Katie Kincaid Space Cadet

by Andrew van Aardvark

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1: Katie Faces Obstacles

  2: Katie Settles In

  3: Katie Tries Out

  4: What's Your Sport, Kincaid?

  5: What Are You Doing For Christmas, Kincaid?

  6: Are You Ready, Kincaid?

  7: Katie is Embarrassed

  8: Katie is Slobbered On

  9: Katie is Marginal

  10: An Overwhelmed Katie

  11: A Depressed Katie

  12: A Determined Katie

  13: In Review

  14: On Reflection

  15: Sunny Days

  Review Request

  KATIE KINCAID SPACE CADET

  Andrew van Aardvark

  Copyright © 2021 NapoleonSims Publishing

  www.NapoleonSims.com/publishing

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Illustration Image copyrights:

  Space ship interior: 127380755 | www.dreamstime.com | SDecoret

  Female soldier back: 115273984 | www.dreamstime.com | Chernetskaya

  Space Station: 156625737 | www.dreamstime.com | Maxim Zhuravlev

  Starry background: from unsplash.com | Brandon Siu

  Earth: NASA

  Prologue

  Hi there, dear encrypted diary, repository of all my deepest and darkest secrets, I've two confessions to make today.

  One, I was a complete rube when I first arrived on Earth. I had no idea. Everything was new and confusing. It completely overwhelmed me.

  Two, my memories of my first year at the Academy are completely fragmentary. They make no coherent, cohesive sense. I recall bits and pieces sharply to this day, but in between are times that are a complete blur. The parts I remember I can't fit into a convincing picture, or rather there are different incompatible pictures I can compose them into. I was there, but I can't tell you what happened. Not honestly.

  Sorry about that, future historians.

  Maybe, at least, these facts will take some of the glow off of any hero worship that might have developed around me. Or, maybe, they'll confirm a different picture, that of a fatally flawed individual who intruded into events beyond them. Or, perhaps, I'll never be of sufficient significance to merit the decryption and study of this document.

  Who knows? The future is, as always, not certain.

  I refuse to believe that means it is totally indiscernible. In particular, I refuse to believe it can't be usefully influenced.

  Be that as it may, back to the topic at hand.

  Sometimes you can't even tell what's happening currently, or what occurred in the recent past.

  The world can be like a kaleidoscope sometimes.

  I'd never heard of, nor seen, a kaleidoscope before my first week on Earth. Went to a country fair somewhere in the vast flat heartland of North America. It was amazing. You'd think with modern electronics and with what can be done with computer simulations that anything in real life would pale by comparison. It doesn't. At least, that country fair on the edge of a small town, the name of which does not matter, didn't.

  It was loud, and it was bright. The noise of the music from the rides and of the happy, excited members of the crowd shouting at each other was overwhelming. Overwhelming. Note that word. That's the theme for my arrival on Earth and my first year at the Academy.

  Anyhow, I'm not going to go on about the fair, or my first experience of cotton candy, or how the dark above didn't seem like open sky, or any of that. I'm not going to tell you about how the rides themselves were mildly disappointing to someone used to regular gravitational changes, but the reaction of the other fair goers was fascinating. Also not going to describe how the star filled sky stunned me once I'd left the fair and was walking back to where I was staying. Walking along in the deep dark of a place far from a major city. Oddly to someone who's seen the stars unfiltered in space the view from the ground where they twinkled from the atmospheric distortion, and wisps of cloud obscured them, and the planet blocked out more than half the view, was still, somehow, more impressive.

  I'm not going to write about any of that. I could be here forever, circling the reality with my words, and never quite reaching it. Life is too short.

  Important thing here is that, that fair is where I won a kaleidoscope.

  They're amazing toys. By a trick of optics they take some simple, if colorful objects, and turn them into beautiful patterns. Many different beautiful patterns. A quick twist of the end of one and you have a new dazzling pattern.

  The world can be like that at times. You believe you've found a pattern, but a quick twist of perspective, and you get an entirely different pattern, though the base elements have remained the same.

  Fascinating. Beautiful. Problematic.

  Problematic if you want to use those patterns to make the right decisions. It's enough to make a girl lose hope in ever being able to do the right thing. To have any hope of truly understanding the world.

  Go too far down that rabbit hole and you'll start thinking it's not given to the human mind to truly understand reality.

  Could be true theoretically. In practice, you've got to try.

  So I figure I was clueless when I arrived on Earth. I figure I didn't have any hope of making much sense of anything until I'd accumulated some experience of the place. Figure maybe can understand some of what happened in retrospect, but didn't understand much of what was happening at the time well enough to even see it.

  Haven't got a time machine to go back and see it over again. Guess both me and future historians are plumb out of luck. Some things are beyond ever knowing.

  I believe you have to accept that and carry on. Better to do something with imperfect knowledge than to never do anything and never make any difference. Most times, not always, but most times, it's good to act promptly too.

  Now, I suspect that the hypothetical future scholar reading this will doubt that.

  Well, happy, secure scholar living in the future world I made for you.

  Too bad.

  And I'm still not really sure what happened in my first year at the Academy.

  Sorry, kind of.

  1: Katie Faces Obstacles

  Planets don’t have climate control.

  Katie had been warned about weather. Katie had thought she’d been mentally prepared for its vagaries.

  She’d been wrong, of course.

  Katie had been standing on the pavement of the, never to be sufficiently damned, parade square for hours now.

  Her and several dozen other cadet candidates. They’d only get to be full cadets once they’d passed the cadet preparatory course. There were a few more weeks to go.

  Supposedly this was what passed for a nice, late summer day in this part of the North American interior.

  Katie, her neck sunburned, they’d shaved off the hair that might have shaded it, and her face sunburned, not much sun inside a space colony, her mouth dry, why she didn’t know, and her feet sore, damned drill, had doubts about that. If this was a nice day, she didn’t want to see a nasty one.

  None of which bothered her as much as the utter pointlessness of close order drill.

  Katie didn’t see the use of drill. Sure she’d read some semi-plausible justifications for it. She didn’t believe them. If the purpose of drill was to waste time so that you never had enough of it to do the things that mattered, so that you got used to that, she could see that. Or if the point was to get you used to automatically following senseless orders, she could see that.

  Otherwise, when the excruciatingly flat surface of the drill grounds developed a hill, and Zulus or Spartans started coming over it, then she’d believe close order drill was som
ething useful in the modern world. Not before.

  “Squaaadrooon! By the right! By the numbers! Foorrrwaard MARCH!”

  Katie had heard it before. She was slow reacting. She put the wrong foot forward and almost tripped the cadet in front of her.

  “Shorty Belter you trying to be funny?” yelled the drill sergeant.

  “No, Sergeant!” Katie yelled back. She had learned some things. Sergeants aren’t called “sir”. Also they didn’t expect replies to be softly polite, only very formal. Formal at the top of one’s lungs.

  “You have something better to think about rather than focusing your full attention on your drill sergeant, Shorty?”

  Katie hated being called Shorty. It wasn’t fair. She wasn’t the shortest cadet. She was only a couple of inches shorter than average and that despite being two years younger than most of the rest of them. “No, Sergeant!” she yelled in reply.

  “So you’re just slow as well as short?”

  There was no winning. It was as if the whole point was humiliation. “Yes, Sergeant!” she yelled back. It seemed the safest reply. For some value of safe. There was no pleasing Drill Sergeant Yakovich.

  “Try harder or your whole squadron will be doing push-ups. Be a shame for growing boys and girls to miss their dinner.”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” Another thing Katie had learned was that the other cadets didn’t appreciate cadets who messed up and got everybody punished.

  By this time she’d gotten into step with the rest of the squadron. Sergeant Yakovitch decided to return to calling out the cadence.

  “Left! Right. Left. Right. Left!”

  For the life of her, Katie didn’t know what synchronized walking had to do with commanding space ships.

  But if that’s what she needed to learn to get such a command, she’d learn it.

  Didn’t mean she had to like it.

  * * *

  Andrew Cunningham almost felt sorry for the red-headed Belter kid.

  Scratch that. He did feel sorry for her.

  Didn’t change the fact he was appalled by her presence at the Academy. It was a triumph of cynical politics over common sense. It wasn’t fair to her. It was even less fair to the rest of the cadets, and whatever better suited candidate she’d taken the place of.

  Andrew was looking at her right now. This morning’s course was on military etiquette. He was off to one side and behind her. She couldn’t see him. He had a good view of her. She looked loose, awkward, and rather stunned. She was making an attempt at a blank expression and failing. Incredulous disbelief was leaking through.

  Andrew had heard about her before arriving on intake day close to three weeks ago now.

  Everybody had.

  In theory, the Academy was open to anyone that met its standards.

  In fact, the vast majority of its attendees came from a small number of families that had been sending their offspring to it for generations. Service as a Space Force officer wasn’t just a highly specialized profession, it was a highly specialized way of life. An individual that had not grown up immersed in that way of life as demonstrated by older family members and their social circles had almost no chance of successfully adjusting to it.

  Not that that guaranteed success. The Academy was tough. It took both native ability and determination to succeed there, even if you did come from one of the right families and knew what to expect.

  Most years saw at least one or two individuals that started with the handicap of not coming from one of the favored families. Usually they were the younger children of families trying to move up socially. Of all the routes into the ruling elite of United Earth, the Academy was the most meritocratic. This was not something ever admitted to the general populace. They were kept cheerfully ignorant by the organs that claimed to inform them. They knew the Academy was difficult to get into and rough going once you’d made it there. That was all they needed to know.

  Ambitious up-and-coming families knew the real score as well as the established ones did. Maybe even better. The young family members they sent to the Academy were not only individually outstanding, they were as well prepared physically, mentally, and educationally as their invariability well-off and invested families could make them. There were special very expensive schools dedicated to providing such preparation.

  It was unheard of for a Belter to have such preparation. There just wasn’t enough concentrated wealth out there.

  For an underage, under prepared Belter to have been accepted into the Academy was all but inconceivable. But it had happened somehow.

  Andrew had overheard a great deal of whispered gossip and speculation as to how or why.

  Some of that speculation had been ugly. Most of it, however, seemed to reduce to a consensus that the Admissions Board had fumbled the process of trying to provide political cover from the official ideology of egalitarianism.

  Officially the Academy was open to anyone who scored well enough in the relevant subjects on the standardized tests every secondary student in the Solar System took.

  Only in practice the standard required was impossible to achieve without years of prior coaching and training devoted to that specific purpose. Andrew wasn’t stupid, but he’d spent hours almost every day since he’d been in junior high school studying for the specific questions he knew counted, and had still sweated the results to the very end.

  And Katie Kincaid, a Belter girl nobody had ever heard of, from a family nobody knew of, had managed to get over that high bar.

  Which was, to put it mildly, extremely impressive.

  And no where near close to good enough to predict success at the Academy.

  Sergeant Dunnigan’s eyes drifted Andrew’s way. His mouth continued to enunciate the lesson in correct military address to all appearances independent of where his attention was focused.

  Andrew had grown up on stories of crafty, not to say crusty, old NCOs, and their tricks. In particular, his older family members had warned him to never fall into the mistake of thinking long term marine enlisted men were mindless robots. “Son,” an uncle had once said to him during a session of space dust stories after a boozy Christmas dinner, “they’ll pull that ‘nobody-here-but-us-chickens’ routine on you until the cows come home.” Andrew had later had to search the Net for the definitions and derivation of both sayings. “Even knowing better, it’s hard not to fall for it, but a senior enlisted man who can’t manage his officers doesn’t last long. They’re never not watching you and how they behave around you. They know one mistake can mean their whole career. Since their careers are their lives, it’s life and death for them. They’re good at not slipping up.”

  Andrew quickly put a blank face on and made sure his eyes were on the Sergeant. Not quick enough, it seemed. The marine NCO’s eyes met Andrew’s briefly. A quick thinning of his lips may have occurred before his eyes shifted momentarily to Kincaid. Nothing easy to be sure of, but Andrew was pretty sure he’d just been told “I see you watching her”.

  The Sergeant didn’t seem to be paying attention to the fact most of his pupils were half asleep. Most of them had learned this stuff with their nursing milk. Growing up surrounded by people in the military, they’d have to have been more than half deaf and blind not to have absorbed it over the years. Neither did he appear to take note of Kincaid’s barely concealed incredulity.

  Andrew didn’t believe it for a second. He didn’t know what the Sergeant thought in the privacy of his own mind. He had doubts the man intended to do much about either set of facts, but he didn’t believe the man wasn’t aware of what was going on.

  Which was interesting. It was one thing to hear years’ worth of stories, it was another to see something for oneself.

  Like the Belter girl.

  She was starting to openly fidget. Sad. Not surprising, but sad.

  Everything he’d ever heard about Belter society said it was extremely and unabashedly egalitarian. What was paid lip service to in the rest of the Solar System was reality in the Belt. T
he least of them had substantial capital and training, if not always much formal education, by the standards of the rest of society. A fact they didn’t appear to be cognizant of. It was a small population aggressively lacking in hierarchy.

  Someone brought up in such a society was going to have a hard time wrapping their heads around social formalities firmly rooted in the Middle Ages.

  To be expected. Not their fault. Still a problem.

  Andrew was aware of his bias. He’d tried not to let it blind him to facts. He’d hoped against hope that the girl would be as exceptional in other things as she was in technical academics.

  The Belter girl seemed bright enough, determined too, but not exceptional enough to make up for her handicaps.

  The sooner she recognized that, the better it would be for everyone.

  * * *

  Henry suppressed the urge to sigh.

  “I’m not sure I understand the logic behind this,” Cadet Candidate Kincaid was saying.

  Henry Vane and his pal, Wolf Hoffmann, were second year cadets. Second year was much easier than first year, but it did have its challenges among them helping and mentoring first year cadets.

  Henry doubted many of them were quite as clueless as Kincaid. Henry had a hard earned reputation for being calm, pragmatic, and relentlessly optimistic. Looked like his reward for those qualities was being assigned Katie Kincaid to mentor.

  His friend Wolf had been given Kincaid’s roommate, Colleen McGinnis, to mentor. As it turned out, like many of the cadets, Colleen had been tutored by her family in the basics of folding and storing her new uniforms. So Wolf and Colleen both were giving Henry a hand.

  In truth, Henry was very impressed by Kincaid. He was also very concerned for her.

  She questioned everything.

  She knew so little of the routine of the Academy and its traditions that it was a puzzle where to begin in explaining them to her. Sad fact was even the Earth environment most of the Academy was situated in was one she was unfamiliar with. Girl was bright, energetic, and had a significant head start in practical technical subjects. Her memory was outstanding. As regards strict logic, her mind was a steel trap. She was space born and had a real head start on life there.