Free Sirius Academy (Jezebel's Ladder) by Scott Rhine Page B

has three.
Anti-terrorism has a reading list, plus a DVD collection. I’m having them
delivered to my room. Professor Sorenson should be a piece of cake. I
doubt there’s anything he can teach me about talents I don’t already know. Horvath
. . . I get the feeling she’s going to make my life hell. Well I give as good
as I get. End Scene.”
    The next shot was Red jogging into
the Alien Tech amphitheater one minute after the starting bell. The other
fifty-nine freshmen and one sophomore were seated already. There was no Daniel,
only Zeiss. The TA wore a button-down shirt of blue Oxford cloth. “Any
questions?”
    A student in front asked, “Why does
Professor Sorenson say the first few minutes on the artifact will be
world-changing?”
    “With each of the twenty-seven
alien pages that led us to the Sirius artifact, we learn enough to keep our
scientists busy for decades. For each combination of pages, we discover more
than the sum of the two. Even with all the pages combined, we wouldn’t know
enough to build this spacecraft for a thousand years. Just walking in the front
door of the craft will give us access to alien techniques and technologies Earth
hasn’t even considered.”
    “Why can’t we land today?” inquired
another.
    “That’s another class. The short answer
is that the nations who refuse to join the collation have missiles aimed at the
artifact. If they can’t have the knowledge, no one can.”
    “Then why are we here?”
    “To be ready when an agreement is
reached. But even if that doesn’t happen, you’re the leaders of tomorrow. The
curriculum and competition sharpen each student to be the best in his or her
arena.”
    On her goggles, Red entered a
caption for the lecture. “My first sermon in the crystal cathedral.”
    When the questions were over, Zeiss
announced, “As promised, today’s class should be easy. Take out your tablets,
and connect to the class website, quiz one. There will be ten short-answer
questions; nothing too strenuous. You’ll have fifteen minutes. Afterward, we’ll
discuss the answers that people missed in open forum.”
    Red was still taking her new school
tablet out of its case when he announced, “Begin.”
    Her tablet had a large note stuck
to the front, “Charge for twelve hours before first use.”
    She immediately raised her hand,
causing Zeiss to walk up and lean over. “Yes?” he whispered. When she showed
him the note, he sighed, “Here, use mine.”
    As she typed the answers at
breakneck speed, Red failed to notice that they were appearing on the large,
overhead screen. Number four, one of the easiest questions, gave her fits. Some
feature of the pad kept blacking out her answer. On the last question, they
only provided a quarter inch for the answer, but she attached an answer file
that took her the remainder of the quiz to expound upon. A few early-finishers
were chuckling. After he called out the one-minute warning, she hit submit and
handed the pad back.
    He punched a button and graded all
the submissions in a few seconds. “Not bad. Low score was 70 percent. The
average was 94. Excellent.”
    The TA walked through a few obvious
answers. One boy claimed, “I had that.”
    Zeiss brought it up on his pad and
said, “Ah . . . Spelling. I’ll give it to you this time, but you should know the
word aerospace for the final. Next, how can you tell a planetary orbits’
expert? The correct answers were increased hormonal activity and fixation with
curved geometry.” He brought up the wrong answers to check for spelling.
    “Horny,” he announced. “Not
specific enough. That definition would encompass ninety percent of our student
body.” No one could see the name of the student, but everyone saw the red X.
    When he read the other wrong
response, everyone laughed again. “Talk to him for five minutes and see if he
tries to teach me something.”
    Zeiss winced. “I’m afraid that
anything they tried to teach you with that combination . .