Vyyda Book 1: The Haver Problem (6 page)

He was also an Earther.
 

Doon
e had the look of a golden boy:  hair never unkempt, square jaw and perfect teeth.  He was the ideal, in the minds of many an Earther, of what an HSPB agent should be.

As Doone walked in front of Caroline, cutting off her progress to the Mars console, he flapped his arms in the manner of a bird in flight.  He didn't look at her, didn't say a word.  He simply flapped.  Caroline couldn't help but turn her gaze to Stovall, who'd seen the entire thing.  He started to make his way toward Doone, but Caroline gave him a small shake of the head, stopping him short.  Nevertheless, Stovall looked at her for a long moment, as if to say:  "Do you see?  I was right!"

Caroline, having none of it, proceeded to get the incoming results from Mars.  It was her routine – the way she began every shift at the comms wedge, in no small part because it was a little like going home.

V              V              V              V

Arcadia (the only city on Mars which had direct involvement with the HSPB) was known for two things:  Its über-empfänger and the vessel maintenance/design depot which had been placed there ages ago, before the personnel working on Bureau craft were required to be Academy-trained, full-fledged agents.  There was also a third claim that Arcadia could make:  home of Caroline Dahl.

Caroline's father, Andrew, had thirty-plus years on the maintenance line, servicing, repairing and refi
tting Bureau vessels.  His tenure had provided her with the benefit of always living in the same dwelling (a comfortable, but relatively small spot provided by the HSPB), always knowing her father would make a living and the ability to rely on parents whose concern for her well-being eclipsed all other matters. 

Not that it lasted.

Her mother became ill and passed away shortly after her sixteenth birthday.  Caroline did an admirable job taking care of her father (even if her cooking left much to be desired).  Their routine was a simple one:  Andrew Dahl home by eighteen hundred, dinner half-past and, more often than not, a gathering of his friends from work for Martian ale and selenza (the Arcadian dice game which had caused the group of five men to lose small fortunes back and forth over the years).  Caroline disappeared during those games, spending time alone in her room.

Andrew Dahl told his daughter repeatedly how proud he was of her for managing to dodge the advances of the young HSPB agents who were being stationed in the Arcadia vessel depot, as the Burea
u sought to phase out all non-agent personnel.

Other young women hadn't been quite so steadfast in their refusal of these hormone-driven young men and ended up as pregnant, unmarried teens in a Martian city that offered little to anyone not officially attached to the Bureau.  Occasionally, one of these young women would manage to get the father of her child to do the r
ight thing – but being the wife of an HSPB agent was only a small step above being an unwed mother (and, in some ways, worse).

V              V              V              V

              Caroline’s father was absolutely opposed to her joining the HSPB.  His association with the Bureau had come not from a desire to be part of the HSPB or fidelity to the ‘Earth cause’.  He was simply a man with marketable skills of value to the Bureau and a willingness to trade on that for work which provided for his family.

             
Beneath the surface, in fact, Andrew Dahl had a simmering contempt for Earth.  It wasn’t just that citizens of Mars and every other settled planet of C-Space felt lesser beings in the eyes of Earthers.  That much was to be expected.  But Caroline’s father seethed, as did many Martians, that Earth had halted terraforming efforts on their planet.  It could have created a viable oxygen environment over time.  Life on Mars would have been changed forever.

             
Instead, humans in C-Space continued to live in tunnels and underground spaces, breathing reasonably clean, but synthetically fashioned air.

             
Caroline’s interest in the Bureau was no rebellious strike against her father’s point of view.  She felt a loyalty, a kinship, to Earth.  At least, she thought she should.  She didn’t hate Earth.  She didn’t hold the planet and its people in contempt.  After all, Mars was part of Earth-controlled C-Space.  They were all in it together…weren’t they?

             
It didn’t hurt that there was a plum offering for those non-Earthers who made it into and through the Academy, distinguished themselves as agents and served a full twenty-five years: opportunity to apply for permanent residence on Earth.

             
It was no guarantee.  Most non-Earthers in the Bureau wouldn’t ever step foot on the home planet, even in service of its well-being.  Still, it was a chance, and a chance was more than most other C-Spacers ever got.

V              V              V              V

Extra effort went into straightening the Dahl residence on the night that Caroline planned to tell her father she'd be going to the Academy.  She also set the aroma-regulators to his favorite scent, "Carobra" (one which she happened to despise), and wore the dress he'd given her for her most recent birthday (also no favorite of hers).

It was all for naught.  The person who came to the door nearly an hour aft
er she expected her father was one of his longtime assistants in the maintenance depot.  Andrew Dahl was dead.

Caroline nee
ded to know how it had happened.  The man hemmed and hawed a bit, finally saying it was an accident: “Just one of those things.” 

The weight of a standard HSPB transport displacement drive cooling base
was more than adequate to crush a human skeletal system.  The fact that Andrew Dahl was eleven feet directly beneath one when it came loose left nothing to doubt.

Caroline couldn’t mourn for long.
  She had obligations.  Arrange the memorial.  Host the gathering in the Dahl residence immediately following and then meet a seventy hour deadline (the clock began ticking with the official pronouncement of Andrew Dahl's death) to vacate the Bureau-owned premises.

Traditionally, the receptions following memorials went on late into the evening.  Caroline hoped against hope that the one for her father would be an exception.  It wasn't.  The men who had worked for and alongside him over several decades didn't se
em to want to leave.  They professed to be concerned about her. Assurances that she gave about being fine and just wanting to rest didn't pry them loose.

She disposed of most of the personal possessions in the quarters which had been the only home she'd ever known.  Not so much a lack of sentimentality as an absence of a place to stow them.  She would
still go to the Academy, and there was no room there for personal clutter.

Word spread through Arcadia
that poor Andrew Dahl's only daughter was Academy-bound.  Among the well-wishers was a pair of recent Academy graduates who had been assigned to the Bureau vessel maintenance depot.  They’d been underlings of Andrew Dahl for a brief period.  The duo offered a celebratory sendoff, along with a detailed rundown of what Caroline could expect from the three years of intense training.

She was inclined to say no. 
Caroline had spent years avoiding the approaches of Bureau personnel.  Yet these were the kind of people with whom she'd have to be working.  An advantage to get a sense of them as soon as possible.  Besides, they were both Earthers and she'd had extremely limited exposure to natives of the home planet.

They took her to one of the newer spots in Arcadia, catering to the increasing influx of actual Academy-trained men and women who would, over time, squeeze out
the old guard, the Andrew Dahls, who thought for themselves.

A sense of urgency to move on took hold of Caroline
that night.  She let go.

The young men were extremely forthcoming about the nature of the Academy, telling tales of training routines, rules which were to be strictly followed, which tests were the toughest and how to survive three full years of the ordeal.

Then they warned her that she'd lose her long brown hair upon arrival, per regulations.  One of the young men took a careful look at her and speculated that she wouldn't go through with it.  She'd be back in Arcadia within hours.

"They'll make
you shave it off.  You refuse – even hesitate – and you're on a transport home in no time," he said.

"Except I don't have a home anymore," she replied with slurred speech,
well into her fifth drink.

"Someplace else then.  But you won't get to be at the Academy."

Though intoxicated, Caroline assured them that she could handle anything the Bureau could throw her way – hair restrictions included.  They suggested casually that she prove it right there and then.  Have her head shaved before even leaving Arcadia.  That would put her in good stead with the Academy staff on day one.

It didn't take much convincing.  She agreed.

The whole story was a lie.  Neither women nor men were required to accept such a haircut upon arrival at the Academy.  And, as if the prank wasn't cruel enough, the two young men privately slipped the hair-tech an extra bit of currency to apply a topical solution used to kill follicles at the root, preventing the hair from growing back.  (In Caroline’s case, it also ended up turning the ‘stubble’ on her head completely white.)

V              V              V              V

              Caroline’s first days at the Academy were spent adjusting to the unwanted attention from her unusual appearance.  She didn’t bother trying to explain, so speculation ran the gamut:  it was an attempt to look tough, accentuate her status as an outsider, sign of a developing health problem, you name it.

             
Once the novelty of her nearly bare head wore off, however, Caroline found herself either well-liked or generally ignored by her fellow cadets.  The other non-Earthers liked her and the Earthers didn’t regard her with any more disdain than they held for other half-spetchers.

             
Either way, no one who encountered her in the earliest days of Caroline's tenure at the Academy thought she was much of a threat to graduate, much less make a strong showing.

It was pure miscalculation.

She had the benefit of a voracious determination inherited from her father.  Andrew Dahl's sheer force of will.  As shortcomings in physical strength, dexterity and hand-to-hand combat took their toll, Caroline mined the memories of her father, frustratingly, angrily stumped over some engineering or maintenance issue.  She remembered the faraway stare, the light biting of his right thumb, almost in rhythmic fashion as he sat or stood, internally chasing the solution anywhere he might catch the scent.  Days or weeks could pass with such determination, such intensity that it seemed impossible to maintain.  Others in the HSPB maintenance depot would be willing to give up.  Andrew Dahl would not.  She couldn’t recall a single situation in which he failed to ultimately reach the solution.

             
Gregor Kimball, lead instructor in physical disciplines, perpetually preached to his cadets in his courses on Sofun Reyeg (the HSPB brand of hand-to-hand tactics) that practice was the most important element.  The Earthers, many of whom had spent several years in schools that taught Sofun Reyeg before coming to the Academy, felt that they had already put in their practice.

             
Conversely, the non-Earthers tended to have an approach of trying to do well, but not appearing to work too hard at it, lest they be perceived by Earthers as attempting to step beyond their station in the ‘natural order’. 

             
Caroline had no intention of conceding anything.  She would use the Sofun Reyeg simulators during off-hours, when no one else was in the training section. She took blows and bruises – a necessary price to pay for real improvement.  And, when she volunteered to face off against Leopold Doone, the Earther whose skill in Sofun Reyeg was generally accepted as superior to any other in the class, the time and pain produced dividends.

             
“Cadet Dahl has shown us why this is a three-year program,” announced Kimball as Caroline stood over the shaken figure of Doone, a victim of her “whip” takedown and roto-kick to the solar plexus.  “Improvement is the point, ladies and gentlemen.  Cadet Doone is very, very good – as good as he was week one of the program…and no better.  Cadet Dahl has improved considerably.”

             
At the end of their final year, Doone trailed only Caroline in the class rankings.  The first time a non-Earther had ever finished atop a graduating Academy class:  highly admired by other non-Earthers who had come through the program; not likely to be forgotten by Earth-born cadets and agents.

V              V              V              V

              Once the shift in the comms wedge ended, Caroline returned to her quarters.  She sat upright on one of her deep-back chairs, staring at Roland’s empty perch, wondering what to do with it.  She was only fifteen minutes into this ‘alone time’ when someone was at her door.  It was Stovall.