by Jim Rudnick
That really got under the skin of the city council back then—what, seventy years ago he thought—and they’d quickly outlawed all advertising outside the dome. So the signs had come down, yet the old steel I-bars still climbed up hundreds of feet but now held nothing. No advertisements, not a single one.
David nodded. That was how it should be—smart council back then—unlike what he’d heard Aunt Kendal ranting about to her staff when she worked from home sometimes. She said she’d find a way to show them what was right under their noses and get even with the Inner Circle.
This time, David grunted. Politics. He reminded himself he wanted none of it.
As he moved a few feet to his right, pretending to be looking for the perfect picture, he brought up the large camera to his face and sighted … moved farther right … sighted … back left a step and then took a few real photos.
Part one, done … as his peers online had said over and over, a large part of a hack—any hack—done in person was to ensure you looked like you belonged. Like you had done this hundreds of times and you were really just part of the background.
He looked down at his camera. It was out of real film, and he looked around where he was. Not surprisingly, as he’d planned this a month ago, he was just a few feet from a large square masonry planter, about three feet square, holding some kind of flower at the front edge of the house’s lawn. But more importantly, the edge of the box was six inches thick. Thick enough for him to balance his camera on which he did and then pulled the bag over his head to get more film.
The house was quiet—he’d planned for this to happen mid-afternoon, and so far, he had not seen another person on the street.
He rummaged around in the bag, finding the holster of a roll of new film, and he placed it on the edge of the planter too.
The bag he also placed on the planter, but he made sure to have one-half or so lean over the dirt at the edge of the planter’s box. Part two, done … get all your ducks in a row—a perfect row, he knew.
He dusted off his hands—they’d yelled at him that a real photographer would have used some kind of aerosol spray to get any and all dust and particles off, but he’d nixed that idea. “Just an amateur,” he said to himself, as he slowly unlatched the back end of the big camera.
He pulled down on the red toggle inside at the rear, and then with both hands, he squeezed the twin releases and the film holster dropped into his hands. He carefully moved it to the edge of the planter box and balanced it on the masonry.
He inserted the new film holster canister—
“Hey, whatcha doing?” a voice said from his left.
Next door to the house with the planter, some man had come out with what looked like a full box of recyclables, and he’d stopped down his driveway, eying David.
David grinned, remembering that smiles make all sorts of questions diminish.
“Hey, just reloading my big camera—I just needed somewhere to place it so it’d not get any dirt or dust—just using the planter box—that’s okay, right?” he asked, making sure his voice was polite and respectful.
The man grunted and then began to tote his blue box out to the curb. In moments, he had deposited it there and had returned to his own house.
David smiled, hooked up the new film holster, and snapped the camera shut.
“And now, the crux of the whole matter,” he said to himself.
He twisted a bit to his right, picked up the used film holster, and slowly wedged it into his bag, or at least that’s what it looked like to anyone else. But in fact, his right hand was already deep in the bag, opening the false bottom, and using his hand like a trowel, he was moving dirt out of his way. He had to go down at least a foot, but the planter had been watered earlier, and the soil was easy to dig into. At the foot mark or so he thought, he pulled the used film holster back up with his left hand turning it ninety degrees for a better fit, and then he began to push it back down.
His right hand, however, grabbed his repeater, in its watertight container, and he dropped it into that new foot-deep hole and quickly covered it up with the soil he’d just removed. Tapping it down and closing the false bottom, he stood up off his knees to push down on the top of the used film holster once more. Then he grabbed the sides of the bag itself and jerked them up and down a couple of times to seat the holster and put the bag back on his shoulder.
Picking up his camera, he clicked the load button and then the auto AI button, and the display screen on the back flashed him the ready icon.
New film, check.
Repeater in place, check.
Anonymous WiFi coming up, check.
He grinned at the craters and the big plain and smiled.
He even took a couple more shots from that point too.
And then he went home to find that his repeater was working as it infiltrated that house’s older router, and he was now on the net but pretending to be living at that house. For a moment, he felt a bit guilty, but then he remembered his peers had said that if you can’t even protect your own WiFi, you don’t deserve to even be on the net.
“Works for me,” David said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Flying into Tower Number Three was a hoot, Tanner thought, as he got to do a big swirly turn off to port to come around and then up the cliff face of the canyon to land quickly at the tower landing pad. “Lots of other flyers here already,” he said to himself, and he could see that most did not carry the same blue coloration and RIM Confederacy Navy insignia either, though there were a few of same.
He jumped out, nodded to the Provost guard at the small hut at the edge of the tarmac, and walked slowly toward the massive double doors. He had to remember to ask what kind of wood that was, but he filed that away for later as a man in civvies was coming up to him with some degree of haste.
“Sir—uh—Captain, is it? Sir, can I get some help here?” the man said and thrust a wad of unruly documents into Tanner’s hands. Who the man was and what the issue was were forgotten or he just neglected to say.
But Tanner had to at least somewhat follow procedures.
“Yes, it’s Captain Scott. And you are?” he asked nicely, not even looking at the papers yet.
“Well, if you construction types learned to read and to follow academy procedures, you’d see that I am Professor Nigel Watkins, the academy ethics teacher, and I’m about fed up with the slowness of all of this. And now, I find that my textbooks—two of which I wrote myself—cannot be here in time for the upcoming semester. And I find that to be someone else’s fault—hardly my own,” he said, his voice whining out the words.
Tanner nodded and looked down at the papers. As he leafed through them, he noted that the textbook publisher claimed there was not enough time—four months, mind you, Tanner thought—to get the textbooks printed, bound, and then shipped to Eons.
He looked at the upset professor with a raised eyebrow. “Professor Watkins—it seems this issue is not with us—the construction crew—at all but with your own publisher,” Tanner said dryly.
The professor nodded but then shook his head back and forth. “Yes—the publisher can’t fulfill the orders because of the stupid construction taking so much longer, and that has backed up all textbook orders with them. I hear that there’s hundreds of these same textbook issues. What are you going to do about it, Captain?” he said.
Upset? Yes, the professor was upset, and at this point, Tanner had no idea as to why this textbook issue had arisen at all.
“Professor, Tower Number Three is the Quartermasters and Services Tower—and this is my first visit to same. Let me look into this, will you, and I’ll make it a point to get back to you. Today,” he said, and he wondered how he could do that, but he smiled anyway.
The professor nodded and then reminded Tanner that he now had a name of a person whom he’d call for updates on this issue and more importantly, he stated flatly, a name he would assign blame to at the next full faculty meeting with the admiral in a few hours as that next
meeting was today. And as a reminder to the captain, he shared that as the president of the Union Local, he would also have sway over the professors as a whole too.
Tanner nodded, gave back the untidy pile of documents, and finally made his way into Tower Number Three. Like the administration tower he’d been in yesterday, the lobby was huge and soaring, full at this point with workmen and movers, using all four elevators, he noted, to move goods and equipment up and into the tower.
“Morning, Corporal,” Tanner said to one of the marines standing on what looked like picket duty at the side of the lobby rotunda. “Mind telling me about the layout of the tower?” he asked.
“Sir, yes, Sir. Lobby is here—well, you can see that. Far doors lead to admin offices for the academy quartermaster, Provost guard offices, that sort of thing. Elevator up to the fourth floor, and the academy library takes up that whole floor, Sir. That’s where most of those equipment cases are heading,” he said, as he pointed to a long grouping of wooden cases on dollies.
“Library takes up from floor four up to nine; quartermaster services and such up to floor thirty-one, and the balance of the fifty-two floor tower is—well, I’ve no idea, Sir. Only been up to thirty-one myself, Sir,” he said, and Tanner got the gist of the layouts.
He nodded, thanked the Provost corporal, and then went over to one of the elevators that seemed to have more people than equipment lined up. Moments later, he got off on floor four—the library entrance.
He had to pick his way around more wooden cases, equipment technicians, and packaging supplies that were now being tossed into piles to be taken away as waste. He slowly worked his way into the vast open space that would one day be a library.
“But not today,” he said to himself, as workmen were still assembling shelving units by the dozens as others laid out the built ones according to some kind of design layouts they had. He smiled. If there was one thing he remembered from his own Earldom Academy days and their library, there was always somewhere to goof off—sleep even. Or more and that brought him a real smile.
He wandered. He looked at the expansive windows along the canyon side of the tower and was glad he didn’t suffer from a fear of heights. He walked along that complete wall and was stopped near the end by a techie.
“Sir, careful along the rest of this wall. We’re running big power cables up to this exact spot—for the POD printers—and we don’t want anyone to bump into a live feed. Not to worry—all is supposed to be dead lines ‘til later—but one just never knows in new construction, Sir,” he said and turned away.
Tanner asked, “Can you tell me—what does POD mean?”
The techie nodded as he was stripping cables of their protective plastic collars. “Sir, that means print on demand—you know, where you can simply supply something as an electronic doc at one end of the printer and the book comes out the other.”
He stripped more of the plastic using some kind of specialized pliers, and Tanner said “Bingo,” to himself.
As he moved through the library, he eventually found the administration offices and popped his head inside to see if he could—
“Can I help you, Captain?” a voice said from behind a monitor at a desk in the corner.
He ambled over and smiled down at the young woman who was eating a kind of lunch—if you could call a salad a lunch.
“Yes, I was just wondering if you could tell me—is there a time line for the completion of the library as a whole? All up and books on shelves, printers ready—is there a date for that?” he asked.
She nodded as she tucked the edge of a piece of something green into the corner of her mouth and then grinned back at him. “Word is we’ll be up before much else is—say in about two months or so. But the classrooms over in Tower Number Two are the slowpokes, Sir. Why?” she asked, as she chewed on her healthy lunch.
He smiled and said, “No reason … just wanted to know,” and he left her to get more healthy.
He went and did a complete walk on the other side of the library too, the non-canyon side, and it too was being finished. There were several workers here, all busy. All engaged. All were actually working, which made him think the two-month time line was a doable one.
Walking out the library doors, he remembered the Provost corporal had said that the quartermasters administration offices were both down in the lobby itself as well as taking up from floor nine to thirty-one. He waited for the next elevator and then went up ten floors to floor fourteen. He got off amid a huge pile of packaging cartons, boxes, and cases, all being slowly tossed into disposal units by a couple of cadets. He nodded to them and noted they sped up considerably as they recognized his captain’s rank.
He entered a set of double doors again and noted there was a security screen protecting the rest of the floor from entry by unauthorized visitors. The screen was unfinished so he just walked through and around the first tall stack of crates, and then he was challenged.
“Sir, sorry—this is a restricted quartermaster staff only area. You will need to leave immediately,” the Provost sergeant said as he blocked Tanner’s path.
Tanner nodded.
Quite right. Properly handled and with the right degree of politeness, yet the velvet glove did have an iron fist within, and he noted the Merkel on the guard’s shoulder.
“Sorry, Sergeant, just walking around. My apologies, I’ll leave and go back down to the lobby administration offices.
The sergeant nodded but held firm in his stance and made sure to take a couple of steps forward to ensure that Tanner pressed the DOWN button on the elevator and then continued to watch him leave the floor.
Down in the lobby, Tanner moved past the large lines of crates and over to the quartermaster’s offices. Inside at the long counter, a young alien from Ttseen presented himself and said, “May I help you, Captain?”
Tanner nodded and asked if he could provide the location and time of the upcoming faculty meeting, and the Ttseen told him they were weekly meetings held over in Tower Number Four on floor sixteen.
He nodded, realizing he could swing by there in a little while and make that meeting without any problem.
He spent the next hour walking other floors of Tower Number Three—not the quartermaster floors but above them in the thirty-first floor.
Empty. Not a single divider or office or room laid out at all. The elevator doors opened on an empty space. Enormous windows on the canyon side looked out at Eons and on the other side down to the tarmac or to Dessau in the distance.
But that was it.
Expansion, Tanner thought. Maybe this is for the Academy getting bigger, but surely, the costs would have been quite large for this kind of future planning to occur.
He shook his head. He was a starship captain—a navy man, not an urban planner. “But sure seemed to be an expensive way to build,” he said as he took the elevator all the way down to the lobby and then went out to his flyer.
Five minutes later, he landed over on the other side of the canyon at Tower Number Four, the administration tower, and was able to just crowd into an elevator as it was going up. He helped the three cadets manhandle the top-heavy dolly out of the elevator car and then pressed the button for floor sixteen and got off to be met by a Provost guard who gave him the once over.
“Sir—help you?” he offered very politely.
“Yes, I’m looking for the faculty meeting? Can you direct me?” Tanner said just as politely.
He was sure the guard had more questions, but he turned and pointed down a long corridor off to the right.
“Yes, Sir. Take this hallway down about halfway, then take a left, and the big conference room is off to your left a few more yards down that side corridor.”
As Tanner walked, he once again noted the beautiful surroundings on the floor. Art on the walls. A few small seating areas spaced down the long corridor too, and as he met the side corridor, he turned to his left.
Ahead behind a solid glass wall, he could see more than fifty people in
civvies sitting around a huge table, while at one end, the admiral sat alone. As he entered the room, the admiral looked up, smiled, and patted the table beside him to indicate that Tanner should come and sit there. And he did.
“Meetings are boring and are supposed to be boring,” he said to himself as the admiral opened up the meeting soon after that. Tanner nodded as he was introduced as the 2IC for the new academy facility building and half-smiled back at the more than fifty unsmiling faces.
The admiral was going over the various timelines; issues that had held them up were named and labeled, and workarounds were identified. Mostly the issues were with the facilities here being ready to be equipped and built-ins being done. “Sometimes,” Higgins added, “the suppliers were behind, and that made everything else get out of whack too.”
Tanner nodded when he should have and looked interested when he should have. He wished to be anywhere on a bridge rather than sitting and listening to this. His mind drifted to the Lady St. August for a moment, but he shoved that away as soon as he thought of her, and it worked or so it seemed.
“Captain, sorry?” the admiral interrupted his train of thought and looked over at him.
“Sir?” Tanner said.
“I meant, did you have anything else to add? You’ve only been here a couple of days, but you must by now have something to say to our faculty,” he said, as he gathered up some of the papers in front of him.
Tanner thought and then spoke up.
“One thing I did learn today was that some of you—perhaps many of you—may be facing some issues with textbook deliveries in time for our first semester,” he said and that got quite a few nods from the assembled faculty.