Lunara: Robin Acadia and the Martians

By Wyatt Davenport

In book six of the series, two hundred years after the MSA were defeated, discrimination is still rampant on Mars.

Earthling Robin Acadia has never been fully accepted into Martian society. She's been living with the prejudices since her Martian father's death as a child, but she never imagined Martian One would push Mars towards complete segregation from their Earth brethren.

With Mars and Earth's tensions growing, she finds help from famous billionaire Kirkon Tibor, who has made tremendous scientific discoveries over the last twenty years, but none greater than his next discovery. To right the wrongs against them, their mission pushes them to find the secrets left behind by Chloe Jones and her mysterious legacy.

But quickly, the greediness of the Martian leadership ruins their plans and they have no choice but to bring in help they never expected to need.

Lunara Series Books:

Seth and Chloe
Gwen and Eamonn
Parker and the Protector
Alexandria I
Alexandria II
Robin Acadia and the Martians

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyatt Davenport
• Release date: Aug 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301713837

Wyatt Davenport

Wyatt Davenport was born in 1977 in Kingston, Ontario, and grew up in London, Ontario, and Atlanta, Georgia. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife Colleen and their two Siberian Huskies. An avid fan of science fiction and fantasy, Wyatt is inspired by authors like Timothy Zahn, Michael Crichton, Robert Aspirin, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Book preview

Prologue

Parker McCloud held the CommUn to his mouth. For the moment, he’s in paradise.

That was the last thing Seth heard before Chloe took over his mind.

The horror and grief overwhelming Seth only moments before were erased in an instant, replaced by an all-consuming rapture. Every thought he’d ever had of a happy life with Chloe seemed to be true in this moment, even if he knew it wasn’t real. Chloe’s vision guided him through a life he’d always wanted. Alexandria was playing with her toys in front of a fireplace, he was in a cabin stocked with wood furniture, and when he looked out the window, a lake stretched for miles. Trees lined the perimeter.

He was on Earth, where they had always wanted to be.

Chloe, he said, what happened?

She didn’t answer him. He looked around for her. Though he couldn’t see her, her presence was tangible. He moved to the kitchen door, but stopped short of it.

Father, Alexandria said, can we go on the lake today?

Yes, he found himself saying, after our chores. He didn’t know what the chores were, but he felt an urge to do them. What do I have to do? No matter; he’d spend the day with Alexandria and Chloe.

I’ll go make my bed, and then we’ll go. A young Alexandria ran into her bedroom.

The scene flashed again.

This time Alexandria was older, in her teens. She stood before him with a flower in her hair.

Daddy, she said with a huge grin, I passed my piloting test. I can fly to school myself now. Beaming, she held up the datacard with her license on it.

Seth took it. You were able to do the high-winds landing?

Of course, she replied. I always pass that. Where’s Mom? I want to show her.

She’s…she’s…I don’t know, Seth said, but he felt Chloe was near. She’s up in the bedroom, maybe.

The scene flashed again.

This time Alexandria was a young woman at the top of the stairs. Her hair was strung with ribbons, and her dress was silky white. She was getting married.

Stop it, Seth said. I know what you’re doing, Chloe.

She isn’t doing anything you don’t want, Daddy, Alexandria said. She’s showing you what you have to look forward to if you care for me.

Stop shifting, Seth said. What does she want? What’s Alexandria’s destiny?

Alexandria slowly descended the stairs. You figured it out, didn’t you?

I think so, he replied. I know that taking care of Alexandria is important to your…her wishes. It’s about Earth, isn’t it?

Yes, Alexandria said. I’m going to help you on Earth, and then you’ll be ready to find out what happened to Mother and save humanity.

Chloe said the future isn’t set, he said. How can I trust her prophetic wishes?

You’re too smart for your own good, Father, Alexandria replied. "Yes, you’ll attempt to save humanity, and you might fail. There’s a familiar person and a stranger in the SDG who’ll help you. They’ll bring your abilities to full potential and provide you with the means to save our solar system."

The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, or SDG, was a small spiral of stars that formed a dwarf galaxy on the relative bottom of the Milky Way.

When will I know they’re here? Seth asked.

I’ll provide you with longevity so you can be patient. Their life will be obvious to you, and you’ll know who they are. Both of them will touch your mind like I will…like Mother did.

Seth shook his head, confused and excited. Do you have to be so vague?

Mother guides with vagueness, so you’ll focus on raising me and not obsess about fulfilling the mission. I’m the most important concern for you. Be patient. They’ll come to you.

Chloe, can’t you come back to guide me?

Chloe’s dead, Alexandria said. I’m your family now.

The rapture of Chloe’s final gift took hold again. He didn’t know how long it would last, but he hoped for an eternity.

More than two hundred years later…

Chapter 1

All eyes are on you today, Kirkon, Amanda Tibor said from her comm station.

Kirkon Tibor forced a smile. And failure would allow everyone to see my backside.

As his sister continued to read off the preflight statistics, a dignified trio of observers stood impatiently waiting for his show to start. All were fixated on the probe hovering two thousand kilometers ahead of them. It filled much of the zoomed viewscreen. Stars glowed around it, and the bluish-white halo of Uranus hovered coin-sized to the port side. Within the next minute or so, the observers would know if he was a failure or not.

One of the observers, Admiral Derek Poole, a thickset man with a short crew cut, had the biggest foot on the project—and on Kirkon’s neck. He was a straight military man, and on more than one occasion had threatened the existence of the Quantum Hyperspace Project. His partners were Vice Admiral of the Outer Planets Laura Reed, who would do anything to impress Admiral Poole, and Martian representative Yolanda Swankland, who seemed to be the practical sort—probably because she wasn’t military.

Kirkon Tibor tried—with little success—to ignore them, as this was the single defining moment of his career and his corporation’s existence. His family’s company, Space Propulsion Inc., had developed, thanks to his genius, the first working hyperspace drive in history. It was a simple matter of using electromagnetic rings to open the fifth through eleventh dimension in the fabric of space, whereby any ship, size independent, could slip through and appear anywhere in the universe in a matter of moments.

And a moment to him was about a day in Earth time. He thought in terms of speed of light, and going seventy thousand light years in a matter of a day was a moment. To Admiral Poole, it was an acceptable amount of time.

Kirkon thought they should be more grateful. Thanks to him, it took a yacht only one hour to get from Earth to Mars and six hours from Mars to Jupiter. Not that the admiral would ever acknowledge his accomplishments. For whatever reason, the admiral had it in for him, and Kirkon decided it was best to never allow the admiral the opportunity to criticize him.

Dark energy field accelerating, Amanda said. Gravitophotons pairing. Ring is almost at full acceleration.

Excellent, he muttered. He stared out at the probe as it began to shine with a sort of soft white glow that wasn’t unpleasant to the eyes and didn’t make him want to look away. It was expected and soothing. How long until we reach the free float of subspace?

By your calculations, forty seconds, she replied.

My calculations and my reputation. Forty seconds until vindication.

The ship began to shake, and he knew it was the antigravity playing tricks on the compensators, as they were close enough to the probe and to Uranus to cause them to be active.

An alert claxon roared, startling him, but one of the bridge hands quickly suppressed it. Sweat pooled under his shirt, making the whole affair more uncomfortable. Unconsciously, he shifted his weight. The musky smell of the bridge was starting to get to him, and since the bridge didn’t normally accommodate so many visitors, the air had become stale. He was noticing every little annoyance now. He really was nervous.

Perhaps seeing him wane, Amanda looked back at him with a confident smile. Their eyes locked, and he knew what she was thinking. You’re a genius. Those were her usual words when he impressed her, and without a doubt, after four years of research, she knew their efforts were about to come to fruition. Everything was progressing perfectly.

She gave him a quick thumbs-up.

Amanda Tibor was his sister, and they were the great-great-great-grandchildren of famous Lunaran Atalo Groves. Since their parents’ deaths twenty years ago, she’d been the chief programmer for his experiments in the field of propulsion. She was also the vice president of the company, and his lieutenant. She was there when the quickdrives were upped by fifty percent; she was there when quickdrives turned into shockdrives; and now she was sitting beside him for the unveiling of his quantumdrive system.

In a crude, patronizing sort of way, she was his good luck charm.

But she was also there when his wife and daughter had all but perished in a shuttle accident. She’d investigated the incident and concluded that faulty wiring from Copper Dynamics was to blame. Suffice it to say, he had canceled all contracts with them. Fifteen years ago and counting, Amanda had been his closest, and perhaps his only, confidante.

Are we far enough away? Admiral Poole shouted at him.

Kirkon ignored him. He wasn’t about to let Admiral Poole seed him with any doubt. He had placed markers every one hundred kilometers out to a million kilometers from the foci of the probe. He wasn’t worried, and if the admiral was uncomfortable, he should’ve shuttled out with the rest of the nonessential crew.

Instead of acknowledging Poole, Kirkon nodded to Amanda, and she nodded back. Then he turned to view the spectacle. This was their moment. Everything was set. He only had to watch his triumph or failure now.

A single pinpoint flashed like a pale emerald against the stars around it.

Then, in a moment’s flash, pops sounded, and the sudden darkness on the bridge elicited a chorus of screams and wails. Kirkon stood still in stunned disbelief, but realized an instant later that it was most likely the electromagnetic pulse that had knocked out power to the ship. He had expected it…but not this far out.

What else is wrong? he muttered.

Don’t give up yet, Amanda said.

With flickering effort, the emergency lights dimly lit the bridge. Admiral Poole stared acidly at him, and all Kirkon could think to do was to shrug his shoulders. The rest of the bridge scrambled to figure out how to restore power to the ship. The soft touch of Amanda’s hand pressed against his forearm. He turned to her.

I had the foresight to power down my portable before the jump, she said, opening the screen to the minicomputer. It wasn’t affected.

Excellent, he replied. What’s the report?

I’m getting readings from the markers that are thirty thousand kilometers out and beyond.

Good, he said. What about the probe?

"Atlantis I. Nothing yet. But I don’t have the software on this portable to track its movements to the SDG."

The SDG was seventy thousand light years from the sun and the source of the meteor cluster from Earth’s past. For that reason, it had been the focus of his attention when he decided he had enough information and gall to test his theory for the quantum drive or hyperdrive.

The meteor cluster was a phenomenon that had caused humanity’s exodus from Earth to Mars. For whatever unknown reason, every meteor in the cluster was destined for Earth, which made it unique, strange, and predictable. The predictability had been the driving force of Lunara. The death of the cluster, which was the single source of metalor in the solar system, had driven the cost of his hyperdrive into the billions. Ships had been remolded with nonmetalor parts, and colonies were razed to recycle the precious element. Metalor had special traits that were still a mystery, and those mysteries and traits made it the most prized resource known to man and the driving force behind his hyperdrive system.

The mystery of metalor stirred his curiosity to no end. The SDG was the only place he was interested in going. He wanted to discover its answers and those of Chloe Jones. He had been obsessed with Chloe Jones since he was a child, and he became even more so when his wife and daughter, now in a comatose state, almost died on one of his new ships. In the few letters to Sarah Cortez that were recovered from the archives of the Great War, Chloe Jones had expressed an intense kinship with a few star systems in the SDG and the meteor cluster.

His goal was to get there to heal his wife and daughter.

Sir, the computer is rebooting, he heard a deck hand say to Admiral Poole. We’ll have energy core recovery in ten minutes.

Ten minutes until he learned his fate.

In the end, it took Kirkon Tibor one full day to find the probe, as he wasn’t able to track it the way he had thought he could through the fifth to eleventh dimensions. It was exactly where he had predicted it to be—ten million kilometers from the star Alpha One in a star system on the closest edge of the SDG. His experiment was a success, and even Admiral Poole had garnered enough gumption to give him a handshake—albeit a quick one.

For Kirkon, it was a step closer to a manned mission to the galaxy—an adventure he had sought since his completion of college at the age of ten, through the assignment within the R&D Center on Mars at twelve, through the joining of his father at Space Propulsion Inc. Every class, every assignment, and joining the company had been about getting to the SDG and Chloe Jones’s secret.

Data streamed into his console. So far, he had plotted four planets—all simple gas giants like Saturn—and several more planets were on the other side of its sun. The metallicity of the star indicated that the planets on the other side could be rich with resources, but with the probe being retrofitted with the large hyperdrive, the sensor equipment was no better than on a light fighter.

Kirkon, Amanda said from behind him. We should send the signal for the probe to return. I want to be sure of the energy levels.

He started. Kirkon didn’t want the probe to come back. He wanted more data. He wanted to find metalor or a civilization that had sent them the cluster…but she was right. There wasn’t going to be a discovery in the first test. It would come in time.

Kirkon swallowed hard. I agree, he said. Call it back and have it come to the same location.

I’ve already made the calculations. She smirked.

Through the stress, he allowed himself to smile back. He stood and made his way across the bridge to where Admiral Poole was speaking with one of his subordinates. It appeared to be an idle conversation.

Admiral Poole, he interrupted, we’ve started the sequence to retrieve the probe. It’ll be here tomorrow at this time.

Understood.

Mr. Tibor, Vice Admiral Reed said, there was a theory about tracing within subspace that return trips would take only a fraction of the time.

Vice Admiral, he said. Jinx, he hated formalities and designations. He knew what she was talking about, and it had to do with the dimensional shift that occurred during subspace and the ability of the navigational systems to replay the jump in reverse to cut down on the travel time. It was akin to leaving bread crumbs in a forest to track your return home. But on a first test, there were too many bugs in the system to eat up the crumbs. Path tracing is only a theory thus far.

So was your hyperdrive only a day ago, Representative Swankland interjected. I read the classified reports, and this was built into the probe, was it not?

Prudent and thorough, the traits of a Martian. Many thought having these traits was born out of the diligence placed on surviving in the harsh atmosphere of the red planet. He disagreed and thought it came from the raw nature of Martian history: prudent to cover all political matters and thorough enough not to forget how the people would react to every detail. All matters were covered.

It was, he admitted. But it wasn’t scheduled to be used on this test, which was also in the report. On purpose, Vice Admiral Reed had brought up the Path Tracing to raise doubt in the minds of the other observers, namely Representative Swankland. He had no doubt of her role as skeptic in addition to faithful servant to Admiral Poole. They wanted him to fail so they could commandeer the project for their profit.

So it isn’t a theory, Reed said, pretty much on cue with his thought.

The jab annoyed him. It was still a theory, and Amanda and he had added it as an afterthought—almost to impress the admiral that significant progress was being made. The programming was barely tested.

As per the mission objectives, we want a complete test of the navigation systems on this run, he said, confident this would subdue her. We’ll test the path tracing another time.

Do you have doubts it will work?

None.

He caught Representative Swankland’s eye. She was perhaps the person he had to impress the most. She would report back to the Martian Assembly. There would be a lot of weight behind her words to the safety commission, too. The electromagnetic pulse could be an area of concern as it reached farther than he had thought it would and could hamper the practicality of the drive system. After all, shipping costs could rise with such timely efforts to travel to one’s jump point.

So why not test it on this run? You’ve already proved the navigation systems work.

It isn’t that, he said. It’s about the communication across stellar distances.

I would like a demonstration of the jump back, Admiral Poole said. Test Path Tracing so we can have complete data for the speaker.

The speaker agreed to my mission parameters—

Kirkon! Amanda shouted from across the bridge.

He turned immediately and saw her waving her hand for him to come. Gladly, he obliged. Anything to get away from having to answer the path tracing question. He hurried over to the other side of the bridge.

Kirkon, Amanda whispered, urgency showing in her eyes. The probe is gone. I can’t find it.

You mean you already sent it into subspace? We can’t communicate in subspace.

That’s just the thing. I didn’t do anything yet. I was still inputting the commands.

Keep looking.

Is there a problem, Tibor? Admiral Poole called.

I don’t think so, he replied, with a heavy throat. We’re inputting the command sequence, and Miss Tibor needed the security code.

He had lied to the admiral. Even though his experiment was a success, it could turn into a huge failure if they couldn’t return safely from the other side of a jump. He had to hope the probe would return.

He turned back to Amanda.

Why did you say that? she whispered.

Never mind. Find the damn thing.

I can’t. It either jumped itself or it exploded.

Exploded. It can’t jump itself. You know that. You programmed it to signal a jump to Alliance Command. He glanced over at the command messages. They’ve received nothing.

I know, I know, she said, as her hands played the console like a piano. It was of little use, though. The probe was lost, and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. Not at these distances.

What was the last reading from the probe?

I checked, and it doesn’t make sense, she replied. A gravity spike came—

He cut her off. He knew what it was from the random numbers scrolling across the screen. Move this information to my private drive, and then erase until a point where nothing appears to be wrong, he said. He couldn’t have this anomaly on the record. It would delay the entire project by five years at the minimum.

We might get caught, she said.

Since when do you worry? Do it, Amanda. He heard footsteps come up behind him and turned to find Admiral Poole standing there. He positioned himself between the admiral and Amanda’s screen.

Something the matter? the admiral asked.

Actually, we lost the probe, Kirkon answered. He didn’t want to admit it, but there wasn’t much choice. He couldn’t make the probe reappear on their end again, so he would have to spin a story that would make it appear that it was neither his fault nor the theory’s fault, and that it wasn’t mission critical for a future mission.

Lost it! the admiral exclaimed. He went rigid.

This caught Representative Swankland’s ear from across the bridge. Her face soured.

Kirkon winced. It isn’t a problem with the probe. His mind was crawling around his skull, searching for something that couldn’t possibly be his fault. Bingo! Do you remember how Alliance Command wouldn’t give me the midgraded fission reactor?

I vaguely recall, the admiral muttered.

Kirkon knew that the admiral remembered it with perfect clarity. It had been a sticking point that he had lost and the admiral had won. Or so the admiral had thought. He would have to spin this story to show that the admiral had been at fault. It was a two-fold victory, if he could pull it off.

Well, as I argued, the mission took three hundred more percent than we had figured. I’ll go over the data to figure out why. Actually, Kirkon planned to distort the data to make it appear so.

And what does that mean? The admiral crossed his arms.

It means, Kirkon said, with a purposeful bite, that the probe ran out of power on the startup sequence, and it’s drifting in the SDG. He hoped his anger didn’t sound contrived.

Let me see, the admiral said. He pushed past him toward Amanda.

Kirkon bit his lower lip. He had forgotten the admiral’s expertise—at least, according to the military—was fission reactors. It was the reason he was assigned to the project in the first place.

As you can see, Amanda said, the power levels bottomed when I started the command sequence.

Where?

She waved her finger across the screen. There. There. And there.

Admiral Poole stared at the screen for a long moment, then turned toward Kirkon and looked him square in the eyes. My report to Alliance Command will be ready by the time we return to Mars.

Admiral Poole had lost. Kirkon smiled from within.

So we’re leaving? Kirkon said. Not that he wanted to stay and have the admiral breathing over his shoulder, going over the data. He said it to play the part of an eager scientist, when in actuality, he had other priorities—namely, getting the data, manipulating it, and getting Swankland to approve the manned mission.

The admiral replied with a grunt and walked away.

When the admiral was out of earshot, Amanda whispered into Kirkon’s ear, Why did you make me do that? It’s not like you to lie.

No, it’s more like you. As usual, you did fine, he said. We can’t have Mars seeing a problem with the project. Our share price would be cut in half, and they’d take the tech away from us. If we hold the data to a point, the next stage will be imminent.

I don’t like it. Mars has its ways of finding out.

You’ll thank me when we’re preparing to depart for SDG within the year, and our share price doubles.

Her eyes widened. Another galaxy within the year?

I wouldn’t have it any other way, he replied.

Chapter 2

Robin Acadia opened her eyes, slowly and with great pain.

The doorbell rang in the darkness—an annoying and loud ring. She stumbled to find the switch to the overhead lights and turned them on. The light shone brighter than she expected, and she closed her eyes immediately, causing her next step to become a pitfall. Her ankle twisted as she stepped on a bottle and sent it against the wall. Her curses drowned out its ping.

Her apartment in the Martian colony of Zephyria was its usual mess, except this time it was littered with wine and beer bottles and not its accustomed clothing and food wrappers.

What happened last night?

Susan Flowers, she muttered. Another ill-advised weekday party that ended with a workday hangover. Susan had just returned from a deep space haul. As usual, Robin and Susan celebrated by giving long parties and by chasing many men. Ugh. That tall blond guy. He left in a hurry. It was a ritual she was tiring of, but Susan seemed to enjoy it, and she couldn’t blame her. Susan had been boxed into a freighter for the last three months with the same people.

Robin’s best friend had always been an abrasive influence on her. Robin had little in the way of friends, and Susan provided what her mother called variety and spice. Plus, Susan saw past Robin’s one fatal flaw. Robin had come from separated parents: her father from Mars and her mother from Earth. This wouldn’t have been so bad had her father not died when she was four, and her mother insisted they stay on Mars. For someone not well-off to begin with, two earthlings on Mars meant a problem.

The Treaty of Lunara, signed fifty years ago, was explicit in its wording about earthlings who lived among Martians. All citizens of Mars, which native earthlings weren’t, were guaranteed employment, fresh food, and shelter. For native earthlings, there would be no government support. Recent tensions between Earth and Mars had left the planets on the brink of hostilities. She didn’t know where she would land if the two sides ended up in combat, but with so much at stake, she doubted that it would ever happen.

The ring sounded again. Is that Susan? No, not this early.

Robin wore a loose nightshirt. With a kick, she pulled on her pants to hide her legs and staggered as the dizziness of last night’s drunkenness still remained. She opened the door with closed eyes. Hello?

Miss Acadia? the boy said.

She opened her eyes to the hazy image of a teenager—all of fifteen at most.

I’m from Cargo Corp Courier. This document is for you.

What is this? She searched her mind for answers.

Slowly, her haze lifted enough for her to reach for the package. Her electronic thumbprint rippled across the document’s cover into the chiming CommUn of the courier. Her identity was confirmed.

The courier left without so much as a Good day or a Happy Victory Day. She looked over at her kitchen. The time read 6:91 Mars Solar Time (MST), and the date was indeed Victory Day. Not that anyone celebrated the holiday anymore. Much of the MSA doctrine and technology had been implemented into Martian society over the last two hundred years. Everything that had been fought over during the Great War had been almost for naught. A society that had preached for unity had become capitalistic and totalitarian, wrapped into one unanimous government known as the Central Alliance. The direction of her government worried her. It was moving away from her principles and rejecting her heritage.

She groaned as she saw the sun peek over the Martian horizon. Across the landscape, the reds were painted a shade darker. Shadows cast in the craters hid the greens of algae pits. At this time every day, there was an hour window where Mars was in its original reddish form, and she cherished this moment.

As she enjoyed the view, her mind drifted. The vision of the girl from her dreams floated before her. The girl was thirteen or fourteen years old, and she’d haunted Robin’s dreams almost every night for the last few years. Robin thought it was her as a child, but with each passing dream, she was more and more convinced it was someone from her schooldays she couldn’t remember. She figured she’d never understand why she couldn’t escape this girl, but her psyche was obsessed.

Her alarm buzzed. She had less than thirty minutes to get to work, and her mind would take three times that long to clear. She headed to the bathroom. On her way, unconcerned by it, she threw the document on the table. It was probably another letter from her mother.

She stripped off her clothes and caught her image in the mirror. Though her green eyes were puffy from the previous night, her jet-black hair remained relatively straight. With a turn, she checked out how Susan’s karate lessons had toned her body. She had never cared much for her pear-shaped waist because it made her entirely non-Martian. But she had been gifted with ample breasts, which many of the taller, sleeker Martian women envied. A part of her thought that if she could share them with the women of Mars, she might be a bit more accepted into society. Instead, jealousy mixed with prejudice to keep her on the outside.

She knew that part of being a woman was criticizing oneself and constantly trying to improve one’s physical faults, but this morning, seeing her face so droopy was entirely too sobering. Partying wasn’t a solution to retaining beauty, especially up against Martian women.

Martians and earthlings were slightly different in overall averages. Martians tended to be taller, skinnier, and more intelligent. Earthlings were shorter and pudgier, with a larger portion of them being workers instead of academics. It was a product of almost four hundred years of a split society.

Robin showered and cleaned her teeth for the long, head-pounding day ahead.

She had a busy day planned. Surreptitiously, she had finished a review of the SDG. The Martian Astrological Society hadn’t sanctioned it, but she didn’t really care. It was what she wanted to do. She had become an astronomer because of the meteor cluster that had been directed at Earth, and she was a believer in Chloe Jones and her abilities.

The ringing of her CommUn broke the silence of the room.

Who is it? she said. A familiar face appeared on the screen. Mom, I got your package.

I didn’t send a package, her mother said.

Robin’s eyes widened. You didn’t?

I was calling to see if you were awake.

Why? Robin asked.

You need to show up to work, her mother replied. It isn’t good to be unprofessional, and at such a young age, it’ll follow you.

I’m twenty-seven, and I can handle Professor Roberts. I have for six years.

Still, you don’t want another reprimand.

I like the pretty reds in my personnel report. I’m going for a Martian landscape across the top of the page.

At this rate, you’ll have it. You know those personnel files are public domain.

"I know,