Sharon Lee - - Prologue

"Hah, that's great! No hours at all and they made you land that feather up there? Somebody's in need of pilot refresh if you ask me!"

There were chuckles from a couple of the others in the machine, and the pilot himself flashed a quick top landing , making sure she'd caught it before going into a monologue on the good and bad points of hovering vehicles . . .

But that would have been too much to tell Asu, and they'd told Theo not to talk about the questions they asked: had she known Hap Harney, had she been told to fly to the mountain, why had she selected that spot, why had she hidden in the rocks—which of course she hadn't, really. They'd gone on and on and on about how long had she been on-world and did she have any opinions on the coming elections and would she call someone who died stupidly a hero just because he'd died and . . . they were amused, somewhat, that the only drink she accepted was from the water fountain.

So she'd hoped Asu would give over on that topic and Chelly—well, he'd helped, actually. He'd had some idea of what she'd been through—apparently he'd had his time with the authorities when the security team came through.

"Asu, I didn't give them your Checksec, they turned it off the moment they saw it and said it was a potential violation of the privacy regs."

"Violation? What's wrong with active protection? Everyone knows you have to take care of yourself! What about my privacy?"

That, it turned out, had been the rub.

Chelly's voice was low and firm while he was talking about it, and he lost some of the blotchiness that looked like it might have come from tears.

"Your Checksec's a pro model, Asu. It not only blocks within a perimeter, but it probes any signals it finds and records them. The thing is, it kept trying to connect to the network so it could report somewhere."

Asu's face and neck darkened; her mouth opened as if she were going to say something, but it took several jaw movements and some hand motions as well before she could articulate anything more understandable than, "Oh no. . . ."

Finally: "I didn't even think! That's the Checksec Jivan gave me—she's head of Security for Diamon. You don't think it was trying to report, do you?"

Chelly's glance may have struck the ceiling before Theo's, but as they looked down at Asu they both shrugged.

Chelly's shrug had turned into a slow hand to the side of his face.

"Could have been calling in, what do I know? I do know that they came in here and swept the place three times, then ran off and did the rest of Erkes. Harney's time here—I guess they had to check everything, since he'd been senior when I got here."

"Same room as us? Right here? In our beds?" Asu's eyes widened.

Chelly hand-talked, Yes, right, right, yes.

"I'll need to get some smutch in then. Bad luck to sleep in a dead man's bed, you know . . ."

It was then that the exhaustion really hit Theo, and she'd wished, very much that she'd had a certain Scout pilot to . . . talk to. Or something. Even Bek. He wouldn't have understood the piloting problems, but he would have made sure she relaxed.

Lying in the top bunk, she smiled. Bek had been a good onagrata , even though they'd both gone into the First Pair knowing they'd each be going off in different directions.

Despite the tea or because of it, she'd slept deeply, if alone, and managed to get up and dress without waking Asu, whose schedule put her on late-day, and took herself to math class, adding a note to shop for tea on the joint to-do list.

Math drill done, and filed, Theo looked around. Others were still at work, which was something she was used to from the Wall, so she did some calculations in her head, trying to keep herself from remembering that there'd been a live pilot in that craft—somebody Chelly had known—trying to concentrate on the drill's final question, which to her mind had two mutually antagonistic answers. She'd chosen the simple one, of course.

Visualizing the other one—no, well, she probably shouldn't use the desk for that, not with others around her still working. She resorted then, like she had at the Wall, to her needle. She slipped it and a length of thread out of a cargo pocket, and bent to work, stretching out a point on the fabric here, and one there . . . and after all, since the fabric was malleable and penetrable she could consider that the needle might be the spaceship and the . . .

The sounds around her changed, which probably meant the rest of the class was finished with the drill. Theo glanced up. Peering at her from the next row was the instructor herself, Pilot Truffant.

"No, Trainee, please don't let me interrupt your work. I'm sure it must be fascinating."

Theo felt her face warm, but she had, she thought, earned some sarcasm. After all, it wasn't very advertent to be discovered doing needlework in math class. The low laughter of her classmates didn't help.

She took a breath and answer the instructor calmly.

"Yes, Pilot."

The instructor moved closer.

"Good, good. We'd hate for you to be bored, here at Anlingdin. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to explain why, in the face of your incoming scores, you find this a compelling way to follow up on a drill."

"Yes, Pilot," Theo said. "I was thinking about the last question on the drill. The work here," she raised the unfinished lacework, "was helping me think."

"Very good. The needle-and-haystack approach to space navigation, I take it?"

Theo looked at the instructor. She seemed more amused than taunting.

"I'm not familiar with the term," Theo admitted, while some few in the class sputtered. "But, on the drill, there was the answer I thought you wanted, and then there was the second answer. I needed—"

"Enough!"

But Theo had already stopped, obedient to Pilot Truffant's hand-talked stop.

"You intrigue, Waitley. Please hold your work a moment."

The instructor turned to the larger class.

"The rest of you are done with the drill. How many were concerned about the 'second answer'?"

No one moved or spoke; the instructor glanced down at her handheld readout and said finally, "This is excellent. All of you have the final answer right. I salute!"

She fit action to words, saluting in all directions, and then leaned toward Theo, face intent.

"The answer I expected is the one you gave," she said quietly. "Now, what does your needle say about the second answer?"

Theo looked down at her work, and then up at the instructor again, grimacing as she tried to put words to thoughts. There were more sounds around as several of the lab students from the other class drifted in, pushing a small materials cart.

"The easy answer," she said after a moment—"that answer is missing a dimension somehow. That is, it is right as far as it goes, so I'm glad I have that. But we're—see, the string-contraction effect needs to be in here; it may be negligible on a clean-paper arithmetic run but we can't assume that's what we have and—"

The hand-talked sharp thought hold mouth hold came quickly, and then:

"Enough, Waitley, enough. You anticipate a lesson some days in the future. I hope you'll have time after the lab to discuss your cloth computer with me."

"Now, Waitley," said Pilot Truffant, "the drill's fine and so is your lab. You just finish that up on your time this evening. I wanted to tell you that I looked at your flight profile from yesterday. You made some wide-awake choices there, some challenging choices. I think that flight'll be flown a few times in the next semester or two, in sim and for real. While I could have done it in your five minutes I'm not sure there's more than a dozen on campus who could have matched it, all things considered."