Valor's Cost

by Kal Spriggs

  I lost all interest in connecting to the network or checking my schedule. I didn't sever the link, but I focused inward. I closed my eyes, feeling miserable once again. I had once dreaded attending the Academy... now it was all I could do to wait until we got back. There would be changes, I knew, but at least I'd have a schedule and some semblance of normality.

  I lay my head back and the emotional exhaustion rolled over me. Before I even knew it, I was asleep.

  ***

  I was floating in darkness. I didn't have a physical form and it felt almost like a dream... but I could feel energy dart past me in all directions. Something, a looming presence, controlled that flow of energy.

  What's happening? I wondered.

  You need this... The presence seemed to push the thought straight into my mind. With that thought came a burst of information. It was a conversation and my brain, sleep muddled and caught off-guard, struggled to make sense of it.

  “This is not what we discussed,” An angry man's voice spoke.

  “I'm doing what I can,” I recognized Charterer Beckman's voice. To my shock, she sounded nervous. “Things are more complicated than expected and let's be honest, your people bungled the timing.”

  “You're treading very dangerous ground,” the man answered. “The people I represent, the nation I represent, does not take kindly to failures.”

  “We haven't failed, not yet,” Beckman insisted. “Admiral Amstrong is still alive, yes, but she's hardly a power. She's basically a broken woman at this point.”

  “People like her don't break, Charterer,” the angry man snapped. “She's a warrior, something that I at least can respect. Do not underestimate her as a threat. This phase required her removal and the acquisition of one of Project Quicksilver's people. The alien tech was supposed to be a bonus... not the only thing we got out of this.”

  I realized with shock what they were talking about. This man, whoever he was, was behind the attack on Black Mesa Outpost, and that meant....

  All of my unfocused anger suddenly had a target. Charterer Beckman. She was behind the death of my brother and my parents and my grandmother Effy. She was behind the deaths of thirty men, women, and children.

  My sleepiness evaporated and I focused on the words with deadly intent.

  “Besides,” the man grunted, “we can't make sense of half of what we got. Their notes were all encrypted and the stuff that wasn't, half of it doesn't make any sense.” I felt a rush of angry mirth. Good luck figuring out what my parents wrote down. My dad had been particularly secretive. It was like a game to him. He'd had papers and theories 'poached' before by colleagues, and he'd bragged to Will and I about how he and my mom had created their own encryption methods, using slang terms and 'in' jokes to hide the meaning of things they'd been working on by hand and then encrypting everything digitally when they typed it up.

  The thought that the people who'd killed my dad were being spited by him from beyond the grave made me absurdly happy.

  “Look,” Charterer Beckman went on, “regardless of the intended results, politically, we couldn't have asked for a better outcome. There's a lot of distrust for the Militia as a result. Admiral Armstrong has taken assignment to Century Station, which is little more than a caretaker position...”

  “A caretaker position with access to the system's sensor networks,” the man snapped. “Or don't you remember that?”

  “My people insist that there's no trace of anything that could implicate us,” Charterer Beckman answered.

  That's what you think... you're going to pay for this. I wasn't asleep anymore, and this recording was going into my implant's saved cache.

  “Well, if you're wrong, you're the one who'll pay the price,” the man unintentionally echoed my thoughts. “Still, I agree. We're probably as well set up for phase three as we could be.”

  “I'm glad you agree,” I could hear the relief in Charterer Beckman's voice. That surprised me. She was one of the most powerful people on the planet. She held the votes to be on the Charter Council, the twelve most powerful and influential people on my world. Only the President, who everyone sort of saw as a figurehead, technically had more power. Why should she be afraid of this man?

  For that matter, President Frey wrote a letter to the Admiral telling her to stop investigating... is he a part of this? The thought didn't sit well with me. I knew the Admiral had been looking into this... but if she couldn't go to the President and if one of the Charterers was behind all this... who could we trust?

  “I'll step up the demands,” Charterer Beckman said. “As long as your people are going to be in place...”

  “They will, we'll talk more later,” the man cut the call and the recording ended.

  I still hung in the darkness, but now I realized that it was the school network. Yet it looked alien, different in a way I couldn't describe. Data bursts passed around me. Clusters of light and speeding transmissions. It was almost as if I were seeing all of it at once, every transmission, every bit of data... and it wasn't just the school network, it was all the networks, maybe even the entire planetary data network. Over all of it was that looming presence. What are you?

  The looking presence didn't answer the question. Enough. You've seen enough.

  Before I could respond, it caught me up and pushed me along, as if I were no more than a leaf caught by the wind.

  I opened my eyes, once more in my body. The train still sped along, my friends were still dozing or working. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. The data file lay in my implant, a ticking bomb that could blow everything wide.

  Yet did I dare send it? The implication was that Charterer Beckman had been behind the deaths of my parents and my brother. She'd allowed the pirates to sneak into the system. She'd passed along the Admiral's schedule.

  She was one of the most powerful people on the planet. She had connections. The Enforcers reported to her. She'd probably pulled strings to get the new superintendent assigned to the Academy. She'd somehow forced the President of Century to send my grandmother a letter telling her to stand down.

  In the face of all that, what good would a single recording do?

  As I considered all that, I'd been preparing a message, getting ready to send it to the Admiral. Yet I didn't send it, not yet. I thought about what the Admiral might do. One recording. A recording that she couldn't know the source of... it could be fake. I didn't think it was, but it could be. The little bit of doubt, the lack of any other evidence... would I be doing my grandmother a favor or a disservice if I sent her this?

  No... I realized. One recording isn't enough. I needed more information. I needed real, tangible, proof. The Admiral needed something solid. I owed it to her, I owed it to my parents and to Will to get them the truth.

  And when I had it, I was going to nail Charterer Beckman with it. I would make sure it went to every news output. I would make sure that every one of her dirty little secrets was made public. And when she went to trial, I would be there to watch her face as she realized that I had taken everything from her.

  ***

  A few hours later, I stood in the Academy auditorium with around a thousand other cadets.

  To this point, there had been no official announcement over who had been appointed as Superintendent. I suppose some part of me was still hoping that the Admiral would step out on the platform overlooking us all.

  As the lights came on that balcony, though, I was disappointed.

  A short, pudgy man with a friendly grin stepped up. “Cadets, welcome back to another year at the Academy. Plebes, welcome in your first full year here. I am your new superintendent, Rear Admiral Fischer. I'm proud to be taking the position of Admiral Armstrong.”

  “Now, any transition is going to be difficult. I want to assure you all that we have some of the very best officers here with me, overseeing this transition,” he went on. “There will be changes taking place. View them as upgrades, improvements, times have changed and we, as Militia Officers and futu
re Militia Officers, need to change with them!”

  His whole speech so far was rather disjointed and I could catch looks of confusion on the faces of other cadets around me.

  “Embrace these changes, Cadets, and you'll all do fine,” he finished. He paused then, almost like he was expecting something. Maybe applause, maybe cheers, I wasn't sure. His smile faded a bit as we all stood in silence.

  “Well,” he cleared his throat and ran a hand through his thinning blond hair. “We've had several staff officers rotate out. Some retiring and some moving on to new assignments. Luckily we've had an infusion of some of the best officers I could find!” I wondered at that. He made it sound like looking for officers to come work for him had been a challenge.

  “Commander Barber is joining us to teach Military Ethics and History classes,” he said. “I haven't worked with the Commander, but he comes straight from assignment at Nelson's University, where he taught ethics and history classes for over ten years.”

  The tall, older man who stepped forward looked awkward in his uniform. He almost looked like he felt embarrassed to be here. I wondered if he'd been a reservist who'd been called up for the duty or what.

  “Coming to teach our military engineering classes, we have Commander Drien,” Rear Admiral Fischer went on. My stomach sank as one of Sashi Drien's relatives stepped forward. He wasn't her father, but he must be one of her uncles or cousins. Any thoughts of him impartiality went out the window at his cool, aloof expression. Rear Admiral Fischer went on, but I had to struggle to understand his words. “... has been working diligently at Duncan City on several military engineering projects and I think that his experience will contribute greatly to your learning.”

  Next to me, I could see Sashi's shoulders hunch forward. She would have classes with her estranged relatives. How was she going to cope? For that matter, would he be impartial enough to pass her if she did well? Is he going to pass me if I do well? Our families' rivalry was something I knew far more about, now, and him failing me on purpose was a real concern.

  “We also have Commander Bill Troyer joining the engineering department,” A stocky, serious-faced officer stepped forward. I wondered at why we had two engineering professors joining the teaching staff. Maybe one of the other instructors had left. I hoped I would have Troyer over Drien.

  “And lastly, we have Commander 'Red' Siebert, taking on the role of our primary flight instructor,” I felt a bit numb as I realized that even Commander Pannja, my long-time kerala instructor was gone.

  “Commander Siebert is a decorated combat pilot who has served on active duty for over fifteen years. You all should be very happy to have her as an instructor here, she's turned down the position, three times before this,” Rear Admiral Fischer finished.

  Commander Siebert was a tall, whip-thin woman. Under the bright lights of the balcony, there were hallows under her cheeks and her eyes looked sunken. Contrary to her callsign, she wasn't red-headed or skinned. I wondered why they'd called her “Red.”

  “Now, we've busy times ahead of us all. There's lots of work to be done to put things on track,” Fischer's words almost sounded absent, like he was reading from a script. “Until now, all of you have trained and drilled mostly in your Cadet Companies. I'm changing that from this point onwards. You'll be given your new drill assignments tonight and you'll all be expected to learn how the other Cadet Companies train and fight. We need to build a full, military cohesion, so I'm also removing the bonuses for Company performance for Cadet Officers and we're going back to individual and assigned roster performance, so if those directly assigned under you perform well, then you'll see the bonuses, but having someone under your company affect your rating when you've no direct authority over them is silly, so we're doing away with that.”

  I wasn't really sure what he meant by that. In one breath, he'd just said we'd drill with people we didn't really know, in companies where we'd have no ties and no incentive to work harder. In the next, he'd suggested that the people working for us, who we'd now have no long term authority over, would be the ones controlling our ranking. I didn't think that cadets from other companies would risk messing up their own rankings to torpedo upperclassmen, but I was going to have a bunch of strangers that I'd have to get to know.

  Mixed squads happened. I'd had responsibility over several last year, but that was supposed to be the exception rather than the rule. You were supposed to work with the people you trained with, lived with, and saw every day. Not total strangers.

  “Now, Regiment of Cadets!” Rear Admiral Fischer's voice took on an almost shrill note, “dismissed!”

  We all stood there, a little confused, as we watched him lead the way off the balcony. The only person we had to compare him to was the Admiral... and he did not compare favorably.

  “Uh, what do we do now?” Ashiri looked around.

  Chris Woods looked at us. He was our Company Commander, and if anything, he looked more distressed than anyone else. This is his ranking that's going to suffer, I realized. Not just his ranking, potentially his career. Still, he took charge quickly enough, “Sand Dragons, fall out, head back to the barracks. As soon as I receive assignments, I'll be posting them.”

  “Yes, sir!” we rumbled in reply. Yet I hated to think how powerless he must feel. Normally he and the Company Training Officer, in this case, Cadet Lieutenant Hooten, would put together initial assignments. Rear Admiral Fischer had just taken away a massive amount of their influence.

  It was worse than that, I realized, a moment later as my implant pinged to notify me of a mass message. The new Superintendent had sent out those assignments to everyone. He'd just taken away any authority and say that the Cadet leadership might have.

  I bit my lip as I saw the expressions on the faces of the Cadets First Class. If Fischer had already undercut them this much, then how much worse would things get?

  ***

  “You lost all of your uniforms and gear... again?” the sour-faced clerk stared at me. Her beady little eyes bored into me. “You lost your gear two years ago in a skimmer crash, I have the paperwork here. Now you're saying you lost it again?”

  “Pirates burned my house down. I lost everything,” I said, staring at her in shock. “I mean, it's in the news and everything...”

  “You think I have time to watch news?” The clerk grunted. Despite her words, I heard a holovid display playing in the background. I felt a spike of rage building in me. “No, this gear is expensive and you're the fifth cadet to come through here today with missing gear. I'm not issuing you anything without a signed statement.”

  “I don't even have uniforms!” I protested. “I'm supposed to drill tomorrow!”

  “That's too bad,” the clerk grinned at me. “But you should have been more careful with your gear.”

  My world went red. I found myself leaning over the counter my face only centimeters away from the porcine woman. “The same pirates who burned my house down killed my grandmother, my mother, my father, and my brother. I lost everything in that attack,” I hissed out the words. “I will not be belittled and embarrassed by you. I sent my paperwork ahead. Give. Me. My. Gear.”

  The woman fell back in her chair, her beady eyes going wide, “You... you can't talk to me like that, cadet. I may not wear the uniform, but--”

  “I killed several of the pirates,” my words were flat. “I crushed them under thousands of tons of sand. Do you know what someone looks like after that?” I didn't know, either, nor did I want to. The clerk stared at me with wide eyes. She grasped around and pulled out her datapad, her fingers shaking a bit as she pulled something up. She glanced at her datapad and then up at me, her face white and pasty. “Oh. Look at that, I, uh, found your request.”

  She reached under the counter and pulled out a stack of gear, all of it stripped and piled loosely, in a fashion that told me she hadn't taken the time to assemble it after it had come from the assembly machines. She had it sitting back there already... she was just too lazy to put it
together and give it to me.

  “Here...” She shoved it at me.

  I took the stack and turned around.

  “Uh, you need to sign for it,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “I'm going to inventory it first and make certain everything is here, I'll come back to sign for it when I've assembled it and made certain it's all present.”

  She didn't say anything as I left the supply office. The civilian clerk had been a pain before. I wondered if she was worse now because the Admiral was gone or if she'd been told to treat me that way. Who knows, maybe she's just always an ogre.

  I stalked back through the corridors and up to my room, still wrapped in the protective rage. I laid out the gear on the floor of my room and went through the process of assembling it. I wasn't terribly surprised that pieces were missing and I used my datapad to note what was missing and what wasn't, then forwarded the list to the clerk with a note that I'd recorded our entire interaction.

  I wasn't terribly surprised when she messaged me back that the missing pieces would be available for pickup when I returned.

  Sashi came back to the room as I was putting together my body armor. She frowned at me, “Isn't that stuff supposed to come assembled?” I had all the pieces of equipment laid across the floor and I was seated in the middle of it, putting together each piece, one at a time.

  “Yes,” I said, the single word response was about all that I could manage.

  “Ah,” Sashi replied. “Need any help?”

  “No,” I replied. The body armor went together in overlapping segments. The lighter impact resistant cloth had armor plate inserts and every section had to be not only assembled right, but then had to be fitted to the wearer so that it lay properly. Then I'd have to attach all the load points for weapons, ammunition, the radio, and all the rest. Normally it would take an hour or more to put together just the body armor, much less all the rest. It would probably take me three or four hours to get everything properly attached and situated like I wanted.