10. Washout

Academy Hill, Vidako
Imperium Stellarum
August, 2847

To Arc’s surprise, Cadet Second Class Iyer stayed until he was settled on a cot in the infirmary, sipping from a bottle of some kind of juice. Heat exhaustion and dehydration were, from the bored expression on the face of the corpsman who’d seen him, everyday occurrences at the academy.

“You need to be a bit smarter about pacing yourself,” Iyer said, pulling a chair over next to the cot and taking a seat. It was, Arc realized, the closest thing to friendly he’d gotten from an upperclassman since he’d arrived. “Vidako is a warm world, and we’re on the equator. You’re not used to the heat. You need to drink as much as you can, and take advantage of any chance to rest Lieutenant Kekoa gives you.”

Arc frowned. “I need those merits, though.”

Iyer was quiet a moment, then sighed and leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. “You’re from Zurah V, right?”

“How’d you know?” Arc nodded, and then flushed when he realized that he hadn’t been addressing the older cadet appropriately. Something about Iyer’s easy manner just encouraged a lack of formality, and it was difficult to put his finger on why. “Sir.”

Iyer waved a hand dismissively. “There’s not all that many pilot cadets in each new class,” he pointed out. “You think we don’t talk about who’s coming from our home systems?”

“You’re from Zurah, too?” Arc sat up from the thin pillow which the corpsman had used to cushion his back.

“Zurah IV,” Iyer said. “I have to admit, the first time I ever got over to Avataran Shahar was when I made my first trip to the academy. Before that, I’d never been offworld. But there isn’t enough traffic from Sargasso to the gate, so it’s always a ship to the spaceport on Zurah V, and then I catch a ride from there out to L2.”

“Well, I’ve never been to Sargasso,” Arc admitted. He couldn’t help but grin at the thought. “Can you feel it? I mean, is it true the city moves when the waves come in?”

Iyer chuckled. “You only really notice when a storm blows through,” he said. “At least, once you’ve gotten your sea legs. I can always tell a tourist by the way they walk. But the artificial reefs break up the worst of the waves, so it really isn’t as bad as you might be imagining. But Sargasso City’s where I first saw a mech.”

“I didn’t think mechs would be safe on the platforms,” Arc remarked. He wasn’t an expert on Zurah IV’s floating cities by any means, even if he did live in the same system, but he was fairly certain that none of the individually linked pieces were more than a square kilometer in size.

“They can support houses, hospitals, and thousands of people just fine,” Iyer said. “So it would be safer than you might expect. But actually, it was Alu’kan industrial mechs going down to set up an oil well. There were half a dozen of them, and someone must have decided that for safety they were going to take along one Riptide, as an escort.”

Arc could feel his own eyes getting wide, and he didn’t even try to stop it. “Those things are supposed to be enormous.”

“They are. Even bigger than a Leviathan,” Iyer confirmed. “I must have been about six standard years old, and I can remember climbing up on the seawall with my friends to get a better look. I’m surprised none of us fell off. But I won’t ever forget the sight. Not the sort of thing you’ll see here.”

“They could train in the bay though, couldn’t they?” Arc pointed out.

“They could, but there isn’t much of a point off one of the ringworlds,” Iyer explained. “They’re just too specialized for fleet to put much of an effort into training pilots who’re only going to operate underwater. Anyway—trust me when I tell you that there’s going to be a lot more, and a lot better, opportunities for you to earn merits than killing yourself on an obstacle course.”

It was done so neatly that Arc couldn’t help but be both surprised, and impressed. Iyer hadn’t ignored what he’d said; instead, with only a brief conversation about their homes, he’d somehow gotten Arc to relax. Even though he saw what was being done, he couldn’t bring himself to be upset. “I don’t know how long I can keep this up,” Arc admitted. It wasn’t something he’d said out loud to anyone—and only allowed himself to contemplate when he crawled into his bunk each night.

“Everyone else in my dorm room only needs three or four hours of sleep a night,” he explained, once it became clear that Iyer was settled in to listen, and that the older cadet wouldn’t interrupt. “They roll out of their bunks in the morning like it’s nothing, while all I can do is drag myself along. I’m tired all the time. I feel like I can’t even think straight.”

“And you figure the right genetic retrovirus will fix that right up for you,” Iyer said. “You’re not wrong, cadet. But a thousand merits is a long ways off. A pat on the back for five or ten because you blew yourself out on the track isn’t going to get you there any sooner. What you got from Lieutenant Kekoa today? That’s only one percent of what you need.”

The kind of bleak despair that Arc hadn’t felt since the days just after his sister had died welled up inside him. Iyer was right—even if he earned ten merits a day, every day, it would be more than half the school year before he could afford the advantage that Delvan Beck and Cal Madine had started with. Perfect grades could knock off as much as a quarter of that, but no matter how he thought about it, Arc was going to have to get through the entire first semester as he was.

“I don’t know if I can make it,” he confessed. “When I think about being this tired for not just days, but months? I don’t know how anyone survives.”

“It eases up after Hard Burn,” Iyer told him. “Those first six weeks are really, really hard. I’m not going to tell you otherwise. But everyone who’s an upperclassman right now has made it through, Sandhurst. We’ve all been where you are right now. And we survived.”

“How?” Arc was embarrassed at how much it sounded like he was begging for something.

“One day at a time,” Iyer said. “Just do the next thing. They tell you to run a course, run the course. It’s time to wake up, wake up and make your bed. Do the next thing, and don’t think about what comes after. As long as you can keep doing that, I promise you, you will make it through.”

Arc nodded, but it was difficult to take much comfort from that. It didn’t feel like the older cadet had actually offered him any solutions.

“One more thing.” Iyer stood up from the chair. “Don’t get Blake Van Camp’s attention.”

“Sir?” Arc looked up and frowned.

Iyer lowered his voice, and glanced around to make certain that none of the orderlies or patients were close enough to hear their conversation. “He’s not a good person, Sandhurst. He’s mean—like a dog that’s been kicked too much. He won’t start trouble with anyone who outranks him, but helping Lieutenant Kekoa gives him an excuse. He will run you—or anyone else he can—into the ground, and he’ll say it’s because you can’t hack it. Stay away from him.”

“I’ll try, sir,” Arc said. But as he watched Cadet Second Class Iyer walk away, he couldn’t help remembering how Van Camp had been embarrassed by Cassie, in front of half the incoming class; how he’d obviously been forced to apologize to her; and how he’d taken the first opportunity to shove Arc out of the way.

𝝮

Do the next thing.

It was simple advice, but fiendishly difficult to put into practice, particularly when one was sunk deep into their own private pit of misery. As the days passed, Arc had no time, and no energy, to devote to anything except somehow surviving each fresh new torture Lieutenant Kekoa subjected them to.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There was the obstacle course, a perennial favorite; marching, jogging, sprints, and crawling beneath strung wire meant to represent mono-filaments capable of slicing a man’s finger off before he’d even realized he’d touched it. Arc bumped up against the stuff enough times that he was grateful the academy only used practice wire, instead of the real thing, or he’d have been horrifically maimed.

The only relief he found from the unending, nearly unendurable pressure, came in two forms. The first was, of course, the moment that Arc was finally able to put his head down on his pillow at the end of each day. He’d never fallen asleep so quickly or so easily, and he slept through every night until the moment the alarms rang out, from utter exhaustion. They’d all bowed to Cal Madine’s wisdom, eventually, and set their own tablets to the same time.

If sleep was a physical necessity, the three brief meals clustered around the end of their table in the mess hall were just as vital psychologically. Stolen moments and snatched conversations in between shovelling food into his mouth were the only bright spots of Arc’s day, and he couldn’t imagine surviving Hard Burn without his friends.