- Prologue

by Sharon Lee

  A bright sidewise flash caught her eye: aircraft in the sun. Not just one, but a group of three or four. Now five. They were nearly as high as she was! She wondered if they were there looking for her, but then—

  The chunking noise came again and she saw bright streams of fiery dots blast from one of the jets, and then from a second; there was another bright flash then and the lead plane roared low overhead, trailing smoke and debris, while the others . . .

  Understanding rushed through her: this was the emergency!

  She flung herself between two boulders as the other planes flashed by, and from the corner of her eye she caught a multiple flash, turning her head in time to see the lead plane, already well on the other side of the mountain ridge, explode in a brilliant flare of metal and flame, and fall out of her line of sight.

  * * *

  "Do you know what they've done? They've stolen my safety! They ransacked my security! They've . . ."

  Theo stood stock-still, and closed her eyes against the noise. She'd been interviewed three times by officials. Her bona fides had been checked at least three times. She'd had very little to eat for the last half-day, she was tired, and she needed to put her day bag down before she used it as a weapon.

  Chelly's door was closed. Theo strode past it, wondering what was going on now. She'd anticipated being asked questions, not being beset—

  "I told you! I told you these people weren't good at security! Did you think we needed a Checksec? No. Does our senior leader think we need a Checksec? No. So what are we going to do about—"

  Theo barged by Asu, swept into the bedroom and swung her bag to the top bunk.

  "I mean, here they call a campus security alert and ask everyone to stay in room and then they won't even answer a simple theft call . . ."

  Goaded, Theo turned, and Asu stepped hurriedly back.

  "He's right, you know?" Asu gasped "Chelly's right! When you do that, you do look like you're looking for a fight . . ."

  Asu started, backed against the door.

  He stood there in person suddenly, gingerly stepping in from his room, his face an uncertain mask of tight muscles under blotched skin, framing tired eyes. Uncharacteristically he wore a sleeveless workout shirt—he'd been doing his best to keep the formal edge on his attire ever since he'd been invited to join the—

  Theo couldn't remember what it was called right now; it was a bunch of gonna-be commanders, all at work being official.

  His hands were carefully neutral, as were his shoulders.

  "I just got word that you'd been released, Waitley," he said quietly. "The rumor was that you'd been shot down, or crashed on the mountain. Is there anything we can do for you?"

  "The rumor was what?" Asu demanded. "Why didn't you tell me? What is going on?"

  Theo moved, slowly, hands also carefully neutral, only half suppressing the sigh she felt weighing on her.

  "Yes, Chelly, you can do something for me. Break out some cheese and biscuits, make some tea. I'm not gonna take this stuff they gave me, if I can help it; I got math first thing in the morning and I need to stay sharp."

  "Tea. Tea." He said it like it was an alien concept.

  Asu shut up and looked between the pair of them as if she just now recognized that Chelly and Theo were both distressed, and not about the Checksec.

  "Yes," she said then, "I see!" She hurried out of the room, calling out, "I know your tea setting, Theo. Chelly, you get the biscuits down; if you need to, you may open my cheese."

  Theo sat on Asu's bunk and slowly pulled off her shoes and her socks. Who knew that the ancient wooden floor in Erkes would feel so good to bare feet?

  Five

  Combined Math Lab

  Anlingdin Piloting Academy

  Math 376 was a relief so far, even with a drill. Eight students and an instructor stand-in were in the Math Lab already; soon they'd be joined by an assistant and the lab section from Math 366, all students who weren't taking an atmospheric component in their training, and maybe even by the instructor herself.

  Surprisingly, the drill had helped settle Theo; this time it didn't involve any of the head-spinning dual-reality arithmetic in which numbers had to be solved for both real and imaginary components at the same time they were solved for string expansion and entropy resistance.

  She still wasn't sure she wanted to risk her life on her computations, but just to be busy without having Chelly's quiet grief hanging over her head was good, not to mention being free of Asu's sulky nattering about her confiscated Checksec. Asu's paranoia hadn't been helped by Chelly keeping his secret until the second cup of tea—

  "What kind of a senior are you if you don't keep us informed? Especially when one of our own . . . well, no, just because he'd slept in our pod doesn't make him ours—this Hap Harney—but Theo's ours and you didn't even tell me and she sleeps right over my head?"

  "Chain of command," he'd said quietly. "You always have to remember chain of command, Asu. Suppose I'd told you everything and then they'd come for your Checksec instead of the other way around? You might have been in big trouble. And yeah, I think it's good that you didn't know Hap Harney's name until just now: again, think what it would look like if I'd have said something earlier and then you'd gone talking to those youngsters you've been coaching in bowli ball? The whole of Erkes could be under a cloud then. Now the news is out."

  Asu'd fumed and fretted; it had taken Theo explaining her view of the whole thing. "I think he was trying to lose them," she'd said, from her new, in-depth understanding of the wind shear problems right there. "I think he knew the mountain from when he was at the academy and was figuring he could break away, gain time—for whatever he was trying to do."

  She hadn't explained that one of the planes had strafed the falling pieces, nor that she'd noticed that none of the military guys who'd landed with the copter had their sidearms on peace-bond. She'd come out from between her boulders when they landed, identified herself, and then had to listen . . .

  "She's got guts and the goods, bringing that thing down in here with no auxiliary," one had said, and then another, "Right convenient it could have been, too, for Harney, heh? Drop himself off here, then glide off with a cutie while we're looking for his body?"

  "You run the gonsarned thermal, then. There's nothing here but her and a cold ship. All pure."

  Volunteer nothing to an official, she'd remembered Father saying then, as he had several times when listening to her retelling of her time on Melchiza. When you're in their power, bureaucrats can be more dangerous than a loaded gun. A gun hits the target you aim at. Bureaucrats are another story.

  She'd kept quiet, then, and was startled when the copter pilot asked if she'd like a turn at the controls once they'd left Slipper Fourteen and the mountains well behind. She'd been watching—what else was there for her to do?—and taking in the whole process, but . . .

  "No, sir. I mean, yes sir—I would. But I don't have any power hours at all and probably I shouldn't."

  "Hah, that's great! No hours at all and they made you land that feather up there? Somebody's in need of pilot refresh if you ask me!"

  There were chuckles from a couple of the others in the machine, and the pilot himself flashed a quick top landing, making sure she'd caught it before going into a monologue on the good and bad points of hovering vehicles . . .

  But that would have been too much to tell Asu, and they'd told Theo not to talk about the questions they asked: had she known Hap Harney, had she been told to fly to the mountain, why had she selected that spot, why had she hidden in the rocks—which of course she hadn't, really. They'd gone on and on and on about how long had she been on-world and did she have any opinions on the coming elections and would she call someone who died stupidly a hero just because he'd died and . . . they were amused, somewhat, that the only drink she accepted was from the water fountain.

  So she'd hoped Asu would give over on that topic and Chelly—well, he'd helped, actually. He'd had some idea of what she'd b
een through—apparently he'd had his time with the authorities when the security team came through.

  "Asu, I didn't give them your Checksec, they turned it off the moment they saw it and said it was a potential violation of the privacy regs."

  "Violation? What's wrong with active protection? Everyone knows you have to take care of yourself! What about my privacy?"

  That, it turned out, had been the rub.

  Chelly's voice was low and firm while he was talking about it, and he lost some of the blotchiness that looked like it might have come from tears.

  "Your Checksec's a pro model, Asu. It not only blocks within a perimeter, but it probes any signals it finds and records them. The thing is, it kept trying to connect to the network so it could report somewhere."

  Asu's face and neck darkened; her mouth opened as if she were going to say something, but it took several jaw movements and some hand motions as well before she could articulate anything more understandable than, "Oh no. . . ."

  Finally: "I didn't even think! That's the Checksec Jivan gave me—she's head of Security for Diamon. You don't think it was trying to report, do you?"

  Chelly's glance may have struck the ceiling before Theo's, but as they looked down at Asu they both shrugged.

  Chelly's shrug had turned into a slow hand to the side of his face.

  "Could have been calling in, what do I know? I do know that they came in here and swept the place three times, then ran off and did the rest of Erkes. Harney's time here—I guess they had to check everything, since he'd been senior when I got here."

  "Same room as us? Right here? In our beds?" Asu's eyes widened.

  Chelly hand-talked, Yes, right, right, yes.

  "I'll need to get some smutch in then. Bad luck to sleep in a dead man's bed, you know . . ."

  It was then that the exhaustion really hit Theo, and she'd wished, very much that she'd had a certain Scout pilot to . . . talk to. Or something. Even Bek. He wouldn't have understood the piloting problems, but he would have made sure she relaxed.

  Lying in the top bunk, she smiled. Bek had been a good onagrata, even though they'd both gone into the First Pair knowing they'd each be going off in different directions.

  Despite the tea or because of it, she'd slept deeply, if alone, and managed to get up and dress without waking Asu, whose schedule put her on late-day, and took herself to math class, adding a note to shop for tea on the joint to-do list.

  Math drill done, and filed, Theo looked around. Others were still at work, which was something she was used to from the Wall, so she did some calculations in her head, trying to keep herself from remembering that there'd been a live pilot in that craft—somebody Chelly had known—trying to concentrate on the drill's final question, which to her mind had two mutually antagonistic answers. She'd chosen the simple one, of course.

  Visualizing the other one—no, well, she probably shouldn't use the desk for that, not with others around her still working. She resorted then, like she had at the Wall, to her needle. She slipped it and a length of thread out of a cargo pocket, and bent to work, stretching out a point on the fabric here, and one there . . . and after all, since the fabric was malleable and penetrable she could consider that the needle might be the spaceship and the . . .

  The sounds around her changed, which probably meant the rest of the class was finished with the drill. Theo glanced up. Peering at her from the next row was the instructor herself, Pilot Truffant.

  "No, Trainee, please don't let me interrupt your work. I'm sure it must be fascinating."

  Theo felt her face warm, but she had, she thought, earned some sarcasm. After all, it wasn't very advertent to be discovered doing needlework in math class. The low laughter of her classmates didn't help.

  She took a breath and answer the instructor calmly.

  "Yes, Pilot."

  The instructor moved closer.

  "Good, good. We'd hate for you to be bored, here at Anlingdin. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to explain why, in the face of your incoming scores, you find this a compelling way to follow up on a drill."

  "Yes, Pilot," Theo said. "I was thinking about the last question on the drill. The work here," she raised the unfinished lacework, "was helping me think."

  "Very good. The needle-and-haystack approach to space navigation, I take it?"

  Theo looked at the instructor. She seemed more amused than taunting.

  "I'm not familiar with the term," Theo admitted, while some few in the class sputtered. "But, on the drill, there was the answer I thought you wanted, and then there was the second answer. I needed—"

  "Enough!"

  But Theo had already stopped, obedient to Pilot Truffant's hand-talked stop.

  "You intrigue, Waitley. Please hold your work a moment."

  The instructor turned to the larger class.

  "The rest of you are done with the drill. How many were concerned about the 'second answer'?"

  No one moved or spoke; the instructor glanced down at her handheld readout and said finally, "This is excellent. All of you have the final answer right. I salute!"

  She fit action to words, saluting in all directions, and then leaned toward Theo, face intent.

  "The answer I expected is the one you gave," she said quietly. "Now, what does your needle say about the second answer?"

  Theo looked down at her work, and then up at the instructor again, grimacing as she tried to put words to thoughts. There were more sounds around as several of the lab students from the other class drifted in, pushing a small materials cart.

  "The easy answer," she said after a moment—"that answer is missing a dimension somehow. That is, it is right as far as it goes, so I'm glad I have that. But we're—see, the string-contraction effect needs to be in here; it may be negligible on a clean-paper arithmetic run but we can't assume that's what we have and—"

  The hand-talked sharp thought hold mouth hold came quickly, and then:

  "Enough, Waitley, enough. You anticipate a lesson some days in the future. I hope you'll have time after the lab to discuss your cloth computer with me."

  "Now, Waitley," said Pilot Truffant, "the drill's fine and so is your lab. You just finish that up on your time this evening. I wanted to tell you that I looked at your flight profile from yesterday. You made some wide-awake choices there, some challenging choices. I think that flight'll be flown a few times in the next semester or two, in sim and for real. While I could have done it in your five minutes I'm not sure there's more than a dozen on campus who could have matched it, all things considered."

  Truffant cleared the lab stuff away cheerfully, and then insisted:

  "Really, I'd like you to show me that other solution you were working on. I've banned an abacus, an antique slide-stick, three kinds of subvocal calculators, and a pet norbear from class in the past. Now I wonder if I have to ban needles and string."

  Six

  Lunch Break

  Anlingdin Piloting Academy

  "You walk everywhere, don't you?"

  "Did the soldiers threaten you?"

  "Were you scared?"

  "How did you get the Slipper to do that?"

  "Are you sleeping with anyone?"

  The girl who asked that got poked in the ribs by the young man next to her. That sparked some laughter and ribaldry which gave Theo a chance to catch her breath and take a sip without looking like she wasn't paying attention.

  If any of the questions surprised her more than any others she couldn't say; the good news was that a couple of the crowd were kind enough to use recognizable hand-talk, and that gave her something to concentrate on, besides trying to eat.

  They'd walked her in to the lunch room like she was leader of the pack, but partly it might have been to make sure no one else joined them.

  All of them were from the math lab; all had been at the school longer than she had and they all wanted to be close to her, where before they barely acknowledged her.

  She managed to answer some questions.


  "I wasn't scared," she said after another sip of whatever soft drink someone brought her, "because I was just too busy." Here she interjected with her hands, pointing toward the could-be instrument panel and signing updown, north, wind speed, drift, drift, updown, clock.

  "The order came and I had to find a way to get the ship out of the air, and the mountain was nearest . . .

  "Afterwards, then I was shaky and wanted to dance!"

  For some reason that prompted laughter, and she grabbed a bite as people quieted and then looked as the youngster—she recognized him as one of the Erkes local students—blurted into the silence, "You always walk so fast and . . ."

  She agreed, nodding in his direction. "I do. I like to walk, but there's not really enough time to just take a hike, and I'm usually a little late . . ."

  Again, some laughter and smiles, and the pair staring back and forth at each other with furtive hand-talk that looked like Later alone ask and an assent and . . .

  "But the Slipper was great," she said, getting back to another question, "except I'd never landed in that kind of a head wind before. I really had to trick her down with a sideslip . . ."

  Here Theo demonstrated with a hand motion and a swing of the shoulders and then a dual slide of hands toward the tabletop. Then she laughed, doubling the attention on her.

  "The only time I worried about the soldiers is when I made them hold the Slipper and one didn't understand so good about paying attention. He let the starboard wing loose before I got the tiedowns set and it almost clipped his nose."

  "You made the soldiers help?"

  Theo snickered.

  "Did I have a choice? You think I'm going to let a school Slipper fall off a mountain if I can help it? They insisted I was going with them, and right away, but the rotor pilot, he told them I was right, the ship needed to be tied down else it might run into his machine at liftoff. So yes, the soldiers helped."

  The other hand-talkers, not the hormone addicts, were more readable: saw flight well done came her way and bowli ball after?

  That sounded good, but she really wasn't going to have time. Not today, she managed and, thank you.