Carter started classes at what the Rangers called the Academy, but was really called the Winston Churchill Education Facility and Training Center, a mouthful if ever there was one. Carter definitely understood why they called it the Academy.

She got to skip any basic science classes, being fast-tracked into advanced Biochemistry, Human Biology and Medicine. She also had to take the basic physical training courses, including weapons classes and physical strength work. There were also several other mandatory subjects, including a class on strategy and tactics that went far beyond anything she'd been taught in the navy, a class on piloting starships and other crafts, and a history class that she soon tested out of, on the foundation and maintenance of the Colonial Network.

Then, she got to choose a handful of other subjects, and her schedule soon included an Anthropology class, a basic Xenology class (or the study of extraterrestrials), and an advanced Mathematics and Statistics course that fascinated her.

The final class, that wasn't actually a class but a designated part of her weapons class, was the oddest. Each trainee–because they were called trainees until they were admitted for a four-month probationary period as a cadet on the starship, at which point they would finally become fully-fledged Ranger Operatives. Anyway, each trainee spent an hour a day in what their trainers called exosuits–flexible, malleable suits that amplified movement and allowed for superhuman strength and maneuvers. They had to prove they could perform up to standard in their suits, and could handle the added freedom of motion they allowed.

But Carter's favorite moment of each day was when she and Gerrit met up in the lab they'd been assigned at the Academy, and Gerrit, as her mentor, talked her through any procedures she didn't already know.

It wasn't all Gerrit teaching her things, though. More often than not, the two of them worked side by side on various projects, some theoretical, some applied. It worked out quite well, too, since Gerrit's specialties were engineering, physics, math, and other things that Carter herself was no expert in.

One day, only a couple of days after Rowan left, taking Ripple and Jase in her wake, Gerrit burst into her weapons training course, his eyes glittering with some victory. He sauntered up to her training and announced, "Sir, I need to borrow medic Roe. I need her help with something rather urgent." He grabbed Carter's arm and dragged her away. "So sorry, hope you don't mind," he called over his shoulder.

Carter grimaced. "He's not going to take too kindly to that," she muttered.

Gerrit grinned. "If he takes issue, I'll just remind him that, without us scientists, there wouldn't be things like Aether travel or nice new plasma guns. That should get through to the old blockhead."

Carter smiled despite herself. "What's up?" she asked. "You're unusually cheerful, or, at least, more cheerful than usual. What happened? Did Slate and Jase finally realized they know nothing about science and need to learn? Or did Ripple smile?"

Gerrit laughed. "Better, young grasshopper," he announced.

"Huh?" Carter asked. "Grasshopper? What's...?"

Gerrit cut her off. "It's a reference to an old movie," he said, rolling his eyes. "It means you're my student. Anyway, I have managed to create a theorem that says that not only is it possible to teleport living beings from one place to another, but that the means to do so are not so impossible as people like to presume!" He said all this with the drama of an opera singer, his face alight.

Carter squealed and, forgetting herself, flung her arms around him and hugged. "Show me!" she cried, after she'd taken a step back. She bounced in place, unable to stay still. The implications of what Gerrit had said were huge.

Gerrit grabbed her arm and tugged her all the way to the lab, laughing with delight. When he flung open the door and announced proudly, "Voilà!" Carter felt her jaw drop. The walls were positively plastered with papers, each covered with Gerrit's scribbling, and there was barely a space between letters, numbers, symbols and diagrams on the chalkboard Gerrit insisted on.

Carter leaned close to the board, guessing that this was where Gerrit had chosen to display the final workings. She squinted at the minuscule writing, pulling out the pair of glasses she never wore and sliding them on. That was better.

As she read, her jaw slowly dropped lower and lower. Holy crap! Gerrit had done it, but... She rubbed out one of the numbers. "No, that's wrong. Hang on, let me just reconfigure..." She erased a couple of others and changed everything that her previous correction had effected.

"See?" Gerrit said. "This is why I need you here. You check my work, and you get just as excited as I do about theoretical discoveries."

Carter leaned away from the board. "But this isn't theoretical anymore. You've made it applicable, even though we haven't actually applied it to anything!"

Gerrit lifted her up and swung her around. "Thank you!" he cried. "You're brilliant, Carter! You know that? Simply brilliant! Hang on, I think I have some ideas on how to transfer the atomic structure of a living organism from one place to another. If we just..." He began fiddling with something on the lab counter.

Carter leaned over his shoulder. "Yes, but we have to make sure the density is exactly the same, or someone could lose limbs or melt or something."

Gerrit grinned at her. "I know!" He sounded much too excited, given the topic they'd been discussing. "Which is why we'll be starting with single-celled organisms. Bacteria and shit, you know?" He held up something he'd been fiddling with, holding a separate part in each hand. "Give that a twiddle, will you?"

Carter took a wire and was about to wrap it around the matching one from the other side when Gerrit yelled, "Not that one!" so suddenly that she jumped back a foot. "Easy," he said. "The yellow one. No, the other yellow one. Yeah you got it. Thanks, girl. You're an angel."

Carter grinned and went back to the calculations. Gerrit was the engineer, not her, and she was perfectly happy to stick with what she knew and understood. So, she proofed the calculations, and, finding no other mistakes, she went back to what they had been working on before.

"Gerrit?" she called from across the lap. "Where did you put the prototype for the new stun-gun? It's not where I left it. Oh, nevermind. What's it doing in the fridge?"

Gerrit looked up, startled. "It was in the fridge?" he asked blankly. "Huh. I thought I put it in the desk drawer when I tidied up."

Carter yanked the fridge door open even wider, then scoffed. "Gerrit, there are pens and notebooks and a tablet and... is that a desk lamp? Seriously? Mate, this doesn't belong in the fridge!"

Gerrit just blinked at her, so, with an exasperated sigh, she returned everything to the desk, then, finally, set the stun-gun down on the counter a ways down from Gerrit, right by her microscope and other tools.

She slid out the cartridge and emptied its contents into a petri dish, then added something that made the contents swirl red. "Dammit," she swore, shoving the dish aside. "That was too slow. Again! We need a more concentrated amount of the neurotoxin."

Gerrit blinked at her. "But a more concentrated dose increases the risk of permanent damage," he said blankly.

"I know," Carter said stubbornly. "But it's not acting fast enough now. As it is, the target will have five to ten seconds to act before he or she is knocked out, if this amount even successfully neutralizes them!"

Gerrit threw up his hands. "Fine, just ignore everything I ever say, why don't you?" But he didn't mean it. It was the way they worked.

Carter nibbled her lip. "What if I added a stabilizing agent to neutralize the deadlier effects, and then upped the dosage?"

Gerrit set down his invention and took off his glasses, then stood there, nibbling on one of the black branches. Carter knew he was running through calculations and properties. "Yeah," he said slowly, after a minute or two. "Yeah, that could work. Give it a try."

Carter pulled out a couple of glass bottles and a pipette, then set out a stack of empty glass slides, a petri dish and a second pipette. She shrugged on her lab coat and shoved her hands into a pair of latex gloves. Careful to keep her hand from shaking, she removed several milliliters of one of the glass bottles' contents and dropped them into the petri dish, then cleaned the pipette and refilled it a tenth of the first amount with the contents of the second bottle.

In the little, glass dish, the two liquids swirled together until they were completely blended. Carter put away everything but the glass slides and the second pipette, then took out a row of bottles full of silvery-gold liquid that shimmered in the light.

These liquids were Gerrit's own invention. Each one was distilled from human bodily fluids–disgusting, on first consideration. Gerrit called them human essence, because he'd cooked them down until all that was left was what made humanity human. There was one for each age range, with a colored dot marking what it was–white for infants both male and female, pink for girls aged 3 to 5, light blue for boys the same age. Yellow for girls 5 to 8, orange for boys the same age. Light green for girls 8 to 12, dark green for the boys in that age range. Lavender for adolescent girls, red for adolescent boys. Grey for women aged 18 to 30, black for the men. Dark purple for women aged 30 to 50, navy blue for the men. And tan for anyone over 50.

Carter took a drop of each and let them fall onto their own slides, then slid the first one into the microscope, adding a drop of the mixture she'd made earlier right before she did. As she peered through the lens, the neurotoxin mixture attacked the human essence, freezing it, but not destroying it like it had before.

She repeated the process with each age range, and, when the last one wasn't destroyed by the neurotoxin, she let out a whoop. "Gerrit, I got it!" she yelled. "You were right! It works!"

Gerrit looked up, scratching his head. With his eyes wide and sleepy behind his glasses, Carter thought he looked a bit owlish. "What?" he asked, glancing quickly around the room. "Oh, the knockout gun. Yeah, great. Wait, you sorted the quantities?"

Carter laughed. Gerrit would always be Gerrit. "First of all, I refuse to let it be called the knockout gun, cause that's just stupid. Second, yes. I figured out the quantities. Or, well, I added more neurotoxin then mixed it with a stabilizer. How's your thing coming?"

Gerrit looked down at the thing in front of him then back up at Carter. "Nearly done, I think," he said. "I figured it would probably work to use the basic concept of radio wave emissions–so, basically, something that works without needing contact. So, essentially, if we input the coordinates of what it's to move here–" He pointed to a keypad on the thing. "–then it can home in on the matter there, as long as we specify it's to move a human or cargo with a few simple equations, and Bob's your uncle, yeah?"

Carter swallowed. Holy crap, Gerrit was good. "Yeah," she managed to croak. She cleared her throat. "Yeah, that's great! Gerrit, that's... I have no words for what that is."

Gerrit stared at her. "That's good, right?" And Carter laughed. Oh, Gerrit, she thought.

But before she could get a chance to answer, the telescreen on one wall blinked to life, and Rowan's rang out through the room. "Gerrit? Carter? Are you guys alive in there? I called both of your flats, and Hisashi answered Carter's comms, and nobody answered at your place, Gerrit. What, no significant other?"

Gerrit rolled his eyes. "You're a bitch, you know that?"

The image on screen flickered, as if Rowan had walked into a brighter room, and, soon, it cleared to show her sitting at a desk in a spartan bedroom. "Thank you," she said, deadpan. Her hair was in its usual braid, but, for the first time Carter had seen, her smile was completely genuine, no hint of sadness lurking in its depths. Behind her, a shadow moved back and forth, then smacked into the side of the bed.

"Fuck!" the guy yelped. "Jesus fucking Christ that hurt!" He hobbled closer to the camera, and Carter realized it was Lieutenant Reid.

Rowan tutted at him. "Language, Levi. You'll set a bad example for our newest recruit."

Levi slipped into a seat next to her and rolled his eyes, but said nothing. "Hey, Carter. Hey Gerrit," he said instead. "How's it going over in not-fucking-freezing-cold-land?"

Carter giggled, and, apparently, it was now Rowan's turn to roll her eyes. "While normally I would remind you to mind your language, you're spot on about the weather. God, I hate this city. It's so damn gloomy!"

Gerrit rolled his eyes. "Children, children," he said in a fake-dramatic tone. "Let's all just calm down. Okay, being completely serious, now, Carter and I have news. Big news. Don't we, young grasshopper?"

Carter took her turn to roll her eyes, muttering, "For crying out loud, I work with children!"

Gerrit elbowed her in the side. "Now, shut up, young grasshopper. I'm not finished. So, anyway, Carter's finally managed to come up with a long-lasting, quick-acting compound for the knockout gun–"

"For the millionth time, we're not calling it that," Carter cried, just as Rowan said, "For fuck's sake, Gerrit, that's not what we're calling it!"

Gerrit threw up his hands. "Fine," he said petulantly. "You come up with something better! And I refuse to call it a boring, old 'stun gun!' Anyway, as I was saying, before I got interrupted for the millionth time, as the young grasshopper here would say, the compound also doesn't present the same risk of long-term damage that the neurotoxin does on its own. Now, all we need to get the thing distributed is for you, Rowan, to finish your designs."

Rowan folded her arms. "Okay, I'm your C.O., right?" she asked, rhetorically. "Why is it that you always wind up sounding like a patronizing grandmother whenever we talk? It's like you have no respect for me, none at all!" But she was smiling goodnaturedly.

Gerrit raised a hand, as if to quiet her. Yeah, Carter totally got the whole 'patronizing grandmother' thing. "That's not the best part! I finally developed a prototype teleportation device. Of course, so far it will only work on single-cell organisms, like bacteria, but... Well, as soon as we find out if it works, we can test it on larger and larger beings and inanimate objects!"

Rowan nodded. "That's great, Gerrit," she said, rubbing a hand across her eyelids. "But not tonight. It's one o'clock in the morning where you are, or have you forgotten to check the clock? I'll get a pass from Carter's teachers so she can be out of class tomorrow to help you, but, tonight, you are both under strict orders to go home, relax and get some sleep. Take a bubble bath! Read a book! Bake cupcakes! I don't care, just go home. Both of you. That's an order from your commanding officer. If you want, I can run it past Stark, too..." She trailed off, one eyebrow raised expectantly.

"Yeah, yeah," Gerrit grumbled. "Whatever. We're going. Goodnight!"

"Gerrit..." Rowan snapped warningly.

Before things could get heated, Carter grabbed Gerrit's arm. "Come on," she said. "Rowan's the boss, and she'd got a good point. Plus, I'm worried I'll drop stuff or spill, or... Well, you know."

Gerrit groaned, running a hand through his hair. "Yeah," he said wearily. "Yeah, you're right. Imagine if one of us spilled that neurotoxin..." He shook his head. "Okay, I'll lock up, if you want to scram."

Carter rolled her eyes. "Nope, not happening," she said. "I know you too well by now, so I say we're both locking up, and then I'm giving you a ride home. Maybe I'll even track your comms bracelet, just to make sure you're doing what Rowan told you to."

Gerrit groaned. "Yeah, okay," he said finally.

A half an hour later, Carter arrived at the flat she and Hisashi shared. He met her at the door with a glass of white wine in his hand. "Here you go," he said, handing it to her. "You look like you need this."

Carter grinned at him. "You're amazing," she told him. "Seriously, completely, amazing." She took a long drink of the wine. Rowan's idea of taking a bubble bath was seriously tempting, but... "I promised you a game of chess, didn't I?"

Hisashi grinned. "Same old Carter," he muttered. "I'll get the board out. You, get snacks and change into pajamas. I feel like a slob next to you."

Carter did, and, finally, sat down on the floor, cross-legged, wine glass in hand, the coffee table in front of her covered with the chessboard and snacks. Hisashi sat across from her, drinking beer. Not Carter's favorite, and she was glad he'd remembered her preference for wine.

They began playing just as the clocks struck quarter to two–ridiculously late for a game of chess, but Carter was enjoying herself. She managed to box Hisashi in quite quickly, and, just as she was about to capture his queen, her comms bracelet flashed blue. Code blue, she knew meant a potential medical emergency, but not too dangerous of one.

"Excuse me," Carter said to Hisashi, who looked worried. She ran to her bedroom, shut the door, slid in her earbud, which had been languishing in her pocket, and answered.

"Hello?"

Stark's voice came across, crystal clear. "Carter? Good, you're awake. There's a bit of an incident at the School–did Rowan tell you what that is?"

"The research facility," Carter replied promptly.

"Yes, good," said Stark. "A group of armed hostiles just attacked, and, even though the Rangers and Marines stationed there will have it under control by the time we could get anyone there, they need someone to supervise the medical evacuation to the Shop–that's our repair base and where we have a very good hospital. I volunteered you; I hope that's okay."

Carter was already throwing on her uniform and packing her medical bag. "Where should I go?" she asked, throwing her lab coat into her bag, pinning her hair up and throwing on a jacket.

"Meet me at docking bay H7," was the crisp reply. "You and I are going in alone. Oh, and better pack your exosuit, just in case."

"Got it," Carter replied, flinging the bag she kept it in over her shoulder. "I'll be there in twenty minutes." She pulled a beanie over her hair, pulled on a pair of black gloves, shoved her feet into her boots, then realized she had to take her gloves off to do up the zippers, then put them back on.

Hisashi stood outside her door, worry etched across his face. "Something came up," she told him, racing for the door. "I don't think I can tell you about it. Gotta run. By the way, I won the game."

She slammed the door behind her and raced down the stairs, forgoing the elevator and taking the steps two at a time. Outside, she hailed the first taxi she saw, half-yelling, "Rangers' Square, docking bays, as fast as you can."

At her destination, she dumped twenty units in the driver's hand without waiting for him to make change. People were in trouble, and she could help.

She'd half-expected the docking bays to be empty and silent, but it was the exact opposite. Rangers raced around everywhere, and little shuttles came and went, heedless of the late hour. Stark was waiting in front of a larger shuttle than she'd imagined