by Kal Spriggs
Quick heal, again. I sat up, looking around. The rest of the flight were getting up and getting dressed so I followed suit. “You okay?” Princess Kiyu asked me. I glanced over at her, just in time to see her pulling her trousers up. I felt very suddenly awake and alert and fumbled with my own pants.
“Yeah,” I coughed out. “I’m fine. Sorry if I was out of it.”
“You just sort of shut down,” she noted.
“I’m a little overwhelmed,” I admitted. I looked around, wondering if we were being watched and then deciding that it didn’t matter. “How much trouble are we in?”
Kiyu pulled her uniform shirt on over her t-shirt, fiddling with it and making sure everything was straight. I knew she was buying time to think and consider her words. “Officially, we are not in trouble at all. There will be no official repercussions, no formal charges, and
“Unofficially?” I asked.
“From how you embarrassed my cousin by making his chosen entrant look bad?” She gave a shrug, “He will almost definitely request from his father that we are all eliminated in Second Screening. Probably during the very final phase, since we are nearly there.”
“What if that doesn’t work?” I asked.
She shot me a look. “In that unlikely event, there will be other opportunities, but he will have to be more cautious. It would not do for him to be sloppy and get caught, especially not when there is adequate suspicion that he knew that Jerral was going to try to kill us.”
I rubbed at my face, “So if we survive Second Screening, we should be safer.”
Kiyu stared at me, her green eyes went wide. After a moment, she began to laugh. “You… you are very much the optimist.”
I gritted my teeth at that. “Okay, just how overt are they going to make this?” I demanded. “Thirty of us in powered armor, a couple hundred irregulars with no armor and mixed equipment. We only need to survive, right?”
“We all need to get to the exit,” she told me. “If we lose even one member, alive or dead, the doors won’t open. The prisoners we will fight, they will know that, almost certainly. When the Institute wants to, they can add military convicts to the defenders, increase their weapons quality and the amount of ammunition they are given. All they need to do is hold us in place and then whittle us down.” She shook her head. “The best flights always lose one or two and have to carry them through to the end. There have been flights before where they lost as many as five or ten and carried them. But the defenders are ingenious. They will use cables to try and snare us or drag away our wounded and dead and hide them away or use them as bait in traps. The ones who kill one of us will be pardoned. We are fighting desperate, wicked people, who will do everything they can to earn their freedom.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Well, we’ve got an advantage, though.”
She shook her head, “We have no advantages. We’ll be outnumbered. We will almost certainly face superior firepower and a readied foe.”
“Yeah, but you’ll have me, and I’m not going to give up,” I told her.
***
That confidence was harder to come by a little later as Richardson put us through another round of scenarios. He had ramped up the difficulty and as he rotated us through flight leaders and sub-leaders, our attitude became increasingly grim. The scenarios were all similar, all designed around the parameters of the final phase of Second Screening. Thirty-six of us went up against two hundred prepared enemies in a variety of environments. The first few were obviously based on the Barrens, with sprawling buildings and narrow, winding alleyways.
Those were hard enough. Enemies sniped down on us. They aimed to pick off those of us in the back or on the flanks. When someone went down, enemies would rush out to try and drag the wounded or “dead” suit away.
The first scenario, we lost almost half the flight trying to recover one person that the simulated enemy dragged away with a ground vehicle. The one after that, we made it three quarters of the way through before we realized we’d lost someone and had to circle back, only to be picked off, one after the other as we had to fight our way back through.
Stealth was heavily emphasized, as was reconnaissance. I took my turn more than once scouting ahead, and at least in the simulated scenario, I seemed to do a little better than some of the others. In my opinion, that was because I didn’t try to ghost along in the five hundred kilograms of powered armor. I used the Kavach’s enhanced strength to climb or bound to higher spots and the speed to avoid enemy patrols. I kept getting warned by Richardson about noise, but that seemed absurd. The exosuits were big and bulky. They were going to make noise no matter what. The enemy already knew where we were.
Even with the extra noise, most of the time I was able to get in position to observe enemy spotters and patrols. As it became clear that I was being more successful, the flight started assigning me to scout more often. Osmund started adopting my techniques, too, and soon enough he and I were more or less the permanent forward scouts.
Not that it helped overall, though. The first few scenarios, we fell apart trying to fight the enemy. As we adapted, though, Richardson just kept dialing up the difficulty. The enemy came at us like ants. As soon as we gave away our position, they started to swarm in from all directions. If we tried to fort up in a defensive position, they just kept coming until the last of us fell. If we tried to fall back and attack from another angle, they’d bog us down with casualties until we couldn’t move anymore and then they’d swarm us again.
We rotated through flight leaders, one after the next, each of us taking a turn. Osmund managed to get us into a defendable position where the enemy finally just wore us down out of attrition. Sanjaya tried a fancy flanking action that almost worked until we got to the exit and found we’d lost three people somewhere along the way. Then the enemy attacked us until we all died.
With Gowri, Nadzeha, and Cheetan, we were swarmed under well short of the exit. With Isagani and Balani, we tried drawing the enemy away and going for a flank, but both times, they downed our rearguard and then we had to fight to recover their bodies.
At that point, we took a break while we ate our rations. I was covered in sweat. We were all tired. While the suits were in training mode, we were still running, jumping and climbing, but the suits kept in one spot, providing resistance and impacts to replicate the simulation. When I’d been killed, Shadow had played me imagery from the Kavach’s sensors of the suits jumping and running in place. It looked bizarre but kind of cool at the same time.
Richardson had walked through those windmilling arms and swinging legs without a worry, which was pretty impressive seeing as a single blow could have crippled or killed an unarmored person.
“This isn’t going so well,” Osmund muttered to me.
“Yeah,” Sanjaya snorted from my other side. “At least neither of you got ‘killed’ and dragged through the streets that last time. My armor replicated the vibration, I think my brain is still rattling.”
“We need to change things up,” I muttered.
“What’s that?” Osmund asked.
“We’re letting the enemy set the conditions,” I frowned as I tried to explain it. “If we keep reacting to them, we’re just going to keep losing.”
“I tried,” Osmund noted, “but it’s hard with how this is set up.”
“Yeah,” Sanjaya nodded. “But you did good. Better than me. I didn’t notice they’d snagged Bahn, Gowri, and Hayden.”
“Both of you did well, it’s just, I don’t know, I feel like we’re playing to the enemy’s strengths,” I shrugged. “I don’t know how to better explain it.”
“Well, if you figure it out when your turn comes up, go for it,” Osmund told me. “I had my doubts about you before, Vars, but you’re pretty sharp.”
“Yeah, you’re doing a great job scouting,” Sanjaya nodded. “And I think your help on the flank on my run was what really made it almost work.”
I flushed, “Thanks guys. Hayden is up next, let’s see what
she comes up with.”
On that cue, Richardson ordered us back into formation and we went into the next scenario.
This one was a more mountainous setting with dense forest. Jonna split us up into three sub-flights each with a pair of scouts. For whatever reason, she didn’t use me for one and had me on rearguard instead.
All three groups went out, moving parallel through the rugged terrain. Jonna managed all three groups, spreading us out in overlapping groups, moving us in bounds so that we could cover each other. She also kept up a roll-call, with each sub-flight reporting their status every couple of minutes through our heads up displays.
It seemed cumbersome, but everything actually went pretty smoothly, especially as she coached us through it. I could tell that she’d rehearsed this on her own, but her confidence and the methods she used kept everyone moving together.
As we located the first enemy positions, she got a more rapid picture of how they were laid out, with a broad frontage of our flight. As the first enemy patrols came towards us, she was already shifting us towards the areas where the enemy was weakest, positioning all three teams on the left flank and then scouting and probing further. As the enemy patrols came in, she sent my sub-flight out to ambush them, triggering the enemy to swarm in our direction. As they came out, the other two sub-flights engaged the left flank as the enemy came out of their positions, mowing them down in droves.
“Advance!” she barked and our whole formation bounded forward into the gap that had created. As the enemy swarmed at us, we went into a fighting retreat, but we were behind their positions so we were actually headed right for the exit.
We lost two or three people towards the end to enemy fire, but the sub-flights were able to recover them and drag them to the finish. For the first time that day, our screens flashed the scenario victory display at the end.
“Very good,” Richardson told us. “That is exactly the kind of methodical approach that you need to succeed. You utilized misdirection and scouting well. You made good use of your speed and mobility.” He looked around at us, “The rest of you utilized your training on tactical movement and covered your fields of fire. Now,” he smiled slightly, “do it again.”
We rotated through three more flight leaders after Jonna. All three of them tried to emulate her formations and reporting to greater and lesser success. We lost each time, though. I was starting to feel like I was seeing a pattern. Most of the time when we failed, it was because we moved slowly. The computer-run opponents took time to mass and swarm us under. Whenever we gave them that time, we lost. Jonna’s plan had been quick and effective, had got us behind the enemy formation and had prevented them from reacting in time.
We took another break after the third iteration after Jonna. That one had turned into a long, grueling fight where we had retreated to a box canyon in the mountainous terrain, but the enemy kept coming at us. It took over two hours to fight that one out until the last of us ran out of ammunition and the enemy swarmed in to finish us off.
Richardson had let that one play out, I figured, to prove a point. We wouldn’t win through defense. Second Screening required us to go and get the objective. We had to play the game and if we didn’t, I was sure that the Institute had a way to force us to play.
We ate our second meal, this time with most of us quietly thinking as we ate. When we returned to our Kavach exosuits, it was Kiyu’s turn to lead the flight.
Richardson had swapped out the scenario once more. This time we were fighting through a rugged, desert environment, with blowing sand limiting visibility, narrow and dry gulches, and steep rocky outcroppings.
Kiyu split us up into twelve groups of three. Each group moved along in parallel, scouting ahead in a broad line. I ended up with Osmund and Sanjaya, and we had to climb and bound over several rock ridges on our path. She had us reporting in constantly, updating information and terrain as we moved. Each team alternated movement as we started to pick up enemy positions, one team setting up a defensive position while another team moved forward. I quickly realized that she was directing us towards thin points in the enemy line and moving us around the enemy patrol routes. Within a few minutes, we were right up near the enemy lines and then she actually coordinated our movement so each team slipped through gaps in their fields of fire and observation. She’d worked out the timing of the patrols and movement so precisely that as soon as a patrol would leave an area, she’d move one of our teams into and through the gap.
It was slow, painstaking process but by the end of it, we’d all reassembled at the exit point without firing a single shot.
“Very good,” Richardson told her. “That’s the kind of thing that will help you all survive. She’s the first one of you to realize that you don’t need to engage the enemy at all. You just need to make it to the exit.”
I couldn’t help but raise my hand. “Sir, won’t the hostiles in the final phase know where the exit is, though? Won’t they have a final defensive position there?”
He looked uncomfortable, “I’m not allowed to tell you specifics of the actual exercise.”
“Theoretically, though, that would make sense, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Richardson nodded. “That would make sense.”
“Wouldn’t that mean that no matter how stealthy we are at the beginning, we’re going to have to fight at some point?” I asked.
“In this scenario, Entrant Drakkan identified a weakness in the enemy positioning that made it so she did not have to fight,” Richardson told me. “That’s the kind of critical thinking that we want to see from you. Identify weaknesses not just in your enemy, but in your own assumptions.”
I nodded at that, but I still came away dissatisfied. Kiyu’s tactics had worked, but they still felt like a gimmick.
We did four more runs that night. Two of them, people tried to mimic Kiyu’s stealth run. The first time it was a total failure. We were detected quickly into the initial scouting and then each of our teams was mobbed down and destroyed. The second time, about half of our teams had slipped through and the enemy detected us and it turned into a close-range bloodbath that wiped out pretty much all of the defenders and all of us as well.
Two more of our flight followed Jonna’s tactics, three sub-flights moving along to find a weak spot to exploit and then attempting to get behind the enemy. The coordinated movement went better, but we still ended up getting bogged down both times.
As we finally broke for the evening, we were all exhausted. My brain, though, was racing. I kept coming back to how I would have fought each of the encounters and I was feeling more and more dissatisfied with how it had gone. It feels too passive, I thought to myself. Shadow didn’t respond, but she’d checked out after the first few runs, saying she was going to focus on cracking the alien encryption.
We had a few minutes to shower. Again, it was all a blur, with entrants trying to get whatever water they could to scrub off stale sweat from over twelve hours in our Kavach exosuits. I kept finding myself standing there, thinking, staring off into space.
“Ahem,” Jonna noted, “I told you to look, but staring like that is going to make people uncomfortable.”
I blinked and then flushed as I realized where I’d been staring. I quickly doused my head under the cold water and rinsed off the last of the soap, too embarrassed to respond. I heard her laugh lightly, and my ears burned as I stepped away from the shower, grabbing my towel and drying myself off quickly. I wrapped myself in the towel and then went to my bunk and started getting dressed.
“You’re easily flustered, aren’t you?” Kiyu noted, just as I was struggling into my clothing. Since my skin was still damp from the shower, it was going a little more slowly than I wanted.
I jerked my underwear up and pulled my t-shirt down with a bit more force than necessary. “I don’t know what you mean,” I told her.
“She’s teasing you because it is behavior that amuses her,” Kiyu told me. “I’ll admit, your behavior around nudity is refresh
ingly naïve. Averting your eyes and such. Very gentlemanly of you.” She gave a merry chuckle as I flushed.
“Thanks,” I bit out, not feeling very gentlemanly at the moment.
“Take it as a complement, if you want, as I said, most here will not hesitate to enjoy the beauty of a body. Looking is natural. Do you not think I’m beautiful?”
I managed to stammer something, feeling my face burn with embarrassment.
“Life is so short and ours may well come to an end soon enough,” she said, her smile turning oddly fragile, “it is nice to appreciate things with the time we have.”
That I couldn’t argue with. And as she said it, I realized that for all her composure, for all of her calculations, Kiyu was still a young woman. She couldn’t be much older than me. She might have trained for this all her life, but she was still just as scared as me. We might very well die… and she was reaching out, as a friend, maybe as more.
I owed her more than to stammer awkwardly in response. I met her eyes, “You are very beautiful, Kiyu. I will treasure what I have seen of you and the time I have spent with you.”
For a moment, her green eyes teared up a bit, but then she gave me a cheerful nod, “You’ve the soul of a poet, Vars, who would have guessed?”
Richardson called us to form up next to our bunks and we hurried to obey. A moment later, the medic came through with our shots of quick heal. As I climbed into bed, the last thing I remembered was the glimpses I’d got of Jonna and Kiyu. They both were beautiful… and I really hoped that I didn’t get them killed.
***
Chapter 17: People Say I Don’t Have Any Subtlety
I woke up and I felt as if something had clicked in my brain while I’d slept. I felt like the problems I’d been struggling with the day before had a solution.
That feeling stuck with me as we lined up for the morning fight for rations. At this point, the daily brawl felt like little more than a formality. Most of the groups knew how the clashes would go. Iron Flight, without Jerral, barely even jostled with us as we took what we needed.
