Chương 67: Osprey

Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum January 30, 2848 When Arc met up with Abioye Taiwo in the simulator hall that evening, he brought an updated sim file, courtesy of Natalie, Iceni, and Lyra. It not only contained the data necessary to faithfully represent the Lady Ren's capabilities, but their best guess as to how Fletcher Radecki's modified Kestrel would function.

"I don't understand how you get away with that beard," Arc commented, as Abioye's fingers moved rapidly across the flat screen, setting up their session.

"Regs say we all need to be clean-shaven. I feel like I'd get busted for a couple hundred demerits by every professor who saw me, until I shaved it off."

"Ah, and there is the difference between you and I," Abioya replied, with a grin and a flash of perfect white teeth.

"You, my friend, are not the son of a duke. As I had already secured every genetic modification I could desire prior to enrolling at the academy, the merit system here has approximately as much value to me as a twenty millimeter shell does to an ant."

"So what, you just let them bust you down to negative three thousand or something, and don't care?" Arc frowned.

"They've got to do something at some point, don't they?"

"Every once in a while Commandant Marlowe calls me into her office and yells a bit," Abioya admitted.

"Then I shave, to keep her happy, and begin growing it back. I wish she'd simply let it go; those first few days it gets very scratchy."

"So much for military discipline." Abioya let his smile bleed away as he finished at the screen and turned to Arc.

"I won't be joining fleet anyway, Arc. There is a place waiting for me in my father's guard at Volans. In truth, I could have accepted a position there already, instead of coming back to make up my wasted year. But I prefer to finish what I've started, among other reasons."

"Would one of those other reasons happen to be named Ireti Ọlatẹru?" Arc asked.

"A gentleman does not discuss such things," Abioya said.

"Come along, let's get into our pods. I want to see what Radecki thinks he's going to do to you." 𝝮 Three runs later, Abioya's lip curled in disgust after he finished a long drink from his water bottle.

"These are the choices of a man who is, fundamentally, afraid," he declared.

"Without confidence, and without honor."

"The last one for certain," Arc agreed, taking another sip from his own bottle. Fighting in the sims shouldn't have been exhausting. After all, their bodies weren't actually doing much of anything at all besides sitting there, strapped in, and moving around two control sticks in between squeezes of a trigger. They didn't even get tossed against their safety harness. It is mental exhaustion, not physical, Iceni pointed out. And it doesn't help that you're doing this at the end of a full day of classes.

"Look at what he's chosen to do," Abioya said, waving his water bottle around in the air as if to emphasize his point.

"The man pilots the single most maneuverable mech in the entire imperial arsenal, and the first thing he does is choose to upgrade the armor. The armor! If I was going to lean on my father to make me a shiny new toy, I would have asked him to find me a set of whatever upgraded thrusters the fourth generation models are going to use!"

"Instead of playing to the Kestrel's strengths, he's shoring up weaknesses," Arc agreed.

"It's the same thing with the missiles. All the recordings we can find of him show that missiles are his weak point, so his solution is to just fill the air with as many of them as he can—to try to make it so that accuracy doesn't matter."

"Quantity is a quality of its own," Abioya said.

"Joseph Stalin, supposedly," Arc said.

"Not the sort of leader I'd want to be quoting." Abioya snorted.

"Do you ever miss one of those?"

"Sure, if it's a quote that's got nothing to do with military history," Arc admitted.

"I had a pretty narrow range of interests growing up. Remember, I'm the guy who didn't recognize a princess imperial when she was right in front of him." He hesitated a moment, and the smile slipped away from his face.

"Do you think I can beat him?"

"You've always put on quite a show of being confident until now," Abioya pointed out.

"He almost pulled one over on me here," Arc admitted.

"If I didn't have friends in the tech crews, and if one of them didn't just happen to inspect the right hangar... It makes me wonder what else he's up to that I don't know about."

"Something," Abioya agreed.

"But you won't ever have perfect knowledge of the enemy. All you can do is plan based on what you do know, and adapt when it happens." He gave a shrug, and set aside his water bottle.

"We can get one more match in before curfew." Arc nodded and clambered down the stairs for his pod. 𝝮 Pika passed his trial, piloting his Tyro in a careful, methodical way that saw him return to the academy with only two minutes to spare on the three hour timer.

With the Alu'kan qualified, his mech operating up to standard, and a tech crew assigned to keep it that way, there was nothing standing in the way of Arc and his friend heading out on their scheduled patrol with Christina Fortin, save for a few days of classes—and a meeting with the judge advocate.

Lieutenant Courtenay called Arc, Vijay, and Christina to a meeting in one of the conference rooms at Montalban Hall three days before Arc and Pika were due to go out on patrol, on the seventh of February—just before the weekend. The three cadets sat along one side of the long conference table, while Courtenay took a single seat on the other.

"We didn't want to pull you out of your classes," he said, once they'd all settled in.

"But as witnesses who provided testimony, you also deserve to know the outcome of Sareth Khan's court martial. The panel returned a judgement this morning, just after nine o'clock imperial standard time." He was right; it would have been smack in the middle of Arc's course on the political and military history of the Singularity.

"Sareth Kahn has been expelled from the academy and separated from imperial military service for psychological reasons," Courtenay explained.

"The panel took his emotional trauma into account, and declined to sentence him to a term of confinement, or grant him a less than honorable discharge. He will, however, never be allowed to serve again. Furthermore, the panel has levied financial penalties against him equal to the imperium's investment in his neural lace." Arc couldn't help but let out a long breath of astonishment. That was a lot of money to have to pay back.

He wasn't quite certain what he'd expected, in all honesty, and he didn't know Khan very well; but he certainly wouldn't say the man had gotten off light. He'll have no difficulty finding employment as a pilot, Iceni pointed out. He has almost three years of imperial training and his own cybernetics. Someone will take him, either a duke or a mercenary group.

"Furthermore," Courtenay went on, "the panel has entered a record of their judgement into the personnel file of both Lieutenant Commander Libby, and yourself, Cadet Iyer. It is the opinion of the majority of the panel that Sareth Khan should never have been permitted to get into that cockpit, and should have been referred for psychiatric counseling." At Arc's side, Vijay first stiffened, and then slumped in his chair.

"Thank you for telling me, sir," was all that he said. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Take this as something to learn from," Courtenay said, rising from his chair. Arc and the other two cadets scrambled to follow her lead.

"Yes, sir," Vijay said.

"Very good. You're all dismissed." Courtenay gathered up his cap and tablet, and left the conference room. After the door closed behind him, the three of them stood in awkward silence for a long moment.

"I'm sorry, Vijay," Arc said.

"I was in command; it's my responsibility." Vijay turned and looked out the windows of the conference room.

"I understand you're both going out on patrol again in a few days." Christina nodded.

"That's right." Vijay turned back to them and forced a smile.

"Well, I hope it's a lot less exciting than the last one. I'll make sure to be there to see you off." With that, he turned and slipped out the door, leaving Arc and Christina alone.

"Your friend is ready?" she asked him.

"He is," Arc promised.

"Good." Christina nodded.

"Make certain you take a look through what he's packed, before you come down to the hangars. You've been out once already, so you should have a good idea of what's actually needed and what isn't."

"I'll take care of it," Arc promised.

"Until then." Christina left the room, and after a moment, Arc followed. 𝝮 On Sunday night, two hours before curfew, Cassie dragged Arc into her dorm room.

"Where's everyone else?" he asked, looking around at the empty bunks.

"Rain took them down to the commissary," Cassie explained.

"They've got a holo-projector set up and they're showing an old twenty-eighth century drama about the first colony on Proxima Centauri. They won't be back until almost twenty-three thirty." Arc couldn't help but raise his eyebrows.

"So we have the room all to ourselves?" Cassie grinned.

"I haven't got to spend a night with you since we were in New Toledo," she said, reaching up to begin unbuttoning her cadet's shirt at the neck.

"I've missed it. And now I'm not even going to get to see you for days." Arc shrugged out of his tunic and threw it aside, without paying any particular attention to where it might end up. By the time he wrapped his arms around Cassie and found her lips with his own, she had her own shirt more than half-unbuttoned.

"Two hours isn't that much time," she breathed, while he slipped his hand into her shirt and ran it up her side, trailing his fingers across her bare skin.

"We can't take too long." The dorm mattresses were less than half the size of the beds they'd been given at the Palacio de las Orquídeas, and even less comfortable, but Arc was certain neither one of them cared all that much. Afterward, he'd intended to find his clothes and sneak back downstairs into his own room, but that didn't happen. Instead, he woke up the next morning to the impact of a pillow right in the face.

"Up and out of bed, lover-boy," Vee called across the room, while Cassie grumbled and buried her face in his shoulder. With a wince, Arc shoved the pillow over the side of the bunk-bed and down onto the floor.

"You may be excused from classes today, but the rest of us need to get moving," Rain pointed out. Arc saw that she, like Vee and C'rise, was dressed in a bathrobe and carrying a basket of shower supplies.

"Make sure you're out of the room before we get back. Cassie may not mind getting dressed in front of you, but the rest of us do."

"Sorry," Cassie mumbled, without raising her head.

"S'my fault. I kept you here." Arc leaned in to kiss her forehead.

"It's alright. I didn't want to leave, either." He got the previous day's clothing on as best he could, but when he stepped out into the corridor of the third floor, Arc felt the eyes of every woman in the dorm on him. Some were on their way to the showers, or back to their rooms, carrying baskets of soap and shampoo; others leaned in open doorward, talking while they got ready for the day. In each and every case, they stopped talking when he walked by.

He tried to keep his eyes directly ahead, fixed on the elevator, rather than engage with any of them. The worst part, of course, was that the class of 2851 wasn't really very big at all—so the women who were watching him flee Cassie's room were all people that he knew, either from having classes together, their time in Hard Burn, or even at the fencing club practices.

"Sandhurst? What are you doing up here this early in the morning?" Sloane Emonstone-Granville asked, stopping in the middle of the hall with her shower basket clutched right up against her belly.

"Looks to me like he's taking a walk of shame," Milla called, from two doors down. She had her uniform on, thankfully. The worst was Jessica, who waited by the elevator, holding the door open for him. Arc couldn't help but tense his shoulders as he walked by, half-expecting that she was going to erupt into violence right there in the corridor.

"Go take a shower," the imperial guard said, in a flat voice.

"You certainly won't get one in the jungle." 𝝮 After making his escape from the third floor, it was almost a relief to be getting off campus. Arc and Pika grabbed a quick breakfast, then carried their packs south to the gate, where they were both waved through into the rows of hangars which surrounded the tarmac. Christina was already there, as well as Vijay, Natalie and the rest of Arc's crew. All in all, over a dozen techs swarmed over the four mechs which would be heading to the south coast of the peninsula.

There were two Tyros, of course, as well as Christina's own Outrider. Arc expected that the fourth mech would round out the squad by bringing the firepower the other three lacked—either a Culverin or a Janissary. If he'd had to guess, he would have put money on a Janissary, just because it would have let them be slightly more mobile. Instead, their fourth pilot, a young woman with a white bob cut to her jawline, tinted just slightly lilac, leaned against the immense, clawed foot of a Culverin.

Arc led Pika over, and his friend immediately dropped his bag and snapped a salute.

"Cadet Fourth Class Pika, sir!" Christina stepped forward, though the effect was slightly comical with how far back she had to lean her head to look up at Pika's face.

"Your friend recommended you, cadet. I hope you understand that your performance reflects on him."

"I do, sir," Pika said, keeping his back ramrod straight.

"Very well." Christina nodded.

"Sandhurst, meet our fourth. This is Semirye de Ligne, one of my roommates." The young woman with the bob pushed herself off the foot of her mech, stepped forward, and offered Arc her hand.

"You ever screened a Culverin before?" Arc accepted the handshake.

"This will be my first time," he admitted.

"But I know the theory. Don't worry, if there's a spiked terror headed your way, I'll block it."

"Good." Semirye nodded her head, and they released each other's hands.

"Well, I said I'd see you all off," Vijay said.

"You've got a good team, and a good commander. I'm sure you won't have any problems. Take care of each other." With a wave, he turned and set off across the tarmac.

"You all know we're headed south," Christina said.

"That means the coast, but it also means a lot of jungle between here and there. Semirye and I have been there before, so just follow our lead. Pika, we'll talk more when we set up camp for the first night."

"Yes, sir." Arc could see that his friend was practically vibrating with excitement. Had he been that nervous when he left on his first patrol? Had it been that obvious to everyone else? He figured that the answer was probably yes. You may upgrade your estimation to a certainty, Iceni told him. Natalie was waiting at the bottom of the rope ladder when Arc walked over to unit seventeen.

"The arm looks good," she told him, keeping her voice low.

"Every test we can run on it says there shouldn't be any loss of motion or functionality, and it's practically rebuilt from scratch, so I don't expect any issues. But if something is off, make certain you tell me everything you can when you get back."

"Got it," Arc said.

"My plasma blades?"

"One magnetically locked to each shoulder," she assured him.

"Good. Thank you. Tell the other guys that, too," Arc said. In truth, looking up at his Tyro, he could hardly see any trace of the vicious fight it had survived when last he'd gone into the jungle. Natalie clapped him on the back.

"Just try to get back in one piece this time," she warned him, before backing away. Arc reached up to grab a rung, set his foot at the bottom of the rope ladder, and began to climb. Once he got up to the cockpit, he stowed his bag next to the standard issue emergency supplies, and then strapped himself into the ejection seat.

He swung the flat screen out in front of him, just over his lap, and watched as the ceramic plates of armor irised inward, cutting off his view of the Vidakan sky, the campus, and the other mechs.

"Give me a connection," Arc told Iceni, and a moment later his awareness bloomed. All of the older pilots were right: it came easier, quicker, every time—and he'd spent a lot of time over the winter break in the cockpit of a mech. Now, there was hardly any disorientation at all as the sensors replaced his eyes and ears. How are you doing over there, buddy? Arc sent, through Iceni, to his private chat with Pika. Great! His friend replied. This is what I've been waiting for all year.

Christina Fortin's voice crackled over the comms.

"Our designation for this patrol is Osprey," she told them.

"Semirye is Osprey Two, Sandhurst, you're three, and Pika, you're four. I want the Tyros in the middle, following me out through the city, with Osprey Two bringing up the rear. Keep your speed to eighteen klicks an hour, that's about all a Culverin can handle. Any questions?"

"No, sir," Arc answered, in chorus with the rest of the team.

"Then move out." The gates opened, and Christina's Outrider loped ahead easily, like a stalking predator. Arc leaned his Tyro forward and followed.