The guy from the test. I realized. The son of a First Citizen who had gotten free admission.
Great. We were saddled with a useless aristocrat, someone who lived in the lowest—and safest—of the Defiant caverns. He’d be in flight school not because of any skill or aptitude, but because he wanted to sport a cadet’s pin and feel important. Judging by the way the other two talked, I instantly pegged them as his cronies. I’d have bet anything that all of them had gotten in without taking the test, so our cadet group had three people who didn’t deserve to be there.
The tall, baby-faced guy walked to the center of the ring of seats. How could a boy have a face that was so extremely punchable? He cleared his throat, then clapped his hands sharply. “Get to attention, cadets! Is this how we want to present ourselves to our instructor? Lounging about, making idle chitchat? Line up!”
Kimmalyn, bless her stars, jumped up and stood at a kind of sloppy attention. His two cronies stepped over and fell into step as well, doing a much better impression of real soldiers. Everyone else just kind of looked at him.
“What gives you the right to order us around?” asked Hudiya, the athletic girl from my own cavern. She stood leaning against the wall, arms folded.
“I want to make a good first impression on the instructor, cadet,” Jerkface said. “Think how inspiring it will be when he comes in to find us all waiting at attention.”
Hudiya snorted. “Inspiring? We’d look like a bunch of suck-ups.”
Jerkface ignored her, instead inspecting his line of three cadets. He shook his head at Kimmalyn, whose version of “attention” involved standing on the tips of her toes and saluting with both hands. It was ridiculous.
“You look ridiculous,” Jerkface said to her.
The girl’s face fell, and she slumped. I felt an immediate burst of protective anger. I mean . . . he was right, but he didn’t have to belt it out like that.
“Who taught you to stand at attention?” Jerkface asked. “You’re going to embarrass us. I can’t have that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’d be stealing your spot, since embarrassing us is clearly your job, Jerkface.”
He looked me up and down—taking obvious note of the patched state of my pilot’s jumpsuit. It had been one of my father’s, and had required serious modification to fit me.
“Do I know you, cadet?” he asked. “You look familiar.”
“I was sitting in the front row taking the test,” I said, “when you turned in your exam without a single question answered. Maybe you saw me there when you glanced at the rest of the room, to see what people look like when they actually have to work to get things.”
He drew his lips to a line. It seemed I’d touched a nerve. Excellent. First blood.
“I chose not to waste resources,” he said, “making someone grade my test when I had already been offered a slot.”
“One you didn’t earn.”
He glanced at the other cadets in the room, who were watching with interest, then he lowered his voice. “Look. You don’t need to make trouble. Just fall into line, and—”
“Fall into line?” I said. “You’re still trying to give us orders?”
“It’s obvious I’m going to be your flightleader. You might as well get used to doing what I say.”
Arrogant son of a supernova. “Just because you cheated your way into—”
“I didn’t cheat!”
“—just because you bought your way into flight school doesn’t mean you’ll be flightleader. You need to watch yourself. Don’t make an enemy out of me.”
“And if I do?”
Scud, it was annoying to have to look up at him. I leaped onto my seat to gain a height advantage for the argument—an action that seemed to surprise him.
He cocked his head. “What—”
“Always attack from a position of superior advantage!” I said. “When this is done, Jerkface, I will hold your tarnished and melted pin up as my trophy as your smoldering ship marks your pyre, and the final resting place of your crushed and broken corpse!”
The room grew quiet.
“All right . . .,” Jerkface said. “Well, that was . . . descriptive.”
“Bless your stars,” Kimmalyn added. Hudiya gave me a thumbs-up and a grin, though the others in the room plainly had no idea what to make of me.
And . . . maybe my reaction had been over the top. I was used to making a scene; life had taught me that aggressive threats would cause people to back off. But did I need to do that here?
I realized something odd in that moment. None of these people seemed to know who I was. They hadn’t grown up near my neighborhood; they hadn’t gone to class with me. They might have heard of my father, but they didn’t know me from any other cadet.
Here, I wasn’t the rat girl or the daughter of a coward.
Here I was free.
The door chose that moment to open, and our instructor—Mongrel—stopped in the doorway, holding a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, a clipboard in the other. In the light, I recognized him from the pictures of the First Citizens, though his hair was greyer, and that mustache made him appear much older.
We must have looked like quite the menagerie. I was still standing on the seat of my mockpit, looming over Jerkface. Several of the others had been snickering at our exchange, while Kimmalyn was again trying to execute a salute.
Mongrel glanced at the clock, which had just hit seven hundred hours. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything intimate.”
“Uh . . .,” I said. I jumped off my seat and tried a little laugh.
“That wasn’t a joke!” Mongrel barked. “I don’t joke! Line up by the far wall, all of you!”
We scrambled to obey. As we lined up, Jerkface pulled off a precise salute, and he held it, at perfect attention.
Mongrel glanced at him and said, “Don’t be a suck-up, son. This isn’t basic training, and you aren’t grunts from the ground corps.”
Jerkface’s expression fell and he lowered his arm, then snapped to attention anyway. “Um, sorry, sir!”
Mongrel rolled his eyes. “My name is Captain Cobb. My call-sign is Mongrel, but you will call me Cobb—or sir, if you must.” He trailed along the line, his limp prominent, taking a sip of his coffee. “The rules of this classroom are simple. I teach. You learn. Anything that interferes with that is likely to get one of you killed.” He paused near where I stood by Jerkface. “That includes flirting.”
I felt my face go cold. “Sir! I wasn’t—”
“It also includes talking back to me! You’re in flight school now, stars help you. Four months of training. If you make it to the end without being kicked out or shot down, then you pass. That’s it. There are no tests. There are no grades. Just you in a cockpit, convincing me you deserve to remain there. I am the only authority that matters to you now.”
He waited, watching to see how we responded. And wisely, none of us said anything.
“Most of you won’t make it,” he continued. “Four months may not seem like long, but it will feel like an eternity. Some of you will drop out under the stress, and the Krell will kill some others. Usually, a flight of ten ends up with one cadet graduating to full pilot, maybe two.” He stopped at the end of the line, where Kimmalyn stood biting her lip.