your squad and move out to the staging point,” Sergeant Burke orders. “Ricci, have your squad pick defensive positions. Let’s see how you do on the defense.”
We spend the day killing each other bloodlessly.
Being on the defense is easier and more difficult at the same time. We can prepare our fighting positions, make use of cover and concealment, but we also have to wait for the other team to begin the attack on their terms. We get wiped out once, and beat the opposing team back twice, getting our revenge for our earlier defeats at the hands of Halley’s squad. At the end of the day, the score is even. One of Halley’s fire team leaders takes first place on the individual kill board, with fourteen kills to his name. To my surprise, I come in second, despite our lack of kills in the first two rounds of the day. I scored killing shots on twelve of Halley’s troops.
“Looks like you’ve found something you don’t suck at, Grayson,” Sergeant Burke remarks when he reviews the kill list with the platoon. “Just don’t think you’re a natural killing machine now. This shit ain’t real combat, you know.”
“You like that stuff too much,” Halley says back in the platoon bay head as we shower off the sweat of the day. “You were having a good time out there.”
“Maybe,” I shrug, as I try not to be too obvious about studying her shapely backside as she turns to rinse the cleaning agent out of her hair.
“You don’t watch out, they’ll mark you for the Territorial Army,” Ricci says from across the head.
“Is that why you sucked so much today?” Halley asks, and a few of the other recruits laugh.
“What do you think?” Ricci replies with a grin. “You think I want to give them a reason to mark me down as ‘Good With A Rifle’? That way lies a TA billet.”
“Well, you sucked at Land Navigation last week, too,” I say. “And I think you were near the bottom of the list in Combat Control. You waiting for the Office Management instruction to show your true skills, or what?”
“Funny,” Ricci says, and hurls a container of liquid soap in my direction. I swat it back at him, and it clatters to the floor between the two rows of showers. Ricci gives me a sour look as he walks over to the middle of the head to retrieve it. Halley lets out a mocking wolf whistle when he bends over to pick up his soap. He holds his middle finger up without looking back at her.
“What a turd,” Halley says under her breath.
I don’t do so well in the next phase of the training.
Our Air & Space week, as Sergeant Burke calls it, begins with a day of instruction on aeronautics, cockpit systems, and the basic principles of atmosphere and space flight. I can understand the theory well enough, and I manage to receive good marks on the electronic exam at the end of the classroom part of the training, but somehow my brain can’t translate that knowledge into practical ability very well. After the classroom instruction, we move on to simulator training, which takes place in a big room the size of our platoon bay. Every member of the platoon has their own sound-proofed simulator capsule. From the outside, it looks like a squashed egg with cables sticking out of its back, but when you sit in it, the inside of the shell turns into a giant display, and the seat and avionics in the capsule are exact replicas of those found in a standard Wasp-class attack drop ship. You take your seat, strap on your helmet, plug into the TacCom console, and the computer that runs the simulation does it best to make you believe you’re flying the real thing. The whole thing sits on hydraulic actuators, which can spin the capsule through three hundred sixty degrees of movement. When I do my first practice drop from orbit into atmosphere, the imagery of the planet below combines with the movements of the capsule to give me a disconcerting sensation of vertigo.
The theory is simple enough. The stick on the right side of the cockpit moves the control surfaces on the wings and tail of the ship. The throttle on the left side controls engine thrust, and the hat switch on its side fires the maneuvering thrusters for extra-atmospheric flight. Pull on the stick, the nose comes up--push on the stick, the nose