54. Applied Tactics and Simulations

Academy Hill, Vidako

Imperium Stellarum

January 12, 2848

When Arc got back to room 207 on Sunday evening, leaving Cassie and Jessica in the elevator on its way up to the third floor, he found that Pika had already got back, and was unpacking his suitcase. Cal, who’d never left, had his tablet propped up on the rightmost of the room’s two desks, because the dorms didn’t come with holo-projectors. A newscast played, muted, while captions scrolled beneath. At a glance, Arc could see that the anchors were talking about the war, but it didn’t look like anything new.

“Welcome back!” Pika greeted him, with a grin. The big Alu’kan left his suitcase for long enough to throw an arm around Arc and clap him across the shoulder blades. “You had a good break? Got to relax?”

“I did,” Arc agreed. “And I got a lot of training in with the duke’s guard, too.” He hoisted his own battered suitcase up onto his bunk. “Cassie’s good. We missed you all.” Arc hesitated for a moment, but the memory of Cal watching that vid from his father spurred him on. “How about you, Cal? Have a chance to catch up on some sleep?”

Above the empty bunk where Delvan Beck had once slept, Cal had appropriated the unused pillow and added it to his own, forming a sort of cushion against the corridor wall, so that he could sit up comfortably and watch the tablet. “I studied,” he said. “Studied, and exercised, and grabbed simulator time while there weren’t so many cadets around.”

“Well, I got to go for a real swim,” Pika exclaimed.

Arc climbed up to his bunk, opened his suitcase, and began unpacking. “Yeah?”

“With my mother and the rest of the pod,” his friend said. “We dove to the artificial reefs at the Golden Banks.”

“Isn’t everything on Stellar Abyss artificial, by definition?” Arc asked, as he fished out clothes and sorted them into piles. Thankfully, the Montalban’s cleaning staff had sent him back with not a single piece of dirty laundry. He did, however, appear to have accidentally absconded with one unmatched sock of Cassie’s. I’ll have to run it upstairs to her later.

Pika shrugged his broad shoulders, held up one hand, and wiggled it. “We made the ring, of course,” he said. “And engineered the contours of the ocean floor, for a variety of biomes. But then some places we left to develop on their own, and others we purpose-built. I say we, but really I mean my ancestors.”

“Got it.” Arc nodded. “So the Golden Banks are a place where the Alu’ka specifically designed a reef. That makes sense.” Clothes sorted, he took an armful down from his bunk and began to put them away. “I’d like to see it, sometime, if we ever get the chance.”

“You will!” Pika promised. “I will show you myself. Perhaps next winter break! Everyone can come. You, Cassie, Vee, Rain…”

“I’m not sure Vee would want to go swimming,” Arc joked, as he turned back around to grab the book that Cassie had given him as a gift, from out of his suitcase.

“What’s that?” Pika asked, leaning in to look.

“Cassie got it for me,” Arc said. “Admiral Nakagami’s memoirs. And he signed it, and made notes inside.” In fact, he’d found the first of them while re-reading a bit of the book on their flight back from New Toledo.

“She got you a personalized book from Admiral Nakagami, the chief of fleet operations?” Cal Madine exclaimed. “That Jack Nakagami?”

“She did.” Arc carried the book over to the desks, hesitated, and then set it down next to the model of the Blood Hawk that he’d placed there at the beginning of the first semester, when he’d first moved into the room.

“You are—so frustrating,” Cal said, after a moment. “I don’t think you get it, Sandhurst. I worked my entire life to come here. My father had to beg half a dozen senators to get me a recommendation. And you just—win a few games, start dating a princess, and now the highest ranking officer in the entire fleet is writing you notes.”

Arc winced, and made the considered decision not to tell Cal that Admiral Nakagami had signed the book ‘Uncle Jack.’ “I get the impression he’s real close to the imperial family,” he said, instead.

Cal shook his head. “I just don’t understand how everything is so easy for you. It’s like it falls right into your lap, while the rest of us have to work for it.”

Arc exchanged a glance with Pika. “Cal, I’ve worked for everything,” he said. “There were days during Hard Burn I thought I’d never be able to get out of bed, nevermind finish a run. Do you know how angry it made me when I found out I was the only one in the room who needed more than four hours of sleep? Talk about unfair.” he laughed.

“Yeah, you worked for years to get here,” Arc went on. “Which meant you knew how to do everything, and I was clueless. I couldn’t have made my own bed if you didn’t show me how.”

“I only did that because we pass or fail inspection as a room,” Cal grumbled.

“Well, thank you anyway,” Arc said. “Just in case I never told you before.” There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Cal simply nodded.

𝝮

When they took their places in the dining hall that night, Cassie sat next to Arc, instead of across from him. After weeks at the Palacio de las Orquídeas, it felt perfectly normal to him—but then he realized that Pika, Rain, and even Vee were exchanging glances.

Arc cleared his throat. “Your feathers are coming in nicely,” he told Vee. He said it mostly to fill the space, but it was also true. In fact, he was a bit surprised at just how quickly his friend’s crest was filling out, though as yet every feather looked like a sort of thin, stiff, waxy tube with just a bit of color buried beneath the surface. They almost looked like quills.

“Pin feathers,” Vee grumbled. “They itch so bad, I can’t stand it. But at least it’s better than being bald.” To Arc’s relief, whatever awkwardness had been between her and the rest of the group, toward the end of the first semester, seemed to have gone.

“Better than the half dozen different haircuts I’m going to have to go through while I grow this out again,” Cassie grumbled, running a hand through her hair.

“I just can’t wait to get back into the sim pods,” Rain said. “All through break, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the war.”

“Think about how much worse it is for the first class cadets,” Arc pointed out. “They’re going to be graduating right into this. I don’t think anyone expected that a year ago.”

That thought settled over their end of the table like a shroud, and for a moment everyone occupied themselves with eating quietly. “I only know a couple of them,” Cassie admitted. “But Ireti Ọlatẹru has been really nice to us, ever since the first day we got here. And my cousin –” she paused, evidently to consider her words.

“I don’t think you have to worry about him,” Vee said. “There’s no way they’d send someone important like that to the front lines. They’ll put him on a carrier in the core worlds, somewhere. Same as they’d do for you.”

Arc could feel Cassie’s body stiffen next to him. “I don’t want to be treated any differently than any other pilot,” she said, and he could tell that it bothered her for the rest of the evening.

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