Aegis attends classes. They're harder, but she doesn't have the game anymore, so she does her homework, and when her homework is done she flies. She is homesick for her critters, but she knows they're safe in her mother's storage space Earthside.

She takes the personal combat elective. She can learn everything intellectually: muscle memory, for her, is how she showers (and Nina hasn't even graduated yet, let alone to Tactical in particular: there are six females on the station and so far Aegis hasn't run into any of them except the one who teaches astrogation). Everything else is about knowing. All Howlett has to to is tell her where to put her arm or how to turn her leg and she can do it. But as it happens this is also the highest level personal combat class Tactical School offers, so when she can not only beat the best student but also do it with skill instead of mere speed, they can't promote her out of it. She sticks around anyway; Howlett knows a lot.

She continues to do her processing in non-English and lets the teachers figure out what they want to do about her psychology.

And once, when she has a sore shoulder from a misstep in personal combat and doesn't feel like flying and is all out of revisions to make to her military history essay, she tries a little hacking. She didn't get anywhere in Battle School, but maybe she can do something from another vantage point. They probably don't require such sophisticated authorizations when they're sending station to station; it'd hog bandwidth. And she has known-plaintext in the psych files.

It takes some fiddling. She's not a computer specialist. But she can pretend to the computer that she's very innocent, syncing a backup of the psych data. She's lost all but this version of a few files, won't it please spit back to her what she's missing.

Eventually it does spit at her, and she copies it to her mother's storage too before they can wipe it off her desk - if they catch her at this she'll delete it from there, too, but maybe they won't notice or they'll outright let her have her fun. She sets a little program to decrypting it while she attends physics and it's done by the time she finishes the problem set.

She looks at what they have on her. It's about what she expected: copies of all her notebooks, comments about the accurate predictions a computer model spat out when given them as data, hysterical flailing when she stopped writing English, and her essays, with a few sparse notes. They don't seem to find her worrying. They seem oddly encouraged by her willingness to injure the boys who were hurting Sue, back when she was littler, half her current age. Someone wrote she's not aggressive, but she's decisive, and the buggers struck first, she won't have any problem wiping them out of the sky.

And that's true. She's seen vid of what they did to China. Even if there were some misunderstanding behind everything and the buggers didn't intend to invite total war, they turned living things into soup, destroyed a hundred historical artifacts, killed millions of people - they were not making an effort to be compatible with humans. She will not have any problem wiping them out of the sky.

She looks at what they have on Sue.