The first two years of our academic life came and went by rather dryly. The first year and much of the second year was spent with general academics not necessarily related to military topics, and that meant things like science, history of the world, and so on.

Some of it we knew already from that documentary we watched years ago; others was new material to us. Most of our curriculum in the first year was just an endless dump of knowledge that continued on from primary school. I would say it wasn’t all that much different from primary school other than the fact that we had only one day off of the week, and we were expected to get out of bed hours before the usual time I would give up at—and that was hard on me and Friederika. Friederika especially got into a lot of disciplinary trouble, and, much like the painful memories of headmistresses in primary school I stuck my neck out for her. There were a few months where I risked getting expelled and I guess there was sometimes behind-the-scenes politics between my dad and the school directors to, erm… overlook some of the incidents.

Regardless, though, that did make me lag behind in our ranks. Though interestingly Friederika still worked hard to gain hers quicker by merit. I have to hand it to her, she does have a good head on her shoulders, somehow. Meanwhile, I never managed to be promoted past the first few cadet ranks, but it doesn’t really matter too much at the end of the day.

Regarding the history of humanity, it was more geared about Federation efforts to colonize the Orion Arm—what is now referred to as the New-Age Manifest Destiny.Under the guidance of Horatio he staunchly believed that in order to ‘avoid another catastrophe on a extinction-level scale, it is humanity’s divine right to preserve what remains of our sacred homeland, and settle and spread out throughout the known galaxy to ensure that Terra is no longer our one and only egg basket’.

I still remember it being mentioned that before the Great War ravaged Terra, our beloved planet was beyond the means of overpopulation—hovering over a trillion or so. A century before Horatio was born, that number was estimated to be around seven hundred billion. Even then, that gradually fell to one hundred billion by the time Horatio took office and transformed SEATO into the Federation. But they say humanity will never be capable of reaching pre-war population levels during and after his time.

In textbooks and more recent documentaries—the one Friederika and I watched years ago was at the very least produced at the end of the first century—early modern censuses lead us to believe that there are at least four hundred billion lives that inhabit life in our part of the Orion Arm, those are usually categorized as followed:

The Metropolitan region, including Terra and her planetary and Side colonies Ten percent The vast Ruthenia region, including Greater, Central, and Lower Ruthenia Forty percent The equally great Frankish Domains Thirty percent Other minor colonial regions, combined Twenty percent

Other than population we learned a great deal about modern attempts at exploring further into the Orion Arm, which were organized between 160-170 under Project SONG and Project SONG-II. These were attempts at sending both manned and unmanned expeditions which turned out to be futile—the differences in light-years between our furthest colonized region and the rest of the Milky Way proved to be too much. In the end both were shelved, and the ambitious followup project, Project MIRACLE—to send colony ships with deep-sleep passengers light-years away in the vain hope they can extend the reach of the Federation was quietly shelved and it’s resources put elsewhere.

We learned the inner workings of government, along with a slew of other boring stuff. The only part that stood out to me the most was how there seemed to be a growing concern of how representation should be done for our interstellar senate, but it leaves me with such head scratching that I don’t worry about it too much. Politics is beyond me sometimes.

Beside our normal courses we also had the odd day where we had basic physical education and sometimes ones more elaborate like learning to drill and doing saluting stuff. I excelled at those which I like to think where my saving throw for staying at the institution rather than the meddling done by my father. Unfortunately for Friederika, her poor physique made her suffer. And some of the instructors were sadistic enough to have her run laps with some gear on as punishment. But the two of us persevered for each other’s sake: there was no way in bloody hell we were going to leave the other behind.

At the end of the first year we had a general inspection done by Commodore DeRyck on behalf of the Admiralty, which was more or less us standing around in rank and file and getting personally reviewed by him and some of his old blokes. It was incredibly stressful, and at one point Friederika almost fainted when it was her turn.

With that our first year came to a close, and our summer break was over before we even knew it. Things began to shift gears. Our sophomore cadet year had more of a mixed curriculum which included more technical courses—which included how to operate a ship’s communication systems or operating a radar. It was also in our sophomore year that we began getting sprinkles of military lessons here and there. We were gradually introduced to the Academy’s simulation systems—mock bridges that they claim are almost a near replica of the ones found on actual Metropolitan spaceships. They were made so that you could get the feel that you were actually there directing a battle firsthand and made it feel so much more personal.

They were fun and exciting—but I sucked at them. The junior and senior cadet officers were far too good and I could never win no matter how hard I try. The only one I could maybe reliably beat was probably Friederika on a good day—but when I lost it made me bitter, and I would end up ghosting her for a couple days at a time, but I’d always get over it eventually. It was also through simulation games that I first met the beautiful redheaded cadet named Alexandra Dolz—some foreigner from the Ruthenia colonies that I’m surprised I never knew of sooner. She was so proficient at the simulation games that I always sought her out to practice against. Unlike most of our other sophomore or even junior year cadets she played fair—she didn’t use gamey tactics that were frowned upon by some junior cadets and even outright banned by senior cadets altogether. These gamey tactics usually included the concept of ‘spawn-camping’ your enemies reinforcements warping in and was such a game breaker that it shocked me that complaints of it fell on the developer’s deaf ears.

Simulations and Alexandra aside, it was also this year that they started instructing us about a gun’s handling, assembly and disassembly. This was something that Friederika and I were relatively good at, and there were even cases where our instructors allowed us to use the firing range at times. Though I was never too fond of shooting, Friederika was more than thrilled to be able to let loose every once and awhile.

My second year at Canberra also saw Paul Plotte enroll at the academy. But because we were a year apart it was rather difficult to see him at any given time—the only time we could converse was usually contained to the precious half hour of meal time we had. Even then, since the Mess Hall is so chaotically big it would be nigh impossible to exchange some words with him.

Not that I particularly cared about ever talking with him, though.

Our sophomore cadet year was hectic. But even more hectic was the outside world—or, er, the Orion Arm rather. From the snippets of news we got here and there, the senate in Sydney authorized another expedition of anti-piracy, which was headed by Commodores DeRyck and his mate Garofano. Since Commodore DeRyck had served as director for most of the first academic year and a portion of our second year, he had to resign to assume his active military post. Throughout the sophomore year of 216 my platoon would frequently huddle around tellys or radios during our off hours to tune in to broadcasts of DeRyck and colonial successes at routing pirate forces in Greater Ruthenia and elsewhere.

It wasn’t all positive news, however.

There was a fair amount of somber news about the growing influence of a warlord named Dong Zhui. Under his leadership was the Madame Scarface, a ruthless pirate who strikes fear into Federation and colonial survivors. Some even say she’s an amazon with short blonde hair and dead fish eyes, others claim she’s not a woman at all—theScarface is either a giant toned man or a grizzly-looking man with cold eyes. But whatever or whoever the Scarface is, they’re a monster that makes the Federation military tremble. But that’s just what the news says, so who knows what’s really going on out there?

As the year 216 came to a close, I could only wonder how life for me and Friederika will turn out once we graduate from the academy. Will we too find ourselves deployed to fight the Dong warlord and his Scarface protege? Maybe by the time we deploy there won’t be a need for officers like us to fight.