Chương 35: Twisted Metal

New Toledo, Vidako Imperium Stellarum October 5, 2847 Arc had a difficult time sleeping all that night, though the wine and the brandy should have made it easy. Part of it was that the room was too large, the bed too wide, and the sheets too soft. The pillowcases were actually silk—he knew it for a fact, because after he felt it for the first time, he looked for the tag tucked inside to be certain.

'100% organic Zuran Silk,' it read. He was still buzzing from the kiss, and he couldn't stop thinking about the taste of Cassie's lips, the feel of her bare back beneath his hands. He tried to picture what it would be like to show her around Silk City, Avataran Shahar back home, and to introduce her to his parents. To Teo and Rashmi. He couldn't picture it, but Phoebe would have liked her, he knew. And at that thought, he felt an intense stab of guilt, even anger at himself.

Here he was, the taste of brandy still on his lips, brandy so expensive it would have cost his father a month's salary, his head resting on a silk pillowcase, a princess imperial sleeping in her room across the hall. And his sister was dead. Phoebe hadn't drunk anything tonight, she wasn't sleeping anywhere, she didn't have a lover or a husband or even friends anymore, because a pirate had scattered the atoms of her body across a thousand kilometers of void somewhere between Zurah and its L2 gate.

He'd come to the academy to put himself in the right place, at the right time, to kill the Pirate Queen of Nepenthe. He hadn't expected to make friends like Pika, Rain and Vee. Even like Vijay Iyer, he supposed, or Natalie Ramírez, the tech student that he and Cassie had dragged with them, a Vidakan spiked terror on their heels. He certainly hadn't expected to kiss a princess. It felt, Arc realized, as he lay there alone in the dark, like a betrayal.

As if, in forgetting why he'd come to the academy, he'd also somehow forgotten his sister. Sometime in the long, dark hours of the night he did sleep, fitfully. In the morning, he scoured his skin with water so hot that it was almost painful, the first private shower he'd had since coming to this world. As promised, his things had been delivered, and his cadet uniform had been laundered during the time that he and Cassie were making themselves into a spectacle on the duke's behalf.

He dressed, tucked the cap under his arm, and left his dress whites hanging in the garment bag he'd used to bring them on the VTOL. They ate a morning meal with the duke's family, and Arc and Cassie met the children who Commander Esteban and his husband, Marcus, had mentioned the evening before. Two boys, Diego and Íñigo, clustered at one end of the table with their cousins, all four of them busily chattering away over a tablet while sneaking glances at Arc and Cassie.

When the duke's butler came to tell them that the grav-car was ready, amidst exchanging farewells with Duke Alvarez and Duchess Nicté, the boy Santiago, who'd been so enamored of the idea of mech duels the night before, tugged at Arc's arm and tilted the screen of his tablet so that it was visible. Princess Imperial in Whirlwind Romance! The headline read. There was a picture, in sharp color, of Arc helping Cassie out of the car the night before, both of their faces caught clearly.

You couldn't tell, he thought when he looked it over, that she was wearing a wig.

"Thanks for the warning," he murmured, and reached out his hand for the boy to clasp.

"When you come back for Christmas, you'll be here for more than one night," Santiago said.

"You have to tell me all about your training."

"I will," Arc promised, and then there was no more time to talk. They were out the door, loading into the car, and the procession of soldiers and mechs once again wound its way through the city streets, this time in the light of morning. It wasn't until they were safely back in the cabin of the Saker and up in the air, when Jessica had confirmed that she'd swept the cabin and it was clear of listening devices, that they finally felt comfortable enough to talk.

"I hope that wasn't too horrible for you," Cassie said. The wig had been packed away, and once their caps were off, all three of their bare scalps glistened where the silver tracery of the neural lace scrawled along their skulls.

"No, it wasn't," Arc said, but she kept going, the words tumbling out.

"I know it isn't what you're used to," she said.

"And I just wanted to say that—I'm really grateful you came with me. It makes it easier, you know, to have someone with you. To sort of lean on. But it wasn't fair to make you do it." His thoughts skittered across the idea of her being escorted around a hundred glittering parties, just like that, a thousand, back on Terra, with the son of some duke, like Santiago, or perhaps the son of an Admiral, like Cal Madine, on her arm. Young officers like Fletcher Radecki.

Arc found that he didn't much like the idea of that—not at all.

"It's alright, Cassie," he said.

"I actually had fun." She raised her eyebrows, clearly skeptical.

"Not all of it." Arc was honest.

"But I liked talking with Commander Esteban, and even Santiago. He wants to see us again, by the way, just so he can interrogate us about what it's like to be a pilot." Arc couldn't help but grin at that.

"But most of all, I liked it because I was with you." Cassie glanced away, to the other end of the cabin where no one was sitting, and then back to him.

"Good. I mean—I know we had a bit to drink. If you're having second thoughts about—you know."

"Kissing you?" The words were clumsy and numb on his lips, and he stumbled over them like a stone on the jungle floor.

"Yeah." Cassie nodded.

"I just want you to know that I won't make it awkward, if—if you want to pretend it didn't happen. We can still be friends, nothing has to change." You're here for Phoebe, Arc told himself. Everything else is a distraction. He reached over and took her hand in his.

"I'm not. I mean—I don't want to be friends, Cassie. That doesn't sound right," he admitted.

"Of course we're friends, but—I'd like to be more. If that's something you want." Of course she wants it, Iceni grumbled, in the back of his mind. It's obvious, isn't it?

"I'd like that." Cassie smiled and squeezed his hand.

"Yes. That's why I asked you to come with me, you know."

"I know." Arc settled back in the seat, the awkward, barely padded military seat that had been designed with everything but comfort in mind, and by common consent the two of them leaned into each other, to doze the flight away. 𝝮 When the Saker touched back down on the tarmac at the south end of Academy Hill, Arc roused himself, unbuckled his safety straps, and slung the garment bag which contained his dress whites across his shoulder.

He stepped up to the door of the cabin, ready to jump out first and help Cassie down, but when the doors opened he froze. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Perhaps fifty meters distant, just outside one of the mech hangars, a Tyro lay on its back, shattered and broken.

One of the arms had been ripped off entirely, and though a swarm of techs crawled all over the chassis, cutting at the armor in a shower of sparks with industrial saws, Arc could tell with just a glimpse that the ceramic plates had been crumpled, punctured, and torn. Not far away, two damaged Outriders and a Janissary stood, surrounding the wrecked mech in a loose semi-circle, cockpits open and rope ladders hanging down to where a cluster of three pilots stood, all facing the working techs.

There was an ambulance waiting, with a crew of corpsmen, for the cockpit to be broken open.

"I wonder who it is," Cassie said, still and motionless at his side. With a loud scream of tearing metal, the techs threw an enormous shaped ceramic plate off the mech's torso, and it crashed onto the tarmac with a loud bang. The sound shook Arc into motion, and he jumped down from the Saker's cabin, then turned to reach an arm up for Cassie to grab onto. Once she was down, by common consent they drifted closer.

It seemed that, with no tight schedule to keep, the commandant had not bothered to send a car: like any other two cadets, they were expected to hoof it back through campus, carrying their things as they went. But Arc couldn't pull his eyes away from the rescue operation that was taking place in front of them, and from the slowness of Cassie's steps, she was no more in a hurry to be gone than he was. Finally, the techs managed to cut into the cockpit.

Arc could only imagine what must have been done to the machine to disable the ejection mechanisms. With the techs finished—and now that they were closer, Arc recognized Chief Jastrow supervising—it was the doctors who went in next. Radecki was there, though for once the older cadet had better things to do than to come over and hang around Cassie. But it was Doctor Seung, who'd come all the way from the infirmary, who supervised the corpsmen as they pulled a limp, helmeted flight suit out.

Once they had the unconscious cadet on a stretcher, they began cutting the flight suit off, moving very carefully, Arc realized, until they had a piece of fabric free—at which point it was thrown aside and utterly dismissed. It was only once Seung had directed the very careful removal of the cadet's flight helmet that Arc finally recognized the face of Blake Van Camp. Arc watched as the corpsmen wheeled Van Camp, who was utterly still, soaked in blood, and so pale that his face looked gray, over to the ambulance.

They'd tied a tourniquet about his left leg, and Arc was struck by a profound sense of disorientation. The cadet who'd tortured him at every chance—who'd forced Arc to sweat through pushups, sprints, and sit-ups all through Hard Burn, who'd stood there berating Arc and the others while they dug the latrine on the shore of the lake, who'd shoved him and never had anything but insults – That man all of the sudden looked very small, very frail, and very young.

It was so completely at odds with the way Arc had thought of Van Camp, until now, that he just couldn't make it right in his head. He was an ass, certainly—a mean, cruel bully who abused his position over the younger cadets. And now, it looked like the man might lose a leg before he was twenty-two. He might even die.

Somewhere, far away in another system, Blake Van Camp's own mother and father, perhaps sisters and brothers, were going about their lives right at that moment, with not the slightest hint that their son or their brother lay there on that stretcher. They wouldn't know for weeks, and by then he would either be dead or alive, with not a thing they could do about it.

"Come on," Cassie said, taking Arc by the arm once the ambulance pulled away.

"There's nothing to see here." On the walk back through the campus to Tycho Hall, Arc felt eyes upon them. It was the middle of a Saturday, and everyone was at liberty, even if they didn't have permission to leave campus. He and Cassie had lost an hour coming back east, which meant that they'd also missed lunch in the dining hall, and that there were a lot of people out on the paths, moving between buildings, or sunning themselves on the lawns, or napping beneath the shade of the overarching boughs.

The cracks around the edges of the paved footpaths were outlined in darker asphalt, which made Arc suspect that there'd been rain, on this end of the continent, overnight.

"You think they've read about our trip?" Arc asked, keeping his voice low so that they wouldn't be overheard. Jessica trailed behind them, just far enough back to give a bit of privacy while also being close enough that she could be with them in an instant if it was required.

"Lyra says the clip of us touching down at the airport has racked up over five hundred thousand views already, and it hasn't even been twenty-four standard hours," Cassie pointed out.

"And Vidako doesn't have the population of a core world. So yes, I imagine some of them have seen it. And no, I don't think you're imagining things. I've gotten pretty used to being stared at and whispered about over the course of my life." It was a relief to get into Tycho Hall and close the door behind them, and Arc couldn't wait to get up to his room to get rid of his dress whites and rip his tunic off.

He was so focused on getting to the elevators, in fact, that he didn't notice the crowd waiting for them until the cheers and applause broke out. The sudden sound surprised him, and Arc flinched back before he could stop himself, before he recognized the familiar faces who'd dragged half a dozen couches and love seats around to have a good view of the entrance to the dormitory. Pika was there, of course, and Rain, with the shadow-rabbit, Flopsy, preening in her lap as she ran her fingers through its fur.

Karisa Lynstan-Hanigata, the RA, was there as well, along with both Vijay Iyer and Ireti Ọlatẹru.

"Our own tabloid celebrities!" Natalie Ramírez shouted, holding up her tablet, which was splashed with a gorgeous still of Cassie in her silk dress, arm linked with Arc's, as they ascended the steps to the duke's palace.

"Looking very fancy, you two." To Arc's surprise, he didn't see Vee anywhere, even though he looked for her. Pika, on the other hand, sprang up from the couch he'd been sharing with Rain, causing the shadow-rabbit to jump out of her lap in surprise and dash across the floor and into the safe, sheltering arms of his owner.

"Dining with dukes!" Pika exclaimed, wrapping both Arc and Cassie in his arms and lifting them off their feet, crushing them into his chest so that Arc could hardly breathe.

"You are famous now, my friends. Well, our princess already was. But you, Arc, everyone knows your name! Soon you will be like Wai the Ship-Breaker—famous admiral!" Arc made a sound, rather than a word; something like 'urk.'

"Put us down before you squeeze us to death," Cassie gasped breathlessly. Pika finally did, and once Arc had caught his breath, he retrieved his uniform cap from where it had rolled halfway down the corridor toward the dining hall. He saw that Cassie had flung her garment bag over one of the empty loveseats and tossed his on top of it. Karisa and Ireti were up by that point, and the two older cadets ushered Cassie and him over to a loveseat where two plates of sandwiches had been set out.

"Once we realized you wouldn't be back until after lunch, we took food for you from the dining hall," the RA explained, while her shadow-rabbit rubbed up against Cassie's leg.

"Have something to eat, or you'll be miserable by the time dinner is served."

"Thank you." Cassie nudged Arc with her elbow and nodded her head. He followed her gaze to see that Rain had kept a plate set aside for Jessica, as well, and that the Alu'kan cadet was just now delivering it.

"I guess that particular secret is out," she grumbled.

"That you have a bodyguard here at the academy? Yes, it would appear so," Ireti Ọlatẹru remarked.

"She mostly managed to remain out of sight, but there were a few images that caught Cadet Morrow in her imperial guard's uniform."

"Where's Vee?" Arc asked, in between bites of sliced chicken, cheese, lettuce and tomato.

"I'm surprised she isn't here with you all."

"She told us that she has to study for an exam next week," Rain said, returning to her own seat.

"And that she would see you both later." That didn't sound right to Arc, but Cassie, after swallowing a bite of her own sandwich, leaned in close and murmured in his ear, "I'll talk to her," so he just nodded and left it at that.

"You all know we didn't really do anything," Arc said, though he did feel a bit warm at all the attention from their friends.

"You're acting like we won a war or something."

"Well, I will admit that I had a secondary reason for coming here today," Vijay said, the smile dropping from his face as he leaned back in his seat.

"The commandant has put the schedule out for patrols into the jungle for the next month, and I'm going to be leading one. We get to pick our squad. If you can get yourself out of the simulator and qualify on an actual Tyro by the time I'm up, Sandhurst, I want you to come with me." Arc thought back to the sight of Blake Van Camp, unconscious on that stretcher, being loaded into the ambulance: of how gray his face had looked, and the tourniquet around his leg.

But then, he reminded himself, qualifying on a Tyro, earning merits on a patrol into the jungle, would take him one step closer to graduation—and one step closer to the pirate queen.

"Of course," Arc said.

"Us Zurah boys have to stick together, after all. I'd be happy to go with you."