Together

Chapter 25★ Amy

We arrive in our deep space piloting class after two and a half minutes of full out sprinting. I note with pleasure that no one else is here yet. After thirty more seconds, two others who got the same idea as me come sprinting in. They are both boys that I don't remember seeing at the meeting in Sim 2.

"Are we late?" A black haired boy gasps. "Our alarms didn't go off on time and we were told to come here first." I check my watch. The five minutes are up and no one else is here.

"That's alright boys." They look relieved with this comment. "No one who did get up on time is here yet, except for these five ladies. Take a seat." We obey. The other girls and I sit in a row of five seats, and the boys sit in a row of two.

"Are we late?" someone pants behind us. I turn and see seven boys standing at the back of the classroom.

"Yes, you are late. But, considering that I was told that I would have all of the new recruits for briefing this morning, and there are only fourteen of you here, I'll let this one go. I take it that this is Jameson's fault, is it not, Miss Wolf?"

Wolf looks uncomfortable, but still replies with her usual, confident, "Yes sir."

"Jameson takes pleasure in torturing the new recruits. After today, you are not to do one thing he tells you. You take orders from officers that outrank him." Good, I think. Don't have to take orders from that unprofessional....

"Take a seat boys. We'll wait for the rest of the recruits to show up." When they did show up, it was in small groups, usually panting and sweating, with terrified looks on their faces.

★★★

At lunch, Jameson gives us the next route to class. It's a mathematics class, which starts out with Calculus 3. Tomorrow we take a deep space navigation crash course, and will take a test at the end of the two weeks. This test will determine pilot from squadron leader.

Lunch was basically the same type of food that we had in Battle School. Some unidentifiable substance serves as protein, but fruits and vegetables look more like they do on Earth. I mostly eat those, since the protein substance usually gives me a stomach ache.

★★★

I flop down into bed. I have a morning class that I didn't attend today because of Jameson's "briefing." Its gym though, so I don't think that we need an overview of that class. Deep space piloting has a longer class period than everything else, with three hours instead of one and a half.

We started right off in Calc 3, and covered what usually takes a month in an hour and a half. We get tomorrow's class period for studying and doing homework, so it's not to bad. We are also taking advanced rocket science, covering the kind of information that Earth scientists have years to learn and understand.

I have this same set of classes for two weeks. Gym at six in the morning (because we apparently only need 7 hours of sleep) and then breakfast at 0730. Deep space piloting starts at 0830 and lunch at 1130. I have dinner around 17 or 1800 before finally getting "free" time, which I am expected to use for studying or the gym. They intend to work us to exhaustion before Ender even gets here.