Leigh replayed the woman’s entrance and saw that she’d come through the very same wall many of the other Selects had been patting down. The energy-matter, or whatever it was, had rippled open, exposing a cylindrical corridor behind her before closing again, leaving them once more isolated from the rest of the ship. Checking the ship’s history log, Leigh saw that the random corridor had lined up with one of the colorful bolts from outside. It had momentarily connected to one of the other ship’s layers, before it was gone again.

“Line up,” the short and stocky woman said without introduction. “Single file. Highest rank up front, lowest in the back.”

Before the woman even finished speaking, everyone was moving as they sync’d their CHIPs to display the same line-up in the center of the room. Jade was already there, and Leigh wondered if the girl had known somehow. Not having enough time to dwell on the fact though, she sprinted to the center of the dome like most of the rest. Moving toward the back of the line-up as she pulled up the woman’s records and skimmed them for pertinent information.

Va’Letty —

Current Rank: Alpha-7

Year 2851

First Academy Selection Rank: 12

Graduated on the third moon of the fourth planet in the Tayen system.

2 Tours Exploration in Sector 43398.

1 Tour Exploration in Sector 43399.

2 Tours Space-Base Sentien A-2.

9 Tours UEF Mercenary Force.

Leigh’s eyes widened at the last entry before Va’Letty went into Academy Supervisory duty. It was common for Alphas to be recruited into the Mercenary Force, but most decided to move into a different sector after the required five tours. The fact that the stocky woman decided to stay on, even after losing her right leg in the third tour and her left arm in the eighth tour, was especially impressive.

Bionics had come such a long way that they could be indiscernible from real limbs if you so chose, but Va’Letty had foregone the synthetic skin coating, leaving the gleaming, metallic energy-matter bare for the eyes to see. It was an odd choice in Leigh’s opinion, but then again, the woman had also chosen to be quite risque in her suit choice. Va’Letty had retracted it to the extent that her entire torso was bare with the exception of a palm-wide black band that covered most of her breasts. The bottom part of her suit was also a simple black, at least it was on the left side. On the right side, she’d chosen to leave the bionic leg just as bare as her left arm. Together with her clothing choices, Va’Letty’s tattoos looked almost natural, though she’d tattooed the right arm so intricately it almost looked like a suit design choice.

The stocky woman’s unique features didn’t end there. Although pretty much everyone Leigh had ever met had always been in great shape, La’Vetty’s muscular body made it seem like the rest of the world was wimpy and gelatinous in comparison. Her abs were not only distinctly delineated, but literally bulged out in the most clear-cut eight-pack Leigh had ever seen. Finally, Leigh couldn’t help noticing that with the woman’s white First Academy hair cropped short, she’d pretty much eliminated all of her feminine features. She was filled with so much muscle that she looked like a little barrel. At 169cm, she was a full 20cm shorter than Leigh, who was herself slightly below average in height.

“Forty-three seconds…” Va’Letty said when everyone had finally finished lining up.

After struggling back and forth for a few seconds because of Ranks, the others settled down. It was something Leigh didn’t have to worry about; she knew for sure she’d be at the back of her file. Only Aru’bal was behind her.

“That was…” Va’Letty said in her bored yet no-nonsense voice, “embarrassing.”

The short woman commanded attention and her height was suddenly forgotten as everyone shrank from her penetrating glare.

“If you’re not embarrassed… you should be. Not a single one of you had to traverse more than four-hundred-and-twenty-three meters to get to your current positions. I’ve checked your records, I know you can all clear that distance in less than twenty seconds… so why did it take over twice that for you to get where you are?”

No one spoke.

“If that’s how it’s going to be until we get there… I’m sorry to say, you will all fail. I don’t give a shit if this ship has to go back fully loaded, I am not staking my name on unprepared individuals. So if you want to be on-planet for your second semester, I suggest you get your shit together.”

Still, no one spoke.

“Scratch that, it’s not a suggestion. You’re supposedly the best of the best. The cream of the crop. The top one percent of the top one percent. Act like it.”

[NUMBER OF COMPLETE IMMERSION MODULES?]

The question came out of nowhere, but Leigh answered it without second thought.

[50]

The moment she did, a second one appeared.

[TIME TO FTL?]

Not that long since the announcement, so...

[11.86h STANDARD, ASSUMING WE ENTER FTL IMMEDIATELY ONCE CLEARING SOL’S NO-FTL ZONE.]

[NUMBER OF GIRLS ON YOUR SHUTTLE SEATING GROUP?]

Easy.

[4.]

[NUMBER OF BOYS IN THE SHIP?]

CHIP, sort by gender. Count.

[42.]

[STOPS SHUTTLE MADE BEFORE LEAVING EARTH?]

CHIP, ship seven shuttle schedule. Number of stops. First one is maintenance and supply.

[37, ASSUMING ONLY SELECT PICK-UP STOPS ARE COUNTED.]

[HEIGHT OF TALLEST SELECT ON BOARD?]

CHIP, sort by height.

[2.32m]

[TIME TO DESTINATION?]

Easy. CHIP for exact numbers.

[UNKNOWN, ESTIMATED 13.27 TO 18.73 STANDARD MONTHS.]

[NAME OF YOUR SUPERVISOR.]

Easy.

[VA’LETTY —]

[ORIGIN?]

Hadn’t gotten to that one yet. CHIP, supervisor background info.

[MIDDLE EAST, REGION 0328, DISTRICT 44627.]

[DISTANCE TO SUA LEMA.]

What the heck is a Sua Lema? CHIP search. One of the girls on the ship, Rank 344. Ugh, should have known that.

[23.99m]

“FALL, ROLL, JUMP!” Va’Letty shouted out of nowhere.

Instinctively, Leigh fell to the ground and executed a roll and a jump. Years of simulations and combat training had made all of these actions automatic. The same could be said for everyone else around her. They all fell in unison, with the exception of one or two stragglers, executing all of the motions by muscle memory.

[NUMBER OF WORDS SPOKEN BY YOUR INSTRUCTOR?] The question came while Leigh was still rolling, but with the help of her CHIP, she pulled up the script of Va’Letty’s words. Skimming the CHIP’s function for counting, Leigh added a few words here and there, choosing contractions where it felt appropriate and still not completely sure how many words four-hundred-and-twenty-three or forty-three counted as. Being decisive about it, Leigh went for five and two. Chances were, she wasn’t going to get it right, anyway, and her instructor had already shown a preference for speed.

[171, ASSUMING CONTRACTIONS ARE COUNTED AS MULTIPLE WORDS.]

On her feet again, Leigh was ready for the next barrage of commands, but as seconds passed and nothing happened, she realized the test, or whatever had just happened, was over.

“Slightly….very slightly… better,” Va’Letty said as if the words of semi-praise pained her. “However, slightly better than utter crap is still crap. Get that through your heads before you take your next breath.”

There was silence as people acknowledged her words, but Va’Letty seemed unsatisfied and barked, “What you waiting for? A flood? Stop breathing, you numbnuts.”

Leigh heard a bunch of people inhale loudly around her, but she’d already halted her breathing before doing so. She was already regretting it a second later, but then Va’Letty said, “Disqualified, I told you not to breathe.”

Leigh’s CHIP showed 19 people’s names light up in red, signifying their disqualification from the ‘exercise’. Leigh’s eyes widened in relief, happy she hadn’t followed suit after all.

“Now, listen up. Yeah…” the barrelly woman glared at a small group of ‘breathers’, “even you failures…”

Leigh listened, but mostly she hoped that Va’Letty’s preaching tone didn’t actually mean she was going to preach. Her longest underwater breath holding time was six minutes and twenty seconds, but she doubted she’d even get half that right now.

“Up until this moment in your lives, you’ve been competing for Ranks. Now, that’s great and all, it’s gotten you prepared enough so that all of you knew to open up the ship’s blueprints to survey your surroundings with. However, you’ve all been trained to do what is expected. Daily Simulations and Cognitive training in every imaginable subject. The same exercises over and over and over again. Whoop-dee-doo. It’s always been about performance, you knew what was expected and you performed accordingly… I’m here to tell you that that’s all over. You see these Ranks you’re lined up in right now?”

It was a rhetorical question, obviously no one was going to answer while holding their breaths. And those that weren’t, well… they were ducking their heads in embarrassment. None of them were bound to speak up any time soon.

“Well, this is the last time you’ll see them. There is no such thing as a Ranking anymore, at least not in the way you’ve grown used to. You don’t get points for making friends. This isn’t a playground. This is war. The UEF knows you have talent… somewhere, so now we figure out in what.”

She glanced at Charlie Delta before speaking again, “A little birdie told me you already know the categories, but I’ll repeat them for the sake of protocol.” She looked at the other Selects as she spoke, “They are: Suit, Logistics, Combat, Strategics and finally… Leadership,” she said and something in her tone made it seem as if she were searching for something she couldn’t find amongst them. The disappointment on her face only grew and Leigh couldn’t help but feel even more like an ant.

“Every single thing you do will count towards your score in these five categories we call Skills, short for S.C.L.L.S.” Va’Letty continued, as if she were used to having to deal with garbage that was forced upon her, and had simply come to terms with her lot in life, “Oh, not so different to what you’ve been doing so far? I’m here to show you how wrong you are. You’ll be doing things you’ve never done before, learning to deal with things you’ve never encountered before. All in the hopes that you’ll be able to adapt yourself to unfamiliar situations in the future,” she paused and looked them meaningfully in the eyes, somehow managing to reach every person present with a single look.

“Learn,” she said, “You’re supposed to be prepared for everything, for every occasion. The fact that none of you were able to correctly answer every single question is… sad. Predictable. But sad. You have to be ready for anything. Always.”

Leigh cringed a bit internally, wondering where she’d gone wrong. She could see the expressions around her, people having the same thoughts. She was used to being right, they all were, always trying to succeed, to be the best, to have the best results. To have someone bring them down and trample on them repeatedly like this was demoralizing to the extreme. Realizing she was letting her emotions get the better of her, Leigh shook her head to clear it and looked ahead, right at Arthur’s gleaming, bald head right in front of her.

“While all of you accessed blueprints, only eighty-nine accessed all your comrades’ personnel files before docking, only seventy-seven accessed my personal files the moment I walked in, and only a paltry three even thought about opening all one hundred files. That is… pathetic. You’re going to be on the same enclosed areas as these bozos for the next extended period of time, you all had at least seventeen minutes time in the shuttle and another six here, more than enough to prepare… and yet, you were all sorely unprepared. What? Too busy rubbing each other’s heads?”

Unable to hold their breaths any longer, people around her started gasping for air, some even kneeling down to breathe better.

Va’Letty pressed her lips together and said in a disgusted voice, “You see this? It’s just… Ugh. It’s only been two minutes and thirty-six seconds. The shortest submitted breath time amongst all of you is over six minutes… this is all lack of preparation. Lack of situational awareness. You must be ready at all times… Next time it might not just be about holding your breaths. That is my lesson for today. If you can at least put that through your heads then maybe, just maybe, you won’t be an embarrassment to the human species.”

Va’Letty then crossed her arms, frowned and simply waited for everyone else to run out of breath. Leigh ran out of breath moments after Arthur did, and keeled over like many others, gasping for air. Va’Letty wasn’t looking at anyone in particular, but her disgusted glare ate at Leigh’s insides, making her feel like crap, literal crap.

Refuse.

Unworthy to scrape the heels of her instructor’s feet.

“Alright,” Va’Letty said. “We done then? Three minutes, ten seconds… pathetic.”

No one dared to speak.

“Stand up straight, for shit’s sake.”

Leigh whipped herself back in place along with everyone else.

“Blank Slate,” Va’Letty suddenly announced. “Line up.”

Leigh’s eyes widened, not ready for the sudden reshuffling of the positions into an alphabetical order of their names.

“FIVE!” Va’Letty shouted in warning.

Leigh scrambled to her place, which unexpectedly wasn’t in the back anymore, not even in the back half. She was a McMann.

“FOUR!”

Leigh sprinted to the fifth place of her line.

“THREE!”

A couple lines ahead of her were Nathan and Monique. Monique gave Leigh a cold look when she noticed her while Nathan offered a surprisingly warm smile upon noticing Leigh’s arrival. The guy was a saint, she’d been a bitch to him and he still treated her with human decency.

“TWO!”

Nathan’s head swiveled back towards the front and everyone else also fell into place.

“Good…” Va’Letty said. “Do you feel good?” She offered them a smile and Leigh found herself smiling back in relief, they had finally measured up to the demanding standards.

“Well, to be honest with you,” Va’Letty said, “I really don’t know why. The furthest distance any of you had to move was 8m, this shouldn’t have taken more than two seconds and when you take into account that I only started counting to get your lazy asses moving… Well, you do the math.”

No one even dared to look in Va’Letty’s general direction.

“Don’t worry though, you’ll have plenty of chances to redeem yourself.” the short supervisor said, surveying them slowly, “You have already been introduced to the first. Your TrueSuit Initiation Procedures. Take those as seriously as you can. I see at least some of you are succeeding at that…” Va’Letty nodded at Monique, Nathan and Charlie.

Nathan was at 0.00013%.

Charlie was at 0.00011%.

Monique’s rate was private, but the fact that Va’Letty had nodded to her first had Leigh wondering if the girl’s rate was even better than Nathan’s. Leigh was at 0.00007%, if Monique really was better, probably 0.000014%, then Leigh’s rate was at literally half of the girl’s performance. The thought didn’t sit well with Leigh, especially considering her upcoming ‘fight’. She just hoped that the TrueSuit performance didn’t have some kind of impact on that as well.

“As for the rest of you…” Va’Letty continued, “I hope for your sakes that you start taking this more seriously. As I have already said, it’s no time for fun and games,” the woman said looking between Leigh and Shi’estna. Leigh jumped inside her skin when she noticed herself being singled out. She hadn’t done anything! Was she really being punished for a stupid contest she hadn’t even started? If anyone, it should be Charlie being singled out, but the asshole had been singled out for something else completely! She’d never been so irritated by another person’s existence before. Leigh didn’t back down from Va’Letty’s condemning stare but mentally, she cast a death wish in Charlie’s direction and hoped he choked on his own spit.

“The second line of testing will take place your Initial Evaluation in-CIM wherein your baseline Skill points shall be determined,” Va’Letty said, completely dismissing Leigh. “Remember that from here on out you have a completely clean slate. From now on your Skills will only be determined by your performance in the Evals, and this is the only time in which your performance won’t be negatively impacted by your mistakes. This is when we find out what you can do, not what you can’t. That we will find out soon enough, at which point those shortcomings will be addressed. For now though, you are strongly encouraged to perform to the best of your abilities… without any restrictions. Know this, capitalize on it, but don’t come to expect it.”

There was a moment of silence as everyone absorbed her words. What was going to be expected of them? And what were they going to do with only fifty CIMs and one-hundred of them? Were they going to fight for them first?

Ignoring their uncertain glances, Va’Letty went on, “As for the third form of evaluation…” she said, slowly looking at the trash around the room, “You are not yet fit to touch it. Your current performance is less than exemplary and before I can hand it to you with a clean conscience, I need to see significant improvement on all counts. In fact, I refuse to give it to any who do not finish the Initial Eval in the allotted time.”

Nodding with determination, she then suddenly and simply said, “Go,” catching every single person off-guard.

This time they didn’t wait around for her to ask a second time, going by what Va’Letty had said the Initial Eval was going to take place. They would have to fight for the fifty spots. The thought must have occurred to all of them simultaneously, but before they could act on it the room transformed around them.

The floor around their standing formation dissolved, leaving a circular platform 100m in diameter and revealing the half-sphere below them, identical to the ceiling above.

The platform itself morphed into a sphere, generating its own gravity centre so that Selects stood at the ‘bottom’ without falling off; ‘down’ was now the center of the sphere. Leigh got a clear view of the newly-revealed area and was relieved to see an extra fifty dull, black CIMs; fighting wouldn’t be necessary.

Six cylindrical poles shot out of the walls and intersected the sphere at perpendicular angles, narrowly avoiding the Selects who had to jump out of the way. The poles divided the room like axes of a three-dimensional graph, the centre sphere being point (0,0,0).

WIthout further prompint the Selects quickly dispatched themselves towards the six different paths leading to the CIMs. By design or not, the one hundred of them split into nearly identical groups that ran along the poles. They, like the sphere, had a shifted center of gravity located at their centers. This allowed them to run along all sides of the 5m diameter pole towards the dome’s outer walls.

Leigh and Arthur somehow ended up in the same group and sprinted with all their might alongside all the others. She still wasn’t quite sure how she was going to climb, or jump 150m, and racked her brain to come up with a solution before hitting the wall, she didn’t. Without the appropriate gear, the height would be deadly.

“Come on, come on, come on!” Va’Letty said, clapping her hands in ‘encouragement’, suddenly a huge grin on her face. “Did I forget to mention this is a group exercise? The groups will be determined by the time it takes you to get in-CIM. I don’t need to tell you about the advantages the first groups will get, do I?”

Leigh stiffened at the thought of being in the last group. This Initial Eval was all about proving herself to the other Selects and if Leigh to do that, she couldn’t have even more handicaps stacked against her. At the very least she had to beat the Shi’estna in the stupid ‘fight’ Charlie had set up. She needed to succeed in getting good baseline Skill points; it was the only way she would both get Shi’estna off her back and potentially reduce the overall resentment directed at her. She had to give herself a chance with the Tent leaders before it was too late. When they were selected , she would be at their mercy and she needed to stay on-planet for the second semester. Off-planet was not an option.

The eighteen Selects all reached the dome’s wall almost simultaneously. Panting, Leigh was considering her options, up or down, when one of the Selects walked around the cylindrical pole. Leigh’s eyes widened as she only now considered the potential implications of gravity on the task ahead of her. Would she have to climb up to reach the CIMs on either side? Was going down not an option?

A scream from the other side of the sphere had her turning just in time to watch as one of the Selects fell the entire 147.5m, answering her questions for her. Even from the distance, Leigh heard the impact his body made when it collided with the ground. A hollow, but simultaneously wet crunch. She thought for sure he’d be dead, but a moment later there were screams of torture. Apparently their new and improved nanite-pumped bodies could take the 150m fall and survive, but Leigh didn’t see anyone else following the first guy’s example.

“Be happy the Quill let us use their gravity technology,” Va’Letty reminded them. “Climbing would take a lot longer.”

Leigh gaped at the woman’s insensitive comment. Apparently they were going to be falling both ways. The guy hadn’t died, but going by his agonized screams he wasn’t enjoying the nanite reconstructive progress either.

“Not that they actually tell us how it works…” Arthur mumbled beside her, completely disregarding the injured guy as well.

Was she the only one that cared about the traumatizing screams echoing through the hollow sphere?

“How the Cog are we supposed to get down there… without breaking all of the bones in our body, that is.” one of the guys next to her, Lo’Brurn—, asked nonchalantly.

Apparently she was.

It was time she stopped caring and got her head put on straight. Everyone else was only out for themselves, it was high time she do the same. Shaking her head, Leigh once more renewed her conviction to beat Shi’estna into the ground. Leigh liked to think of herself as a pacifist, but she was sick and tired of the girl’s unexplained antics.The girl was only going to be Leigh’s first hurdle though. Leigh had to surpass her to get what she really wanted. And if the recent Initiation Procedure had taught Leigh anything, it was how useful it could be to have a clear image of goal in mind. Shi’estna’s face under her boot seemed like a good place to start.

Before that though, she had to figure out how to climb down a 147.7 meter drop.

Without ending up in a wet pile of goo that is.