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

Snorting, the girl said, "Looks like this Rike isn't so patriotic. Likely, the only Tundrians he cared to warn are the ones of value."

We hustled inside the building, over to a couple dozen students huddled around the the anti grav rink. They were off varying ages and races. Most of them I didn't even recognize, but they all had one thing in common: the wings on their backs. In fact, the girl and the Animarian were the only ones in the room not sporting them. That knowledge was apparent on the group's faces.

"What're they doing here?" a snide boy in our grade asked. "It's supposed to be--"

"Tundrians only?" The girl shoved away from me, supporting herself on her own two feet. "Yeah, but what kind of party would it be with all you sticks in the mud in one room?"

And then the world lit up in spectacular colors.  The giant holo above the rink used for recording scores now pictured a familiar AI, the one who guarded our apartment. For a terrifying moment, I thought he'd found us, but then a quick glance at the crowd dispelled that. Holos were springing to life in people's hands and back pockets, all showing the same image.

"He's using the master computer to broadcast his signal to every electronic interface on campus," the human said in awe.

"It." I didn't like her giving the robot a gender, making it more like us. More powerful.

"Attention Tundrian remnants of the school," the giant AI head said. "Your counterparts have been neutralized, and Commander Rike has arranged a shuttle to take you to safety. My brethren will take you to it. All you have to do is bring the few among you that don't belong, so that they may join their classmates before the destruction of the school commences." It paused. "You have one hour."

April 20th:

"You have one hour."

Over twenty pairs of beady eyes turned to stare at Kavi and I. The owners looked like vultures in a way that had nothing to do with their wings. I gulped, mentally calculating how many minutes stood between me and full muscle recovery.

Too many for a girl who wasn't good at math. So I went with my gut.

"What a load of crap," I told Kavi loudly, deliberately not looking at anyone but him. "Does that thing think the Tundrians are stupid or something? Granted, that was my first impression, but that message was so obviously a trap. He might as well had invited them to dinner and given them a menu with their name on it."

Kavi eyes were wide and petrified, but he kept them trained on me. I could feel the confusion around us, replacing the predator likeness and turning the crowd back into a bunch of kids. I could control kids.

"Like one name drop is enough to convince us they're on our side, and we'll walk like little lambs towards the robots that "neutralized" our classmates and teachers." I snorted. "And an escape shuttle? How convenient."

By the end, I figured I'd was laying it on a little thick, but if they were all like Dru, they'd need that extra push to get the information through their dense skulls. I needed to be careful, though, if I didn't want to end up hog tied at the AIs feet.

I walked over to Dru. "We shouldn't stay here."

He stared at me for a moment with lowered lids, and, by the end of it, I'd convinced myself that he was going to do the tying himself. True, we'd been less than friendly throughout the year, but I'd thought we'd grown to a reluctant indifference when he didn't leave me for dead at the hospital.

"The building isn't very defensible," he said, not reassuring me but not rushing to hand over my corpse, either.

I shrugged. "I was just thinking that there's no back way out. Where would you go if you wanted to hide from a bunch of robots."

Nodding, Dru acted like I'd answered a question for him. He motioned for the Tundrians to move out, and they did. Without protest or reminding him that they didn't have to hide. They had a way out.

Loyalty. I'll never understand it.

The ship lurched like it had before in the empty classroom. It felt like the ship was being bent and then ripped apart. Stumbling, I held onto the nearest arm to keep from eating linoleum. My ears were assaulted by an unholy shriek.

"Warp drive," I shouted, but the sound was already dying down. "Sounds like they didn't do the prep first. That's deliciously dangerous."

Dru frowned. "First we stopped, now we're in warp. Are they changing our direction?"

"Stands to reason. There's a lot of AIs on this ship, but not nearly enough to show up at the Annual United Galaxy Peace Conference. It'd be suicide," Mae said in a monotone.

I started massaging the numbness out of my muscles. "And they said they were going to destroy the ship, not use it to arrive in style at a party."

Dru shot me an annoyed glance. "The Anual is when the galaxy's worldz get together and renegotiate peace treaties. It's politically charged event, not a party."

"So what happens when the diplomats brats don't show up without a hair misplaced in their pretty little heads," I mused, knowing full well the answer. Saying nothing, they all suddenly became very interested with their shoes. "Bye bye twenty years of peace in the galaxy. Not that we'll be around to see it."

One of the Tundrian boys in our year, who'd been holding back his words so hard he looked like he was constipated, spoke up. "No, you're the one who won't be around to see it. The rest of us have a shuttle waiting for us." He turned to Dru. "Why are we wasting time with this--human? We should be turning them over, so we can leave before the ship is destroyed!"

"What're they gonna do? Run it into a planet?" Kavi muttered.

I grinned at him, amused, before what he'd said hit me like a ton of bricks. How were they going to get rid of a city sized ship with hundreds of people on board? Self destruct was a maybe--if the ship even had that, but it wouldn't leave the AIs enough time to get away. Assuming they meant to....

I pulled Kavi aside. "Is there anywhere else besides the main control room where you can pilot the ship like this?"

He shook his head. "I don't think so."

I swallowed audibly. "But what about course information? Can you get that somewhere else?"

Dru apparently had wings and ears like a bat, overhearing our whispers. "My aunt has a readout in the hangar."

"Show me."

The smoke hadn't cleared and the breathers were running low, maybe an hour left on them. Trying the take in the thin air, we moved towards the center of campus with silent precision. Around every corner was a possible ambush waiting, and it set me on edge, digging my nails deeper and deeper into Kavi's arm.

We didn't run into any, however, reaching the large, arching doors into the colosseum without incident. The light were all turned off, leaving the pale "sunlight" the only force illuminating the large arena. The door to the hangar was open, ripped off its hinges.

The sight inside made me gasp. "Those monsters."

We were looking at a graveyard of ships. Pieces with ragged, raw end laid strewn everywhere. Crafts were left on their sides, crushed in places, and sparking slightly. It was like a rampaging giant had torn his way through all these beautiful machines with extreme prejudice.

"If they destroyed this one, it's likely that the one with off-world capable ships is gone as well," Dru said.

My eyes were watering at the waste of it all. "What do you care? You've got a shuttle."

Dru, Kavi, Mae, and I weaved our way through the corpses, avoiding sparked where we could and getting shocked where we couldn't. He lead us to the back wall to a small, concealed panel. We had the jump over the remains of a vintage Cruiser, and I almost lost my lunch.

The panel open up to reveal a non-holo digital screen, old as dirt. Unlike the rest of the electronic things in the arena, this wasn't shut off or broken. Dru typed--typed-- in a security code and a statistical page was pulled up.

"It says we're headed away from any known weigh stations or planets," Dru said, a frown in his voice. "In fact, it says we're flying towards nothing, just a pair of coordinates with nothing there."

"Maybe they're just going to kill us and ditch the ship," Mae said.

I shook my head. "Then why not use a stronger gas? I can think of a wealth of cocktails more deadly than the one they hit us with."

"Seemed to work on you just fine," Dru said.

"Not really, if I'm still breathing to tell about it."

He turned back to the screen, but said under his breath, "Pure evil doesn't go down that easy. More's the pity."

I chose to ignore that, glancing nervously behind us to make sure we were still alone in the eerily quiet room. "Can you find out anything else about the coordinates?"

"Like what?"

I went out on a limb. "Like energy readings."

"There's nothing until-- woa!" Dru clicked at the screen frantically. "Out of nowhere I'm getting a huge gravitational pull. Astronomical."

Mae moved up behind him, reading over his shoulder. "And there's a significant electromagnetic force in the area."

I took the bait, peering at the readings. "That place is more charged than a couple hundred people in socks on shag carpeting."

"But there's nothing there," Dru protested, though who he was arguing with I had no idea.

Electric charge and gravitational pull from nowhere, I though wearily, wishing for about the hundredth times hat day that Igor was there. It stood to reason that something had to be there, just something that we couldn't detect. Except as far as I knew, there was no cloaking system in the galaxy sophisticate enough to fool these sensors.

So maybe we were picking it up, but what only had the charge and gravity of a planet or star but no visible mass?

"Is there a star nearby?" Mae asked. "Maybe the system's just not seeing it."

"No," I said. "We're seeing it, alright."

Kavi whispered to me, "Astra, it's too big to--"

I waved his words away with a careless gesture, but it felt like my insides were about to come out of my mouth. "Let's think about it for a second. If you wanted to cause a galactic incident by going after the kids of the most powerful leaders in the universe, what would you make sure not to do?"

Mae was the first to answer. "I wouldn't want them to have evidence against me. United, the worlds could do something, but with no leads they'd all blame different enemies. It'd be chaos."

"Making it easy for someone to