《Defending Mars》Captives of a Red Planet – 17 – Back to the stone age

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The woman led her out of the reception nook with its desk, computer screens, and shelves with books and slogans, some in English, some in what had to be the Russian language into a larger chamber, carved out of solid rock like the most of the rest of the tunnels she’d seen on the way through the maze. The nook had seemed the first nice corner of the place, but where Tory was next led to wasn’t so much. It was just a big room with several tables where a bunch of kids sitting around.

Was this what a bornhere school looked like? It didn’t look like the other kids were being who mostly looked younger than Tory were being taught much of anything. There were maybe 20 or so, clustered in small groups, dressed in their rough, patched clothing, mostly patched coveralls of various muted colors that it seemed living in caves on Mars did to clothes.

The ‘teacher’ marched her to a desk of her own and sat her down.

“Stay and be quiet,” the woman ordered.

While the other Martian kids, girls and boys alike took notice of her, all stared as she was put in her seat. Tory couldn’t help stare back. She hadn’t been a place with so many Martian kids. All the kids in Cerberus had been immigrants from Earth like her. The only other difference, other than most were taller than her, even the young ones, was that all of them seemed to have decent hair on their heads, unlike her. About half did back in the CU, but no one yet had bothered to tell her what to do with all the Martian dust that seemed to cling to her own straight hair. Tory just couldn’t figure out how to solve even with the instructions she’d been given on arrival on Mars. Nothing she’d tried so far worked.

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She was seated far enough away from the other kids to not be able to talk to any of them, and that probably encouraged the staring even more, at least until the teacher slammed something on her own desk and started to speak to the class in Russian, forcing them to turn back to their teacher, forming their scattered collection of chairs and desks back into a semblance of a classroom with most operating their own tablets at the teacher’s command.

Where Tory had been seated there was an old console on the desk, a screen built into the surface, and a couple tablets laying by it, but on investigation, they were all kind of prehistoric, not just in appearance, but function as well, not to mention their GUIs were entirely in Russian as well. Given the rough stone that made up the walls and ceilings of the room, the entire complex really. Tory was starting to feel in addition to being a prisoner again, she’d also been sent right back into the stone age. Fossil might have been able to figure out the old tech, but like anyone else she needed on this planet, she was fifty million miles away.

Quickly bored, Tory checked out the tablets for a while, figured that maybe there was some way she might be able to hack into them, but their operating systems were so medieval that none of the tricks she knew worked to get them out of their front ends. Otherwise there wasn’t much of interest on them and no apparent option to change to English.

While the teacher droned on, a couple of the kids still snuck peeks at her, a pair of them talking quietly, one even looking curious, probably wondering who had been sent in to make their day the least bit exciting.

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