Tanderon (18 page)

“So this is Tanderon,” Val mused, still looking around as he stopped beside me.

“Our university sites tend to be more hospitable.”

“It all depends on what you want to study,” I commented, then nodded toward a knot of four men making their way across the permal. “Here comes your welcoming committee from 2. They’ll see that your suffering is minimal.”

He turned away from the grayish skies to glance at the administrators from 2, then brought his gaze back to my face.

“I’ve decided that I want you coming with me,” he announced, pinning me with that deep black stare. “I’ll tell Ringer it was my decision, and he can let the Council know.”

I returned his stare with a frown, not really believing what I’d heard. Just like that the decision had become his, and to hell with everyone else involved? The wind ruffled my kilt and blew some strands of hair in my face, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

“You have no say in this one way or the other,” I told him harshly, pulling the windblown hair out of my mouth. “When I asked for your help you were too busy philosophizing to make the effort, so now you can shove it! When I get out of here it’ll be through my own efforts, just the way it always is.”

I felt tempted to add something more, but there’s a saying about words spoken in anger. Val tried to grab my arm to keep the discussion going, but I pulled away from him and strode off across the permal, passing the four from 2 without even looking at them. There was a brief flurry of greasy greetings behind me, showing that Val had been snared, but I didn’t slow down until they were all a good distance behind me.

I was mad as hell at what Val had tried to pull, offering me help only because it had suddenly become his decision. I’d been about to assure him he would not be suffering in bed if that’s what was bothering him, but somehow I hadn’t been able to make the words come out. A stray wisp of dust swirled aimlessly around my feet as I walked, and I honestly didn’t know whether I’d held the words back because I was afraid he’d agree – or whether I was afraid he’d disagree.

I’d nearly reached the port perimeter before I became aware of the fact that I was being watched. There were a lot of cadets walking around the port due to it being third session registration time, but the proctors stationed around the area had more to do that time than direct new arrivals. The proctors were mostly male and all were armed. Their eyes watched me carefully as I moved past them, and their hands rested casually on the butts of their stunners. No one had said a word to me or made a move in my direction, but that didn’t matter. There was no doubt in my mind that all those beady eyes were there to make sure I went only where I was supposed to go.

Just to test the theory I detached myself from the group of cadets I’d been walking among and started back toward the grounded liner shuttles, but the first steps showed I wasn’t suffering from paranoia. The proctors I’d passed earlier had been slowly closing the gap behind me, and five of them stood like a wall between me and the nearest shuttles. They’d stopped moving as soon as I’d turned back toward them, and one of them drew his stunner and gestured with his free hand. I wouldn’t be bothered as long as I continued on in the direction they wanted me to go in; if I failed to cooperate, their stunners would do the thing for me.

I turned around again and headed back toward the port perimeter, not even bothering to match stares with the busies behind me. Chances were they didn’t know who they were dealing with and would have been easy to take out, but I’d already made that decision on Xanadu Orbital Station. If any blood was spilled during that particular three month period, it would not be my doing.

The small town that was the Academy wasn’t far from the port, but transportation had been provided for the new cadets. I boarded one of a fleet of ancient buses along with everyone else going to the Academy, and endured the short, bouncy trip in silence. The silence was on my part, though, since my seatmate began to demand my life history as soon as she sat down next to me.

I ignored the flood of words and looked out the sealed window at my right arm, watching the proctors standing around the bus line as they watched me. Two proctors just happened to board the bus I sat in seconds before it moved off in line to follow the bus ahead of it. I blew a kiss to the proctors left behind, then stretched out in my seat and comfortably closed my eyes. My seatmate finally got the message then and moved to another seat, but it made no real difference. Purgatory doesn’t change with company.

Ten minutes later the slow speed of the bus slowed even more, and I opened my eyes to see that we were already among the buildings of the Academy. The town was built on the basis of a square, with new buildings or necessary practice areas having been added one street behind the core square. We had entered on South Street, passing the mess hall, armory, officers’ quarters, and general offices on the left. At the end of South Street we turned right onto West Street, passing the women’s barracks on the left. Then we crossed North Street to pass the classrooms buildings on the right, and finally we stopped on West Street past the classrooms buildings at the registration center.

The only thing we hadn’t passed were the men’s barracks on East Street and the infirmary one street behind South Street, cleverly named White Sheet Lane. Beyond the registration center were the exercise fields and target areas, but we didn’t get to see those either. The buses slowly disgorged their contents, and I sat and waited until the last of the kids on my bus had passed me before getting out of the seat and ambling after them. I’d gotten a good number of curious stares from my fellow students, but no one had tried to join me.

The proctors who had ridden the bus were standing right next to it as I disembarked.

They didn’t say anything, so neither did I. Instead, I continued my amble toward the wide double doors of the entry, and ended up getting there after the last of the new horde had pushed its way through. A P.A. system added to the din of a thousand voices by announcing, “New registrants! Go to the line with the first initial of your last name first. Repeat, the line with the first initial of your last name first. You will be told where to proceed from there.” The message clicked on at regular intervals, but I could still see kids hurrying in all directions in confusion, the uniforms making them look like Pete and Repeat.

I’d paused in front of the doors to look around before walking in, but there was really no sense in putting things off. I started moving again, passed across the threshold, and was no more than two or three steps into the building when alarm bells went off all around me, bringing proctors out of their bored slouches and right to my side.

There had to be at least half a dozen of them, all male, and their expressions were nowhere near as curious as those on the faces of cadets who had noticed the goings-on and had stopped to watch. The proctors around me were serious to the point of grim, but I didn’t find out what was happening until a chief proctor pushed his way through the onlookers to join the circle of starers. He looked at me, glanced down at a flat photo in his hand, then nodded his head in satisfaction.

“I thought it might be you, Santee,” he said in a well-practiced rasp. “I wondered why we were told to be on the lookout for you, and now I know.”

Well, I was glad he knew. I stood in the middle of another curious crowd, but the only reason for it seemed to be the presence of a photograph in the chief’s hand.

The photo had probably been supplied by Ringer, but I had no memory of any time it might have been taken.

“How nice of you to come and greet me personally,” I beamed at the chief just to be saying something. “Now I feel completely at home. Do I get a special tour of the place too?”

There were a few nervous chuckles from the watching cadets, but the chief didn’t share their amusement. He stood as tall as I did, his brown hair cut short and bristly, his brown eyes seemingly perpetually outraged. He squared his thick shoulders in response to my comments, and the photo in his hand was forgotten.

“Don’t get smart, Santee,” he growled, looking me up and down in disapproval.

“You’re nobody who has to be greeted. The detectors say you’re carrying a weapon and I want it.”

A few gasps and murmurs came from our audience, underscoring my frown and the chief’s glare. I hadn’t known new cadets were being checked for weapons, and finding out the hard way hadn’t done much for the peacefulness of my image. If I’d known earlier I could have stashed the knife, but at that point it was much too late. I stood there trying to think of some other way out of it, and the chief lost what little patience Mother Nature had given him.

“Come on, come on,” he snapped, holding out a hand toward me. “Cough up whatever you’ve got and do it fast.”

Anyone listening to these wire recordings may or may not understand why I felt reluctant to hand the knife over. So for the sake of unemotional reasons let me add that it wasn’t part of an agent’s training to casually lose track of whatever weapons he or she may have had. With this in view, I cocked my head to one side and temporized.

“Why, Chief!” I scolded with an appropriate amount of shocked modesty. “In front of all these people? We’ve hardly known each other long enough for that!”

The cadets came up with a lot of dirty laughs and even the watching proctors guffawed, but the chief turned out not to be the sort of man who appreciates being teased. His skin darkened in rage and the look in his brown eyes went flat, and the hand being held out toward me closed into a fist.

“You wiseass kids are all alike,” he rasped, his voice low and uneven. “You walk in here acting as if you own the place, but you find out fast enough who does the pushing and who does the getting pushed. I know you’re carrying a weapon, and you’ll hand it over or have it taken away from you. And one more wisecrack and you’ll start picking up demerits even before you’re officially registered.”

The deep silence around us was emphasized by the gleam in his eyes, a gleam that said he loved to do whatever came by in the way of pushing. The chief was a man who enjoyed lording it over a bunch of helpless kids, but I was hardly what might be called a helpless kid. I clearly had no choice about handing over the knife, so I decided to give the man exactly what he’d asked for.

I brought the knife out fast, causing the light to flash from its tempered blade, six inches of graceful, razor-edged mirroring plus hilt, deadly in the hand and balanced for throwing. The short-haired man in front of me paled and jumped back, scratching frantically for his sidearm, but before he could get it free of the holster I reversed the knife and held it out toward him hilt first.

“Now, how can I refuse such a gracious request,” I drawled, keeping the mockery out of my eyes. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

The man straightened out of the semi-crouch he’d adopted and wiped the palms of his hands off on his pants, all the while being very aware of the stares of the cadets and proctors around us. His eyes were furious over the way he’d reacted to me, and I noticed that none of the proctors was laughing at him even behind a hand. I would have bet a bundle that the lack of laughter stemmed from the sort of man the chief was. For that reason I wasn’t very surprised when he pulled the knife out of my hand so viciously, he almost took off a couple of my fingers.

“Yeah, you can do something else for me,” he snarled, wrapping his fist tightly around the knife hilt. “You can consider yourself on report! Now get over on the line you’re supposed to be on! You’ve wasted enough of our time!”

I felt tempted to tell him my estimation of how much his time was worth, but I’d already had more of him than I’d wanted in the first place. I gave him an up-and-down tinged with disgust, then turned away to move through the proctors and cadets still around us. My arrival at the Academy had been just as successful as I’d known it would be.

It took only a minute or two to find the end of the S line, so I added myself to it then glanced idly around at the rest of the room. As large as it was it still seemed crowded with all the people who filled it, leaving very little to see aside from lines and lines of uniformed bodies, males in trousers, females in kilts. None of the lines moved very fast leaving us nothing to do but stand and wait, but not everyone there had the patience to do nothing. Some of them had been searching eagerly for a distraction, a fact I discovered when I looked away from the rest of the room to find myself semi-surrounded again.

A bunch of boys from the R and T lines to either side and the S line I stood on were clumped together, looking me over and grinning. They were mostly eighteen and nineteen, and not one of them could have been over twenty. I moved my attention away from them in total disinterest, but that didn’t do anything in the way of discouraging them.

“And I thought it was going to be dull around here,” one of them said, leading the others closer. “What’s your name, pretty doll? I want to write it down so I don’t forget it.”

I looked back at them with no trace of enthusiasm, and briefly shook my head.

“Forget it before you ask it,” I advised, glancing from one grinning face to the next.

“I don’t go in for cradle robbing.”

I began to turn away from them to end the conversation, but the second of them moved directly in my way to show how attractive a grin he had.

“Is that a nice thing to say?” he asked with a laugh, obviously not believing my disinterest. “We’re the best around here, and you’re in luck because we’re going to choose you.”

I studied him in silence for a moment, then nodded my head to concede the point.

“Yeah, that’s just about the way my luck’s been running lately,” I admitted, looking him up and down. “Why don’t you do us both a favor and take off? You haven’t got anything I’d be interested in.”

His grin turned briefly to a leer, and then he and the first one laughed as a third joined them and leaned an arm on the second one’s shoulder.

“Don’t play hard to get, doll,” the newcomer scolded, his grin as wide as the ones his friends showed. “We don’t discourage that easily. Why make things tough when you can have all of us?”