Chapter 2102: Second Year Exam

They went to dinner together, and the table that had once been called the losers’ table was crowded now, filled with Jason’s friends from the Technology wing and several cadets from the piloting classes, all of whom greeted Ning with interest when he sat down.

Naysha arrived halfway through the meal.

She stopped beside the table when she saw him, and for a moment, she simply looked at him.

She had changed too. She was sharper, more focused, and more self-assured in a way that went deeper than the calm composure she had always worn. She carried herself like someone who knew exactly what she was capable of and had no need to prove it to anyone.

Her red hair was still cut short to fit beneath her helmet, but her face looked older than Ning remembered, as though the year had taken something soft from it and replaced it with something harder.

Everyone was a year older now. But Naysha looked as though she had grown far more than a single year.

She sat down across from him.

"You’re back," she said.

"I’m back," Ning agreed. "I heard you’ve been busy."

Naysha gave him a long, measuring look, as though wondering exactly how much he had heard. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small tablet, which she slid across the table toward him.

Ning looked down at it.

It was a set of orders, bearing the same seal as the ones that had sent him to the hub a year earlier.

"I’ve been ordered to the hub," Naysha said quietly. "I leave in two weeks."

Ning looked up at her and smiled. "Congratulations."

But Naysha did not smile back.

"That’s not all," she said. She reached across the table and tapped the bottom of the tablet, scrolling past the formal language of the orders to a short line of text at the very end.

Ning read it.

<Pilot candidates reporting to the orbital hub will be assigned to active defensive patrols upon arrival, effective immediately. All training rotations are suspended until further notice.>

Ning read it twice, then looked up at Naysha.

"Active patrols," he said.

"They’re not sending us up there to train anymore," Naysha said. "They’re sending us up there to fight."

* * * * * *

The second-year final exam began a week after Ning returned from the hub, and it quickly became clear to every cadet in the academy that it was a very different thing from the exam they had taken the year before.

The first-year exam had been demanding, but it had been built for cadets who were still learning the basics. The second-year exam was built for cadets who were expected to become soldiers. It stretched across six days instead of four, and every part of it was harder, longer, and judged far more strictly than anything they had faced before.

The first day was given over to written tests, as it had been the year before. But where the first-year tests had asked cadets to recall what they had been taught, the second-year tests asked them to apply it.

They were given battlefield reports and asked to identify what had gone wrong, engineering faults and asked to trace them to their source, and communication logs full of disguised Mekharan traffic and asked to find the enemy hidden among the allies.

By the end of the day, the lecture hall was filled with cadets rubbing their eyes and staring at nothing.

The second day took the piloting cadets to the True Simulation facility.

Every cadet in the Piloting field was required to complete a full assessment in the pods, and for many of them, it was only the second or third time they had ever set foot inside one. Instructor Varga oversaw the sessions personally.

When Ning walked into the waiting hall with the rest of his class, she glanced up from her tablet, saw him, and nodded once without a word.

Ning drew a battle in the atmosphere of a gas giant, fighting among floating refinery platforms suspended above an endless sea of storm clouds.

He held back as he always did, but less than he once had. He had spent a year flying alongside active pilots, and if he produced a score like the ones he had given the academy during his first year, the instructors would wonder what had gone wrong at the hub.

So he flew well.

He anticipated the shifting objectives, identified the disguised enemies hidden among the refinery drones, and coordinated the allied units around him with the same quiet efficiency he had shown in the blizzard more than a year earlier.

When the simulation ended, his score sat comfortably in the low four hundreds, and nobody in the observation gallery seemed surprised in the slightest.

Naysha went later that afternoon.

She drew a battle among the moons of a ringed planet. Ning watched from the gallery as she moved through it with a precision that drew murmurs from the other cadets around him. She had been practicing the True Simulation every night for more than a year, and it showed in every decision she made. Her score was only a little lower than his, in the upper three hundreds, and Varga wrote something down on her tablet when Naysha climbed out of the pod.

The third day was the live-machine evaluation.

For the first time in any of their exams, the cadets would be tested in real Mechas rather than simulations. The academy had arranged for a small fleet of Rank 2 machines to be brought to the outer training grounds beyond the city, and each piloting cadet was given a series of tasks to complete under the eyes of evaluators from the military.

They had to maneuver through obstacle courses, fire at moving targets, and recover safely from a simulated system failure in mid-movement.

For most of the cadets, it was the first time they had ever piloted a real machine outside of supervised training sessions, and Ning could see the nerves on many of their faces as they climbed into the cockpits.

For Ning, it was almost relaxing. After a year of flying Rank 3 machines alongside Dorn and the others, a Rank 2 in the open air of Truimal felt light and responsive.

He completed his tasks cleanly and quickly, with none of the small mistakes he had once made on purpose. The evaluator watching him, a stern woman who had not smiled at a single cadet all morning, wrote a long note on her tablet when he finished and nodded to him as he climbed down from the cockpit.

The fourth day was the tactics exam.

It took place in a large simulation room in the academy’s tactics wing, where each cadet in the Battlefield Tactics field was given command of a simulated squad and placed in a series of battle scenarios. They were not piloting machines themselves. They were commanding others, issuing orders, positioning units, managing supply lines, and responding to changing conditions as the battles unfolded around them.

Ning found it the most enjoyable part of the entire exam.

He commanded his squads the way he had commanded the allied units in the blizzard, anticipating the enemy’s moves, positioning his units where the next threat would appear before it appeared, and using the terrain and the enemy’s own expectations against them.

In one scenario, he deliberately revealed his squad’s position to draw the enemy into a trap, a tactic he had borrowed from the lesson Lorna had taught on his very first day at the academy, when she had explained how a commander had once won a battle by telling the enemy exactly what he planned to do.

His instructor watched the scenario unfold in silence. When it ended, she asked him where he had learned it.

"First-year history," Ning said. "Instructor Stellis taught it."

The instructor looked at him for a long moment, then wrote something down.

The fifth and sixth days were the engineering portions, which were longer and more complex than the year before. Each cadet was given a damaged system from a real Mecha and asked to diagnose and repair it within a strict time limit.

Jason finished his before anyone else in the Technology wing had even finished their diagnosis. When the evaluators came to inspect it, they found that he had not only repaired the fault but identified two others that the exam’s designers had not known existed.

And then it was over.