Valor's Stand

by Kal Spriggs

“Yeah,” he answered, “but coming off of Regimental Training Officer, it's like being made the assistant dishwasher. A step down like that, it's like saying I wasn't ready for the big-time.”

  “He's trying to make it so we don't get commissioned,” I reminded him. “So even if we don't give him an official reason, he can point at our assignments and suggest we weren't quite bad enough to get kicked out.”

  “You say the most cheerful things,” he grumbled. “Why do I keep you around anyway?”

  I threw my pillow at him and he caught it and put it behind his head, pretending to snore.

  “Okay,” Ashiri went on, “Most of these others, especially the Company Commanders, fit the criteria. And they're all in positions to get nice bonuses on points towards the end of the year.”

  I nodded. Dawson had been made the Company Commander for the Sand Dragons. Not that he was a bad guy. He was a solid, dependable cadet. He was kind of a friend and he'd helped me out before. But he wasn't the type to stick his neck out and he tended to just do what everyone else was doing, even if he worked a bit harder at it.

  “What about you?” I asked Ashiri.

  “I put in for Contingency Response, and surprise, I'm your assistant,” she smirked.

  “You can't get good help these days,” I muttered. I checked my chrono on my implant. “Okay. So until we see anything we can do without getting caught and arrested, we stay low. We keep our eyes open. We wait for an opportunity to accomplish something.”

  “Or when things get so messed up that we have no choice but to act,” Ashiri added.

  “Yeah,” I said, “or that.” I swallowed and stood up, “we should call it. Early morning tomorrow.”

  Ashiri rose and shot a glance between Kyle and I. “Yep.” She gave an overly dramatic yawn, that turned into a deep one that made Kyle and I yawn in response. “Geez, I guess I'm tired. Night guys.”

  She left, closing the door behind her.

  “So,” Kyle said.

  “So...” I nodded.

  “I should go,” he rose.

  I didn't say anything until he reached for the door. “Stay.” I said. “Please.”

  “Um...” I saw him flush. “I thought you wanted to wait...”

  I headed off that topic before he went too far down that path. “Just, I don't want to be alone. I want to be near you. The past few months...” I shuddered a bit. “I don't want to be away from you if I can help it.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “Do you want me...”

  “Lay down,” I told him. He lay back on my bed and I curled up next to him, my head on his shoulder. I killed the light with my implant and we lay there. I listened to his heart beating, I could feel his warmth soaking into me.

  I wanted to enjoy the moment, to enjoy his touch. But it had been so long since I'd felt safe, since I felt I could relax.

  I fell asleep within seconds.

  ***

  “Drive Ship emerging!” Someone shouted over the net.

  I didn't look up from my terminal. We were running a host of drills all across campus. Most of them were aimed at culmor attacks. Even in the Contingency Staff, we were running plans for different types of threats.

  “Ship count, three M-Type Cruisers, three T-Type Cruisers, six S-Type Cruisers...” The count went on, even as I was focusing on updating the battle plans that I'd been assigned.

  Most of the Plans section was working on big threats. The Culmor Empire, as far as we knew, preferred to use large drive ships, typically G-Types, for their strategic drives. G-Types were dreadnought-sized, though K-types were the size of superdreadnoughts. They weren't designed to fight, though. They carried a few weapons, but their main source of threat was that they projected a huge warp drive field, big enough to enclose tens of thousands of kilometers... big enough to transport entire battle groups.

  So when a culmor force arrived, they typically showed up with a dozens of heavy cruisers and scores of corvettes. Only their drive ships were equipped with a second warp drive ring for faster than light travel. Their cruisers and corvettes, plus any larger ships they had, used that extra space for more power plants and more weapons.

  The Culmor Empire didn't just rely on drive ships, though. They employed some commerce raiders, too. They were lighter ships, what we might call frigates, only they were designed to be fast, faster than most human destroyers, but with merchant-style drives that were relatively fragile and light weapons. The ships were able to travel individually, they mounted two drive rings and could transition to faster-than-light warp.

  Those often acted as military transports, too, bringing in scouting and raiding forces.

  I'd been running contingency plans mostly related to those evil little ships.

  Commander Jotaro Drien was overseeing the Plans section. He'd been relatively decent to me the previous year, sort of out of character for a Drien. But then again, the Admiral had told me that he and my mother had sort of been a thing. Maybe he was different from most Driens. I almost thought, like Sashi, but I caught myself. I had trusted Sashi before and just like before, she'd betrayed my trust. It didn't matter why she had betrayed it. If she was working with her grandfather, then she'd joined up with the bad guys.

  He had issued a variety of potential threats that would warrant the Academy responding, but not calling up the entire Militia. Most of the first couple weeks, those threats had been relatively simple. A Culmor Empire commerce raider probing the edge of the system. A pair of them dropping mines near the Secundis Mining Station. A squadron of them emerging in near orbit and dropping a raiding force from orbit.

  They'd grown progressively nastier. One of them involved a raider launching long range kinetic weapons at the planet, and trying to detect the source of the strikes, detect further incoming attacks, and at the same time trying to conduct rescue and recovery operations on the base or city hit. That one was bad enough with a hit on a military base. When we ran the scenario for a hit on a major city like Nashik or Duncan City, the casualties were in the tens of millions.

  Right now we were trying to “contain” a group of culmor raiders who had dropped from orbit in their powered exosuits. The ridiculous things were hard to detect near the ground and they individually carried a lot of firepower. They were faster than all of our ground armor, able to outrun it by bounding along or burning thrusters. They were small targets, too, so our skimmers had a hard time locating them, and when they did, the stupid suits had enough firepower to be a threat even against them.

  The contingency plan we'd put together for that one hadn't played out well in the last scenario. We'd lost almost a full company of infantry, four armored vehicles, and three skimmers, all to take down fifteen of the stupid little exosuits. They were slightly less than two meters tall.

  It was more than a little infuriating.

  If we had powered armor of our own, that might be different, but we didn't. We had old weapons and old equipment. We were preparing to fight an enemy who had nearly wiped out humanity and the Guard were keeping our most modern, best equipped force tied up, far from home.

  I had to fight back tears of rage and focused. “Cadet Second Class Takenata, I've made the changes to the Operations Plan. Tell them it's good for a test run.”

  “Roger, ma'am,” Ashiri replied. I saw her start logging it, and then turned my attention to the next plan.

  “Exercise termination,” someone announced over the intercom. Everyone looked up, a little shocked. Normally the drill days went sixteen or eighteen hours anymore and they had run drills on Sundays, too, not just Friday nights and Saturdays. We heard “pause exercise” occasionally when the instructors wanted us to reset and reorganize. But to end the exercise at this point?

  Admiral Drien's dry voice spoke over the intercom. “Cadets, you're doing good work. But we need to step things up. To this point, we've tried to balance classes with the drill cycle. As of today, I'm shifting things a bit. Our Cadets First Class are going to cease all classes, effective immediately.
We'll lock their grades at their current standing.”

  Well, I'm glad I'm caught up on all my homework, I thought to myself.

  He went on, “The remainder of this year, they'll focus entirely on drills and patrols. Our Cadets Second Class will substitute their simulator time for patrols under our Cadets First Class and Instructors. They'll do their other classes as normal. That patrol time will be strictly overseen and I'll institute special safety protocols, but that should allow us to have twenty-four hour patrols to assist our Active Militia.”

  I felt my stomach sink a bit at that. Twenty-four hour operations was going to be absolutely brutal.

  “Our third and fourth class cadets will continue their classes for the time being,” Admiral Drien finished. “Now, since we've been working everyone fairly hard, I'm calling a break for the rest of the day. We'll conduct after action reviews on today's drill on Monday morning. Enjoy your time off.”

  “Oh boy,” Ashiri muttered, “We get all afternoon and all day Sunday off, whatever shall we do with the time.”

  I shot her a look, but I didn't think anyone had heard her, and the mutter of conversation in the Regimental Headquarters was such that it would have been hard for the monitors to pick it up.

  I closed out my terminal and waited as the room cleared out a bit. I couldn't help but glance over at Sashi, who was looking tired and worn, over at the command operations section. She looked over at me, seeming to sense my gaze. For a moment, our eyes met and I could see that she was just as tired and worried as me. She looked lonely, too, and I wondered if she could trust anyone.

  I looked away, fighting back angry tears. She should have thought of that before she went and made a deal with her skuzzy family.

  “Let's go,” I told Ashiri. She fell in next to me and we walked out without looking back.

  ***

  Chapter 22: I Am Not The Most Patient Person And I Accept That

  “M-Type,” I told Kyle as he flashed a sensor readout to my implant. With the threat being the Culmor Empire, now, we were having to relearn a lot of the sensor readings for enemy ships. Knowing the difference between a Drakkus Empire ship and a Dalite Hegemony ship might be useful, but not as useful as knowing the difference between different ships in the Culmore Empire forces. “Heavy on missiles, salvos as many as... forty warp drive missiles at a time.”

  “Eighty,” Kyle corrected me, “but they're lower-yield fusion warheads, thirty to forty megaton range.” We were in his quarters, which were pretty similar to mine. Unadorned concrete walls, a single bunk, and a large desk for working.

  “Hock,” I muttered. Even I wasn't certain whether the swearing was over the number of missiles or the fact that I'd gotten it wrong.

  He flashed another one.

  “S-Type,” I answered automatically. “Six fusion beam turrets, single gun mount each. Three matter-antimatter cluster launchers, each on a turret.”

  “Nasty things,” Kyle nodded. “I'm not sure why they like the single turrets.”

  “They can engage more targets at once?” I suggested.

  “Maybe,” he shrugged. “But it's inefficient, you know? We put more weapons in a turret because it maximizes firepower on a target while saving on space, we can fit more guns on that way, you know?”

  “I think I remember a simple concept like that, yeah,” I snapped, a little irritated. “Look, they're aliens, who knows why they do things?”

  “But it's a design limitation, they're carrying less firepower on one of these than something like the Guard's Typhoon-class heavy cruiser. I mean, the cluster launchers are pretty freaking scary, but still...”

  “I don't know,” I told him tiredly. After our short break, we'd been flying every day we weren't drilling from our positions. Since he was a squadron commander for Dust Company, that meant he got to fly even on drill days.

  At this point, I didn't know why they didn't just graduate us and send us to units. We'd certified plenty of hours, already. They'd done away with final exams and classes. Even the standings were so skewed as to pretty much be irrelevant. I want this to be over with. Admiral Drien's silent take-over had corrupted everything I loved about the Militia. He'd turned the organization I trusted into something I couldn't trust. The worst part of it all was that he had effectively destroyed the only home I'd had left.

  “It's just something that I was thinking about,” Kyle went on. He sighed, putting his head down in hands. “My grand-dad passed away last night.”

  “What?” I asked in surprise. I'd known that his grandfather had been sick. He'd gotten a bad dose of the life extension drugs, which had shown up later on in his life. “Hock. I'm so sorry, Kyle. Are you going to go to his funeral?”

  “I don't know if they're going to let me go,” he told me, not raising his head. “I put in for it, but you would have thought I'd asked for some big favor. Commander Leath said that a responsible officer does his duty no matter the circumstances.”

  “Your duty?” I found myself rising. “Those hocking jerks. You just lost family, a man who died because the Militia gave him bad meds over fifty years ago.”

  “I know,” Kyle sounded tired. “My dad...” he trailed off. “My dad said he'd really like me to come home. I think he's worried about some of what's going on.”

  I could understand that. Kyle's dad was in the Militia too, he was a destroyer captain, if I remembered right. He had to be seeing all of what was happening. At this point, everyone was. But no one knew what to do. Admiral Drien had basically used the threat of the culmor to push through more changes. From what I'd heard, the Enforcers had begun making arrests. No one knew anyone who'd been arrested, but rumors were flying that their assets were being seized, too. Merchant ships, millions of dollars, all kinds of things. I didn't know what Admiral Drien planned to do with it, but I doubted I'd like it.

  “We'll make sure you get home for it,” I told my fiance. “I'm sure they'll let you go. They have to.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Kyle said softly. I saw his shoulders shudder a bit and I moved over and rested my hands on his back.

  “It's going to be okay,” I told him.

  “I know,” he muttered. “It's just... I wanted him to be at the wedding, you know? Maybe to hold his great-grandchild...”

  I felt tears well up. “I know. And for what it's worth, I understand.”

  He stood up quickly and caught me in a hug. “I'm worried, Jiden. I've never been afraid like this before, but I'm really worried. Even if we get this business here on Century fixed,” even upset, he didn't mention Admiral Drien directly, “then what do we do about the culmor? About the Drakkus Empire? What if the Guard decide to move in like they did at Harmony or Ten Sisters? I mean, there's rumors that the Dalite Hegemony is building up. We're just one little world.”

  “We'll take them all on,” I told him, squeezing him tight.

  “I know we will,” he pushed me back. “I'm not worried about standing against them, not if I'm standing next to you...” he swallowed, “I'm worried that sooner or later, I'll be standing alone.”

  “I'm not going anywhere,” I pulled him down in a kiss. “Neither are you.” I elbowed him in the ribs, “You're not getting out of marrying me that easy.”

  He stumbled back, rubbing at his ribs, “I see that my plan has been figured out.” He rolled his eyes, “You talk to Ashiri about being your Maid of Honor?”

  “She's good with it,” I told him. “You pick out a Best Man, yet?”

  “Yeah, Karmazin, only problem is, it's kind of hard to ask him, you know?” He snarled the words.

  I glowered at him, but he didn't change expression and I couldn't fault him for it. We still didn't know if Alexander Karmazin was even still alive. He'd been arrested months ago. There'd been no trial. There'd been no real word of official charges.

  He could be dead. I considered that. It didn't feel right, though. I wasn't sure why, but I felt that Karmazin was still alive.

  “Now that I have you distracted,” Kyl
e flashed another sensor readout over to my implant.

  “G-Type Drive Ship,” I answered. “Relatively minimal armament, but what it carries is modular. Potentially warp drive missile launchers or their B-Type fighters.”

  “Nice,” he told me. “Honeymoon?”

  “What?” I stared at him.

  “Where do you want to go on honeymoon, after the wedding?”

  I blinked at him. “I don't know. Someplace nice?” Neither of us mentioned that we probably would be looking for work at that point. Commander Leath had dropped a couple of none-too-subtle hints about that in my classes with him. I didn't need to be a genius to understand that Admiral Drien was not going to offer me a commission. My grandmother might fight that, but she was stuck in place with the Centurions. Maybe that's for the best, maybe she would suffer an accident if she came back.

  “My dad recommended a trip on a luxury transport. He offered to pay for tickets.” Kyle's voice was neutral.

  “Transport?” I asked.

  Kyle nodded, not meeting my eyes. “You know, one of the ones with complementary food and stuff? There's one that does a trip from here to Expo.”

  “And back?” I asked.

  “Sure, we could ride it back here,” he looked down at the desk. I caught his meaning though. His dad was offering us a way off-world. We'd have to find work at Expo, but we'd be safe. Safer than here, at least. What are we going to do when we get there? We had no money, no real job experience besides the Planetary Militia.

  “Maybe,” I said. “let's see how we feel closer to graduation, huh?”

  “Sure,” he said, but he didn't sound all that excited about it. I couldn't blame him. This was a conversation neither of us would have imagined we'd have. But then again, up until a few months ago, we never would have believed that we'd be willing to leave our homeworld behind.

  Kyle closed his eyes. “I love you, Jiden Armstrong.”

  “Love you too, Kyle Regan,” I told him.

  He opened his eyes, “You know, I got a question. When we have kids, are they going to have my last name... or yours?”