“Blue leader, this is Blue-Pod-Three. We’ve got three contacts moving up the E-Seven Path. Stop,” Jason said into his head-set mic, making sure to repeat the line exactly as he’d been taught. He had little doubt the instructors were listening to the team’s comms and were salivating at the possibility of punishing a recruit that deviated from protocol.

“Blue-Pod-Three. Remain in concealment. If engaged, retreat to E-Nine. Stop.” Nuiy sounded far more sure of the terminology than he did over the comms. Which he supposed was only to be expected given her past history.

“Blue-Pod-Three confirms. Stop.” Call done, Jason settled back down to waiting.

As he watched the trio of black suited figures walking down the path across from him, he found his thoughts wandering.

He could admit, that if one sort of squinted, a lot of things a recruit went through in basic could be labeled as fun. Sparring. Shooting. Swimming. Hanging out with friends. Seeing new and interesting scenery. Playing with cool and expensive equipment. From an outside perspective, any one of those tasks could be seen, individually, as fun.

The problem was, as the saying goes, that the devil was in the details.

“I think she might have seen us,” Tarcil murmured from his position, interrupting Jason’s thoughts. The pair of them were crouched in a bush, their matte black suits doing a pretty reasonable job of disguising them from unfriendly gazes.

“Are you sure?”

Unfortunately, ‘reasonable’ wasn’t quite good enough in this case, as the now all-too-familiar crackle of air ionizing lit up the night, as shots lanced invisibly through the air above both of them.

Yep, playing a game of laser-tag on steroids might have been fun in abstract. In reality it was hellish. It wasn’t so much the exercise itself, as it was the fact that Jason was tired, hungry, sore and sweaty. Which was pretty much par for the course for any activity he’d undertaken since arriving at the Crucible.

Individually, no one task was really all that hard. Even the PT sessions weren’t really that hard. No, it was the accumulation of a hundred different things piled on top of each other that really dragged a recruit down.

“Starting the timer,” Jason muttered as he shouldered his rifle, honing the sights in on the distant forms of ‘red team’ as they occasionally popped out of cover to shoot in his and Tarcil’s direction. As he did, his HUD lit up, a small countdown timer appearing in the top right of his vision, the number unerringly dropping down from three minutes.

Tarcil was already shooting back, the diminutive male’s shooting less accurate than Jason’s own, but making up for it with sheer enthusiasm and quantity. Which admittedly, was probably more useful in this situation.

“Are we attempting to eliminate them or are we retreating?” Tarcil asked.

It was a silly question, but it had to be asked. As nominal ‘pod’ leader of the pair, it was Jason’s call.

“Retreating to E-Nine,” Jason said as he let loose a spray, more intended to keep their attackers from moving up than put anyone down. “Nuiy probably wants to wait for the OS to change before going back on the offensive. Until then, we’ll probably keep retreating.”

A strategy Jason didn’t disagree with. After all, while Orbital Supremacy lay with Red Team, their attackers didn’t even have to take out Jason and Tarcil themselves. They just needed to pin them in place long enough for the hypothetical ships in orbit to get a firing solution on them.

“Got it,” Tarcil agreed, though it wasn’t hard to miss the weariness in his friend’s voice.

Not that Jason could fault him for that either. They’d run through this exercise a dozen times already today, and the novelty of playing hardcore hide and seek in the woods had already long since worn off.

“Right, we back-skip again,” Jason said, tongue no longer fumbling over the Shil’vati equivalent for the notion of leapfrogging. “You run behind those rocks over there. I’ll cover you. Then you turn back and cover me.”

It probably didn’t need to be said, but he’d been partnered with Vieyshi last round, and had promptly caught a few bolts between the shoulders when the alien had forgotten to turn around and cover him long enough for him to break cover. Instead, the twin had sprinted off into the night, apparently expecting him to be hot on her heels.

He could almost physically feel Tarcil rolling his eyes under his helmet, but the alien nodded all the same.

“Right. Three. Two. One. Go!” Jason shouted, raising up to spray down the distant outcrop where their opponents had taken cover.

Unfortunately, the opposing trio hadn’t been idle either. From both their teachings in the classroom, and their experiences from the previous rounds, the Red Team had spread out. The end result of which was that Jason couldn’t effectively pin all three of them down at the same time.

He tried to shout a warning to Tarcil even as he kept shooting, but it was too little too late. He heard more than saw his ally go down, a surprisingly feminine squeak coming from him as the alien’s suit locked up and he crumpled unceremoniously to the forest floor.

“Shit.”

Jason momentarily considered radioing Blue Leader to inform her of the situation, but quickly found his attentions entirely filled with trying to fend off the three members of Red Team who were advancing on him.

“Double shit,” he cursed as a hail of fire forced him to hug the dirt.

Hell, Nuiy had probably already worked it out anyway, given that she had a direct feed of her team’s ‘vitals.’

The next minute was filled with frantic shooting. To be honest, Jason found he was doing better than expected at keeping the members of the Red Team from advancing on him. Maybe he was better at this whole soldier thing than he thought?

He was just patting himself on the back when the end came.

There was no warning. Every joint in his suit suddenly locked up, and he felt a distinct sensation of vertigo as his statue-like form tipped into the dirt.

“What the fuck?” he grumbled.

Had someone snuck up on him? Another pod? Then he noticed the timer on his HUD was blinking, the digits within all zeroes.

Well, that made him feel like an idiot. Suddenly he didn’t feel so great about his success during the little firefight. He hadn’t been surviving because of his amazing skills. He’d been surviving because Red Team had been content to let him plink away at range, just so long as he didn’t move. They didn’t need to risk armor damage or a possible elimination by advancing, they just had to wait for the orbital strike.

Which was exactly what happened.

“How are you doing, Jason? Or is this Tarcil?” a familiar voice asked as what was evidently Adrilla - and the other two members of the Red Team pod - sauntered over.

“Jason,” he grunted. “Tarcil went down somewhere over there.” He tried to point before remembering that he was frozen. “And I’ve been better.”

The trio were walking with far too much confidence for a group that was ostensibly still in an ‘active warzone.’ Which didn’t say great things about how the rest of Blue Team was doing.

“I can imagine,” the Shil’vati said, amusement audible even through the distortion created by her helmet, accompanied by the chuckles of her fellows. “Is it just the two of you?”

Jason rolled his eyes. She definitely already knew the answer to that. There were only ten people on each team. It wasn’t hard to keep track of each pod and their numbers with a little communication. One leader and three pods of three people wasn’t exactly a lot.

Originally his and Tarcil’s pod had another member, some girl named Vrish, who Jason had never really spoken to before. Just another purple face in the mass of faces that was the dorms. The few words she’d exchanged had been shy and halting.

Not that they’d gotten much time to talk. The girl had gone down in the first few minutes of the round to an ambush. It had been while Blue Team had Orbital Superiority too, which was even more of a kick in the teeth. Vrish had certainly thought so, given the shy girls surprisingly inventive cursing when it happened.

Not that he had any obligation, or intention, of telling the trio before him any of that. Even if they probably already knew it.

Information was power after all.

“Not saying?” Adrilla asked, sitting down on a log across from him. “I can respect that. Though we’ll have to stick around and search for your third member.”

She put a finger to her ear, probably relaying her intention - or asking permission - to do just that. Permission which she apparently got given that she nodded her head a moment later. Which wasn’t good. If they were free to ‘chill’ like this, it likely meant the round was already pretty much over for Blue Team.

Which meant laps for Blue Team afterwards.

This was the tie-breaker round before the day ended, after all. The score board and ‘prize’ being a little incentive from the instructors to perform ‘as if their lives were on the line.’

As if reading Jason’s thoughts, the smugness in Adrilla’s tone redoubled as she settled down on her bark ladened perch. “So, tell me about your weekend out on the town? I heard you rocked Freyxh and Nuiy’s world?”

“Oh Empress, just kill me now,” Tarcil’s voice deadpanned from his dirt facing position a meter away. “Properly this time.”

---------------

The exercise was finally over.

“Ugh, I’ve got a crick in my ass from being stuck like that,” Tarcil said.

The entire cadre was sitting in a grassy clearing, albeit unconsciously divided by team, their helmets either in their hands or being used as impromptu seating. Both team’s weapons had already been locked away in the bus’s heavy-duty trailer again.

“Your ass?” Freyxh asked, looking over from where she’d been slowly exchanging words with Nuiy.

“He fell funny,” Adrilla chimed in from where she’d been chatting with Raisha and the other members of Red Team on the other side of the clearing. “You should have seen it.”

Tarcil promptly gave her the Shil’vati equivalent of flipping someone off, pressing two fingers to his lips in a V-shape. Adrilla just laughed at the show of aggressiveness from the usually demure male.

Jason chuckled too, patting his friend commiseratingly on the shoulder. Getting paralyzed by your suit wasn’t fun. It was actually kind of claustrophobia inducing, being completely unable to move and closed in on all sides. The sensation only got worse if you were in an uncomfortable position when it happened.

“Alright recruits, enough chatter.” An instructor called stepping forward so she could see both groups. “You all performed adequately in our exercise today. However, I will remind you that the purpose of this exercise was not to reflect a real combat scenario.”

She casually aimed a single finger into the sky above. “In reality, ownership of Orbital Superiority does not change every few minutes. At least, not outside the opening moments of an invasion. At which point, an attacking force would not have troops on the ground anyway. Nor would either fleet in orbit be in position to provide orbital strikes, as they would instead be focused on the elimination of the opposing force in space.”

She stomped the ground lightly. “In all of Shil’vati military history, every combat stratagem has essentially boiled down to the seizure and retention of the ‘high ground’. Make no mistake, space is the ultimate high ground. Anyone who controls it, controls the engagement.”

Jason could see that. Earth had been a pretty prime example of it, even before you introduced the tech disparity between Humanity and the Shil’vati, the fact that the aliens had been capable of raining death indiscriminately from orbit, with mankind having no practical way of striking back, had pretty much sealed Earth’s fate.

The fight for orbital control was the only real battle that mattered. Ground engagements were essentially an afterthought and clean up. Hell, if you didn’t have any morals or need for what was on the surface of a world, you could even forgo the ground fight entirely. Just level everything from the safety of orbit.

“The ground doctrine of her Empress’s military is simple in abstract,” the instructor continued. “A ground force that does not have orbital supremacy must go to ground, engaging in guerrilla warfare and asymmetrical combat until such time as orbital supremacy is re-established.”

She drove a fist into her palm with a meaty slap. “A ground force that does have orbital supremacy acts as the eyes and ears of the fleet. Its job is to locate enemy positions and units for destruction from orbit.”

She paced up and down in front of the crowd.

“Our entire military make up reflects this doctrine. Small, fast units capable of acting independently from each other and the greater command structure in the field. Speed, stealth, and reliability are the only considerations that matter.”

It was kind of strange to Jason, to think of the massive aliens focusing on stealthy hit-and-run strikes, when socially they were much…blunter. What he was hearing now he would attribute more to the fantasy elves than the Shil’vati’s more stereotypically ‘orcish’ nature.

Then again, he supposed that was the reality of warfare in the space age.

“Today’s exercise was an attempt to get you all accustomed to that reality. In an era where any point on a planet can be leveled with pinpoint orbital strikes in minutes, it pays to be able to rapidly engage and disengage from combat.” She looked over all of them. “Concealment is the only effective means of defense against a foe that holds an orbital advantage. Remember that.”

Jason felt his heart skip a beat as her eyes seemed to shift over him. Then they moved on and the moment was over.

“Over the next few weeks, in addition to your normal training, we will be running exercises out here in order to familiarize you with small unit tactics. Each of you will have a number of opportunities to act as pod leader, and all of you will be squad leader at least once.”

She gestured for all of them to stand up.

“Alright, everyone back on the bus. Once we get back to the Crucible, Red Team may return to the dorm. Blue Team can join me on the training field.”

The clearing lit up with the disparate sounds of celebration and dismay as the recruits filed back onto the bus in a semi-orderly fashion.

----------

Jason enjoyed the soothing sensation of the razor running over his chin, leaving behind smooth, unblemished skin. He hadn’t had time to shave that morning before they’d all been hustled out onto the PT field, and the absence of the act from his routine had been low-key bugging him all day.

As he checked his handiwork in the mirror, he found his mind returning to his decision not to inform the instructors about the attack on the weekend.

It should have been a no brainer…except it wasn’t. There was no guarantee whatsoever that anything would come of it. Hell, you heard about similar shit being covered up in the human military all the time, and nothing he’d seen about the Shil’vati military suggested it was any different. In some ways it was worse.

He also still wasn’t entirely clear on how far the Interior’s reach was. From his Data-Net readings it seemed like a curious mix of military police, regular police, the FBI, and the CIA. Which seemed like a recipe for awful abuse to him - and no one he’d spoken to about it seemed to disagree.

According to Nuiy, there’d been talk of downsizing the Interior in recent years and splitting it’s disparate duties between a few new agencies, but apparently that kind of talk seemed to occur every thirty years or so – and always seemed to go in circles.

“I’m never going to get used to that.”

Jason glanced over to where Tarcil had just finished brushing his teeth, using an object that was pretty much identical to a human toothbrush. The pajama-clad alien was staring at Jason’s razor with bemusement and a tinge of discomfort.

“It’s not that different from the hair on your head,” Jason pointed as he placed the item back into his toiletries bag.

Truth be told, he didn’t have to shave if he didn’t want to. The Shil’vati military had no regulations on facial hair because the alien’s didn’t grow it. Curiously, they did have Regs about malting and hair in the barracks – which Jason could only assume was intended for the werewolf-like Raikiri. A theory that was further reinforced by another regulation against recruits ‘scenting’ things.

“Think I should grow it out though? Might lessen some of the interest I’ve been getting?” he joked.

Tarcil cocked his head. “Why so?”

Jason found himself unconsciously mimicking the movement. “Well, it’s hair. You guys don’t have it. Anywhere other than your head that is.” He gestured to his chin. “Wouldn’t you find it a little off putting if I randomly started sprouting hair in odd places?”

Tarcil just shook his head. “I meant I’d never get used to the idea that you shave it all off your face. You don’t do that to the hair on your head. You just trim it. You don’t shave the hair under your arms or the area…around your groin either.” He shrugged. “Why just the hair on your face? It seems so…arbitrary.”

Jason deliberately ignored the way the Shil’vati was now blushing slightly blue from the mention of his pubic hair.

“It would be…odd.” He searched vaguely for an explanation, before returning to his original question. “It wouldn’t be gross to you? All that hair?”

The lithe alien shrugged. “Raikiri have lots of hair. They aren’t gross.”

“That’s…different. They’re covered in hair. We only have a bit in odd spots.” Jason gestured to his underarms for emphasis.

Tarcil was utterly nonplussed. “So?”

“It’s…vestigial?” Jason said, desperately trying to frame his thoughts.

He didn't actually know if human body hair truly was vestigial. He had no idea why humans only had a small covering of the stuff. Something to do with heat? Or sweat? …Or bugs?

Tarcil tapped his tusks. “Shil’vati ancestors used to have longer tusks. So you could say ours are vestigial? Are they gross to you?”

“No, but... Argh.” Jason ran a hand across his scalp. He didn’t even know why he was arguing about this anymore. “Wouldn’t you find a hairy Shil’vati odd?”

“Yes.” Tarcil nodded easily. “Because I would know that the hair was out of place on a Shil’vati.” He looked meaningfully at Jason. “You aren’t a Shil’vati though, you’re a human.”

Jason gestured to their similar forms. “I look like one.”

Tarcil shook his head. “Superficially, yes, but not enough for it to be uncanny. That would be unsettling. Instead, you’re only sort of similar.” He gestured between them. “We have a number of differences. Different builds. Different extraneous features. Different facial structures. Different colors.”

He leaned back casually on the sink. “As I said, if our species’ resemblance was uncanny, it would be odd. It’s not though. So no, I don’t find the hair itself odd. Only your obsession with shaving certain bits of it.”

Jason sighed, tired of the conversation. He’d been joking about trying to make the girls in the cadre lose interest in him by growing a beard, but that joke had contained an inkling of truth.

The two males glanced over as a rustling sound came from the door to the bathroom, and it wasn’t long before the twins appeared, a bunk’s mattress being dragged between them.

“Excuse me?” Tarcil asked, easy atmosphere gone as he pushed off the counter, arms crossed. “What the hell are you two doing?”

“Cool it, Tarcil,” Vieyshi said as she pulled the mattress across the tiles. “We’re just planning ahead here.”

Tarcil was utterly unamused, either from being dismissed, or being told to ‘cool it.’ “For what?”

“Our turn,” Veiysha piped in smilingly from her position at the back of the mattress.

“Your turn?” Jason asked, more amused than anything else by the goings on.

Vieysha nodded, completely missing the warning look her twin was giving her. “Well, you’ve done everyone else in the group. We figure it’s our turn next.”

Jason nearly swallowed his own spit.

“First of all, that’s a lie.” He coughed. “I haven’t ‘done’ Raisha.”

Something he needed to amend shortly. He liked her a lot, and more importantly, he was pretty sure if the girl didn’t get laid soon, he was going to wake up one night with her humping his leg. Or she might explode. Maybe both.

“And doesn’t the girl know it,” Tarcil murmured, unknowingly echoing the human’s thoughts.

“Secondly.” Jason brought up two fingers. “Why would that mean that I’d be ‘doing’ you two?”

The two paused in the act of lowering the mattress into the corner of the room, identical looks of horror on their faces.

“Wait, you mean…you don’t want to?” Vieyshi asked.

“…I didn’t say that,” Jason responded, ignoring the withering look Tarcil sent him.

The alien sighed.

“I’m tired of this idiocy. I’m going to bed. Jason, clean up your mess,” the diminutive male said as he walked out of the room.

Leaving Jason and the twins who both looked like wounded puppies as they stared at him.

Jason stared at the mattress. The male bathroom certainly had the space to spare.…

No, he thought, bringing that train of thought to a screeching halt. You’ve got to at least try to maintain some level of professionalism. If you let them bring that mattress in here, it’s basically an open invitation to everyone in the cadre.

He had to set some boundaries. The instructors had his number now, fitness wise, and they were running him into the ground on the PT field. He couldn’t do that and satisfy an entire cadre’s worth of horny aliens.

No matter what the human pornography that was now making the rounds through the dorm’s omni-pads might say. Hell, if he didn’t die of dehydration or a crushed pelvis, exhaustion or the DIs would definitely finish him off. He still hadn’t forgotten his discussion with the elderly DI in the Watch Office.

He looked at the twins who were still staring at him like wounded deer. The sexy, lithe twins. With the pierced nipples. Who were incredibly eager.…

He felt his heart breaking.

What a missed opportunity….

“Take the mattress back where you found it,” he said, exhaustion in his every word. “Preferably before an instructor notices.”

He barely heard the pair grumbling as they pulled the mattress back out.

“This is your fault. You came on too strong!”

“My fault! You were the one who-”

The two voices faded from hearing, leaving one human alone in the bathroom. Alone but for his broken dreams of what could have been.