15. The Lake

Jungle southeast of San Teodoro, Vidako
Imperium Stellarum
September 12, 2847

By the time they’d cleared the camp site by the lake, there was plenty of freshly chopped wood and cleared brush to burn, and soon half a dozen large camp fires lit the jungle evening. The cadets who weren’t occupied in standing guard as sentries, maintaining the vehicles, or cooking gathered around the fires to eat their meals.

Arc had never been camping before. The mulberry groves on Zurah V weren’t meant for recreation; they were home to the moths that produced silk for the mills. No one was going to let a few teenagers go out and hack down branches to burn, and the fear of forest fires was pounded into the head of every child who grew up in Avataran Shahar.

As a result, he had, at first, felt distinctly uneasy with the idea of deliberately burning wood, right in the middle of a jungle. But when Arc saw how much work it took to get the green wood to catch—and how, even once the alien branches were burning well, they popped and sizzled as moisture ran out of the wood into the fire—he realized that there was about as much chance of accidentally starting a forest fire here as there was of him knocking a Tyro over by bumping into it.

Once he accepted that, Arc was able to enjoy parts of the experience. There was something about the flickering light of a natural fire, the way it cast the faces of his friends with a warm orange glow, picking out the shapes turned toward the fire pit, while casting everything outside that circle of light into even darker shadow, that made him feel closer to them. Cassie sat on one side of him, Vee on the other, with Rain and Pika across the flames, as they ate their evening meal.

Rations were good enough for a quick lunch. They filled your belly, and if you weren’t too picky some almost tasted good. But Arc was grateful that the grav-trucks had brought actual food, as well. There might come a day when he was forced to live for two weeks on fleet rations alone, but he hoped to put it off as long as possible. Surrounded by his friends, he bent over a bowl of stew, and tried to decide what animal the meat came from.

“It’s definitely not fish,” Vee said, and Pika nodded. The Torean was sitting close enough on Arc’s right side that their hips touched, and the delicate feathers of her head crest occasionally brushed against his ear, tickling his skin.

“What’s the name of those big herbivores?” Arc asked. “The ones the spiked terrors eat?” Doctor Vogel hadn’t spent nearly as long lecturing them about indigenous fauna that she didn’t consider a threat.

“Leatherbacks,” Cassie answered, scraping her spoon around the inside of her bowl to get at the last bits of her stew. “But this isn’t it. I had some with the commandant, and it tastes different.”

“It’s vat grown,” Cadet Second Class Vijay Iyer said, walking up out of the night with a bowl of his own and taking a seat on the other half of the log that Rain had claimed.

“Sir!” Arc scrambled to his feet, along with his friends. Pika fumbled his bowl, which looked comically small in his enormous hands, and nearly dumped what was left of his stew into the fire.

“At ease,” Iyer said, waving at them to sit back down. “It’s vat-grown meat. You can tell; there’s a particular taste to it. Lab meat’s always almost right, but just a little off.”

“I like it,” Rain said, and everyone, including Arc, looked at her. The Alu’kan girl hunched around her bowl. “It feels familiar.” Of course, he realized. She would have been raised on vat-grown food on the Torean ark-ships.

“Any word from the mechs in the jungle, sir?” Arc asked. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since he’d watched the Janissary and the Culverin disappear into the trees at the edge of the lake.

Iyer’s mouth was full of stew, so he simply nodded. “Ireti says they’ve chased off a spiked terror,” he explained, once he’d had a moment to swallow. “They’re going to push it as far away as they can before coming back, but Lieutenant Kekoa doesn’t think it’s worth the damage to the mechs to try to kill it. Nothing for you all to worry about here.”

“Thank you for letting us know,” Cassie said, from Arc’s other side. She wasn’t pressed up against him in the way that Vee was, but for some reason Arc was even more aware of her presence. Whenever either of them moved in such a way as to accidentally brush the other, he couldn’t help thinking back to when he’d leaned over her on the shuttle, or when they’d wrestled on the ground during training.

Iyer’s eyes flicked between Arc and the women to either side of him, and the light of the fire seemed to set them dancing. Was that a smile on his face, or was Arc imagining things? “Anyway, starting tomorrow, we’re going to work you hard, so I recommend you all turn in early and get a good rest,” the older cadet said. “Especially if you’ve drawn a shift on guard duty.”

At that comment, Pika sighed. He’d been assigned second watch.

“And Sandhurst,” Iyer continued, lowering his voice. “Stay away from Van Camp, if you can. That goes for all of you, actually. Hopefully he’ll be too busy to bother anyone, but if he doesn’t see you, you’ll be out of sight, out of mind.”

Cassie stirred at Arc’s side. “What is a man like that doing at the academy, anyway?” she asked. “He always seems to be looking for trouble. Fleet is supposed to be better than this. The psych tests –”

“You may have a slightly inaccurate view of fleet, Your Imperial Highness,” Iyer interrupted. “I’m not saying that to put you on the spot. I’m doing it to remind you that your life has been very different than the rest of us. I imagine you’ve met half a dozen admirals?”

“More,” Cassie admitted. She actually seemed to be squirming on the log they were using as a seat, as if Iyer’s words made her uncomfortable.

“Right. So you’ve seen the very highest ranks. But I’d guess you’ve never really spent time with marines, with non-commissioned officers, with the ratings who cook in the galley or crawl into the access tunnels to fix the electric systems on a carrier when some circuit breaks.” Iyer looked down at his bowl, as if surprised to find that it was empty.

“I have,” Rain said, her voice quiet in the night. She was barely audible over the sounds of the camp: the crackle of the fire, the murmur of conversation from hundreds of other cadets scattered among the fires, or scrubbing dishes, or walking the perimeter. “It was marines who rescued me. Taught me to fight.”

“And were they all nice guys?” Iyer asked.

Rain shook her head. “Some of them weren’t nice at all.”

Iyer nodded. “I’m sorry to break it to you princess, but not everyone who makes it into fleet is a good person. Van Camp’s clever. He’s only a year ahead of me, so I’ve run into him before. He’s a bully, but he knows how to kiss the requisite amount of ass when it comes to the next person up the chain of command, and he knows how to cover himself. If you give him an excuse, he’ll come down on you as hard as he can, right up to the very limit of what’s allowed. But he won’t take it far enough to risk himself.”

The author’s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“It’s my fault,” Cassie said. “I embarrassed him on the first day. I wasn’t thinking, or I’d have handled it differently. But it just made me so angry that he didn’t even let me have a day—an hour!—of being just like everyone else. Now it’s like he’s got something to prove.”

Arc turned toward her. There was a part of him that wanted to reach out a hand, to offer her some kind of comfort, but he hadn’t earned that right, had he? “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “You didn’t know what kind of guy he was. None of us did.”