Flight of the Outcast (13 page)

   
Power supply at 5 percent,
the ship told her sternly. Instantly, she consulted the datafeeds. She wouldn't make it, not at this speed. Ten kilometers short of the hangar the ship would take over and land itself. How many demerits would that cost her?

   Unless—

   Unless it was another test, a trick. Doing a quick calculation in her head, she thought she should have more power than that—25 percent at least. Should she slow?

   
Warning: Power supply at 4 percent. Ship override in
two minutes.

   She could slow to half speed and make it. Or she could chance it and—

   "I'm out of power!" Kayser's panicky voice sliced through her thoughts. "The ship's taking me down!"

   She couldn't see him. She was too far ahead. But if he was out of power, her ship might be out too—

   She reduced thrust to half speed. She would come in with seconds to spare now. Already, she could see the campus in the distance. She calculated her incoming trajectory and made a course adjustment to use the absolute minimum of power. She was over the main entrance of the campus now at only five hundred meters altitude. People were staring up. There was the hangar—

   A black blur screamed past her. "Sorry, Disaster—"

   Asteria's blood ran cold at his snickering. Kayser had slowed and was already entering the hangar. She guided her trainer in ten seconds after him. She slipped into the correct berth and released the hatch. The flight sergeant was waiting, his face purple.

"What did I tell you?" he demanded.

"I kept to within tolerances," Asteria told him, climbing out.

   "Stand still." He released the sleek helmet and helped her lift it off. "Breathe!"

   She gasped air and felt woozy. At the far end of the trainer dock, two helpers had removed Kayser's helmet. He came swaggering toward them. "Sergeant," he said, "I want to report this cadet. She improperly addressed me by my family name."

   The sergeant glared at him. "If I give her a demerit, my lord, you must have two. We could hear your transmissions. You deliberately violated your orders when you engaged in a race with Trainer Seven. You transmitted false data to her craft."

   Kayser's face turned scarlet. "I didn't do—"

   "Please!" The sergeant leaned close, and in a furious, low voice, he said, "You didn't do anything? I was listening, my lord! You overrode the data stream in Trainer Seven to make it look as though it was out of power. And you sent a false distress communication. Both are against the rules. Now—do you want to press your charge?"

   "No, let it go," Kayser snapped and stalked past Asteria. The doorway swallowed him.

   A moment later, Trainer Two swooped in and berthed. Hot on its tail was Trainer Three. Asteria reported to the tech who had suited her, and he removed the pressure suit in the same efficient fashion. "If you get short of breath, use this," he said, handing her a respirator no longer than her little finger. "It's triox. You may have to use it to adjust to breathing on your own the first few times you suit up. All right, get into your uniform and then report to Sigma Two for debriefing."

   Four other girls had been on the training flight, and the last of them, an Aristo named Gaila, came in as Asteria finished dressing. "Mastral will have your skin," she warned in passing. "Remember you're a Commoner." Her mouth curled in what might have been a smile. "Even if you do know how to fly."

   By the time the class had assembled in the debriefing hall, Kayser had told everyone about beating Asteria in their impulsive race. Asteria clenched her teeth. So much for their truce. She didn't like the way Kayser's cronies grinned at her, but what did she expect?

   The flight coordinator came in, ran through the list of cadets, and explained what they had done right and had done wrong. Some had been slow to react to deliberate complications; others had made errors in navigation—one, a hapless Aristo named Mikkels, had come back half an hour late after making a bad turn, not realizing the obvious—that his nav system was giving him false data.

   Still, everyone scraped through with grades of 2.5 or better. Dai's was a very respectable 3.0. Asteria's was 3.4—"You reacted well to the onboard emergencies," the coordinator observed dryly. "Almost well enough to rack up a perfect 4.0. But you exceeded the speed requirements in returning."

   Her face felt hot when Kayser received a score of 3.7. "You received a 3.4 for your navigation and reaction to emergency situations," the flight coordinator said. "And we decided to give you a 10 percent bonus for having won an informal race."

   Kayser flashed Asteria a triumphant leer.

   Dai whispered, "Don't react."

   As the class broke up, Kayser and his shadow Broyden strutted past. Asteria said, "Congratulations on winning the high score… my Lord Mastral."

   He stared coldly at her. "That's not funny, Disaster." To Broyden, he said, "I don't think she'll be at the Academy much longer. Too gullible."

   Only after the two had left the hangar did Asteria realize she had balled her hands into fists.

   "Let them laugh," Dai told her. "You can show him up at the end of term in the War Games. Hey, want to go into Haven this weekbreak?"

   "No." Alone of all the students who had earned the average of 2.5, Asteria had never left the campus for the monthly half-day excursion to the coastal town.

   "Come on," Dai said. "Get some real food for a change. Swim in the sea."

"I don't have any money," Aster said.

   "I thought they were supposed to give you an allowance from your father's estate."

   "Oh, they will. Eventually. The Bourse don't do anything quickly."

   "Then I'll treat."

   "No, thanks. I just don't want to, all right?" She hesitated when Dai dropped behind. "What's wrong?"

   Dai was huffing and puffing for air. She turned and saw that his complexion had taken on a faint green tinge. He tried to smile. It looked like a grin of pain. He gasped, "Uh—are you going to use your triox?"

   "Turned it in already," she said.

   "Oh."

   "Come on," she told him. "You're just readjusting to the air, that's all. Using two triox would be a rules violation."

   "Right." But he gave her an odd look, and he sounded far from convinced that she was sincere about "rules."

       Asteria had heard of them almost as soon as she set foot on Academy soil. They happened every year, toward the end of spring term. For sixteen days, classes were suspended, students dropped all talk about ways to violate rules without being caught, and the instructors became intensely interested in advising their favorite cadets on how to conduct themselves.

    The first-year cadets were also first in the War Games schedule. The four hundred top-ranked cadet pilots were divided up into sixteen teams for the competition. On the first day, by an arbitrary selection process, each team was paired with an enemy team. The eight winners went on to a second pairing on the second day; on the third day, the surviving four were paired; and on the last day, the surviving two teams faced each other for the top honor of the class.

    The teams alternated between playing the roles of attacker or defender in each round. Defenders would be given a specific task—prevent the enemy ships from knocking out a communications center, for example, represented by a beacon that could be silenced if an attacking ship could hit a target with a laser beam. The attackers had to devise the strategy and tactics necessary to achieve their objective.

   And of course the flight coordinators would be sure to throw in challenging accidents and mishaps. Asteria and Dai both made the cut, though they were not assigned to the same team, somewhat to Asteria's disappointment. She was in Team Gold, he in Team Red. The Golds, led by an Aristo girl named Helene Kaccia (merely the daughter of a baron, and so no one had to call her "my lady"), had informally decided to rename themselves the Bolts, and they adopted a stylized jagged spear of lightning as their symbol. Dai was the leader of the Reds, and Asteria wasn't surprised (and admittedly, she was amused) to hear that he had decided to call his team the Fabulous Flying Freaks. Their symbol was a brick.

   "Why a brick?" she'd asked him.

   Dai shrugged. "Why not?"

   Kayser was the commander of the Silver team—he had renamed them the Daggers—and Asteria suspected that he must have used his Aristo influence, because Broyden and Gull, his two buddies, were also on his team.

   Helene was on edge about the contest. "We may not win," she said, "but please, please,
please
, let's make it to the third round at least. You're all good—but make sure you're at least that much better than the other teams. If we get to round three, no one's going to make fun of us."

   The first day was not very challenging at all. The Bolts were paired against the Sabers, with the Bolts attacking, the Sabers defending. They flew trainers almost identical to the one Asteria had first flown—only these were equipped with mock weapons, chiefly laser cannons. They fired harmless light, but any ship hit by the blast would register the probable damage and relay the score to flight control.

   Their turn came early in the morning. Already Asteria had seen Dai, who triumphantly announced that the Freaks had soundly trounced the Team Green. Charged with defending a section of airspace, the Freaks had engaged the Green ships in close aerial combat, losing nine ships to imaginary damage but downing or seriously damaging all twenty-five of the enemy.

   Asteria suited up for the briefing. Helene told them they were protecting a troop transport, represented by a huge, slow skimmer. They had to see it safely across two hundred kilometers of airspace to win. She divided the pilots up, with some taking positions below the skimmer, some to either side, and some above. To Asteria, Helene said, "I want you to fly rear guard. Hang back, be inconspicuous, and charge in if anyone gets in trouble."

   "Aye," Asteria replied.

   Helene gave her a wan smile. "You've got good moves, Locke. Not all Aristos think you're a disaster."

   "Thank you, group leader," Asteria said flatly.

   They took off, assumed positions around the lumbering skimmer, and Helene gave the order to arm their weapons. Everyone reported in, Asteria last as the rear guard—and before Asteria knew it, they were gaining altitude as they left the Academy behind.

   She kept her senses on the alert. A hundred kilometers out, she spotted the first attack, a wave of six ships coming in high from the north. And when the others were fighting them off, she saw the second wing, rising one at a time from the dark cleft canyon of a river far below. "Straight ahead and low!" she said over the ship-to-ship communicator. "This is the main body!"

   "Gold three, four, five, six, and seven, engage!" Helene ordered. "Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, give them support!"

   The Gold team swooped down like hawks. Asteria counted ten enemy ships down on the deck. Six overhead…there were still nine to account for. Not behind, not ahead…not above or below. The trainer pulsed data to her as the trainers wheeled and fired their laser markers at each other: "Saber seventeen disabled. Saber nineteen destroyed. Gold three, 12 percent damage, life support marginal. Saber two disabled."

   "Here they come," Asteria said. "The last nine: high and dead ahead."

   "Gold twenty-four and twenty-five, stay with the troop carrier," Helene ordered. "Everyone else, come with me!"

   Below, the trainers that had been downed were skimming off on autopilot, their human pilots unable to affect them now. Three of the Gold ships had been destroyed or damaged so badly they were out of the battle, but on the other hand, fourteen of the Sabers had been put out of commission. The Sabers had only eleven left. Still, even one would be enough—if the pilot's aim was true. "Heads up!" snapped Asteria. "Get him, get him!"

   That fantastic 360-degree vision flooded her head, showing her everything that was happening. The lead Saber ship had rolled out of combat and was diving down on the transport. Pako Zanthem, an Aristo boy whose nerve seemed cold as liquid nitrogen, rose to meet it—but almost at once Asteria's trainer said, "Gold twentyfour pilot killed," and Zanthem's ship dived away.

   The belt cut in, boosting her awareness, speeding her reaction so that time slowed down. Asteria warped her own trainer up to face the threat. She yawed, letting the enemy laser bursts beam past harmlessly, then focused on its leading edge, where the pilot's head would be. The Saber ship did a tricky bank, but she stuck with it and fired her weapons. "Saber one downed," Asteria's trainer told her. She spun to get back to the transporter they were protecting, and then she saw another enemy ship closing fast.

   She pounced on it and fired; a half-second later it fired back; and the trainer announced, "Saber four navigation disabled. No score on Saber four's firing." Adrenaline course through her as she rose again—

   Then it was all over. Just like that. The voice of a controller said, "Well done, Gold. Decision by massacre. All trainers return to base."

   She felt the heightened awareness drain away as the formation peeled off to retrace its course. The belt's effect faded, leaving her feeling empty.

   After the return to the Academy and the debriefing, Asteria found Dai watching two other mock battles in the barracks holoroom. "This real time?" she asked, sitting next to him.