Interstellar Academy by Kennedy Harkins (read books for money .TXT) 📕

Professor Iqbal turned on his holo and project for a class list of numbers. It was a least forty pairs long, with two numbers to each group. “And now, for your first lesson: I lied to you earlier. Never take something at face value in science. Who has the same number as you has nothing to do with who you’ll be partnered with.” He ran his finger down the list. “Move to sit with your partner as according to this listing. The spot you are on the list determines which side and which table you sit at.”

It took a little bit of figuring out as the logic was all backwards. I was almost certain that was deliberate and didn’t like it one bit. I ended up having Mae direct me to my seat where, unfortunately, my partner was already waiting for me. I dropped my pack on the table, and the sound it made was my  protest against cruel and unusual punishment.

“Well, if it isn’t my old pal Dru,” the girl said.

I grit my teeth, almost hearing my stepmom’s voice when she said that awful shortened version of my name. “How’s the stomach?”

He lip curled, and her eyes narrowed.“Just peachy. There’s this lovely imprint of your first, so now, I can always remember our time together.”

Borna and Borko were sitting across the lab bench from us. This was little comfort for even though they were Tundrians, I didn’t really like either of them. Borko was too dense to be anything but a foot soldier, and his sister had always struck me as competition. I could respect her, but she wasn’t my friend.

Plus, they were both Scala, not Kver, with the colorful feathers to prove it.

Professor Iqbal called attention to the class, peering up at us with a slight curve to his snout. “Now that we’re all settled, I want to discuss our first project.”

He scurried over to a large cabinet with a ladder in front of it. He weaved around obstacles like a mouse in a maze, making it look effortless to maneuver around the room. For someone with wings, I figured it’d be a lot like squeezing through an air vent: a tight fit with very little headway made.

He pulled out a tray with a couple dozen glass bottles resting precariously on it. He held it above his head like a waiter, bobbing and weaving around the clutter to the lab tables and giving each pair a bottle.

I turned mine over with careful consideration. It was a typical glass bottle with a rubber stopper, one you could find anywhere on any of the four worlds and their colonies. It was filled with nothing, so I looked around the room for a large vat of some chemical, something he’d be using to fill the bottle. I came up empty.

Astra took the bottle from my hand, swirling it’s nonexistent contents. “Maybe it’s some kind of invisible gas.” She brought it closer to her face. “Possibly deadly. Maybe we’re going to learn how to kill a large group of people without leaving a trace.”

I snatched it back from her, not wanting her to leak her humanness all over something I’d have to touch.

“Before any of you strain yourself,” Professor Iqbal said. “There’s nothing in the bottle. But I want there to be by the time Friday rolls around.” He settled back behind his desk. “I want you to find me something--and it does exist on this ship-- and put a piece of it in that bottle. Here’s your clue: What runs and has no feet, roars but has no mouth? Talk about it with your partner--as this is a group project--for the rest of class.”

I turned the vial over in my hands a couple times, thinking.

“What do you think it means?” the girl asked.

“It sounds like some kind of creature,” I said reluctantly. I didn’t like group projects under normal circumstances.

She snorted. “I don’t think Professor Iqbal is telling us to cut a piece off an animal. It’s got to be a inanimate object.”

I clenched my fists, remembering how good it had felt to hit her. “What kind of inanimate object runs and roars?”

“A machine runs.”

I blinked and almost said that it didn’t, picturing a holo sprouting feet and sprinting towards me. I realized just before I sounded like an idiot that she was saying it ran as is it was on and working. Tundrians took things a little more literal, one of the reasons we weren’t great producers or consumers of art.

“Then...what about an AI? Couldn’t they roar?”

“But they have legs and mouths,” she said.

“Oh.” This was going to be harder than I thought.

She sat back, smiling. The human was obviously enjoying this, probably because I was miserable. “Maybe you should spend a little less time beating up girls and a little more time with your head in a book.”

Definitely because I was miserable.

September 6:

“I’m miserable!” I yelled at Kavi a few days later while the librarian tried to shush me. “Why did I even want to stay and this stupid school?”

Kavi didn’t look up the text book on his holo screen, but said exactly what I’d told him to when this point arose. “You want to be a pilot and because Professor Earhart is an wonderful woman.”

I rubbed my temples. “No no, Kavi, awful, not wonderful. Awful.”

He looked up. “Sorry. I get those two confused. Why does it matter again?”

“I’m beginning to think that Mae hit you a little too hard during today’s sparring session. Because I’m being spiteful. In both instances actually. My parents would rather see me dead than as a lowly captain.”  

He tapped out of his text and opened up the packet that was due in Life Studies tomorrow. “Don’t worry, Mae didn’t beat me nearly as thoroughly as Dru did you,” he said, having adopted my nickname for Drusus--though never to his face.

“Thanks,” I said levelly.

Speak of the devil, I thought, as Dru and Mae walked by the window we were sitting by. They were dressed in their school suits, the extra ones that had been supplied specifically for battle class. They had better ventilation as opposed to insulation in the other suits which were built for space. The pair carried these sticks I’d often seen them with, weapons that emitted electricity.

Bet Dru couldn’t wait till his aunt let him use that one on me. So far it had only been bare hand--which did plenty of damage. I fingered one of my sore ribs from this morning’s beating. He didn’t need any more advantages. Give me the stick, and let him stay weaponless.

He’d probably still beat me.

Kavi, noticing the two receding figures I was staring at, said, “Dru’s a trained warrior, Astra. You are not meant to be better than him any more than I am Mae.”

I thrust the holo away from me. The text had stopped making sense a long time ago. “It’s not even that. I don’t care about fighting.”

“But you care about what Professor Accia thinks of you,” he guessed.

“Yes. No.” I sank back in my chair, rubbing eyes that hurt from too much squinting. “It’s just...he flies so well.”

Kavi nodded. “And you don’t.”

“Thanks. With friends like you, who needs Dru to beat them up?”

Flying class yesterday had been worse than the first one. We hadn’t even been allowed into real ships, all the of students secluded in a simulation room. It looked like an old arcade, with private compartments for each student to pilot his own “craft” alone. The dashboards looked a lot like the one in the craft Professor Accia had taken us up in but with far fewer options.

Upon planting my butt in the Captain’s chair, I’d realised just how similar the simulation was going to be to flying a real craft: I sucked at doing both. Apart from that, the two were completely different, because freshman didn’t start out on the amazing, life like virtual simulators. These were more like trumped up video games.

Still, as soon as I managed to get off the ground--a feat that took me twenty long minutes while Dru was off leading a Battalion, I crashed. And crashed. And crashed. I couldn’t clear more than a hundred feet before running into something or experiencing systems failure. Somehow, I didn’t think that was an acceptable flaw in a pilot.

I dropped my head down to the table.

“You shouldn’t let Dru get you down. His aunt is a flight instructor, he’s had more experience than some of the seniors.”

The librarian came over again, her chest puffed out to tell us to shut our traps. I made a rude gesture at her, and she left just as quickly as she’d come, disappearing behind the stacks of book tags.

“I should still be better than him. Alkaevs overcome obstacles to be the best,” I said, my mouth pressed against the table. “Second is just the first loser.”

“And you’re not even in second place,” he said helpfully.

I banged my forehead against the wood in response.

“Here.” He got up, pulling me to my feet as well. “I saw this section on the way in.”

He dragged me over to a shelf near the entrance. The library was a couple floors and covered in shelf space just like an old fashioned library, though everything was digitalized. Instead of books on the shelves, there were tags. They were square, barely thicker than a piece of cardboard, identification makers that stood in the place of books. Instead of taking a book from the shelf, you found it’s tag and scanned the code onto your school holo, downloading the book onto the device.

Kavi, having to use one of the stools, because he was so short, began to pull down tags seemingly at random. He threw them at me, almost causing me drop them all in a spectacular heap. It was happening so quickly I couldn’t read to titles. A new one would appear in my hands before I could even think to look.

“What’s all this?”

“This,” he said, holding up a particular tag. “Is the Guide to the Cruiser XI.”

I caught that as he tossed it to me, noting the picture of the craft mentioned--looking slightly better than the condition I’d left the last one I’d piloted in. “Hmm. I hear those are easy to crash--rigged even, some would say.”

Kavi continued raining tags down on my head.“The rest of them are every freshman book on flying. Wait--there might be a few more in the biographies and autobiographies section.”

“That’s fine, Kavi. I’m not interested in reading out other people.” I set down the stack of substantial stack of tags--hundreds at least. “Do you actually think reading about it is going to turn me