Going to Alaska

August 475 I.C., Odin

Reuenthal packed everything he would need to leave to attend the IOA very carefully, keeping his bag stashed in the linen closet, which his father never opened. He wasn’t bringing much, just enough clothing to wear when he wouldn’t be in uniform, and a few things he didn’t want his father to throw out or destroy while he was gone. He packed light, though, because he was only going to be able to take one trip from the house to school, as he was going by taxi.

On the morning of the day he was supposed to report to the IOA, Reuenthal tried to gather his things while his father was still asleep, and carry them into the front hall to wait for the taxi to arrive at the house. Unfortunately, this required more than one trip, and the sound of Reuenthal moving around in the house summoned his father out of bed.

The morning light was streaming in through the window above the front door, illuminating the dust motes in the air. Reuenthal was looking out past the blinds to watch the street for the taxi’s arrival. His father stomped down the stairs, wearing only his underwear and his slippers.

“Running away?” he asked, looking at the bags at Reuenthal’s feet.

“No, sir,” Reuenthal said.

“You’ve packed like you are.”

“I wouldn’t stand in the hall with my things if I was running away. I would leave.”

“Don’t be smart with me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are you going, then?”

Reuenthal pulled his well worn IOA acceptance letter out of his pocket and held it out. His father stared at it for a second, then pulled the paper out of Reuenthal’s hand. He read the letter slowly.

“Think you’re smart, then?”

“What do you want me to say to that, sir?” It was backtalk, but his father seemed like he was in a relatively good mood this morning. He was leaving, anyway. The sense of freedom that gave thrilled him a little bit, enough to make him take risks he might not have otherwise.

“You won’t last there,” his father said. “I don’t know why you bother.”

“I will.”

“They’ll kick you out.”

“I doubt it.”

His father shook his head. “Will you be coming back here?”

Reuenthal shrugged. He would probably have to, for summer and winter breaks, but he didn’t want to commit himself to that one way or another.

“Do you need any money?”

“No, sir,” Reuenthal said. He had enough saved from his summer job that he would have enough petty cash to last him the year. Tuition and room and board were both covered by the government, to be paid back in the form of his commission as an officer upon graduation.

“Good.” His father held out the letter, and Reuenthal took it back, folded it, and slid it into his pocket.

There were times they could be almost civil to each other. In the hallway mirror, Reuenthal could see both of their reflections. They had the same dark brown hair, but that meant nothing, and was approximately where any resemblance ended. Reuenthal looked like a spitting image of his mother, in most respects. His father’s eyes were watery and blue, sunken a little into his face. Reuenthal had one blue eye from his mother, and one black eye from somewhere else. Their eyes met in the reflection and Reuenthal didn’t look away, even though the early sun bouncing off the mirror was almost too bright to look at.

His father shook his head. “Don’t make a fool out of yourself,” he said, then turned and walked away down the hallway.

The taxi was pulling up outside.

It took very little effort for Reuenthal to unpack his belongings in his new dorm room, since he had so little. This left him with plenty of time to familiarize himself with his class schedule and walk around the campus to find all the buildings.

He liked his new uniform. It was nicer than the one his high school had assigned. He enjoyed the relative anonymity of walking around the campus and strolling through the freshman dormitories, reading the names off of the little brass tags on the doors, scoping out who lived where.

The IOA’s intranet, where he had gone to find his class schedule, had listed a public ranking of all the freshmen students. Reuenthal made sure to memorize the names of the top thirty or so, since he wanted to know what kind of competition he was going to have.

These sorts of information gathering exercises lasted until dinner, when the whole freshman class was supposed to gather in the largest dining area on campus, a formal hall, for a convocation meal. The sun was setting as he walked up to the building, lighting up its windows like pillars of fire. Reuenthal’s shadow filled the entire path in front of him, at least until he reached the heavy wooden doors, and entered the dim hall.

The room was already half populated with students, and a general hum of conversation filled the air. The atmosphere was tense, not helped by the room being too warm. It was still the heart of summer, and the room was filled with bodies, throwing off heat. Candles flickered on the tables. Ostentatious, Reuenthal decided, but he didn’t mind. He headed towards the front of the room. Seating had been assigned by rank, or something close to it. He was seated at the head table, in any event.

There was already one student sitting there, staring vacantly into space. Reuenthal looked down at the nametag placed in front of him which read “Hank von Leigh.” This, then, was his immediate rival, the second place student.

Reuenthal had examined the nametag before getting a close look at Leigh, but as he sat down, he had a chance to look at him more carefully. He was surprised at what he found.

First, and most noticeably, Leigh was obviously a foreigner of some kind. Perhaps he was the son of a rebel defector, or something. His whole facial shape was one that Reuenthal had only ever seen in history books, or in photographs of rebel politicians and soldiers and the like. Still, despite the obvious foreign-ness of Leigh, there was something arresting about him.

Leigh had messy black hair falling around his face. It looked like he had perhaps tried and failed to style it before coming here, because it was slightly damp, and pushed in ways it wouldn’t naturally sit, based on the way it was drying. He had a long, flat nose sitting above a gentle mouth. His eyes were dark, and he met Reuenthal’s studying gaze for a moment, then his face twitched, and he tilted his head back, staring up at the ceiling. Reuenthal’s eyes traced down Leigh’s neck, then, watching it move as he swallowed. Was he nervous? Reuenthal couldn’t exactly tell.

Neither of them said anything, and it took several of the other new freshmen coming in and taking their seats to break the silence that lay between them. Reuenthal put names to faces: Ansbach, a sallow faced man (sixth in the class); Bittenfeld, a loud redhead (eighth); Wahlen, broad shouldered and kind looking (fourth); Gautier, sneering and blond (third). More trickled in.

There was the usual bluster of young men figuring each other out, started by Bittenfeld. He pointed at Ansbach, though Reuenthal wasn’t sure why. Maybe they already knew each other? “Hey, Ansbach.”

“What?” Ansbach was not interested.

“You might be worried that I’m aiming for your place. You shouldn’t be. I’m aiming for his.” And, of course, Bittenfeld pointed directly at Reuenthal.

This kind of posturing was more stupid than anything, so Reuenthal just said, “Oh?” and left it at that.

Wahlen’s expression indicated that he also found this unnecessarily silly. “You know that’s not how ranks work, right?” he said. Bittenfeld frowned and crossed his arms. Wahlen might have rolled his eyes, but it was too dark to tell. To change the subject away from useless posturing, Wahlen said, “What departments are you all in? I’m in strategic warfare.”

Dutifully, everyone answered the question. All said strategic warfare, with one exception. Leigh, when everyone looked at him, shrugged his shoulders with a kind of guileless smile on his face and said, “Military history.”

“How are you number two, then?” Bittenfeld asked. Reuenthal was glad that he had, because he also wanted to know the answer, but was not quite rude enough to just blurt it out. “My cousin—“ Reuenthal filed away the information that Bittenfeld had family connections, despite not having a noble name— “said that history is for people who couldn’t hack it in strats, but were too bad at math to go into engineering.”

“You could stand to be more polite to people who outrank you,” Wahlen said. So, he cared about respecting the proper order. Interesting. Still, even he was curious, based on the tone in his voice.

“I like history,” Leigh said. He was still smiling, though his smile had a nervous edge to it now, and he wasn’t meeting anyone’s eyes.

“You’re going to be eaten alive,” Ansbach said. The viciousness in his tone gave Reuenthal pause, and he studied Ansbach again for a second. His lips were curled up around his teeth, and he was looking at Leigh with outright hatred. Reuenthal made his judgement of Ansbach then: he was dangerous.

Reuenthal supposed he should be grateful to Leigh. His foreign face in the number two spot had stolen all of the interest of the rest of the top students. In any other year, Reuenthal as number one might have been under their scrutiny, but Leigh was getting the brunt of it instead. Reuenthal was sure he could have held up under whatever microscope they chose to examine him, but he didn’t have to. Maybe he would later, when some of the curiosity about Leigh’s face wore off, and they all grew to know each other more by their talents, but he didn’t know for sure.

If his peers spent their energy tormenting the number two student instead of trying to beat the number one, that would make it easy for Reuenthal to stay on top.

Then again, Reuenthal thought, all this would depend on how Leigh himself reacted to the situation, and how smart he was. Reuenthal couldn’t tell, not from just this few minutes of association.

There might have been more conversation between the students, but then some appropriately patriotic music began to play, and the whole assembly had to rise to greet the chancellor of the school as he walked in to give his welcoming address.

Reuenthal barely paid any attention to the sonorous speech. Instead, he watched as a group of waiters came around and placed glasses of wine in front of each student. He looked across the table at Leigh, who was listening to the speech with a look of annoyance. Their eyes met, then Leigh looked away. It was so deliberate, that turning away. Reuenthal wondered what it meant.

At last, Chancellor von Steger raised his own wine glass. “To your future as students, and to the Empire! Sieg Kaiser! Prosit!”

Across from him, the mumbled “Prosit” that Leigh gave could not have been less enthusiastic. Reuenthal found it amusing that Leigh so clearly did not want to be here, but was second in the class. He raised his own glass, gave a “Prosit” of his own in Leigh’s general direction, then drank. The wine was cheap, but he didn’t mind at all.

Reuenthal spent his first few days of classes mostly alone. Although he had no problems with the other students, per se, he had no real use for them. He wasn’t the most social of people under the best of circumstances, and the competitive atmosphere of the IOA made him suspect that most people who would want to be his friend here would turn around and stab him in the back without a moment’s hesitation, should the opportunity arise.

His classes didn’t seem particularly difficult. The majority were focused specifically around strategic warfare, with only one required history class, and one required math class this semester. The lectures were dull, but the subject matter was interesting, and Reuenthal was looking forward to the practical course. An older student, assigned as his mentor, had told him the practicum would be of the greatest importance towards preserving his class rank. All the students would compete against each other in simulated war games in a six-hour session on Wednesdays.

Reuenthal arrived in the classroom early, and chose a seat near the back so that he could watch all the rest of his classmates filter in. The course instructor, Captain Staden, was a grey haired man who stood stiffly in the front of the room, checking the time on a pocket watch. Just like Reuenthal, Staden was watching every student who walked into the room. Leigh was one of the last ones in the door, squeaking in just before Staden put his pocket watch away and said, “Welcome to the first class of the Strategic Warfare Practicum. I’m Captain Staden, the instructor for this course. We’ll all be seeing a lot of each other, unless you drop rank severely, since I run the top level practicum for all four years of the SW cohort.”

It wouldn’t actually take that much to fall out of this top class, Reuenthal noted. There were only about forty students in it to begin with. It seemed that these top students were in a different kind of leadership track than the rest of the class of fifteen hundred. He wondered exactly how much shifting of ranks there would be.

Staden explained how the class would operate. There would be one hour of theoretical lecture, explaining the scenario they would be playing out, and then the class would go off to actually play the war game. The games were conducted anonymously, with none of the participants knowing the names of the others. Four students would be playing each game: two would be competing, while the other two would work together to moderate the game. The way it worked, in theory, was that each competitor would send written orders to their simulated group of ships, or tanks, or soldiers, and the game moderators would then be responsible for deciding how those orders would be carried out. There was a hugely complicated set of rules for the GMs to follow when deciding how things would play out, but as Staden explained, a list of rules alone was inadequate for accurate simulations where students were free to come up with imaginative solutions to problems: a flexible human touch was required to decide outcomes. This was why the games were not simply conducted against and graded by computerized opponents.

The scenario that they would be playing out today was an interesting one. Staden apparently preferred ground warfare simulations to space battles, so this first game was taking place on a planet. The planet, a miserable ball of ice called Kapche-Lanka, was real, a hotly contested place where both the Empire and the rebels in the Free Planets’ Alliance had mining operations set up to gather rare ores. Communications on the planet were severely limited by near-constant snowstorms and by the fact that if either side attempted to put satellites in orbit, the other shot them down immediately. All travel was ground travel, because the weather was so bad that air travel was nearly impossible, and, except for a narrow strip of liquid water near the equator, there were no navigable waterways.

Once the situation had been explained, each student was assigned a role, and sent out to a different room, where everyone sat in a private cubicle with a computer already set up to perform the simulation. Reuenthal was happy to be assigned a role actually playing the game, though he would have preferred to be playing attack, rather than defense.

He understood why attack and defense roles had to be assigned. If two students matched up against each other who both (correctly) believed that the safest thing to do was wait for the enemy to come to them, and simply defend their base without wasting resources trying to attack the enemy, then the game would be very boring, with neither student ever doing anything. Realistic, since that was most of what happened on the real planet, but boring and impossible to grade.

Reuenthal had at his disposal a fleet of tanks, stationary base artillery, and a decent number of soldiers. He had absolutely no information about his opponent, except that his opponent could only win by attacking him, and the general location of his base.

The first thing that Reuenthal did, then, was send out a few tanks as reconnaissance, sending them the five hundred kilometers or so to the other base. He ordered them not to try to report back by radio, just to turn around and return home once they had gathered information about the enemy’s strengths. He figured that radio was unreliable and would give away his tanks’ positions, if he wasn’t careful.

While Reuenthal waited for his scouts to return, he spent some time arranging his base’s defenses to his liking. He knew that his opponent would likely have to approach from across the wide, flat plane in front of his base, but there was an off chance that he would send his troops on a long, circular route over the mountains and approach from behind. That part of the base was weakly defended, and so Reuenthal spent a great deal of time moving some of his stationary artillery to the back of the base, and positioning tanks waiting in some of the well mapped mountain passes.

Reuenthal’s scouts returned, giving him detailed information about how many tanks the enemy had at his disposal, and what his own base defenses were like. With this information, Reuenthal was half tempted to send out his tanks to try to capture the enemy base, but that wasn’t his win condition, so it would have been a waste of time, and probably would have cost him the game. His scout tanks also reported that they had been followed back, though the enemy tanks that had been following them had left and returned to their base as soon as they came within fifty kilometers of Reuenthal’s. Interesting.

Reuenthal had been considering what to do with this information when his computer screen suddenly went dark, and the TA at the front of the room announced that it was time for lunch. He was grateful for the opportunity to stand and stretch and go out into the warm summer sun. He got and ate lunch in the closest dining hall, finishing quickly. When he returned to the building where class was held, there was still a bit of time before he had to return to the game, so he leaned against the brick wall and watched students mill about on the green.

A fair distance away, too far to hear what was being said, Reuenthal watched two boys approach another student who was laying on the green, arms casually crossed underneath his head. The standing students were Gautier and Dietch, and Reuenthal suspected that the student taking a nap was Leigh. The three had a short conversation, ending with Gautier giving Leigh’s bag a sharp kick, scattering its contents on the grass. Leigh made no move to defend himself, and didn’t even sit up until Gautier and Dietch had walked away.

Reuenthal was vaguely annoyed at the whole scene, and he wasn’t sure if he was more annoyed at Gautier and Dietch for causing trouble for no reason, or at Leigh for not defending himself. After all, Leigh was clearly more competent than the other two were. He had nothing to lose by defending himself.

There were reasons, Reuenthal knew well enough, to choose not to defend oneself. But this was clearly not one of them.

He watched Leigh gather up his things. Leigh looked over at him, saw that he had been watching, and nodded. They headed back inside the building to resume class.

Back in the simulation, a blizzard had descended on Reuenthal’s base, reducing visibility to nothing. He posted extra watch at the outside of his base, for all the good it did him. He wasn’t sure if his opponent would be willing to risk attacking him during this weather, but Reuenthal hated the fact that he couldn’t see the enemy coming. Eventually, the snow lightened without any attack on Reuenthal’s base.

Apparently, though, his opponent had been driving through the blizzard, because the GMs reported to Reuenthal that he could now see enemy tanks on the horizon. The number reported was significantly less than the number that he had been told the enemy possessed, so Reuenthal was certain that this was a decoy force, and the rest were, as he had imagined, coming around from behind to attack his base over the mountains. He was very glad that he had moved his artillery, then.

Reuenthal fired on the attacking force with his stationary artillery, and there was a bit of a back and forth. Unfortunately, the fact that he had moved a significant amount of his artillery away did make it so his opponent could take out some of the remaining pieces and inch his way closer to Reuenthal’s base. Even though this was a small detachment, Reuenthal did not want them coming close to the entrance to his base, so he sent out his tanks.

Immediately, there was a problem. As soon as his tanks left the doors of his base, the GMs reported huge losses, sudden explosions that took out a huge chunk of his force and caused confusion among the rest. Although his tanks were being fired on by the enemy, he knew this could not have been caused by just a concentrated blast of artillery or tank fire. It had to be something else. He sent a command to investigate, and the answer came back quickly: the whole field outside his base had somehow been studded with landmines.

Reuenthal took a short breath, then got to work hastily reorganizing his formation, ordering his tanks to fire at the ground in front of them to clear away the landmines, which were not buried deeply, just hidden under a dusting of snow. A nearby hit from a tank gun blast was enough to set them off and allow his vehicles to move forward unhindered. It had been a clever trick the enemy had pulled, and it had cost Reuenthal dearly, but it wasn’t quite enough to allow this tiny force frontal access to his base. Reuenthal summoned back some of the forces that he had left guarding the rear of his base, to reinforce his defenses in the front.

The situation dissolved into a somewhat chaotic fight. When Reuenthal sent his tanks forward, the enemy split up and a small group managed to squeeze their way in between Reuenthal’s forces and the base, both blocking his retreat and allowing a group of their soldiers to disembark and try to take the base on foot. It was unfortunate, but Reuenthal was trying to focus on stopping the main bulk of tanks.

Then, he got a notification that a different group of enemy tanks had slipped around the back side of the base, and Reuenthal was immediately annoyed at himself for removing the tanks he had stationed back there. His artillery wasn’t doing enough to stop them, and they breached the defenses and started coming around the base from that direction.

Reuenthal wasn’t sure exactly what it would take for the other side to get a “win”. Did they have to capture his command center? Did they have to take the mine that was attached to the base, so that it could be used for their own production? That seemed likely. Given that Reuenthal no longer had any defenses inside his base, and there were people on foot headed for his command center, he gave one last order. His remaining artillery turned around, facing inwards, and started shelling his own mine, destroying vital, unprotected equipment, so that even if this base was taken, it would be useless to the enemy for quite some time. Reuenthal was already losing, so he would at least make the victory for the enemy feel a little hollow.

All at once, it was like a switch had been flipped. As soon as his opponent realized that the mine was being destroyed, the GMs sent Reuenthal a message:

> Yes.

The computer screen went black as his little simulation ended. Reuenthal stared at his reflection in the blank screen for a moment, then stood and stretched. He realized that he was the last person in the classroom. Even the TA who had been sitting at the front of the room had left. His opponent and GMs must have been sitting in different classrooms, and he had gone past the end of class time, playing out this game. He took his time gathering his belongings, not in any rush to get back to his dorm.

When he walked out into the hallway, Reuenthal was only a little surprised to find Leigh there, leaning with his eyes closed and his head tilted back against the cool stone hallway wall. His hair looked a mess, like he had been running his fingers through it nonstop for several hours, and his leg was jiggling, as though he was letting out some excess energy. He looked up when he heard Reuenthal moving in the hallway.

Reuenthal was a little surprised when Leigh spoke. “Hey, Reuenthal. Good game.” Reuenthal hadn’t noticed before, but it was obvious now— Leigh spoke with a distinct accent. Phezzani, probably.

Reuenthal walked towards him, and Leigh stiffened, perhaps worried that Reuenthal was going to torture him as Dietch and Gautier had, but Reuenthal merely offered him his hand. “Good game.”

Leigh hesitated, then took his hand to shake. His hand was soft and warm, but his grip was firm. Reuenthal wondered how long Leigh would maintain eye contact.

“I look forward to our rematch,” Reuenthal said as he dropped his hand.

Leigh made a face and rubbed the back of his head, the tone of the conversation suddenly casual. He seemed to have decided that Reuenthal wasn’t someone he needed to be wary of, which Reuenthal thought was a mistake on his part. “We’ll have to play other people before we match up again. And by then, I’m sure I’ll have lost my number two spot.” His voice was somewhat chagrined, and there was a hint of a smile on his face.

“Oh?”

“I’m not that invested.”

“Is that why you retreated right as the GM was telling me that the doors to my command center were being fired upon?” Reuenthal wanted to know if it had been an odd choice to retreat on the edge of victory, or if Leigh had had a specific victory condition that Reuenthal had managed to foil.

“I had already lost at that point. You could have wiped out my tanks if I’d stayed much longer, and then everyone left would have been stranded, and…” He shook his head. “It was a pointless battle, anyway. The planet isn’t worth the effort.”

Reuenthal was surprised that Leigh thought that he had lost. It was true that Reuenthal still had a numerical advantage, but the loss of his command center and the mine would have made coordination difficult, and any victory would have been a pyrrhic one. He might have been able to regroup his tanks and retake the base, but if the game had ended immediately after Leigh had taken the command center, as Reuenthal suspected it would have, it would have looked like a decisive loss on his part. It all came down to timing, and where one sliced the victory at. Leigh didn’t seem to realize that, though, and was looking at it as though this was a real objective, with real lives at stake, rather than just class points.

“In a sense,” Reuenthal said.

“What do you mean?”

“You should decide what level you’re playing the game on, von Leigh.” Reuenthal had no desire to start giving Leigh real tips on how to beat him next time, so instead of saying anything else, he gave a curt nod and headed off down the hallway. He could feel Leigh watching him as he left.