Wormhole Pirates on Orbis (5 page)

“Good, then,” he said, and clapped his hands. “I’ll let you guys be. Take good care of them, Riis.”

“I will,” she replied.

“
Good-bye,
Charlie,” I groaned. Charlie nodded and turned back toward the chutes. Ketheria waved good-bye to him.

Why was Charlie doing this? Suddenly, I felt angry. I didn’t need someone to watch out for me and drag me around. I fought Madame Lee! I saved the Samirans and battled with Odran. I could walk through these doors by myself, and for some reason I could not understand, I wanted Riis to know that, too. I
needed
her to know that.

“Everyone ready?” Riis asked.

“You know, we can do this ourselves,” I told her. “We have a lot of experience . . . I mean I have . . . well —”

“How old are you?” Grace cut me off.

“Well, that depends who’s asking,” she said. “But I did some calculations, and in Earth years I believe I would be fourteen or fifteen years old. The same as some of you.”

It was hard to swallow that she was the same age as me.

“Let’s hurry inside. There are some things I need to show you before the spoke begins.” Riis slipped through the sparkling energy field guarding the entrance, and we all followed.

The air inside the Illuminate was noticeably cooler. Something else was different, too. I breathed deeply. Were they pumping extra oxygen into this place? I tucked that question away for Vairocina. Hundreds and hundreds of students milled past me, laughing and shouting, moving in packs. My stomach turned over once, maybe twice, and I thought my palms would drip with perspiration. Bad things often happened when I felt this way. The two rotations I had spent on Orbis were never easy. In fact, they were often dangerous. But none of it scared me as much as I was scared now.

Riis stopped in front of a towering glass wall speckled with dozens of little holes about the size of my palm. I saw that each hole was actually the end of a clear tube that snaked up the wall to some unknown destination. Riis held her hand out under the opening and a small oval-shaped device popped out. She took the blue plastic thing and attached it to the port behind her ear. I noticed that Riis did not decorate her port like most of the other kids.

“This is how you get the cycle’s announcements, cancellations, test results . . . anything they want you to know. You might as well grab one. You won’t understand much of it, but you should get into the practice,” she said. “We call it the tap.”

Other students were reaching over and grabbing their tap, so each of us followed. Of course, I simply stood there. I had no place to put it.

Max reached out and took the blue device from the tube and inserted it behind her left ear.

“Why don’t they just do this wireless?” she said out loud.

“What do you mean?” Riis asked.

“I mean, why all this hardware? Surely with the technology on the rings, this stuff can be sent directly to our implants.”

Another Citizen, reaching for a tap, overheard Max and snorted at the comment. Even Riis looked puzzled. “You mean have the information come directly into my brain without asking?”

Max nodded and said, “Yeah, it would be easier.”

Riis responded adamantly. “I would never let someone put something into my head without my permission.
Never.
”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Max tried to apologize.

“My brain. My choice,” Riis said, and turned to me. “You need to get one too.”

“I can’t,” I told her.

“He’s a softwire,” Ketheria said.

“Ugh! You’re a Space Jumper!” Riis cried. She sounded just as repulsed as Max on the subject. I thought that Charlie would have told her about me.

“No, I’m just a softwire,” I replied.
Why did I sound like I was defending myself?

“That’s weird,” Riis said. “Let me see.”

Weird.
Great. Like I told many before her, “There’s nothing to see.” But she still reached up and touched me behind my ear anyway. Her fingers were warm and smooth, like glass touching my skin.

“Wow. I don’t know what you should do, then,” she said.

I reached out to the tap tube and the small device plopped onto my hand. I
pushed
into the chip and uplinked the information by simply willing the file into my mind. The tap was a simple storage device, and the result was instantaneous.

“It says everyone must register for placement testing during this spoke,” I said.

Riis smiled. Was she was impressed?

“That’s great,” she replied.

“What’s placement testing?” Theodore asked.

“They need to know what to teach you.”

“Why not just a little bit of everything?”

“That’s impossible. The amount of knowledge available to an Orbister doubles every three and a half cycles. With the placement test, they can decide what to teach you and when to teach it to you.”

“They want to see how smart you are,” I said.

“Or how dumb,” came a voice from behind me. I turned, almost expecting to see Switzer standing there.

“Go suck on your tap, Dop,” Riis snapped.

I turned around and saw a tall greenish alien who reminded me of a plant moving swiftly in the wind. It took everything in me not to roll my eyes. I had met this alien once before on Orbis 1, and I had hoped to never meet him again.

“So you’re still here, huh, Softwire? You never took my advice,” he said, filling the space between us.

I let out a deep breath. It was too soon for this. I knew Dop’s strength from experience, as well as his rotting breath. I turned my face slightly to the side.

“Not so tough anymore?” he taunted me. “I’m glad you’ve finally learned your place on the rings.”

I wanted to ask him if his species had ever invented a toothbrush. I wanted to carve my initials into his green skin. I wanted to crush him with my bare hands and throw him into a compost bin, but I didn’t. I couldn’t even muster a reply. Maybe it was the new school. Maybe it was all of these Citizens. I didn’t know. All I could do was stare at him and hope my knees weren’t shaking.

“Well?” Dop pressed on.

“Well,
what
?” I mumbled.

“What are you doing here?”

“Same as you, Dop,” Riis said.

“They’re attending the Illuminate?” He looked at his two friends standing behind him. “This is the human trash I told you about, orphaned in outer space and left to wean off the nipple of a robot. Losers.” Dop turned back to Riis. “When did they start letting knudniks in here? And why are you with them? Did someone force you to show these carbon clumps around?”

A sickly alien with sinewy arms and stiff black hair extending from the back of his head whispered to Dop over his shoulder. He stared at Riis, his eyes widening.

“You volunteered!” Dop flicked his hands out and slapped them together. I had never seen the gesture before, but it looked insulting. Riis leaped toward Dop, grabbing him by his skin as if it were hair. She twisted him around and clamped down on his throat before his friends could intervene, though I don’t think they would have even if they were fast enough.

“Golden!” Max cried.

“If you ever do that to me again . . .” Riis breathed into his ear.

“You’ll what?” Dop gasped, still defiant.

Riis pushed him away, and Dop rubbed his throat, smiling.

“That’s right. You’ll do nothing,” he shouted at Riis as she stormed away. We followed her up a ramp, glancing back at Dop and his smiling friends.

“It’s ridiculous,” Dop shouted for everyone to hear. “We have pirates attacking our Citizens, but still we have to care for these freeloaders!”

“Why did you let him go?” Theodore asked Riis, but she didn’t respond.

Instead she looked at me and said, “I hope you don’t cause this much trouble everywhere you go, Softwire.”

Me too,
I thought.

Most of the Citizens I had ever encountered shared Dop’s beliefs. They presumed that Orbis belonged to them, and they didn’t want anyone else here. The younger Citizens seemed especially adamant about this. Somewhere in their history, however, they seemed to have forgotten that
we
did all the work they didn’t want to do, or work they considered beneath them. Maybe if they did it themselves, there wouldn’t be so many of us here. But Riis said Dop complained simply because he could. That it was his privileged position in life. His grumbling was just an imitation of his own parents’ rhetoric. Insults he had heard since he was born.

But Dop had nothing to be worried about. I couldn’t wait to get off this ring.

We followed Riis up a curved sloping ramp, past many more students, flying messenger drones, and electrostatic doors. It was going to take a while to learn my way around here — this place was huge, and we tried to soak up every new sight. One group of students circled a tall boy who was projecting an image from a metallic device attached to his neural implant. The wormhole pirates’ attack of the last cycle played out in front of them as a 3-D holograph. I slowed and watched this new interpretation of the events. In this version, the Citizens appeared much braver than I remembered, overwhelming the wormhole pirates
before
the security forces ever arrived.

Max saw it, too. “That’s not how it happened,” she exclaimed.

An alien standing next to the one projecting the fictitious event turned and glared at Max.

“She’s right,” I said. “Where did
that
version come from?”

A tall alien, the one with the ear projector, glanced at my vest. “Knudniks?” he whispered, and turned his back to me. Another from the group, a girl who looked identical to the other, with wild carroty hair and skin as white as ceramic heat shields, nudged her twin and pointed at the hologram.

“Isn’t that you?” she remarked, pointing at the image of Max.

In the hologram, Max and I were huddled behind a bench, crying. Bawling like the little ones on the
Renaissance!
A Citizen was gallantly defending us from the wormhole pirates.

“That’s a lie!” Max snapped.

“I wouldn’t want anyone to see this, either, if I were you,” the alien said, and the four of them laughed, turning their backs to us.

Max stomped forward, her fists clenched, ready to knock the laughter right out of them, but Riis stopped her and pulled her back. “You can’t believe anything from those pob projections,” she said. “It’s propaganda — that’s all that crap is.”

“But it’s a lie,” she protested.

“You were there, right?” Riis asked.

Max nodded, grinding her back teeth and breathing forcefully out her nose.

“Then you know the truth, right?” she added.

Max nodded again.

“Then that’s all that matters. Whatever they think means nothing. It’s only thought. What they think about you is none of your business.”

“But —”

“Let it
go,
” she said. “You’re not going to win this one. They don’t know how to lose, anyway — believe me.”

The ramp leveled off and opened into a small round foyer. Along the walls, holographic numbers hovered at eye level. Some were green while most were red. There must have been a hundred of them. Riis walked up to a green one and swiped at the floating numbers. The wall appeared to part, revealing a tall storage bin that slid forward. Riis placed her helmet on one of the shelves. Other students came and went, but none of them acknowledged Riis.
Does she have any friends here?
I wondered. She certainly seemed to know how everything worked, so I assumed she had been here for a while.

“Grab any of the green ones. Remember the number. It should work with those skins you’re wearing,” she informed us.

I swiped at the number 952, and the storage device slid forward. “Now what?”

“Leave your stuff there,” Riis said as she pulled off her green and silver suit and hung it in the locker. She was wearing a crimson outfit that flared at her hips. It covered most of her body except for her long legs. Then she took a small wand from the locker and brushed her hair with it. Riis’s auburn hair turned pure white, a striking contrast to the blood-red suit. I just stood and stared. I wasn’t the only one.

“I didn’t think her hair was real,” Grace whispered to Max. “Too stiff.”

“Everyone done?” she asked after she put the wand back.

“We don’t have anything to put in these things,” I told her.

Riis looked at us just standing in front of the open lockers. “Oh,” she remarked. “Well, now that you picked one, the Illuminate will leave any notices for you in it — personal notices, test scores, or whatever they like, actually. Anything they can’t put in the tap.”

“Riis,” I said.

“What?”

“Why did you volunteer to show us around?”

Riis checked her hair and outfit in a mirror that hung in her locker, then swiped at the number, closing the storage device.

“That is not your business,” she said, and turned up the hallway. “Come, you’re late.”

I guess Wiicerians don’t answer questions, either.

We spent the remainder of the school spoke filling out data screens to register for our placement test. Completion of the exam would officially commence our school rotation, I was told. The task was tedious, but proved to be a useful distraction from the sneers and knudnik insults that had been shoved our way all cycle long. It also left no room to think about wormhole pirates. By the time we were finished, the rest of the students had already left. Riis had to go, and she said her good-byes quickly.