“DOWN…” the bullhorn blared. Sass dropped, as all the cadets did, knowing what was coming. Most of the spacers made it down before the MPs fired, but the hoods tried to run for it. A billowing cloud of blue gas filled the room; a thrown canister burst against the back door and felled the hoods who’d headed that way. Sass held her breath. One potato, two potato. Her hand reached automatically to her belt, and her fingernail found the slit for the release. Three potato, four potato. She flicked the membrane mask open, and covered her face with it. Five potato, six potato. Now she had the tube of detox, and smeared it over the nose and mouth portions of the mask. Seven, eight, nine, ten… a cautious breath, smelling of nutmeg from the detox, but no nausea, no pain, and no unconsciousness. Beside her, a spacer already snored heavily. She looked up, eyes protected by the mask. Already the gas had dissipated to a blue haze, still potent enough to knock out anyone without a mask, but barely obscuring vision.
The MPs spread around the room, checking IDs. Several other cadets were clambering to their feet, protected by their masks. Sass pushed herself up, looking for Abe. She wondered if he carried a Fleet emergency mask.
“ID!” It was a big MP in riot gear; Sass didn’t argue but pulled out her new Fleet ID and handed it over. He slipped it into his beltcomp, and returned it. “You start this?” he asked. “Or see it start?”
Sass shook her head. “It started over here, though. I was coming across the room - “
“Why didn’t you get out and call help?”
“My father - my guardian was over here.”
“Name?”
Sass gave Abe’s name and ID numbers; the MP waved her out to search. She veered around two fallen tables… was it this one, or that? Three limp bodies lay in an untidy pile. Sass shifted the top one; the MP helped. The next wore spacer gray, a long scrawny man with vomit drooling from the comer of his mouth. And there at the bottom lay Abe. Sass nodded at the MP, and he took a charged reviver from his belt and handed it to her; she put it over Abe’s gaping mouth. He looked so… so dead, that way, with his mouth slack. The MP had dragged away the tall spacer, and now helped her roll Abe onto his back.
They saw the neat black hole in his chest the same moment. Sass didn’t recognise it at first, reached down to brush off the smudge on the front of his jacket. He’d hate that, dirt on the new jacket he’d bought for her graduation. But the MP caught her wrist. She looked at him.
“He’s dead,” the MP said. “Someone had a needler.”
Even as the room hazed around her, she thought “Shock. That’s what’s happening.” She couldn’t think about Abe being dead… he wasn’t dead. This was another exercise, another test, like the one in the training vessel, when half the students had been made up to look like wounded victims. She remembered the realistic glisten of the fake gut wound, trailing a tangle of intestines across the deck plating. Easier to think about that, about the equally faked amputation, than that silly little black hole in Abe’s jacket.
Later she heard, through an open doorway in the station, that she’d acted normally, not drugged, drunk, or irrational. She was sitting on a gray plastic chair, across a cluttered desk from someone who was busy at a computer. The floor had a pattern of random speckles, like every floor she’d seen for the past four years. She turned her head to look out the door, and an MP with his riot headgear under his arm gave her a neutral glance. She was Fleet, she hadn’t started it, she hadn’t had hysterics when they found Abe’s body. Good enough.
It didn’t feel good enough. Her mind raced back and forth over that minute or so the fight lasted, playing back minute fragments very slowly, looking for something she couldn’t yet guess. Where had it started? Who? She had been carrying the drinks: Abe’s square, squatty bottle of Priun brandy, and the footed glass for it, and a special treat for herself: Caprian liqueur. She’d been afraid the tiny cup of silver-washed crystal - the only proper receptacle for Caprian liqueur - would bounce off the tray if someone bumped her, so she hadn’t been looking more than one body ahead when the fight started. She’d looked up when… was it a sound, or had she seen something, without really recognizing it? She couldn’t place it, and went on. She’d dropped the tray, and in her mind it fell in slow-motion, emptying its contents over the shoulders of someone in spacer gray at the table she’d been passing.
Suddenly she had something, or a hint of it. In the midst of that fight, someone to her right had blocked a kick with a move that had to come from Academy training… a move that almost had to be learned in low-grav tumbling, although you could use it in normal G. Only it hadn’t been one of the graduates, nor… her mind focussed on the anomaly… nor one of the spacers. It had been someone in purple and orange, with blue sleeves… a gang jacket. She’d tried to take a fast look, but like all the second gang, the fighter’s face had been painted in geometric patterns that made identification nearly impossible. Eyes… darkish. Skin color… from the way it took the paint, neither very light nor very dark.
“Ensign.” Sass looked up, ready to curse at the interruption until she saw the rank insignia. Not local police; Fleet. And not just any Fleet, but the Academy Vice-Commandant, Commander Derran.
“Sir.” She stood, and wished she’d had time to change uniforms. But they hadn’t run the scan over all the spots yet, and they’d told her to wait.
“I’m sorry. Ensign,” the Commander was saying, “He was a good man. Fleet to the core. And on your graduation night, too.”
“Thank you, sir.” That much was correct; she couldn’t manage much more through a tight throat.
“You’re his only listed kin,” Derran went on. “I assume you’ll want a military funeral?” Sass nodded. “Burial in the Academy grounds, or - “
She had only half-listened when he’d told her, years ago, how he wanted it. “I don’t hold with spending Fleet money to send scrap into a star,” he’d said. “Space burial’s for those who die there. They’ve earned it. But I’m no landsman, either, to be stuck under a bit of marble on a hillside; I hold by the old code. My life was with Fleet, I had no homeland. Burial at sea, if you can manage it, Sass. The Fleet does it the right way.”
“At sea,” she said now. “He wanted it that way.”
“Ashes, or -?”
“Burial, sir, he said, if it was possible.”
“Very well. The Superintendent’s told me they’ll release the body tomorrow; we’ll schedule it for - “ He pulled out his handcomp and studied the display. ‘Two days… is that satisfactory? Takes that long to get the arrangements made.”
“Yes, sir.” She felt stupid, stiff, frozen. This could not be Abe’s funeral they discussed: time had to stop, and let her sort things out. But time did not stop. The Commander spoke to the police officer behind the desk, and suddenly they were ready for her in the lab. A long-snouted machine took samples from every stain on her uniform; the technician explained about the analysis of blood and fiber and skin cells to identify those she’d fought. When she came out of the lab, she found a Lt. Commander Barrin waiting for her, with a change of clothes brought from her quarters, and the same officer escorted her back to Abe’s apartment. There, another Fleet officer had already opened the apartment, set up a file to receive and organize visits and notes that required acknowledgment. Already dozens of notes were racked for her notice, and two of her class waited to see her before leaving for their new assignments.