by Alex Stewart
A tranche of barren heathland, unsuited to agriculture, had been enclosed by a sagging chain link fence, on which dispirited and rusting signs hung every hundred yards or so, warning of dire penalties for anyone contemplating trespass. Since most of the arrivals and departures were by grav sled the barrier served more as a psychological boundary than a physical one, but the array of sensors buried along its length and the constantly patrolling security drones poised to swarm anything not broadcasting the right access codes tended to deter anything airborne and unauthorized from wandering across it. Anything capable of reason, anyway—a thin line of avian bones and carcasses littered the ground just inside the perimeter.
The main buildings of the campus became briefly visible as Aunt Jenny’s sled bucked up and over the fence, leaving an appreciable portion of my stomach behind, before the scattering of buildings disappeared again, occulted by the intervening landing pads and servicing facilities. A few glittering motes caught the sun at a more reasonable altitude, probably other potential candidates arriving for assessment, but she’d been having trouble with the emitters again, and didn’t trust the sled’s stability more than a few feet off the ground. Something I didn’t mind too much, as avoiding obstacles had taken up most of her attention during the trip, and I wasn’t really in the mood for conversation.
Not that I wasn’t grateful for the lift, and the tacit support it represented. Mother was too busy preparing the Queen Kylie’s Revenge for departure to even pretend any interest in my concerns, Tinkie was back with her unit, and Dad was dealing with the sort of crisis I might have understood if I’d actually listened to any of my lectures in estate management; it seemed to involve a lot of time meshed into the datasphere, and even more wading through mud and nodding to logorrhoeic agriculturalists, and he’d jumped at his sister’s offer to provide transportation for me.
A reflected flash of light from a gleaming metallic pimple in the middle distance suddenly caught my attention, and I couldn’t quite suppress a shiver of excitement, despite the number of times I’d seen its like. A spacecraft, whose spherical hull, optimized for rift entry, marked it out unmistakably as a starfarer, was nestled into the open girderwork of its cradle like the Commonwealth’s largest breakfast egg. The ground tenders scurrying around it gave me enough sense of scale to identify it as only a small vessel, little more than a cutter or a courier boat: but it was capable of travelling to other stellar systems. Though I’d been in space more often than I could remember, they’d only been local hops to orbitals, or other nearby bodies, and the thought that I might soon be departing for far wider horizons sent a tingle of anticipation down my spine.
Noticing the direction of my gaze, Aunt Jenny smiled at me. “Won’t be long before you’re aboard something like that. Maybe even the skipper, one day.”
“Like that’ll ever happen.” I snorted at the absurdity of the idea, although I found myself relishing it too.
Aunt Jenny shook her head. “Someone’s got to be the first RN Captain with a dick,” she pointed out. “Might as well be you.”
“Might as well,” I agreed, not quite daring to believe it was possible. That’d be a coup for the Forresters, right enough. Possibly even enough of one to gain Mother’s grudging approval at last.
“Just need to get you through the screening first,” my aunt added, and my good mood evaporated like dew on a sunny morning.
This was going to be tough. I scanned the schedule for the day, which hung conveniently in the overlap of our dataspheres. Orientation. Preliminary testing. Which would boil down to hoping the questions they’d ask were the ones I’d memorized the answers to. Then the one session I was completely confident I could deal with: lunch.
By now we’d reached the campus area, an elegant complex of buildings in faux Early Settlement style, surrounded by an untidy sprawl of one- and two-storey structures, many of which had clearly been intended as temporary when first erected a generation or two ago. The main buildings were surrounded by well-tended lawns, across which Aunt Jenny cheerfully skimmed, to the visible consternation of the cadets crisscrossing them on foot. We were at least a head higher than even the tallest, but most of them ducked reflexively anyway, a wake of genuflecting profanity following us as we made our way to the parade ground, where arriving candidates had been directed to park their sleds.
“Good turnout,” Aunt Jenny observed, dropping us neatly between a couple of sleek family runabouts, next to which the blocky lines of her utility model stood out like a pig at a cat show. There must have been over a hundred sleds parked there already, most of them relatively new and well cared for, and we drew a few curious glances from other recent arrivals as we clambered out and I began to work the kinks from my back. The majority of candidates were arriving alone, and I felt a surge of self-consciousness at being accompanied by a relative, as though I were being escorted to my first day at kindergarten.
“Yes,” I agreed, as a couple of young women, sisters or cousins if the close resemblance between them was anything to go by, glanced in my direction with frank curiosity. There were few other men in sight, and all those I could see were unaccompanied, trying their hardest to project an air of confidence I doubt many of them actually felt as they negotiated the thickets of semi-audible comments from the women around them. At least there was no sign of Carenza . . .
Until a familiar sled swooshed overhead, grounding with a slight bump just where it would most impede our progress across the open expanse between the line of parked vehicles and the building. One of Carenza’s favorite toys, it was as streamlined as the edge of a razor blade, ridiculously overpowered for its size, and sprayed a shade of look-at-me red guaranteed to scorch the retina of anyone incautious enough to do so. Coupled with her level of piloting skill, which was considerably lower than she fondly imagined, the damn thing was a fatal accident looking for someone to happen to; which was the main reason, other than the obvious one, I’d never accepted a lift in it.
“Sorry, didn’t see you there,” Carenza lied, powering down and glaring at me as though regretting I hadn’t ended up underneath the thing. Clearly the incident with the drink still rankled.
“Sorry Lieutenant Commander ma’am, I didn’t see you!” Aunt Jenny barked. “Or did you skip over the section on rank insignia?”
“No ma’am, sorry ma’am.” Carenza went several different shades of panicky, belatedly registering my aunt’s presence. Having been selected for assessment put her under a tacit obligation to abide by the RN’s code of conduct, at least while she was on a Naval base. Her hand fluttered indecisively up and down next to her face.
“Have you been sworn in as a cadet already?” Aunt Jenny asked, in patently insincere surprise. Learning fast, Carenza shook her head.
“No ma’am.”
“Then there’s no need to salute me, is there?” My aunt watched Carenza scramble out of her open-topped piece of boy bait with narrowed eyes. “Not an auspicious start, young lady. You need to buck your ideas up if you want to stay here any longer than the first cut.” She tilted her head towards the trickle of candidates heading towards the main building, several of whom had paused to take in the entertainment. She raised her voice to encompass the loiterers. “What are you lot waiting for, a League invasion? At the double!”
She grinned as the little knot of spectators scattered like pigeons from a shotgun blast. Carenza broke into an unsteady jog, following them, with a last venomous glance in my direction.
“Should I call you ma’am too?” I asked, and Aunt Jenny shook her head.
“Not while there’s no one around, anyway.” She looked me up and down, and smiled. “Good luck, Simon. I know you’ll make us proud.”
“No pressure, then,” I joked lamely, and strolled away, completely failing to look confident and unconcerned.
* * *
I’d be lying if I said the incident with Carenza hadn’t dented my mood at all, but things went pretty smoothly after that. The morning started with a welcoming
address consisting mainly of platitudes, after which we were broken up into smaller groups to be shepherded about by upperclasswomen: who, in the manner of their kind, made it patently obvious that they regarded their charges as the social equals of snot. Which was water off a duck’s back so far as I was concerned, any Commonwealth citizen with a Y chromosome having met that attitude innumerable times before—although several of my fellow candidates visibly bristled, unconsciously marking themselves out for special treatment should they subsequently find themselves back here as cadets.
A desultory tour of the facilities was interspersed with a variety of assessments, both mental and physical. These included a run through an obstacle course, which I completed a satisfying distance ahead of the pack despite having neglected most of my athletics training during the preceding weeks of sedentary study, a pattern recognition test I felt I’d scored reasonably well on, and some exercises I found completely bizarre (like dropping beans into a bottle with our eyes shut).
The make or break one would be the first theory session, though, and as the time to take that drew nearer, my apprehension increased. It wasn’t entirely unknown for a candidate to drop out at this stage, once the first batch of assessments were in; even though I knew this hardly ever happened, I couldn’t quite shake a nagging sense of disquiet that I might be one of the rare exceptions, and kept picturing my mother’s likely reaction if I was. All right, she expected me to fail, Aunt Jenny had let that much slip, but if I crashed and burned at the first hurdle she’d take that not only as confirmation of my uselessness in general, but a slight on the illustrious Forrester name which could only be expunged by changing mine at the earliest opportunity: and once I was married off, I could wave goodbye to any hope of financial or personal independence for the rest of my life (unless fate intervened, in the shape of a fortuitously early widowerhood).
So it’s hardly surprising that, as our separate groups reconvened in the main hall, coalescing like drops of mercury, my nervousness almost overwhelmed me. So much so, in fact, that I barely even registered the reappearance of Carenza, who’d fortunately been allocated to a different knot of potential cadets for the morning’s activities. Spotting me across the crowded expanse of scuffed parquet, she grinned maliciously as we returned to the seats we’d occupied for the opening address.
Still here? she sent, along with a virtual of a surprised expression.
Perhaps fortunately, I was spared the indignity of failing to come up with an adequate riposte by the swarm of security protocols which suddenly meshed with my personal neuroware, blocking any incoming and outgoing data. The sense of isolation was mildly disturbing for a moment, but I soon got over it: I habitually disconnected from any nodes in the vicinity while messing around with my personal ‘ware, to avoid distractions, or anyone else getting a glimpse of what I was up to. If the muttering around me was anything to go by, though, quite a few of my fellow candidates were used to being meshed-in more or less the whole time.
I examined the roadblocks with interest. Some of the datanomes seemed familiar, and I poked them with my homemade sneakware, finding bits of coding I’d encountered breaking into Mother’s message packet back home. One patch in particular seemed surprisingly porous, but before I could pick at it, a single channel reopened just long enough to disgorge a datapack before slamming shut again.
Attention, Candidates.
Answer each question in order. If you are unable to do so, move on.
Raise your hand when you have completed the entire test, and the blocks will be removed to enable you to mesh-in for assessment.
Candidates will not be permitted under any circumstances to continue, or modify answers, after re-meshing.
Well, that all seemed clear enough. Stilling a sudden flutter of panic, I slit open the packet and pulled the first question.
My hammering heart slowed. The problem was similar enough to one of the exercises I’d practiced in the conservatory back home to seem easy, and I dashed off the answer with a sudden burst of confidence. So much so that I was on the verge of tagging it complete and moving on before I noticed a subtle error in the starting conditions, which would have completely invalidated the result. I recalculated it, more slowly, checking the answer three times before moving on to the next question, a prickle of cold sweat starting between my shoulder blades.
The next problem was equally tough, and I felt my confidence ebbing away again. This was taking too much time: I’d never complete the test at this rate. I took a deep breath, wrestled my doubts to the floor, and looked at the third question.
This time I felt I’d been punched in the gut. I hadn’t a clue what the answer was, or even how to begin to work it out.
I wavered, in an agony of indecision. Skip the whole thing, and accept the massive loss of points that would entail, or waste more time hoping that some kind of solution would occur to me? But what if it didn’t? Then I’d have even less time to complete the rest of the test. Or suppose I wrote it off, then found another further down the list I’d be forced to skip?
I could feel the bright future I’d mapped out for myself slipping like sand between my fingers.
Then another solution occurred to me. It was a risk, a huge one, but if I managed to pull it off . . .
Quickly, before conscience or common sense could intervene, I poked at the porous section of the roadblock protocols with my sneakware, scratching away at it, feeling it beginning to give way. Why it was even there I had no idea, but right then I was in no mood to question my good fortune.
Abruptly I broke through, extending a cautious tendril into the wider datasphere, and found the answer. Carenza. She’d been meshed in to my ‘sphere when the roadblocks descended, and hadn’t broken the connection from her end. After all, why should she, when there was nothing there to connect to? But it had left a hole I could use.
And use it I did. My experience trawling the datapools of Summerhall stood me in excellent stead, and I lost no time in finding the files containing the questions and answers. They were encrypted, of course, but barely more heavily than the ones I’d so cheerfully rifled at the university, and my customized sneakware made short work of that.
I’d have to be careful, I reflected, mindful of my earlier downfall. If I used enough of the purloined data to make a clean sweep of the test I’d be bound to raise suspicions, let alone set up expectations for my future performance I’d struggle to maintain. Somewhere around eighty-five percent should be a high enough mark to ensure my acceptance, without standing out too noticeably from the pack.
Before I could begin to siphon off the information I needed, though, a jolt of heavy-duty counter-intrusion code bit off my tendril, and a pair of invigilators began weaving their way between the seated candidates with an air of grim determination. I cut the link from my end, and focused entirely on the question floating in my personal ‘sphere, in a desperate attempt to look innocent. Giving up on the problem I couldn’t solve I skipped it, and began working away at the next, which, thank God, I found a lot more tractable. If I’d broken the connection in time I might still be able to salvage this . . .
“Come with us, please.” The leading invigilator spoke quietly, but her voice still carried in the large, quiet space of the hall. I glanced up, my heart hammering, to see her and her colleague flanking Carenza, who was gazing up at them in complete bafflement.
“Excuse me?” She glanced from one to the other, her brow furrowed. “I’m busy at the moment. Can’t this wait?”
“No.” The senior invigilator reached down, and yanked her unceremoniously to her feet. “Outside, now.”
I stared at the drama I’d unwittingly provoked; fortunately I was far from being the only one, or I’d be signaling my guilt to the entire hall by now. I breathed a silent sigh of relief. By using Carenza’s open link as a springboard, and cutting the link from my end so quickly, I’d fortuitously pointed the finger at her, rather than myself, when the breach was discovered. All I had to do was sit tight, and
wait for the fuss to blow over.
“But I haven’t done anything!” Carenza protested, trying and failing to wrench her arm free. Big mistake, as anyone who’d grown up with a sibling could have told her, simply making it easy for the invigilator to apply an arm lock. Expostulating loudly, her feet slipping on the wooden floor, my nemesis was bundled ignominiously towards the nearest exit. “You’re making a mistake!”
“If I had a farthing for every time I’ve heard that . . .” the junior invigilator said, with a sardonic glance at her superior.
Though it does me no credit, I have to admit that my main feeling at that moment was one of vindictive satisfaction. Not only had I got away with it, I’d ensured that Carenza wouldn’t be anywhere near the campus during my own tenure. Or ever, come to think of it. Proving her innocence would take a great deal more intelligence and expertise than she possessed, of that I was sure.
But not the Proctors. They’d go over every scrap of data in the nodes I’d penetrated, tracing back the path I’d taken. They’d analyze every crumb of Carenza’s datasphere, and it wouldn’t take them long to realize she didn’t have anything like the sneakware required to access their system, or the knowledge to use it even if she had. They’d find traces of the link she’d left open to me, and draw the obvious conclusion.
I could still brazen it out, though. If I purged my ‘ware thoroughly, erased every trace of the sneaker, they could suspect all they liked, but they’d never be able to prove anything . . .
And then I made the mistake of taking a final glance at the scuffle by the door, and found myself looking Carenza full in the face.
I just couldn’t do it. However much I detested the woman, I couldn’t lay waste to her life, or her future. My conscience wrestled free of the chokehold I’d been trying to put on it, and kneed me in the groin.