Iron Prince: A Progression Sci-Fi Epic (Warformed: Stormweaver Book 1)

by Bryce O'Connor

  Aria grumbled an acknowledgement in return, letting herself fall onto her back as her body registered the beating of the last hour.

  “Oh, and Aria…”

  She lifted her head again, seeing that her uncle had paused as he opened the door.

  “Remember that it’s ‘colonel’ when we’re at school,” Rama Guest, commanding officer of the Galens Institute, told his niece with a raised eyebrow.

  CHAPTER 11

  “And so I grant thee my life and soul, oh cruel mistress of battle…”

  - The Collected Poetries of Adison Gimble

  Major General Adison Gimble

  Specifications Request acknowledged.

  …

  Combat Assistance Device: Shido. User identification… Accepted.

  Type: A-TYPE

  Rank: E3

  …

  User Attributes:

  - Strength: F5

  - Endurance: F3

  - Speed: F6

  - Cognition: F5

  …

  CAD Specifications:

  - Offense: F4

  - Defense: F4

  - Growth: S

  With a sigh Rei closed the Request, feeling a strange combination of pleased and dejected. The low-atmosphere tram swayed gently around him, and he shut his eyes as the thrum of the orbital turbines beneath his seat hummed.

  E3… In the 2 months since he and Viv had received their acceptance letters, Rei had only managed to eke out an additional two level in his CAD-Rank. He wasn’t disappointed, per se—jumping four levels in Rank over the space of 10 weeks was practically unheard of, even for someone starting with specs as low as his—but he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a little disheartening. After leaping out of the Fs and almost straight to E1 in what had essentially been a matter of days, he had to admit he’d expected to see a more substantial improvement over the duration of the summer. Courses had ended—with him not-unexpectedly finishing in the top of the graduating class—and, with nothing left but his job, he’d been able to spend several times as many hours a day training as he had in the last weeks of school.

  Unfortunately, while Rei had certainly not served himself short on commitment to his conditioning, it was the tools of his education that appeared to have failed him.

  The ISCM simulations available to new cadets had only lasted him another week after he’d finally managed to break through to F2 Endurance. He’d made good progress even in that time, seeing steady boosting across the board, but the basic instructional projections were well… basic. They weren’t designed to teach anything more than essentials of various combat, with the military preferring to entrust more complex direction to their combat schools, or at the very least to the sanctioned trainers many User’s families—like Viv’s—tended to hire for the gap months before term started. As a result Rei had found himself hitting a wall pretty quickly, and—if he was being honest with himself—was actually decently pleased with the progress he’d managed to make in the meantime repeating and reusing simulations, trying to challenge himself on beating every projection level a little faster and a little more cleanly dozens of times over.

  Frustration leaked into his thoughts, and Rei absently lifted a hand from where it had been resting on the top of the flat military cap settled in his lap, running his scarred fingers through his newly trimmed hair. The ISCM had long since done away with most aesthetic regulations for their servicemen and women. Mankind had always staked much on the value of their outward appearance, but with the now-common practice of designer genes coming along around the same time as the rising popularity of the SCTs, having distinguishing characteristics among Users who were popular in the circuits was important. Still, Viv had downright refused to let Rei attend the Commencement with his regular wash of disorganized white, so he found himself rubbing at the shaved sides of his head, the clean trim fading up to a healthier three or four inches running along the top and back. He liked the cut—Viv had paid for it from her own pocket as a congratulations for breaking into E3 only a few days before they’d been set to depart—but it was definitely a change.

  Everything was a change…

  Rei opened his eyes and glanced to his left. As expected, Viv hadn’t so much as twitched from her place facing the wide tram window, looking out at the split horizon of a white-blue planet and the unmoving darkness of space above. He could see her reflection in the glass, her own black-and-gold regulars matching his against the glow of Astra-3 below them, and he watched her stare at nothing in particular for a while before deciding she looked like she needed interrupting.

  “Credit for your thoughts, space cadet?”

  Viv blinked, then met his eyes in the reflection.

  “Oh you know,” she answered in a deadpan after a moment. “Just thinking of all the new hotties I get to meet today.”

  Rei chuckled. “Don’t go making a name for yourself on day one. Leave some ladies for the rest of us.”

  Viv huffed and sat back in her seat, looking around at him with narrowed eyes. “You always get fixated on the girls. I’ve had my fair share of dates with some handsome gentleman too, you know.”

  Rei smiled, lifting his cap from his lap to pull it low over his eyes before leaning back against his headrest, like he were going to take a nap. “Uh-huh. I remember. Mikael Dorsey. In our first year. You dated him for a month after he beat the shit out of me behind the physics lab for not letting him copy my paper on planetary magnetics.”

  “Yes.” Viv snatched the hat off his head, tossing it back onto his knee and sticking her tongue out at him. “And you know damn well I led him on for that whole month before breaking his heart for messing with you.”

  “My hero,” Rei sniggered.

  Viv just managed to hide a smirk. “My point—” she said with intention, crossing her legs and settling back again “—is that you should worry about me stealing all of Galens’ best looking girls and boys. Give me some credit.”

  Rei made a noncommittal grunt, but said nothing more. After a little silence, though, he realized that Viv was eyeing him sidelong.

  “What?”

  She hesitated for a moment, like she didn’t know how to broach whatever subject was on her mind, her attention lingering on the golden cuffs around his wrist. “Well… Speaking of looks. I noticed today, when I saw you in the uniform… When were you gonna tell me you’re getting taller?”

  Some of the levity left their conversation abruptly, and Rei tensed a little. He twitched his hands a bit, trying without success to hide the ring of bare skin between his CAD bands and the edge of the cuffs.

  “How much?” Viv pushed.

  Rei sighed, giving in. His best friend had never been one to let go of a subject once she latched onto it. “Just over half an inch,” he admitted. “Some muscle mass gained too, if Shido’s readings of my metrics are right.” He lifted one arm, letting the blue on black-and-white shine in the reflection of the planet through the window. “A lot of the latter probably has more to do with our training than any genetic correction, though.”

  “Not bad,” Viv murmured. “At that rate, you might only have another year or so of being legally considered a toddler.”

  “You’re hilarious, for an over-sized flagpole,” Rei answered dryly.

  Viv grinned, but her amusement didn’t last long.

  “And your pain? Any symptoms?”

  Rei shrugged. “Fine, actually. I was a little surprised. I was starting to have an issue with my right hip at the beginning of the summer, but it didn’t get any worse, and even started feeling a bit better about a week ago.”

  Viv was beaming, then. “That’s great!” she exclaimed quietly while the tram took a bump over some turbulence. “That’s even better than you’d hoped, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Rei acknowledged, a little more readily this time. As always, Viv’s excitement could be infectious, even when it came to subjects he didn’t love talking about. “I’d re
ad that the correcting might be able to address active symptoms of some diseases, but the research was spotty, and nothing on fibro directly. No Users had it before me, apparently.”

  “Whoa. Such a shocker.” Viv rolled her eyes so hard it looked painful. “Probably because most people with bone needles stabbing them in the joints and organs every couple weeks might have had the sense to take life a little easier.”

  “Are you saying I don’t know when to quit?” Rei asked, raising an eyebrow at her in mock displeasure.

  “Rei, I’m saying you’re the damn king of ‘not knowing when to quit’,” Viv huffed, throwing her hands up in surrender. She let them hang there for a second, though, grinning at him.

  “Then again… That did get you into Galens, didn’t it?”

  For the thousandth time in 2 months Rei felt his heart skip a beat at the thought. It still hadn’t really processed. Not really. Not when he and Viv had accepted their enrollment together the very night Kana Loren had handed them their letters. Not when he’d signed his vacuum-sealed uniform, dispensed to him by a delivery drone through his dorm room window. Even now, swaying along in a car of a tram moving 1000 miles an hour as it hurtled him towards the very epicenter of his disbelief, it hadn’t processed.

  He’d made it in…

  Of course, he wasn’t about to let Viv know just how much he still couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that he, like her, wore a grey band stitched with the red griffin and square, marking him as a first year cadet at the Institute.

  “I like to think it had more to do with my grades and work ethic then my pain tolerance, thanks very much.”

  Viv scrunched her nose at him and dropped her arms, obviously displeased he wasn’t humoring her games that morning.

  Then her blue eyes took on a mischievous gleam.

  “Uh-huh. Well it definitely had to do with something, cause there’s no other way the board of admissions would have let in a guy the average height and weight of a pre-teen with an eating dis—Owe!” She laughed when Rei smacked her in the arm to shut her up.

  Masking his own smile, Rei let his head fall back again, actually planning to sleep a little if he could manage it, given they were traveling twelve time zones away.

  “Shut your trap, flagpole. Just wake me up when we get there.”

  *****

  Given that Astra-3 had four times the surface area of the Sol System’s Earth—the ISC’s origin planet—it wasn’t much later than mid-morning locally by the time the tram finally came to a halt at the Sector 9 orbital station. Disembarking, Rei and Viv were told by arrival notification to their NOEDs that an auto-flyer was waiting for them off the platform, and so it wasn’t long before they were out of the station and loading what pads, spare clothes, and other belongings they’d brought with them into the oblong vehicle’s rear storage compartment. All around them people were on- and off-boarding, leaving and finding their own flyers, and more than once Rei had to keep Viv focused as she noticed other cadets in uniform obviously heading to the Institute. After reminding her some half-dozen times that they would have ample opportunity to meet their school- and classmates that same day without putting the two of them at risk of being late for their scheduled time of arrival, the pair finally tucked themselves into the vehicle and were soon zipping back down towards the planet at breakneck speeds. Rei watched the clouds whip by them with a small measure of awe, having rarely had the chance to leave Astra-3’s surface other than his very infrequent trips back to see Matron Kast and the other staff of the Estoran Center on Astra-2. It was an awesome sight every time, only mildly distracted from by Viv’s nervous bouncing in the seat beside him.

  Finally entering the troposphere, Castalon—the city the Galens Institute was set practically in the middle of—came into distinct relief, and the flyer’s momentum shifted steadily from vertical to horizontal until Rei and Viv where zipping along an upper air-lane through a brilliant plethora of glimmering, towering skyscrapers. The “ground” seemed a foreign concept to the metropolis, Rei realized, feeling their vehicle rise and fall as theirs and other lanes apparently adjusted to accommodate a seemingly infinite number of walkways and closed bridges that interconnect the buildings until the place felt more like a hive of steel and glass than a city.

  “The shortest of these must be four hundred floors high,” Viv hissed, and Rei glanced around to see her looking out her own window in awe. It made him feel better for staring. The Aradas were a well-off family—this was the first summer Viv hadn’t joined them on their annual vacation to the resorts of Venus, in fact—and she’d seen a good bit more of the humanity’s expansion than he had. If she was impressed by Castalon, therefore, it stood to reason he was allowed to gape.

  “Apparently most of this sprawl has been in the last seventy-five years or so,” he told her, returning his attention to the behemoths of twisted and spiraling metal, watching neon signs of every shape and scripting whip by them in barely legible streaks of a thousand different colors. “The city’s built itself up around Galens’ reputation.”

  “What?” Viv sputtered. “There’s only like four hundred cadets at the Institute at any given time!”

  “384,” Rei corrected automatically. “But the top finishers in the Collegiate Intersystems consistently include a couple of Galens grads every year, and there’s a few well-known S-Rankers who are still in the pro circuit. They even have a pro IS Champion to their credit, from back in the 30s: Dalek O’Rourke.”

  “The Gatecrasher.” Viv identified the man by his circuit name. “Yeah, I know. My mother met him once. Told me she’d never known another person filthy rich enough to buy his own terraformed asteroid as a second home.”

  “The pros of getting crowned a King,” Rei agreed, following a massive sign for the “Easthold Mall” that encompassed three different buildings as it passed them by. “With names like that attached to theirs, though, it’s not surprising Galens is a civil hub.”

  “Aaaah that doesn’t help my stomach,” Viv moaned, and Rei could practically hear the nerves in her words.

  “You’ll be fine, Ms. D7,” he assured her, emphasizing Viv’s breakthrough from the week before. After two and a half hard months of training and instruction, she’d earned herself her first CAD-Rank improvement. “You can leave all the anxiety to the E-Ranker sharing your ride.”

  “Why do you think we’re friends?” Viv groaned. “I need someone to make me look good by comparison.”

  Rei rolled his own eyes with a chuckle.

  They talked and joked the rest of the short ride, their humor strained and their laughter a little forced while they approached their final destination. When the flyer started to descend sharply, Rei knew they had to be getting close, and the pair of them grew quite. Taking a corner in the wide throughway between the skyscrapers they’d be following, a massive, open space expanded outward before them like a crater in the middle of the city, and Rei blinked as he saw green for the first time.

  They’d both seen pictures of the Institute before, he knew. Rei had done personal searches on the feeds for them occasionally before meeting Viv, and a hundred times together since. Still, despite that, there was no comparing the awesomeness of the grounds as taken directly from the sky.

  Despite housing only 384 students and some quarter that many members of staff and security, Galens was a sprawling institution with dozens of buildings of as many different shapes as uses that encompassed a full square half-mile of space. A massive wall formed an imposing 4-sided barrier around the edge of the campus itself, beyond which a band of verdant forestland 100 yards wide separated the Institute from the ground floors of Castalon’s nearest structures. This greenery was in turn divided and interspersed with a careful system of paved paths leading to and from the four cardinal entrances to the school. Inside the wall the actual buildings formed a balanced pattern of symmetry, centering around the very heart of the Institute where a single colossal, oblong building stood out like a black
-and-grey gem in a complex setting of metal and earth.

  Even as he looked at it, the angular roofing plates of the Arena caught in the sunlight of the day, glimmering in Rei’s eyes.

  “Holy. Shit,” he muttered, so low that even Viv didn’t hear him as she shamelessly pressed her nose to her own window to ooh at the spectacle of their approach.

  Too soon, their flyer had dipped below the canopy of the tree line, and the Arena disappeared from view. The vehicle came to rest lightly in a wide, semi-circular courtyard of synthetic marble outside the south entrance, joining a half-ring of identical vehicles from which other students were ducking out of in ones and two, some with the grey armbands of first years, others with the green and blue of second and third years. The flyer door opened with a faint hiss on Viv’s side, and she led the way out, gazing with an open mouth up the wall that extended an easy 100 feet above their heads. Only the wide entrance that cut a massive wedge through the old-fashioned mortared stone gapped it, accented on either side by massive, hanging black cloths. These banners were emblazed in gold with the seven stars and crossed swords of the ISCM, below which a smaller section of white showed off the red griffin of the school itself. Rei, standing up next to Viv, would have called the sight ostentatious, but the sheer weight it exuded to anyone beneath its heights made it easy to forget the uselessness of such a defense in an age of flying transports, wormhole drives, and a scattered percentage of high-level Users who could have cleared the top of the wall if they got a running start.

  “You two. Keep moving. There’s more flyers inbound.”

  Together Rei and Viv looked around as a Sergeant with the red-on-white armband of a school staffer addressed them sharply from where he stood in the center of the courtyard. Hurrying to gather their bags from the storage compartment, they didn’t bother watching the pod fly away to be replaced almost immediately by another, instead moving together to approach the officer. The sergeant had a wide pad in one hand and looked to be checking off arrivals and instructing them on where they should go from there.