Chương 65: Hangar 356

Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum January 30, 2848 When Arc stepped out into the cool drizzle which had shrouded the campus in mist, he had to take a moment to rub at his temples in an effort to soothe his headache. An hour and a half of sorting data relayed by the Honorius had been even worse than sitting through Professor LeMay's normal lectures on space physics—which were already enough to give him second thoughts about the zero-g track. If it hadn't been absolutely essential that he have a Kestrel...

Don't try to fool yourself, Iceni told him. You'd want a Kestrel anyway. You care too much about maneuverability, and you'd never be satisfied waiting for someone else to win or lose an orbital battle before you fought on the ground. Anyway, you're doing better than most of the other students in the class; you just don't like it.

"I didn't realize I signed up for an artificial intelligence to spend the rest of my life poking holes in my own illusions," Arc grumbled—but there was a smile on his face when he said it. He hunched his shoulders against the rain, and set off for Tycho Hall to get lunch before it was time to get into the simulator pods. It is in my interest that my host pilot be honest with himself, Iceni pointed out. It is statistically correlated with long term survival in a military career. There was a moment of hesitation.

Also, Lyra would be very angry with me if I allowed you to wallow.

"Lyra, or Cassie?" Arc asked. Lyra wants what Cassie will want, when she gets around to thinking about it. Arc chewed his lip for a moment.

"Iceni, are there any psychological studies on two people who both have integrated artificial intelligences keeping up a long-term relationship, and how it affects them?" He immediately thought of Esteban and Marcus. Several, though most of them don't come out of the academy, Iceni admitted. Neural lace and integrated AIs are far more common in the Singularity, of course, so most of the data comes from their systems.

The majority of the imperium's pilots are actively serving in fleet, or one of the ducal guards, at any given time, and that tends to be rather hard on relationships. That was something that Arc had deliberately tried to avoid thinking about—the idea of him being on a fleet carrier in one of the outer systems, while Cassie was probably stationed at one of the core worlds. What would it be like to spend months, or years, apart from each other?

Could he really expect that she'd still be there, by the time he got back? Would it even be fair to her to ask it? Iceni reached out to activate the electronic lock on the door into Tycho Hall, and Arc's hand reached out before the light had even switched over to green. Once he was inside, he paused in the foyer to remove his cap. Like his tunic, it was soaked by the rain, and wouldn't get enough time to dry while he ate lunch with his friends.

Still, he walked over to the elevators and ran it upstairs anyway, hanging both pieces of his uniform off his bunk before he rushed back down to the dining hall. One of the cooks had come up with the bright idea of feeding raw leatherback steaks into a meat grinder to make burger patties, and there were a dozen of them grilling behind the chow line as students moved through with their trays.

One after another, the kitchen workers slapped the leatherback burgers onto buns, adding cheese, vegetables, and sauces to the instructions of each cadet in turn. When it was Arc's chance to order, he noticed that one of the cooks had cracked an egg open and was quickly frying it.

"Can I get one of those on mine?" he asked. That held him up a moment, but his seat was waiting for him, all the same, when he slid in next to Cassie. Her burger was half eaten by the time he got settled, and he didn't interrupt her until after he'd had the chance to take a big bite and see how leatherback stacked up against vat-grown beef. The answer was, pretty well.

"I think this would be better if it was made from fish," Pika said.

"Red Sail from out in the bay, perhaps." Every human at the table regarded him skeptically.

"Blasphemy," John Rixey said, before he wiped a smear of barbecue sauce away from his chin.

"Fish burgers?" Sloane Emonstone-Granville said, making a face. It was the same sort of face Arc had seen her making a lot during Hard Burn, especially when she was forced to wrestle other sweaty cadets on the ground.

"I think that might be cultural appropriation," Cal Madine said, completely stone-faced, and everyone stopped to stare at him for a long moment.

"Was that actually a joke?" Vee asked, leaning across the table.

"Madine, do you have a sense of humor?"

"Of course I have a sense of humor," Cal grumbled, and at that, everyone laughed—everyone except for him. Ever since the first simulation against the Na'xir, Cal and his friends had begun making a habit of sitting with Arc and Cassie's group. Not every meal, but often enough that it was no longer unexpected, or quite so strange. At first, Arc hadn't been certain what to think. But simply existing in their dorm room together didn't feel quite so uncomfortable anymore.

"So," Arc said, once he'd washed his bite of burger down, "who's on your list today, Cassie?" Cassie held up her finger and took a moment to swallow.

"McCarthy," she said.

"The kid who fell in the latrine during Hard Burn?" Vee asked.

"That's the one," Cassie confirmed. Over the week since she'd started her plan, while he was otherwise occupied testifying at a court martial, she'd beat a different cadet every day. In the meantime, Lieutenant Commander Libby had continued running his top ranked pilots—other than Cassie—through the qualifications test, sending each out of the city and down to the quarry in turn.

"I would have thought Libby would get the point by now," Rain said.

"He has," C'rise assured them.

"I can feel his annoyance at the end of every session, and it's only getting worse each time. He has a surprisingly disciplined mind, however, and I can't tell you what he'll actually do."

"Huh. Who would have thought that guy would practice meditation," Vee said, with a shrug. The motion set her feathered crest ruffling, and Arc half-expected that was the reason she'd done it. Ever since the waxy buildup around her pin-feathers had fallen away, and she'd started to look like when they'd first met her again, she'd taken every opportunity to display her plumage to best effect.

"It may not matter what he thinks if he has orders," Cal Madine pointed out.

"Princes and princesses don't get sent to the front lines. Your brother isn't fighting the Na'xir, is he?" he asked Cassie.

"No." She shook her head, at Arc's side, and the motion bumped their shoulders together.

"But I'm not asking to go throw myself at a hive on Ha'veth," she went on.

"I'm just trying to get into a real cockpit, and into the jungle. They let my cousin do that."

"You're cousin's the son of a duchess, not the emperor," Sloane pointed out.

"There's levels here."

"He's the son of a prince," Cassie shot back.

"Prince Caelum's the older brother, and he came pretty close to winning the election. If a few senators had flipped, Bhaskar would be the son of the emperor, and I'd have grown up in La Cité des Étoiles. Hell, there's nothing stopping him from running in the next election." Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"There's nothing stopping him, but he wouldn't be anyone's favorite to win," Sloane pressed.

"That would be either your brother, or his older sister. And you don't see either Orion or Cressida Xiao-Solaris riding around a mech fighting giant lizards." At Cassie's glare, she held her hands up in signal of surrender.

"I'm not saying that I agree with them," Sloane said.

"I'm just saying there's a reason for it. I'm the youngest daughter of a cadet branch of the Emonstones. No one cares who I marry, or whether I get myself blown up. If you get killed, a lot of people care, and a lot of questions would be asked of the academy."

"Some of those people are right here at this table," Arc pointed out, using the last bit of bun to wipe sauce from his plate. Then, he popped it into his mouth.

"It just pisses me off," Cassie grumbled.

"They always say they aren't going to give me any special treatment, and then they do something like this."

"By the way," Pika said, "I've gotten responses from those mining corporations, Arc. I think I have a pretty good idea of which site we should pick."

"Good," Arc said.

"We can meet up in the war-room and look what you've got over tonight, and then you can send a message to Radecki's second."

"After dinner?" Cassie asked, looking around the table to make eye contact with each of their friends in turn, and receiving a nod in confirmation.

"I'm glad to see you're putting an appropriate amount of care into planning this," Cal Madine said.

"Though I still think it's idiotic. Commanders shouldn't get into duels."

"Lü Bu at the north gate of Chang'an," Arc replied.

"Harold Godwinson at Hastings," Madine argued.

"Richard the third at Bosworth field."

"No," Cassie declared, standing up and clapping Arc on the back.

"We are not just going to sit here while the two of you throw the names of ancient battles at each other to prove a point."

"I can keep going," Arc protested.

"At the Battle of the Granicus, Alexander—Mmph!" To his surprise, Cassie leaned down, took him by the chin, and kissed him thoroughly. He kept expecting her to stop and break away, but she kept going, and he found himself reaching out to wrap his arms around her waist. When she was finally finished, he found that he needed to take a deep breath. Vee cackled.

"That's one way to shut him up. The next time Cal gets going, maybe you should try that, Sloane." Arc glanced at the other cadet, and found that her face had turned bright red. Without a word, Sloane Emonstone-Granville stood, picked up her tray, and carried it over to the garbage.

"And with that," Pika declared, "I believe it is time for us to get to the simulators." All around their end of the table, everyone got up and began to clear their places.

"Which reminds me," Cassie said, "Lyra told me that she and Iceni have finished prepping the sim profile for your next practice session with Abioye. They had to apply for clearance through Chief Jastrow, and that went all the way up to Rear Admiral Townshend, which is why it took so long."

"Yeah," Arc agreed, waiting for his turn to dump his tray.

"It's all because of that little piece of tech mounted on the right arm." He deliberately avoided saying 'plasma shield generator' out loud. It wasn't that he didn't trust Cal, Sloane, and John—but there were a lot of other people around in the dining hall. Fletcher Radecki and his cronies in the media had already shown no compunction about buying information on Arc and Cassie's stay in New Toledo; now, Arc's life might very well rest on what they could keep secret before the beginning of the duel.

The entire dining hall was emptying out behind them, and Arc reached out to hold Cassie's hand as their group shuffled out through the foyer and then along the paved paths which snaked through campus.

"Do you think she actually likes him?" Arc leaned in to whisper, nodding his head toward where Sloane, John Rixey, and Cal walked in a clump.

"You saw her blush, same as I did," Cassie murmured back, with a grin. Arc shook his head.

"I just can't imagine Cal with anyone. He's so -""Stiff?" Cassie finished.

"Yeah. Not my taste. But hey, more power to her if she knows what she wants."

"Arc! Cassie! Wait!" Arc turned at the shout, and both he and Cassie slowed their steps. Pika, Rain, Vee and C'rise held up for them, as well, while Cal's group kept on going. Natalie Ramírez, with Bill Tremblay and Dan Moore on her heels, came running up, faces flushed and panting. Several tendrils of Natalie's dark, curly hair had escaped her bun, and now formed a sort of frizzy-halo around her head.

"What's wrong?" he asked them.

"Was there a problem in the fuel lines again?" Their first attempted test of Lady Ren's thrusters, three days earlier, had come to an early end when they found that one of the fuel lines had been improperly secured at the factory, and came loose the moment it was under pressure. They'd had to get the mech back into the hangar to clean the entire thruster assembly out and re-attach the fuel line—properly, this time.

It was a visceral lesson in just how important it was to shake down a new piece of equipment before relying on it in a combat situation: Arc could still feel the moment of panic when he'd been riding plumes of fire, then felt the fuel pressure give, and watched his readout drop as fast as a piece of lead thrown into water.

"No, that's fine," Natalie gasped, as everyone gathered around her and the other techs.

"We've got her all ready for you to take her out again, and clearance to use a testing field on Saturday morning. No, we came because Bill got asked to take a maintenance run through hangar three fifty-six."

"Alright." Arc couldn't help but frown as he looked over at Bill. If that number should have meant something to him, he had no idea what.

"When a mech's being stored for a while, but not actually mothballed, someone's got to go through and make sure all the hangar systems are working," Bill Tremblay explained.

"They have someone make the rounds once a week, right? And you can get merits for it, because it's extra duty. Anyway, it's easy work, and we always do it in groups. So I'm just going from one hangar to the next with Diane -""Which is the real reason he does it, because she's cute and he gets to walk with her," Dan Moore broke in.

"Shut up Dan, that isn't the point," Natalie snapped.

"Go on, Bill. Them 'em what you found."" Kestrel unit eighty-eight," Tremblay said. Cassie and Arc exchanged glances, but it was Vee who put it together.

"That's Radecki's mech," she hissed, leaning forward and taking a moment to look around and make sure that no one was listening to them.

"I've watched enough footage to know that number by heart. It should be up on Chel with him. What's it doing down here?"

"That's what I thought," Natalie said.

"All the other Kestrels went up with the Honor. It should have been loaded onto the space elevator and taken up to Pinnacle Station weeks ago."

"We know he's actually up there, don't we?" Arc asked.

"Iceni -" All Academy records confirm that Cadet Second Class Fletcher Radecki is stationed on Chel, the AI said. From the way Cassie, Vee, and Pika all exchanged glances with him, their own AIs must have confirmed the same thing.

"So what's he piloting up there?" Rain asked.

"If his Kestrel's down here."

"I don't know," Natalie said.

"That's why we came running to tell you as soon as Bill said something to me. It means something, and I figured you should know as soon as we could find you." Arc felt a heavy stone settle low in his stomach.

"Cassie," he asked, "do you think a senator could get a custom-built mech for his son?"

"Depends on the senator," Cassie said, after thinking it over for a moment.

"The junior senator from some out-world, during their first term?" She shook her head.

"No. But someone who's been in the senate for decades? Someone with a seat on a few powerful committees, personal wealth, and a lot of political connections? Yeah, probably."

"Would winter break be enough time to do it?" Arc asked.

"Not something completely custom, built from start to finish," Natalie answered.

"There just wouldn't be time. But they wouldn't have to start from scratch, would they? Get themselves a stock chassis and swap out a few components for upgrades—that doesn't take long at all. A couple weeks, maybe, depending on how much trouble they have sourcing parts. And assuming they've got a decent tech crew."

"We are making assumptions," Pika pointed out.

"For all we know, there was something wrong with his usual mech, and he took a different one up to Chel."

"We can't hope for the best-case scenario," Arc said, shaking his head.

"I need to assume the absolute worst, and plan for it. If I get up there and he's in a stock Kestrel, fine. But if I show up and he blindsides me with some kind of souped up mech, it's going to be a disaster."

"So what do we do, boss?" Natalie asked.

"His tech crew will be up there with him, won't they?" Arc asked, after thinking for a moment. Which meant there was no chance of pinning any of them down.

"You know exactly who would be able to tell us," Cassie said.

"Chief Jastrow. Everything that comes in or out of this academy has to go through him. He won't want to say anything, though. He's already skirting the line helping us get Lady Ren ready."

"Then we give him plausible deniability," Arc said.

"And I know just how we're going to do it." He turned to look at C'rise.

"After we're done in the sims, you and I are going to take a walk down to the hangars."