How exactly she got across the pond with piles of tires for stepping stones she hardly knew. She was so tired she did it on full automatic. She didn’t have the energy to worry about it. She just did it.
Once again the little patch of shady forest was a welcome, if brief, respite.
And then she came into sight of the final obstacle she could not hope to manage on her own.
The large high wall without any netting. The one you needed a boost up, or pull up from a teammate, to get over.
At the top of it, Andrew waited for her. He waved.
Katie gestured back. Andrew was a jerk, and she’d never been so happy to see someone in her whole life.
A burst of some speed seemed appropriate. She reached the wall’s foot and jumped to grasp his dangling hand. He took her weight with a grunt, and she half walked up the wall, and was half pulled. It was a miracle neither of them lost their balance.
Finally, they were together. Both winded. Both resting on the wall’s top.
“Thank you,” Katie said. “Thank you, for waiting for me.”
“Cadets help each other,” Andrew replied. “You’re welcome. Don’t think it means I think you belong here, though.”
“What?”
“It’s not personal,” Andrew said. “I admire your guts, but you’re a fish out of water here at the Academy. You’re going to flunk out sooner or later. The sooner you quit and save us all the pain of that, the better.”
With that he rolled over the far side of the wall and grabbing the edge dangled there for a moment before letting go.
Katie watched him land like a cat, twist, and jump over the huge mud puddle waiting below.
Distracted by surprise and the beginnings of anger, she followed suit.
Somehow she made it down and over the puddle without belly flopping in it once again.
Katie stumbled across the finish line in a daze.
A scattering of other stragglers remained standing about. They gave her a feeble scatter of cheers, before turning to make their way back to their barracks. The barracks where showers and clean clothing awaited.
Katie stood and thought about what Andrew had said.
It made her angry. The hell with him. The hell with them all. Katie wasn’t quitting, and she wasn’t going to allow anyone to stop her. She was going to make it through this year and every following year, and then she was going to graduate from the Academy. Katie was going to be a Space Force officer.
Nobody was going to stop her.
* * *
“Wakey-Wakey!”
Katie’s body rolled out of bed without the conscious involvement of her mind. Zero six hundred. Twenty minutes for morning toiletries. No excuses. Excuses were met with yelling and push-ups. And ridicule. And contempt.
At least female cadets weren’t required to shave. On the other hand, they weren’t cut any slack for purely female issues either. Cadet primping wasn’t a thing. Neither was being body conscious.
The whole business of going into a big room with a bunch of other naked people to be sprayed down with water as a way to get clean still struck Katie as odd.
Katie was getting used to it, though. Guess you can get used to anything.
No time to waste. Grabbing her toiletries bag with her soap, shampoo, combs, toothpaste, and toothbrush she proceeded down to the heads. Why the “heads” she did not know. More tradition. Probably tradition adopted, that is stolen, from some senior service. Tradition that made no obvious sense in the modern world, but that was the Space Force for you. Or at least the Academy.
No time to waste. She knew exactly what motions her body needed to perform and how long it took. As long as nothing went wrong or you weren’t in a daze, it wasn’t so long you couldn’t get out in front of the barracks and formed up in time.
At first, being totally unfamiliar with what passed for clothing on Earth, Katie had had trouble with this. Shipsuits which you wore almost all the time, only taking them off to change and clean them made a lot more sense. But, no, they all had to wear clothing that was old and out of date even by Earth standards.
She’d complained at first.
Learned not to do that.
It was a lingering problem that many of her fellow cadets thought she was odd and a whiner both.
Katie wasn’t the last to form up. That was progress.
At least she wasn’t the cadet being required to command their march to the mess hall. Being able to march and not having to double time was also progress.
“Caadeets!” Oops, the preparatory part of an order. She knew what was coming. “Aaa-tenn-SHUN!”
Snap. Crash. They were getting good at this nonsense.
Similar snappy left turns, and a quick march, and they were dismissed to eat breakfast.
They had a whole half hour for that. Not so much when lining up to get the food came first and lining up to return one’s plate and cutlery to the scullery followed. There were rarely any food scraps left. Not that the food was great, but they were always that hungry.
Truth be told, the meat, eggs, potato, toast, and beans combinations variously done weren’t like anything Katie was used to, and she had no idea how the quality compared to similar food produced elsewhere. Not as good as some bacon and eggs she’d had at a diner. Perfectly adequate hungry cadet fuel.
Return to the barracks was another fall into formation at 0700, followed by room clean up and inspection and a march to classes beginning at 0800. Those concluded at 1200.
Another longer formal march, flags flying this time, and a half hour for lunch. March back to classes at 1300.
Classes over at 1600 and march back to the barracks. Change and report for physical exercise. Soon they’d all be getting to select the sport which they’d be playing in. Anyone who failed to qualify to represent the Academy in extramural sports was assigned a place on an intramural team.
They were expected to be back in barracks, washed up, and formed up to march to supper by 1730.
They got a whole forty-five minutes for supper.
The food was again strange to Katie, but she found she enjoyed most of it. It’d never occurred to her, but her parents hadn’t really been interested much in food. They’d rotated the same dozen or so pre-prepared meals over and over again. Katie’d never objected, but after roast beef, broiled fish, and roast chicken at the Academy, she realized she’d been missing something. Food could be a real pleasure.
That was one bright spot so far.
Finally they got to study from 1900 to 2200. Actually, they were required to. Confined to the barracks currently, they’d been told they’d be permitted later on to use the library and to participate in extramural sports.
Even with her superb memory, Katie was having trouble. Turned out one non-English international language was a requirement in addition to a course in English literature and composition. Katie was taking French. She wasn’t doing well in either French or English. Grammar seemed like a rather silly exercise to her. History wasn’t a problem. Neither was Physics. She was getting by in her Math course mainly because of her excellence at actual problem solving. She was having problems with the theory and doing proofs. She worried they’d only become worse.
Once again she failed to understand what either language theory or mathematical proofs had to do with running, let alone a commanding a space ship. As the only one of the cadets with actual experience in space, she felt qualified to have this opinion.
* * *
Katie’s roommate, Colleen McGinnis, was writing home.
Colleen’s family was on Earth, so if they’d been allowed personal communication devices, phones like all normal people called them, she could have talked to them in real time.
That wasn’t an option for Katie. The lag to the Belt was too long and bandwidth too expensive to allow for that.
In truth, Katie wasn’t sure spending some of her precious study time writing home was a good idea. Only when Colleen had announced she was writing her family, she
seemed to assume Katie would be doing the same. If not right at this time, some time at regular intervals. Katie was trying to fit in, so she was following Colleen’s lead.
Katie didn’t think she was any sort of cold, heartless mutant, but she was awfully busy and very tired too. They had so much to do that there was no chance it’d all fit into the time they were given. She had to think that was deliberate. If it’d been strictly up to her, she’d have prioritized studying the many areas it turned out she was ignorant of.
Then there was the math. Katie had been proud of her ability at math. She could calculate trajectories and fuel usage in her head easily enough. Orbital elements were a snap. Mathematical proofs on the other hand baffled her. She could follow the arguments well enough when other people made them, and mathematical constructions and operations rarely confused her. Exactly what constituted an acceptable proof did. Too much detail was slow. Not enough, and they weren’t convinced.
Katie was pig ignorant of them. It was something she had no experience of. Sometimes native brainpower isn’t enough to make up for ignorance. Doubtless there was a lesson in there.
Be that as it may, her current task was to compose some heartwarming reassuring messages for her parents, as well as for her friends, Calvin, and Sam. The simple and honest approach would have been three quick identical messages saying something like; “Really busy. No spare time. Completely baffled by some of the things we’re doing. Huge gaps in education trying to make up on the fly. Will let you know how things went come Christmas. Hope not to flunk out.”
Katie knew that wouldn’t do. Since there was no doubt they’d compare notes, she needed to send personalized messages to them all. They had to be reassuring without being actively dishonest.
Katie glanced across their shared dorm room to where Colleen sat at her desk. She appeared to be physically writing notes with some sort of ink dispensing instrument. She looked pensive, but happy as she chewed the end of it between moments of scratching words down on real paper.
There was no way Katie was paying interplanetary freight to send physical notes home. To say nothing of the fact that the messages would take weeks, not tens of minutes to arrive that way.
No, Katie was tapping away at a keyboard like a modern civilized person.
It would have given her great pleasure to be able to unload to Sam or Calvin about how the Academy eschewed most things modern and had weird ideas of what constituted civilized. Technically there was no reason she couldn’t only somehow it seemed it’d be incautious to do that.
One of the many things that had startled Katie when reading the various induction papers on her first day in the Space Force was that legally cadets, Space Force members in general in fact, had no right to privacy. Legally all their communications and behavior at any time were subject to monitoring by the Space Force or such parties as it might choose to delegate. It’d made her hesitate. She really had signed her life away.
Katie had been reluctant to discuss the matter with her classmates. Things she’d overheard gave her the impression that they expected everything they did to be potentially subject to scrutiny, but they didn’t really think about it much. Apparently living in a fishbowl was a part of military life they took for granted.
Katie wasn’t sure. All the same, she wasn’t going to say or write anything to anyone she wasn’t willing to discuss with a senior officer or a security interviewer. The attitude of the Sand Piper’s crew, who’d she’d deployed with for a couple weeks back on Ceres, made it clear Space Force officers didn’t feel anyone was constantly looking over their shoulders. On the other hand, Katie was all too aware that she was an unusual candidate and likely drawing a lot more attention than most cadets, even if it was very discreet.
So, no griping about how odd the Academy was in letters back home.
Katie decided to write her parents first.
“Dear Mom and Dad,” she wrote. “You weren’t kidding about the stringent discipline. Every moment of my time is scheduled, and it turns out there’s a correct military way to do everything. I’m not sure you’d recognize the well behaved, unquestioning individual your daughter has become.”
That was a start. For a second Katie envied Colleen having something to gnaw on while she thought. Staring blankly at a computer screen didn’t cut it for feeling legitimately thoughtful.
Katie settled for giving her parents a sanitized version of the Cadet Preparatory Course, being careful to mention how helpful her fellow cadets had been without mentioning Andrew Cunningham’s comments regards how out of place she was. It’d stung at the time. It surprised her how it continued to rankle.
She ended up describing her current daily routine in breathless tones and ended with; “Your loving and appreciative daughter, Katie.”
With a little rewording and some changes of emphasis, she should be able to reuse much of that for her other two letters. More detail and humor for Calvin, less detail for Sam. Sam was already familiar with the military from an enlisted point of view. Katie assumed there was at least some overlap. She would make a point of asking for his observations.
Katie wondered if she should hint at the need for discretion. She didn’t think it’d be needed. Sam, she didn’t doubt, understood it much better than she did. He’d been around the block.
Katie was a little more open about how challenging the whole course was with Calvin. “Well, I know how it feels to be dropped in the deep end of the pool for real now. Water was cold, too. I can now swim after a fashion. Just barely managed to do the minimum required, but I passed.”
Katie didn’t go on about how frightening the prospect of drowning had been. She most certainly didn’t write about the unaccustomed gut wrenching fear of failure she’d felt.
A few more, somewhat cleaned up, mini-antidotes like that, and she ended on a sincere, friendly note. “Always your good friend, Katie.”
Sam was harder.
Sam had never attended the Academy. He’d been enlisted. It occurred to her he could have been one of the marine drill instructors they’d had. At the very least, he must have known people who’d had that posting. Reading between the lines, it appeared marine NCOs had something of an exclusive little club going. One that shared tips and information. Katie wondered if he mightn’t be keeping tabs on her via that back channel.
Katie also wondered what he was hearing, if he was.
She hadn’t messed up badly in any way she was familiar with, but she was definitely a fish out of water. The marine NCOs who’d been instructing them were pretty inscrutable, but she had no doubts whatsoever they’d noticed that. What they thought of the fact, she had no idea.
So she opened with warm, but standard greetings, and then got to the point.
“I guess there’s nothing you could have told me that would have prepared me for the reality,” she wrote. Anybody else she’d have worried about them taking that the wrong way. With Sam she could trust he’d understand she was stating a simple fact. “Even Earth alone would have been too much to describe. The all encompassing nature of the way the military dictates your whole life down to the simplest things I can see now how it’s something you have to experience for yourself. I also recognize you tried to hint at it to me. I guess I really was an insufferable know it all. Hey, Sam, guess what? It’s really hard to know what you don’t know. Who’d have thunk?”
Katie gave him both a more comprehensive and less detailed account of her doings. Most of it he already would know the details of, he’d certainly understand all the military terminology she’d spared her parents and Calvin. It was a revelation of sorts how useful it was in succinctly explaining their activities. Learning it hadn’t been just another set of hoops to jump through. Guess she ought to have more faith.
“Trying to do you proud, Katie,” she wrote as her ending salutation.
Katie looked up. An hour had passed. She still had some proof about continuity of the line and differentiability to write. Also a three thousand word essay on early mod
ern agriculture. What every spaceship watch officer needed to know. Only an hour before lights out, which meant she’d have to pretend to be asleep while finishing the work. Katie would be dragging her butt again tomorrow.
Another typical day at the Academy.
* * *
“Cadet Davies, where’s Cadet Wong?” Andrew asked a flustered cadet as they fell in for morning parade.
“Right behind me, Cadet Commander,” Davies replied.
It was Andrew’s turn in the role which involved making sure everyone was formed up to parade over to the mess hall for their meals and then marching them over there in the proper fashion. It was an assignment that changed daily. As there were a couple of dozen cadets, they’d each only get less than a half dozen chances to demonstrate their command presence.
“Well, let’s hope so,” Andrew said. “Otherwise we’ll all be double timing over to breakfast.”
A low mutter of unhappiness greeted this prospect. They’d had to double time everywhere during the Cadet Prep Course, and being allowed to march, not run, places was a valued new privilege.
“Look sharp like proper Academy cadets!” Andrew declaimed. He couldn’t be too demanding. His authority was limited and temporary. On the other hand, he’d be evaluated on the squadron’s deportment, so he wanted them to look as proper and military as possible. It was a fine line to tread.
Speaking of deportment his eye fell on Cadet Kincaid, somehow slumped at ease staring off into the distance at something only she could see.
Andrew felt guilty about her.
The cadet code held cadets helped each other. If she’d not successfully completed the obstacle course that marked the end of Cadet Prep it would have placed him, and their teammates, Susan, and Stephen, at risk of being declared deficient. Likely not outright flunked out, but it wouldn’t have looked good. It would have probably meant extra duties to demonstrate the ability to work as a team. It frustrated him that Susan and Stephen hadn’t appreciated that. It annoyed him that Katie was such a burden.
Worse, he still wasn’t sure helping her was the right thing to have done. Practically speaking it was prolonging Kincaid’s misery, and as long as she was part of the squadron she was making the rest of them look bad and they were being required to make up for her deficiencies.
Katie Kincaid Space Cadet Page 4