8. Hard Burn

Academy Hill, Vidako
Imperium Stellarum
August 13, 2847

During lunch in the mess hall, the dull ache in Arc’s shoulders grew to the point that he found himself flinching every time he lifted his fork from his plate. He recognized the telltale signs of everyone else at the table shifting in their seats, because the soreness from the shots in his own butt was making him do the exact same thing.

Doctor Seung’s words seemed to run through his mind on an endless, repeating loop, so that he could hardly concentrate on the conversation at the table. Not with a tolerance below five g’s you won’t, she’d said, and Arc could feel a wall being built, piece by piece, between he and the cockpit of a Kestrel. More than five gs by the end of the year. I can do that, he told himself.

His thoughts were so focused on the task ahead of him that he was halfway through clearing his plate before he noticed that Cassie wasn’t in the seat she’d taken at dinner the night before. Vee and Pika, who’d spread himself out at the end of the table, were doing their best to draw Rain out into the conversation. The Torean was going on about, Arc realized upon coming back to the world around him, music.

“—and when you see them live, you can feel the base in your bones,” Vee said, bumping Rain with her shoulder. “If you’ve never experienced it, you absolutely need to. Life is not complete. I’m telling you, we’ll find a time to go during one of the breaks between terms.”

She rounded on Arc. “Tell her. You’ve been to a show, right?”

He blinked. “Like a concert? Yeah, we have live bands at the Silk Festival every year back home.”

Vee narrowed her eyes. “Alright, important test here, Arc. Major consequences, I can’t be your friend if you get this wrong. Show me that you’re a man of taste. Do you know Trillie and the Event Horizon?”

“Umm,” Arc said, very articulately. “I mean, I think I’ve heard of them? It’s a fusion band, right?”

The Torean girl’s eyes narrowed, and the vibrant blue feathers of her crest twitched. “You think you’ve heard of them?”

“I mean, I definitely have,” he said. I’m pretty sure, at least. “Yeah. Anyway, do any of you know where Cassie’s at?”

“Saw her walking –” Pika paused mid-sentence, and frowned.

“You ok there, big guy?” Delvan asked.

“Fine,” Pika said. “Saw her walking toward the center of campus,” he said. “Nose in her tablet.”

“I wonder if we should grab her some lunch,” Arc mused, out loud. “Did they actually say what we’re doing this afternoon?”

Rather than answer, Pika shoved his chair back and lurched to his feet. The Alu’kan entirely abandoned his meal of fried squid, running for the door of the dining hall with an awkward, lurching gait.

“They did not,” Rain said, her voice so quiet that Arc could barely make it out. “For good reason, I think.”

She nodded her head to indicate the tables around them, and Arc was surprised to see just how empty the mess hall had become. As he watched, one of the clean-cut boys sitting near Cal Madine stood up, carried a half-cleared tray to the trash, and then hurried out of the room. He wasn’t moving quite as quickly—or as awkwardly—as Pika had, but it was a near thing.

“It’s the vaccines,” Delvan said, from his seat at Arc’s side. “You can’t pump people full of that many inoculations without getting some kind of reaction. And I think I’d rather be in my bunk than here, by the time it happens.” He rose, carrying his own tray, and headed out, leaving Arc with only Vee and Rain.

“Come on, Arc,” Vee said, standing up, throwing her tunic over one arm, and grabbing her tray. “If you really want to grab something for Cassie, Rain and I can walk you up to our room.”

The three of them stacked their dishes, collected a few pieces of fruit, a muffin and a bottle of water, and then headed out through the long hall toward the foyer and the elevators. Today, the couches and love-seats were remarkably empty of students.

Vee walked between Arc and Rain, slipping her hands through each of their arms and linking them all together so that they had to walk in step. If she was feeling the effects of the vaccinations they’d all endured over the course of the morning, she certainly didn’t show it. Arc was surprised to catch a hint of some kind of citrus scent on her; it reminded him of an orange, or perhaps a lemon.

Being escorted made the trip up to the third floor only slightly less awkward, particularly when two young women rushed by the trio in the hallway on a panicked beeline for the communal bathroom. Vee released Arc’s arm long enough to scan her identification card, then pushed the door open in one sudden motion that was exuberant as everything else she seemed to do.

“This is our room!” Vee exclaimed, turning about with her arms spread wide so that her feathers fanned out in a dazzling display of iridescent blue and green. She threw her tunic onto one desk, then leapt up and, with a single beat of her arms, managed to fling herself back onto one of the top bunks, where she landed with a bounce.

Arc set the food they’d brought for Cassie on the other desk, and turned to make for the door. “I guess she isn’t back yet,” he said. Obviously. It wasn’t like there was any place to hide an entire person in such small rooms. “Just let her know I stopped by?”

“You could wait with us if you want?” Vee offered.

“No, I think I’d better get downstairs,” Arc said. “I want to check on Pika and make sure he got to the room in one piece. I’m sure I’ll see you all tomorrow.” He gave both girls a wave, then ducked out through the door and fled down the hall from the glares of passing cadets who made him feel as if he were trespassing.

𝝮

Pika, as it turned out, was not in their room.

Instead, Arc’s bunkmate had splayed himself across the cool tiles of the second floor bathroom, where he stretched out in front of the toilet he’d claimed as his own. He rose only periodically, and only to empty whatever was left in his stomach. Arc managed to get a cool, wet cloth over his new friend’s forehead just before he began to feel the effects of the vaccinations himself.

Rather than an upset stomach, however, Arc’s particularly brand of torture came in the form of a restless, sweating fever. Later, he remembered climbing up into his bunk, with a bottle of water that he wedged between the mattress and the wall, and cocooning himself in his blanket and sheets.

That was the last clear memory until the fever broke, and the intervening time was a haze of fragmented feelings and images: throwing the blankets off because he was burning up, only to begin shivering and grab desperately once again for something to keep him warm. Sucking down gulps from the increasingly warm bottle of water, until that was gone. People coming and going from the room: Delven Beck’s voice, and Cal Madine’s, and even someone else, who took his temperature by shoving the end of a thermometer into his ear.

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But those times were only when Arc was closest to the surface of the waking world: for the rest, he swam through a sea of dreams and memories. That terrible moment when Rashmi had come running in, interrupting whatever inane thing Arc and Teo were arguing about, and shoved her tablet in his face. The headline, ‘Pirate Attack,’ and the too-calm, uncaring voice of the news anchor as he’d named the merchant ship Adversity.

The succession of crushed hopes, coming one after the other, as the days passed. It was Phoebe’s ship that had been attacked, but as long as the captain turned over the cargo, she’d be fine. There was a fleet destroyer burning hard to intercept; surely the pirates would want to flee before it got there. Beecher Red Crest was on the ship, and sortieing personally. The ace would drive them off. The ship had been destroyed, but there would be life pods…

Teo and Rashmi, each embracing Arc in turn at the funeral, while everything was numb and nothing but an empty casket remained for his mother to weep over. So many flowers, from Phoebe’s teachers, her friends, from Dad’s friends at the silk mill, so many that Arc couldn’t stand the smell of them any longer, cloying like death in his nose.

The fever finally broke during the afternoon, on the day after the cadets had received their vaccinations. All of Tycho Hall felt like an infirmary, Arc found, when he eventually staggered out of the dorm room to throw himself into a hot shower. Three corpsmen had set themselves up in the foyer on the ground floor, in fact, so that they were available for the worst cases.

“At least two girls were stretchered out to the infirmary,” Cassie said, around bites of toast buttered with thick local cream. The entire mess hall was only serving the most bland foods, broken down into sections for each of the three major species that made up the imperium.