Chương 47: Episode 47 - Conflict of Interest

The complaint arrived at 0813. Cassian was at the archive terminal when the notification came through — not his personal terminal, but the one that Cirus had set up as a passive monitor for him four days prior. He read through the complaint once. The language was precise and bureaucratic, the level of procedural correctness that he expected from Station Security. An accusation of conflict-of-interest against Instructor Harren, filed by Station Security Legal.

He noted the things that were absent from the documentation. Aldric's name wasn't on it, department based rather than individually filed. The complaint was factually accurate about almost everything, just not what it was actually for. Cassian forwarded the complaint directly to Harren. She responded almost immediately: 'received, anticipated, no action required from you until the board contacts us.' After noting this, he closed the terminal. Time for his 1400 session.

* The squad was already waiting for Cassian in Bay 7-Echo. Today's session pitted 7-Delta against Squad 7-Mu — fifteenth in the composite ranking, they were consistent performers who had been diligently studying Cassian's squad's performance logs. He briefed the squad and mounted up.

In ECHO-LANCE's cockpit, Cassian felt the familiar pressure change, recycled air replacing the bay smell, the haptic controls warming under his hands with responsiveness he had come to appreciate in grade-C equipment. The sensor crown swept its arc. The visual overlay populated, showing 7-Mu's six frames in amber, his own squad's frames in green, and the relay beacon glowing blue at its far position.

7-Mu came in with a two-vector push -- their heavier frames driving the center while two lighter frames peeled wide on the right flank. The opening this maneuver created left 7-Delta with two choices that weren't choices at all: cover the center and the flank takes you, cover the flank and the center takes you. Cassian decided to cover neither.

"Korrath, shift to the center," he said.

"Hold against everything that comes your way." Korrath moved HEARTHBREAKER into the center corridor with the deep resonant hum of the heavy support frame at full power, and what happened next was not elegant. 7-Mu's center frames hit HEARTHBREAKER at full advance and the impact resounded across the bay. The mech's dampeners engaged with so much force that Cassian felt in his chest from thirty meters away, a concussive pressure driving through ECHO-LANCE's chassis.

The haptic controls rattled under his hands and the vibration made his teeth click together, hard. In HEARTHBREAKER's cockpit, Korrath absorbed the impact the way he absorbed everything -- completely, without hesitation, the way a mountain absorbs weather. Even though Korrath hadn't moved in the cockpit, HEARTHBREAKER was on the move, having been pushed back half a step by the impact. Korrath corrected this by driving forward into the push rather than give way.

In the corner of his overlay, Korrath noted that his hull integrity had dropped just below 90% from the initial contact. The opposing frames were pushing hard, just not hard enough to break Korrath or HEARTHBREAKER. 7-Mu's center frame moved to help his squadmates intercept HEARTHBREAKER and fired directly into the frame's torso with his ion lance.

The discharge of the blast lit up Cassian's overlay as a hard orange gland and, in HEARTHBREAKER's cockpit, Korrath felt it as a full-body shock, every control surface around him spiking with electromagnetic static for the half-second before the systems cleared. HEARTHBREAKER's hull integrity fell again to 85%. Once again, Korrath drove into his push, disregarding the damage. CRACK - another ion lance blasted into HEARTHBREAKER. Left shoulder this time. 78%. The joint was degrading.

Seeing the damage, Cassian took note and left Korath in the center. The Dravak clearly had no desire to stop his push. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Ren -- right flank timing."

"Their right screen committed at second nine. They are fully extended. No secondary coverage behind them." Nine seconds committed, no backup. Cassian now clearly saw what Ren was seeing as his overlay came into focus: 7-Mu's right flank two frames deep into the approach corridor with nothing behind them because everything they had was either pushing HEARTHBREAKER or committed to the right push.

"Nyx'ara." SHADOWRUN, having crept along the left wall of the bay, now launched off of it and crossed the space diagonally at top speed. The intake vents went full amber-hot as soon as the actuators engaged, the heat shimmer lighting up the thermal layer of Cassian's overlay as a trailing corona behind the interceptor's narrow profile. Nyx'ara wasn't threading a gap. She was crossing open space at the speed where the gap either existed when she arrived or she found out it didn't the hard way.

Nyx'ara exploded into 7-Mu's right flank from behind — their blindspot completely exploited. The EM wake from SHADOWRUN's acceleration hit the rear frame's sensor array only at the last second, the only indicator for the pilot being a glimpse of display static just before the proximity warnings screamed in their ears. The 7-Mu pilot involuntary flinched and jerked their frame half a step to the left. Enough, barely.

SHADOWRUN hit the gap between the two right-flank frames at speed, intake vents blazing, the wall of the approach corridor close enough on the right side that the proximity alarm shifted from periodic warning to sustained complaint. She was past before either frame could track her. First relay beacon: sixteen seconds. Cassian, trusting Nyx'ara's precision, called out orders over the squad net:"Cirus — objective approach, left corridor, now." RAZORWIND was already there.

Cirus had been building the left approach geometry almost as soon as Korrath began his push, the targeting array on his right forearm cycling through the angles as 7-Mu's formation committed itself forward and left the objective approach unguarded. He moved with the explosive commitment of someone who had already found the answer and was executing it without hesitation.

Two shots from his resonance rifle as he moved: CRACK, CRACK -- both of 7-Mu's remaining objective-area frames going amber, suppressed, right arms offline for four seconds each. HEARTHBREAKER, having pushed as far as it could, now deployed the anchor pylons. The hydraulic CLUNK of the deployment echoed through Bay 1-Echo's full-spectrum lighting, a deep mechanical declaration, and then HEARTHBREAKER became something other than a moving frame.

The pylons bit into the composite floor and locked, and Korrath's entire body registered the sudden, absolute stillness -- the harness catching him, the seat transmitting the total rigidity of a frame that had decided it was done moving. His hull integrity had now dropped to 74% and was still absorbing fire from 7-Mu's center push. It didn't matter. He had decided. 7-Mu pushed against Korrath and HEARTHBREAKER for just over a full minute longer. In that time, six more ion lances connected.

Each one discharging against HEARTHBREAKER's hull and lighting up the bay. The shoulder joint that had absorbed the most fire was visibly degrading – response lag in the left arm's movement becoming more evident, the actuators struggling to deliver full hydraulic pressure throughout the arm. Still, HEARTHBREAKER held the center and didn't move. Not one centimeter. Not because the frame couldn't be moved — the sustained fire would eventually find its threshold.

No, the frame didn't move because Korrath had decided this ground was his and he would be as immovable as mountains of his homeworld. Towering, domineering geographic monuments that were of such a scale that they could not acknowledge anything acting against them. The window closed. 7-Delta held two points to 7-Mu's one. Fifteen points. In the cockpit afterward he pulled up HEARTHBREAKER's integrity numbers. 55% at the close. He looked at the number for a while. Then he looked at the session score.

Then he filed the maintenance request and moved on. * At 1900 Cirus submitted the supplementary analysis to the faculty review board. Forty-seven pages. He had been building it since the morning after Cassian told him about the complaint. Cassian had told him at 2100 the previous night. Cirus had the data architecture built by noon the next day.

The analysis itself had taken two more days -- not because the work was uncertain but because forty-seven pages of rigorous correlation between coaching interventions and session performance metrics required the kind of care that Cirus applied to things he was going to put his name on.

"The document will be difficult to dismiss," Cirus said, when he submitted it.

"Difficult, though not impossible. The board can rule against the evidence if it determines the conflict of interest exists regardless of outcome. But the evidentiary threshold for that ruling is high."

"Then we've set the threshold as high as we can."

"Yes." He closed his slate.

"The rest is an institutional process." Institutional process. Three years. He was getting better at holding those two words. Six ion lance hits. More than a full minute. HEARTHBREAKER did not move. The complaint was filed. The session ran anyway.