Mako (The Mako Saga: Book 1) (2 page)

****

“Mornin’ everybody,” Lee began, eyeing the steady stream of latecomers now scurrying through the door of his classroom, each one pausing in search of a familiar face before proceeding as inconspicuously as possible to the back row of stadium seats. “My name is Dr. Lee Summerston, and let me be the first to welcome you to HIS-2321, Intro to Warfare History. Now I know it’s early—”

“Ya don’t say,” a voice muttered through a mild chorus of groans.

Lee cocked an eyebrow and the room fell silent again. “Like I was sayin’… I know it’s early, for all of us, but in the interest of keepin’ things simple on day one, today’s class is pretty much a straight-up orientation to prep you for what we’ll cover in here this semester. So just bear with me, hold your questions ‘til the end, and I’ll have you outta here in plenty of time for another hit of espresso before your next class. Fair deal?”

They nodded.

“Excellent,” he went on. “Now, since most of you are history majors, you’re obviously required to be here because it’s a mandated part of your curriculum. However, some of you are taking this class as an elective and I’m glad you chose to do so. No matter the reason why you’re here, I honestly hope this class turns out to be a good experience for you in the end.”

“Are we gonna get extra credit for attendance?” someone yawned from up top, and Lee smirked again.

“You mean, am I gonna give you free points for not being a complete and total slack-ass?” he thought before responding. “No,” he said bluntly. “That’s because, after today, I don’t take attendance again until the final, and even then it’s only because I have to. The way I see it, you’re here on your own dime, or student loan, or scholarship, or whatever. If you wanna be here, you will be. If you don’t, then you won’t. Either way, your grade will only be what you make it. With that said, I will toss you the occasional pop quiz.”

Another collection of groans.

“I know, I know, just relax. All quizzes are for extra credit, and none of ‘em count against your grade. So, if you’re the type of person who can sit at home in your jammies and slippers and learn everything from the textbook, then by all means, knock yourself out. But if you think you might be in need of a few extra points come the end of the semester, then it behooves you to come to class.”

“What kind of questions will we get on the quizzes?” asked a young woman down front.

Lee tilted his head and smiled. “Let’s just say it also behooves you to know that I’m a pretty avid college football fan, so a quick scoreboard check before class might not be a bad idea. Understand?”

She nodded and grinned.

Satisfied with his opening, Lee grabbed the stack of course syllabi from the podium and started toward the first row of students to begin handing them out. Slowly ascending up the steps, distributing the stapled forms to each row as he went, he glanced up to spot a young man at the far end, slouched down in his seat and completely oblivious to the world around him. Dressed in a faded Layne basketball t-shirt and a ratty brown ballcap, his eyes were fixated on, of all things, the course textbook.

“
Gamer-Prime Magazine,
huh?” Lee chirped over the young man’s shoulder at the concealed booklet.

Startled, the boy lunged forward to corral the piping hot cup of coffee on the edge of his desk as the young woman seated directly in front of him jerked away from the would-be spill.

“Oh, um, no sir—I mean, yes sir,” he stuttered, tightening his sweaty clasp around the cup while the girl scowled back at him.

“Somethin’ tells me that ain’t gonna be on the final,” Lee noted, hearing the room snicker around them.

“No, I guess not, sir,” the boy said, blushing.

“Don’t worry, I won’t take it from you,” Lee conceded, seizing on the chance to make a point. “Trust me, you’ll need that tip on page 36 when you touch down on E-14.”

“Sir?” the boy asked, sitting up straight and shooting his instructor a look of bewilderment.

“That’s the
Mako Assault
article, right?” Lee asked, starting back toward the front of the room.

“Ahhhh, yeah?”

“And I’m assumin’ your clan is stuck on one of the earlier environments? I’m guessin’… E-10, maybe E-11?”

“E-9, actually,” the boy fumbled, visibly astonished that his college professor even knew what video gaming was, much less how to use terminology like “clan” and “environment.”

“E-9,” Lee recalled—eyes turned reflectively to the ceiling. “Oh yeah, 9. Have ya made it to the bunker yet?”

“Yes sir. We hacked the core and got the files, but the intel said—”

“Let me guess,” Lee interrupted. “The intel specified that security’s response time would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 160-180 seconds, but you’re still gettin’ pinned down outside the main complex every time you bolt for your escape?”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah,” the boy said. “CIB’s intel told us—”

“There’s your first mistake,” Lee corrected. “Always take CIB’s projections with a grain of salt. In their defense, they’re usually pretty accurate, but they’re never without a hole or two when you actually hit the ground.”

Stepping back behind the podium, Lee glanced at his watch, mindful of his self-imposed deadline to end class early.

“Tell ya what,” he concluded, “in the interest of time, I’ll give you a quick way to get through 9 and then we’ve gotta move on. Granted… it ain’t the strategy that my team used to beat it, but it’ll get the job done. Now, how good is your Com-Spec?”

“You kidding me?” the boy grunted, seemingly offended. “Zeus full-on mastered Alystierian code via beta site training before we even started the game. The guy’s like, untouchable! He’s the best
MA
hacker on the net!”

Lee flashed a tenuous smile. “With respect, sport, I can promise you he’s not. Anyway, tell Zeus there’s a secondary function in the computer core’s primary security mainframe that’ll allow him to trip an installation-wide lockdown. Mind you, that won’t buy much time—only 60 seconds or so—but it oughta be enough for you to make a break for your ship. He can access the command with the authorization code Alpha-Zulu-6-4-Charlie.”

Utterly beside himself, the boy sank back in his chair and rubbed his eyes to process what’d been said.

“Hey Dr. Summerston?” he wondered aloud. “You said your team used a different strategy to get out of the bunker, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you didn’t use the lockdown, how did you guys get out?”

Lee shrugged, having waited for this exact question. “I did a case study once about a small unit of British soldiers in World War II who found themselves in a similar situation. They were pinned down by the Nazis in a small village just outside of Vienna, and they were carryin’ intel that was absolutely vital to the Allies. Needless to say, they got out and I modeled a lot of my workup for E-9 off of their ideas.”

“And what did they do?”

Lee’s smile widened. “You can read about it for yourself. It’s on page 297 of that textbook you were just usin’ as a cover for your mag.”

****

The boy’s jaw dropped in amazement. It wasn’t like he’d never been called out by an instructor before, but never like this. Not only had this guy just busted him for reading a gaming mag in class, but then he’d completely trumped him on its contents? In what crazy parallel world does that even happen? Truth be told, his clan had been stumped on E-9 for nearly three weeks now, and here he was being walked through the solution by—of all people—his history professor?

Then again, the boy thought, the man’s outward appearance alone should’ve indicated that he wasn’t a total academic stiff. Fairly tall, with a stocky, medium build and slightly rugged features, he couldn’t be any more than 32 or 33 years old, tops. Plus from the looks of things, he was no stranger to a gym, or the beach for that matter, judging by his copper skin tone and the sun-streaks in his shaggy brown hair. Add all that to the mild southern accent in his husky voice, and whoever he was, he was a far cry from his fellow faculty members here at Layne, with their horn-rimmed glasses, tweed coats, and tobacco-stained teeth. On a related note, if the looks of the other students around him were any indication—particularly the huddle of girls down front who hadn’t stopped giggling since he walked in this morning—they apparently thought so too. Bottom line: this guy was alright and maybe because of that, this class wouldn’t suck so bad after all.

“So where are you?” the boy asked, unable to help himself.

“I’m sorry?” Lee replied, re-opening his lecture notes to continue.

“Which environment? I know you’re at least on E-15, which is definitely impressive. But where, exactly, are you in the game? E-21? 22?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“C’mon, sir” the boy persisted. “You just called me out in front of the entire class. At least throw me one bone for my troubles. Seriously—gamer to gamer—where are you?”

Lee rolled his eyes and tossed his pen onto the podium. “We’ll begin E-42 tonight.”

With one sudden look at the garnet-stoned Florida State University class ring on his instructor’s right hand, the boy’s deep brown eyes went wide with complete and total disbelief as the revelation of his professor’s identity sank in.

Rocketing forward in his seat, the words shot like rapid fire from his mouth. “
No freakin’ way! You’re—”

“Okay class, if you’ll turn to the third page of the syllabus, you’ll find…”

Chapter 2: Echoes

Fifty-five obnoxious minutes later, having answered six questions about the final, four about the term paper, two about attendance, and another three about his grading system—as if none of this had been covered in the slides—Lee crammed his thumb drive and leftover syllabus materials back into his briefcase for the return trek up to his office.

“So much for thirty-five minutes,” he grumbled, offering a halfhearted wave goodbye to the boy in the brown ballcap who’d all but bumrushed him after class with a not-so-quick round of Twenty Questions:
Mako Assault
edition.

“What did you do on E-4?” he’d insisted. “How did you get past the second wave on E-8? Is the rumored ambush on E-16 legit? Do you ever square off with Commandant Masterson before the game ends?” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Of course, Lee couldn’t really hold it against the kid. After all, he’d been every bit as exuberant once he’d gotten hooked six months ago—still was. Hence why he’d shirked pretty much every responsibility he had this weekend to run back through his workup for E-42. Laundry, lawn work, cleaning the war zone that was his kitchen; it all paled in importance of what lay ahead tonight. To his knowledge, only a handful of clans had made it this deeply into the game; and at present, out of an estimated 18.5 million users worldwide, his was the only active clan even close to the end.

Naturally, this fact had drawn them a moderate amount of celebrity status in gamer circles online, hence the boy’s animated response in class. As such, Lee’s pulse quickened with the thought of what tonight could mean. True, there was no monetary reward for beating the game—although given last month’s utility bill; that would’ve been nice. There was no earth-shattering praise or prestige—no tickertape parade. Just the knowledge and personal reward that went with doing something that literally, no one else in the world had done, and in the case of Lee Summerston, whose ramen noodle budget and borderline manic-depressive state allowed him the ability to do little else, it was everything. It was the chance to finish something—to do something that no one else had. Ultimately though, it was a chance to be proud of something again, a feeling he hadn’t known in a very, very long time.

Yep. Tonight would be a good night—it had to be.

Jingling his keys into the lock beneath the smoky glass pane of his office door, Lee pushed through the opening and tossed his briefcase down beside the hand-me-down desk he’d called dibs on last spring when most of the tenured faculty had received new office furniture. Granted, this one wasn’t in much better shape than the rickety excuse for a workstation that’d occupied the space before, but at least it wasn’t in danger of collapsing on him at any given time, and that alone was a much-welcomed upgrade.

Rolling up his squeaky office chair and taking a seat, Lee hunched over to the ancient computer tower beside the desk and pressed the power button on its scratched faceplate. As it buzzed and sputtered to life, he began sifting through the mail he’d retrieved from his faculty box in the supply room, sorting out the things he’d actually need (early semester memos, faculty messages, orientation fliers—that sort of thing) and lobbing the rest through the basketball hoop over his trashcan. That was when his eyes locked on a large yellow envelope at the base of the pile, marked “Clerk of the Court: Leon County, FL.”

Staring at it for a long moment, Lee pondered the implications of its contents. He’d waited eight long months to receive this package, far longer than it should’ve ever taken. Had he actually bothered to show up at the court date when all of this had become final, he’d have had them there on the spot but he wanted no part of that. There had been nothing left to say, nothing left to divvy up, and in the end, nothing left to fight about. So the notion of standing in front of a judge just to hash it out all over again had seemed like little more than a painful exercise in futility. He’d done and said all he’d planned to by that point, and bottom line: he just wanted it over. True, everything had been made official at the drop of the gavel on that early February morning back in Tallahassee, but now—after all the clerical screw-ups, mailing mishaps, and address changes—the physical proof of the closure he’d so desperately longed for had finally arrived.

Shooting a thoughtful gaze to the picture of his parents on the wall, Lee billowed a hard sigh as his fingers ripped through the envelope’s gluey seal to remove the documents inside. Slowly sliding them out into view, he followed the list of names and dates down the top page—past the judge’s stamp and docket number—until his eyes eventually found the only three words that meant anything to him; “Dissolution of Marriage.”