Chương 76: Unit Twelve

Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum February 15, 2848 Cassie was the first one awake on Saturday morning, and she'd already showered, dressed, and tied the laces of one of her two boots by the time Rain sat up in her bunk. The Alu'kan girl came awake immediately, without any of the bleary in-between state that humans always seemed to go through, even when they did have the benefit of a hyperefficient brain flush modification.

"Heading down to breakfast, first?" Rain asked, and Cassie couldn't help but smile. As her roommate had gradually come out of her shell, she'd more and more become something of a mother hen, and it wasn't at all uncommon for her to pester the other girls in the room about getting enough to eat, not staying up too late, or any number of other things. The intervention on the roof had only been the most extreme example.

"I'm meeting Arc downstairs to get something to eat before I take the test," Cassie confirmed.

"I think Libby scheduled mine this early as a bit of revenge. You going to visit Pika this morning?" Not that she really needed to ask.

"Mmm-hmmm," Rain answered, slipped out from her sheets, and stood in the center of the room to stretch with her arms over her head.

"He's past the halfway point now. Hopefully he won't miss too many more days of class." Cassie finished tying off her second boot and stood up. She snatched the statue of Sitātapatrā that Arc had gifted her up off the desk and slipped it into one of the pockets of her jumpsuit.

"Good luck," Rain said, and stepped in to give her a quick hug. Cassie squeezed her back in return, then headed for the door while Rain began to gather up her shower things. When Cassie stepped out into the corridor, she wasn't surprised at all to find Jessica there. Together, they walked to the elevator. The imperial guard didn't speak until they were headed down.

"I gave your Tyro a three-hour inspection last night," Jessica began, without preamble.

"I'll check it over again this morning, but it'll be quick. I ran background checks on your entire tech crew."

"As long as they can actually do their jobs," Cassie said. The last thing she wanted was a team that passed every security check but couldn't actually keep up with the work. It shouldn't be a concern, since they'd made it to the academy—but she didn't like the idea of selecting technical cadets based on anything but their own abilities.

"Don't worry about that," Jessica said.

"Ramírez gave me a list of names."

"That should be fine, then." Cassie exhaled, and she was able to relax a bit. Natalie wouldn't recommend anyone who wasn't a gearhead themselves, and more than capable of digging into the guts of a mech. Arc was waiting for them at the entrance to the dining hall, where he leaned against the doorway. It bothered him, she knew, that he couldn't walk with her over to the hangar—but until the commandant said otherwise, he was off patrol duty, and not cleared to enter the southern portion of Academy Hill.

The thought nearly sent Cassie spiralling down a torrent of worries—what if he was drummed out of the academy? What if they let him stay, but he was hurt fighting Fletcher Radecki? What if he lost? Cassie forced all of that aside with an active effort, helped along by a quick hug and kiss before they stepped into the line together, Jessica following just behind. Cassie grabbed herself a tray. This early on a Saturday, they were the only cadets in the dining hall.

Everyone else was taking the opportunity to sleep in. She knew that she'd have three hours to take the test, plus whatever time it took to start the mech up, get into the cockpit, and be approved to leave campus. All told, Cassie didn't expect to be done until lunchtime, so she stuffed the pockets of her jumpsuit full of protein bars and energy wafers, then loaded her tray with a bowl of imported oatmeal and fruit, along with a helping of eggs.

"Nervous?" Arc asked, once they'd made their way to their usual spot. Jessica sat across from them, since there was no one else around.

"Not about passing," Cassie said, before she could think better of it.

"I hope that doesn't sound overconfident?" Arc laughed, in between bites of his own meal.

"Having lost to you over and over again in a sim, no, it doesn't sound overconfident."

"I'm more worried about getting to the hangar and finding out that it isn't going to happen for some reason," Cassie admitted.

"That someone's going to find some new hoop I have to jump through. I think until it's actually over, I won't be able to relax." And, in fact, she was too nervous to eat more than half her breakfast. She ended up pushing it around her plate, eventually, while Arc and Jessica finished up. Cassie was the first one out of her seat, the first one to dump her tray in the trash, and the first one out the door of Tycho Hall into the cool morning.

I wish they didn't have to make it so hard, she complained to Lyra, as the three of them walked south through campus. I just want to be treated like everyone else. I'm not certain you ever will be, the AI said. Arc walked with them up to the gate, where they embraced once again.

"You're going to kill it," he murmured almost in her ear, their heads pressed close together.

"I've got the present you gave me," she said, and pulled Sitātapatrā out of her pocket to show him. The sight of the little statue made him smile, and that made her smile, and somehow the whole thing made Cassie feel a bit better.

"I'll see you at lunch."

"I'll be waiting right here when you finish," he promised.

"With Rain and Vee and everyone else." Cassie nodded, kissed him one last time, and then set off through the gates and onto the tarmac. Jessica walked at her right shoulder; though she hadn't tested out on a Tyro yet, her clearance as an imperial guard was more than enough to get her through the gate. A part of Cassie wanted to turn her steps toward Hangar 417, but she was there to pilot a Tyro, not Lady Ren. Instead, she and Jessica walked over to a hangar with an open bay door and the label '311.'

There was a cluster of people milling about at the feet of the mech which stood there: Chief Jastrow and Lieutenant Commander Libby, to begin with, but also Natalie Ramírez and another three tech students, two of them wearing the sort of glasses that could be used as portable display screens. Jessica immediately split off from Cassie's side, pulling a scanner from her back pocket, and began to circle the mech's feet, while Ramírez stepped forward and flashed a grin.

"Morning, Princess," she teased. Ramírez's hair was wild, and Cassie guessed that she'd pulled it back into a messy bun rather than actually take the time to deal with it so early in the morning. There was also, somehow, already a smudge of grease on Natalie's cheek, though Cassie couldn't imagine what she'd had time to get into between rolling out of bed and meeting there at the hangar.

"Let me introduce you to the head of your crew," Natalie went on, jerking a thumb at one of the three techs hovering awkwardly off to one side.

"I picked him out myself, so you know he's good. Sticks, this is Cassie. Cassie, this is Benny Rimas. We call him 'Sticks' because he's like twenty kilos soaking wet."

"Fifty-five," Rimas said. He wasn't much taller than Cassie, but he was so lanky that the entire impression was exaggerated: without something next to him to provide perspective, she would have believed that he measured two meters or more. His dull brown hair was cut short, and he wore sturdy, utterly unattractive glasses that she recognized as standard fleet issue. She would have been willing to bet quite a few credits that Ben Rimas's first thousand academy merits would be spent fixing his own eyesight.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Cassie reached out and shook his hand.

"If Natalie likes you, you must know your stuff."

"I never said I liked him!" Natalie protested.

"I said he was a good tech." Sticks rolled his eyes, and walked over to the foot of the Tyro, motioning for Cassie to follow.

"This is unit twelve," he explained, waving a hand to indicate the mech.

"We set it up how you wanted, though it's a bit odd. The high altitude drop pack is connected and fueled up, and there's a plasma blade hilt magnetically locked to each hip. What made you go with the BA thirty millimeter rotating autocannon, over the standard laser rifle?"

"Higher rate of fire," Cassie explained.

"I tried it out in a sim the other day, and I liked it."

"Cadet Sabran-Solaris," Lieutenant Commander Libby called out.

"You're all set," Sticks said, quietly, and backed away.

"She'll start right up for you."

"Thanks," Cassie said, and then turned to face the approaching officer.

"Sir."

"I imagine you already know this, but I'm going to go over it anyway," Libby said, stopping about two meters from her.

"There are three waypoints, and they'll light up on your sensors. You head south to the first waypoint, and take out the targets there. Next waypoint, repeat. Three waypoints, three hours on the clock. You need to get back here before time is up, and you need a hit rate in excess of sixty-percent to pass. There's a Saker in the air, and Cadet Red Crest is leading a patrol. She'll confirm you on comms. In the event of an emergency while you're out, you follow her orders. Everything clear?"

"Yes sir!" Cassie replied, looking straight ahead so that she didn't have to meet his eyes. After a moment's hesitation, Libby stepped forward and lowered his voice.

"I don't have anything against you personally, cadet," he said.

"I simply don't see any way for you to operate in the field without putting other soldiers in danger. For what it's worth, good luck out there." Then, he turned on his heel and marched away, before she had a chance to reply.

"Alright, enough sitting around and yapping," Dimitri Jastrow shouted.

"Morrow, are we clear?"

"Clear," Jessica called down, and Cassie saw that her bodyguard had gotten up on the catwalk, at some point, while she'd been talking first to Sticks, and then to Libby.

"Good. Get up there, cadet," Jastrow said. Cassie walked up to the rope ladder, took the rung just above eye-level in her hand, and then sucked in a deep breath to calm herself, and held it before letting it out. Then she set her boot on the bottom rung and made her way up. Once she'd gotten into the cockpit, she turned around and slapped the button which would reel the ladder back in, and sunk into her seat.

The ejection chair wasn't brand new and custom fitted to her, like Lady Ren's: it was more like the old Tagma that she and Arc had taken turns piloting over winter break with Pilar de Estrada. Cassie settled herself in, secured her harness, and then pushed the button to seal the cockpit. She waited until the plates of ceramic armor had telescoped inward, cutting off her view of the hangar, before reaching out to Lyra. Hook me up, Cassie told the AI, and then waited.

Her awareness flowed outward to encompass the entirety of unit twelve, the humming power of the mech eager to spring forward at her slightest thought. It was different from being in a simulator pod, somehow: more visceral, more real. There was a weight to the Tyro that any computer, no matter how good, couldn't entirely fake.

"You're cleared to pick up your rifle, cadet," Libby said, over the comms.

"Your call sign for this test is Mole Rat Actual, and the patrol watching your perimeter is Sparrow Hawk." Cassie reached an arm out and took the Broadleaf Arms seven-barrelled autocannon off the rack. When the electronics on the grip interfaced with the palm of her mech, an ammo count appeared beneath that of her other weapons. She used the Tyro's left hand to cradle the rifle against her chest, supporting the barrel with both arms.

"Mission clock starting now," Libby said. Cassie stepped forward out of the hangar and set off across the tarmac, to the southern gate they'd been marched through during Hard Burn. She wanted to take off at top speed, but she also didn't want to give Libby any excuse to criticize her for tearing up pavement. Instead, she kept a steady pace through the gate and south through the city streets, where she was pleased to see there were few grav-trucks or cars out at such an early hour on a Saturday.

The patrol checked in with her around the time she was leaving the city limits, and entering the farmlands that surrounded San Teodoro.

"Mole Rat Actual, this is Sparrow Hawk Actual." It was a woman's voice, though not anyone Cassie knew well.

"This is Mole Rat, over," Cassie said.

"There shouldn't be any trouble," Red Crest said.

"Last patrol killed a cornibus down around the estuary, and we don't think anything else has pushed into its former range. I'll let you know if that changes. Otherwise, good luck on your qualification test. Sparrow Hawk Actual out."

"Thank you, Stalker," Cassie replied. That was Arc's patrol she was talking about.

"Mole Rat over and out." The moment Cassie was off the road and into the jungle, she leaned forward and pushed the Tyro up to a running speed of just under twenty-eight kilometers an hour. The extra weight of the drop pack was slowing her down, but from what Arc had told her about the test, it would save her time in the long run.

Only the occasional branch slapped against her armor: so many training mechs had been through here over the past few weeks that a path had been blazed through the foliage, and she doubted it would have a chance to even begin growing back until all the cadets had left for the summer break. There it was—the abandoned quarry. Cassie slowed her mech as she neared the top of the sheer granite cliffs.

"Targets?" she asked. Acquired, Lyra confirmed. Designated as grav-tanks, on the opposite bluff. Is it your intent to run right off this cliff?

"Something like that." Cassie grinned, lifted her rifle, and fired off one burst of thirty millimeter shells after the next, snapping the barrel from target to target without even waiting to see whether she'd hit. Then, with one last push from her mech's left leg, she was out in open air and falling. The drop is a hundred and eighty-meters straight down, Lyra protested, and Cassie thought that she detected a note of panic in the AIs mental voice.

"I know." Cassie lit off the vectoring thrusters on the Tyro's drop pack, riding plumes of fire down through the cut as more targets populated. There was the second waypoint, marked below at the entrance to the bottom of the quarry, and she steered her descent toward it while the automated testing systems fell into confusion around her. She was supposed to have hit the waypoint first, but the targets were activated by proximity and all out of order as she came down from above.

Tracer rounds leapt out from the Tyro's shoulders to tear into a target that had been marked as enemy infantry, while Cassie used her seven-barelled rifle to sweep a line of fire across a concealed artillery position. No sooner had the feet of her mech crunched down to a hard landing, directly on top of the second waypoint, than she lit off the thrusters again and shot forward, skimming over stretches of granite and pools of stagnant water alike.

A spray kicked up behind her Tyro, soaking the cliff faces, and Cassie couldn't help but whoop in glee. This was it. This was what she'd been practicing for since she was a little girl, this was what she'd always wanted, and whatever lingering fear she'd had that once she got into an actual cockpit, she somehow wouldn't be good at it, that there would be some indefinable difference between simulator and the real thing that would take it all away, that all vanished. This feels right.

She blasted forward into the ambush at the end of the test, registering the final waypoint, and actually had to spin her mech around for a moment to strafe behind her, because the targets hadn't caught up with how fast she'd been moving. The autocannon clicked and whirred, out of ammo, and she threw it aside to draw a plasma-blade in each hand, the purple light casting the cracked stone of the quarry into sharp relief to every side.

There was a target marked as a Singularity Myrmidon, and Cassie flashed past it with the last of her thruster fuel, lashing out with one plasma blade to decapitate the enemy mech, then landing behind it to thrust the other through its chest. Sensors disabled, pilot killed, Lyra observed. You're currently running twenty-eight minutes ahead of the mission clock. Cassie sent a mental signal for her mech to drop the thruster-pack, and felt the connections detach.

Her fuel readout icon vanished, and without either the weight of the drop pack or the rifle, she could actually feel how much lighter and more responsive the Tyro was. Laughing in pure, uncomplicated glee, she dashed for the next target, plasma blades held out to either side. By the time she returned to Academy Hill, Cassie was starting to come down from the high of piloting. She'd been forced to slow once again when she got back onto the roads, but she was still running twenty-seven minutes ahead of the clock.

"Cadet," Lieutenant Commander Libby said, as she walked unit twelve onto the tarmac, "I haven't seen a run like that in years.

"So I passed?" Cassie asked. She realized that she was drenched in sweat.

"Passed?" Libby let out a sharp bark of laughter.

"Sabran-Solaris, you just set a new academy record. You beat Beecher Red Crest's time by thirty-two seconds. Congratulations—you're a Tyro pilot."