Flight of the Outcast (16 page)

   "What?" Asteria blinked. Overhead, the intense stars of the Corona cluster were already gleaming in the purple sky. "Where are they attacking?"

   "Peshwan outposts," Dai said. "I guess you didn't hear. The news came in today. It wasn't a major Tetra force. Just a few dozen probes, but they destroyed a relay station and took out five drone ships before a Fleet Dreadnaught wiped them up. The
Victory,
crew complement of two hundred, weaponry—"

   "I know the specs," Asteria said. She thought for a few moments and added, "I wonder what the Tetras are like. Physically, I mean. Are they humanoid or reptilian or insectoid, or like nothing we've ever seen? And why do they attack our settlements? They don't seem to colonize the planets they conquer."

   "They haven't conquered any since the First Tetra War," Dai reminded her. "And who knows what they look like? All we've ever captured have been mechanized ships with silicon AI systems—and they don't even seem to have a language. We never hear any comm chatter, and the captured Tetra ships don't have any written language anywhere in them that we can find. If we ever negotiate a peace, I don't know how we'll do it."

   "We don't have an actual Tetra body, but we've found tissue," Asteria pointed out.

   "Yeah, one time, and even that wasn't certain. It was tetraploid tissue, but it might not have been from a pilot—could have been a specimen of some alien animal that ship had collected. There wasn't enough left to reconstruct a body configuration."

   Crees were beginning to hum in the bushes. Asteria reflected that she had never seen a cree, either: small insects native to Dromia that didn't bite or sting but were known only for their gentle, musical droning sounds. She looked up at the sky. The brilliant, tiny orb of Coriam shone like a sapphire halfway up the sky to the north, above the flat roof of the mess hall. She wondered, not for the first time, what life on the privileged world of the Aristos must be like.

   She took in a deep breath, smelling the minty aroma of the blossoms, which seemed to be growing more intense as the evening drew on. The crees murmured. It all seemed so peaceful. "Well, we won't have to worry about Tetra attacks here," Asteria said. "I just wanted to congratulate you for winning the battle."

   "Thanks."

   "Well, are you going to tell me about it?"

   "It was close," Dai said grudgingly. "Did they tell you we won by one ship, and that one was within seven points of exploding?"

   "I heard."

   "Well, this is how it happened." Slowly at first, and then with a growing intensity, Dai went over the whole battle: the arrangement of the two teams, the mass attack that he recognized as a feint—it was the same basic battle plan that Kayser had used once before. "I checked the map to see how Kayser planned to sneak up on the refugee ship. Same skimmer they'd used before, by the way. Anyhow, no rivers, no canyons, but there was one point where we were sailing along above the western cliffs, and I figured he'd drop down almost to sea level and follow the coastline."

   Dai picked up a twig and bent down to sketch in the dirt. "Here's where the skimmer would pass over the cliffs. It's only a few kilometers up to where we turned inland again, so I thought if Mastral was going to try to sneak-attack us, this would be the place. I told Helene what I thought would happen, and she had me go up to 2,500 and hang back. Sure enough when Gull and Mastral came swooping up for the attack, I saw them in plenty of time to dive. I called Helene…" He tossed the twig aside. "You know the rest of it. I didn't have much to do with the actual win, because I had no way of working into firing position. Just a matter of getting in front of Mastral and not letting him get a clear shot at the skimmer."

   "You were brilliant," Asteria said. "It was the only way to deal with that kind of an attack."

   "It worked, anyway. We won."

   "Congratulations. I'm sorry I missed the party."

   "Yeah, me too. Gold Team would never have been in the running if it hadn't been for your victories earlier. And congratulations to you, too, on escaping from Vodros' clutches," Dai said. He leaned back and stared up at Coriam, as if gazing in scorn on all Aristos everywhere. "I know one thing for certain. If I ever get to be commander in chief, the first general order I'm going to issue is that in the Royal Space Fleet, there will be no further discrimination against Commoners."

   "They won't let a Commoner become commander in chief," Asteria reminded him.

   "See what I mean?" wailed Dai, spreading his arms to the sky, as though imploring the stars. "Discrimination!"

The next twelve days passed rapidly, a welcome break in the routine of the Academy. The whole school hung on the War Games, tension building with each round. The second-year teams faced more intricate tactical situations than the first-year teams had confronted; the third-years were able to use more advanced simulated weapons and larger training craft, and the fourth-years actually got to fight in space. The senior class cadets did not fly in single-pilot craft like the first-years, or small strike vessels with crews of six like second-years, or even destroyers like the third-years—but in full battleships, each with a crew of twenty-five to thirty.

   It was true that the battleships were only simulators—a real cruiser would have a crew of a hundred or more, not just twentyfive cadets and a gaggle of Cybots, each Cybot taking the place of twenty humans. Still, the ships were almost full-sized, and on the holos, their maneuvers and firepower were almost as impressive. Watching them, Asteria yearned to be at the controls of one of those big warbirds—or better, handling a real one. Going against real enemies. Against Tetras.

   Against Raiders. Against those who had destroyed her family.

   The fourth-year victors were Team Galaxy. They successfully defended an asteroid (standing in for an outpost planet) against a deadly wave of simulated Tetra needle-ships—larger than lifesized, because a human could not fit in one of the tiny Tetra craft. The Academy gave the cadets one whole day of celebration— and the very next day, it was back to the grind.

   In the meantime, Asteria became keenly aware that Kain Kayser was a smoldering volcano waiting to erupt. When his claim of having been fouled was summarily rejected by the judges—even after his uncle had demanded a reconsideration of the judgment— Kayser clearly had developed a brand-new grudge against Dai. And just as clearly, he still nurtured the old one against Asteria, ignoring the uneasy truce he had agreed to. In the common room one evening, he loudly argued with his cronies that Commoners should not even be permitted to enroll at the Academy.

   "Their brains aren't developed," he had said. "They don't have the capacity to absorb and retain information that an Aristocrat does. Oh, I'll grant you they have a kind of animal cunning. They can do things like trick their way into the Academy when they don't have any right to be here."

   "They can also beat you at piloting," Helene called across the room.

   Kayser gave her a sour look. "You're an Aristocrat, though a low-ranking one, and you were the one who shot me down," he said. "The Commoner just got in my way, that's all. Anyway, I hear that the results of the War Games might not count. An admiral is looking into an irregular substitution. The whole last game probably will be voided."

   "What admiral is it? Your uncle?" Asteria asked him.

   Kayser ignored her and turned back to his friends, dropping his voice and muttering. But they looked at her and laughed nastily.

   
Don't let yourself get mad,
Asteria told herself.
Another few
weeks, final examinations, and then you're in space for the
whole summer. Don't risk it. Don't get mad.

   Because she had a secret to protect. If she could manage it, her summer in space wouldn't just be a round of observing. She would somehow get into a real fighting ship. And then—

   
She imagined a Raider ship in her sights: not just any ship,
but the one she had seen leaving the shattered agridome. The
one that had carried the ones who had killed her cousin and
her father. She itched to open fire—

   No. Best not to think about it yet. Later, there would be time. But she had to make sure that she did nothing that might disqualify her from summer space duty.

   Still, it was getting harder and harder to control her temper. She kept a lid on it with difficulty, but the pressure built up. It drove her to push herself even harder. Physically, she was in the best shape of her life, bench-pressing fifty-six Standard kilos, able to run eight kilometers without pausing, knocking down top marks in every PT test. With Dai's help, she struggled through chemistry. She slowly managed to improve, notching her first 3.0 grades in the last part of spring term. Her overall average crept up too; sheer stubbornness prevented her from scoring anything lower than a three. She and Kayser were tied at 3.6. It wasn't the highest average in the class—at least half a dozen others had better ones—but she didn't care about being first, just about being better than Kayser.

   Her best class was flight training. She had a 3.9 there, while Kayser was stuck at 3.7. He complained constantly about not being treated fairly—though Dai maintained that the flight instructors always bent the rules for him—and insisted on three tries before finally conceding that he could not match Asteria's time in a speed trial. Still, he claimed that the fault was mechanical; his trainer, he said, had a defective drive.

   That should have been a triumph for Asteria, but all the effort she was putting into classes was wearing her down. She always felt starved for sleep, and the bad temper that she kept from showing around Kayser seemed to bubble up in other ways.

   One evening as five of the Bronze 1 Commoners were reviewing for a chem exam, Dai patiently explained—for the third time—covalent bonding.

"I still don't understand the concept," Asteria said.

   Bren leaned forward. "It's a negative-to-positive stable attraction—"

   "I didn't ask you!" snapped Asteria. "Dai's the one with the

4.0 chem average!" Bren flinched. "Sorry." Dai quickly tried to smooth things over: "I guess I'm better at understanding it than explaining it. Okay, Bren's right about the stability."

   Asteria felt a dull ache. The pain in Bren's eyes hurt her too. Asteria was too ashamed of herself even to apologize. And then at the next midbreak, while she and Dai were playing an informal game of netball, she scored two points in quick succession and lashed out at Dai for laughing about it.

   "You're losing!" she reminded him, throwing her racquet down.

   "Hey, it's only a game!" he protested.

   She stamped her foot. "If you don't take it seriously, what's the point of even playing?"

   He shot back, "If you take it all that seriously, it stops being a game. Come on, Aster, I'm not Mastral."

   "Sorry," she said grudgingly. She bent over to pick up her racquet. "Go ahead, serve."

   Added to her stress was a worry that she shared with no one: The belt around her waist was…different. It had been made of flat links; somehow the metal had
flowed together,
and now it was a smooth but flexible band around her stomach, four inches wide. And it felt different too: still tough and resistant, but somehow pliant, as if it were alive. She dreamed about it some nights, dreamed that it spoke to her. Or questioned her: "What do you need?"

   What in the universe had Carlson Locke stored away? Alien tech, someone had suggested. Was the belt something made by the Tetras? Was it dangerous?

   Was it changing?

   Was it changing
her?

   At times, she would have sworn that it was. Especially when she was encased in the trainer, executing a tricky maneuver or straining for speed. She could
feel
energy surging in the belt, shooting into her when she needed an extra edge, faster reflexes, and a burst of strength. Nobody could touch her in the physical defense classes now—she held the champion slot and had a perfect score, 4.0, in hand-to-hand. When an attacker came toward her, she had the oddest sensation of entering some physical zone that was far removed from everyday life. She perceived the opponent as moving in slow motion, at half speed. She had all the time she needed to ward off a blow, catch the opponent off-balance, and get through his or her defenses.

   And she thought all those…advantages…were streaming from the belt. As if it plugged into her nervous and muscular systems, the way she plugged into the trainer, and boosted her abilities.

   Afterward, she was always ravenously hungry. The meals in the mess hall had not improved, but she wolfed down the bland, tasteless food nevertheless. When her weight began to fall, the Cybots in charge of the mess hall started giving her a little extra at each meal—Dai claimed they were punishing her—and she had to report to sick bay for a metabolism analysis. Still, the medical Cybot could find nothing wrong with her except that she was revved a little higher than most girls her age. Vitamins and a slightly increased food ration were the only treatments it prescribed.

   Somehow, she held it all together for several weeks. But she had the feeling that if Kayser didn't let up in his constant hectoring and harassment, one day she would lose it.

L
ocke," the PT instructor said, "partner with Lord Mastral."