Chapter 2097: First Flight

When the shuttle docked, Ning was met at the airlock by a young officer with a tablet, who checked his identification and led him through a long series of corridors toward the pilot section of the hub.

The pilots were waiting for him in a large briefing room near the hangars.

There were around twenty of them, sitting and standing around the room in loose groups, wearing flight suits and the worn, practical expressions of people who had spent years doing a difficult and dangerous job.

When Ning entered behind the officer, the conversations in the room died away, and twenty pairs of eyes turned toward him.

The skepticism in the room was immediate.

Ning could see it on almost every face. Some of the pilots looked amused, exchanging glances and smirks as they took in his age and the cadet insignia on his uniform.

Others looked openly irritated, their arms folded and their expressions sour, as though they had been told to spend their time on something they considered entirely beneath them.

"So this is the cadet," one of the pilots said, a tall woman leaning against the wall near the back of the room. "Second year, they said. He looks like he should still be in the first."

A few of the pilots laughed.

"I heard he scored nearly four hundred in the True Simulation," another said.

"Simulations are simulations," someone else muttered. "Let’s see him do it in a real machine."

"I didn’t sign up to babysit," a broad-shouldered pilot near the front said, not bothering to lower his voice. "We’ve got a war on. We don’t have time to hold a cadet’s hand."

Before anyone else could add to it, a voice cut through the room.

"Enough."

The pilots fell silent.

A man pushed himself away from the wall near the front of the room and walked toward Ning.

He was older than most of the others, perhaps in his late forties, with a lean, weathered face, close-cropped gray hair, and a long, pale scar running from the corner of his left eye down to his jaw.

He moved with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who had nothing left to prove to anyone.

He stopped in front of Ning and looked him up and down for a long moment.

"Captain Dorn," he said. "You’ll be training under me."

Ning saluted. "Yes, sir."

Dorn did not return the salute. He simply continued looking at Ning, his eyes narrowed slightly, as though he were trying to find something wrong with him.

"I’ll be honest with you, cadet," he said. "I didn’t ask for you. I don’t want you. I’ve been flying for twenty-six years, and I’ve lost more friends to this war than I can count. I don’t have the time or the patience to train children who think a good score in a simulator makes them pilots."

He leaned slightly closer.

"But command says you’re here, so you’re here. You’ll do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, and you’ll do it right the first time. If you can’t keep up, you’ll be on the next shuttle back down to your academy, and I won’t lose a moment of sleep over it. Understood?"

"Understood, sir."

Dorn straightened. "Good. Hangar four. Twenty minutes. Don’t be late."

Ning was not late.

Hangar four was a vast, echoing space near the lower levels of the hub, its floor lined with maintenance cradles holding Mechas of various sizes.

Technicians moved between them, running diagnostic checks and making adjustments, and the air was filled with the sounds of tools and the low hum of engines being tested.

Dorn was waiting beside a Rank 1 Mecha at the end of the row.

Ning looked up at the machine as he approached.

He had seen Rank 1 Mechas many times now, in simulations and in the academy’s hangars, and he had sat in their cockpits during training.

But this one was different. It was a real, active machine, its armor scarred from use and its systems fully armed and fueled, ready to be flown out into open space.

"You’ve flown these in simulators," Dorn said. "This isn’t a simulator. Get in."

Ning climbed into the cockpit.

The moment he settled into the seat and connected his helmet to the port behind him, he felt the difference.

It was subtle, in some ways. The cockpit looked almost exactly like those in the simulators, with the same controls in the same places and the same displays glowing with the same information.

But it did not feel the same. The seat beneath him vibrated faintly with the hum of the Mecha’s reactor, a deep, steady pulse he could feel in his chest.

When he moved the controls, the machine responded with a weight and a resistance that the simulators had only ever imitated, a sense of real mass and real momentum behind every movement.

When the hangar doors opened and Dorn’s voice came through the channel ordering him out, Ning guided the Mecha forward and launched it into open space.

He felt the acceleration in his body, not the artificial jolting of a motion system, but the real, steady pressure of a machine pushing against the vacuum.

Truimal hung beneath him, vast and gray-orange, and the hub stretched out behind him, glittering with lights. The Mecha moved where he told it to, its engines responding instantly, and the stars wheeled slowly around him as he turned.

Ning found that he enjoyed it.

It was a strange thing to realize. He had crossed galaxies, watched stars be born, and traveled through spaces that few beings in this universe would ever see. And yet, sitting in the cockpit of a small, scarred machine in orbit above an ordinary planet, feeling it respond to every movement of his hands, he felt something close to genuine delight.

"Stop sightseeing, cadet," Dorn’s voice snapped through the channel. "You’ll have plenty of time to do so when you’re free. Now, formation drills. Follow my lead."

Ning followed.