Chương 60: Fencing

Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum January 21, 2848 By Monday evening of the following week the last of the forty-five cadets of the class of '48 had departed from Pinnacle Station for the ISS Honorius. Accompanying them went just over a hundred and twenty fourth-year technical cadets, six professors, nine FS-3 Kestrels, a model each of all three imperial line mechs, and one AS-3 Leviathan.

The Honorius, a decommissioned cruiser which had been given to the academy for precisely this purpose, would move first from Pinnacle Station to Chel, the artificial moon which Arc had declared the ground of his upcoming duel, and from there out to the gate at L2. The cadet-crewed ship would then make an extended patrol out to the fifth planet of the system before returning to Vidako.

Along the way, the cadets would simulate mech drops on not only Chel and the fifth planet, but zero-g deployments designed to defend or assault a gate. By the time everything was said and done, if nothing went wrong or delayed them, Ireti Ọlatẹru, Bhaskar Nova Xiao-Solaris, and their classmates would return by the 22nd of May, in time to prepare for their graduation ceremonies and receive their orders for deployment.

The third year zero-g track pilots, on the other hand, would be split between a group dropped off by the Honorius on Chel and a group stationed at the top of the orbital elevator, on Pinnacle itself. A dozen or so cadets and their tech crews—including Fletcher Radecki—would spend the rest of the semester patrolling the moon and Pinnacle Station. It was these patrols which had greeted Arc, Cassie, and the other newly arrived cadets during their journey down the orbital elevator to San Teodoro, months before.

No one expected any of these cadets to actually enter combat of course—a pirate ship would have to be suicidal to operate inside a system hosting nearly two hundred imperial mechs and a still very functional cruiser, not to mention Duke Montalban's guard. The point was to get them experience serving on an Imperial warship. The departure of something like two-hundred students from the campus left the entire academy, Arc reflected, feeling somewhat hollow.

He couldn't shake the feeling that there should simply be more people, whenever he walked from one building to another on his way to classes. The effects of the senior class's departure trickled down to every group of cadets below them, changing the rhythms by which the entire academy operated. For the first half of the academic year, it had been the oldest cadets who shouldered the bulk of time patrolling in the jungles of Vidako.

Cadets like Bhaskar and Ireti had, in addition to protecting the march during Hard Burn, led groups of third-years and second years to keep Spiked Terrors away from the city. Now, that obligation fell to the class of '49. Some of them, such as Vijay Iyer, had already earned their position leading patrol groups; but now the rest were expected to step up and gain command experience, filling out their patrols with second year cadets like Christina Fortin.

In order to keep to the patrol schedule the academy demanded, it was time for the mole rats as a group, not an isolated individual, to get themselves into actual cockpits. Lieutenant Commander Libby ran a qualification run every day of the week, save for the weekends. The faster he could fill those ejection seats with warm bodies, the sooner the pressure on the second and third-year cadets would be relieved.

That meant by the time the oldest cadets had left, Arc was one of six first-years qualified to take a Tyro into the jungle. To his utter lack of surprise, the rest of the first batch was made up by Cal Madine, John Rixey, and the rest of their crew of military brats. He was certain that all of them had gotten substantial simulator time before ever getting to the academy, and a quick conversation with Rixey over breakfast one morning had confirmed it.

The last of the six was Milla Cieszyński, who was only a decent pilot but still the top shot in the class with any kind of ranged weapon—including a CO-4 mech grade laser rifle. All six of them were immediately given a patrol schedule, to which new qualifying pilots were added the moment they passed their examination. Arc, who'd already gone out on one patrol, was pushed to the bottom of the rotation so that the new pilots could get their trigger-time.

To his surprise, when he looked at the schedule, he found that he was scheduled to go out with Christina again, and he resolved to catch her after their course with Professor DeVault. DeVault had, in the meanwhile, squeezed every bit of speculation, theory, and downright guessing he could out of that initial simulation run against the Na'xir. Only after his cadets had exhausted themselves of analysis did the professor actually share the recommendations fleet command had come up with, using the same data.

"Couldn't you just have shown this to us first?" Sloane Emonstone-Granville groused. After an entire semester of War and its Theorists with the girl, Arc had come to the conclusion that she was carrying a bit of baggage. Iceni had confirmed for him that she was, indeed, one of those Emonstones—the youngest daughter of the ducal family's cadet house.

He was fairly certain that she hadn't done a thing for herself in the entire first eighteen years of her life, and now the idea of wasting time, or being inefficient—which in this case meant doing work that someone else had already done—seemed to drive her absolutely crazy.

"I could have," DeVault admitted, with a pleased smile.

"But that, Cadet, would not have been an authentic education exploration of our course material. You want to not simply be an officer—every cadet who graduates from this academy will be that. You want to be on the command track for an admiral's flag, or you wouldn't be here."

"Which means we will have a staff to crunch data and make recommendations," Sloane continued, unwilling to give up so easily.

"Perhaps," DeVault said.

"But if so, you will need to be able to evaluate their work. And you are far more likely to end up on someone else's command staff, along your route to the big chair, than not. In short, you need to know how to dive into intelligence like this and make something of it. Which you have done, for the first time, here. Get used to it." DeVault shifted his holographic display with a single motion.

"Fleet has pushed out a list of standardized loadouts for each mech chassis which are being referred to as the 'E' variants," he explained.

"As you've all learned through through experience -""You mean excruciating," one of the third years complained, and a laugh rippled through the seated cadets. Even DeVault chuckled.

"Very good. In any case, ballistics have a difficult time piercing a Na'xir carapace, and they don't appear to make substantial use of missiles in the same way that we do. The order of the day is lasers, flamethrowers, and plasma accelerators, along with bunker busters so that our Culverins can collapse those tunnels they enjoy so much. Now that we know they employ subterranean structures, we can use ground penetrating radar to see what they're doing before they spring a trap."

With another motion, he pulled up rotating images of a Culverin, Outrider, and Janissary which had all been equipped specifically to fight the Na'xir. Arc noted that, rather than a chromium war-club, the Janissary carried two plasma blade handles, magnetically attached at the thighs. Cassie would approve. There was also a snub-nosed, mech-scale gun that he hadn't seen before. DeVault grabbed the weapon and expanded it.

"This is a standalone version of the Thermic Labs mech grade flamethrower which had previously been designed to be mounted onto a hardpoint on the arm of a Janissary," he explained.

"Unfortunately, Outriders and Tyros simply don't have hardpoints positioned in the right place to swap the standard model on, so Thermic Labs kludged this together and has started turning them out. In any event, for our scenarios moving forward, both these handheld weapons and the 'E' variants will all be available to you." Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

That, at least, seemed to make everyone happy, and it appeared that DeVault had decided it was a positive not to let the class out on. Arc folded up his tablet, slipped it into his back pocket, and hopped two rows of seats to catch up to Christina before she could reach the door out of the simulation dome.

"Hey," Arc said, falling into step beside her.

"I saw we're heading out on a patrol together." The other cadet nodded.

"I requested you," she admitted.

"Like I said, you showed me that you're someone I can trust to watch my back."

"Thank you." Arc couldn't help but grin.

"You can do something else for me, actually," Fortin said, reaching out to take him by the elbow and drawing him to one side of the corridor so that the rest of the class could walk by them. They stood beneath a flier advertising positions for a xenobiology summer expedition to some sort of ruins; only two strips of paper had been ripped off the bottom.

"I'm supposed to take another mole-rat, but I don't know very many of your year well enough to make a good choice. Give me a name." The very first thing Arc wanted to do was to name Cassie—but unless she could convince Lieutenant Commander Libby to change his mind, she wasn't scheduled to test out for months yet. Iceni, he asked, who's the first one out of our crew to get a qualification test? Pika, she answered, immediately. Followed by Rain.

Vee's low grades last semester, combined with her tendency to wreck simulated mechs attempting, as she puts it, 'advanced tactical maneuvers,' have put her nearly as far down the list as Cassie.

"Pika of the Stellar Abyss ringworld," Arc said, without a moment's hesitation.

"He's my roommate." Christina Fortin frowned.

"Do you want him along because he's your friend, or because he's a good pilot?" she asked.

"I want him because he'd never in a million years leave someone behind or turn his back on us," Arc said, thinking of Sareth Khan. Christina must have caught his meaning, because she nodded.

"Alright, then. I'll add his name to my proposed squad roster. Tell him to make sure he passes his qualification test." 𝝮 That evening, after dinner, he and Cassie had their third fencing club practice. Arc wasn't completely convinced that it was worth sacrificing study time to spend two hours every Tuesday and Thursday evening in the athletic center, but in this particular instance he'd decided to take one of his father's oldest pieces of advice: 'happy wife, happy life.'

Not that he and Cassie had even thought about getting married—but the sentiment seemed to hold true. The club was run, to Arc's utter surprise, by Commandant Marlowe. When he'd seen her in gym clothes, the very first time that he and Cassie had walked into the room, he'd thought for a moment that he must be in the wrong place. Even on their third time attending, he couldn't quite get used to it.

Marlowe, who'd always appeared in a spotless and pristine uniform whenever he'd entered her office, was an entirely different person with her hair pulled back in a sweaty braid and a padded fencing jacket covering her chest. While he and Cassie stretched out next to each other, following the commandant's example, he couldn't help but shake his head.

"She was the absolute last person I thought would be running this club," he whispered.

"Then you haven't been paying attention," Vijay Iyer hissed back, from Arc's left.

"Have you seen her mech?" Arc blinked. Of course, it made sense that the commandant would have a mech parked somewhere on campus—but he'd never once caught a glimpse of it, or even heard anyone mention it. He didn't have the slightest clue what she piloted. Cassie, bent sideways with her leg extended so that she could grab her toes, gave a distinctly un-princess-like snort.

"Arc's not a mech-head, remember?" she murmured.

"Still," Vijay grumbled.

"Trust me. There's no one else you'd rather learn this stuff from." After loosening up, they each grabbed a weapon from the rack and lined up into a square of columns and rows, facing Marlowe. While the class was called the fencing club, Vijay and roughly a third of the other students grabbed weighted wooden clubs, rather than swords, and took the far left side of the formation. They began by practicing swings—or cuts, as Marlowe called them—while she modelled from the front.

A couple of picked third years that Arc didn't recognize prowled the edges of the group, stepping in to make corrections when first-years like Arc did something wrong. It wasn't at all what he'd been imagining, and while they all grabbed drinks from their water bottles after the warm-up, he mustered the nerve to ask the commandant about it.

"If you've ever seen competitive sport fencing, you know this isn't it," the older woman agreed, with a nod.

"In fact, what I'm teaching you only goes back a few decades, because before that we didn't have plasma blade technology that was practical for mech-scale weapons. The first generation imperial mechs only had hunks of sharpened alloy to use as combat knives."

"Fighting with a plasma blade isn't like any kind of historical fencing, because the weapon has a different profile," she went on.

"And we need to train your body to move in a way that's going to translate to your mech. That means we aren't going to do anything fancy. You're going to learn to cut, and to block or set aside, and you're going to drill it until it's second nature. Then, when you get into the cockpit, if you've gotten close enough to need to draw one of these weapons, you're going to know what to do without having to stop or think about it." That meant, to begin with, a lot of cutting.

The cadets were paired off; Arc would have gone with Cassie, but all of the first-years were set up with older students, to begin with, so instead he faced off against Vijay. Then, they cut, while the older students blocked.

"You're still swinging for my sword," Vijay chided Arc, ten minutes in. He'd leaned his practice club against one wall and taken a sword from the rack for this part of the exercise.

"Don't aim for that. Swing past it. You're trying to slice me in half, Arc."

"I don't want to actually hurt you," Arc admitted.

"Don't worry. You won't." Cassie, on the other hand, seemed to have no problems at all whaling on her poor, unwitting partner all evening. Arc knew that she'd already spent years training for this, and it showed. Even he could tell that she was one of the best fencers in the class, despite being a mole-rat, and eventually Commandant Marlowe had to step in and relieve her original partner. According to Cassie, that was all to the better.

"That was incredible!" she gushed, as the two of them burst out into the cool Vidakan evening. It had clearly rained while they were inside the athletic center, because the stone steps leading down from the doorway were stained a darker gray than usual, and the leaves of the overhanging trees still shed fat drops of water. Arc grinned, happy to see her happy.

Ever since Lieutenant Commander Libby had screwed her over, she'd been nursing a sort of simmering anger, and this was the first time he'd seen her truly distracted by something else. That, alone, was worth going to fencing club. He could always catch up on his reading later.

"She show you anything fancy?" he asked.

"I don't even know how to explain how good she is," Cassie said, shaking her head and taking him by the arm. They were both absolutely soaked in sweat, and a part of him half-expected her to wrinkle her nose and let go. But then again, Arc reflected, they'd spent so much time running and marching together that this was practically their normal state of affairs.

"It's like she knows precisely how far you can reach, all of the time," Cassie went on.

"And she just moves, like, the smallest amount needed to simply not be there. Even when she blocks a cut, it's just these little movements, and your blade skids by like a centimeter away from her. It's insane. I'm going to learn so much from her."

"So what was Vijay talking about?" Arc asked, as she practically pulled him south through campus.

"Like I should know something about her, or something?"

"Ask Iceni, later," Cassie said.

"Right now, I've got something to show you."

"We're not heading back to Tycho Hall?" Cassie shook her head.

"Nope. Radecki's up in orbit now, remember? That means he should have better things to worry about than us." Arc's heart skipped a beat, because he immediately understood what she was talking about. They'd held off, to keep the secret, but there was no reason to wait any longer. Together, they approached the gate through the fence into the south end of campus, where the landing fields and hangar bays were.

Iceni and Lyra used their neural lace to pass their clearances through, and the gate rumbled open on automated wheels. From there, Cassie led Arc over to a hangar that he'd never entered before. To the right of the door, the number '417' was engraved on a metal plate.

"You ready?" she turned to him and asked, with a grin and sparkling eyes. Arc took a deep breath and nodded. It was time to see the mech he was going to pilot on Chel, when it came time to face Fletcher Radecki.