He got up from above her, dusting off his school fatigues. The grey uniform was wrinkled to hell. Extending a hand to Riley, he pulled her small frame up into a sitting position. She stood, leaning into him for a hug. He wrapped his arms around her. She shivered. She was clammy in his arms, but he warmed her with both his love and body. She was right, he thought, we should be scared.

  “I am scared,” Helos said from behind Auberje, “I am scared but also excited. We met a real-life alien today. We interacted with her. She’s our headmistress!”

  Riley shivered again, “I hope not. I think we can’t trust her. I tried to ask you guys questions, to communicate with you without her hearing, but she blocked all my communication. I tried to record her too; I am not sure if it worked. As soon as we reached the ship, I knew we had to get as far away as we could from her reach.”

  Auberje pulled away from her. Staring at her in the eyes, he moved one hand slowly to his eyes and pointed around the cockpit and another to his ear and did the same.

  Riley’s eyes got big, Helos’s bigger. They looked at one another intently. Nodding at the same time, they started searching with their PDA lights. They scanned with the ship physically first. Inch by pain staking inch, they found three listening devices, a tracking device, and a homing beacon. They put all of them into the airlock.

  “Phew, I am glad we found all those,” Riley said.

  Auberje shook his head, shushing her with a finger. He gestured to the main console of the Triumvirate. He set up his PDA next to it. He connected a thin wire from his PDA to the only port on the Triumvirate’s terminal.

  Five hours of programming, scanning, debugging, and re-encrypting later… He was fairly certain, “70% certain,” Auberje told his companions, “I found the listening and tracking software. But I am definitely not 100%. She did some things with software I wasn’t aware you could do. I am pretty knew to hacking. We have only taken one course on it so far. I read the books for the next three years too, but it was mainly theoretical.”

  “You did wonderfully, Auberje,” Helos looked very sorry for himself, sitting glumly at his own PDA terminal, “I tried to debug just one library of code. I didn’t find anything. Then you took a look and found 600 lines of malicious code. I feel like a complete failure.” He set his head in his hands, resting his elbows on his duty station.

  “Think about how I feel? I knew she wasn’t trustworthy. How could I think a few jumps through space would make it impossible for her to find us again?” Riley was also distraught. She had spent the last five hours alternating between pacing and backseat coding. Auberje hadn’t minded much. He understood her anxiety. This was unexpected.

  He was torn. He thought Caran Avis meant to do right by them. He also didn’t like being spied on. His father’s enemies regularly tried to bug their apartments in the Dyson Sphere colony. He was used to the manual sweeps his guards would have to do daily. Still, this was unprecedent even for his level of espionage. A foreign entity, an alien entity, was spying on them.

  He shrugged, “I don’t think you two did too badly. Riley caught on to her first. Helos, you put in a good effort. Your suggestion to check our PDAs was invaluable. If you had not suggestd it, I might have thought they were clean. They were clearly trying to mask the other systems being clean as well. Once I got around the malware on our PDAs, it was easy to locate similar and frightenling different malware on the Triumvirate’s systems.”

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “Still, that was quick thinking, Auberje, good job!” Helos clapped his friend on the back. “Do you think we need to check the suits?”

  “Yes!” Riley rolled her eyes in consternation. She smacked her forehead. Of course she hacked the suits too. She had experienced it. Taking Helos and Auberje by the hand, she lead them to the back of the ship. The three suits sat idly in the rear.

  A few hours later…

  “Okay, I think we finally have the last of it. We lost 11 hours of race time. I think we are going to be in big trouble, we need to get back on course,” Riley said.

  “I agree, I do think we have the last of them. We found almost 30 different malicious programs, a dozen physical ones including all the suit ones,” Auberje yawned. He was the one responsible for most of the work the last day or so.

  Helos nodded, “you sleep, Auberje, I am going to get all this shot out of the airlock and into the nearest star.”

  Riley navigated toward the local G-type main-sequence Yellow dwarf. The system was the next one on their list. They had to risk getting back to a predetermined list of sights the headmistress had sent them. It was a risk they had to take. Even knowing Caran Avis might be able to set up scanning and tracking for them along their route. It was unavoidable if they wanted t be students at Star Academy.

  Before he fell asleep, Auberje took an informal poll of his friend’s opinions; do we think Caran Avis is the headmistress?

  “No.”

  “Not a chance.”

  Auberje agreed. Something was extremely fishy with Caran Avis. Acting like the headmistress but then bugging their ship and tracking it across the known universe. They were certain one of the tracking devices was implanted by the Star Academy staff. It wasn’t sophisticated enough or particularly well hidden. A safety feature, supposed Auberje, allows the school to recover any lost or destroyed ships anywhere in the local spiral of the Milky Way. It would take time, but it would pulse the school with a location every 48 hours.

  They left one in the ship. The rest were unceremoniously ejected out the airlock.

  The next place on their route back to the Star Academy was a planet system called “Tetron 115 AB.” Tetron was supposed to be an unremarkable planet in the center of nowhere toward the edge of nothing. This was about as far from civilization as you could imagine.

  Helos and Auberje were looking forward to it. They were up next for suit time. In the meantime, as Riley piloted the ship, plotting their course and navigating the jump drive’s verisimilitudes, the boys did a little show and tell with their quest rewards.

  “These Minnut were ingenious. The elastomer muscles are state of the art. The power source is a Carbon Fusion engine. This thing runs on space rock dust. A few pounds of sand can power the Mark II for days. A pound of uranium or plutonium or thorium… I bet you could get years of peak operations out of so much fissile material,” Auberje was geeking out.

  “Can you imagine the two of us, battling against the Harx in those things? We could outmaneuver ships, were through the laser and missile fire. Plus, the material the Mark II mecha is made of is revolutionary. If we can copy it, it is a step change in material science. Not a huge step but still. Really awesome. Puts you in awe of all the other things this sentient race knew or could have known,” Helos sat on his chair, leaning back and dreaming of what ifs.

  “Too bad they were completely eaten and subsumed by the Harx. They must have been something to behold before their fall,” Helos could sense from Auberje’s words the despair. They both contemplated the last moments of the creators of the Mark II.

  The Harx were terrifying. Riley was right to be worried and anxious. Existential threat, check. Potentially dangerous, untrustworthy, magical ally, check. Sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, check. This was going to be a lot of fun.