Chương 36: October Days

Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum October 6, 2847"Are you sure you want to do this?" Cassie's voice came through the speakers in the simulator pod with the slightest bit of crackle.

"I've been running simulations for years, Arc."

"I'm certain," he said, as he looked over the icons which displayed the status of his Tyro's systems. The wireframe was green, the batteries read 99% charge, and his shoulder-mounted autocannons had six-hundred rounds each. The CO-4 Mech Grade Laser Rifle was a solid, comforting weight in the Tyro's hands, but he frowned when he noticed one final weapon system, one he hadn't ever used before, displayed.

"IMT Plasma Blade," he muttered. Vijay Iyer's voice crackled over the speakers.

"Cadet Sabran-Solaris requested one of those for each of you, and I decided that it wouldn't hurt to approve," he explained.

"Though if you want to learn how to use one, Sandhurst, you should really join the fencing club. Anyway, I didn't wake up early on a Sunday to sit here while the two of you waste time. We've only got a two-hour block before someone else has the next time slot, so get moving. I'm setting you both up in the jungle, since that's where we're going to be patrolling. Show me what you can do, kids." Around the Tyro, the simulation shimmered.

Wide, sweeping plains of waving grass faded out of existence, to be replaced by the thick trunks of native Vidakan trees, growing up out of the soil and spreading their boughs overhead into a tight canopy. The ground to Arc's left fell away into a ravine, through which a river tumbled. A choking mass of death root, its red, bladed flowers the brightest thing in the jungle, spilled down over the edge of the ravine, dangling its roots into the water.

All the sounds of the jungle surrounded him: the buzzing of zombie-flies, the cry of native birds, the rushing of the water over stones, all the thousand noises of a vast tapestry of life.

"I'm starting you two-hundred meters apart," Iyer said.

"I've thrown in a few tree cats, but no spiked terrors yet. I'll save those for the third or fourth run. Begin." Sensors, Arc thought to Iceni. Find her for me, while I get us moving. I'll see what I can do, the AI replied. I have audio, visual, infrared, and radar, though the foliage will interfere with that. If Cadet Iyer had given us a larger playing field, this would be very difficult.

Arc turned the Tyro away from the ravine: he didn't want to risk a fall while climbing down, even if it might be used to give him cover. It might have been different if he had thrusters—and if he'd any training or experience in using them—but he didn't. Instead, he kept the barrel of the CO-4 Laser Rifle up, cradled in both of the mech's hands, while he slowly advanced through the thick jungle growth, bearing slightly to the right. I've got something, Iceni said. Coming in fast from ten-o-clock.

Arc began the turn back to his left just in time to eat a spray of autocannon rounds, marked by bright tracer fire, straight into his mech's chest. The impact rocked his Tyro backward, throwing his balance off, and it was all he could do to keep from falling by releasing the barrel of his rifle with the mech's left hand, and grabbing onto the trunk of a nearby tree, which splintered beneath the mechanical, grasping fingers.

While he was occupied with not falling, two brilliant green lasers snapped out of the jungle, flickering into existence for only a single, frozen moment of time. One scoured a line of melted ceramic along his left arm, but the other missed entirely, burning through twenty-meters of thick jungle at once. Iceni painted Cassie's mech in bright, vibrant red, but she was nearly entirely concealed by the jungle and already moving.

Arc brought his rifle around and snapped a shot off without even waiting for his targeting reticule to change color. The higher-powered beam was half a shade between blue and green, the sort of brilliant cerulean one saw in advertisements for tropical resorts on old Terra. He couldn't even tell whether he'd hit or not, and Cassie was already gone. Arc let go of the broken tree trunk and slowly turned the mech, trying to keep her from getting around behind him as he backed up.

The wire-frame damage indicator pulsed between green and yellow at his mech's left arm and torso.

"Where is she?" he asked Iceni, and with a thought toggled to infrared sensors, hoping to catch the hot barrels of her autocannons. I don't know, his AI said, clearly frustrated. It's like she dropped off my radar entirely. But that can't –"The ravine," Arc realized. He had just enough time to formulate the thought before a beam of cerulean light lashed out, perhaps two meters above the ground, from where Cassie was using the river as a sort of impromptu trench and firing position.

The heavier laser rifle, more powerful than any of their shoulder mounted guns, melted through the ceramic plates which protected his mech's ankle, and then the graphene-fiber artificial muscles which allowed the foot to both move, and to support the Tyro's weight. This time, Arc wasn't able to keep his mech upright. It crashed onto the jungle floor, tearing through half a dozen low-hanging branches and vines as it went down. In the wireframe damage readout, the white leg of his mech pulsed yellow.

If he could roll the mech over, onto its hands and knees, Arc realized that he might still be able to get it up again. He'd lost the rifle in the fall, but with both hands still functional there was a chance. Then, a shadow fell over his sensor feed, revealing Cassie's Tyro, looming over Arc's fallen mech with an ignited plasma blade.

"My win. One to zero," Cassie said, and plunged the glowing blade down directly into his simulated cockpit. 𝝮 The rest of the morning went by in much the same way, with Cassie ripping Arc's mech to pieces in a variety of brutal and inventive assaults. The problem wasn't so much that he couldn't see what she was doing, or that her tactics were particularly impressive, but that she was just so much better at moving her mech than he was. Those years of practice before ever coming to the academy were showing.

It was as if she'd been running with weights on for years, and now that she'd been given her neural lace, those weights had finally come off. Arc, on the other hand, continued to be awkward and hesitant as a pilot. He wasn't a bad shot, when he had time to aim, even without the targeting computers. He felt like he had a good eye for terrain, and how it might be used—in any event, he always understood how Cassie was using it to beat him, even when he couldn't keep up.

In fact, if he'd been quicker, more natural at moving the mech, he'd seen several opportunities over the course of the morning to turn things around on her. Because Cassie had, Arc came to realize, a pattern. A style might be a better way of putting it. She liked to get in close. She wanted to finish things with a plasma blade, and so she was always trying to create an opportunity to catch him off guard, so that she could close distance without losing her mech in the process.

Once she did get in close, it was all over. She'd carved off his mech's arm, leg, or head enough times over the course of one morning to make that particularly clear. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. But in spite of how utterly aggravating it was to fight her, he was learning. It was hard to see in the moment, when she could run rings around him without any apparent difficulty, but when Monday afternoon came, Lieutenant Commander Libby noticed.

"Someone approve you to put in extra simulator time, Sandhurst?" Libby asked. He was waiting for Arc just outside the simulator pod at the end of the class.

"Cadet Iyer, sir," Arc explained, as he unbuckled from the pilot's chair.

"He wants to take me on his patrol at the end of the month, sir. I spent two hours down here with Cadet Sabran-Solaris over the weekend." Libby considered him for a long moment and nodded.

"Good work, cadet. I hope you appreciate that Cadet Iyer is giving you an opportunity, and I hope that you take full advantage of it."

"I will, sir," Arc assured him. As an upperclassman who'd tested out to pilot both the Tyro and a Janissary, Vijay Iyer was approved to sign up for simulator time without needing an instructor's permission—and there was no regulation against him extending the privilege to underclassmen. Open simulators weren't often available, so they took the times they could get—which meant early mornings, and late in the evening.

Once again, Arc began to feel the familiar exhaustion creeping up on him, more slowly than during Hard Burn, but just as miserable. He agonized, pointlessly, over whether to spend merits he didn't have on a Hyper Efficient Brain Flush genetic retrovirus. Commandant Marlowe had approved both him and Cassie for a hundred merits, as compensation for their trip to Duke Montalban's palace in New Toledo.

It was the equivalent of acing two academic courses, but it still left Arc just shy of three hundred merits, and he needed a thousand, no matter what he chose. There was simply no way to make up that gap in the time he had. So, he worked, perhaps harder than he ever had before in his life. Any possible time that Iyer could get him in the simulators, Arc took. If Cassie couldn't be there, he fought Pika, or Rain, or Vee. If none of them could make it, Vijay sent him against simulated spiked terrors.

And sometimes, the older cadet even got into a simulator himself. Those sessions were somehow both the best, and the worst. On the one hand, Arc had never felt so thoroughly outclassed at anything in his entire life. Vijay might not have had as many total hours in a simulator as Cassie did, but he had two years more experience in using his neural lace implant and AI. He shattered Arc's armor with blows from that massive, chromium-cobalt-nickel alloy war-club.

He fried Arc's electronic systems with precise blasts from an over the shoulder plasma accelerator. He lit Arc's Tyro up from every conceivable direction and angle, from close and long range, from ambush and charge alike. Arc got very, very used to the sight of his damage readout blinking red. When he wasn't in the simulator, he was in classes.

He wrote an essay for Professor DeVault analyzing Admiral Nakagami's assault on the Singularity Control Ship, Leyding; barely passed Doctor Vogel's exam on indigenous Vidakan ecology; and hit his head against astrophysics math until he thought numbers might bleed out of his eyes. In between, he and Cassie stole moments together where and when they could. There was little privacy on campus—especially with Jessica Morrow a constant presence.

The imperial guard was slippery as a shadow, and you'd never know she was around until the moment, Arc found, that they tried to slip into either of their dorm rooms without any roommates present. Then, Jessica appeared as if summoned from a magic lamp. On the rare weekend days when it didn't rain, they spread a blanket out on the grass between the paved campus paths, beneath the shade of black or brown leaves.

It was on one of those days, during the last week in October, that Arc said what he'd been thinking ever since the first time Cassie had trashed him in the simulators. He was lying on his back, and she was stretched perpendicular to him, with her head resting on his stomach. A month's growth of black fuzz on her scalp looked like a shadow sketching her hairline.

"I don't understand why Vijay's taking me, and not you," Arc said, while he ran his fingers through Cassie's very short, very soft hair.

"I do," she said, her voice sleepy and muddled.

"Keep doing that. For one thing, he doesn't want to be the guy who gets a princess killed or wounded in the jungle. And for the other, you two come from the same system. Zurah boys stick together, right? Like you said."

"You're so much better than I am, though," he said.

"I honestly don't feel like I'll ever catch up. If I was picking someone from our year to watch my back out there, it'd be you every time."

"You might be a bit biased," Cassie pointed out.

"But that's sweet, anyway. But look, Arc, you shouldn't be trying to catch up with me. You should just focus on being the best pilot you can be."

"I just feel like I'm never quick enough," he admitted.

"Like everyone I match up against is a step ahead of me." Cassie was silent for a moment.

"Slow is fast," she said, finally.

"What?"

"Stop trying to do things quickly," she told him.

"Slow down and focus on doing them right. Take your time. Stay calm. You end up wasting more time with a sloppy shot, or tripping over a boulder, or whatever, than if you'd just taken your time in the first place. Slow is fast."

"I'll try it," he said.

"But I still wish you were coming with us."

"Me too," Cassie admitted, and rolled off his belly, so that she was supporting herself with one arm and looking down at his face. Arc let his hand, his arm, fall away and settle onto her arm.

"Are you afraid?" she asked.

"Of ending up like Van Camp?" he replied.

"Spending the next year getting a new leg grown and rehabbing it?"

"Yeah. Or not coming back." Cassie looked down into his eyes from above, and beyond her the leaves rustled in the wind beneath two suns. Arc thought about it, really thought about it for a moment.

"I'd rather be going out there in a mech than on foot again," he said after a moment.

"At least this time if one of those monsters comes at us, I won't be completely defenseless. I'm more afraid I'm going to mess up somehow—that I'm going to wash out and never get up into space."

"If you were going to wash out, it would have happened by now," Cassie murmured.

"Anyway, I won't let you. But you need to promise me you're coming back in one piece." Arc nodded, but she interrupted him.

"No, out loud," she insisted.

"I want you to say it."

"I promise," Arc said.

"I'll be back."

"Good." She leaned down to kiss him. 𝝮 The first-year cadets were supposed to test out on a Tyro by the end of the first term, in December, before everyone began to leave campus for the break. Arc wasn't certain what proportion of imperial citizens actually followed the Church of Christ the Universal Redeemer: certainly not a majority, but perhaps a plurality.

In any case, the traditional academic calendar dated back centuries to universities—some of which still existed on Terra—that had followed the same traditions since the 19th century, or earlier. Arc stepped out onto the tarmac at the south end of campus on the twenty-seventh of October, because Vijay Iyer's patrol was due to leave on the thirtieth, and there needed to be time to make a change in the event Arc didn't qualify.

He wore his everyday cadet's uniform, because if all went well he wouldn't be in the cockpit for more than a few hours, never mind going to orbit. The Tyro that was waiting for him needed a new paint job: even the number '17' stenciled to its upper left torso in white paint was chipped and dull. But that wasn't important: it had a full load of batteries, live ammunition, and a rifle waiting on one of the wheeled, powered moveable weapon racks which were used to hold mech weapons when they weren't in use.

Lieutenant Commander Libby waited, halfway between the enormous feet of the mech, with one hand on the rung of the rope ladder which hung from its cockpit. Chief Jastrow stood next to him, along with half a dozen technical students, including Natalie Ramírez, who gave him a broad grin and a thumbs-up signal when the instructors weren't looking her way.

"My kids have been going over it since we brought it out of storage two days ago," Jastrow said, once Arc was within conversational distance.

"Hasn't been used since last year, otherwise. If you qualify, unit seventeen will be yours until you test into another mech." Arc looked up, up at the enormous chassis that rose above them, and nodded.

"The test is simple," Libby explained.

"I've marked three waypoints with buoys that will light up on your sensors. You maneuver the mech south until you're outside of the city, to the first waypoint, and you shoot the designated targets. Move to the next waypoint, do the same thing, and at the end, bring it back here and walk your mech into a hangar. You have three standard hours to complete the trial and get back, with a minimum sixty percent hit rate on those targets. There'll be a Saker following you in the air, in case of emergency. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Arc said. He reached out and put a hand on the ladder.

"Get on up there," Lieutenant Commander Libby said.

"And whatever you do, try not to fall and break your back on the tarmac." He shoved a pilot's helmet into Arc's chest. Arc pulled it over his head, settled it into place, and began to climb the ladder.