Ten Thousand Fleets Chapter 9: 9. Merits and Demerits

Read chapter 9 of Ten Thousand Fleets by DavidNiemitz on NovelPedia.

9. Merits and Demerits Academy Hill, Vidako Imperium Stellarum August, 2847 Over the days that followed, Arc began to get a very good idea of how Academy Hill, and the campus which stretched across it, were laid out. Lieutenant Kekoa and a constantly rotating cast of upperclassmen assistants—each of whom was only too happy to ‘smoke’ any cadet who made the slightest mistake—drove them to and fro across the paths, the greens, the training fields, and the obstacle courses with delirious fury. At the center of the campus were the administrative buildings, such as the infirmary and Montalban Hall, the commissary and the officers’ club, as well as a wide lawn surrounded by genetically engineered variations of Terran trees. Moving north from there were the academic buildings, the athletic facilities, and the student dormitories, followed by housing for the officers and professors who made up the academy’s faculty. Continuing downhill led to The Valley, though lowly first-year cadets trying to survive Hard Burn weren’t permitted to leave campus. The southern portion of the hill, nearest to the farmlands which surrounded San Teodoro, and to the thick, equatorial jungles of native life that flourished beyond, was taken up not only by the small airfield to which Arc and his classmates had been delivered on that first day, but also by all of the industrial apparatus that went along with the school’s function. Mech hangars, repair bays, warehouses full of orderly row upon row of ammo crates, cranes, gantries, forklifts, industrial exoskeletons, shooting ranges and practice fields all together took up more than half the campus, but the largest single structure was the grounded bulk of the ISS Olybrius , a decommissioned frigate used for training. Saker VTOLs buzzed overhead, grav-trucks came and went along the access road which led to the warehouse loading docks, and Arc ran along the edge of the fences, in line with the other cadets, sweating until his clothes were soaked through beneath the twin suns of Vidako. They ran past T-3 Tyros , the thirty-five ton training mechs of the Imperium Stellarum, singly or in pairs. The 3rd class cadets, just a year ahead of Arc and his friends, still moved their machines awkwardly, and the massive feet of the mechs shook the ground with every step. “Get a good look,” Lieutenant Kekoa told them, as he marched them past. “Because the only way you get to ride in those mechs is through me—and my job is to weed out those of you who are too weak to hack it. I would rather leave you sobbing on the ground than let you into a cockpit if you haven’t earned it. I would rather you collapse right here, right now, with a burst heart, and die in the dirt, than see one of you maggots get all the way to fleet, crack under the pressure, and get a wingmate killed.” Arc did look: everyone did. Those mechs were what was ahead of them, if they managed to survive the torture which currently encompassed their days. The Tyros were not fancy, or complicated. They had one job alone, and it was a function for which they had been carefully designed: to teach cadets the very basics of how to pilot. Secondarily, the engineers had put some thought into how to make certain those cadets survived the inevitable accidents they would have. In many ways, the shape of the Tyro was a much closer analogue to the human body than the Kestrel that Arc and Cassie had seen in space. There were no wings or thrusters, and both forearms ended in carefully articulated, five finger hands which could mimic the motions of a human, Alu’kan, or Torean. The lower legs and feet were disproportionately thick and wide, the better to provide a new pilot with stability and a lower center of gravity. While there was armor plating on those lower legs, along with the tops of the hips, the outsides of the forearms, and the shoulders, the Tyros were obviously not meant to survive a battlefield. The silicon nitride ceramic plates were kept light and out of the way, to