38. Ambush

Academy Hill, Vidako

Imperium Stellarum
November 1, 2847

“If you can’t keep your dirty socks off the floor, Vee, I swear I’m going to throw them all out,” Cassie snapped. She tossed her tablet and her cap on top of her mattress, let the door to the dorm room swing closed behind her, and bent over, snatching one half-rolled sock after the next and gathering them in her left hand.

“I’ll get them in a minute,” the Torean girl grumbled from her top bunk, without making any movement whatsoever. Cassie wasn’t even certain that she’d attended her morning classes—she certainly hadn’t made breakfast in the dining hall with the rest of their friends, which was becoming something of a pattern.

“I already did it. Here.” Cassie threw the ball of dirty socks up into Vee’s bed, in the general direction of her head.

“Hey!” Vee exclaimed, shooting up out of her blankets. Cassie saw that her friend wasn’t even dressed, and that confirmed her suspicion about those skipped classes. “What crawled up your ass and died?”

“Nothing,” Cassie said, flopping down on her bed. “I’m just getting sick of living with a slob.”

“That isn’t it,” C’rise said, from her own bunk. “You’re snappy and irritable because you’re worried about your boyfriend. That is the correct term, isn’t it? I don’t feel like it particularly conveys the right meaning, just gluing those two words together. In Shaii’en, we –”

“I don’t want to hear about your language,” Cassie exclaimed. “And stop poking about in my head. I thought we talked about this.”

“We did, and I offered to practice meditation with you, so that you weren’t always screaming out your feelings for anyone to hear,” C’rise said. Her calm was just one more thing that infuriated Cassie.

“Is that it?” Vee remarked, still half-buried in her nest of blankets. “We’re all worried about him, Cassie, but that’s no reason to be such a bear about it. Get off my ass.” The creak of springs beneath her mattress was the only warning that Cassie had before a pillow hit her in the face.

Cassie grabbed it in her hands, and for a moment had an nearly overwhelming urge to simply rip the pillow in half. Instead, she took a deep breath, counted to ten, and stood up. She carried the pillow over to Vee’s bunk and regarded her friend with as much calm as she could muster.

“Ironic, coming from you,” she spat. “Fine, maybe I’ve been a little—irritable.”

“You’ve been a bitch,” Vee said.

“At least I’ve got a reason. You, I don’t even know what’s going on with you,” Cassie said, tossing the pillow back onto Vee’s bed. “I thought we were friends, but now it’s like the only time I actually see you is to sleep. And now you’re cutting classes—are you trying to wash out? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Vee rolled out of bed, grabbed her shower basket, and stormed out the door.

Cassie sighed and turned to C’rise. “Do you know what’s happening with her?”

“I thought that telepathy was an invasion of privacy,” the pink-skinned girl said.

“And I thought we were always going around shoving all our messy feelings in your face,” Cassie said. “You must have picked up on something.”

C’rise sighed. “I don’t want to get involved in your interpersonal conflicts. Take a moment to think about it, princess. What other change preceded the change in her?”

“I don’t know,” Cassie grumbled. “We finished Hard Burn, we were taking classes, we got into the simulators. Arc and I went to New Toledo, but –” There was something that shifted in the other woman’s eyes, just enough that Cassie, trained by her mother and father to watch the courtiers on Terra for the slightest clue, stopped. “No.”

“I see you’ve figured it out,” C’rise said. “Took you long enough.”

“What, she liked Arc?” Cassie raised a hand to her temples, because she felt a sudden headache coming on. Perhaps not literally, but certainly figuratively. “Dammit.”

It didn’t take much effort to imagine how she would have felt, in Vee’s place. Having to watch two of her friends get together, hold hands, snuggle on the couches and loveseats downstairs in front of the dining hall, and probably chatter away obliviously. Just picturing Arc with his arm around Vee sent a stab through Cassie’s belly. No, it wasn’t hard to imagine at all.

“I should talk to her,” she decided. It would be awkward and uncomfortable, but it needed to happen. Cassie didn’t have so many friends that she wanted to lose one. She’d have to apologize, too—not for the relationship, that wasn’t something she’d done wrong. But for being short-tempered since Arc had gone out on patrol. That was her fault.

“Perhaps don’t ambush her in the shower, however,” C’rise suggested, raising her tablet. “Now. I need to study for an exam on the first wave of human colonization. A bit of quiet would be appreciated.”

“I’ll get out of your hair.” Cassie said it without thinking, and then her eyes fixed on the nacreous shell that extended up in pearlescent colors from C’rise’s scalp. The other girl lowered her tablet and met Cassie’s eyes, and for just a moment, there was silence. Then—and she couldn’t have said which of them started it first—they both burst out laughing.

𝝮

A peace offering, Cassie decided, would be appropriate.

After Lieutenant Commander Libby let them all free from their simulator training for the day, she hurried out of the building and across campus, to the academy commissary. She hadn’t visited more than once or twice over the entire first semester because, for the most part, Cassie was just as happy eating with her friends in the dining hall. She’d never cooked a day in her life, so she didn’t have much use for ingredients. But, if you knew that you were going to have to miss a meal the commissary was good for picking up a deli sandwich that you could carry along with you—and the building also included a bakery.

She had to wait for two people to be served in front of her—one upperclassman, and a professor that Cassie didn’t recognize. Then, she was in front of the glass case, stuffed full of muffins, cupcakes, croissants, and such a variety of treats that she was immediately overwhelmed. “I need something for a Torean palette,” Cassie told the white-aproned worker behind the counter. “Something sweet—like a dessert.”