Chương 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 a bottle of rice wine, and Teo had been giving her 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 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 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, that feeling 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 do, 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 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 was 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 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 weighed 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. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. 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, than 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.

"What's this one for?" Arc asked, and couldn't help but flinch as the needle went in. He couldn't see it, but from the feel of things it might as well have been a mile long. Most of the time, he'd found, any questions he bothered to ask were answered, though always with an air of boredom.

"A fungus native to Luyten's Star," the corpsmen explained in a flat voice.

"If you breathe the spores in and don't get treatment, your skin starts to bubble within twelve standard hours. By the time it pops and starts to foam, it's too late." After that, Arc decided that he didn't need to hear any further details about just what medical conditions the shots were meant to guard against.

It had been nearly six hours of shuffling along barefoot from room to room, station to station, and doctor to doctor, when Arc was finally given a cover sheet from a humming printer, which was affixed to the top of his file. Without anything else to do, he scanned over the information, skipping right past his name, birth date, and everything else he knew to a section labelled 'Summary: Cognitive and Physical Assessment.'

Cardiac Health 49th percentile Cognitive Processing Speed 99th percentile Hand Eye Coordination 66th percentile Reflexes 50th percentile Spatial Intelligence 92nd percentile Strength 46th percentile G-Force Tolerance (Head to Toe) 4. 7"Sandhurst, with me," an orderly called, breaking Arc's concentration.

He shuffled out of line, still barefoot and carrying his clothing, and hurried along through a series of turns which took them down one hallway, then another, and finally up the stairs to the second floor of the infirmary building to an office. The anxiety which had been building within him during the entire walk spiked when he saw the placard posted on the office door: Doctor Nara Seung, Head Physician.

"Inside." The orderly opened the door to the office, and Arc shuffled onto a thick carpet that felt positively luxurious under his toes, after hours of standing on cool, hard floors. A secretary with close cropped gray hair, in the uniform of a lieutenant, looked up from the screens at his desk.

"Doctor Seung will see you in just a moment," the officer said, and nodded to a row of three chairs set against the wall.

"Can I get dressed?" Arc asked. The secretary nodded, and Arc busied himself pulling on his uniform pants and shirt, then wriggling his toes into socks. By the time he had his boots on, the door to the inner office opened, revealing a woman of indeterminate age, wearing a white lab coat over a dark skirt and a red blouse. Her dark hair was loose, and though Arc hadn't made a study of regulation haircuts for women, he was certain from the look of her that she must be a civilian.

"Arcturus Sandhurst?" Doctor Seung asked. At Arc's nod, she motioned for him to come forward. Once he'd stepped past her, she swung the door shut, walked back to her desk, and settled into a very comfortable looking swivel chair. Two separate curved monitors, each of which had to measure at least a hundred-twenty centimeters, were placed to either side, leaving her a window of open space through which to speak to visitors. At her nod, Arc settled into the chair which had been left in front of the desk.

The office looked to be more suited to business, or perhaps to the day-to-day operations of the infirmary, than to any particular medical purpose. Oh, there were framed diplomas on the walls—one from the Yale School of Medicine, on Terra—and a variety of glossy charts, depicting the various nervous, circulatory, and other systems of human, Torean, and Alu'kan alike—but there was nothing even remotely in the vein of an examination table.

"Do you need this, ma'am?" Arc asked, holding up the file he'd been carrying around all day.

"I have a digital copy here," Doctor Seung said, indicating the leftmost screen with an inclination of her head.

"Tell me, cadet, did you undertake any physical preparation for this academy at all?" Arc flinched and shook his head.

"No, ma'am. I won a tournament to get in." Seung sighed.

"You are at a significant disadvantage, compared to the other cadets," she explained.

"You don't have any genetic modifications, but while that's unusual, it isn't a deal-breaker. We do have students of exceptional ability who come from working class families, but most of them know that they're coming here at a deficit, and at least put in the training time to get their bodies to a certain minimum level of fitness. You, on the other hand —" She leaned forward in her chair, raised her hand, and flicked at her screen.

Arc could only see the lights reflecting off her face, but it was enough to tell him that she was scrolling.

"You're significantly underweight, with much less muscle development than I'd expect in a young man of your age." Arc glanced back down at the summary attached to the front of his file.

"46th percentile should be only slightly below average, shouldn't it?" That wasn't so bad, was it? After all, there were plenty of children and elderly people who'd be in far worse shape than he was. And why did a mech pilot need to be lifting weights, anyway? Nara Seung sighed.

"We're not looking for 'slightly below average' here, Cadet. We're looking to produce the best pilots we possibly can. If you wanted to succeed, you should have spent every day between your tournament victory and leaving your home world preparing yourself."

"I did," Arc blurted out, unable to keep from speaking out in his defense. Doctor Seung looked at him incredulously.

"How? Because I certainly don't see it."

"I reread von Clausewitz's On War, Sun Tzu, and Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power on History," Arc said.

"Then I went through Admiral Nakagami's memoir on the Singularity War, and Meecha Void Skimmer's analysis of the Battle of Sol during the re-unification in 2443. And before I left Zurah V, I loaded my tablet with —""Stars above," Doctor Seung interrupted, raising one hand to rub her forehead with her fingertips, as if she'd been given a spontaneous headache by his answer.

"I understand you're smart, Cadet. Your cognitive processing speed is the best of your year—but that isn't going to matter if you wash out during Hard Burn. Look, why are you here, instead of at the Fleet Academy on Luna?"

"I want to pilot a Kestrel," Arc said.

"Not with a tolerance below five g's you won't," Seung snapped back, and her words sent a stab of fear through him. If I can't get a Kestrel or a Leviathan, I'll be stuck in the ground forces, he realized. And I'll never be able to go after those pirates. Arc swallowed.

"That can be improved though, can't it?"

"By physical conditioning!" Seung leaned forward across her desk.

"You need to build strength, and you need to be in top notch cardiac health. You need neck muscles, cadet. And frankly, based on your performance on the treadmill, I have serious doubts as to whether you'll even make it through the morning runs." Arc felt, suddenly, as if he couldn't get enough air. The sound of the doctor's voice seemed quite far away, and he had that peculiar sensation which arises just before one loses consciousness.

Whatever Nara Seung was saying, the words were getting stuck somewhere between his ears and his brain.

"I need to pilot a Kestrel," he said, louder than he meant to, and from the doctor's expression he was certain that he'd interrupted her. She bit her lip and frowned.

"And I need you above the 50th percentile in both cardiac health and strength before I can clear you for that training," she said.

"I need you to be able to pull more than 5 gs without passing out."

"I have until next year though, don't I?" Ark asked.

"I thought everyone trained in Tyros for the first year at the academy and then chose a mech to specialize in during the second year."

"While that is true, cadets are separated into ground-based or space-based training tracks at the beginning of next year," Doctor Seung pointed out.

"Which means you need to get these numbers up before the end of the spring term, or I'm going to place you in ground-based training next year." She took a breath, and when she continued, her voice was gentler.

"You might think about a Culverin," the doctor suggested.

"If you have a good mind for tactics, it would let you sit back off the front lines and focus on coordinating a wing of pilots. Or a Leviathan..."

"No." Arc shook his head, pushed his chair back, and stood up.

"You've told me what to do, Doctor," he said.

"I'll meet your requirements by the end of the year. I promise." Nara Seung examined him for a long, silent moment, and then shrugged.

"We'll see, I suppose. For what it's worth, I wish you luck, Cadet. In the meanwhile, I'm putting the orders in—you're going on double rations until you pack some weight on. And as it's nearly time for mess, I recommend you get moving." Arc took his things and practically fled the office.