Midshipman (The David Birkenhead Series)

by Phil Geusz

  Despite my late start, then, it could be said that I was about as well settled in at the academy as it was reasonable for me to expect. By the time the traditional hell-weeks were over and it was time for our academic classes to begin, I was a cadet-corporal. This ranked me above a full third of my classmates. That was the best that could be reasonably expected, given my late start and the demerit. Where I really expected to shine was in academics, and all of that was yet to come. I was looking forward to it, actually.

  And it’d all begin tomorrow morning, I reminded myself as I stretched out in the too-large bunk that Leyland made so perfectly for me every morning. Right after the Commandant’s traditional class-opening speech. During which he was supposed to apologize to me.

  Personally.

  22

  By the time classes began I’d been a cadet for almost a month. This meant that I knew my rank insignias and who and when to salute, could perform basic drill without thinking about it, and knew how to avoid angering the instructor-sergeant—most of the time, at least. It also meant that I knew how to properly don my overly-ornate and formal (to my taste, at least) full-dress uniform in five minutes flat, race to the mess hall without scuffing my perfectly-shined sandals, breakfast with my squad while sitting at attention (a position that didn’t actually exist in the drill manual, but was apparently much-beloved by our instructors) without dribbling anything on myself, and then dash out to the parade-ground for today’s special event, a traditional speech by the Commandant congratulating us on surviving the most difficult weeks of our training and explaining what would be expected of us during our classroom hours.

  I arrived on the parade ground with at least twenty seconds to spare, which put me ahead of most of my fellows. “Move, move, move!” the instructor-sergeants shouted, though they seemed less enthused these days. Probably, I reasoned, because none of us were stupid—or masochistic—enough to be late anymore. We formed ranks and snapped to attention when Colonel Xing of the Royal Marines called us to order, then stood at-ease as he delivered a preliminary address about the Academy’s tradition of dignity and the dignity of tradition. His voice was full of fire, and he waved and gesticulated as he warmed to his subject. In short, what he lacked in actual content he made up for with fireworks. Then, after a summing-up that we were all afraid not to applaud, he announced…

  …the Commandant!

  I have to admit that I stood a little taller, waiting for him to come out and apologize to me. I was still deeply angry about the Mast incident, though for the sake of His Majesty and the House of Marcus I’d never make anything more of it in the future. The Herald had sent me a letter explaining that His Highness had specified that I was to be called out front-and-center to receive the apology, which was to be gracious, complete, and at least sound sincere. Indeed, for the past few days my First Squad had been lining up in the center at assemblies instead of at the far left, in preparation for the big event. This was so I wouldn’t have to walk so far, and thereby keep the proceedings as short as possible. It was going to be highly embarrassing for almost everyone involved, of course. So, the quicker it was over and done, the better.

  But apparently no one had informed the Commandant about the need to hurry. We waited and waited and waited, while the Colonel first grew nervous, and then after a hurried conference on the podium launched into an improvised extension of his “traditions” theme.

  “Traditions aren’t just important, they’re what gives life true meaning. I can’t tell you how many good men I’ve known that’ve died—” he was just declaring when the single blaster-round rang out across the quad. We all heard it, though our discipline was already too well-ingrained for us to break ranks. For an instant the marine officer stood with his mouth hanging open, ready to deliver whatever words might’ve been next. Then slowly he hung his head and sighed as the rest of the podium crowd dashed off into the Administration Building, which loomed immediately behind them. For a long time nothing happened—Colonel Xing stood at the mike but said nothing, looking frequently over his shoulder. Then he apparently received some sort of signal, because his head fell again. “Class dismissed,” he finally declared. “Instructors, make use of the rest of the hour at your discretion.”

  We all knew what’d happened, though it wasn’t made official until dinnertime. We all donned black armbands and a few days later attended a special service for our fallen Commandant. I was offered the opportunity to opt out, given the special circumstances of Captain Drecherd’s suicide. But I went anyway, on the assumption that he must’ve been sick somehow to do such a terrible thing to himself. Besides, I was at the Academy to learn. And for all his faults, Commandant Drecherd taught me the most important lesson I ever received there.

  It was only right that I should be properly grateful to the man who first demonstrated to me the lengths to which at least some humans were prepared to go in order to deny a Rabbit anything resembling justice.

  23

  Things fell into a smooth easy groove after that, or at least as smooth and easy as things could ever be for a cadet at the Academy. We wore our black armbands for thirty full days, then cast them aside immediately after being introduced to our new Commandant, a Captain N’Dobe. He also delivered the apology that should rightly have been issued by his predecessor. I must say, the captain did so with dignity, class, and sincerity which didn’t seem at all forced. Even better, afterwards he invited me to his office to see if I had any further complaints.

  Which I didn’t of course. Dr. Stanley, my mathematics professor, doubled as my personal counselor. He took this role very seriously, to the degree that I was at least to some extent a teacher’s pet. Once he recertified my test scores and verified that I really, truly had already passed a chief engineer’s final examination, I was immediately named a teacher’s assistant and excused from all normal math classes. Instead of doing my own math work, I acted as a tutor for any of my classmates who were in trouble. This was about the best thing that could happen to a cadet, because it meant that I had to be allowed at least some freedom to set my own schedule and move about at times and places when no one else could. At first I was worried that it was because of His Majesty's interest, but then I learned that James and two other cadets had also been tapped to become assistants in other subjects. I felt better knowing that, because after all I really had mastered the subject more thoroughly than any of the other midshipmen. No one could credibly claim that I didn’t deserve the job. In any event, between the responsibilities of my role as Dr. Stanley’s assistant and him being my personal counselor, I met with the mathematics instructor several times a week. At first I thought he was just being friendly when he asked me all sorts of questions about my day-to-day life on the grounds. Then one day I was offered six new varieties of hay to sample at dinner time, just hours after I’d mentioned to him in passing that the Academy’s slave-ration hay was far tastier than my own even though it probably cost half as much. From then on I had to be careful of what I said to Dr. Stanley. This wasn’t because I didn’t like him or he didn’t want to help. Rather, he wanted to help too much.

  Being a tutor should also have given me the opportunity to meet a lot of the other cadets and get to know them socially. It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately, except for one. It was probably humiliating enough for a fellow cadet to be assigned a to a tutor at all in the first place— mandatory extra coaching meant one was in danger of flunking out, and everyone knew that the Academy wasn’t all that demanding in academic terms. But… I fear that many of the cadets I tried so hard to help never could get past my Rabbithood. Some insisted on instructing me in detail about how to do my job, while others complained right in front of me to Dr. Stanley that they were entitled to assistance from a real teacher. Only three of my dozen or so charges actively worked and cooperated with me. Of these only one, a certain Jean Le Vorsage, Heir to the House of Vorsage, seemed genuinely grateful. By graduation time he stood roughly in the middle of our class in math, which h
ad seemed far too much to hope for at first. Even better, on those rare days when we happened to eat a meal at the same time he made it a point to sit down with me and share all the latest gossip as a sort of thank-you for my efforts. I was very grateful for this indeed, because with James doing his own tutoring work as well we rarely so much as saw each other anymore. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that not one other cadet ever spoke to me about anything but business my whole time at the Academy except for James and Jean. Best of all, when Jean passed his final with points to spare, he gave me a little golden card that would admit me to his family’s holdings for the rest of my life as an honored guest. I almost cried, it meant so much to me.

  This wasn’t to say that the other cadets didn’t respect me. According to both Jean and James, I was usually spoken of in the same way that a professor or instructor-sergeant might be. “They’re confused,” James explained to me one day during one of our all-too-infrequent moments together. “On the one hand they hear larger-than-life stories about you, and know you just well enough to realize they’re true. So they want to admire you. But on the other… Well, you’re a Rabbit, David. And most humans aren’t ready to look up to a Rabbit yet, no matter what he’s accomplished or how polite and well-spoken he is.” He sighed. “I don’t think very many of them actually hate you. Or, at least they don’t dare say so in front of me. You simply don’t fit into their picture of the world and how things ought to function in it. Because you’re one-of-a-kind, there’s no little box in their minds that neatly fits the situation.” He shrugged. “Quite a few do resent you, however. And deeply indeed. The worse you make them look, the more they hate it. That may be why they don’t want you as a tutor, now that I think about it. But we’re all still just kids, and there’s still time for them to grow out of it. So I guess we ought to give them a little space and hope.” He shook his head. “This whole situation where certain people are allowed to own others… I discover new dimensions to its wretchedness every single day! Maybe we just ought to be thankful that you’re tolerated here at all.”

  I took James’s advice to heart, the way I always did, and tried my best to simply be grateful for what I had. I also treasured every second of my blossoming friendship with Jean as well. By and large, however, I spent my days at the Academy deeply lonely in a crowd, watching the others laugh and smile and pass the time of day with each other as if I weren’t even present. I was lucky to be here, I reminded myself, instead of planting flowers or cultivating wheat or madly dashing about a house trying to cater to a master’s every whim. It hurt sometimes, and hurt badly.

  But when times were the roughest, I thought about Dad. He’d been a loner too, I recalled. As well as perhaps the most highly-accomplished Rabbit of his day. All through my childhood I’d wondered why it was always work, work, work with him, and no friends. Now that I was growing up myself, however, I was beginning to understand that just maybe it hadn’t been by choice.

  24

  School went smoothly month after month. As expected the curriculum didn’t challenge me. Only three classes covered ground that was really new—etiquette, astrogation, and (rather surprisingly) strategy. James and I had already studied the Academy’s strategy textbook, but in the meantime a new instructor had been hired. He brought a whole new syllabus with him. Instead of dry, uninteresting chapters droning endlessly about industrial and logistical bottlenecks, Professor Lambert spent almost every class examining actual wars of the past and encouraging us cadets to speculate on who’d actually won and why. Sometimes it was terribly confusing, like when he listed Russia as among the losers of the First World War and Britain as one of the greatest losers of the second. But… As counter-intuitive as the professor could be sometimes, he always made us think outside the box. “So,” he explained in class one day. “In 1990 Coalition troops raced across Iraq at will until a surrender stopped them short of Baghdad. Yet in retrospect Saddam Hussein clearly won this war, while the United States proved the biggest loser. Who will tell me why and how? And even better, what lessons should we learn from it all?”

  Some of the cadets hated Professor Lambert, because with him nothing was ever hard and fast. Some cadets got F’s for agreeing with him on their papers, while others (including me) were praised for defending a contrarian position. This confused a lot of my classmates, who never did seem to grasp the underlying purpose of it all. “Strategy is the most fluid subject you’ll ever study,” the professor began our first class. “There can be thousands of correct answers, many of which can and will become wrong ones at a second’s notice. Everything is theoretical, yet results can only be judged pragmatically. Strategy is perhaps best seen as an art-form that combines one quarter chess, one quarter high-stakes poker, one quarter anthropology, one quarter bull-headed determination, and one quarter sheer intellectual capacity into a seamless, perfect whole. And yes, as a matter of fact I did just list five quarters. In strategy nothing ever fits together quite right. That’s the sort of thing that makes it such a satisfying field of study.” At this the eyes of most of my classmates glazed over. I, however, looked forward every single day to Professor Lambert’s class. Jean le Vorsage whispered to me one day in the cafeteria that the faculty mostly didn’t like our new instructor because he’d been forced on them by His Highness as the beginning of a big shakeup. He was also considered too young and brash. Near as I could tell, however, a shakeup was long overdue. Certainly Professor Lambert’s class was time better spent than pairing off in ridiculous couples and learning the ins and outs of ballroom dancing. Which, because of my big feet, I couldn’t help but get terrible marks in.

  We were also encouraged to develop our leadership skills. While my tutoring counted towards this goal, the theme was a constant one and so like everyone else I was required to lead in a dozen different ways. I rocketed up through the cadet-ranks until I was a captain at the mid-term, for example, which was pretty good because our class was only large enough to support a single lieutenant-colonel. And even that post hadn’t been filled yet—it was too early in the year. For the moment at least, only two of my fellow cadets outranked me. Both were cadet-majors, both were doing spectacularly well, and both were scions of hugely important Houses.

  James, of course, was one of them.

  Somehow or other I’d been made Information Officer, which meant that it was my duty to write and edit a weekly Academy news-sheet and e-mail it to everyone. Additionally I sometimes wrote up news-releases for the outside media—under strict supervision!—and acted as a reporter at intramural sports events and the like. For a long time I couldn’t figure out why they gave me that particular job—my writing ability was nothing special, I’d never taken a holoshot in my life, and all I really wanted was to sit in my room and study as much as possible. Then I noticed that James, who absolutely loved to make and be around friends and who therefore would’ve made a truly outstanding Information Officer, had been placed in charge of scheduling and inspecting the sentries. We all stood sentry sometimes, so this was an unpopular job that required making cold, pitiless decisions and then standing by them despite all the complaints that were sure to come. In other words, it was perfect for forcing the warm, gregarious James to develop new skills in one of his weaker areas, just as being the Information Officer was for me. Overall, I reckoned I got the better end of the deal. Reporting on an endless series of fencing matches, water-polo games and dancing contests wasn’t so bad compared to having to be the studentbody’s hardass-in-chief. Especially since it almost always got me out of sentry duty myself.

  Everyone was also required to participate in at least two group extra-curricular activities. This was particularly difficult in my case, because I was prevented by my Rabbithood from taking part in competitive athletics of any kind. I didn’t like that at first, not so much because I wanted to play sports but because I thought I was being discriminated against. Which was true, actually. But it turned out that there was good reason for it. All human sports are based on the premise th
at fundamentally identical beings are going to be competing against each other. Therefore any team I joined would suddenly find itself gifted or disadvantaged in ways that it was impossible to foresee. While it was obvious why I couldn’t be on the track team (too fast, too good a leaper!) or lift weights on equal terms with my fellow cadets (inadequate upper body strength), it wasn’t until I was actually allowed to try out for the fencing team that everyone involved began to appreciate the scale of the problem. Sure, my arms were a little on the weak side. But I had leg-strength and stamina in spades, so at first glance it appeared that everything would come out in the wash. On the first day, however, my reflexes proved to be so much better than anyone else’s that despite a complete lack of training it took everything the assistant coach had to beat me. Even worse, I could see my opponent’s next move coming a mile away. That, it turned out, was due my somewhat rabbitish fovea. A feral rabbit’s eye is designed to detect movement instead of perceiving detail, and therefore has no central concentration of visual-receptors like a human’s. While capital-R Rabbits like me do have such concentrations, our eyes are still somewhat more geared towards detecting motion at the expense of detail than those of humans. If competitive watch repair without magnifying lenses were a sport, my classmates would’ve beaten me at it every single time. But it wasn’t a sport, of course. Practically all human athletics were all based on hand-eye coordination involving fast-moving objects, the very kind of vision I excelled at. In the end they simply excused me from team sports altogether and allowed me to climb the Mast a few extra times a day to stay in shape. By then I couldn’t argue. It was lonelier, but also fairer.