Chương 55: 24.Electronic Warfare Course 24-2

Jess was waiting outside the classroom. The moment she saw me she drew a sharp breath.

"You actually came out alive."

"Sorry to disappoint."

"I'm not disappointed, I'm in shock." She fell into step beside me.

"Do you know what the whole class looked like when they were watching you?"

"What?"

"Like someone let a stray dog into a demonstration hall, and the dog started pointing out escape route deficiencies in the exhibit design." I thought about it.

"Sounds like I was being quite constructive." Jess nearly walked into a wall laughing.

"You were brutal though," she said.

"Aida—most people don't go at her directly."

"Because of her background?"

"No." Jess said.

"Because she has good grades, speaks steadily, and looks like the correct answer in person. The most infuriating thing about that type is—she doesn't need to push anyone down. People just believe her first." I glanced back at the classroom door. Aida was still inside, hadn't come after me, just watching through the crowd in this direction. No simple dislike in that gaze—which was actually the more inconvenient part. She didn't want me gone.

She just thought I was wrong, and she very much wanted to understand exactly where. That kind of person, once they fixate on something, is a nuisance. But also very hard to ignore. I turned back and kept walking toward the NCO Division blocks. Today's ledger: One: formally experienced how clean—and how nauseating—the air in a mixed Upper-NCO session can be. Two: formally met Aida Rosen—a woman who is the standard answer from her hairline to her punctuation.

Three: dismantled a clean tactical solution into a messier but more survivable version in theory class, and collected the collective discomfort of every white uniform in the room. Four: Aida is not useless. This is particularly annoying, because if she were just decorative, I'd have less to think about. Five: I'm beginning to understand that the most troublesome thing about military school isn't the rules themselves—it's the people who genuinely believe the rules exist for good reasons.

Wind moved through the central corridor. White walls caught the light. The Upper House towers in the distance were still spotless, as though dust had never been invented in their vicinity. Something occurred to me. Jess was the one who knew where the seams were. Harvey was the one who took broken things and made them work again. Akari was the one who waited for commands in a way that made you uneasy.

And Aida— Aida was the kind of person who, when you came back with blood on your hands, would first ask why you hadn't followed procedure. That kind is a problem on the battlefield. A problem in a unit too. But for some reason I had the persistent feeling she'd end up being more useful than I currently gave her credit for. Because the greatest value of a standard answer isn't that it's always right. It's what happens the first time it watches itself fail to save someone— That moment tends to be very instructive.

The afternoon session was scheduled in the north wing of the central academic block, under a name long enough to be its own regulation: Sensor Integration and Electronic Interference Fundamentals. In plain language, roughly: How to blind the enemy's eyes, while confirming your own brain is compliant enough. One look at the course name and I knew this wasn't going to be pleasant. The things that are truly unpleasant are usually not guns, and not running.

They're the people sitting in air-conditioned rooms, using beautiful charts to explain how the battlefield can actually be organized into data. Regrettably, the Federation has a deep affection for exactly that kind of thing. The observation classroom in the north wing was cleaner than the mixed theory room from the morning—clean enough that it looked like someone wiped it down with rubbing alcohol every day and still felt it was failing. The entire wall was a semi-transparent projection screen.

The floor had a ring of cold-blue light guides embedded in it. The seating wasn't desks and chairs—it was a row of individual operator stations, like sliding people directly into open coffins and providing each one with a keyboard. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. The air was cold, with a faint ozone smell and the dry quality specific to server rooms.

A particular kind of place—one where you're still technically alive, but the environment has already begun processing you as something that can be filed. Jess walked in and immediately said something low and unpleasant.

"I hate this kind of room." I swiped my identification ring across the operator station.

"Why?"

"Because it looks like the kind of room that would automatically classify me as noise." I considered that.

"That's fairly accurate." She gave me a look.

"You're about the same. You're just higher-risk noise." I couldn't argue with that. The operator station lit up—personal records, range scores, and the morning theory class's grouping notes all surfaced together on screen. The Federation has always been diligent about collecting people. As though archiving your breathing patterns, gait, hit rate, disciplinary record, and shoulder width in one place would help it decide more efficiently which column you were meant to die in. I glanced left.

The white-uniform side already had plenty of occupants. Mixed session again, apparently. The afternoon's psychological pressure package hadn't concluded. Then I saw her. Short gold hair—a cool gray-gold, cut clean, like every strand knew better than to waste its angle. White Upper House uniform worn with a neatness that bordered on severity. Shoulders level, collar straight. She sat at her operator station with almost no superfluous movement.

No glancing at the course outline the way others were doing, no looking around the room. She logged in, ran a very fast sweep of the main interface, closed every window she didn't need, and left one single, very clean tactical display. That display was unsettlingly clean. The way some people's rooms are too messy—they're living tired. The way some people's interfaces are too clean—they've made a habit of deleting anything without immediate use. Jess followed my line of sight and said quietly:"See her?"

"That one?"

"Evelyn Sado." She looked up at that moment, and I caught her eyes directly. Ice-blue shading into gray. No warmth, but no performed arrogance either. What was more troublesome was that it wasn't the look of someone looking down at you—it was an appraisal. The way a quality inspector on a factory line watches something slide past: first check if it's usable, then decide whether a second look is worth the time. I suddenly understood why Jess had described her as a functional frenemy.

Because this kind of person, when they look at you, isn't asking whether you're easy to get along with. They're asking whether you're worth entering into the system. She pulled her gaze back quickly, like a confirmation completed. … Wonderful. Deeply unpleasant first impression. The instructor came in.

Not the one from the morning—a tall, lean man in a black uniform with a technical instructor's coat over it, a data cable port hanging at the side of his neck, looking like someone who had spent so long sleeping in server rooms that he'd eventually become a kind of ambulatory cooling system. He stepped up to the main control station at the front, skipped the pleasantries, and pulled the tactical projection to full width. The entire wall became a ship-interior sensor map in an instant.

Heat signatures, movement vectors, IFF friendly-force identification, interference noise, communications nodes, electromagnetic pulse residue—layered on top of each other, beautiful in the way a star chart that could kill you is beautiful.

"Electronic warfare isn't pressing a few keys to make the enemy's screen go fuzzy," he began. His voice was thin, like a blade sliding across paper.

"Electronic warfare is deciding who gets to see what, who will believe what, and who dies first inside the wrong information." Good. I liked that line. At least this one wasn't using the textbook as a bedtime story.

"The system will organize the battlefield for you." He pointed at the sensor map in front of us—complex enough to make you want to swear.

"But organized isn't the same as true. What you're learning today isn't how to read data by specification. It's how not to go along with the data when it starts lying." … Oh. The Federation occasionally says something that sounds human. The first exercise was simple: distinguish friendly forces from false signals. The second added delay, heat interference, and signal overwriting. The third was where it got ugly—find the error that was too plausible inside a mass of seemingly reasonable information.

I wasn't unfamiliar with this kind of thing. Spend enough time on the wrong side of observation glass, and you learn one thing: the truly dangerous stuff doesn't hide in the noise. It hides in whatever looks most like a normal reading. Evelyn was clearly good at this too. She barely paused through the first exercise, fingers moving across the operator station fast and controlled. Not the showy kind of fast—every command looked pre-routed, clean and decisive, without a moment's hesitation.

The way she selected filter layers was elegant: strip the heat-source noise first, cross-reference friendly echoes, then use communication rhythm to eliminate anomalous overwrites. A minute later, the main display lit up with rankings. Evelyn Sado: First. Unsurprising. No cheering from the white-uniform side. Upper House students don't do that. They simply received it as a matter of course—the way people accept the sun rising from their side first.

When the second exercise began, the instructor cranked up the interference. The display turned chaotic immediately. Heat signatures drifting, IFF mislabeling, three-second local communications delay, some friendly signals briefly duplicating.

"Remember," the instructor said, "the system is most dangerous not when it fails completely—but when most of it is correct and only a small part is wrong." Right. Very Federation, that line. When something collapses entirely, people know to run. What's dangerous is partial failure—localized enough that everything keeps appearing to function. While I was working, I heard someone to my left say, very quietly:"The signal in corridor seven isn't friendly." Cold voice, steady. Evelyn.

She wasn't talking to me—she was talking to a white-uniform student beside her. That person clearly hadn't caught up yet, still staring at the friendly identification code.

"The ID matches," they said. Evelyn didn't even turn her head.

"It matches too cleanly. Real friendlies don't read this clearly under this level of interference." My hands slowed for half a beat. … Oh. Interesting. She was looking at the same thing I was. I switched my own layer over and zoomed in on the blue friendly marker in corridor seven. IFF code normal. Heat signature normal. Movement speed normal. Even the communication pulse was steady and clean. Clean like an advertisement. Which meant it didn't look real. Real things are usually a little ugly. Breathing stutters.

Stride varies. Communication rhythm gets dragged slightly by the environment. A signal too clean usually isn't a person—it's someone's way of making you believe there's a person there. I was about to flag it when the system threw up a prompt: Friendly identification confidence: 93%. Recommend maintaining access clearance. I stared at that 93%. Deeply annoying. The Federation loves packaging errors as high-confidence judgments.

That way, when people die, everyone can first review why the operator failed to follow the recommendation. I reached over and cut the access clearance on that corridor, blocking the node. The operator station immediately flashed red. Warning: Unauthorized interruption of high-confidence friendly channel. The next second, the whole classroom went quiet. The instructor looked up.

"Who cut it?" I kept my hand on the main interface and didn't bother pretending.

"Me." Jess closed her eyes behind me. Probably counting internally: right, fourth time today. Someone on the white-uniform side made a soft disapproving sound. And Evelyn finally turned her head—looked at me directly for the first time—eyes carrying not surprise but something very clear: you'd better know what you're doing.