“Still got yours, bud?” Fin asked as she munched on a stick of celery.
I nodded, recalling the scientists I’d seen on the Link who’d tried removing theirs and ended up like vegetables. They’d always make such a big deal about how even the most brilliant scientific minds weren’t brilliant enough to exercise prudence and needed to be prevented from researching things they weren’t supposed to.
“What if they’ve figured out a way to block them?” asked Sebastian.
“Block Mylan Chips? That‘d take a ridiculous amount of directed energy,” Fin said, putting down the celery.
“We would’ve won the Rim by now if they had it,” I said. “And they wouldn’t need us to fight anymore.”
But if they could have autonomous drones like the one that served us drinks on the shuttle wandering around, I did wonder what other borderline things they could get away with. Clearly the military had a little more leeway out here than back on Mars.
“No matter what kinds of weapons they dream up, they’ll always need someone to point them,” said Fin.
“Is that what they’re teaching us? I can’t really tell—no introduction, briefing, or anything.” My eyes locked with hers. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“I might,” she said.
“I mean, if you wouldn’t mind . . . we’re not doing so hot at the moment.”
She looked around to see if anyone else was in earshot. “I’m actually not allowed to talk about that—it’s part of that whole maze thing I mentioned. Caelus’s rule,” she said, the bantering tone slipping into uneasiness.
“Is Caelus one of the instructors here?” I asked.
“No, he’s a Black.”
“A Black?”
“Blacks are student officers. Blues are regular students.”
“And we’re Greens, right?” Sebastian asked, glancing down at his uniform.
“It appears that way.”
“And this Caelus, is he in the cafeteria right now?”
She hesitated.
“Which one is he?” I asked, my eyes sweeping across the tables. There was only a handful of students wearing black uniforms.
“If I tell you, you’ll look, and then he’ll see you looking and figure we’re talking about him. And we don’t want that,” she said, the words coming out hard but brittle. Scared. The fear was especially noticeable because the tone in everything she’d said before had been so casual, so supremely confident. This made me think that her short, aggressively zigzagged hair and the way she sprawled out in her seat and used her elbows to take up as much table space as she could, might have been a similar kind of posturing.
Sebastian wrestled his legs out from behind the crossbar, grimacing. “I’m going to grab some more food. Do you guys want anything?”
“No, thanks,” I said.
Fin shook her head and gave him a thumbs up.
After he’d hobbled over to the serving line I turned to her, lowering my voice, confidential-like: “So you can’t tell me anything, huh? Not even something obvious, like who picks the student officers?”
“Nothing that won’t get me in trouble.”
“Trouble,” I repeated. “Trouble with the instructors or trouble with Caelus?”
She didn’t reply.
“You see, though, I’m great with secrets. Sebastian let it slip what a maniac he is with the ladies and I’ve only told a few people,” I said.
Her lip curled. “We’ll see how long you try to be funny. Get your nose broken enough times and the humor just kind of bleeds out.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to know not to break the rules.”
“And what happens if you do?”
She tilted her head almost ninety degrees. “Even you’ve been around long enough to know that.”
“So is that our first assignment?” I paused and took a deep breath. “Seeing how fast we can learn them?”
She shrugged.
“What if I just throw out a few guesses and you tap the table if I’m getting close?”
Fin frowned and patches of red formed on her cheeks. For her to tell me anything, I was realizing, I’d have to scare her more than whoever was scaring her now, which wasn’t something I wanted to do. “Okay, then. Can I at least ask you where you’re from?”
“You can ask it.”
“Oh, come—”
“I’m joking. I’m from Mars.”
I flinched. Fourteen thousand light years away and I couldn’t stop being reminded of home. “Me, too.”
“Oh yeah? What part?” she asked, apparently more nostalgic than I was.
“New London. Well, the lakes just outside it, actually. I don’t want to be the kind of guy who says he’s from the city even though he’s from the burbs.”
“Don’t worry; there’s no risk of confusing you for a city kid.”
I gave a mock look of incredulousness. “Now, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“The lakes by the spaceport? I’ve heard they’re beautiful,” she said, ignoring yet another question.
They were, I wanted to say, but if she wasn’t going to share anything with me, I was hardly going to volunteer any personal details about myself. So instead I just shrugged and ping-ponged back, “What about you?”
“Terrarae. It’s a small fishing center on the Antares Sea. Doubt you’ve heard of it.”
“Doubt I’ve heard of it?” I laughed. “You grow the best fish on Mars.”
“Not everyone sees it that way.”
“Well, I’m not one of the fishermen you put out of business, so that makes it a little easier.”
“I suppose.”
“So that’s why they call you Fin here?” I asked.
“You’d think that, but it actually followed me.”
“From Terrarae? Does everyone get an aquatic name there or something?”
Now it was her turn to laugh. “No. A few years back when the Fervin and the San Racone Seas came online, both three times the size of Antares, prices were falling and it looked like the entire place was going tits up. As a last resort, our mayor issued a challenge to figure out a way to handle the new competition. They had already done everything they could to raise production—the fish were packed so tight they couldn’t turn around in their tanks—so I decided to go about it the way.”
“What way was that?”
“Make them taste better. When you isolate all the variables, happier Mars fish somehow taste the best but, to make them happy, you need to give them better food or more room which are both expensive. So I designed an agent that would bind to the fish’s cerebellum, making them think they were swimming in open water. It ended up raising their Taste Index scores and we were able to hike prices by two hundred and fifty percent. Some kids from school started calling me ‘Fin’ then, and it just stuck.”
“That kind of research should’ve triggered your Mylan Chip.”
“No kidding, but they gave us these pills that interfered with it a little. Supposedly they’re to relax your adrenal glands, but you know how Mars biotech companies are with off-label uses—always on the edge. Always pissing the Fleet off.”
This seemed about right; my mom, who’d been a Fleet diplomat, had constantly griped about her role arbitrating between the Confederate Panel and Mars Tribunes, who she’d claimed lobbied for legislation that allowed Mars companies to skirt Confederate law. She had said that it was only because Mars was such an economically important member that it hadn’t been sanctioned and discharged from the Confederation already.
“So you’re a mad scientist?” I asked.
The question seemed to amuse her. “Only when I need to be.”
“Do you need to be, here?”
“I imagine it’s why they selected me. It’s definitely the reason I joined; I get to use the chemlab for anything I want during free hours,” she said in a much lighter voice than the one she’d used when she first sat down. Her pos
ture relaxed. She eased the weight off her elbows. I got the sense that now that she’d deemed me innocuous and we weren’t talking about that Caelus guy, she was willing to shed the previous act and shoot the shit. “Back home I only got to work on fish.”
“You’d think they’d start letting you do anything after that,” I said, recalling how my best friend back on Mars, Verna, got access to our school’s entire database after wowing administrators with the firewall she developed for her IT final project. My other best friend, Marco, had begged her to change the transcript-wrecking C he’d gotten in Earth history, but that wasn’t her style.
“You’d think,” Fin repeated. “Though science isn’t really a big priority back there, even with the pills, and it didn’t take long to get bored synthesizing fish food.”
“But aren’t you worried you’re going to have to work on synthesizing some weaponized supervirus or something?” I asked.
“To be used on the Verex? That’s kind of the point, dummy.”
It made me think of a favorite line of Professor Dalton’s: “What’s born in war grows up in peace,” and I asked, “Yeah, but what happens when the Verex are gone and the potion you iced them with is still sitting on the shelf? The next time a colony rebels, the Fleet’s probably going to pull it off.”
She shook her head. “I’d love to hear your noble reason for joining up.”
“I meant to sign with the Quaker Corps, but I must’ve put the wrong acronym down since I don’t draw the tail very long on my Qs, so they end up looking like Os and—”
“There you go trying to be funny again, but seriously . . .”
“But seriously, I wasn’t too concerned about the whole ‘after the war’ part. I thought for sure I’d be going to the Rim since I’m not a brilliant chemist—brilliant anything, really. As it sits now, though, the war will probably be over by the time I graduate, if I graduate, so who knows who they’ll have me shooting at then.”
“Probably the bad guys.”
“Yeah . . .”
A voice rang out from behind our table. “Hey, Green, what’s on your tray?”
I turned my head to see a cadet in black, a couple years older than us, watching Sebastian hobble back over to our table.
“Let me see your arm,” the kid demanded as he stepped closer. He pulled out his U-dev and scanned Sebastian’s wristband, studying the readout for only a second before his eyes locked onto him. “You’re over your limit. According to the file here, your nutrient unit quota for lunch is six hundred seventy-eight and you’re at eight hundred twelve, even without the shit you just got for seconds. That’s a problem.”
Sebastian scrunched up his face in a frozen panic, suddenly conscious that the drone of chatter was subsiding and everyone’s attention was pooling on him.
“So obviously, you can’t have any of that,” the cadet continued, nodding at the tray. He grabbed a roll off the top and took a large bite out of it. “But that still leaves us the hundred thirty-four . . .”
“I didn’t know there was a quota—”
“Because you didn’t care to look. Instructions were sent to your U-dev when you entered the cafeteria, just like they always are,” the Black cadet said through the food, satisfaction showing on his face.
“But this was my first time here,” Sebastian pleaded in almost a whisper, looking first at the kid and then me, with stunned, helpless eyes, desperate to have this not become a bigger scene than it already was.
“Every direction you’ve received since you enlisted has been beamed to your U-dev: where your shuttle was, what time it was leaving, when it would be docking, how to find the Tread Room—everything. This thing fucking wipes your ass for you, and in the cafeteria it even has the good sense to say not to shovel too much food into your fat face, since apparently that’s lost on you, too.”
I looked down at my U-dev and saw that a manual titled Health and Safety had been sent to our inboxes six minutes ago. Having no time to go through its 350 pages, I did a global search for the term “nutrient unit” and hastily scanned the results.
“Now, how are you going to return the NUs?” the Black cadet asked.
“Return them? I already ate—”
“I know.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” Sebastian asked, sounding even more despondent as the implication dawned.
“Simple. I want you to take two fingers”—he flashed his index and middle finger in the air—“and stick them down that fat gullet of yours.”
“Right here?”
“Right here.”
“But it’ll make a mess.”
“That’s why we have janitors.”
I’d heard enough. My feet pushed down hard and my chair screeched out from under the table. He was my height, maybe a little taller, in a form-fitting one-piece that showed off his sculpted build—which didn’t really worry me because I could already tell I was quicker than him. More troubling was the anger, icy and raw, coating his eyes in a gloss that made it look like he was itching for a fight—impervious to seeing things any other way. His hair was combed neat, styled ever so slightly, and his face was smooth and unblemished, which was good news because I could tell he was going to favor it.
I seized the tray from Sebastian’s hand. “Thanks for grabbing this, man. I must’ve missed these when I was up there. Do you want the other?” I asked, holding an identical pastry out to the kid after taking a bite from the first one.
“This is yours?” he asked, caught a little off guard.
“Yep, Seb was just bringing it over.”
The Black cadet looked right at me, simmering. All other conversation in the cafeteria had halted, leaving every eye fixed upon us. Perhaps if this had happened in a more discreet setting, things could’ve de-escalated, but not here, not a chance.
“I know you’re lying,” he said coolly. I could feel him sizing me up in his head. “But it doesn’t matter; he was already over the limit.”
“That was mine, too,” I said, equally cold.
“All of it?”
“Three hundred NUs of it. I’m just really hungry.”
“And he’s just bringing you food?”
“Yep. I’m pretty high maintenance.”
The cadet’s eyes narrowed.
“It’s okay, though, my quota is really high. Fast metabolism.” I held out my U-dev with my free hand, the nutritional readout scrolling across it.
Frowning, he snatched it and thumbed through the pages. After a few moments, his frown contorted into a smile.
“Prove it.”
“Okay, fine. Sebastian, tell him.”
Sebastian started to speak, but the kid held up his hand. “I’m more concerned with what went in your mouth than lies coming out of his.” He grabbed a spoon off a nearby cadet’s plate and held it out to me with the concave side down.
“‘SO’ stands for ‘student officer,’ right?” I asked, not breaking his stare.
“Right.”
“What’s your name?” I asked, wondering if this was that Caelus guy Fin had been so worried about.
“Why? You going to tell on me or something? Guess what, no one cares.”
“I just want to know your name.”
“Student Lieutenant Taryn Miller.”
“So as a student officer you’re supposed to be leading us, right?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “And yet our first impression is of you finding the weakest, easiest-to-pick-on target, and then needlessly embarrassing him in front of everybody. That’s pathetic. You say the information was sent to our U-devs, but it was buried under a hundred files.”
I looked around the cafeteria, catching as many eyes as I could. “How many of you new arrivals thought to check section eighteen C, subsection four D, of your just-sent health and safety manuals before you ate? Honestly?” No hands were raised. “If you can’t effectively communicate the orders, you shouldn’t be giving them.” And then I shouted: “All of you new people, who would want to follow this
dickhead into battle?”
No one said anything.
Taryn was fuming. I was holding my U-dev in one hand and Sebastian’s tray in the other, so there was no way to block Taryn’s incoming fist and it slammed into my nose with such force that I felt the bone breaking again. I fell backward, and my head struck the table behind me—my U-dev and the tray crashing a split-second later, jets of hot food and liquid leaping into the air.
The left side of my face tingled as I stared up at the ceiling. The lights seemed brighter. There was shouting somewhere in the cafeteria, but the ringing in my ears made it feel miles away. I staggered to my feet and noticed Sebastian, eyes wide, pointing behind me—and as I swung my head around Taryn landed another unchallenged blow, catching me square in the jaw. I fell backward again, slumping against the side of the table. For a few moments I thought that everyone had just gone quiet, but when I noticed that their mouths were moving and I watched trays and silverware drop, muted, to the floor, I knew there was something wrong with me.
Blinking away a trickle of blood, I saw Sebastian getting shoved to the ground and a jolt of anger cut through the pain. This time when Taryn swung, my head wasn’t there and his knuckles crunched against the metal. I grabbed his arm as it recoiled and pulled with enough weight to send him flying face first into the same bench I had just been hunched over, following it up with a hard kick to the sternum that landed him awkwardly on the floor.
I stumbled, swaying, over to where Sebastian was being held down by two Blues. One of them saw me and rushed forward, but I grabbed his wrist as he punched, guiding it ever so slightly to the left of my face, before spinning around and using my momentum to help me break his bone against my shoulder. He cried out for a second, but then my elbow caught him in the mouth.
The other one didn’t see me coming and my foot hit him under the chin, snapping his neck backward and dropping him, sprawling, to the ground.
Suddenly what had been distant shouting rushed back to the surface as Blues streamed forward into a tangle of limbs. Someone grabbed my arms from behind and tried to put me in a headlock, but a voice shouting, “Enough!” echoed around the cafeteria and suddenly they were free again. I wiped blood out of my eyes and saw that everyone else was stepping back, too, in almost choreographed unison as another figure in black approached.
Lakes of Mars Page 4