Katie Kincaid Space Cadet

by Andrew van Aardvark

  "So I guess I just have to not fail or mess up," Katie said in a chipper tone.

  It rarely fooled her mother, but Katie was disappointed to see it didn't convince her grandmother either. The old lady gave her a quelling glance. "You're in an unfamiliar situation no one prepared you for," she said. "You will make mistakes. More than most. Some of them will be egregious. Odds are you're going to end up in front of a review board at some point having to justify yourself."

  "Good to know," Katie said sourly. If grandma didn't want chipper, Katie wouldn't bother.

  "It'll be important to have a good attitude," her grandmother went on.

  "Okay," Katie conceded.

  "Be ready. Be steady. Stay the course," her grandmother said. "Look obedient and compliant, but don't give any ground and above all don't look weak."

  "Okay," Katie said. She could stand her ground, she knew. It was good to be told it was the right thing to do. She thought she could be respectful too. It'd be more work, but she could manage it.

  "You need to project the feeling you belong at the Academy and in the Space Force without being arrogant about it," her grandmother elaborated.

  Katie nodded. She understood the point. It worried her that sometimes she was told she was being arrogant, but she couldn't see it. "Being confident but not seeming arrogant can be hard," she said.

  "Try to put yourself in the other person's shoes," her grandmother said. "But if it comes to it, it's better to seem arrogant than weak." She gave Katie a hard look.

  Katie understood something was expected.

  "Understood," she said.

  "Good," her grandmother replied.

  The conversation turned to less fraught matters then. The two women did need to get to know each other.

  Katie, however, couldn't stop turning her grandmother's advice over in her head.

  That advice had a hard, disturbing kernel of warning in it.

  * * *

  Henry had enjoyed his Christmas vacation at home, but it was good to be back on campus. It was quiet. Not something that could be said of his family, let alone his entire extended family gathered together for Christmas. His parents were making a special trip to spend New Year's in a festive big city setting. It was a bucket list item for them.

  Henry had been glad of the excuse to return to the Academy a little early and before the rest of most of the cadet body.

  Now he was looking forward to quiet drink in an almost deserted Cadet's Mess. As he entered the cool gloom of the bar, he noticed one other person. None other than Katie Kincaid.

  He'd heard she'd gone to her grandmother's for Christmas. Henry couldn't help feeling an intense curiosity about how that had gone. If Kincaid was to be believed, and Henry thought she was, she'd have been meeting her grandmother for the first time.

  Henry felt bad about feeling that way. On the other hand, this was a chance for him to do the girl a good turn. He could feel good about that.

  Kincaid had done well to last as long as she had. Girl was capable and no quitter. If she could survive BOTC, she'd have overcome the worst of the trials she faced. He figured he could help with that.

  So he nodded to her in passing as he went by her to get the cold beer he'd been thirsting after for the last few weeks. Once he had it, he returned to the table she had to herself.

  "Mind if I sit here?" he asked her.

  Katie looked up. Apparently she'd been so lost in her own thoughts she'd barely registered his presence. Surprise, then wariness, then a relieved happiness all flickered across her freckled face. She really was going to have to learn to have a better poker face. "Sure, no problem," she answered.

  Henry it seemed was on her list of people she was happy to see. He wondered how long that list was. Not as long as it should be he feared.

  "Have a good Christmas?" he asked as he sat down.

  "Visited my grandmother," Katie replied. "It was odd. I'd never met her before. She's not the ogre people make out, but she's not exactly all warm and fuzzy. I don't think she's going to be knitting me a scarf."

  Henry all but choked on his beer. The Dragon knitting a scarf. Wasn't that an image? "You don't think so?" he said.

  "Nope. Not going to be much help at all," Katie said, shaking her head contemplatively. "She all but apologized for it. All she had was advice. It was mainly that I should be ready to have a hard time of it." She shook her head again. For some reason, what her grandmother had told her seemed to have been a surprise.

  "She's not wrong, you know," Henry said. "You know it's possible someone on the Admissions Board deliberately dropped you in the deep end here as a way of getting at her."

  Katie's face froze. He'd surprised her. She hadn't realized. "You think?" she said in a toneless voice after a brief pause to think.

  "It's possible," he said. "It's politics. We're all going to have learn about that, but you're facing a steeper learning curve than most of us."

  Katie managed a twisted, glum smile. She knew Henry was on her side. "Seems everybody is full of good news."

  "Better to see the storm coming," Henry said, "than to be caught off guard."

  "Better if there was no storm at all," Katie retorted. "But thanks for the heads up."

  "Mind a little advice?" Henry asked.

  "Looks like I can use all I can get," Katie admitted.

  "If you can get through BOTC," Henry said, "the rest will be easier. Not easy, but easier."

  "Okay, I'd heard that, but it's useful to have it verified," Katie said. "Anything more?"

  It was all Henry could do not to grin at what an earnestly serious approach she was taking. He knew she needed to, but she was so young. He couldn't help feeling she ought to be still in High School planning what to do on the weekend with her girlfriends or maybe who to go to the school dance with. He wondered if there'd been girlfriends and school dances on Ceres. "I can fill you in on the details so you're not surprised by what's coming up," he said aloud without cracking a smile.

  "I'd appreciate that," Katie replied.

  "You're not going to get a March break this year," Henry said. "That sort of nonsense is for frivolous civilians. You get to spend a week in the snowy woods running around playing soldier and junior officer."

  Katie's lips quirked. "I spent part of my holidays in the snowy woods running around on skis. It was fun."

  "The BOTC preparatory course isn't that bad, but people don't usually find it that much fun," Henry replied. "You spend most of your time being ordered around by fellow cadets and the rest ordering them around. The being ordered around part is the easy part. When you're in charge, you're responsible and they give you problems to solve and then toss you curveballs to see how you handle it."

  "Real world problem solving," Katie summed up in a contemplative tone.

  "Nominally. In part," Henry replied. "Mostly BOTC is a test of character and whether or not you can get people to follow you, or at least do what you tell them to."

  "And the preparatory course is a dry run?"

  "Hmm, a very dry run. More just a familiarization with the format to tell the truth," Henry said. He really had only his own experience to go by and the odd remarks other cadets had made in passing. "They don't try hard to stress you out in the preparatory course rather the opposite. They don't want the actual BOTC to be a shock. They're letting you dip your toes in the water."

  "Dip your toes?" Katie asked.

  Henry realized the Belter girl may have never heard the expression, and it'd have no meaning in her experience. "Yeah, when kids are at the beach and they're afraid the water might be very cold, they'll sometimes dip their toes in it to check the temperature before jumping in."

  "Wow, they didn't let us do that in the swimming test."

  Henry smiled. "Well, it's not like the water was cold or you were getting much choice about jumping in."

  Katie smiled back. It was nice to see for a change. "Guess not," she said.

  "Anyhow, the point of the preparatory BOTC week is
familiarization," Henry said. "It's embarrassing to the Academy whenever the Training Directorate flunks a cadet, so the Academy tries to give us as much as a heads up as possible. They can't cheat by giving away the specific trials or exact scenarios you'll see in the actual BOTC, but they can show enough of the format and the nature of scenarios that it reduces the cognitive and emotional overload."

  "Sounds like a good thing," Katie said.

  "In general it is," Henry agreed.

  Katie gave a wry frown. "Let me guess I'm an exception."

  "Give the girl a prize!" Henry announced. A little humor might take the sting out of the fact. "Yeah, usually cadets go into the prep course knowing each other pretty well and it's fairly low key if informative."

  "But I didn't know anybody at all before getting here, and I've been so busy with biathlon events that I've only got to know Susan and Colleen. I haven't even seen much of you or Wolf."

  "Precisely. Sorry about that, we're all busy. Hear the biathlons are going well, but there's a downside and now the bill's coming due. Nothing to be done for it," Henry said.

  "I understand," Katie said distantly, then with a little more animation, "we're going to the World's later this month."

  "That's great," Henry said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

  "But more time away from the Academy and the other cadets, right?" Katie said.

  Henry nodded. The girl was no social butterfly, but she wasn't stupid either. "Yeah, look even if it cuts into your studying you've got to spend more time doing things with your classmates. Susan and Colleen are great people, but they're not exactly outgoing either."

  "Colleen seems to have made a lot of friends," Katie said. "Susan already knew a lot."

  "Colleen works at it," Henry says. "Both her and Susan were clever about the parents they chose too."

  Katie looked puzzled. "Parents they chose?"

  Henry gave an over dramatic sigh. "It's a joke."

  "A joke?" Katie asked, puzzlement tingeing her voice. "Oh!" she said as she saw it. "They were lucky through no effort or fault of their own. Obviously no one gets to pick who their parents are."

  "Obviously," Henry said. "Or their extended families." He had to remind himself Katie was genuinely very intelligent. Merely utterly lacking in clues about some things. Which was why he was making this effort.

  "So belonging to the right families makes up for their being personally somewhat antisocial?" Katie asked.

  "Exactly," Henry said in a tone he made as bright and congratulatory as he could. He worried he was overdoing it, but nothing he'd seen so far indicated Katie was attuned to subtle social cues. "But maybe antisocial is overstating it. You can be less socially engaged than someone like say Wolf without being outright antisocial."

  "I know I have to seem slow at times," Katie replied gravely. "I have noticed that a lot of cadets are small "p" political. It's like they've all been raised from birth to spend their lives manipulating people. I guess even people like Susan and Colleen have plenty of contacts. Without trying, they know all sorts of little things I'd never guessed at. I'd say I feel like a fish out of water, but really I feel more like an air breather that's been submerged in a tank with a bunch of fish that don't like me because I don't have gills."

  Despite himself, Henry smiled at the baroque metaphor. "You've spent some time thinking about this?"

  "Yeah," Katie said, taking a sip of the neglected drink she was nursing. "Might be handling it awkwardly, but I am trying. Don't give up on me."

  "Don't get discouraged. Acknowledge the problem, but keep working on it. Handle it one piece at a time."

  Katie nodded. "Good advice."

  "It is," Henry confirmed, "but hard to follow. No guarantee you'll succeed even if you do."

  "It's hard," Katie said. "The district Commander back on Ceres told me straight out he thought it'd be too hard for me. I had a hell of a time convincing him to sign off on my Academy application."

  "Well, you're here now," Henry said. "And you're not planning to give up, are you?"

  "Nope."

  "Good. So what's the plan?"

  "I have to show the other cadets that I belong here despite not sharing their background," Katie said. "I've got to really be on top of the problems we're assigned."

  Henry couldn't disagree with that as far as it went, but he couldn't help feeling Katie had also missed his main point. How to say that without being discouraging? "I think it's less important to excel than it is to not fail egregiously."

  Katie looked puzzled again. "Doesn't excelling automatically mean not failing at all?"

  "Trying to excel suggests energetically taking on risks. By doing things differently than the average Joe might for instance. It's more important to fit in than to stand out," Henry answered.

  "Okay." Katie's tone suggested she didn't at all agree.

  "You don't want to give people the feeling you've got answers they don't. You don't want to be seen to be trying too hard. It might work out for the better. It might not. Main thing is you won't get much if any extra credit if it does, but it'll exaggerate the poor impression created by any failure."

  "That sounds like it's better to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally," Katie said. "That feels plain wrong."

  Henry sighed. "You're right, it can lead to group think and failure. Every time something really bad happens because of institutional failure, the post-mortem traces it back to group think and nobody wanting to be the oddball sticking their neck out."

  "So why are you telling me this?"

  "Because the reason people are afraid to stick their necks out and depart from conventional wisdom is because it's usually a bad idea."

  Katie looked outraged. She desperately needed to work on her poker face. "That's just evil," she said.

  "No," Henry said with clear determination and no give. "It's realistic. The baby antelope has to die if the lion cubs are to be fed. If members of a group can't fit in, they get cast out."

  "Even if group think condemns the group to failure? That's wrong."

  "True," Henry conceded. "Sometimes it makes sense to buck conventional wisdom. If you do, you'd better be obviously right, and the results better be seen to benefit the group more than they do you. If not, you'll only be hated more for being right."

  "That's awfully cynical."

  "Look the fate of the universe is not going to rest on anything you do on the BOTC course, let alone in the prep for it," Henry said. "Your immediate goal is to get along with your fellow cadets so they're working with you and not against you. Understand?"

  "I can follow the logic," Katie answered. She frowned, then tried to smile at him. "I don't like the picture you're painting."

  "I'm not saying your classmates are evil or bad people or the system is broken, but it is natural for people to like and feel more comfortable with people like themselves that they understand. You need your classmates' good will and you need to fit in better to get through BOTC. The preparatory course is a good chance to practice at that. You should take it."

  "Okay, that makes sense."

  "Glad you think so. In any case, the thing to do is to not mess up and to not stand out in a bad way. Standing out in a good way shouldn't really be your main goal."

  "Maybe not," Katie said, "but I've been looking into this and I think there are things I can do that will help me do that. Making my classmates like me more, I can't do that much about."

  "Please try."

  "Sure."

  Henry looked at Katie. Katie was an interesting person, and he'd have liked to gotten to know her better. He also wished she looked more likely to take his advice. Sometimes you didn't get what you wanted. He finished his drink. "Well, I've got to do some study of my own. Thinking of taking the engineering stream and the course work is a bear."

  "Thanks for trying to help," Katie said. She did look sorry at not having pleased him.

  "Least I could do," Henry said. Not quite true, but too close to
it for his taste. He got up and left.

  6: Are You Ready, Kincaid?

  The Coach contemplated the snowy Scandinavian woods. It was an idyllic scene, but not that different from a similar one in northern North America at the same time of year. It was the middle of January.

  What made these woods special was that the World Biathlon Championships were being held in them. The Academy's biathlon team had made it to the World's and the Coach couldn't help enjoying that fact.

  It worried the Coach that their success rested so heavily upon two first year female cadets, Fritzsen, and Kincaid. Susan Fritzsen wasn't his concern. Kincaid was.

  The two worked well together. With Fritzsen's help, Kincaid had gone from having immense potential to being the team's star.

  Fritzsen, who was very good herself, didn't seem to mind being left in Kincaid's shade.

  The Coach suspected she had the same worry he did. Kincaid was a star on the biathlon circuit. As an Academy cadet, she was floundering to a degree she didn't appear to appreciate.

  Coach Svenson wasn't a man given to wasting time in regrets. You acted. You hoped it worked out. If it didn't, you assessed and corrected. You did not waste time in self-flagellation.

  All the same, sometimes mid-course corrections were necessary. Sometimes minimizing the downside of a decision was as important as maximizing the upside.

  Kincaid had proved she had a tremendous upside as a biathlon competitor. The team stood to lose her if she could not make it as a cadet. Above all, she had to succeed at the upcoming Basic Officer Training Course she'd be taking. Taking along with her classmates whose co-operation and goodwill she was going to need. The classmates the Coach's biathlon team had taken her away from.

  The young woman in question ought to be arriving soon. Wasn't going to be much opportunity to say anything useful to her. Not here and now, but maybe he ought to think of something to say on the return trip. A sort of "well done" talk now you need to address this thing talk.

  It was mere tens of seconds before he saw her emerging from the edge of the trees. Obviously tired, but focused, happy, and determined too.