Katie Kincaid Space Cadet

by Andrew van Aardvark

  “People management. You’ve got keep your people happy, wanting to help you, and clear on how to do that.”

  “Clarity I get,” Katie had replied. “The rest of it sounds like a popularity contest.”

  The old lady had sighed. “It’s good if they like you, but it’s essential they respect and trust you.”

  Katie hadn’t said anything to that.

  Her grandmother had interpreted her silence correctly. “Yes, because of your background and the fact it seems you haven’t gotten to know most of your fellow cadets during the last year, that is going to be a problem for you. I understand.”

  “Advice?”

  “Persevere. Don’t give up.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  * * *

  Susan knew canoing solo wasn’t safe. Susan didn’t much care.

  Susan wasn’t going to give up the chance to enjoy the solitude of North Woods out of fear. Susan was careful to take all the other precautions possible. She had her life preserver on. She’d told her family where she’d be and when she planned to be back. She’d checked the weather for the day. Susan had also gone over maps for the area she was in carefully before embarking on her trip. Tied to a lanyard in her front right breast pocket was her waterproof personal communications device.

  It amused Susan to use the Space Force’s terminology for a phone.

  And if all that wasn’t enough, she had an emergency satellite beacon. It’d contact Search and Rescue if necessary.

  Susan suspected she’d be in more danger crossing an intersection in the city.

  Only it’d be a lot more noisy and a lot less pleasant in the city.

  All in all, Susan was happy to be away from the cadets she’d had to spend most of the last year in close proximity to.

  Of all of them, the only one she wouldn’t have minded having as company was Katie Kincaid. Kincaid was brash, over energetic, and despite a year on Earth would doubtless have been a novice in the woods. Still, Kincaid was refreshing. She didn’t indulge in the political maneuvering that was habitual in the other cadets.

  What others might see as arrogant stubbornness on Kincaid’s part, Susan recognized as a self-confidence based on having been very good in a demanding environment.

  So if Kincaid had not already had an invitation to her grandmother’s Susan might have invited Katie on Susan's backwoods expedition. Or maybe not. As much as Susan liked the Belter girl, her future looked rocky.

  The other cadets didn’t know Katie as well as Susan did. They had no reason to like her. It meant that all Katie was going to get from them on the BOTC course coming up in a week was passive tolerance. At best. Katie was going to need more than a little luck if she was going to have any hope of passing the course with such a handicap.

  And that done, her years as a junior officer were likely to be rocky too. Katie probably knew space and how to work in it better than most other officers in the Space Force. Not something likely to endear a junior officer to her superiors unless Katie was very discreet.

  Not exactly Katie’s middle name.

  So maybe it was best Kincaid wasn’t here. Katie managed to be disturbing even when she wasn’t present.

  Susan put the girl out of her mind with a good wish.

  She concentrated on being still and waiting for the beaver she wanted to photograph to appear.

  * * *

  Andrew was not given to being irritable or entertaining conspiracy theories. However, four weeks into the BOTC and having been assigned Colleen McGinnis and Katie Kincaid as teammates he was feeling angry, hard done by, and wondering if someone on the Basic Training School’s staff was out to get him.

  Andrew looked at McGinnis across the back of the truck they were being transported in. McGinnis was sleeping. Everybody but Andrew was sleeping. It had taken only a couple of days and nights without much rest, for all of them to start grabbing sleep whenever they could. Andrew knew he should be resting too. He wanted to. His body ached for it. Only he was too disturbed. Too annoyed.

  It wasn’t McGinnis that was the problem. Sure she wasn’t much help as a teammate. McGinnis was merely adequate, but at least she wasn’t a problem.

  No, the problem was the lightly snoring girl jammed in beside him. Katie Kincaid was the problem. Turned out Kincaid’s problems with most team sports had accurately predicted what she was like to work with on a team in the BOTC. If Andrew had been feeling generous, he might have allowed she wasn’t performing quite that badly. He wasn’t.

  The fact that Kincaid was proving to be a clueless klutz only half the time, not all the time, was proving no consolation at all. The issue was you couldn’t predict when she was going to screw up. Andrew never felt able to trust her. Andrew felt like he had to watch for her to energetically do something clueless and counter-productive every moment they were together. Well, not when she was sleeping like this, though who knew when she’d wake up and have some brainstorm.

  It didn’t help that she was physically sub-par. Two years younger than most of the cadets and not used to Earth’s weather or gravity, she was at a definite disadvantage. The course was designed to stress the average cadet. The cadets were outside five days at a time every week, carrying heavy loads all day long and a good part of most nights. The first couple of days hadn’t been too bad, but after that the fatigue had started to build. It told on all of them, but more on smaller females like McGinnis and Kincaid than most.

  Not their fault, of course.

  Only although the School’s staff didn’t deign to explain how they’d allotted the individual cadets to the four three-person teams that made up their training platoon, Andrew didn’t think it was right they’d put both McGinnis and Kincaid on the same team. The same team as him.

  Andrew was bitterly aggrieved that he’d got Kincaid for both the Cadet Preparatory Obstacle Course team and now again for BOTC. Didn’t seem fair. Seemed almost too much of a coincidence.

  Even at his most paranoid, he didn’t think anyone could be targeting him personally. He wasn’t that important. Not yet. He could imagine somebody wanting to get back at his family, though. You didn’t get power and influence without making at least some enemies.

  In any event, the only target he had for his frustration was Kincaid. Andrew was coming to detest her. He knew it wasn’t fair. Kincaid gave no signs of having malicious intent. Only her erratic incompetence made her a problem. One he was saddled with.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  Andrew only knew he’d welcome a future with less Katie Kincaid in it.

  * * *

  They’d made it to the middle of the fifth week of BOTC. Colleen was beginning to feel a dull optimism about her chances of passing.

  The sun was on the horizon and there was a night march coming up, but for now they were being allowed time for supper. Katie was currently in charge, and for a change she seemed well organized. Always nice as any time a cadet commanding wasted tended to come out of their fellow cadet’s time to sleep and eat.

  They were even getting time to heat up some water for hot drinks. Caffeine had long since ceased sufficing to keep them alert, but it was still appreciated. Even the combat rations Colleen was choking down weren’t that bad. Dry and lacking flavor, they were only ten years old and good for another twenty. The included packets of hot sauce livened them up some.

  Another week and a half and they’d be done with all this. Colleen couldn’t wait. It was possible that at some point in the coming years they’d tell stories in which this was all a great adventure. Colleen didn’t think so.

  Colleen had managed to hang in and not mess up much. They were all being given five tasks for which they got command of the platoon. Colleen like all the others had completed four of them. Colleen’s performance had been at best average, but it’d been good enough. Colleen didn’t think she’d mess up enough at whatever her fifth task was that she wouldn’t pass.

  The same was true of all of the rest
of the cadets in their training platoon, except one.

  Katie Kincaid had done adequately in one of her tasks. Katie had managed to lead a successful night march, set-up and defend a bivouac. She’d managed to excel in another task. They’d been acting as the emergency response team in defending against an attack on a group of buildings. Katie had displayed shocking energy and given exactly the right orders to repel the attack without any waste of time. Colleen had been impressed, and she knew their instructors had been too.

  Unfortunately, Katie had completely flubbed two other tasks.

  They’d been tasked with setting up an emergency helicopter pad for an evacuation. Clear an area and put out markers to show the aircraft where to land. It should have been one of the easier chores they’d been given. Not easy enough. Colleen wasn’t sure what had happened as Katie had assigned her to moving brush. All she knew was the marine sergeant instructing them had torn Katie a new one. Unusual. The marine instructors were usually more patient. Colleen could only imagine that Katie had got confused. Or perhaps she had assigned the task of putting out the markers to someone else who’d got confused and not had the foresight to check their work. Colleen didn’t know. Colleen only knew it meant Katie was down points.

  Up points on one assignment and down on another, Katie would still have been okay if she hadn’t messed up on another simple task. They’d been given a heavy barrel to move from point A to point B over a small obstacle. Somehow Katie had managed to still be organizing ropes and logs when their time ran out. Katie hadn’t asked for advice, and nobody had offered any. Colleen figured if Katie hadn’t wasted her time trying to come up with a complicated, perfect solution, it would have worked out okay. It wouldn’t have been hard to have just rolled the barrel most of the way and then over some logs. Katie had succumbed to analysis paralysis.

  So Colleen felt dully happy for herself.

  She felt dully worried for Katie.

  Colleen shoveled her rations into her face, knowing she needed the energy.

  * * *

  Katie would never have guessed she’d find herself thinking of her marine instructors as tiresomely cute or coy.

  Live and learn.

  In retrospect, it did make sense. The goal of the instructors was to test how their officer candidates reacted to unexpected situations. The instructors wanted to see how the cadets thought on their feet. They wanted to see if they could make good decisions while short of time and under stress. So they wanted their exercises to contain an element of surprise. They weren’t giving out full details of what each exercise involved. They weren’t even always clear about the real goals during a particular task. In fact, they were deliberately misleading at times giving out ostensible tasks with supposed goals, but then throwing a wrench into the works.

  On the other hand, the instructors' purpose wasn’t to flunk their charges by giving them insurmountable problems. And so they were cute. The instructors walked a fine line between throwing candidates in the deep end with no warning and telling them exactly what they could expect and needed to do. They were coy. They hinted at facts without outright stating them. The instructors would say your task is to take the platoon from here to there, and yes, it’s possible there are enemy forces in the area.

  The instructors never said outright you should expect to be ambushed.

  Second last day of the fifth week of the BOTC course and Katie was in command of her training platoon for the fifth and last time. Five minutes ago she’d finished receiving a set of those ever so artfully constructed orders.

  Given how she’d done during her previous stints in command her whole career was riding on how she did this time.

  Katie was less than amused by the careful ambiguity of her orders. The prospect that some of the information she’d been given might be purposely misleading might have made her sick to her stomach if she hadn’t been so tired. Fatigue, the drug that insulates you from life’s little injustices.

  The whole platoon was tired. Katie’s orders had been clear that she was to arrange for it to get some rest in a set of moderate sized storage buildings they were currently located at.

  At the same time she had been tasked with “aid to the civil power”. The story was that some nearby water works were in danger of being attacked by rioters. Agitators supported by unnamed “bad guys” were organizing “disaffected elements” of the local population. The Agitators were destroying public property in an attempt to undermine the state.

  It wasn’t a plausible scenario. It was one that created a situation where Katie had to balance two divergent goals somehow.

  Katie had a plan for it. Now to see how well it worked out.

  Katie raised her hand over her head in the gesture that meant “form on me for an O-group”. She yelled, “O-group. On me.”

  Katie’s platoon mates moved liked automatons. They were tired and had had all the enthusiasm squeezed out of them. Katie figured only the thought they only had a little more than a day of this left was keeping some of them going. All the same, they moved without hesitating. They didn’t waste any time or energy. A few minutes and they were all gathered around her, waiting. Waiting for her orders.

  “This is the situation,” Katie began. This part was easy. Katie passed on what she’d been told more or less verbatim.

  “Our mission is twofold,” she continued. This part was a little trickier. She had to pass on the clearer parts directly. Including the fact they’d been given conflicting orders. She also wanted to include what the marine instructor had only hinted at. Unlike him, she couldn’t fudge facts. She would be graded on how clear and precise her orders were. It meant she had to give her own interpretation of what he’d suggested.

  “We’re to rest and prepare for a probable night march this evening,” Katie said. “We have also been tasked to provide security for some local public infrastructure while doing so.”

  That pronouncement met dead silence. Nobody so much as fidgeted. They were intent on what she had to say next. How Katie interpreted this dual mandate and how she decided to tackle it would determine whether they got some rest this afternoon or if they’d be falling over their own feet from extreme fatigue tonight.

  “Company command,” Katie said, “believes the chance of actual unrest targeting the waterworks we’re tasked with protecting to be remote. They believe a light, rotating guard as a precautionary measure should be sufficient.”

  Someone found the energy to snicker at this assertion. They all knew very well how remote the chances of this being true were. It simply defied common sense that Katie’s final task would be to organize a group nap.

  Katie smiled her acceptance of this common understanding. Be that as it may, they needed to play along. “So, execution,” she went on. “While three-quarters of the platoon rests, but remains fully outfitted and ready to move at short notice, each three-person team will take turns standing guard. One member will man the communications back here with the bulk of the platoon. A two-person group, one communicator and one dedicated guard who will be in command, will keep watch at the waterworks.”

  That was the basic outline of her plan right there. There were, of course, details of administration, precise command structure, and communications protocols to make clear in painful detail.

  “I will take command of the first watch,” Katie finished up. “McGinnis will handle the first communications watch here. Cunningham will be my communicator.”

  Katie wasn’t entirely happy about that. Cunningham had been cool towards Katie. Despite that, he had done everything she’d ever asked of him at least adequately. Still, she’d had rather had Susan as her right hand and maybe Stephen Lee or Eva Karoly manning the communications back here. Only that would have meant breaking up the teams they’d been assigned to. It would have looked odd. It would have looked like she didn’t completely trust Andrew or Colleen. That wouldn’t do.

  Anyhow, it all seemed straightforward enough.

  There’d be some sort of incident a
t the waterworks. Katie be willing to bet her last dollar it’d be during her watch, the first one. Katie would need to summon the rest of the platoon to form up and control the situation. The key would be to act in a timely fashion. Not to summon the platoon too early, but certainly not to wait too long either.

  Katie could handle this.

  She hoped.

  * * *

  Susan was feeling rather bemused.

  Susan tried not to be obvious about it. Susan was perfectly aware that her attitude would annoy many of her fellow cadets. They were in the main tired, stressed out, and taking BOTC very seriously.

  Katie, for instance, who was just finishing up her last Orders Group, and doing a fine job of it too, she was taking the whole thing altogether too seriously.

  Katie would be better off relaxing some. If she kept handling this task as capably as she was currently, she’d do fine on it. That would mean she’d pass the BOTC without issues. Not in the top half of the course, but not in danger of flunking out.

  Kincaid was a very capable young woman. Susan wasn’t impressed that so many of their classmates were too closed minded to see that. Susan supposed she shouldn’t be surprised.

  They were all almost as young as Katie herself. Most of them had never been forced out of their comfort zones. This course was the most discomforting experience most of them had ever had.

  Too bad that along with Katie’s youth, and the fact Katie was way out of her comfort zone, that this meant that she was working at a severe disadvantage.

  Too bad that those facts meant Katie lacked self-confidence and a sure touch. She veered unpredictably from being overconfident and inattentive to nervous, worried micromanagement. Neither being calculated to give her temporary sub-ordinates confidence.

  Hopefully she’d hold it together for the duration of this exercise and not do something to fumble her last chance to avoid the review board.

  Susan regretted she wasn’t in a better place to help.

  Katie was going to have that snake Cunningham at her side during her trial.

  Cunningham was probably too chickenshit to actively sabotage her. Probably.