by Rick Partlow
"And that's why you're here?" I assumed.
"Oh, hell no," he corrected me, shaking his head. "I'm here because my mom and dad act like they want to kill each other half the time but they're not bright enough to break up."
I shared a laugh with him for a moment before the door slammed open again, but this time it was a pair of upper-class cadets, Second Class from the markings on their collars. Deke and I sprang to attention and I only got the briefest of glances before I forced my eyes straight ahead. They hated when you looked at them. One of them was a short, slender Asian---from what I'd read, I'd gathered that he was from the same part of the world as Jason, but that was the only similarity between them. This guy had a narrow, sharp-edged face and I thought his name was something like Nakamura if I'd read it right. He had a thin, twisted smile on his face that didn't look at all friendly.
The other guy...now he was something totally different. His skin was as dark as the middle of the long Night on Canaan, when the storms blotted out the stars, and he was taller than Jason but much more solidly built. His face could have been carved out of basalt with a chisel and his eyes were keen and intelligent. He had the face and bearing of a leader of men. His name tag read M'voba.
"Well, well," Nakamura said in a smooth, trained voice with an edge of not entirely friendly humor to it, "we got ourselves a big one here, don't we Mat?"
M'voba didn't laugh and didn't respond, just planted himself right in front of me. I stared at his chest, which wasn't hard since it was almost at my eye level.
"About one and a half g's," he estimated, his voice deep and sonorous, a voice that would carry over a crowd. He grunted softly, thoughtfully. "Obviously not from Morrigu; not quite ugly enough for that." Nakamura laughed at that. "I'd say Canaan. Is that right Cadet Mitchell, are you from Canaan?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" I responded as loud as I could, the way they'd instructed us at in-processing.
I expected a dressing down, but he said nothing else, just looked at me with thoughts churning behind those dark eyes when I risked a glance up at them. He moved over to Deke, and I could see the tall upper-class cadet regarding him when I looked out of the corner of my eye, but it was Nakamura that spoke.
"Cadet Conner, why are you in my Academy?" The smaller man demanded. "What makes you good enough to share these hallowed halls with the likes of myself and Cadet Second Class M'voba?"
"Sir," Deke bellowed hoarsely, "this cadet will not rest until he has exhausted every opportunity to prove himself worthy of attending the Commonwealth Service Academy!"
"Someone has been studying," M'voba commented drily. "Those are words, Cadet Conner. Empty words without action to back them up. Why don't you show us how committed you are by dropping down and knocking out fifty pushups?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" He dropped to the pushup position and I only hesitated a heartbeat before joining him. Dropping to the floor seemed to take longer than at home, which felt incredibly odd. And doing pushups took much less effort, to the point where it felt as if I was cheating.
I fell into his pace though, and we finished the set in less than a minute, then jumped back to attention. Deke was breathing a little hard, but didn't seem too worn out; apparently, he'd prepared well for this.
"Very impressive," M'voba allowed. Then he stepped up to me again. "But not as impressive for you, Mitchell. You have an unfair advantage, isn't that right?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" I agreed readily.
"Why don't we see just how many pushups you can do, big man," he continued. "Drop and keep pushing until you're too tired to push." He raised a finger. "I won't judge, I won't punish you for not doing enough. Just show me how strong you really are."
"Sir, yes, sir!"
I dropped again, in-between the bunks, and started doing pushups again.
"You're not going to let your roommate do pushups alone, are you Cadet Conner?" M'voba asked him.
"Sir, no, sir!"
Deke dropped down in front of me, his feet facing the opposite wall, so I could see him levering up and down even as I did. We counted out the exercise together, falling into a rhythm, and had no problem until we reached a hundred. At that point, Deke paused in the up position and I did too, to wait for him. He did three more and I followed his pace, but I could see his arms shaking with exhaustion, sweat dripping off his face to plop on the tile floor.
"Whoever stops first," M'voba said from somewhere above me, "will be cleaning the latrines on this floor by hand, and by yourself."
I sneered at that, towards the floor where it was safe, but I wasn't surprised. That was the kind of thing upper-class cadets did to lower-class. I went slower, and Deke tried to follow me, but I could tell he wouldn't last much longer. His eyes came up and I caught them with a look.
"One," I mouthed silently. "Two...three."
On three, we both collapsed to our chests against the floor, though for Deke the collapse was necessary. He was panting raggedly against the tile as I rolled over and looked up at M'voba.
"I guess we both clean the latrines, sir," I said, clambering to my feet and coming to attention. Deke was much slower getting up, and his blue utilities were stained with sweat at the back, breath still coming in deep gasps. I made my face completely straight, not wanting to give even a hint of a smile.
"Yes, you do, Mitchell," he confirmed, but somewhere behind that graven image of a face I sensed some approval. "Report there after dinner and your supplies will be waiting."
M'voba jerked a head towards the door and he and Nakamura strode out, closing it behind them.
"Jesus," Deke hissed, falling back onto his bunk, wiping sweat off his forehead. "They start the tests early here, don't they? I mean, class doesn't even start till tomorrow..."
"You ever clean a bathroom?" I asked him, grinning.
"Are you kidding?" He said indignantly. "On civilized planets, the bathrooms are self-cleaning!" He rolled his eyes. "Not here of course. Here, they have us instead of cleaning systems. Because it's so important that future starship captains know the correct way to clean a fucking toilet."
"Builds character," I assured him. "We don't have that high-tech stuff on our farm; that's why we have big families."
"Well at least I'll have an expert on slinging shit with me while I'm cleaning it up," he cracked in return. We started to chuckle, but then quieted down as we remembered what happened the last time we started laughing.
I checked the time on my 'link. "You'd better get cleaned up," I said. "Dinner's in a half hour."
***
Cleaning the latrines was so much easier than I'd imagined. Their version of "by hand" basically meant you poured the cleaning solution over everything, then sucked it up with a liquid vacuum, followed by a buff with a powered hand-waxer to make everything shine. Deke still managed to find reason to bitch about it, of course, but that was part of his charm.
We'd just about finished when two other Fourth-Class cadets came in, both of them female, both dressed in the T-shirt and shorts that were shower wear, and both carrying towels and shower bags. One was a tall girl, taller than me, with dark hair and eyes and tan skin. She was striking, with high cheekbones and an exotic look to her and very long, nice-looking legs. The other was shorter than me, with a build the Earthers would have considered a little stocky but which seemed petit to me. Her light brown hair was short and spiky and her eyes were dark pools set in a heart-shaped face.
I jumped up from where I'd been polishing a water drain, and Deke followed at a more leisurely pace.
"Do you need us to leave while you..." I motioned to the bathroom.
The two girls looked at each other oddly, then burst out laughing.
"Are you serious?" the shorter one asked in a pixie sort of voice.
"Forgive my roommate here," Deke said, nudging me in the bicep. "He's from out in one of the more parochial backwoods colonies."
"I suppose that makes you Mr. Cosmopolitan then?" the taller one commented, her voice with a slight accent, her
tone sardonic.
"That makes me Deke Conner, at your service." He nodded politely. "My friend here is Cal Mitchell."
I waved, not wanting to offer a hand that had been cleaning bathrooms.
"I'm Holly Morai," the shorter girl introduced herself. She eyed Deke peculiarly. "You're from Montreal, aren't you? I can tell by the accent."
"And you're from Ottawa or thereabouts," he replied, both of them grinning.
"Daniela Vallejo," the other girl said, offering a small wave. "I'm from the Lima Superplex."
"I'm from the Canaan colony," I supplied, in case anyone was interested. "Sorry if I offended you; where I live, males and females don't generally share bathrooms except at home."
"That's very old-fashioned," Daniela said with a chuckle. "Come on, Holly," she urged the other girl, "we need to get a shower and get our room squared away for morning inspection."
"Nice meeting you," Deke said, smiling broadly as they headed back into the shower stalls.
"Well," he said, turning to me after they disappeared from view, "maybe this place won't be so bad after all."
"Considering that after we leave here, we get to fight in a war," I said, kneeling again to finish cleaning the drain, "I think we should enjoy it while we have the chance."
"Yeah, I don't know dude," he said, shaking his head and scowling slightly, "I think the whole deal will be over in a few months before we get in on any of it."
"And that disappoints you?" I asked him, cocking an eyebrow doubtfully.
"Hey, if I wanted to be safe, I'd have signed up for tech school and gone to build ships," he countered. "I mean, those fuckers killed a half a million people and all we've done so far is launch a few raids on their outposts near their frontiers, and those are mostly automated." He made a face. "I thought President Jameson had balls, but the way things are looking, I think he's glad the squatters are gone and just wants the whole situation to go away."
"You really think so?" I frowned. "I don't know man...things are just never that simple." I sighed, getting back to the drain. "Come on, let's get this over with. We have class tomorrow."
***
"How many of you have heard of the League of Corinth?" Colonel Markham asked, looking around at her students. There were thirty of us in her History of the Commonwealth course, all Fourth-Class, and we were all a bit shell-shocked after our introductory week at the Academy. No one answered. "How about the Haudenosanee Confederation? Noricum?"
Still no answers. She shook her head in a very scholarly way, which seemed odd given that she looked like one of my sister Kaitlyn's teenaged friends playing dress-up in a uniform. She touched a control on her podium and a holographic projection snapped to life at the front of the classroom, showing a three-dimensional map of Earth, with several locations highlighted in red.
"The League of Corinth," she pointed to a highlighted area I knew was now known as Greece. "Established 338 BCE and existing sporadically until 224 BCE." The map shifted and showed the northeastern corner of North America. "The Haudenosanee Confederation, 1122-1812 CE." Another shift of the globe and a glowing red section of northern Europe appeared. "Noricum, 400-16BCE." She looked back to us. "All of these were examples of what sort of government?" She speared another student with a look. "Ms. Wiesenthal?"
"Umm..." the girl dithered. "Confederations?"
Colonel Markham smiled thinly, unimpressed. "Good guess. Specifically, federations or confederations. And why is this significant?"
A hand rose, from some tall, rangy-looking kid with a square jaw, a rough-hewn face and a weathered tan.
"Yes, Mr. West?"
"Because the Commonwealth is a federation," he said, his accent very pronounced. I didn't know where it, or he, was from though.
"Very good," she confirmed, clearly more impressed by this answer. "And what is the definition of a federation?"
Another hand went up and Colonel Markham pointed. "Yes, Ms. Nguyen?"
"A group of states with a central government but independence in internal affairs."
"That's the dictionary definition," the Colonel said with a nod. "What does it mean in practice for us though?" She looked directly at me. "Mr. Mitchell?"
"Well," I started, then cleared my throat when my voice sounded a bit hoarse. "I mean, the Commonwealth has a constitution," I tried again, "and each planet and state inside it has to abide by certain laws, like universal suffrage over age twenty-one and equal treatment for all citizens, and allow free trade with other members of the Commonwealth. But inside their borders, they can make their own laws as long as they don't contradict the Constitution." I shrugged. "Like on my world, Canaan, the Church of the New Society of Friends is considered a political entity and elects its own representatives to the planetary council, but under the Commonwealth Constitution, there also have to be separate representatives from the unbeliev...err, the secular voters." Not that there were that many of them, nor did they have much say, in practice.
"Good example," Colonel Markham acknowledged, clearly pleased. "Does anyone know the weaknesses of a federation type of government?"
No takers this time. She waited for a moment, then went on herself. "Okay, how about economics? A federation worked fine for economics when there was a big pie and not a lot of people at the table, but what happened when we ran up against the Tahni?" Another look around. "The Tahni had been united under a one world government---basically a theocracy---for centuries, with an economy that worked very efficiently, at least for making war. We quickly found out that we lacked the economic cohesion to fund an interstellar war, which necessitated the formation of...what?"
This time Cadet West raised his hand again. "The Corporate Council," he said when she nodded to him.
"Exactly. We had to make an exception to the Constitutional prohibition against monopolies in order for our economy to produce the fleet of ships needed to prosecute the First War with the Tahni. And we left it in place afterwards because the threat from the Tahni still existed during the Truce." She cocked her head. "Which has obviously now ended, so we're fortunate the Corporate Council still exists, no? But its existence is also a counterpoint to the sort of government we set out to establish in the wake of the Sino-Russian War, so does that still make the Commonwealth a federation or more of a republic? Any opinions?" A hand. "Ms. Petrov?"
"My father says," the girl interjected, "that the Corporate Council is squeezing out smaller businesses under the umbrella of security. He calls them a shadow government."
"Many people think that way," Colonel Markham admitted. "Particularly in the colonies, which has led to the growth of a huge black market in the Pirate Worlds, hasn't it?"
"What do you think, ma'am?" Cadet West asked her. I looked at him again. His features would make you think he was simple and shallow, but his eyes seemed to be deeper somehow, like there was something cunning and intelligent hiding in there under excellent camouflage.
"I think life is rarely black and white," Colonel Markham confided with a conspiratorial tone, as if she was sharing something with us that she shouldn't, "and sometimes you have to take the bad with the good because there's no better way. For instance," she touched another series of controls and the globe rotated to Asia, showing a featureless brown that denoted the wasteland left behind by the nuclear exchange between Russia and China, "the Sino-Russian War."
She looked around at us, judging our reactions. I looked at her, keenly interested. The Sino-Russian War had always been given by the Church as an example of the evils of the World, and the reason for the foundation of the New Society of Friends.
"It was the realization of all of humanity's worst nightmares for a century, death and devastation over half the globe, three billion people dead before all the starvation and plague and aftershock wars were finished. And yet..."
She stepped out from behind her podium and walked slowly down the aisles between our chairs. "And yet the Crisis forced us to unite, led to the formation of the Human Commonwealth, led to the
exploration and exploitation of the Solar system's resources...and most important for us as a species, perhaps, led to the discovery of the ruins under what was once known as the 'face on Mars.' Though the Face was an optical illusion, it was indeed a marker for the remnants of a Predecessor facility from tens of thousands of years ago. It led us to the wormhole jumpgate to Proxima Centauri, and from there to the habitable world of Hermes. And on Hermes, we found the carvings that gave us a map of the jumpgates connecting much of the Cluster together."
She walked past me, and my eyes followed her as she clasped her hands behind her back and continued. "This eventually led to the entire field of hyperdimensional physics and the invention of the Transition Drive. Without the spur of the Sino-Russian War, do you think any of this would have happened?"
She looked around again, surveying us. "In the opening years of the 21st Century, space travel was restricted to automated probes, none of which could have found those ruins. No one had the political will nor the political capital to spend on a manned mission to Mars, and unity was the furthest thing from anyone's mind. The world was divided, from regions and nation-states down to communities, along lines of religion, political philosophy, socioeconomic status, ethnic identity...and there was no end to the division in sight."
She looked to Cadet Petrov again. "What would your father say about that, girl?"
Was there sarcasm in her tone? Maybe. I wondered who Petrov's father was.
"He would say," Petrov answered cheekily, "that every cloud of nuclear fallout has a silver lining. Ma'am."
Markham's eyebrow went up and I thought for a moment she was going to explode on the girl, but instead she laughed, an oddly gentle sound.