Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder)

by Scott Rhine

  “Hey, that was all Red, man. We have a room over here, check it out.” As they passed the grass-covered grill hut that sold glowing-green test tubes of booze under the name ‘moonshots,’ Lou said, “Nice utility belt.”

  “This is what I normally wear to the beach. It has spare everything: first aid kit, weather service radio, aloe . . . Is that a roll of condoms hanging from the ceiling fan?”

  “Dude, safety for our soldiers is the number-one rule of the Academy,” Lou explained. Calling out to his posse, he shouted, “If it’s gonna salute?”

  “It wears a suit,” finished his crew.

  “Wonderful,” Zeiss said, rubbing his forehead. “No lawsuits, please.”

  “Here, I brought some bock beer for you—the good stuff. Relax. The semester’s over and you’re off duty. When’s the last time you had a date?”

  “Too long,” the TA laughed, opening the gift bottle.

  “There is all kinds of high-class strange out there, bro. Get your game on and get you some!”

  Zeiss smiled at Lou’s enthusiasm. “I’ll go find a seat by the pool.”

  He ran into the Sorensons on the way there. When the TA saw the riding crop on Daniel’s lap, he had to go tease them. “I’m surprised you showed, Professor Horvath. Wow. You went all out on the costume, too. Half the guys here are going to ask you to sign their magazine. The other half—” Having said too much, he covered his blunder by taking a swig of the beer.

  In German, the woman dressed as a dominatrix said, “Will want me to spank them for their math secrets? Which half are you in? I don’t see a book.”

  Zeiss sprayed beer off to the side.

  Daniel high-fived her. “She still has it.”

  “Sorry. What induced you to wear . . . whoa?” Zeiss couldn’t look below her chin. Lou was right; it’d been too long.

  “Well, I begged a lot,” said Daniel.

  “And Mira wanted it. She only turns eighteen once,” said Trina.

  The DJ posted a schedule of co-ed activities and cranked the rock music.

  Daniel told them, “I had my man put the cake cutting after the banana-cream-pie eating contest, and the girl-on-top chicken fight.”

  “That’s almost an hour from now. This sun is brutal. I’d spend a lot of time under the umbrellas if I were you,” Zeiss said, nodding to the patio that overlooked the pool and beach. “Where’s the birthday girl?”

  Trina shrugged. “She said something about not having anything to wear. Risa’s helping her.”

  “Plan on at least another hour,” suggested Daniel.

  “Is that a complaint?” she asked.

  “No, mistress,” he grinned.

  “Get a room,” Zeiss quipped as he left them.

  Sitting in a reclining chair by the pool, he adjusted his fedora to block the sun and enjoyed the view. He bobbed his head to the heavy beat of music playing poolside. He snapped to high alert when he spotted a particularly well-shaped pair of legs walking away from him. A blonde in heels and a black throng strutted to the grinding guitar of “Shine” by Collective Soul. She wobbled, making it clear she was new at the stilettos, probably a novice model. Zeiss hopped up to help, but the woman stopped a foot in front of him to bend over and adjust the strap on her shoe.

  The moment stretched out for Zeiss, and he didn’t want it to end. His body felt like the first time his father forced him down the expert ski slope—stark terror, weightless stomach, and an incredible rush of adrenaline. He instinctively grabbed her elbow as she wavered again. With a voice deeper and smoother than he thought possible, he asked, “Do you need an arm to lean on?”

  The young woman seized the arm gratefully and a smile played on her brightly painted lips. “Z,” she began. Hearing his name with affection thrilled him even more. His mind raced. Was this one of his sister’s friends? Did she know him? If so, today was going to be the best date ever. When she turned her flawless face and spotlighted him with her blue eyes, he was lost. “Ever the gentleman.”

  He processed the voice and hit the metaphorical tree on his ski run. “Red?” he said shakily.

  Risa’s voice came from behind him. “We did a good job, right?”

  Zeiss could only pant like his leg had been hyper-extended again.

  The blonde said, “We’re going to nail that copilot chair today. He won’t know what hit him.”

  “Maybe you should avoid that term around the mils . . . Back me up on this, Herk,” Zeiss said to the bomb-disposal tech hauling two coolers of food and drink.

  “I am smart like tractor, strong like bull,” the Polish group member said.

  The TA whipped off his shirt. “You’re going to burn, Red. Put this on.”

  The young woman blocked his efforts to wrap her. “Don’t smudge the makeup or the hair. I put too much effort into baiting this line.”

  “Dental floss is more like it,” Zeiss complained.

  Risa cooed at his fit abdominal muscles. “Damn, Z, you’re hiding a six-pack.”

  Zeiss waved his hand. “Only one bottle, but it’s the real deal, not this weak American stuff.”

  Herk laughed. “I hear that.”

  Just then, Zeiss heard the synthetic shutter click of a digital camera. He spotted the photographer with a zoom lens on the other side of the pool. “Herk, get that camera or our team is compromised.”

  “On it.”

  The two men came at the photographer from opposite sides, and he bolted toward the TA. Zeiss tackled him into the pool. Herk fished the man out while Zeiss pocketed the camera’s memory card.

  Red had almost reached Lou’s keg when Zeiss caught up to her. He wrapped her in a towel and said, “You need to see Professor Sorenson, now!”

  “Your friendship is the only reason your arm is still attached,” Red said through gritted teeth. As he guided her, she complained, “You’re embarrassing me.”

  “You’re embarrassing yourself,” he countered. When he got to the patio in front of Daniel and Trina, Zeiss gesture to the girl and hissed, “This is not appropriate!”

  “I shaved,” Red said, opening the towel to show Trina.

  Daniel turned his head, refusing to get involved in what was clearly a girl issue. Zeiss couldn’t move his eyes. They were glued to the bikini line where she was pointing. After an embarrassing delay, he waved the camera memory card, “The whole world will think so if she keeps this exhibitionism up.”

  “You’re right,” Trina said sternly. “Young lady, you need to carry your media fogger at all times.”

  “I meant this lack of a suit,” whispered Zeiss.

  “Did you borrow that from my closet?” asked Trina.

  The billionaire risked a glance. “This is wrong on so many levels. That’s the suit from Cancun. I thought it was ripped.”

  “Good memories. I had it fixed.” Trina shrugged.

  “There’s no room for a fogger,” Red objected.

  Trina explained, “It’s built into the big gold tag hanging off the side.”

  “I wondered why you needed a big T on your suit.”

  “It was a joke, so people could tell me from my sisters.”

  “Hush,” Daniel jumped in.

  “That explains why the top is a little loose,” Zeiss mumbled.

  Red growled him. “First you don’t like the food and now there’s not enough of it?”

  “I only meant stealing from a teacher is a serious charge,” the TA fumbled.

  “Borrowing,” Red insisted. “She gave me access to her wardrobe. You know that.”

  “So, no charges are being brought,” summarized Daniel. “She’s eighteen now, legal for everything here. There’s not a thing we can do to stop her.”

  Zeiss knew that; he’d somehow chosen to forget it.

  “Thank you.” The young woman stormed off to find Lou before the first contest.

  “I’m heading back to the island on the next shuttle,” fumed Zeiss.

  “Whoa,” said Daniel. “I can’t jump into the pool,
and our martial-arts instructor is on-call for security. Someone has to keep an eye on these kids so they don’t drown.”

  “I have to watch?” asked an outraged Zeiss.

  “You signed up for it,” insisted the billionaire. “That’s an order.”

  The first contest was a suggestive one. The man ate a plate of pie off the woman’s lap, and then the woman had to eat a banana. Red wanted to be Lou’s partner, but couldn’t bring herself to touch contaminated food. (The cake was under armed guard, locked in a freezer.)

  Zeiss approached his sister’s friend, Vanessa, for a favor. “Congratulations on getting the cover this year. You earned it. Seventeen hours for one shot; I couldn’t imagine.”

  The model smiled, flattered. “Trying to get back into my good graces?”

  “No, I have a student who’s having a bad time. He went through survival training and things went terribly wrong. He was the only one of his team to make it.”

  She was a little suspicious at first. “So you just throw your ex his way?”

  “Not at all. Llewellyn’s Welsh, from a good family. I remember your grandparents were from Wales. I thought you might have something in common. He’s the one over there trying to convince that girl that a banana won’t hurt her.”

  “He’s cute!” the model exclaimed. “He seems to have a lot of friends already.”

  “I asked the other pilots to look out for him, but all he talked about earlier was burying the pain in alcohol.”

  “Poor baby. I’ve got this.” Vanessa snatched Lou for the contest before anyone knew what happened. They won first place. She also paired with him for the co-ed water chicken fight. Lou strode over to the TA while teams were getting in the water. “Dude, you are a god. I don’t know how you did it, but I owe you big-time.”

  “Just treat her like a lady, not a Kleenex,” Zeiss insisted. “She’s my sister’s best friend.”

  Red was arguing with Risa. “Let me use Herk; I need to take that lingerie tramp down a notch.”

  Risa wasn’t having any of it. “I called him first. Take Z, he’s the tallest one here.”

  The thought of her legs around his neck made Zeiss sit down. “No,” he asserted. Then his mouth betrayed him. “Not unless she wears my shirt and hat, too.”

  Red shouted, “I have SPF 50, Mister Safety. Back off!”

  She eventually badgered Auckland into being her horse because he had the most experience with sports.

  Zeiss put on sunglasses and pretended to chat with his sister while he watched every flirt and giggle in the pool. When the twisting in his stomach produced an audible growl, Claire asked, “Are you okay, Conrad?”

  “I’m going to hell,” her brother muttered, taking another swig of his beer.

  “The trick is to enjoy it. I do,” Claire countered in German. “Oh! I’ll be right back; that man over there is a movie producer!” She trotted off to meet a bigwig from Fortune Multimedia, and Zeiss knew he wouldn’t see her again for the rest of this visit.

  Red won the chicken fight by resorting to martial arts and nearly breaking Vanessa’s nose. While the model iced the bruise, Lou yelled at Red. “Watch it; she’s delicate. Not everybody chews wing wreckage and spits nails like you.”

  Daniel canceled the cake for the afternoon, not wanting to draw more attention to the young woman’s erratic behavior. Zeiss asked Kaguya Mori to start her set early and provide a distraction. “Please,” he begged. “Do what you do best and get everybody looking at you.”

  The Japanese heiress smiled. “Because you asked so nicely.”

  For her first number, she did a cover of “Genie in a Bottle”, staring at Zeiss during the refrain. Red picked up the suggestive moves and began to hit on the pilot next to Lou in order to make him jealous. Zeiss had to take off his hat to cover his lap.

  “This is not going to end well,” Herk muttered in his ear.

  “I’ve got to go,” the TA stammered, unable to tear his eyes away from the gyrations. “Have Sonrisa fly cover for her. Red’s missing certain pack instincts that most women have. I don’t want her hurt.”

  Chapter 29 – Burned

  After returning to the almost-abandoned Academy on one of the shuttle boats, Zeiss went to the secure level. Since he’d effectively quit by leaving against orders, he drafted a formal resignation letter and printed it. Aside from a few paragraphs of polishing, his dissertation was finished as well. He’d only been delaying to maintain his cover. That job was over, so he printed the tome off as well.

  As he collated the pages, he came across the camera memory card. “I guess I need to look at this to see what the security breaches were.”

  Bringing the photos up on the projection screen, he felt the breath knocked out of him again. He zoomed in on the girl’s face. His hand hovered over the delete button, but somehow it hit print again by mistake.

  He wiped the memory card after that. “Maybe it’s the blonde hair,” he said to the whales.

  Pulling up another photo from classroom security logs of Red concentrating by a whiteboard, he felt the same pang. “Nope. I’m a pervert who’s going to hell.”

  He printed that photo, too, before deleting it. Reasoning that the enemy agents had the same access to security footage that he did, Mira’s cover ID wasn’t safe as long as any pictures of her remained in the system for comparison. He used Sojiro’s facial-search algorithm to locate more footage. At Christmas, her face lit the room brighter than the tree when she tasted his chocolate mousse. Print.

  “What are you doing?” he railed at himself.

  He put the photos into an envelope addressed to Trina. Zeiss placed a note inside. “Someone she loves should have these.”

  He set the interface to locate and then scrub images on automatic. The last thing he dropped inside the envelope was his access badge for this level. Hands shaking, he sealed it shut. “I have to be strong. I’ll go to Oxford and forget all about her.”

  He knew he wouldn’t be safe until the photos were out of his hands, so he ran to Professor Horvath’s room and slid the envelope under the door. When the crinkling stopped, he sat on the floor, relieved that the temptation was gone. He left his dissertation and resignation in Professor Sorenson’s inbox.

  Just after lights-out, Zeiss strolled slowly back to his pod for his last night on the island.

  When he walked into his office, he smelled cherry hair shampoo. He opened his bedroom door in the dark, savoring the scent he was sure was just his sex-starved imagination. To himself, he chuckled, “You deviant.”

  He almost dropped his keys when Red whimpered, “I deserve that. I’ve been a spoiled brat and it’d serve me right if you spanked me. You were right.”

  By the light of his surge protector and screen saver, he could see Mira in her white bathrobe. The ghostly glow was so unreal, he asked, “Why are you back early?”

  She had been sent home early for fighting. But instead of dwelling on her own flaws, Mira slid the robe down to reveal a shoulder so red that it was almost purple. “I’m so hot it hurts!”

  His breath shuddered. “I can get you relief, but I can’t let students be seen in my room.”

  “Then don’t turn on the light,” she suggested.

  He tossed his utility belt on the table and pulled out a massive bottle of burn gel. “This is what you need. I know this is your first experience with this kind of thing, so I’ll try to be gentle.”

  She dropped the robe on the floor as she darted into his bedroom and laid facedown on his bed. “Hurry. Rub it in!”

  Under his breath, Zeiss whispered in German, “If I’m going to hell, I might as well have a few minutes in heaven first.”

  The young woman moaned loudly when he squirted the aloe gel on her back and caressed it in.

  “Shh, use the pillow or you’ll wake my neighbors,” Zeiss begged.

  ****

  The girl’s voice was distorted, and Dolan could see nothing on the micro-cam other than the TA’s utility belt and the robe
on the video screen. The student operating the bug turned to his roommate. “Booty call! He is so busted. I’m posting this live to the website.”

  “Sure, but they’ll take that down soon,” said his friend. “We need witnesses. Since I did the weather announcements this past hurricane season, I know how to hook it straight to the PA speakers.”

  ****

  Zeiss sat, shirtless, in the cement security cell under the airport, his face haggard in the harsh fluorescent lighting. He shivered in the air conditioning. Taggart sat across the desk from him, with his back to the two-way mirror. The commander said, “Let’s go over this again. Tell me about the banking records we found on your desk. There’s a large Swiss account in your name.”

  “I’m from Switzerland, this is not illegal,” Zeiss explained. “In my family, it’s expected. The money is from my work here.”

  “The account was created during your extended vacation last year and gets irregular contributions.”

  “My bonuses. I have to hide them from my students. They watch me.”

  “I wonder why. You had an awful lot of pornography on your hard drive.”

  “That was research, approved by Professor Horvath.”

  “Yeah. She was removed from this investigation because of allegations you slept with her during your Isolation Chamber experience.”

  “She broke in after I fell asleep . . . to talk to me.”

  “Hey, I can’t fault you for that. If she paid me a midnight visit, I wouldn’t put up a fight either. You’re both adults. Tell me what the female student was doing in your room.”

  “I was . . . helping her.”

  “Uh-huh. Why you?”

  “Because I’m always prepared for these things. She knows that. I take care of her,” Zeiss said lightly. Then he addressed the mirror. “That didn’t come out right.”

  “An innocent sunburn?”

  “Yes. You can test my hands for residue.”

  “We didn’t find a bottle.”

  “I gave it to the young lady.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” said the security commander, chuckling. “What was she wearing when she came in for this alleged medical treatment?”