Chapter 2096: The Space Hub

Varga looked at the result for a moment, then at Ning as he climbed out of the pod.

"Good," she said.

That was all, but Ning noticed she wrote something down on her tablet as he passed.

A few weeks later, he was sent back to the facility a third time.

This session was harder than either of the previous two. The simulation placed him in a space battle around an orbital station, where the Mekharans had disguised themselves as damaged human vessels drifting among the station’s docking arms.

His sensors were almost useless against them.

The disguises were perfect, their signals indistinguishable from those of the real vessels around them, and several allied units fell in the opening minutes before anyone realized what was happening.

Ning watched the drifting ships for a while before he noticed something.

The real damaged vessels drifted exactly as their damage dictated, spinning slowly and tumbling in the directions their broken engines and torn hulls would have pushed them.

The disguised Mekharans drifted almost perfectly, but not quite. Every so often, one of them made a tiny correction to its course, a small adjustment that no truly damaged vessel would ever have been able to make, to keep itself in position near the station.

Once he noticed it, he could not stop seeing it.

He began destroying the disguised vessels one by one, each with a single, carefully placed shot. When his allies questioned the order to fire on what appeared to be friendly ships, he sent them the correction data directly through the allied channel, timing the message carefully to account for the delay.

Within minutes, the remaining allied units had learned to spot the disguised Mekharans as well.

His score at the end of the session was even higher than before.

<389 Points>

This time, when Ning climbed out of the pod, Instructor Varga came down from the observation gallery to meet him on the floor of the chamber.

She stood in front of him for a moment, looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before. It was thoughtful, and perhaps slightly curious, as though she were trying to work out a problem that did not quite make sense.

"Three sessions," she said. "Three scores in the high three hundreds. In three different scenarios, each of them harder than the last."

Ning waited.

"I’ve been overseeing this facility for eleven years," Varga said. "I’ve watched active pilots with a decade of combat experience walk out of those pods with scores lower than yours. I’ve watched cadets who went on to become some of the best pilots in this system struggle to reach three hundred even once."

She paused.

"I’ve passed your name up the chain."

Ning raised an eyebrow slightly. "Up the chain?"

"To the people who decide which cadets are ready for real machines," Varga said. "And which of them are ready to start training alongside the pilots who fly them. I don’t know how quickly they’ll act on it. They’re cautious people, and you’re very young. But they’ll be looking at you now."

She held his gaze a moment longer, then turned and walked back toward the observation gallery without another word.

Ning stood on the floor of the chamber for a moment after she had gone.

He understood what she had meant. Most cadets spent years at the academy before anyone considered them ready for a real Mecha, and many of them never reached that point at all.

The path from the academy’s simulators to the cockpit of an actual machine was long, slow, and carefully controlled, and most cadets walked it one small step at a time.

Ning was moving along it far more quickly than anyone normally would.

He was well on the way to becoming a real Mecha pilot, faster than any cadet before him, and he found that he was looking forward to it.

Three months into the new year, the orders arrived.

They came through Ning’s helmet early one morning, before his first lesson, in a brief and formal message bearing the seal of the military command on Truimal.

He was to report to the military space hub orbiting above the planet in four days’ time, where he would begin training alongside active pilots for the remainder of the year.

He read the message twice, then went to find Lorna.

She already knew. She had been informed the night before, along with Greeves, and when Ning found her in her office, she looked up from her desk with the same openly pleased expression she had worn after his first True Simulation.

"Varga’s recommendation went further than I expected," she said. "And faster. I’ve never seen a second-year cadet sent up to the hub before. Most cadets who get there do so in their final year, if they get there at all."

She leaned back in her chair.

"Don’t expect a warm welcome. The pilots up there are fighting a war. Most of them will see you as a distraction. Prove them wrong."

Ning told Naysha and Jason that evening over dinner.

Jason stared at him for a long moment, then broke into a wide grin and congratulated him so enthusiastically that several cadets at the nearby tables turned to look. Naysha said very little. She simply looked at him with a thoughtful expression for a while, and then she nodded.

"I’ll be up there soon," she said quietly. "Don’t get too comfortable."

Ning smiled. "I’ll be waiting."

Four days later, he boarded a military shuttle at the edge of the city and rose slowly into the sky.

The space hub was enormous.

It hung in a high orbit above Truimal, a vast, sprawling structure of interlocking rings and docking arms built around a massive central spire.

Warships were berthed along its outer edges, transport vessels moved in and out of its docking bays in a steady stream, and Ning could see the faint glow of Mecha engines flickering around its lower levels as pilots moved between hangars.

It was easily the largest military installation he had seen in the system.