It was easily an hour after midnight, according to the ship’s time, which had a five hour difference to the local time at the Academy, where I left in the morning. Starfleet-Ships were always using Federation Standard, which was still calibrated after some old time-zone on Earth, the cradle of humanity and capital-world of the Federation. I had no idea where or what Greenwich was, but it was the time we were using, combined with a twenty-four hour day. Tradition, I was told, something to remind humans where they came from and what was supposed to be natural for us.

I hardly cared about natural, not while eating a ration-bar that tasted mostly like the mouth of wet sand I had tasted once, when I had managed to fall on the beach. Back then, I had instantly spat the sand out but the ration-bar was supposed to supply me with everything my body needed, other than taste, and given that I was simply in no state to visit the mess and hope to find some food there, I had to make due.

The last few hours, ever since Commodore Ryker, Manta, decided to test me, had been a long and grueling simulator session. I had been operating under the assumption that I, one of the best pilots in my Academy-class, was at least competent, even if the pilots I had been training with and against had a lot more experience than I did. We completed one simulation after the other, with me in the lead and Commodore Ryker in the wing-position, letting me make the decisions and mistakes. He was, quite frankly, a brilliant pilot, always in the position he was supposed to be, always covering me, without fail.

Sadly, Commander Siloh, Wildcat, and Lieutenant Wirum, Wolverine, were in a similar class and that meant, again and again, I had been the weak link. Now, the tattered remains of my ego were simply asking to be shot into space, for a nice funeral. I had been utterly dominated in the sims, they had demonstrated to me, again and again, that they were the better pilots. Not in a malicious way, they had taken the time to explain my mistakes to me, each and every time, showing me what I had done and how they had exploited it. I was certain that I was learning, and learning a lot, but it didn’t change the fact that dying some eighty times over the course of eight hours was depressing, especially without scoring a single kill in return, at least against them. I had my share of kills in the simulations we had been doing against computer-generated targets, when we had been flying as a group of four but that just wasn’t the same.

Another thing that had been quite interesting was that, as soon as we were in the simulators, I was told to use their callsigns, not their names and rank. The call-sign could either be the official designation, in my case Carmine 17, or the nickname I had been given in fighter-circles, Twitch. The others had asked me to use their nicknames in the group-channel and the official designations for squadron and higher channels.

During one of our short maneuver-critiques, I asked why that was and was told that it was both tradition and its purpose. During a past war, they didn’t tell me which, one of our enemies had managed to crack the encryption on our starfighter-channels, searching and deliberately targeting the higher officers, even putting out bounties on specific, highly reputable and respected starfighter-officers. Since then, it was tradition that, once we were in our Starfighters, there was to be no mention of an individual's rank or name and they carried it into the simulations as well. As the Academies motto told us, train as you fight, fight as you train.

I managed to find my bed in the dark room and, despite the fact that I wanted nothing more than fall into it and sleep, took a shower before putting on a new suit and crawling into bed. I was out like a light as soon as my head hit the pillow, wondering if I would be able to hear an alarm, if there was one.

Luckily, nothing happened during the night, no alarms, no surprise-drills, just a night of comfortable rest for my weary body. Not so much for my mind, sadly, when I woke up thanks to my alarm, I was half-remembering flying endless simulations, getting my Starfighter shot out from under me every time. If nothing else, those fragmented dreams spurred me to do better, to show the four experienced pilots that I was able to learn.

Grace, the cadet I was sharing my room with, was just getting up as well and gave me a friendly smile.

“I didn’t hear you get in last night, nor did I see you when we cadets got together in the evening. Did you have a nice night?” she asked, implication heavy in her voice, strong enough to make me wonder just what she had heard or what had happened.

“It seems I got myself signed into the advanced Flight-School. The officer in charge of training me decided that he would run me ragged in the sims, putting me through some eight hours of training before letting me out.” I explained, managing to suppress a yawn long enough to get it out, before asking, “What kind of get-together did you have?”

“Sucks to be you, I guess.” Grace said, her grin still wide, making light of the joke, “One of the other Cadets suggested to get together, so we could all meet and greet. For the next two months, we will be working a lot closer together than usual and you just know that the full officiers will haze us, as you experienced last night. It’ll be easier to cope with that as a team.” she explained, sounding reasonable. At the same time, I strongly doubted that what Commodore Ryker was doing was hazing, unless I was completely wrong, he and the rest of the wing were doing their best to train me. It might look like hazing from the outside but I had learned a lot from them and was willing to put up with what they had put me through and a lot more, if I continued to learn from them. But, at the same time, I didn’t want to alienate my fellow cadets, so I gave a affirmative if mostly noncommittal grunt and changed to topic to breakfast.

It didn’t take us long to get ready, in uniform and everything, so we set out to get something to eat. I let Grace take the lead, knowing that she obviously had been in the mess before. We didn’t need to walk a long distance but then, nothing on the ship would be more than some two-hundred meters away, depending which corridors you took.

The mess itself was as utilitarian as the rest of the ship, the tables and benches bolted to the floor, just in case the artificial gravity was ever damaged and everything laid out in a simple and concise fashion. I grabbed myself a simple cereal-mix, coffee, or at least something that looked like it, and juice, knowing that I needed the liquids for the upcoming day.

Just looking at my food made me realise that, while the ration-bar had sustained me, I was brutally hungry, having missed lunch and dinner the day before, so, almost completely ignoring Grace, I simply dug in, focusing on nothing but moving food from my plate into my mouth.

Once the cereal was mostly gone, I regained enough of my mental faculties to take in the area around us, noticing that there were more cadets and, a little further away, a couple of enlisted. I couldn’t see a single full officer in the mess and somehow, that made my intuition tingle, telling me that something was going on.

“Something is happening.” I mumbled to Grace, not quite sure why I was feeling so agitated.

“Other than you, going to town on your food?” she asked, her joking smile present again.

“Maybe.” I shrugged, quickly finishing my food, just in case.

I was feeling a little foolish when I was finished with breakfast while Grace and the other cadets around us had still half or more of their food remaining, even if some of them had began eating before me.

Just as I was standing, to put away my dishes, the normal lighting was replaced with red, emergency lighting and a siren started to blare, telling us that we were under combat alert. I also noted that I was suddenly no longer standing on the deck but that the motion I had used to stand up was carrying me on, towards the ceiling.

I quickly grabbed onto the table, before I could float away, realising that we had more than one problem. The most obvious was that, while I had been able to secure myself, the various food-items hadn’t been so lucky, instead they had followed some remnant acceleration and were now starting to float and mingle all in the mess. In simple terms, we had a mess in the mess.

But, much more important, the ship had no artificial gravity, which meant that either, the Master of the Ship was a sadist or the ship was in deep trouble. Either would be bad. Personally, I hoped the Master was a sadist.

“See you later.” I mumbled to Grace, before pushing off, towards the door, “We are supposed to get to our combat-positions.” I added, just as I was flying towards the door, barely managing to chuck my dishes into the receptacle next to it, before I was out of the mess.