Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder)

by Scott Rhine

  Desmond jerked the little girl off her feet as he changed directions.

  As the cook lifted a machine pistol from a camping cooler, Trina dove behind the nearby wooden picnic table. Lead sprayed the area, eliminating the rest of the glass and stinging Desmond’s back and shoulders. He kept running, due to momentum and body armor. Daniel pointed at the propane tank with his pocket laser and shouted, “Penguin!”

  The terrorist stared at him in puzzlement for a few seconds before swiveling the gun barrel toward the billionaire. Then A19 fired on the designated target. The propane tank exploded, taking the entire trailer with it in a fireball. Shrapnel and the cashier’s body were launched across the grassy expanse.

  “Evac!” called the billionaire unnecessarily, hobbling away in the same direction that Desmond had darted.

  “Copy. Evac front gate in T minus four,” came the calm response from the pointer.

  Trina crawled toward the cashier’s body to find a weapon.

  Desmond cradled the girl in his arms like a football as he called over his throat mic, “I have Precious Cargo, heading toward LZ one. ETA—”

  Although a sniper’s bullet to the head silenced the rest of his report, Desmond’s last action was to fall protectively over the girl. Daniel changed his course and used a blue porta-potty for cover. He couldn’t see the attacker, making the laser useless.

  As another Fortune bodyguard ran to help, the sniper switched to automatic. The second guard dropped to the ground with leg wounds. Daniel hopped to a mature tree and then to a cement trashcan as bullets scattered concrete dust. Only ten feet from the girl, he was pinned.

  Trina grabbed the cashier’s pistol and rolled behind a kiosk. She called in the situation to their support teams. “Gunman on the north side of the quad at my twelve.”

  “Twenty degrees elevation,” the billionaire added seamlessly when she paused. “Range ninety to a hundred feet. He’s not an active.”

  “Too far for me to get with a handgun, but the area’s too populated to carpet bomb,” she complained. Moments later, she reported with more optimism. “Two paramedics have responded. Inbound at ten o’clock.”

  One paramedic drew a syringe and the other pulled out a ceramic blade as they walked toward the girl. “It’s a kidnapping,” Daniel warned, using his opponents as cover against the sniper while he closed the gap. As the first paramedic rolled Desmond’s body aside, the billionaire swung a crutch toward his throat like a baton. The man staggered backward to avoid the blow. When the man with the syringe was three feet away from her husband, Trina put a tight grouping of bullets into his heart.

  The second imposter lunged at Daniel with the knife. They grappled and fell to the pavement. Daniel may have been crippled, but people always forgot how incredibly strong his arms were. However, the assailant killed people for a living. In the time it took Daniel to choke him into unconsciousness, the killer stabbed the billionaire three times, grazing the kidneys. Mira’s uncle managed to reach her, leaving a trail of dark blood on the sidewalk.

  Trina provided cover fire. “The open window!” She emptied the clip on her borrowed weapon as Daniel herded the girl toward a park bench. When she had only the bullet in the chamber left, the rifle spoke again. She dropped to the grass, expecting pain. But there was none.

  Daniel’s laser pointer dropped from limp fingers. He’d almost made it.

  “No!” Trina shouted verbally and through the psychic link.

  He mouthed the word “Run” as his body and left lung collapsed. The little girl held her hands over his back, trying to stem the flow. His eyes glazed over, but he refused to abandon his loved ones in their time of need. Only two people in the crowd could see what happened next. A transparent image stood over his crumpled form. It looked like a younger version of the man, distorted by static. He flickered in and out, struggling against a great windstorm.

  Daniel could see a security guard approach the frustrated, grieving Trina from behind. With a projected thought, he showed his wife the scene from his point of view. She whirled and shot the man’s gun hand as he drew. But this attacker was special, he could ignore the pain. “Rex,” she noted as they went hand-to-hand.

  His wife would beat the Rex eventually, but the large fighter had drawn her out into the open. The moment she won, the sniper would finish her and then the girl. Daniel had to do something, but his body was useless. Even this warning during daylight had caused him minor nerve damage. Every moment he spent exposed felt like sandblasting.

  There was only one way the other two would live. To the girl, he said, “Grab the laser pointer.”

  Because the command was so urgent, she obeyed.

  Wavering, he sent a picture of the window across the quad. Mira aimed the laser at the exact coordinates. The last thing Daniel broadcast before dissolving into sand particles was a memory of the Monty Python show. Mira repeated the announcer’s words. “The penguin on top of your television set will now explode.”

  Soon after, the sniper’s entire room detonated.

  When the Rex turned to look, Trina crushed his windpipe.

  One man with a cell phone caught the entire event on video. The girl was still reeling from the aftershocks of death when Aunt Trina ran over and applied field dressing to Daniel’s wounds. She was the only one who carried superglue patches in her purse—for just such an occasion. “Don’t die!” she ordered her husband.

  When the helicopter landed on the grass seconds later, the copilot hopped out and waved a hand in front of her face, trying to snap her out of the trance. “What your name, sweetheart?”

  Mira was still staring at her bloody hands. She wanted to answer “Miracle Redemption Hollis,” but all that came out was the first syllable of her middle name, “Red.” Everything after that moment, that choice, had been red.

  Chapter 2 – Sirius Academy: Age Sixteen

  Red wanted to do a fly-by on the floating college, but they had missile launchers aimed at her from each side of the landing zone. From this height, she could see the floating colony was divided into eight pie wedges. Half were agricultural green and the others bubbled with space construction modules. Every square meter of cement on the perimeter sparkled with solar collectors. The center sported a huge dome over the main campus of Sirius Academy. To her, it was the octagonal glass cathedral of the Holy Grail—UN astronaut school.

  “Sirius Tower, confirm my friend-or-foe transponder is working.” Her flight goggles reported that her onboard systems had already blocked seven remote software probes, searching for vulnerabilities. A commercial plane would’ve been subverted and switched to their control by now. But Red didn’t like giving up control.

  “Roger, friend is sounding 4 by 4.”

  “Um . . . did anyone tell you it’s not polite to point?” she said, referring to the anti-aircraft missiles.

  “Sorry XRD-2, we give everyone the same welcome. Don’t deviate from the beacon and no one has to spend their Saturday cleaning debris out of the South Pacific.”

  “Roger, Sirius Tower. Coloring inside the lines.”

  After she performed a vertical landing on the wide swath of tarmac, a flight crew, several students, and a small security team rushed out to greet her. A lot of them had been practicing on the shooting range or performing mock repairs on the model of the Fortune Aerospace mission shuttle. Everyone, except the lead guard with commander’s bars, was wearing shorts. Red climbed out of the cockpit and handed the man in charge the clipboard with her assignment and cargo manifest.

  “I’m Commander Taggart, the duty officer.” The trim, fifty-year-old veteran raised an eyebrow at her five-foot-nothing height, a couple inches under the NASA minimum. When she took off her helmet, he stared. The tomboy had short, brown hair with a swirl of metallic red that matched her flight suit. She could have passed for thirteen; however, everyone knew the minimum age for the Academy was sixteen. “You’re two days early.”

  Red keyed open the cargo doors with her crypto-ring. “Accordi
ng to the school calendar, I’m starting three weeks late. Besides, we had a priority mail shipment of medicine, and I thought I’d deliver it early, in case someone needed it before Monday.”

  As the door opened, they all saw the name on the ship. A man in a mechanic’s one-piece joked, “Half-Pint. Is that name yours or the prototype’s?”

  “Behind the cockpit, the interior is a half-scale model of the Sirius mission craft: the same fittings and controls, with half the cargo rating. It’s a gift from Fortune Aerospace until the bureaucrats let you have a real one.”

  The mechanic grinned from ear-to-ear. “God bless our rich uncle.”

  “It takes the same fluids as the real thing. The maintenance manual is on the copilot chair. I’ll show you a few things that aren’t in the manual once I stow my gear.”

  “You’re staying?” asked an older student with a crew-cut and the label ‘Merrick’ on his ammunition vest.

  “She’s the new student,” explained the head guard. “Replacing the math washout.”

  The other students winced at the mention of the incident, but the man with the crew-cut grew angry. “You jumped the queue to get in here. There are at least three of my guys on the short-list. Did you buy your way in?” Merrick leaned over her with menace.

  “Cool out, jarhead,” said a Japanese teenager with a backpack slung over his left shoulder.

  “Pilots get a point bonus,” she asserted, and neither backed down.

  “Merrick, clear off my deck,” Taggart ordered, and the man reluctantly obeyed.

  Red scanned the commander’s badge with her flight goggles and confirmed that his face matched company records. “Releasing care to Commander Taggart at 10:47 academy time. Add your pilots to the access list before you touch her; there’s a self-destruct feature.”

  As the mechanic unloaded a meter-wide freezer unit, he read, “Portable forensic freezer unit?”

  Taggart nodded. “I’ve heard of those. It has a backup battery and secure, signed access for preserving chain-of-evidence.”

  “Yeah, the power’s still on,” said the mechanic. “What the hell’s in it?”

  “My lunch,” she said. Everyone laughed at the perceived sarcasm. “I’ll carry my duffle but could you personally escort that skid load of supplies to my quarters?”

  He started to complain until he saw the high-security tag on the load. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll be logging over a thousand flight hours during my five years. My friends call me Red,” she insisted.

  The Japanese student who’d been following close behind asked, “What do your enemies call you?”

  “Asshole,” she said, without skipping a beat.

  “Hah! Great movie quote. You’re all right,” said the guy with the backpack. “I’m Sojiro.”

  She scanned his badge and text scrolled by on the left lens. He was a specialist in virtual reality interfaces. She smiled, “My grandfather used that line all the time; I just stole it from him. Are you the welcoming committee?”

  “I pulled Foreign Object Disposal patrol on the runway—kind of like detention for safety freaks. But Professor Horvath said I could show you around until she gets done with her class at noon. Where’d you get the goggles, bootleg on the Ginza strip?”

  “No, they came with the plane. Why do you ask?”

  “That design is supposed to be exclusive to our island, but a lot of tech has been leaking to the outside lately.”

  He signed her in at the entry gate and clipped the guest badge to the front zipper of her flight suit. “I’ll take you by the admin office, your dorm room, and some places you can meet people.”

  Then Sojiro led her down the tunnel, through the concrete-walled outer-ring of the artificial island, ambling at a slow pace so she could take it all in. He pointed to a white starburst set into a piece of polished marble. “This is the memorial. Each symbol represents someone on the project who was killed or permanently disabled in service. The first and brightest star is for Quan, the one who launched the first Cassavettis-Reuter star drive. The butterfly represents . . .”

  “The great Jezebel Hollis,” she finished, running her hand over the golden shape. “There sure are a lot of stars. Don’t the others get names?”

  He shook his head and kept walking. “Sirius Academy is named for the loyal dog that followed Icarus, the code name for the star drive field.”

  “Not quite,” Red corrected. “Sirius was the preamble song for ‘Eye in the Sky’, the original code name for the alien artifact.”

  Because her brusque comment had silenced her tour-guide, she asked, “Why do you have class on a Saturday?”

  “Antiterrorism exercises when other people aren’t using the school. Horvath’s pretty hardcore. I wasn’t paying attention and got shot first . . . again.”

  “What were you doing that you weren’t supposed to?”

  He looked both ways and then slipped a sketch book out of his backpack. The active sheet showed several views of a stern woman with platinum-blonde hair twisting arms and performing humiliating take-downs. Instead of a martial-arts uniform, the subject wore tight leather gear with a low-plunging neckline. In spite of herself, Red laughed. “You’ve got a gift.”

  “I’m the hero of my own manga. Everyone has to do so many hours of journaling for psych profiles. It’s part of the first-year weed-out.”

  “I hate writing. Spelling has too many arbitrary rules. I plan to do mine as a video blog.”

  “Most people do because that’s the format they train us to use on exercises and in the field. That way when someone messes up, the UN space program has a record. They keep a few people like me around in case the alien artifact blocks cameras. My manga records my school experience as a fictionalized graphic novel.”

  “Sweet.”

  They stepped out of the tunnel into sunlight. College-aged kids were playing Frisbee, rugby, and sunbathing in a grassy quad. He pointed to a couple buildings. “This is the back quarter; not many people come here during the week.”

  She noted the glass sidewalks. “Are those solar?”

  “Yeah. Around here, if it’s not growing, it generates power.”

  “Wow. Self-sufficient?”

  He shrugged. “Sort of. All the computers, lights, and air conditioning run off solar and wind. The engines only have to use fuel at night or during storms. When we have cloudy days or everyone’s doing a computer assignment at once . . .” He paused because she was obviously gawking instead of paying attention.

  “I’m finally here,” she whispered to herself.

  “You’re not carrying much.”

  “All I need: eight flight suits, in different colors.”

  “That’s the Base Exchange, the BX. It’s a general store, in case you want to pick up some casual wear. If they don’t have something you want, they can order it, but delivery can take a while.”

  She smiled. Her outfits were custom-made, bulletproof, and fire-resistant. “I’ll wait till I have a closet.”

  “Okay. Over there’s the simulation building. Advanced students get to use the virtual reality for space walks and jet packs; we just get to use it for remote classrooms. We only have about thirty teachers and a dozen or so assistants. Whatever they can’t teach you, they’ll find a specialty class somewhere else in the world with an audio-video link.”

  “This area’s so roomy for such a small island.”

  “The level below us is full of computers and supplies.”

  Red feigned interest as they meandered counterclockwise on the grooved glass path that ringed the island. She handed his sketch back. “Do you have a thing for Professor Horvath? I mean, she’s almost forty.”

  “Really? I couldn’t tell. You could crack a walnut on her ass.” When she didn’t speak, he whispered, “A lot of guys ogle her, but I . . . don’t swing that way. That’s another reason I get shot first. The mils, military types, don’t like gays, and nobody wants me on their team.”

  “What’s your speci
alty?”

  “Alien machine interfaces, with an emphasis on ship design and construction.”

  “That rocks. I’ll take you on my team any day.”

  “Thanks. But the new character still has something missing—a fantasy element.”

  “She needs a weapon, a wicked one to represent her attitude.”

  Sojiro’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! The pain stick or the rod of discipline.” He immediately sat on a bench and whipped out a pencil.

  While he was distracted, she asked, “So about the guy I’m replacing: did he burn out from reading the psi page?”

  “Huh? No, he washed out, literally.” Pointing to the huge pool on the port side, Sojiro explained, “They strap you into a cockpit and smash you into cold water. To pass, you have to get out the exit. It’s harder than it sounds. I couldn’t get my seatbelt off the first time, and one of the rescue divers had to give me oxygen. Lucky for me we get three tries on the big tests. Last year, the freshman class dropped from sixty-five down to forty-five people.”

  “Better to fail now than in orbit.”

  “That’s what they tell us. Personally, I think it’s to save money. Over a quarter-million dollars a year per student is a lot for the sponsor countries to shell out. The Academy’s got to be making money hand over fist.”

  She shrugged. “You’d be surprised what fuel, food, teachers, and all these high-tech toys are costing.”

  “You make it sound like a cruise ship. I’m busting my ass. Only about half of us are likely to graduate.”

  “About the same number it takes to make a complete mission to Sirius.”

  “One of these years, they’ll actually send some of us.” Sojiro checked the watch on his right wrist. “The admin just texted me. We’re going to skip getting your badge for now and go straight to the clinic—meta seven, center. It’s in the middle of the same meta-pod that holds the girls’ dorm, the first one to our right.”