Max nodded and said, “Yeah, it would be easier.”
Riis responded adamantly. “I would never let someone put something into my head without my permission. Never.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Max tried to apologize.
“My brain. My choice,” Riis said, and turned to me. “You need to get one too.”
“I can’t,” I told her.
“He’s a softwire,” Ketheria said.
“Ugh! You’re a Space Jumper!” Riis cried. She sounded just as repulsed as Max on the subject. I thought that Charlie would have told her about me.
“No, I’m just a softwire,” I replied. Why did I sound like I was defending myself?
“That’s weird,” Riis said. “Let me see.”
Weird. Great. Like I told many before her, “There’s nothing to see.” But she still reached up and touched me behind my ear anyway. Her fingers were warm and smooth, like glass touching my skin.
“Wow. I don’t know what you should do, then,” she said.
I reached out to the tap tube and the small device plopped onto my hand. I pushed into the chip and uplinked the information by simply willing the file into my mind. The tap was a simple storage device, and the result was instantaneous.
“It says everyone must register for placement testing during this spoke,” I said.
Riis smiled. Was she was impressed?
“That’s great,” she replied.
“What’s placement testing?” Theodore asked.
“They need to know what to teach you.”
“Why not just a little bit of everything?”
“That’s impossible. The amount of knowledge available to an Orbister doubles every three and a half cycles. With the placement test, they can decide what to teach you and when to teach it to you.”
“They want to see how smart you are,” I said.
“Or how dumb,” came a voice from behind me. I turned, almost expecting to see Switzer standing there.
“Go suck on your tap, Dop,” Riis snapped.
I turned around and saw a tall greenish alien who reminded me of a plant moving swiftly in the wind. It took everything in me not to roll my eyes. I had met this alien once before on Orbis 1, and I had hoped to never meet him again.
“So you’re still here, huh, Softwire? You never took my advice,” he said, filling the space between us.
I let out a deep breath. It was too soon for this. I knew Dop’s strength from experience, as well as his rotting breath. I turned my face slightly to the side.
“Not so tough anymore?” he taunted me. “I’m glad you’ve finally learned your place on the rings.”
I wanted to ask him if his species had ever invented a toothbrush. I wanted to carve my initials into his green skin. I wanted to crush him with my bare hands and throw him into a compost bin, but I didn’t. I couldn’t even muster a reply. Maybe it was the new school. Maybe it was all of these Citizens. I didn’t know. All I could do was stare at him and hope my knees weren’t shaking.
“Well?” Dop pressed on.
“Well, what?” I mumbled.
“What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, Dop,” Riis said.
“They’re attending the Illuminate?” He looked at his two friends standing behind him. “This is the human trash I told you about, orphaned in outer space and left to wean off the nipple of a robot. Losers.” Dop turned back to Riis. “When did they start letting knudniks in here? And why are you with them? Did someone force you to show these carbon clumps around?”
A sickly alien with sinewy arms and stiff black hair extending from the back of his head whispered to Dop over his shoulder. He stared at Riis, his eyes widening.
“You volunteered!” Dop flicked his hands out and slapped them together. I had never seen the gesture before, but it looked insulting. Riis leaped toward Dop, grabbing him by his skin as if it were hair. She twisted him around and clamped down on his throat before his friends could intervene, though I don’t think they would have even if they were fast enough.
“Golden!” Max cried.
“If you ever do that to me again . . .” Riis breathed into his ear.
“You’ll what?” Dop gasped, still defiant.
Riis pushed him away, and Dop rubbed his throat, smiling.
“That’s right. You’ll do nothing,” he shouted at Riis as she stormed away. We followed her up a ramp, glancing back at Dop and his smiling friends.
“It’s ridiculous,” Dop shouted for everyone to hear. “We have pirates attacking our Citizens, but still we have to care for these freeloaders!”
“Why did you let him go?” Theodore asked Riis, but she didn’t respond.
Instead she looked at me and said, “I hope you don’t cause this much trouble everywhere you go, Softwire.”
Me too, I thought.
Most of the Citizens I had ever encountered shared Dop’s beliefs. They presumed that Orbis belonged to them, and they didn’t want anyone else here. The younger Citizens seemed especially adamant about this. Somewhere in their history, however, they seemed to have forgotten that we did all the work they didn’t want to do, or work they considered beneath them. Maybe if they did it themselves, there wouldn’t be so many of us here. But Riis said Dop complained simply because he could. That it was his privileged position in life. His grumbling was just an imitation of his own parents’ rhetoric. Insults he had heard since he was born.
But Dop had nothing to be worried about. I couldn’t wait to get off this ring.
We followed Riis up a curved sloping ramp, past many more students, flying messenger drones, and electrostatic doors. It was going to take a while to learn my way around here — this place was huge, and we tried to soak up every new sight. One group of students circled a tall boy who was projecting an image from a metallic device attached to his neural implant. The wormhole pirates’ attack of the last cycle played out in front of them as a 3-D holograph. I slowed and watched this new interpretation of the events. In this version, the Citizens appeared much braver than I remembered, overwhelming the wormhole pirates before the security forces ever arrived.
Max saw it, too. “That’s not how it happened,” she exclaimed.
An alien standing next to the one projecting the fictitious event turned and glared at Max.
“She’s right,” I said. “Where did that version come from?”
A tall alien, the one with the ear projector, glanced at my vest. “Knudniks?” he whispered, and turned his back to me. Another from the group, a girl who looked identical to the other, with wild carroty hair and skin as white as ceramic heat shields, nudged her twin and pointed at the hologram.
“Isn’t that you?” she remarked, pointing at the image of Max.
In the hologram, Max and I were huddled behind a bench, crying. Bawling like the little ones on the Renaissance! A Citizen was gallantly defending us from the wormhole pirates.
“That’s a lie!” Max snapped.
“I wouldn’t want anyone to see this, either, if I were you,” the alien said, and the four of them laughed, turning their backs to us.
Max stomped forward, her fists clenched, ready to knock the laughter right out of them, but Riis stopped her and pulled her back. “You can’t believe anything from those pob projections,” she said. “It’s propaganda — that’s all that crap is.”
“But it’s a lie,” she protested.
“You were there, right?” Riis asked.
Max nodded, grinding her back teeth and breathing forcefully out her nose.
“Then you know the truth, right?” she added.
Max nodded again.
“Then that’s all that matters. Whatever they think means nothing. It’s only thought. What they think about you is none of your business.”
“But —”
“Let it go,” she said. “You’re not going to win this one. They don’t know how to lose, anyway — believe me.”
The ramp leveled off
and opened into a small round foyer. Along the walls, holographic numbers hovered at eye level. Some were green while most were red. There must have been a hundred of them. Riis walked up to a green one and swiped at the floating numbers. The wall appeared to part, revealing a tall storage bin that slid forward. Riis placed her helmet on one of the shelves. Other students came and went, but none of them acknowledged Riis. Does she have any friends here? I wondered. She certainly seemed to know how everything worked, so I assumed she had been here for a while.
“Grab any of the green ones. Remember the number. It should work with those skins you’re wearing,” she informed us.
I swiped at the number 952, and the storage device slid forward. “Now what?”
“Leave your stuff there,” Riis said as she pulled off her green and silver suit and hung it in the locker. She was wearing a crimson outfit that flared at her hips. It covered most of her body except for her long legs. Then she took a small wand from the locker and brushed her hair with it. Riis’s auburn hair turned pure white, a striking contrast to the blood-red suit. I just stood and stared. I wasn’t the only one.
“I didn’t think her hair was real,” Grace whispered to Max. “Too stiff.”
“Everyone done?” she asked after she put the wand back.
“We don’t have anything to put in these things,” I told her.
Riis looked at us just standing in front of the open lockers. “Oh,” she remarked. “Well, now that you picked one, the Illuminate will leave any notices for you in it — personal notices, test scores, or whatever they like, actually. Anything they can’t put in the tap.”
“Riis,” I said.
“What?”
“Why did you volunteer to show us around?”
Riis checked her hair and outfit in a mirror that hung in her locker, then swiped at the number, closing the storage device.
“That is not your business,” she said, and turned up the hallway. “Come, you’re late.”
I guess Wiicerians don’t answer questions, either.
We spent the remainder of the school spoke filling out data screens to register for our placement test. Completion of the exam would officially commence our school rotation, I was told. The task was tedious, but proved to be a useful distraction from the sneers and knudnik insults that had been shoved our way all cycle long. It also left no room to think about wormhole pirates. By the time we were finished, the rest of the students had already left. Riis had to go, and she said her good-byes quickly.
Charlie was not outside the Illuminate when the spoke finished.
“Where do you think he is?” Theodore asked.
“Maybe he forgot,” Max replied.
“Charlie would not forget,” I told them. But I wasn’t sure. Charlie often disappeared for a phase or more without even a hint of where he went. Except now he was our Guarantor. He couldn’t just leave us, could he?
At the entrance of the Illuminate, the robot sentries remained on guard. A few kids still trickled through the energy field, but most were now gone, finishing their conversations in the plaza or boarding their personal transportation vehicles. One machine, nothing more than a metal wheel with a seat suspended near the center, rolled toward us before lifting off the ground. Max never took her eyes off the thing. Riis is probably halfway home by now, I thought.
Max had moved back toward the Illuminate. “Where you going?” Theodore asked her.
“I just want to take a peek at those machines,” Max shouted over her shoulder.
“Can you imagine how freaked Charlie will be when he shows up and we’re not here?” Theodore replied. “I think we should hang around.”
“Then stay there,” Max called.
“Think there’s any left?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“Won’t hurt to look.”
I turned to Ketheria. “Go,” she assured me. “Theodore will wait with me.”
I bolted toward Max and trailed her to the far side of the Illuminate, where we had seen some of the vehicles land. The metal helmets of the school guards swiveled as we rounded the Illuminate. Only two vehicles remained parked behind the school. One was another of those wheels with the cockpit hanging just below its axis. I could see two gyro jets clinging to a metal fender wrapped two-thirds around the tire. It was impressive, but it was the second vehicle that caught my attention.
“Hold up,” I whispered, but Max had seen it, too. We tucked carefully out of sight next to one of the Illuminate’s concrete footings.
A stocky alien heaved a heavy-looking pipe over his head before slamming it into the windshield. CRACK! His long arms stretched beyond their sockets as he pummeled the machine with the pipe once more. This time the glass shattered into a million little pieces.
“He’s going to steal it,” I whispered.
“You just figured that out now?” Max teased. “You’d better study for that placement test next cycle.”
“Shhh,” I warned her as the alien glanced in our direction. He turned back to the vehicle and reached through the busted windshield and released the hatch.
The thief was dressed in a black tattered jumpsuit that gathered at the neck but left his long muscular arms exposed.
And that’s when I saw it. That mark on his arm.
I must have been forty meters away, but there was no denying it.
Max saw it too. “How can that be?” she whispered.
Once inside the cockpit of the stilted vehicle, the alien maneuvered the device away from the Illuminate and toward a small forest lining the plaza.
“Max! JT!” Charlie was here.
She looked at me with wide blue eyes. “Should we tell Charlie?”
I peered into the forest, but there was no sign of the alien or the stolen vehicle.
“Maybe we were wrong,” I said.
“Both of us?”
It was impossible to deny. That creature was marked with the same symbol I spotted when the wormhole pirates attacked: an alien skull sitting over two crossbones.
“Come on, it’s not our concern. The Citizens are capable of handling their own problems. At least, that’s what they tell everyone,” I said. I’d lived on these rings long enough to know they would never believe a knudnik, not even two of them.
“But you know you saw it. We know the truth, JT.”
“The truth doesn’t matter here,” I said, and headed toward Charlie.
When we rejoined the others, Charlie asked, “What were you guys doing back there?”
“Nothing,” we both said. Without any further discussion, we had decided to ignore what we saw.
Charlie held our gaze as if I were going to add something. Did he see the wormhole pirate? No, I thought, that’s impossible.
“What?” I said to him. I felt the warmth rising in my cheeks as he stared.
Charlie put his hand on my shoulder and led me away from Max and the other kids. I saw Ketheria smiling.
“I know you and Max . . . are close,” he whispered, crouching down while searching for his words. “And there comes a time in a young man’s life . . .” These words came even slower.
“What are you talking about, Charlie?”
“My parents were never around to explain things to me, either. And don’t misunderstand me; I’m not trying to be your parent. I want to help you, you know, be there for you, the way my parents never could, but . . .” Charlie was sweating. “You kids deserve more. . . . Oh, I’m not very good at this.”
What was he talking about? Did he know I was lying to him? Should I tell him about the wormhole pirate? I stared at my feet, covered in my clumsy oversize boots, looking to them for some solution. Just tell him, they yelled at me through the rubber. “Charlie, we went to look at the different vehicles the students use to get to school. You know how Max loves machines. Well . . .”
“You were just looking at the fliers?” Charlie almost seemed excited by that.
“Yes,” I said.
“You two were
n’t doing anything?”
“To the fliers?”
“No! Not the fliers. I mean . . . to . . . So you weren’t touching the fliers?”
“No, we weren’t.”
Charlie let out a long breath. “Oh, good,” he exclaimed, and stood up. The concern on his face washed away; a big smile brightened his eyes. “I’m glad. Yes, they are nice machines.” He laughed. “Whew, come on, let’s go home. I bet Ketheria’s starving.”
And just like that, the conversation was over. It was as if Charlie didn’t even want to know about the wormhole pirate.
That’s when I decided that adults were very strange.
After dinner I planned to concentrate on the placement exam that awaited us at the Illuminate next cycle. Ketheria acted unconcerned about the exam. She enjoyed her reunion with Nugget and spent every moment playing with him in the garden outside or constructing wild stories that left him on the ground laughing. Ketheria was only retelling the entertainment files Mother had shown us on the Renaissance, but Nugget found the actions of humans on Earth to be quite hilarious. I shook my head as I watched him rolling around, snorting and giggling. It was hard to believe that this alien was the spawn of Joca Krig Weegin.
Instead of studying, however, Max and I quietly debated the meaning of the wormhole pirate we discovered after school. We were seated outside, hidden by the alien foliage, but Theodore still managed to find us. He was doubtful, however, that the event had ever happened.
“Are you sure?” Theodore questioned me. “You had to be pretty far away.”
“I’m positive,” I told him.
Max ignored Theodore’s doubts. “JT, do you think there’s a connection between the wormhole pirate who stole the transport and the ones who attacked our shuttle?” she said.
“That’s impossible. Even if he was a wormhole pirate, why would there be a connection,” he argued, and stood up. “I’m going to study.”
“Let him go,” Max whispered. “But we should study a little too.”
“Do you think the test matters much, you know, for us?”
“What do you mean for us? You’re more than just a knudnik, JT. You’re a person, too. What happened to all that talk on the Renaissance? You couldn’t wait to get here and start your life. You will be a Citizen one cycle, just like them, so you’d better get over this us and them thing you have.”
Wormhole Pirates on Orbis Page 4
