A soft chime went off near my head, shaking me from my sleep. Working out with Emerson had been exhausting yet, I had something nice to look at, which made it more bearable. It had helped a great deal to let me sleep, giving me a nice seven hours of rest.

Knowing that the night would be long and most likely spent either in a ready-room or in a simulator, I went to the mess, getting something to sustain myself. There, I noticed a few other cadets and, after getting food, sat with them. I had seen them at the academy and might even have talked to some of them at some point in the last few years but didn’t really know any of them. Still, we were all on the Merathorn together, so I decided to be a little more social than normal.

“Leonora Horn, is it?” one of them asked, after I we had exchanged greetings and I had been asked to sit. “You are bunking with Airah Zost at the Academy, right?” she continued, making me blink in surprise as I wondered why she would know that.

“Yes, but, please, call me Leo or Twitch.” I asked, still not sure what was going on.

“So, how’s the ice-queen in private?” the same woman asked, her smile causing the hairs in the back of my neck to stand.

“I am not sure what you mean.” I answered, feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the way she was asking. It felt intrusive and incredibly impolite, almost like trying to instal a camera in the bathroom to gain material to make fun of someone. Not wanting to make my discomfort obvious, I focused on eating, saying as little as possible.

The conversation quickly shifted from Airah and back towards the exercises all of us had been in during the morning. By listening, I learned that Cadet Muir, the woman who had asked about Airah earlier, was on bridge-duty and the exercises there had been just as rough and brutal as what the rest of us had endured. Only that in her case, she had been right under the nose of the Master of the Vessel, the one who was ultimately responsible for everything happening to us. Maybe that was why she took everything that went wrong like a personal insult, not a potential lesson to be learned.

Another Cadet sitting with us, Kaylen Hood, as he had introduced himself at one point, had been assigned to engineering. Knowing that made me curious enough to re-join the conversation and ask what they had done and how my cabin-mate, Grace, had been through. When I had returned to the cabin earlier, she hadn’t been in and when I woke up just before coming to the mess, she had already been deeply asleep, so I was interested.

When I asked, he visibly grimaced before shaking himself, as if trying to get rid of a scary memory.

“It was an experience. When I got there, things were crazy. Gravity was deactivated and as soon as each of us got there, we were presented with an individual failure-scenario to solve. Mine was a problem in the reactor-containment-field that would cause it to malfunction within a short time and I had to find a solution before we were all killed.” he explained and I could feel his pain. While I didn’t know a lot about the systems on capital ships, I knew that they were powered by antimatter-reactors and just the mental image of thousands of antimatter-torpedos going off inside a ship was enough to cause a shudder. But at the same time, jettisoning the reactor, my first idea, would leave the ship stranded in the void, a slowly drifting graveyard.

“How did you solve it?” I asked, now curious even if I most likely wouldn’t understand the details of his answer.

“It took me a while, long enough for the failure to actually occur twice, but I finally had the idea to use the supply-conduits for the Starfighters to reduce the pressure. I needed to come up with a couple of work-arounds, but according to the simulation, it would have worked. For some reason, they didn’t want me to test it in the active system.” he explained, chuckling for a moment before going into details on his work-arounds. At that point, I was sadly unable to grasp more than the basics but it sounded quite interesting and he was talking in such an animated manner that I didn’t have it in me to interrupt him.

When he finally wound down and I was almost finished with my meal, whatever I would call it, I asked if he knew what had been thrown at Grace. This time, I wasn’t even fully able to understand what the problem had been, just something with the potential to cause the inertial dampening to shut off. That wouldn’t be as bad as a reactor-failure but it would leave the ship mostly stranded until it could be repaired. Not a fun problem to have during what was supposed to be a battle.

“What did they throw at you? Ryan was showing off some impressive bruises, complaining that the mechanics had sabotaged his fighter to make him look bad.” another cadet asked, causing me to wonder if Ryan was actually thinking the mechanics had decided on their own to cause trouble or if he was just playing dumb, like I had earlier.

“It was an experience, no doubt about that. But they couldn’t do anything too serious to our fighters, not without risking a serious accident out there. You really don’t want to have a Starfighter crash into a capital ship, that would be deadly for everyone involved. Especially when the one crashing is a Raptor with six antimatter-torpedos.” I explained and the idea caused more than one of them to go a little white.

“That’s why we have the simulators in the hangar, so that they can torture us without risking millions of mark in equipment.” I continued with a grin, causing chuckles all around before I stood and finished my statement, “And speaking of simulators, my training-officer wants to torture me some more. See you all around.”

The others wished me good luck with my training before returning to their own conversation while I walked away, heading towards the hangar. While waiting on the elevator, I checked if Commodore Ryker had answered my earlier question and indeed, there was an affirmative answer. While there was no specific time-frame given, I was promised the lessons soon.

Down in the hangar, I walked over to my Starfighter, logging into its systems to make sure it was in the condition I needed it to be. If we were to deploy, I wanted to have the preflight walkaround completed already so I would only have to make a quick check like I had earlier in the day. Now, I had enough time and could actually check that the mechanics had done their job as they were supposed to. It was an ancient ritual, going back to the times of atmosphere-bound pilots, long before humanity had ever reached the stars. While I didn’t believe I was experienced enough to find mistakes made by an experienced maintenance-crew with any certainty, I was the one risking her life on the performance of the Starfighter.

Finished with my walk-around, I walked over to the conference-room we had used earlier, seeing that other pilots were idling inside. There were still some twenty minutes until the third and fourth group had to be ready but I didn’t want to be late, so I took a seat inside, taking out my tablet and continuing to read one of the hyperspace-papers. It slowly started to make sense, which likely meant I was misunderstanding something. Or that I was hallucinating due to exhaustion or alcohol but I wasn’t feeling tired or drunk, so the misunderstanding was the most likely explanation. Otherwise, it might mean I was truly getting it, but somehow, given the complexity, I doubted that.

Right on the clock, when the complete Carmine-Squadron was gathered, Commodore Ming entered, giving us additional information about the Merathorn’s jump-schedule and times when certain groups were not only to be on standby but sitting in their fighters, ready to be launched within seconds. Soon after, she dismissed Groups 1 and 2, leaving Commodore Ryker with Groups 3 and 4 in the room.

At that point, the Commodore surprised me a little, asking for volunteers to help me train in the simulators, adding that he, Commander Siloh and Lieutenant Wirum would all join. When the entire Group 4 instantly raised their hands to volunteer, I was quite touched. I hadn’t even talked to most of these people, let alone got to know them and they were willing to help.

“Great. Let’s get going then.” Commodore Ryker ordered and everyone stood, walking over to the simulators. Their willingness to help and support made me realise one thing: I didn’t just want to get a good evaluation, I wanted to make all these pilots, these veterans, proud. I wanted them to look back one day and take pride in knowing that they had trained me.

I needed to excel.