No one can hear you thri.., p.33
No One Can Hear You Thrive, page 33
"Anyway," Hunt said, as she went back to her own research. "Seems like he's living in the officers' quarters."
"Yea, I figured," I said.
"Where are you getting all this information from?" Kenya asked.
"Oh, uh... Well, his social media account. He's on Alliance Net. His placement was open. Plus, there are a few public sites for information from the fleet, which is where I got his pic from. And the pic of the other two demons. I found them listed in his friends list. Anyway, I'm going through pictures that he's been flagged in, and a few of them are of him in the officers' quarters. But none of them have him going into his room, and he doesn't post anything himself."
"Of course not," Porter said. "That would be too convenient."
My implant let out a little beep, as the first set of results from the automated search came up. It would continue to search for another couple of diddies, every once in a while spitting out another set. I glanced down at the list of postings, mostly from forums and a couple conspiracy sites. I recognized one of the sites from last time, but none of the items on the list showed any promise. Just a post about a high school teacher ten years ago trying to pull something similar. He just happened to have the same last name. I did a little more snooping on it, only to find that the man's name had been Tom. Either he had gone under an alias before, or it was a completely different person. No one would ever choose Gop as an alias. Once I was sure none of it would help, I cleared out that set of results.
"If we're going to be here a while, maybe I should go get some snacks," Kenya said. "I feel like I'm the only one here that's not helping with anything."
"What do you mean?" Porter asked. "Your wife isn't helping either."
"She brought the original conspiracy to our attention," Hunt said. "And we're helping her."
"Dor can manage just fine on her own," Kenya said. "I'm sure she's gotten plenty of information already."
"Not really," I admitted. "Nothing that pans out anyway. But like I said. It's still early."
"To think, we're literally going to spend all weekend in the library and not do any studying," Hunt said. "Seems like such a waste."
"I don't know," Porter said. "It's really coming down right now. Down here seems as good a place as any to hide out the storm."
"Ah ha," Brit called out again.
"So, snacks?" Kenya asked.
"No, seriously," Brit said. "I think I'm in."
Chapter Forty-Eight
The Testing System
"You're in what exactly?" I asked. I still wasn't sure what it was that we were trying to break into. My initial thought was that it was some kind of testing database, but that was the best guess that I had from the link to the app.
"It's the instructors' database," Brit said.
She moved back over a seat, coming back to the rest of the group. Instead of moving the device, she just slid the display back over to the center of the table, letting us all see it there. I leaned forward in my seat, trying to see it better, even though I was seeing it sideways. Porter and Kenya were both seeing it upside down.
"It's the system they use to make the tests themselves, distribute it to the students, and record the results."
"Can you pull up the questions from next week's test?" Hunt asked. We all stared over at her in silence. I wasn't sure if she was being serious or if that was another bad joke. "What? I don't want to fail again."
"Actually, no, I can't," Brit said. "I've... I've already tried."
"Yea, and you're all stunned that I'd ask," Hunt muttered.
"Well, yea. I was ashamed enough not to bring it up. Anyway, it looks like the old tests are in here."
She pointed towards the display, where a list of tests was shown. Each test had its own link, though the list showed the unit, week, and timestamp of the tests themselves. I did notice that Unit 1, Week 2 was listed several times along the list, all with different timestamps. It seemed to me like those were exactly the tests we'd want to see for next Friday.
Instead, Brit clicked on Unit 1, Week 1. The test that we had taken the morning before. Instead of a single test sheet, a huge list of questions popped up. The scroll at the bottom of the display showed that there were two hundred twenty-six questions listed there. As I scanned through the questions on the first page, they all seemed easy enough. I even spotted several that I remembered from my own test the day before.
"What's this?" Porter asked, pointing towards the display. "Up in the corner?"
"It says E-1," Brit said, shrugging.
"Yea, I can read upside down just fine. What does it mean?"
"They're all marked E-1," I said, pointing to them. I tapped on the next button on the bottom of the page, bringing up the next set of questions. These too looked familiar, though after the first few questions, they were all marked E-2.
"Maybe it's the difficulty of the questions?" Kenya asked.
"They are rather easy," Hunt said, nodding her agreement.
Brit tapped on the page button a few times. The list scrolled through three levels of easy problems before moving on to medium. After medium, we got to hard, with still several dozens of questions left to go. Even figuring that the open-ended questions were at the end, it begged the question just how many levels there were.
"Hey, Hunt, pull your test out again," I said. "Let's see if we can find some of them in there."
"None of these look familiar," Hunt said. But she pulled her own display back over next to the one from Ensign Rodriguez's device. She loaded the copy of the test that she had gotten, placing the questions right up next to the list, even scaling them the same way so that they would align.
"You're right," Kenya said, as she quickly scanned through them. I knew that she wasn't actually looking at the questions themselves. Rather the pattern they would have made on the page.
"Keep scrolling," I said. "Maybe we'll find them near the end."
"Probably," Hunt said.
Eventually, the hard questions gave way to an S section, which I figured was super hard or superior or something. But even these didn't match any of them either. They gave way to C, which I assumed was challenging. It wasn't until three pages after them that we got to I. The test lined up next to the list matched exactly, question for question.
"What's I?" Brit asked. "Or is that an el?"
"Impossible," I said. I couldn't help but laugh a little at just how obvious they had been about the whole thing.
"That's it, right?" Kenya asked. "That's the proof that we needed. They gave her all impossible questions. Like literal impossible questions."
"It's almost laughable in the blatancy of it," Hunt said. "And yet, I managed to get a ninety percent on the multiple choice questions. Is there a set after impossible?"
"What could be harder than impossible?" Brit asked, but she continued onwards. "No, that's it."
The multiple choice questions broke into a similar arrangement of the short answer questions. There were more of these than the multiple choice questions, though, as each test would only have one of them. With the multiple choice questions, they could mix them up so that no two people would be sitting next to each other with the same questions. At least, assuming that they weren't just given all the impossible questions.
Brit continued to scroll through them, looking for the question that Hunt had been given. She scrolled all the way through to the end of the section, through dozens of questions for each of the difficulty levels. Not a single one looked like a match to the one that Hunt had been given.
"Now that seems like the proof we need," I said, pointing at the end of the list. Point at the gap after the last question was listed, where Hunt's question should have been. "The instructor must have just put it on your exam without caring if it was possible to be answered correctly by anyone given the right material. Did you ever find the answer in the handbook?"
"No," Hunt said, shaking her head. "But I did find it on the public access site for the fleet. Porter and I found the site yesterday while you guys were enjoying your time off the base. The information was available to us, but not in a way that any of us would think to memorize it. I mean, they're all in there. Even those ships whose missions would be classified. If any of the names are classified, they're just redacted on the page itself. In fact, the COB and CO of the Hillary are both redacted right now."
"Except I met with the CO of the Hillary when I was on it," I said. But then I remembered that Captain Venkman might not be the CO anymore. As that was clearly not information that should be spread, I didn't mention that to my friends.
"Anyway, I say we just bring this stuff to the commander of the base," Kenya said. She pointed at both of the displays, side by side. The evidence of the conspiracy. "Think you can get another appointment with her?"
"I don't know," Hunt said, shrugging. "Maybe not after failing the exam and having met with her on Wednesday. Maybe one of you guys should request it? Dor maybe?"
"Sure, I guess," I said, surprised that she called me by my first name. Kenya had said it often enough over the weeks that we had been hanging out together, though I still didn't know Hunt's first name. "Not sure if she'd be in her office today, though. Weekends and all that. Try pulling it up on your site."
"Uh, guys, not to rain on your parade," Porter said. Just as he said that, a loud crack of thunder managed to make its way through the sound dampening of the building. It sounded more like the muffled grumbling of a stomach, but I was certain that it was coming from outside. "We can't bring any of this to the commander."
"What?" I asked. "Why not? This proves everything."
"Well, first off, no it doesn't. It proves that there was a question on a test that shouldn't have been there. It doesn't prove a conspiracy. Even the fact that all of the questions on her exam were in the I section. That's just a really unlucky roll of the die. One bad test doesn't make a conspiracy. We'd need to show that people who passed the test only did so because they got easy questions. And that members of certain factions are being targeted over others. All that showing these displays to anyone would show is that Dor managed to steal a smart device off of a teacher and Brit managed to hack into their system. Both crimes punishable by expulsion from the fleet."
"He's right," Hunt said. "We need more than this. And we need it from something that we could have gotten access to on our own."
"But you did," I said, pointing towards the test. "You got this by asking Ensign Rodriguez. And he gave it to you willingly. You didn't extort him or promise sexual favors or anything, right?"
Porter's eyes flicked over at Hunt, immediately interested in the answer. However, before I could say anything, or Hunt could notice, he glanced back at the displays in front of him. Squaring his face and putting on an air of neutrality. I just smiled at him, glancing over at Kenya to share a knowing look. She was smiling back at me, similarly having noticed it.
"No, of course not," Hunt said. "I asked. I mentioned that we were both hulandans, though he would have known that already. It might have been faction over fleet a little, but still. I don't think I'll get in trouble from having it."
"Then that's the new Plan A," I said. In all this time of just blundering around, trying to get something on the conspiracy, there hadn't been any time to overanalyze the paths we could take to overthrow it. "You schedule something with the base commander and just show her this. Tell her you looked through the handbook twice and the answer wasn't in there."
"I looked through it five times," Hunt corrected. "But what would that do?"
"At worst, nothing," I said. "But it's a start. It'll get the ball rolling. Don't complain about how hard the test was, especially since you only missed five of the questions. If you had gotten a reasonable open-ended answer question, you could have gotten that too."
"Damn right," she said.
"Hell, I managed to pass all my tests at A-school, despite similarly difficult tests. But none of them had questions that went too far beyond what was available to me. And I was expecting them to be super hard."
"Sounds like the variable difficulty tests actually worked the way they were intended for you," Porter said. I just shrugged in response.
"So, that's it?" Hunt asked. "I show it to the commander?"
"Don't whine. Don't complain. Don't even ask for a retest. Just ask if this would have been a valid question, because you think a mistake was made. That's all. Got it?"
Hunt just nodded, but everyone was looking at me with questioning looks. None of them seemed to think that was enough to do anything. I couldn't quite disagree with them. But it was the first step. The easiest step. And it wouldn't get any of us in trouble in the process.
"If she takes you seriously, and does the right thing, she'll take your copy of the exam and compare it to this database. She'll see that the question isn't in there and then take it to the instructor... Wait, which one was your instructor?" I asked. I looked towards the corner of the desk, where Kenya's copy of the pictures of the two dead demons were still displayed. While I had been seeing them around the base all the time, I never saw either of them in any of the classes.
"Oh, she's not one of those," Hunt said, pointing towards the pics. "But she's obviously a demon if she gave me these questions. Conspiracy or not, those questions were torture."
"So, what's Plan B?" Brit asked.
"Plan B is we get dirt on this Harding guy. Or one of the instructors that we know is in on it. Add your instructor to the list. And if Brit's people can get back to us, hopefully they'll have more. There have to be dozens of instructors here right now, any number of whom could be in on it."
"Three instructors per class," Kenya said, ticking them off on her finger. "One class per week for a year. That's one hundred fifty instructors, give or take. I know a few weeks will be off for holidays and graduation."
"Are you sure there are only eight in on it?" I asked, looking over at Brit.
"Nope," she said, shaking her head.
"I don't think there are that many instructors," Hunt said. "From what I could tell, the increase in people being accepted to the academy only went up about four months ago. About the time that we started basic training. Before that, I think it was just one class per week."
"So, seventy or so," Kenya said, doing the math in her head. Where math is done, according to her.
"And three of them are hulandan," I said. "With the politics around your faction, those instructors are going to be pulled on Monday. At least, that's what Harding seemed to think. If they're in a position to insert more demons into the faculty, that tips the weight in their favor."
"But it also makes it harder to keep under wraps," Brit said. "The more people that are in on a conspiracy, the shorter it takes for it to be exposed."
"What about the mages and the pure bloods?" Kenya asked. "They can't be in on it themselves, and there's nothing that's going to pull them en masse from the faculty."
"You're right. But remember what Harding said last night? He seemed to have a plan for the base commander as well. How much you want to bet that that plan would include more instructors as well?"
"Do we even know that she's not a part of it?" Brit asked.
"That wasn't the impression that I got from Harding," I said. "But the great part about Plan A is that it doesn't matter. We're not revealing anything that would get us in trouble. Just that we had this copy of the exam. Can we look at some of those older exams? Do they have the same questions?"
"And if they do, can we pull up this week's version of the Unit 1, Week 2 exam?" Hunt asked.
When we, once again, looked towards her in incredulity, she started to laugh it off like it was a joke. The laugh died instantly when we heard something coming from the hallway. Silence instantly filled the room as we all looked over to the door. The handle rattled in place, though the door held. The chair in front of it kept it in place.
"Occupied," I called through the door. The only indication that I had that the walls weren't completely soundproof were the sounds of thunder that had reached us earlier.
But instead of the person going away, leaving us alone, the handle continued to rattle. They started banging on the door, trying to break into the room.
What disturbed me the most, though, was that the door was starting to give way. It shuddered noticeably in its frame. The edges of the wood bent inwards at the blows. And the third bash started sending splinters towards us as the wood started to break apart.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Cornered
"I know you're in there, little girls." The voice from the hallway came through the cracks as they broke in the door. It was low, guttural, but booming. It echoed around the small room and seemed to stab my heart through my chest. There was only one thing known to the alliance that had a voice like that.
"It's a pure blooded demon," I said.
"In full hellian form," Kenya agreed.
The door bounced two more times before a large chunk of it flew free. The entire corner of the door blew into the room, almost taking my head off in the process. It indented itself in the far wall. When I looked at it, practically resonating there, I could almost see into the next room over. The light from over there filtered through the cracks around the edges of the splintered wood.
"I see you in there, little girls," the voice said.
I looked back at the door, at the hole that had formed there. The eye stared through it with a black darkness all its own. The flesh around it was a fiery red, calling to mind the fires of Hell itself. Not only was it a hellian, but it was a wrath demon. The strongest of hell's warriors. The champions of the wars they once sung about. We didn't stand a chance against it.
"Hey," someone called out in the hallway. The eye disappeared momentarily, as the demon responded to whoever had called its attention away from us. I did not envy that idiot.
"We need to get out of here," I said. My eyes flicked around the room. I was trying to find some escape, some other exit, where I knew there was none.
"The wall," Hunt said, pointing towards where the shard from the door was. I wasn't sure what she was talking about. My mind was too busy screaming to think much of anything beyond that.
