Chương 17: Out of the Jungle

Jungle southeast of San Teodoro, Vidako Imperium Stellarum September 15, 2847 Arc, Cassie, and Natalie Ramírez rode back to the lakeside camp carried together in the open palm of Vijay Iyer's Janissary. The older cadet kept the mech's left hand cradled up nearly against the enormous machine's torso, articulated fingers and thumb gently curved inward to act almost as a sort of half-cage for them to cling onto.

It was a good thing, too: for every careful step Iyer took, the mech's palm rocked and swayed until Arc felt half sick to his stomach, and if one of them had fallen, it would have been a drop of seventeen or eighteen meters to the jungle floor below. They followed the same path that Arc and the other cadets had hiked to get to the waterfall, with Van Camp's Tyro leading the way back.

The evidence of the two pilots' pell-mell rush through the forest was clearly visible to either side: broken and splintered tree limbs had been shoved out of the way, and the wet, loamy earth was torn up by the violent tread of running mechs. Arc kept expecting them to catch up with John Rixey and the rest of the group, but when it didn't happen he assumed that they'd been met by a medical team.

That assumption was borne out when one of the academy's great, twin-rotored Saker VTOLs came flying in from the northeast, then descended by the shore of the lake, where the cadets had cleared so much ground while making camp. The Saker was off again, back in the direction it had come from, so quickly that Arc doubted they'd even turned the rotors off. Cassie grabbed his shoulder and gave a squeeze.

"That means Seidl's alive," she said, having to shout over the sound of the helicopter and the crashing of the mechs through the brush.

"They wouldn't be hurrying back so fast if she was dead." Arc nodded and felt a knot in the pit of his stomach loosen. They'd take her to a hospital in the city, surely. He didn't know how things would go from there, and he couldn't see how the pounce of the tree cat wouldn't have broken Maja Seidl's back, but it was still a relief to know that she was alive. He looked down at his sleeves, at his hands, and saw how much of the girl's blood had stained him after only the short time he'd carried her.

Before he could think better of it, he brushed his palms against his pants, but it didn't help. The camp was a buzz of activity when they arrived. Arc's home world, Zurah V, had never imported hornets as part of the original colonists' terraforming efforts—mulberry trees didn't require a pollinator—so he'd never actually seen a hornet's nest kicked, but the idiom had survived.

Iyer walked them over to a waiting group of corpsmen, knelt, and carefully lowered the Janissary's hand to the ground so that the three cadets could climb off.

"Are you hurt?" one of the corpsmen shouted, over the thump of Van Camp's Tyro walking past, toward the field maintenance station that had been set up at one corner of the camp.

"I'm fine," Arc called back.

"It isn't my blood." It turned out that his word wasn't good enough; all three of them were taken over to one of the grav-trucks, where the field infirmary had been set up. Arc was instructed to strip off both his stained jacket and his undershirt, both of which he doubted he'd ever see again. Once the blood was washed off his hands and forearms, and he'd been thoroughly checked for cuts, bruises, scrapes, and broken bones, he was finally released—with a new undershirt.

Ramírez wasn't so lucky; the medics seemed to have no intention of letting her go until they were certain that the mad run along the jungle path hadn't exacerbated her previous injury.

"Hey Sandhurst!" Ramírez called out, as he and Cassie walked past. The corpsmen had her leg up, her pants off, and her bandage unwrapped, but none of it seemed to make the girl self-conscious. Arc supposed that days of camping together and squatting over a latrine would do that.

"Thank you," she said, and winced as she endured having her stitches prodded at.

"Thank you for not leaving me behind. You too, princess. I won't forget it." Arc shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable.

"I just did what anyone would do."" Por mis cojones," Ramírez cursed.

"That's a load of bull and you know it. When you have a ride, Sandhurst, you've got a tech. I'm your Huckleberry. Just don't wash out and make sure you actually get a mech, alright?"

"Yeah." Arc nodded.

"You've got it, Ramírez. You just take care of that leg."

"And I'll take care of you too, princess!" she called, as they walked away.

"I owe you for that zombie fly!" John Rixey was waiting for them, leaning against a stack of supply crates just outside the camp infirmary. Like Arc, he'd been stripped of his jacket and original undershirt, and from how wet his hair was, he must have been scrubbed to get Maja Seidl's blood off him, as well.

"She's alive?" Arc asked, and though the departing Saker should have been evidence enough, it was still a relief when Rixey nodded.

"When they got her on the VTOL, at least," the other cadet said.

"They put her on a backboard and strapped her down, but it seemed a little late to me after we bounced her all to hell coming back down the trail."

"Is her back broken?" Cassie asked.

"I don't see how it couldn't be with something that big coming down on her spine." Rixey shrugged.

"But I'm not a doctor. Anyway, I wanted to apologize to you, Sandhurst."

"Apologize?" Arc frowned.

"For what?"

"For not moving quick enough," Rixey said, and when he shifted his weight from one foot to another, Arc thought that he looked downright uncomfortable.

"You were in command. I should have followed your orders right away, and instead I almost got us all killed by asking questions. So, yeah, I owe you an apology. It won't happen again." He extended a hand to Arc. For a moment, Arc was so astounded that he couldn't move. The idea of one of Cal Madine's friends apologizing to him was so bizarre, so completely outside of anything he would have imagined, that it was only after Cassie bumped him with her elbow that he reached out and clasped the other man's hand.

"It wasn't your fault," Arc said.

"None of us expected anything like that to happen."

"Then we need to start, don't we?" Rixey said.

"Whatever bug Cal's got up his ass, you and I? We're straight. I've got your back if you need it." He gave a squeeze, and the two men dropped each other's hands. Then, Rixey turned and walked away. 𝝮 Everyone who'd been part of the ill-fated water-gathering expedition was relieved from duty for the rest of the day, and those who'd not been injured were debriefed, one by one, by Lieutenant Kekoa.

Arc found himself wondering whether some other squad of cadets was going to be sent to fetch the abandoned canisters, though after thinking about it for a moment he decided that he really didn't care. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. When it came time for Arc's turn, he stood at attention outside of Kekoa's tent.

Cassie, who'd been called first, ducked out from beneath the flap, thrust aside a handful of hanging mosquito netting, and looked over at him like she wanted to say something. But before she could open her mouth, the lieutenant's voice came from inside the tent.

"In here, Cadet Sandhurst." Arc met Cassie's eyes, gave her a nod, and ducked inside. Lieutenant Kekoa's tent was not substantially more luxurious than the cadet's own accommodations, save for the fact that he didn't seem obligated to share his space with anyone else. There was a single cot, with a thin mattress and a sleeping bag; a fleet-issued footlocker; and a collapsible camp desk with a chair, upon which Kekoa's tablet and a lamp rested.

Arc stood to attention in front of the desk and saluted just as he'd been taught to do.

"Cadet Fourth Class Sandhurst reporting, sir." Kekoa leaned back in his chair, and it creaked so loudly that Arc worried it would give way and completely collapse beneath the Alu'kan officer's muscular bulk.

"At ease, cadet," he said, and crossed his hands over his lap. He waited while Arc stepped left and put his hands behind his back.

"This report is just about done," Lieutenant Kekoa said.

"I've interviewed the rest of your ad-hoc squad, with the exception of Cadet Seidl, who I'm informed is now in stable condition at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital downtown. We would have normally sent her to the academy infirmary, but we don't have the specialists on spinal surgery that Mercy does. If you were worried that she wouldn't make it, however, you can relax."

"Thank you, sir," Arc said. Kekoa picked up his tablet.

"Alright. Start at the beginning, cadet, and tell me everything. I want to hear your thought process, so talk me through every decision you made." Arc nodded and began to speak. He told the lieutenant about how he'd set two cadets to watch over the filling of the canisters, but that he'd wanted to handle the purification tablets himself. How Cassie had been the first to move, and kill the tree cat, and then how he and John Rixey had rolled its carcass off Maja Seidl's unconscious body.

How he'd started to command a stretcher to be built and then noticed the broken path left by the tree cat's rush through the jungle.

"That was your one mistake," Kekoa said, cutting into Arc's report.

"You should have had the injury called in before even starting on the stretcher. But you did good to set a watch, and once you identified the incoming threat, you got your people moving. You made the right choice to move her out of danger, and that's the only reason she's still alive. I'm told you carried Seidl yourself, and that you even went back for tech cadet Ramírez."

"Yes, sir," Arc said.

"I don't see how we would have got her out if the mechs hadn't arrived right then, sir."

"Which they wouldn't have done if you hadn't called in," Kekoa said.

"Do you see anything else you could have done better?"

"I could have handed those purification tablets off, sir," Arc said, after thinking for a moment.

"I could have kept an eye on someone else while they were doing it, and I would have been better able to respond to what happened."

"Knowing when to delegate is the mark of a good officer." Kekoa made a few final notes on his tablet, then set it on the desk.

"Something always happens on these trips, cadet. If it wasn't this, it would have been something else. You just happened to draw the short straw this time. But you did well, and you got all your people out alive. There's plenty of more experienced officers who can't say the same thing after their first time in combat." Arc nodded.

"May I ask a question, sir?"

"Go ahead, cadet."

"Why was I chosen to lead the water-run, sir?" Arc asked.

"Why were we even sent to do that? There must be better ways to keep the camp supplied."

"The answer to both of those questions is the same," Kekoa said.

"We want to see how you perform out in the real world before we put you in the classroom. We want to see who breaks under pressure, and who keeps their head in a crisis. You won a wargame to punch your ticket to the academy. That means you've got brains, cadet, but it's a whole different thing to make a good tactical decision in real life, when bullets are flying and your people are bleeding. You kept your head, which tells me what I needed to know. You've got potential.

Now, it's up to you to live up to that potential. Don't disappoint me."

"Sir, no sir!" Arc said and snapped back to attention.

"Good. Now, fifty merits. You didn't accomplish your objective, but you brought your soldiers back alive. Use the rest of the day to recover and get your head together, because tomorrow you'll be back on duty. Dismissed." 𝝮 It was a very different column of cadets who marched back to Academy Hill at the end of two weeks in the jungle. They were tired, sweaty and dirty; covered in bug bites, with more than a few blisters, cuts and bruises among them.

Cadets Ọlatẹru and Xiao-Solaris had never quite managed to put down the mother of the juvenile spiked terror Arc and his people had encountered, but they had run it off far to the northwest before returning to camp. All four mechs escorted the first-year cadets as they trooped up the road which led to the top of Academy Hill. There, Lieutenant Kekoa lined them up at attention on the tarmac, beneath the twin suns that made the air shimmer from the sheer heat boiling up from the pavement.

Arc saw that both Commandant Marlowe and Doctor Seung were waiting for them, and at Kekoa's command, he and the other cadets all snapped to attention.

"It is my honor and my pleasure to congratulate you on completing Hard Burn," Commandant Marlowe said, stepping forward. She seemed to have no need of a microphone or speaker to make her voice heard to the entire assembled company of cadets.

"There may have been moments that you wondered how you could possibly continue. But whatever doubts you may have had, you, like every class of cadets before you, persevered," Marlowe went on.

"In the years to come, I hope that you all look back on this accomplishment with pride and consider it a source of strength. We wanted to push you further than you'd ever been pushed before; and you are still here. Which brings me to the next step of your training. Technical cadets, you are dismissed." Arc watched as Natalie Ramírez, Moore, and Tremblay, who'd been on the water run under his command, broke ranks and hurried away from the tarmac to their own dormitories.

Once only the pilot cadets remained, Marlowe turned to the woman standing at her side.

"Doctor Seung." Nara Seung stepped forward. Unlike Marlowe, her hair wasn't tied back in a bun, and a gust of wind caught hold of her dark tresses and blew them about her face. Once the wind had died, she spoke—and, in further contrast to the commandant, she did use a microphone and speaker.

"By completing your intensive training, you have all earned the right to be fitted with a neural lace implant, along with a nascent artificial intelligence," Seung explained.

"The Imperium does not, as a rule, condone extensive use of cybernetics, but it is impossible to pilot a mech without this technology. When you return to your dorm rooms, you will find that each of you has been given a scheduled time for surgery. Please report promptly at the time slot you have been given: my staff and I have forty-nine procedures to perform, and forty-nine recoveries to manage. Please do not be the cause of a delay."

"Implantation will begin in the morning," Commandant Marlowe announced.

"If any of you have made it this far, but are having second thoughts, you should see your RAs immediately upon returning to your dorms. This is the last point at which you can walk away from the academy without a permanent cybernetic implant in your head, for the rest of your lives. Dismissed." Arc walked back across campus with his friends, who grouped up together in common, unspoken consent.

His pack dragged at his back; even though they'd used up the rations they'd carried on the way out, the thing actually felt heavier now, with the prospect of rest so close at hand. His hair was sticky with sweat and plastered to his forehead, and he ran a hand through it without thinking.

"Gonna lose all that tomorrow," Pika remarked, with a grin. The Alu'kan patted his own head which was, like all his species, covered by the same dark-gray skin as the rest of his body.

"I'm not looking forward to it," Cassie admitted. She reached back to her bun and began pulling pins as they left the hangars, helipads, and access roads behind on their path into the heart of the campus.

"It's going to take me years to grow it back." Arc glanced over at Vee.

"How does that work with your crest?" he asked. Would her head need to be plucked? Would feathers grow back? He realized that he didn't have the slightest idea.

"Quicker than your hair," the Torean girl shot back.

"They have to be careful not to damage the follicles, though. I hope I get a doctor who knows what they're doing—if they leave me with a permanent bald spot, I'm going to rip someone's eyes out."

"Is anyone thinking of leaving?" Rain asked, her voice just loud enough to be heard over the rustle of leaves overhead.

"No," Arc and Cassie replied at almost the same time. Pika just shook his head.

"Nah. How could I leave you all behind to suffer without me?" Vee said, with a grin.

"Good," Rain said.

"I don't want to lose anyone else." The next morning, at 0930, Arc reported to the campus medical center to have his head shaved clean. Once that was done, he was prepped for surgery. It was cold, and he couldn't help but flinch when the IV was inserted into his arm.

"Count back from ten," the masked anesthesiologist told him.

"Ten," Arc said.

"Nine…" The world went black.