Transcendent (9781311909442) (14 page)

Shelby twisted her lips to the side and
nodded.

“I’d have found it soon,” Lesk assured
her.

She offered him a smile and motioned for
Krys. “Stick around and see what else you can help with.”

Krys tilted his head and then saw Lesk
looking equally confused.

“Keep an eye on him,” she said. She paused
before adding, “If you’d prefer, I can send some soldiers by
instead?”

Krys thought back to how he’d been tracked
with thermal imaging in the woods. He shook his head. “I’ll stay
put.”

She nodded.

“Lieutenant, I—”

“You’ve got a lot of work to do, right?” she
asked.

He nodded.

“Seems like having an assistant would come
in handy.”

“An assistant?” Krys and Lesk both
asked.

“It’s too late to send him to the starport,”
she said. “Maybe next day cycle we’ll be able to do it.”

Krys stared at her. “You’re not—”

“I have to figure out who you are first,”
she snapped. “So make yourself useful so I can justify the loss of
resources for feeding you.”

Krys nodded. “Yes, ma’am!”

Lesk grunted and shook his head. He shrugged
and looked around. “Most everything on this side needs work. Take
your pick. Tools are—”

“In the shed, I know,” Krys said with a
grin. “I, uh, used to spend a lot of time here.”

Lesk snorted and turned away.

Krys glanced at Shelby and saw her watching
him before she turned and walked away too. He stood still a moment
and then realized he needed to get to work. Maybe later he could
try to make sense of things. Like why the strange woman had saved
him twice now. But that would be later. For now, he needed to get
busy.

Lily paused as Palla held the button to keep
the door into the lift open. She stared at the group of boys
walking down the hallway in the boys-only section of the habitat
ring. Several of them looked to be her age but she didn’t spot
Krys.

“Lily, you’re going to be late!”

Lily nodded and joined Palla in the lift.
She offered her a smile but didn’t explain herself. She’d buried
herself in her studies for months now, learning everything she
could and consistently outscoring her older peers on tests. Her
instructors were catering to her needs, which didn’t seem fair, but
she used it to her advantage. Unfortunately, most of them were
running out of things to teach her.

“Nervous?” Palla asked in a whisper so the
other people in the lift wouldn’t hear her.

Lily considered Palla’s question. Was she
nervous? “I don’t think so,” she answered.

“Then what’s wrong?”

Lily kept her face blank and shook her head.
“Nothing. I just thought I saw somebody I knew.”

Palla frowned. “The boys?”

She nodded.

Palla shook her head. “Lily, just because
you’re in classes with boys that doesn’t mean you should let your
focus slip.”

“I’m not slipping,” Lily said a little
louder than she meant to. She earned a glance from a couple of
other passengers, older instructors or workers, but they turned
away just as quick.

“Okay,” Palla said. “I just want to make
sure. Last thing you need is to go boy-crazy!”

Lily snorted. The boys she shared classes
with didn’t interest her. They were slow and childish, even if they
were two years older. It didn’t make sense to her. If she was so
smart and in these classes, then where was Krys? The station
records she kept checking insisted he was there too. Krys was
smarter than her. He knew things she’d never heard of or imagined
were possible. And he could spot the flaws in all her crazy ideas
faster than she could come up with them. He was the smart one, not
her.

She considered some of the boys in her
classes and smirked. Okay, maybe she was smart too.

“What?” Palla asked.

“Huh?”

“You’re smiling.”

Lily forced her face smooth and shrugged.
“Just looking forward to the simulation.”

Palla studied her a moment longer and then
turned her attention back to the displays in the lift. The circular
cabin slowed, making Lily feel like her stomach was rising faster
than her body. It was, she supposed, what with momentum and the law
of inertia. Each lift moved from one habitat ring to the next,
matching velocity before docking. The shifting velocity, due to the
different habitat ring sizes and speeds necessary to maintain
tolerable gravity, was what caused the butterflies in her
stomach.

A green light above the door lit up a moment
before the door slid open. People stood up from their seats or
moved from where they’d been standing. Lily glanced at Palla as she
rose and followed suit. The process of using the lifts was still
new enough to her she didn’t take it for granted. She figured by
the time they made it back to their ring, she’d be used to it—the
biomech simulators were located on the innermost ring, so she had
four more lift rides to take to get there.

“There should be a faster way to get there,”
Lily muttered two lift rides later. “Walking from one lift to the
next and waiting for the cabin to arrive. It’s not very
efficient.”

“High priority transport is available.
Shuttles that go from ring to ring,” Palla said.

“Yeah, but that’s high priority. We don’t
qualify.”

“Not yet, maybe.”

Lily glanced at her mentor. Was Palla right?
Would she be considered high priority as she got further into her
mastery? “Do you really think so?”

Palla waited until they left the lift and
were walking side by side towards the next lift station. She leaned
her head closer and said, “Lily, we started out rough, but I think
we’ve grown a lot these last few months.”

Lily nodded. It was true. She’d turned
fifteen and while she didn’t feel any different, she knew she had
to be. Palla, on the other hand, had changed a lot. “It’s been
good,” Lily agreed. Palla had come around, slowly, and instead of
trying to keep all the attention focused on herself, she was using
Lily now to keep herself relevant.

“So trust me, you’re going to go a long ways
if you can handle this.”

“Handle a simulator?” Lily asked. “How hard
can it be? It’s not even real!”

“But it feels real, that’s the point. Don’t
think you can breeze through this like you do everything else.”

Lily gasped. “I don’t breeze through—”

Palla turned and fixed her with a stare.
“Lily, please. You’re the perfect girl and you know it. Smart,
beautiful, caring, and funny. You do everything right every time,
and that means you’re lucky too. I’m worried that your luck will
run out at the worst time, so I want you to be careful.”

Lily nodded rather than respond. She’d felt
lucky and overwhelmed at first too, but as time passed and she
started to believe what people were saying about her, it was
becoming harder to remember it could all come crashing down. That
was turning into her greatest fear. The thing that woke her up at
nights. That and the fear that she would finally find Krys on the
station but he wouldn’t recognize her.

“This is one of those moments,” Palla said.
“If you can’t score well on your first simulator, you’ve pretty
much ruined your chances of getting into the armor division. And
you’ve already locked yourself into a military path, so anything
else is a fast track to nowhere. And with everything President
Ondalla is counting on, we’d probably end up manning a deep-space
listening post a dozen AU past Pluto!”

“We?”

Palla nodded and smiled. “We’ve kind of tied
our futures around each other. Or at least mine’s tied to yours
now.”

Lily took a deep breath and nodded. “All
right, I won’t let you down.”

“Don’t let yourself down,” Palla said. “As
long as you’re proud of your performance, you’ll be doing what’s
best for me and everybody else. That’s what President Ondalla wants
us all to realize.”

Lily nodded. It rang true with what the
president had said as well as what she’d been learning in her
classes. “All right, I will.”

Palla grinned. “That’s my girl!”

Lily blushed and continued on her way to the
next lift and went on until they reached the closest habitat ring.
The two students walked through the corridor and did their best to
smile, nod, or otherwise stay out of the way of everyone they
encountered. The layout of the ring was well-thought-out and
labeled well enough that it only took them five minutes to find the
simulator rooms.

Lily stepped in to the registration terminal
and pressed her eye against it. She was still getting used to
having her retinas scanned after having it done the first time when
she arrived at the station only a few months prior. For most
children, those born in the controlled environment of a lab, having
their identification data recorded in the system was part of the
birthing process. For Lily and the others born on Venus naturally,
bio-medical identification wasn’t available.

Palla stepped up and scanned her eye and
then followed Lily through the door that hissed open. They entered
into a hallway with technicians watching monitors and moving back
and forth while an overhead screen displayed the simulated arena
taking place.

She saw a juggernaut model biomech facing
off against a dreadnaught model. The two heaviest biomechs, one
built to take a pounding and the other designed to give one. Both
were too heavy to fly like the one in President Ondalla’s
presentation. The dreadnaught used its better speed to circle
around a large warehouse. The juggernaut slowed and turned, waiting
until the dreadnaught lumbered into view. The slightly smaller
biomech jammed its feet into the ground but it was too late.

The juggernaut fired its massive rifle and
sent the dreadnaught teetering off balance. The massive machine
corrected and swung back around in time for two of the four
short-range high explosive missiles to explode against its shoulder
and chest. The other two sailed overhead and tried to arc back
around. They hit buildings and exploded without further damaging
the dreadnaught.

The dreadnaught fell, cracking the blacktop
of the road and leaving gouges as the pilot tried to roll it back
to its feet. A second round from the massive 120-millimeter cannon
in the juggernaut’s hand passed within a meter of the fallen
biomech. The juggernaut paused and stretched one arm towards its
adversary. The end of the focusing barrel on the arm-mounted laser
glowed red for a moment and then cooled to a darker color as the
dreadnaught tried to rise again.

Lily’s eyes jumped to the juggernaut. She
saw the smoke rising from the black scoring on its thigh. The
biomech and its pilot didn’t seem slowed in the least by the
attack. While she watched, a second energy weapon must have struck
the biomech. The armor on the left side of its chest sprayed
outwards and was flash boiled into liquid and then gas by the ten
megajoules of energy. As the smoke cleared, she saw the armor was
thick enough to survive, but the smooth bowl had been melted into
it.

“Lily Strain?”

Lily jumped at the loud voice behind her.
She spun and saw a man in a blue and white military uniform
standing there. She stiffened and did her best to stand at
attention, even though she wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “I’m
Lily Strain, um, sir.”

He stared at her and nodded. “At ease, Miss
Strain. My Name’s Colonel Rand, but you don’t need to get so formal
around me yet. You show me something in there and earn your first
set of tracks and we can talk.”

“Tracks?” Lily asked.

“You’re trying out for the armor division,
Miss Strain. We use tracks here, not stripes. The only stripes we
have are the ones we leave in our enemies’ underwear!”

Lily’s eyes widened and she heard Palla gasp
beside her. She nodded. “Yes, um, yes sir. Where do you want
me?”

He pointed down the hall. “Last booth is all
yours. You’ll get a fifteen-minute intro lesson then we’ll have
some missions for you. Think you can handle that?”

She nodded and thrust her chin out.
“Absolutely, sir.”

He grinned. “Good, I like that attitude. Go
ahead.”

Lily turned and started towards her booth.
She glanced up and saw on the display that the juggernaut had used
its rifle to fire two massive armor-piercing rounds into the chest
of the fallen biomech. Smoke rose from it and fluid dripped onto
the ground before the image blacked out. She heard the muffled
sounds of somebody cursing and coughing and glanced back in time to
see the door of a simulator booth open. A man stumbled out and
would have fallen if not for the wall that he managed to reach out
and support himself against.

“You’ll do great,” Palla whispered,
distracting her from the sight.

Lily smiled at her and nodded. “For all of
us,” she promised before heading into the booth and pulling the
door shut behind her.

Krys looked up from the control panel of the
hydroponics system and saw Shelby walking towards him. The door
shut behind her, blocking out the darkness of the long Venerian
night and he tapped a few more commands on the screen. He pressed
the execute button when she finished making her way through the
greenhouse and stopped next to him.

“What’s this?” he asked as she held out a
cup to him.

“Today is Krys Evans’s birthday.”

Krys smiled. He’d managed to get on just
about everyone’s good side, whether civilian or soldier, over the
past six veeks that he’d been turned into an unofficial member of
the community. “Whether I’m him or not?”

She shrugged and took a drink of her
cup.

Krys raised the cup to his lips and smelled
the fruity aroma. He didn’t notice the tang of something sharper
under the fruit until he’d tasted the creamy drink. The sharper
taste beneath the collection of mango and orange burned his throat
and made him cough.