by Maura Milan
The other guard, Geoff, stared at Ia through the observation window, his jaw slightly agape. He had a holocomic up, and he was glancing back and forth from the comic to the girl beyond the glass. The specific panel he was looking at was of I. A. Cōcha, rendered as a tall, hulking man with giant biceps and muscular thighs as big as his own body.
Noticing Geoff’s distracted state, Aaron cleared his throat. “You heard the flight master. We need to keep watch.”
Geoff looked up apologetically and quickly swiped away his screen.
“I’ve been a fan since issue one,” Geoff murmured. “But she’s not at all like in the comics.”
Knives knew what Geoff was reading. It was a black-market holocomic, depicting all of Ia’s adventures. In this series, I. A. Cōcha was a hero of sorts. Knives had read it too, while he was researching her. He’d found every article and bit of source material on her. Because of his eidetic memory, it didn’t take him long to digest everything. He remembered every single date and detail like a photograph that materialized every time he closed his eyes, starting with the day she appeared on the scene five years ago. Mif, he thought, she was only twelve when she hijacked the Sinsia fruit caravan?
He waved a hand as he walked off. “When she wakes up,” he said, “you know where to bring her.”
Knives marched out of the med bay, ready to be rid of the responsibility. But with each step, the weight of her still remained. All this, he thought, and it was only the first day.
CHAPTER 9
BRINN
BRINN SLID HER TRAY down the serving counter. On the other side, an articulated metal arm slopped down a slimy orange ball in the middle of her plate. Brinn stared at her meal but didn’t bother to speak up. They were on a planet where resources were scarce and the land was frozen in ice. Of course the food wasn’t going to be good.
She walked out into the spacious canteen, lined with rows of tables where the First Years sat in heated discussion. All around her, the beep of holowatches filled the room as cadets rushed out into the hall to take their incoming streams.
Brinn found a place at an emptying table and was about to take her first bite of the mystery slop when Angie slinked down into the seat across from her. Brinn sat alert, unsure how to process her presence. She had avoided Angie throughout primaries, but now here she was.
“My dad’s miffed,” Angie said. “I asked if he could talk to someone about sending Ia off to prison where she belongs, but there’s nothing he can do.” Angie nodded over to Nero, who was pacing up and down at the far end of the canteen, gesticulating wildly while conversing with someone on a holoscreen. “Apparently Nero’s uncle is going straight to the Queens about it.”
Brinn shook her head and grabbed a spoonful of orange goop. “But that won’t do anything. The Queens don’t have any governing power. That’s the first thing anyone learns in civics class.”
“Tell him that.” Angie clacked a pink fingernail onto the metal tabletop. “Why would the Star Force do this? Why would they decide to bring her here and endanger our lives like that?”
Angie eyed Brinn, as if she was waiting for her response. It was strange that Angie wanted to actually have a conversation with her, but Brinn was also wondering these things. She let out a sigh. “I don’t know. All we can do is trust that they have a plan. I mean, it’s the Star Force. They didn’t become the most powerful military in the universe by making mistakes.”
At the table next to her, a frantic cadet was in the middle of a holostream with her family, her mother demanding that she return home immediately. Angie leaned over the metal tabletop and looked Brinn in the eye, her expression now serious. “So are you staying?”
Brinn groaned at the thought of calling home and seeing her mother’s face on the holoscreen. She couldn’t tell her mom that she was giving up. That wasn’t going to happen. Ever.
So she nodded. “I’m going to stay and do my part.”
“Patriot!” Angie teased, resting her chin in her palms. “You and my dad think exactly alike. He wants me to do the same.” Angie snorted.
A crisp two-tone bell trilled throughout the canteen, and a message flashed on the large holodisplays in the middle of the room. Curfew at 2200.
Brinn glanced at her holowatch. That was in ten minutes.
“Great.” Angie got up. “I don’t even know if I can sleep tonight.”
Brinn grabbed her food tray and her duffel bag. “Come on. Let’s find our rooms.”
After they got rid of their trays, Brinn and Angie shuffled into the hallway along with the other cadets, following the signs for the dormitories. They stopped where the hall branched into two separate paths.
“What room are you in?” Angie asked.
Brinn flicked through the messages in her holoscreen until she found her room assignment. “G-372,” she read and then spotted an arrow for rooms G-350 through G-400 pointing to the hallway on the right.
Brinn was about to say goodbye to Angie when her holowatch beeped. She glanced down at her wrist. In bright-orange letters, the word FAREN scrolled through the small black square of the screen. Brinn was raising her hand to dismiss the stream when Angie angled her head over.
“Is that your younger brother?” she asked. Despite Brinn’s warnings, Faren was part of the Junior Poddi League at primaries, so most people, including the popular crowd, knew him.
“Y-yeah,” Brinn stuttered. “I’ll call him back.”
“Just take it,” Angie said and then reached over to boldly tap the answer icon. A small, bright screen projected in the space above, displaying Faren’s cheerful grin. His jaw dropped when he saw Angie’s face.
He waved his hand meekly. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello, little Tarver,” Angie said with a grin. Even now, Brinn couldn’t tell whether that smile was predatory or benign. Brinn waited for Angie to accost her brother, to needle him with intrusive questions.
But then Angie looked over at Brinn. “I’m sure you have a lot to tell him.” She turned, waving her hand in goodbye. “See you tomorrow, if we’re still alive.”
Brinn said good night and watched Angie as she disappeared into the other hallway. A scene like this would have never happened in primaries. Angie would have ignored her, and Brinn would have been perfectly fine staying out of her sights. But now, after all that had happened, Brinn realized it was nice to know that she wasn’t alone on Aphelion. Even if the other person was Angie Everett.
She looked back at her holosteam, taking in Faren’s shocked expression.
“Angie Everett’s a cadet? What did she want?”
Brinn looked behind her to make sure Angie was no longer in sight. “Somehow she’s decided we’re friends.”
“If she finds out…” He was talking about Brinn’s Tawny heritage.
“I know,” she said, reading the room numbers as she walked. “I’m being careful.”
“So tell me about the academy. Did you meet Captain Nema?”
“No,” Brinn answered.
“Oh,” Faren said, sounding disappointed. He angled his head in quick thought. “Well, did you get to fly a jet?”
“No,” she answered yet again, waving it off. “We have testing tomorrow to find out what departments we’ll be sifted into.”
Faren crinkled his eyebrows and leaned closer to the screen. “So you just sat around and had a boring first day?”
“Today was definitely not boring,” Brinn answered as she turned into another hallway and spotted two guards standing in front of one of the rooms. One of them, the smaller of the two, was standing at attention, but the other guard had pulled up a stool. She furrowed her brow. The last room she had passed was G-371, which would make this room…
Brinn glanced over at Faren. “I’m going to have to call you back.” She tapped her watch, cutting off the holostream before Faren could even answer.
A series of questions rushed into her head. Was she in trouble? Where had she seen those guards before? What were they doing in
front of her room? She hurried to the door and tapped her hand against the scan near the entrance, anxious to get inside and hide.
The door slid open, and Brinn froze. Her mouth gaped as she watched Ia Cōcha’s limber frame balance on top of the center table, attempting to pry open a vent in the ceiling with her fingertips.
Numb from disbelief, Brinn dropped her duffel bag on the floor. It landed with a loud thud, resonating throughout the empty spaces of the room.
Ia turned her head and eyed Brinn up and down, mugging expertly like a criminal. “Hey, roomie.”
CHAPTER 10
IA
THE SMALLER GUARD, Aaron, leaned his head into their room, and once he saw Ia on top of the table, he rolled his eyes. Aaron was a borg, but his construction was like nothing Ia had ever seen. The detailing, from Aaron’s expressions to his complex speech patterns, was light-years more advanced than the few Borgs she had seen in the Fringe. Most of those had no skin at all.
“Cōcha, how many times do I have to tell you?” Aaron asked. “The only reason you’re not cuffed right now is because we’ve cement-locked all the vents. There’s no way out.”
Her other, larger guard, Geoff, slinked in with a bashful smile. On their walk to the room, Geoff had peppered her with hundreds of questions about her career, and from that, she quickly found out that he wasn’t just a guard—he was one of her fans.
“I see you two have met,” Geoff said. “Cadet Brinn Tarver meet Cadet Ia Cōcha.” He waved back and forth between them as if he wanted them to shake hands.
“What the hell is going on here?” Brinn yelled. “What are you waiting for? Cuff her! Bring her back to where you all keep her!”
Where they were keeping her, it turned out, was here. After Ia had been knocked out by the flight master, she’d woken in the med bay. They’d spliced off her Sponge Tips, but Ia had been delighted to find that they hadn’t discovered her eye mods or any of her other secret toys. After she’d dressed, the two guards had escorted her to this room.
“Cadet Tarver.” Geoff inched closer to the skittish girl, seemingly trying to make himself appear as nonthreatening as possible. “All Aphelion registrants are required to stay in the dorms, including Miss Cōcha. But don’t worry. We’ll be right outside in case anything happens.”
As the guards exited the room and the doors slid closed, Ia turned to her new, unfortunate roommate and shrugged. “What a day. Right, Tarver?”
Brinn didn’t answer. Instead, she scooped her duffel bag off the floor and rushed to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.
Ia stared at the bathroom door until she was sure Cadet Tarver would not be coming back out and then turned her attention back to her previous task. The vents might be cementsealed, but there had to be other ways to get out. Ia flipped up the beds, examining the hinges for any loose wires or screws, but everything had been custom molded to attach seamlessly to the wall. There was nothing to pry loose, nothing to get her fingernails into.
She jumped onto one of the mattresses, hoping the bed frame would snap away from the wall with her weight, but it held firm. Damn Olympus and its solid manufacturing skills.
Ia hopped back down onto the floor and focused her attention on the round table and stools in the center of the room. With all her strength, she kicked her foot forward, aiming at the tabletop. It didn’t move, but Ia did, ricocheting backward until she skid to a stop on the floor.
“Cadet Cōcha.” A male voice hummed through the room.
Ia sat back on her haunches and glanced from corner to corner to find the source of this voice.
“Who am I speaking to?”
“I am the Monitor for this dorm room. An AI program designed to assist your studies and integration into cadet living.”
“Great.” Ia combed her fingers through her ash-black hair. “Get me access to the ArcLite.”
“You do not have security clearance.”
All right, so they blocked her from the ArcLite. They’d told her they would, so that was no surprise. But maybe there was some way to outsmart the Monitor.
“Any direct lines to this room then?” she asked.
“There is one that exists.”
“Connect me.”
In the center of the room, a screen flashed with the words: Contacting the flight master.
“Disconnect!” Ia jumped up and screamed, “Now!”
She had two things to do while she was here: get this miffing heart tracker out of her chest and escape. As far she could tell, General Adams and the flight master were the only two people in possession of the silver remote. General Adams was offworld, which meant she had to snatch the remote from Knives. She’d taken it before, so she could do it again. She would just have to be craftier this time. But tonight, she didn’t want to deal with him. She hated to admit it, but he made her nervous. Unbalanced.
“You sound distressed,” the Monitor observed. “Shall I play a music stream to calm your nerves?”
“No.” She waved her hand in the speaker system’s general direction. “Just some peace and quiet will be fine.” Ia sat so long in silence that the lights, thinking there was no one in the room, dimmed down, shrouding her in darkness.
How was she going to break out of this place? Aphelion was built so deep in the mountain that even if she set off a bomb, the place would be a little crumbly, but still intact. The only real exits were through the cargo lift and the end of the runway. But the cargo elevator had no control box inside it. Even if she found a way inside, she wouldn’t be able to make it go up, not without finding the actual cargo controls in Aphelion’s massive campus. As for the runway…Well, she’d tried that and failed. It was going be a massive pain in the ass to break out of this place, so maybe her best option was to find someone to break in.
Like Einn.
But without access to the ArcLite, she needed another way to connect to him.
Ia clicked her eye mod on, switching it to thermal view. Fiber wires ran hot, and even in this cold environment, they would be giving off some sort of heat. Her eyes scanned the four walls surrounding her, sifting through a flood of blue. Then her eyes stopped at a bundle of red wires, glowing like a torch in the night. There it was. A landline, hidden behind the wall near Tarver’s bed.
But just like everything else in the room, the walls were solidly made. There were no panels to punch into. No weak spots to wiggle her way in. That wall was the only thing getting in between her and her brother.
But it was just a wall, Ia told herself, and walls were made to be knocked down.
And once that happened, she would connect to that landline and contact Einn so he could break her out of this high-tech Bug Hole. Ia thought of her brother, of that glorious feeling of standing beside him while this entire place burned to the ground. She fell asleep with a smile on her face.
CHAPTER 11
KNIVES
KNIVES WAS ANNOYED. His stomach was grumbling. And instead of heading to the canteen to satiate his late-night hunger, he was on his way to the conference room.
Why on Ancient Earth were they calling a meeting at this time of night?
He passed his hand over the sensor to the conference room. The door slid open in time for him to catch Professor Marik Jolinsky slamming his fist on the long, white table in the middle of the room.
“This is getting out of hand. More than half of the new class have already elected to transfer to another academy.”
“What are you griping about, Marik?” Knives asked as he slouched into a nearby chair. Bastian was also present, as well as the other instructors. Even the general was holostreaming in, his image shifting from blue to regular skin tone as his holo warmed up.
“You saw them earlier, Knives,” Marik continued. “Those cadets were scared out of their minds.”
Ah, Ia’s escape.
Even now, Knives was still reeling from it. It was a miracle that he’d even caught her. The thought of it unnerved him. How was he ever going to keep up with her? Sh
e was reckless and brilliant, which only meant he had to be equally as reckless and brilliant.
But he didn’t want to.
Before Ia arrived on Aphelion, Knives had taken this flight master position as an easy ride through the rest of his contracted fifteen years of service. It was supposed to be simple. Wake up, teach class, stay out of his father’s way, and do the bare minimum.
This was not the bare minimum.
“Where is your head, officer?” the general barked, noticing Knives’s dwindling attention. Always the general, and never the father. Even as a hologram, General Adams’s presence was overpowering. Knives found the best way to counter it was with a large dose of apathy.
He shrugged. “I’m hungry.”
The general let out a very audible sigh and motioned for Marik to continue.
“Might we consider sending her to a less prestigious academy?” Marik asked. “Nauticanne Academy back in Rigel Kentaurus perhaps.”
“That won’t do. Their perimeter has too many holes. Aphelion is the most secure training grounds in all of Olympus,” Bastian pointed out. “It’s our best option.”
Professor Meneva Patel cleared her throat. “I’d like to point out that she’s already escaped once. Or did all of you already forget?” Professor Patel was the smartest person in the building, and because of that, no one wanted to cross her. “What will we do if it happens again?”
Knives felt everyone’s attention turn to him. He sighed. “Then I guess I’ll have to catch her again.”
The general’s voice edged into the conversation. “Flight master, do you have anything to add on Cōcha?”
Of course he did. He had a whole list. “She’s undisciplined. Arrogant. Impossible to talk to. But she’s also…” He wanted to use the word talented, but he decided against it. “She’s cunning.”
“Ia Cōcha may be a criminal, but she’s quite the young lady.” Bastian clasped his fingers, clearly trying to remain diplomatic. “There are things brewing out there that go beyond anything we’ve handled before. Ia may be a force the Commonwealth needs right now. She has the wits, the skill, and more importantly, the audacity.”