to the city, do we have any other choice?”
“No,” Cobb said softly. “You don’t.”
“But—”
“If it comes down to destroying Alta but saving Igneous,” Cobb said, “Igneous is more important. There’s a reason we rotate a third of our ships, pilots, and command staff into the deep caverns. The DDF can survive—maybe—if Alta is destroyed. But without the apparatus to make new ships, we’re done for. So if the admiral orders it, you shoot that bomb and make it detonate, even if doing so destroys Alta.”
We watched the green light crawling through an ever-widening sphere of destruction. Finally it faded.
Cobb made us fly exercises until I was numb from exhaustion, my reaction times slowing. Then he made us do it again. He wanted to drill deeply into us to always watch for bombers, no matter how tired we were.
During that last run, I hated Cobb like I’d never hated anyone. Even more than the admiral.
We failed to stop the bomb this time too. I reset my position, falling into line by rote to start the next run. However, my canopy vanished. I blinked, surprised to be back in the real world. The others began pulling off helmets and standing up to stretch. What . . . what time was it?
“Did I recognize that last battle, Cobb?” Arturo asked, standing up. “Was it the Battle of Trajerto?”
“With modifications,” Cobb said.
Trajerto. I thought. It had happened about five years ago; we’d come very close to losing Alta. A Krell flight had snuck in and destroyed the smaller AA guns. Fortunately, a couple of DDF scout ships had brought down the lifebuster before it could get close enough to Alta.
“You’re using historical battles for our simulations?” I asked, trying to push through my stupor.
“Of course I am,” Cobb said. “You think I have time to make up these simulations?”
Something about that struck me, but I was too exhausted to put my finger on it. I climbed out of my mockpit, tossed my helmet onto my seat, and stretched. Scud, I was hungry, but I didn’t have any dinner with me—the next batch of jerky was curing back at my cave.
I had a long, tired, hungry walk ahead of me. I grabbed my pack, slung it over my shoulder, and started out.
Hurl caught up to me in the hallway, then nodded in the direction of the nearby dorm section. I could read her expression. They could pretend to be tired, bring food back to their rooms . . .
I shook my head. It wasn’t worth riling the admiral.
Hurl gave me a raised fist. “Badass,” she whispered. I found energy for a smile, raised my own, then we parted.
I trudged toward the exit. The other classrooms were dark, save one, where the instructor was lecturing another flight of cadets. “The best pilots can steer a ship out of an uncontrolled fall,” a woman’s voice said, echoing in the hallway. “Your first reaction might be to eject, but if you want to be a real hero, you will do whatever you can to save your acclivity ring. A Defiant protects the people, not the self.”
It was basically the opposite of what Cobb had taught us.
On my way through the orchard outside the base, I noticed my radio blinking. M-Bot wanted to talk with me. I had persuaded him, with effort, to stop breaking into my line while I was training. It just seemed too likely that someone would overhear us.
“Hey,” I said into the line. “Bored?”
“I can’t get bored.” He paused. “But I’ll have you know that I can think at thousands of times the speed of a human brain—so twelve hours to you is by relative measure a long time to me. A really long time.”
I smiled.
“Reeeeaaaaalllly long,” he added.
“What did you think of the training today?”
“I took some careful notes for further review,” he said. Most nights, I went over with M-Bot what I’d done wrong. His programs offered excellent analysis of my flying. While he offered commentary that could sometimes be unflattering, the nightly debriefings had proved effective in helping me tweak my flying—and I felt I was doing better than ever.
We hadn’t gone into the air again. Rig had taken out the ship’s GravCaps and shields to disassemble and document them. It was work beyond my ability to help with, but I didn’t mind, as I had the practices to keep me busy.
“You really do need help against bombers,” M-Bot said to me. “You died or destroyed the city seventeen times today, while