6: Doctor Nara Seung

Academy Hill, Vidako
Imperium Stellarum
August 13, 2847

The screech of a tablet alarm shredded Arc’s muddled dreams. He’d been back on Zurah V, at the annual Silk Festival with Teo and Rashmi. Phoebe had snuck them all a bottle of rice wine, and Teo had been giving Arc’s older sister moon eyes again, but it had been good.

Good enough that, when he rolled over and pawed at his own tablet to check the time, he felt the weight of knowing that it would never happen again. Phoebe was gone, and Teo and Rashmi were back on Zurah V; besides a few recorded messages here or there, he didn’t expect to see either of his friends for months.

The tablet screen informed Arc that it was 0330, Imperial Military Time. He’d made the change before turning in the evening before, and he’d set an alarm for 0400—an alarm which, his tablet informed him, was still active.

Arc groaned. “Whose alarm went off? It’s too early.” His eyes felt dry and grainy, as if sand had been kicked in his face, and even rolling over to pull his pillow over his face was nearly too much effort.

The lights flicked on, and then Cal Madine’s voice came from the edge of Arc’s bunk. “Get up and get dressed. We’re due at the infirmary in fifty-nine minutes.” He hit the side of Arc’s upper bunk, apparently to emphasize his point, and the whole frame shook.

“Only need half an hour to roll out of bed,” Arc grumbled. He didn’t think he’d ever woken up this early in his entire life.

“You need to be in uniform, and your bunk needs to be made properly,” Cal insisted. With a sudden yank, he ripped Arc’s academy-issued blanket off of his body, leaving him in only the sleeping shorts they’d all been given. “I’m not failing room inspection because of you, so let’s go.”

Arc gave another groan, which sounded too whiney even for his own liking, lurched upright, and tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. By the time he was able to look around, he was surprised to see that both Pika and Delvan were up already. The Alu’kan had a towel slung over his shoulder, and a shower basket that looked preposterously small for his size in one hand.

“How are you all just—awake?” Arc complained. “This is so early.”

“I told you I’m genetically engineered,” Delvan said. “Part of that is a hyper-efficient brain flush. The chemicals and hormones in my brain are tuned up better than a racing yacht. Anything more than three hours of sleep is just a bonus. I’d guess the admiral’s son here is the same.”

Cal was already folding his sheets with, Arc noted grumpily, the expected military precision. There wasn’t so much as a crease or wrinkle to be seen. “Of course,” he confirmed. “One of the best basic gene-mods a soldier can have. My father made certain of it when I was first conceived.”

Arc squinted, and looked over at Pika, who’d slipped a pair of shower sandals on over his enormous webbed toes. “And I suppose you’ve got it, too?”

Pika shook his head, and gave Arc a big, toothy grin. “No. My ancestors had to sleep at sea before they migrated to land,” he explained. “We sleep in short bursts. Have to be able to surface to get a breath of air.”

“This…” Arc tried to think of a word for just how unfair it was that he was the only one in the room who’d be dying of exhaustion all day. “This is such a load of crap.”

“I’m off to hydrate,” Pika called over his shoulder as he headed out the door. “I’ll make my bunk when I’m back.”

“Hey Cal,” Delvan said. “Could you show me how to make my bunk right?”

Cal Madine nodded. “Of course. Like I said, I don’t want to fail our room inspection, so you all need to learn how to do this. You should get down here too, Sandhurst, and watch.”

“I thought you didn’t like me.” Arc squinted and regarded the other cadet with suspicion. Perhaps it was being jolted awake so early, but he had a difficult time believing that Madine actually cared about him in the slightest. In all fairness, it definitely had something to do with being woken up. But also, the other boy hadn’t exactly given him the warmest welcome the day before.

“I don’t,” Madine said, plainly. “But that doesn’t matter. We pass or fail inspection as a room, and you’re going to need those merits a lot more than I am, Sandhurst. Now come down here and let me show you how it’s done.”

𝝮

Arc ended up folding his sheets three times, under Cal’s direction, before his efforts were deemed acceptable. Still, he couldn’t complain—at least not too much—because when their RA, Cadet Second Class Katari, looked over their efforts, he gave a curt nod and then moved on to the next room.

The four young men from room 207 lined up with the rest of the cadets from Tycho Hall to be marched over to the infirmary. They were joined by an even larger group of students from the two dorm halls which hosted the students in the technical program, and there just under two hundred of them were split up into two lines by gender.

“Strip down to your skivvies, gentlemen!” Lieutenant Kekoa announced, stalking up and down the lines. “That goes for you as well, ladies! You’re all cadets in the Emperor’s service here. You will fold your clothing and carry it through the lines. You will keep your eyes ahead of you, and follow instructions as they are given. Move!”

Arc’s face burned as he stripped off his uniform, boots, and even socks. Each of them were given an open topped plastic tray with a handle to either side in which to carry their clothing, and it was barely big enough to hold everything. Every few moments, one or both of the lines moved forward, step by shuffling step, but in the meantime he could feel his face flushed hot and red from the embarrassment of having to stand there in front of hundreds of people—both men and women—most of whom he’d never even met before, in nothing but a pair of academy issued shorts.

He’d never been someone who had much interest in sports or exercise, and for the most part he only got either during the required courses in secondary school. Compared to the cadets ahead of him, who’d clearly spent months or years getting ready for the academy, Arc felt like a skinny, underdeveloped child. He wasn’t short, by any means, but he also wasn’t carrying any muscle.

Worse yet, he knew that all of the women in the next line, a bare five meters to the left, could see him. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was only other boys, but the thought of Cassie and her dorm-mates seeing him like this was a special kind of torture. It was an active effort to keep his eyes from flicking over to the other line—both because he was looking for Cassie, and because the girls were wearing nearly as little as he was. He kept his eyes latched on the broad back of Pika, who stood in front of him, because he was terrified that if he looked away he’d embarrass himself, or make one of the girls angry.

It got a bit easier once his part of the line began moving through stations, because at that point the cadets were split up. Arc was weighted and measured, and made to carry an entire packet along with his clothes. At each step of the way, a nurse, corpsman or doctor took the papers, recorded the results of whatever test or procedure Arc was forced to undergo, and then handed it back for him to take along with him on the next step of the long, torturous process.

His eyes were mapped with a bright green laser that left him blinking and hardly able to see by the time he moved on into the next room, where two vials of blood were drawn for testing. Arc was forced to do push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups until his arms felt like rubber, all with an expressionless but faintly disapproving nurse nodding and marking notes on his packet at every step of the way. He ran on a treadmill with sensors attached to his chest to track his heart rate, which at least warmed him up so that the air conditioning didn’t feel quite so chill. At one point, he was loaded into an enormous centrifuge, which was spun up to speeds so high that he was crushed back against the headrest and couldn’t have moved his head if his life had depended on it.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

And after the tests came the needles.

Arc had never been stabbed with so many injections in his life: in fact, he suspected that he was getting more vaccinations now, all at once, then he’d had in the entire previous eighteen years put together. Needles were stabbed into his left shoulder, and then his right shoulder, and once his arms were swollen and aching, he was told to pull his shorts down and bend over by a middle aged woman who treated his bare ass with all the attention Arc might have shown to a slightly battered old piece of furniture.