Tales from the Academy

Chapter 33

"Stand by to click-on. Low impact! Don't let them hear us!"

Anny Payne was falling, falling through vacuum toward the hull of a hostile vessel. The utter blackness of space was all around her, the usual dusting of stars washed out by the brilliant white of the ship that filled almost half the sky. Seven other troopers fell with her.

"Ten meters… five…. thrusters… now!" The small thrusters built into Anny's space armor hissed briefly and nulled out almost all of her velocity. As gently as a falling feather the padded soles of her boots touched the hull plates and clung. The others, all heavily laden with equipment, landed in a circle around her.

"Jer, Kal, Alby, get the bubble set up. Patric, Len, unpack the cutter. Denis, you and Wil keep an eye open for hostiles." The others were already doing what she wanted before she'd even spoken. They had learned the drill well. She watched them working and kept a special eye on the three members of the team not from C Company. The senior year was bringing a lot of changes. Now that they'd picked their specific career tracks they were no longer working exclusively with their own companies anymore. The sixty-five members of C Company were now on over thirty different tracks. It was the same with all the other companies and those on the same track were being grouped together in new teams. It was a little strange at first, but they were getting used to it. At least the boys from the other companies didn't seem to have any problems working with her.

"Team Two, report your status." The message crackled over her com speaker. It was the mission commander. She opened the circuit and replied:

"Team Two, we have successfully landed. Preparing to make our breach. No sign that we've been spotted. Over."

"Hurry it up. Team One's almost ready to move."

"Acknowledged." She looked and saw that Jer's team was just finishing up. They had unfolded a large plastic bubble, well, a half-bubble actually, and fastened it to the ship's hull with a self-sealing strip along the edges. A tiny burst of gas from a cylinder was enough to inflate it in the vacuum and it expanded into a blister large enough for their entire team. They moved inside through a flexible airlock, sealed it, and then fully pressurized the bubble. Patric and his partner had already assembled their cutting device and once inside fastened it to the hull of the ship.

Their objective was to get inside the ship and seize control of it and rescue some hostages. The simulation didn't bother with details of where they were or why the situation had occurred. It was strictly a tactical exercise. So, they had to get aboard. And they couldn't just blast a hole in the hull with their weapons. Not only would that have alerted the enemy (whoever they were) to their presence, but it would have depressurized whatever section of the ship they did it to. Hatches and emergency bulkheads would have automatically slammed shut and then they'd be forced to cut their way through each and every door or bulkhead as they reached it. Slow, dangerous, and probably fatal to the hostages.

Hence the bubble. When they cut through the hull, the thin, but extremely tough material would keep the air from escaping and—hopefully—allow Anny and her team to move quickly through the ship before the enemy was aware. A second team was going to do the same thing on the other side of the ship.

"Okay, we're ready to go," announced Patric, straightening up from the cutter, which was a rectangular framework about a meter on each side. It mounted a powerful laser which should slice through the ship's hull like the proverbial hot knife through bug-butter. Anny slapped Patric's armored shoulder and opened the circuit to the commander.

"Team Two, ready."

"Good work. Okay, we move in ten seconds. Stand-by… " Anny signaled Patric, who held the cutter control. "Stand-by… Now!" Anny's hand flashed down and Patric hit the switch. A dazzling glare appeared around the edges of the cutter that rapidly moved along the path of the framework. Clouds of vaporized metal wafted up and condensed on the inside surface of the bubble.

It took less than thirty seconds to complete the cut. When the laser went out Patric and Kal Dravich grabbed the frame and pulled. A neat section of the hull slid out with the frame. As soon as there was room to get by, Anny slipped through the hole. "Follow me!"

Once through the hole she fell about a half-meter to the deck as the ship's artificial gravity field took hold of her. But she scrambled up, weapon ready, and looked around. She seemed to be in some sort of storage room. Large crates and boxes were all around, including several that had burst and scattered their contents when the cutting laser had inadvertently sliced through them. There looked to be a hatch on the far bulkhead and Anny went over to it. The rest of her squad assembled behind her. She called up the deck plan of the ship on her Heads-Up-Display. It was only an approximation, based on the type of ship, but it was all she had until their sensors went active. She'd memorized it before the mission started, but she took one last look. "Everyone ready?"

"Let's do it," said Jer. All the others signaled they were ready.

"Okay, let's go!" She opened the hatch.

[Scene Break]

"Hoo-eey!" said Patric two hours later as they emerged from Vorwood Hall. "That was murder!"

"The mission, or Captain Vorgood's evaluation of how we handled it?" asked Alby. "Frankly, I'll take enemy plasma fire over Vorgood's tongue!"

"Even if the plasma fire cuts you in half?" asked Jer.

"Over quicker and didn't hurt near as much," quipped Alby.

Anny grimaced. The simulation hadn't gone very well and Captain Vorgood's critique had been particularly cutting. Oh, they took the ship, but half their troopers had been killed or wounded and nearly all the hostages had perished. Alby had had a fatal encounter with an enemy plasma arc that had gotten past his space armor's defenses and four others in her squad had been badly wounded. She wished the simulator wasn't so damn detailed in what it showed, but she supposed that it was probably desensitizing them to the horrors of actual combat. But it was still like a punch in the gut to see one of her friends 'dead'. She hoped she never came to accept something like that as routine.

"We've got to move faster," she said aloud. "The first part, getting aboard, went perfectly, because we were doing it all by the numbers and we could take our time. But once it hit the fan, we spent too much time making decisions."

"Didn't we just spend half an hour hearing the same thing from Captain Vorgood?" asked Alby. The others snorted.

"All right, all right," said Anny. "But he was right and we have to do better."

"We will," said Jer. "We're still new at this."

"Less than a month until the training cruise," grumbled Anny. "We don't want to look like idiots once we start doing this for real."

"Wonder what ships we'll get?" said Patric. "I don't suppose there's any chance we'll all be kept together."

"Are you kidding?" said Jer. "They'll put us on four different ships heading in four different directions. That's the way the military works, you know that."

"Yeah, probably."

"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that," said Alby. They looked at him and he wore a familiar grin.

"Now what have you done?" asked Anny, rolling her eyes. "Hacked into the Ops computer system and modified our orders?"

"Well, I thought about that, but in the end I decided to use an older and well-proven technique that almost always works: the Vor 'old-boy' network."

"What do you mean?"

"I asked my father for a favor." Alby was grinning.

"What?"

"Hey, what's the point of being Vor if I can't use it to abuse the system? I asked my father to pull some strings and even though he's retired, he still has plenty of strings to pull, believe you me! He made a few comconsole calls and he's assured me that we'll all be assigned to the same ship for our training cruise."

"Oh man, that's great!" exclaimed Patric. Jer was smiling and she found herself doing so, too. "He probably wanted Anny and Jer close by to pull your fat out of the fire again if necessary," added Patric

Alby snorted. "You're closer to the mark than you know. We Vor are a superstitious lot, y'know. I think Father considers Anny a good luck charm for me now. Keeping me out of trouble and all."

"If I'm supposed to keep you out of trouble then I'm the one who needs a good luck charm!" exclaimed Anny and they all laughed.

There was a brisk breeze blowing across the parade ground. Autumn was coming and the weather had turned colder. The second-year battalion was out drilling and Anny and the others were forced to detour around the field instead of cutting across it like they usually did. She watched them with a critical and slightly envious eye. The seniors didn't drill nearly as much as the underclassmen and she sort of missed that. She wondered if the assault regiments did much close order drill. She mentally slapped herself; she still had another eight months before graduation and she was already getting nostalgic about this place!

They reached the barracks and Anny trotted up the main set of stairs with the others rather than taking the special stairs they had built for when the Second Six lived here. She went into the company office, planning to do a little paperwork before dinner call. She twitched in surprise when she caught sight of a tall stack of envelopes sitting in the middle of the desk. What…?

She picked up the top envelope and her eyes grew wide when she saw that it was addressed to her in a very formal and flowing script. The envelope itself was a heavy blue parchment and it was closed on the back with a wax seal bearing the arms of the Academy. Oh good grief! She suddenly realized what this was and a chill went down her spine. She cracked the seal and drew out the paper inside and confirmed her suspicion. Great. Just great.

Sighing, she picked up the stack of remaining envelopes and carried them out to where Jer was sitting on his bunk. He looked up as she approached. "Here, First Sergeant," she said. "Hand these out."

"What are… Oh! The Senior Class Fall Formal?"

"Yup."

"Did… did you get one of these?" Jer's eyes were gleaming and he was trying hard not to smile.

"Oh yeah." Anny was not smiling.

"What are you going to do?"

"What choice do I have? It's not an optional formation."

"Well, you could ask Patric to break your leg."

"Don't tempt me."

"Come on, Anny, it will be fun." He paused and his smile faded. "You uh… you didn't get any special instructions with your invitation, did you?"

"Do you mean was I ordered to wear a dress instead of my uniform? No. Not yet, anyway. There's still three weeks for someone to think of that, though."

"Stop worrying."

"How can I stop…" The pinging of her wristcom interrupted her. She saw that it was Abigail Vorburn. "Yes?"

"Uh, sir, could you come by the barracks when you get the chance?" said Vorburn. "We've got a… situation."

"What's wrong?"

"Uh, nothing, really. It's just a situation."

"All right, I'll be right over." She grimaced and looked at Jer. He just raised an eyebrow.

"Duty calls?" he asked.

"Duty never stops calling," she sighed. "See you at dinner."

She grabbed her cap and headed back down the stairs, growing more grumpy with each step. The Fall Formal! That's all that I need! She'd known it was coming. It was an Academy tradition that stretched back almost as long as there had been an academy. Each fall there was a formal dance for the seniors. Young eligible women from all the prominent Vor families were rounded up to provide partners. For generations it had been seen as a match-making exercise as much as anything. A good many marriages that followed graduation were set in motion by the Fall Formal. In recent years daughters from some of the more respectable non-Vor families had started to be invited due to a shortage of unmarried Vor women. A lot fewer marriages were resulting, too, but the tradition went on. Somehow Anny had been hoping that she might be excused, but, the invitation—the command to attend—was sitting on her desk and there was no escaping it.

And it wasn't like she could just blend into the background. It was set up so that they had to participate. So what the hell was she going to do when they paired off the couples for the Grand March? Which side of the room was she supposed to line up on? I am NOT going to wear a dress and line up with the girls! What if she was ordered to? What if she wasn't ordered to and she ended up paired with a girl? She could just imagine the rumors that would start! Bloody hell…

She stomped right past the sentry at the gate to the Women's Barracks, wondering what Abbie wanted her for. Things had been going fairly smoothly since she'd had her little session with Woitek and Vorkolgan. What had happened now? She went up the stairs to the third floor, only slightly reassured by the lack of shouts or screams or rivers of blood pouring down the steps.

She went through the door and all of the girls turned to face her. She opened her mouth to ask what was going on, but stopped, her eyes growing wide.

"You have got to be kidding me!"

Each one of the girls was holding a blue envelope.