Chương 215: 82. Flight Training and Evaluation

Shipboard announcements before noon generally serve one of two purposes. The first: drag you out of your bunk like a body being hauled off. The second: drag you out, then inform you, in far more official language, that what just happened was only the warm-up — the part that actually kills you starts now. That day was the second kind.

When the eleven of us — Maki Kushima, Jess McCallow, Dwight "D" Barkley, Harvey Knox, Roy Hartmann, Lan Weiss, Akari Flak, Aida Rosen, Evelyn Sado, Ash Vander, and myself — were called down to the briefing cabin on the lower training deck, the Yukikaze outside was cutting its route with perfect composure, hull steady as a ship with absolutely no intention of letting anything happen. That's usually exactly when things happen. The briefing cabin looked even less like a classroom than a classroom did.

Walls: military grey. Seats: military grey. The projection panel up front — wide enough to double as a sentencing platform — also military grey. The only thing that wasn't grey was the white text that lit up when the projector kicked on, bright enough to feel like someone had driven a lamp straight into your eye socket. Captain Tobita hadn't arrived yet. Standing at the front in his place was a tactical NCO.

Her voice was flat, her expression was flat, but her killing intent was entirely intact — like a short blade already sheathed, one that everyone in the room understood would draw blood the moment it came out. She skipped the pleasantries.

"Attention. By order of the captain: as the current leg of the voyage has margin to spare, four supplementary drill segments will be added to the trainee cohort effective today. All personnel will log and attend. Unexcused absence will be treated as withdrawal from the training program." The cabin went quiet for a moment. I wasn't scared. It's just that every time I hear the words supplementary segments, I instinctively wonder where in my life I've offended fate this time. The projection jumped.

The first line appeared. Segment One: Combat Craft Piloting Simulation. Second line. Segment Two: Shipboard Breach / Counter-Breach Exercise. Third line. Segment Three: Exterior Hull Maintenance Operations. Fourth line. Segment Four: Bridge Simulation — Enemy Contact and Self-Preservation. I stared at those four lines and had exactly one thought: this isn't a training schedule. This is four personally curated methods of death, courtesy of the captain.

D, sitting diagonally ahead of me, tilted his chair back and let out a low whistle.

"How thoughtful," he said.

"Flying to running, outside to inside. Full coverage."

"You can relax," Lan said from the other side, not even turning her head.

"Given your track record, Segment One might be all you need."

"Hey — aren't you supposed to encourage your comrades at a time like this?"

"I'm streamlining your life planning." Harvey pressed two fingers to his temple, looking like just listening to us was already giving him a headache. Jess crossed her arms, stared at the four lines, and let out a short, sharp sound.

"Beautiful," she said.

"First shake everyone into brain soup inside a high-speed tin can. Then run them through the ship like lab rats. Then chuck them outside to freeze. Finally drag them to the bridge for a public execution. This syllabus has all the layered nuance of domestic violence." I almost laughed. But Maki, sitting beside me, didn't so much as move a shoulder. She just watched the projection, as if those four lines weren't a training schedule but a lunch menu she was about to sign off on.

That's the most infuriating thing about her. Where everyone else sees trouble, she sees procedure. Where everyone else feels pressure, she mostly just feels: there are steps, so it can be done. That kind of person is either extremely reliable or extremely punchable.... Unfortunately, she tends to be both. The NCO continued:"The four segments will not be completed in a single day. They will be scheduled in batches according to ship operations, conditions, and route.

Today's segment is Segment One: Combat Craft Piloting Simulation. The remaining three will follow on subsequent orders. Now broadcasting today's course content." The projection switched. The overview of four deaths atmosphere instantly narrowed into the far more specific here's how we're killing you today. Today's Module: Standard Single-Seat Combat Craft — Basic Familiarization, Attitude Control, Propulsion Operation, Simulated Engagement. Completion Standard: Cohort of eleven, unlimited respawns.

If any single trainee lands one confirmed hit on the instructor's craft, the entire cohort passes. The line below had even been kindly bolded for us: Instructor: Shun Tobita. I stared at that name for a full two seconds. Then two more. Then I turned to Maki.

"... Am I still asleep?"

"No," she said.

"You're just unlucky." I nodded. Reasonable. The only people in this world who can make reality sound exactly like a sentencing are judges — and Maki. The briefing cabin was clearly stirring too.

"Wait," Roy couldn't help saying.

"The captain's leading this himself?"

"It's just a piloting sim, isn't it?" Evelyn looked genuinely thrown.

"Does it need to go this far?" Akari had her eyes down, scrolling fast through her terminal, as if checking whether she'd misread a column. Jess, being very Jess, leaned back in her chair, grin turning downright criminal.

"... Someone that caliber coming down to babysit us personally," she said, "probably pissed somebody off and got stuck with the gig." I nearly lost it. Not because it was clever — because it was exactly the kind of thing she'd say. She hadn't even seen the man yet, and already going for the throat. That wasn't courage. That was a survival-instinct defect wrapped in a sharp tongue. And right on cue, the automatic doors at the back of the cabin slid open. No alarm. No fanfare.

No idiotic VIP entering, please rise ceremony. Captain Tobita just walked in. He wasn't wearing the formal duty uniform he wore on the bridge — the one that made him look like he was personally carrying the ship's whole mass on his shoulders. This was closer to light flight-training gear. Jacket unzipped partway. A thin databoard tucked under one arm. His pace wasn't fast; you could almost call it lazy.

The problem is, some people can walk in looking like they just woke up, and you can still tell they're the kind of just woke up you do not test. The air in the cabin went half a beat still. Jess stopped talking. I worked very hard not to look at her. Tobita walked up front, set the databoard on the table, and scanned the room once. His eyes weren't sharp, exactly — more like a man looking at a batch of people still breathing, and finding that acceptable. Like we weren't students.

Like we were materials about to be shoved into a storm, and he was mildly curious how many bones would come back.

"Everyone here?" he asked. The NCO answered immediately.

"All eleven trainees present, sir." Tobita nodded, gaze finally sweeping our faces.

"Then let's not waste time," he said.

"You've all seen the four segments. Today's the first. The reason's simple — on this ship, if you can't fly, you'd better at least learn how not to die. If you can fly, try not to die embarrassingly." No one in the cabin dared answer. D clearly wanted to. He chose to value his life instead. Tobita hooked a finger back. The projection switched to a three-dimensional model of a black combat craft. Narrow. Sharp. The kind of thing that looked like speed and killing intent had been welded directly into the airframe.

The profile wasn't bulky — long nose, main wings swept back — and from the side it carried an almost clinically clean beauty. Not a gentle beauty. More like a scalpel. White text appeared beneath the hull. Federal Forces Standard Single-Seat Combat Craft — Type Zero. Tobita turned slightly, raising a hand toward the projection.

"Type Zero. Currently the only standard single-seat combat craft in mass service with the Federal Forces. Standard-class warships carry twelve each; carriers are calculated separately. This is what you'll be touching today." The Type Zero on the projection rotated once. The ventral hardpoint, wing roots, and nose armament lit up in sequence. It wasn't my first time seeing combat craft specs.

The problem is, reading a spec sheet and standing in front of someone who's actually flown the thing are not the same experience. Tobita's voice wasn't loud. It was almost mild. But every sentence landed like it had been nailed directly into the back of your skull.

"Standard configuration, single pilot. There are also a trainer variant, a two-seat attack variant, and a reconnaissance variant. The recon frame has an extended nose, two-person crew, and for long-range missions includes a basic cryo-sleep system and—" he paused, as if donating the Federation one last second of dignity, "—basic sanitation facilities." Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. D put his head down first. Harvey's shoulders twitched.

I pressed my lips together, or I'd have laughed out loud. Basic sanitation facilities was an extremely high-class way of saying: on long deployments, the Federation kindly provides you with a dignified reason to use the bathroom in space. Tobita, apparently indifferent to whatever the room was doing with the concept of a toilet, kept going.

"The hull can be coated with a special black compound to absorb electromagnetic waves and reduce active detection probability. The effect isn't magic — you won't disappear. But it might buy you a few extra seconds of not being seen before you die."

"That's not comforting at all," Jess muttered.

"I think it's fine," I muttered back.

"At least it's honest." Maki didn't join our low-grade commentary. She was staring at the armament layout, focused enough that she looked like she was already dismantling the numbers. Tobita raised a hand; the Type Zero's wing roots lit up.

"Primary armament. Two 20mm Type-99 rotary plasma cannons, mounted at the wing roots on both sides. Traded the original laser cannon's long-range sustained-beam function for higher pulse rate and close-range burst output. At knife-fight range, a single one-second burst can reduce an Imperial light fighter to scrap." No drama. No heat. He delivered reduce someone to scrap in one second with the same energy as a kitchen knife's maintenance instructions. That was the most unsettling part.

Two small points lit up at the nose.

"Secondary armament. Two 7. 7mm pulse laser cannons, upper nose. Low yield, low draw, straight trajectory. Not there for you to play hero. They're for test-firing, threading, confirming your firing line. Once you've got the bite, switch to the mains and send them off." He glanced at us.

"Remember — the secondaries aren't for spraying. Anyone who uses them as primary firepower, I will personally pull the log and play it back. Publicly." D's hand shot up. Tobita looked at him.

"Speak."

"Sir," D asked, dead serious, "does public playback include just the tactical errors, or the facial expressions too? I'd like to calibrate my shame threshold in advance."

"Comms log included."

"... Understood. I will conduct myself with appropriate gravity." Real laughter broke out this time. Even Roy couldn't hold it in. The corner of Tobita's mouth might have moved. Once. Then he lit the ventral hardpoint.

"This is where the Type Zero gets complicated. Ventral special hardpoint. Carries either a 250 kg rocket-propelled hyper-vibration warhead for armor penetration, or a 250 kg rocket-propelled micro-fusion torpedo for area destruction." Two silhouettes appeared. One long and tapered, built to have a very firm conversation with armor plating. The other rounder, fatter, and considerably more like bad news.

"No electronic guidance," Tobita continued.

"I'll say that twice. No electronic guidance. If you think this thing finds its own way, go back to your bunks right now and sort out your affairs. In real combat, pilots have to fly like old-era dive bombers — punch a single craft into a ship's anti-air net alone, and release manually, at point-blank range, on nothing but sight, experience, and nerve." The cabin went quiet like someone had hit mute. I stared at the Type Zero on the projection and finally understood exactly why it had been built to look like that.

It wasn't a machine designed to keep you safe. It was the Federal Forces telling its pilots, with complete confidence in their own position: here's a fast knife. Figuring out how to come back alive is your problem.

"This thing," Evelyn murmured, "is basically forcing you to charge straight at their face."

"Congratulations," Jess said.

"You've finally grasped Federal design philosophy." Ash added mildly from the back row: "Or maybe the Federal budget just ran out right there."

"Keep that to yourself," Harvey said.

"Some truths don't belong on a warship."

"Then where?"

"The graveyard." I pressed a fist to my mouth. If this group doesn't die in combat someday, it'll be because they talked each other to death first. Tobita didn't stop any of it. He probably understood letting students run their mouths before takeoff beat letting them lose their lunch after. He collapsed the projection into a multi-window layout, shrank the Type Zero's schematics to the side, and pulled up a page of training rules.

"We're not testing ordnance release today. Basic handling and simulated engagement only." He glanced over us.

"But the rules are simple. Eleven of you. Unlimited respawns. If any one of you lands a single confirmed hit on my craft, the entire cohort passes." The moment that landed, I saw the most perfectly unified expression in the room. A hybrid of you have to be joking and he doesn't look like he's joking, distilled into pure despair. Roy spoke first.

"... Wait. One hit counts?"

"Correct."

"Just one?"

"Correct." D slowly raised both hands and covered his face.

"We're done," he said.

"This kind of rule is scarier than normal grading. Because it sounds like there's hope. There isn't."

"Not necessarily." Jess lifted her chin, that insufferable fighting spirit already lit.

"If we can get on his tail—""Only if you can catch him first," Maki cut in, flat. Jess rounded on her instantly.

"You got a problem?"

"No," Maki said.

"Just saving you some crash count." The air between them caught fire. Sitting between the two of them, I suddenly felt my name shouldn't be Hoshino Shimo. It should be Fire Door. Every time those two locked eyes, I got the distinct impression the whole ship was quietly trying to lower its accident rate. Tobita rapped the table once.

"Good. You're awake," he said.

"Save it for the sim. Ten minutes to relocate. Assembly at the hangar simulation bay. Anyone late goes straight into the first wave of target drones." He tucked the databoard back under his arm and turned, clean and abrupt — zero intention of waiting for anyone to process it. It felt less like a course briefing and more like an execution notice. The second he left, the cabin exploded.

"First wave of what?!" D was on his feet first.

"This isn't a class, this is sanctioned abuse!"

"What I'm more concerned about," Harvey said, standing and pressing his temples, "is that when he said one hit and everyone passes, his face looked exactly like someone saying feel free to dream."

"Because that's exactly what he meant," Lan said, smoothing her cuffs as she rose, voice frosted over. Evelyn looked around, honestly nervous.

"We're really supposed to shoot at the captain's craft?"

"What else?" Jess snorted.

"You want to ask him to save us the trouble and ram a wall?" Akari was already speed-reading the training interface, muttering as she walked.

"Attitude control, inertia compensation, thrust-vector switching, target lock, sim damage reset... No. This system's more of a headache than I projected." I stood when Maki did.

"You don't look great," she said.

"Because I have a healthy attachment to being alive."

"Then fly better."

"That sounded a lot like a threat wearing an encouragement costume."

"As long as it works on you." I looked at her perfectly matter-of-fact face and had a brief, sincere urge to bolt that 250 kg warhead directly onto her tone of voice. Nothing she says is heavy. It just all lands with an unreasonable amount of weight. On the way to the transfer, Jess drifted up on my other side, still talking.

"Hey, Hoshino. If you throw up in there, give me a warning first. I don't want your name carved into the shared comms channel for history."

"Don't worry," I said.

"If it comes to that, I'll aim straight for your frequency."

"You wouldn't dare."

"I absolutely would."

"All right." Maki passed between us, voice level.

"Two cosmically deficient human beings — save some energy for the thrusters."

"She started it," I said instantly.

"I saw," Maki said.

"That's why I said two." Unbelievable. She's so fair it's genuinely offensive. The hangar simulation bay was bigger than I'd expected. The hatch slid open, and cold air laced with lubricant and faint metal hit us. The space ahead opened out like a hollowed-out steel cathedral. Simulator pods lined both sides in rows, black shells mounted on lift bases, sensor frames and data cables jutting out front like the limbs of enormous insects.

At the center of the main display area sat a full-scale training shell of the Type Zero. Black. Not painted-black. The kind of black that swallows a little of the light hitting it. Long hull, sharp lines, nose tapering to a machined point. The wing roots swelled just enough to hide the two 20mm Type-99 rotary plasma cannons. The secondary ports above the nose looked like two cold pupils — narrow, straight, quiet as a snake that hasn't opened its mouth yet.

Standing there, I suddenly understood why people use the word beautiful for weapons. Because when something's function is pure enough — reduced entirely to speed, lethality, and survival — it becomes beautiful in a way that has no business being that.

"All units, take positions," the duty NCO called out. Tobita was already at the display, tapping the Type Zero's ventral hardpoint with a gloved hand.

"Come closer," he said. We crowded in. Up close, my first thought was: this thing has zero intention of treating your dignity kindly. The cockpit was as narrow as a coffin that had grudgingly learned to fly. The single-seat layout treated "human" as a component reluctantly accommodated, and every structural line was telling the pilot the same thing: you'd better be thin enough, calm enough, and not too attached to living. Tobita patted the cockpit rim.

"Remember — today's a sim, but the operating logic is real-craft logic. Once you're in, attitude acclimation first, then basic turning, accel/decel, axis shifts, then the engagement zone."

"Sir," D raised a hand, "if someone spins themselves sick before even reaching the engagement zone, does that count as contributing to Federal psychological warfare?"

"It counts," Tobita said.

"I'll log you as negative instructional material."

"... Copy. I suddenly feel very cared for."

"That's a misreading." The whole row laughed. Even I had to admit — the most irritating thing about a man like Tobita is that he's clearly doing something to you, and you still end up a little impressed by how cleanly he does it. Then pod assignments went out. Maki, two seats diagonally ahead of me. Jess, left-rear. D, right-front. Harvey and Roy on the far side. Lan one pod down from Akari. Evelyn, Aida, and Ash in the back row. I settled into the pod. The familiar pressure closed in from both sides.

Shoulder harness down, waist locked, headrest sealed. The main display ahead was pure black, nothing but a standby cursor blinking like a very polite death notice. Honestly, the first person to surface in my head wasn't Tobita. It wasn't Maki either. It was J. J. Ricos. That lunatic's teaching method at the special forces training camp was nothing like a normal instructor's. Other people taught flying starting from the manual. He taught flying by making you throw up first.

His theory was simple: if you don't even know how you throw up, going up in the air just means you throw up higher. I'd hated that philosophy with my whole being back then. Right now I had a fleeting, obscure urge to apologize to him. Half a second's worth. Any more would be letting him off too easy.

"All units, open internal comms." Tobita's voice cut through the headset — clean, steady, like the flat of a blade tapped lightly against a nerve.

"Roll call. Confirm on receipt." Voices came in one by one.

"D, copy."

"Harvey, copy."

"Jess, copy."

"Maki, copy."

"Hoshino, copy." After I called in, my fingers adjusted their grip on the stick on their own. Left hand throttle, right hand main control. Don't chase the visuals with your eyes. Breathe steady. Let your inner ear know today's going to be bad. Then I caught myself.... Shit. Was that too natural? I eased my posture back a notch, trying to look like an averagely nervous rookie. Not out of humility — experience had taught me that standing out in a place like this only ever buys you a higher grade of misery.

"Attitude calibration," Tobita said.

"Three, two, one — engage." The display snapped to life. It felt like being kicked straight out of the ship into space. Black exploded outward. Data frames snapped on. The virtual starfield and training zone unfolded into a three-dimensional abyss. The weightlessness and spatial disorientation hit like a hand reaching into your skull and blending up, down, left, and right into soup. First second: silence. Second second: the comms channel started swearing.

"—Shit, that's fast!" D's voice detonated first. A beat later, a very obvious collision alarm blared from somewhere else.

"Warning: attitude unstable. Warning: attitude unstable."

"Who hit what?" Harvey gritted.

"Not me!" Roy protested.

"I haven't even — wait, why is it rolling sideways and up at once—""Because your hands are too stiff!" Akari's voice cut through, not entirely stable herself but theoretically sound.

"Don't fight the inertia. Ride it first—""I am riding it!" D shot back.

"It's not riding me!"

"Learn the difference between thrust and fate!" Another alarm screamed. Jess, back-left of me, had clearly entered I refuse to lose to a machine mode. She pulled thrust too hard; the whole craft lurched forward like it had been grabbed by the collar. Then, overcorrecting, she carved an extremely ugly wide arc through the virtual zone. I held out. Then didn't.

"Jess. That wasn't a maneuver. That was a mood."

"Shut up!" she barked over comms.

"Let's see you fly one—""She's flying better than you," Maki cut in, out of nowhere. My heart nearly skipped.

"Hey!" I protested on reflex.

"I'm stating a fact," she said.

"Could you ask the subject's permission before stating facts about them?"

"No." Damn it. She was tearing my cover down on an open channel with all the urgency of someone reading off a wind report. She didn't have time to keep at me, though, because Evelyn's side produced a short gasp, followed by a system alert:"Overload threshold exceeded. Reduce thrust. Reduce thrust."

"I'm reducing it!" Her voice was starting to drift. Aida jumped in immediately.

"Watch the central attitude axis, not the stars outside! Slow your breathing. Pull the nose back to centerline first!" On the other side, Harvey cursed low, sounding like a man negotiating with his own stomach.

"I take back everything I said about a full breakfast being a good idea..."

"Did you say that?" Roy asked.

"I'm saying it now, retroactively." I wasn't completely unaffected either. The spatial flips and thrust shifts still grabbed my inner ear and gut and shook them together. But compared to the chaos around me, my body still remembered how to hold on. J. J. used to love saying one particularly annoying thing:"Don't fight the frame for direction. You're not steering a cow. You're conning a knife." I thought he was insane at the time.

Right now, I had to admit that piece of madness was actually useful during high-speed attitude correction. So I did the most conservative thing available. No rushing the recovery. No rushing the turn. No racing to be the first one stable. Just pulled my Type Zero back to centerline, bled the inertia off along the thrust line, and pressed the roll down to an angle that wasn't too embarrassing. Steady. Steady enough that I wanted to swear at myself. Because it meant I really was more used to this than everyone else.

And the last thing I wanted right now was for that to show.

"Hoshino." Tobita's voice cut into the channel. My fingers tightened.

"Y-yes, sir."

"Still alive over there?"... Unkind question. Very Tobita.

"Temporarily alive," I said.

"Good. Stay that way. Everyone else, listen up. First pass isn't about looking good. It's about not turning yourselves into garbage. Correct attitude, drop thrust one level, restart on the standard lane."

"Copy..." A wave of half-dead responses came back over the line. I quietly exhaled. Good. That had sounded like a casual check-in. Probably. Hopefully. I'd like to believe so. A second later, D let out a scream.

"Wait wait wait — why am I rolling again?! Who made the universe 3D?!"

"Do you hear yourself right now?" Lan asked, flat.

"I hereby accept a two-dimensional life!" Half the channel lost it. I was laughing hard enough my shoulders shook, nearly throwing off the attitude I'd just stabilized. Jess was grinding her teeth somewhere to the left, hauling her craft back level. Maki slid smoothly back onto the lane like the surrounding disaster had no physical relationship to her whatsoever.

I looked out at the virtual starfield unfolding ahead, listened to the rolling mix of alarms, curses, stubbornness, and live humiliation in my earpiece, and had one very clear premonition. Today's session was not going to end at everyone flails once and calls it a day. Not even close.