red
kept scribbling down the wall and onto the floor.

“One . . . end,” announced Auckland.

Red immediately reclined on the
floor, breathing heavily. “Better than I remember!”

“Shh,” insisted Auckland, turning
on instrumental music while Yvette massaged her head, shoulders, and neck.

Zeiss opened a green tea and handed
it to her. “Drink, don’t think.”

After ten minutes, while Sojiro
took still photos of the wall, Zeiss said, “Just one drive makes emergency braking
difficult, so Smith put one on each end, like a dumbbell. This does the trick.
Because field generators cost about half-a-billion each, we stopped there. Why
do you have four, Red?”

Eyes closed, the girl said, “The
unused Icarus drive at the front creates a gravity field half the magnitude of
the thrust.”

“Anti-gravity?” asked Yvette.

“More like gravity reduction,”
Zeiss explained. “Cassavettis proposed a Bucky-ball with a hundred, so you
could travel in any direction. Unfortunately, the fields repel. Even two
moderate fields require steel to anchor them. A hundred would overcome the
molecular cohesion of the ship.”

“That’s why I went with only four,”
Red whispered. “It’s still a balanced, ideal solid, but we can make it work.”

“Only two billion?” squeaked Risa.

“They’ll get cheaper with
mass-production,” Red declared.

“But two in front still balance the
two in back: no gain,” Zeiss pointed out.

Red shook her head. “Only the point
in back is active. The other three are buffers. We could accelerate eight times
faster. Forty gs would feel like five.”

“Unless one component fails,” Zeiss
countered. “Then it’s a spectacular mess.”

Red shrugged. “That’s a problem for
the engineers. The goo will protect us for small fluctuations.”

“She did it,” Yvette said in
wonder. “She’s going to find a way to land on the artifact. You all are. I’d be
a fool to miss this. I’m in.”

That night and the next morning, Zeiss made incredible
progress on the hunt. Using the pop star’s original photos, he detected several
covert messages. He couldn’t crack them yet, but the TA was able to plot who
was sending ciphers to where. Finding originals for the more risqué photos was
more problematic. He copied each coded message to his desktop as he revealed
them. Red-eyed, he showed up ten minutes early to Daniel’s room so he could
tell Trina the news. “I’ve pinpointed two enemy hubs: Tasmania and Bangkok. I’m zeroing in on all transmissions to those sites. Lazlo and Merrick were regulars,
as were several maintenance workers who’ve since left. I have one active mole I’m
tracking—a guard by the name of Carmine.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?” the
platinum-blonde professor demanded, pulling out her phone. “Taggart, get me a
location on Carmine. Now.”

While she waited, Zeiss continued.
“The early encryption was much weaker, but the strength increased exponentially
a month before I arrived. I’m hoping that by analyzing enough of the earlier messages,
I can crack the later ones.”

Explosions rocked the island. The
dining room chandelier swayed. Lights flickered. Alarms jangled in the
distance. To find out what was happening, Daniel’s consciousness hopped around
the island without his body to hold it back.

Trina slid into a set of body armor
and smart goggles from the closet. She strapped a pistol to her hip and a
commando dagger to her left arm. Opening his eyes, Daniel said, “Fire is
pouring from the data storage areas in the underground. People can’t get to the
evacuation boats through the smoke.” Then her husband rolled his eyes back and
vanished into the chaos again.

Tossing Zeiss a shotgun from the
same closet, she ordered, “Put Daniel in the lifeboat, kill anyone who comes
through that door.”

“We can gather everyone in the
cafeteria. There’s a tunnel . . .”

“I’ll handle the children, but I
can only do that if he’s safe.”

“Yes, sir.”

As he loaded his unresponsive boss
to the tiny lifeboat, he saw it was only big enough for two. Zeiss thought
about Mira, but he couldn’t bring her here without violating orders. If they
did need to evacuate, Trina or he would have to travel with Professor Sorenson.
Further, the enemy had security camera access and might be monitoring his
position. Trina seemed to think assassination was a possibility. Mira needed to
be far away from here, safe. The office in the secret sublevel had a similar
escape pod.

He fumbled his pad on and waited
for it to respond. Zeiss had an urgent message waiting, but because of the
disaster, he had no read access. Desperately, he punched Red’s access code. She
answered, “Would you people leave me alone? It’s not even six o’clock yet, for
God’s sake.”

“Mira, I need you to do me a
board-level favor.” Her first name woke her in a hurry. He told a little white
lie. “Go to my lower office and disconnect my computer from the net. There’s
been a pretty big distraction and I’m tied up.”

“Sure, Z. On it.”

“Take Sonrisa and weapons. Don’t
stop to change. Call me when you arrive.”

He hung up to phone Yvette. She was
awake but answered the phone in her native language. In English, he said,
“Zeiss. Underground explosions. Go next door to the clinic and help triage.”

“Oui.”

Next, he called Herkemer. “It’s Z.
Help with the data storage explosions.”

“Already on it,” said the bomb tech,
panting as he ran, “Get Risa—”

“Done.”

“Thanks. Over and out.”

Red rang his pad. “Mission accomplished,” she said, out of breath. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, hand the phone to Risa.”

The Latina replied soon after.
“Yeah, Z?”

“Things are crazy. I promised Herk
I’d keep you two safe. If anyone comes after you or there’s another explosion,
you ladies get in the lifeboat.”

“That’s sweet, Z, but—”

He pushed an override button,
cancelling Red’s visitor code for the sublevel door. “You’re locked in for the
duration. Sorry.” He disconnected, wincing at the anticipated reaction.

Daniel stirred. “Whales fleeing the
sounds. Hurry!” He reached for a stack of white boxes with brown
lettering—morphine. Gritting his teeth, the professor triggered his own theta
state to block the impending pain from overexertion without the mental buffer the
whales provided.

Zeiss fumbled a box open as he voice-dialed
Sojiro. The box held an array of glass ampules. The artist opened with a
static-filled, “What’s happening?”

“Make the island follow Silver
Dancing,” the TA ordered cryptically, but the connection terminated before he
could confirm. The pad displayed the symbol for no signal. Of course, the
computer storage center was on fire. He’d done as much as he could and more
than he’d been authorized to.

He pulled out a single container of
morphine. How much should he dose Daniel with? The instructions showed him how
to use the injector but not how much. Was it a day’s worth or one shot in the
container? “I should’ve looked that up on my pad first,” he told himself. “Now
I can’t leave to ask anyone.” He attached the heart monitors first to make sure
he didn’t put his boss in a coma. Next, he stalled by propping Daniel’s head up
with a pillow and covering him with a blanket. Finding Daniel’s vein and
psyching himself up took five minutes. Deciding that too little medicine was
better than too much, he applied one-fourth of the contents. The vital signs
muted a little but stayed in the normal range. He re-capped the needle to reuse
in four hours.

Groggy from almost no sleep the
night before, Zeiss crouched in front of the lifeboat door and waited for an
attack. No one could help him and he couldn’t aid his friends. The part where
the plan ended was always the hardest. That was why his mother had taught him
Go: waiting was an acquired skill.

****

Trina returned four hours later,
clothes smudged with soot. Her pistol hung limply from her hand, forgotten. She
barred the door and started peeling off clothing. Zeiss stood, although his
circulation-starved legs protested. “I need to check on—”

“Sit!” she shouted, pointing the
gun like a finger. She checked Daniel over and nodded. “You did well. You
could’ve used the whole ampule; he has a high tolerance now. But I’m glad you
didn’t because I don’t want to have to wean him off the drugs again. Last time,
withdrawal was brutal.”

“In the orbital?”

She nodded, holstering the gun.
Whispering in Daniel’s ear, she said, “Forever begins today.”

His lids fluttered open. “Headache.
The whales came back?”

Trina shook her head. “Our
machine-interface wizard wrote a new algorithm to track and predict the
movements of our youngest whale, reasoning that the mother wouldn’t be far
behind. It’ll save us thousands of gallons of fuel a year.”

“Remind me to buy Sojiro an art
gallery,” Daniel muttered.

“He’d settle for getting his comic
published,” Zeiss said, handing Daniel a cup of juice and a handful of pills.
“Take your meds and some aspirin.”

After Trina and the TA guided
Daniel to his bed, the two snuck out, closing the door behind.

“You,” Trina said, poking Zeiss in
the chest with her forefinger. “I came in here fully planning to roast your ass
for this whole fiasco, but just about everything that went right today had your
fingerprint on it, too. Yvette called up several students with medical training
before the phones crashed. Triage services were ready before the first casualty
arrived. Herk pulled in military firefighters who knew what they were doing.”

“What’d you find in Lazlo’s
personal storage?”

“Destroyed. He had a couple of long
video files we might be able to recover a few frames from, but I doubt it.”

“Sex videos? Meetings with the
enemy contact?”

“No way to know. I just have one
bone left to pick with you.”

“Mira?” he guessed.

“What?”

“Mira called you, pissed off,
right?”

“No, the phones are still down. She
can just stew in silence for a while as far as I’m concerned. I’ll find her
after I shower and eat. Some of us didn’t get breakfast or lunch.”

“Breakfast? Crap, I forgot. No
wonder I’m shaking. I thought it was the adrenaline and lack of sleep.”

“You can sleep the rest of the day
and have dinner on us, but first you need to walk me through what happened with
Carmine. Who else knew you were onto him?”

“No one. I stayed up until I found
him, which was all night.”

She paced. “How did you find him?”

“Sojiro found that the messages
were being hidden in photos. Red showed me how and which ones to target.”

“Someone knew it was just a matter
of time after that and took measures,” Trina reasoned. “Your signature was the
last one to read the data logs that Carmine destroyed. He tried to escape on a
fishing boat, but we sank it before it could get close enough.”

“So he’s in the brig?”

“When we closed in to cuff him, he
started convulsing. No one touched him. There are no marks, but he’s in a coma.
He was reporting to someone just before we arrived.”

“I pulled the top of the dandelion
off again and didn’t get the root.”

“We can still catch the enemy if we
know who warned them. Who did you tell?”

Zeiss listed all the team members.
“But I swept for bugs and cameras. We were clean.”

“It’s a human link. We track them
all, you included, for every minute from the time you discovered the messages
until the explosion. Taggart’s waiting for you.”

After he left, Trina showered, ate,
and fell asleep next to her husband. Since everyone trusted Red, she was the
last person who security tracked. By noon, their prime suspect was Green. He’d
gone to the women’s dorm as predicted, visited Kaguya, and vanished after
passing through security.

“Who worked that security desk last
night?” asked Zeiss.

“Carmine,” said Taggart. They ran
to the clinic to see if their witness had turned up among the casualties.

Dr. Marsh spoke with them
personally and looked at the photo on Taggart’s pad. “He wasn’t one of our smoke
inhalation victims. Wait,” he said, checking his own log sheets. “Here it is. Ms.
Mori said she sensed pain radiating from one of the storage rooms this
afternoon and discovered your navigator tied up in the corner. He’s been injected
with hallucinogens and beaten.”

When Zeiss reached the room, Kaguya
was already at the man’s bedside. Green was whimpering something to her like,
“Pet the bunny.”

She soothed him, stroking his hair,
and saying, “Yes, you can pet the bunny when they let you out of here. You were
so brave.”

The TA said, “Green. God, I’m
sorry. What happened?”

“You never came looking for me,”
his former student mourned. “They beat me for your crypto information, and it took
almost a day for you to find me?”

“Green, I had no idea. I thought
you were having fun being with a star and didn’t want to eat with us.”

“Some valued team member I am. Do
you even know my first name?” the man snapped. Before Zeiss could respond, the
man ranted, “Why isn’t Red visiting? Is she doing something more important than
my bleeding? I’m done with your team. Kaguya has an opening on hers, and she
cares
about her people.”

“You’re disturbing the patient,”
Dr. Marsh whispered to Zeiss. “The commander can talk to him, but you should
probably leave.”

Depressed, Zeiss trudged to the
library elevator and badged into the sublevel. The door had been disassembled
from the inside. A note was pinned to his mutilated computer chair. “This is
what I’m doing to your ass when I find you–R.”

Eventually, he tracked Sojiro down.

“You don’t look so good, Z.”

“Better than Green. I just need
about twelve hours of sleep. The black hats roughed him up pretty bad. He blames
me and Red, and he’s quit the team over it. She’s already on the warpath
because I locked her and Risa in the safe room.”

The artist shuddered. “Bad juju.”

“I’m going to be sleeping in the
locker room for weeks.”

“You were kind of sexist, sending
Herk and me into battle and the ladies into the tower to be protected.”

“No. I sent Yvette to the clinic to
help.”

“Uh-oh. You’d better hide here
while I smooth things out with her.”

He took off his workout shoes and
fell asleep on top of Sojiro’s sheets.

When he woke up, Mira was standing
over him, livid. “Thirty seconds.”

Zeiss sat up and shook his head to
clear it. “You’re the most important person in the world. We had to keep you
safe from the terrorists and near a lifeboat. Even if the whole island sank, you
had to survive.”

“And I don’t get a choice?” she
shouted in his face.

“No,” he said without blinking.

“Aaarrrgh!” she shouted, kicking
the door open so hard the knob put a hole in the wall. She faced that wall and
struggled to control her breathing.

“You need to talk to Dr. Marsh
about anger management,” he suggested.

“Don’t tell me what I need. I just
lost a team member because of your interference,” she said to the wall. Walking
out the door, she growled, “Don’t bother coming to dinners anymore. I’m replacing
you as our adviser.”