You recite the number. It’s not large. They didn’t say much about your assignment here. “Advanced training” covers a lot of ground. But you couldn’t escape the rumors; no one could.
The war has been going on for the last two decades. You know the names of the worlds the enemy claims they “liberated” from your realm’s oppressive rule, the military bases demolished by enemy swarms. And those were only the first to fall to the Taurag Republic. They won’t be the last.
This realm is a vast one: worlds upon worlds you’ve never heard of. Some have more strategic value than others. The Taurags care a great deal about what they call honor. They make a point of sparing civilian targets. But your people are still losing.
You tip your chin up and await details.
“We’ve learned of a new weapon,” the instructor says. “Preliminary analysis indicates that it can reach kill counts in excess of anything ever seen before. We’re looking for people with the flexibility of thought to handle the weapon’s capabilities.”
He taps something next to the map. Red markers flare up. You recognize their import: attacks on Shuos space, except there are more than you had known about.
“Yes,” the instructor says quietly. “The Taurags hurt us worse than we’ve led people to believe. Worse than the Taurags themselves know. I doubt they’ll be fooled for long. We have time to prepare for their next thrust, but not a lot of time.”
You indicate that you understand.
“The training begins now,” he says. “We’ll start with a straightforward game.” He smiles a tilted smile at you, knife-sweet.
Your heart is thudding painfully. The Kel, who knew him primarily as a soldier, might remember only his remarkable battle record. The Shuos know that beyond formations and guns, his inescapable kill count, he is also a master of games.
The instructor’s fingers flicker again. A new map, this one of a space station. It unfurls simultaneously in your mind through your augment, tapping your visual and kinesthetic senses. You orient yourself, then walk the unnamed station’s skin, probe it for vulnerabilities.
“The scenario,” he says. “This station has been targeted by Taurag sympathizers. Its population is ninety thousand people.”
Ninety thousand people. A pittance, from the viewpoint of an interstellar polity, yet each of those ninety thousand names is a shout in the darkness. The augment informs you that the station is instrumental to research of an unspecified nature. Impossible to avoid speculation: presumably the government is developing countermeasures, presumably it wants to protect its next superweapon.
The station has its own security, but the researchers can’t function if it locks down. They may be close to a key breakthrough. And there’s the old paradox: you can’t defend everything everywhere for an indefinite length of time without an infinite budget. Even then someone will devise some unexpected angle of attack.
“You’ve been dispatched to handle the threat,” the instructor continues. “Assume for the exercise’s sake that you’re loyal.” He grins at you, unfunny as the joke is. “You have no such assurance about everyone else. Trust them or not, your call. You’ll have access to Shuos infantry gear.”
You’re surprised by his use of the euphemism. It’s not like he needs to worry about offending your sensibilities. The augment provides the list of available gear. The system asks you what you want to requisition, and you put in your requests.
“Any questions?”
This is a test in itself. “If the station falls,” you say, “how many will die? Beyond the ninety thousand?”
He raises an eyebrow. “The kill count is up to you, fledge. Go left out the door and follow the servitor. It’ll take you to the game room.”
THERE USED TO be a saying, which originated with the Kel, that no game could ever replicate the fear of death that accompanies real combat. It was a dig at the Shuos obsession with training games. After all, how could a simulation with numbers in a computer, with gameboards and tokens, prepare you for the possibility that you’d have to sacrifice your life? The Kel and the Shuos often work together, especially during warfare, but that doesn’t mean they always get along.
Then Shuos Mikodez, head of the Shuos, assassinated two of his own cadets for reasons never divulged. Mikodez was the youngest Shuos to attain the head position in centuries. The people who doubted that he was ruthless enough to hold on to the seat suddenly became a minority. And over the next decades the Shuos prospered under Mikodez’s guidance.
The saying withered after that, not least among the Shuos themselves.
YOU FOLLOW THE instructor’s directions exactly. Not to say that it’s always optimal, but your instincts tell you that this is not one of the exercises where they want you to play hooky. Once you’re outside, a spiderform servitor, all skittering angles and lens-eyes, escorts you through the corridors.
Your first stop is to pick up your equipment. The weapons aren’t real, though the masks, armor, and medical supplies are. The former are marked with the horrific ninefox red that indicates that they’re simulation gear. The worst thing you could do to someone with the fake scorch pistol is break their nose with it. (Well. Not the worst thing. The worst polite thing.)
Next the servitor leads you to an unmarked lift, although it doesn’t follow you in. From here you’re on your own. The lift’s interior is decorated in sea-green rather than the florid Shuos colors. There’s a juddering sensation as it takes you through the Fortress’s levels, and then the doors whisk open.
The simulator is more advanced than the ones you’re accustomed to. You enter the designated sim chamber and hook yourself up to the monitors, heart pounding. You’ve never enjoyed the next part, where the augment overrides real sensory stimuli in favor of programmed ones. It’s a pity that you’re weighed down with the gear, but you’re expected to take your equipment seriously, and it comes with additional sensors to record everything.
Your senses jitter as the scenario calibrates itself to you; your old roommate described it as the sensation of your eyeballs turning inside-out in a dark room. Then a garden replaces the simulator’s interior. Under other circumstances you’d appreciate the forsythia and the red-and-gold carp swirling lazily in a pond.
You spot eight people around you straight off—no, make that nine. The scenario dumped you into a vine-covered nook near an engineer complaining about a fungal infection to two people who look like they’re trying to think of excuses to be elsewhere. You have also been provided with an absurd tall glass of something lavender-orange topped with iridescent foam. You hope it’s not based on anything real.
You need information, and it’d be nice to get access to the station grid. You have credentials appropriate to a low-level technician, which is what you’re pretending to be. You’re no grid-diver, but the point isn’t outsmarting the computers, it’s outsmarting the people the computers serve.
For the first hour—simulated time; you’re painfully aware that your internal clock has been screwed with—you circulate around the garden to get a sense for what’s going on. Not a bad insertion: stressed people gravitate toward gardens. You eavesdrop and learn that scoutmoth patrols have glimpsed ambiguous signals from the direction of the Taurag border. People are skittish.
It’s here that the game changes.
The augment has an alert for you: Target active. Scenario timer engaged. Target’s kill count: 0.