RITZA ACADEMY
LIEGEDEN, EMPORIA
FEDERATED SUNS
6 APRIL 3150
1915 HOURS
Noah wasn’t in the dorm room when Jasper arrived, and he was glad of it. Next year, he’d have his own room and, while Noah was a pretty good roommate, Jasper preferred solitude. Full but restless, he grabbed the room phone to call Nadine. She had to have figured out something about what was going on.
Silence greeted him instead of a dial tone. He scowled. It wasn’t normal for the dorm phones to be out, and right now, every oddity was worthy of paranoia. After checking that every part of the phone was plugged into every other part and the wall, and still not getting a dial tone, he headed next door to check their phone.
Jasper almost jumped out of his skin when the dorm-wide intercom crackled: “All cadets, report to the common room. I repeat, all cadets, report to the common room immediately.” It was Sir Michael’s voice, and he did not sound happy.
This can’t be good, Jasper thought as doors on all sides of him opened and cadets poured out.
The Dewitt MechWarrior Dormitory was one of three main dormitories on campus. It housed all of the MechWarrior cadets from the first class to the last. The other two dormitories—Robinson for upperclassmen and Sable for underclassmen—housed the infantry cadets. The Davion building was for unmarried professors and enlisted who preferred to live on campus.
While it seemed like a lot of bodies when crammed into the common room, there were only about 150 MechWarrior cadets in total. The Dewitt dorm, like all the academy’s dorms was coed, and all cadets were expected to treat their peers with respect, dignity, and kindness, no matter their race, gender, religion, or background. In a perfect world, such a declaration wouldn’t have been needed. Emporia was not a perfect world.
Sir Michael Yaxley waited at one end of the common room. “Look around. Make sure your roommate and your neighbors are here. Is anyone missing?”
Jasper craned his neck until he saw Noah. Their eyes met, and Noah gave him a thumbs-up. Another girl raised her hand, then put it back down as a couple cadets bolted down the stairs. Both had a flush of embarrassment and melted into the crowd of students.
If Sir Michael saw them, he gave no indication. “Everyone’s here? Good.” He paused and looked like he didn’t know what he was going to say. As silence and the tension grew, it looked like he wanted to yell at someone, anyone.
No one made a sound. Not even the most annoying jester among them.
Sir Michael pulled out a piece of paper. “I’m going to read you something. No one is to say a word until I am done. Understood?”
A bunch of the cadets nodded, Jasper included.
“I said, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir!” rang throughout the room.
Sir Michael took a breath and began reading aloud: “As of today, 6 April 3150, Emporia is under attack by the Draconis Combine. On 5 April 3150, the Seventh Ghost Regiment took control of New Exeter and the New Exeter Spaceport. Baron Zachary Vogel has command of Emporia’s MechWarriors, and he is dealing with the situation. At this time, the Ritza Academy is on lockdown. No cadet may leave the academy grounds. Classes will continue on a truncated schedule. All cadets are expected to continue their studies and make the academy proud.”
The room remained silent.
Jasper didn’t know which would happen first…if his knees would buckle or he’d throw up. Heart pounding, he kept his bearing and decorum as best he could. No one else was panicking. He wouldn’t either. Even if many of them had no idea what being at war was like.
“Questions?” Sir Michael asked.
The room erupted in shouted questions from excited and scared cadets. It gave the maths professor the excuse he needed to shout his own fury and fear. “QUIET!”
The room’s noise dropped to a whisper, but did not go as silent as before.
“One question at a time. You are Ritza Academy cadets, not animals.” Sir Michael lowered his voice. “Now. Questions?”
One by one, cadets raised their hands. The professor pointed.
“If the spaceport has been captured, how are the MechWarriors dealing with this?”
It was an obvious question. Sir Michael shook his head. “I don’t know.” He pointed to another raised hand.
“When will the missing professors return?”
“When they have completed their mission.” He pointed to another hand.
“Why aren’t we out there helping them? At least the senior class?” This was Pascal Cole, a Blooded cadet Jasper knew and liked. His father was a former MechWarrior turned administrator.
Sir Michael was slower to respond. “Because you’re all still cadets.”
“We have to start somewhere!” This came from a female voice, but the speaker didn’t identify herself, despite the professor giving the back of the room a sharp look. A small scuffle of shoving cadets broke out and subsided.
“Cadets…” Sir Michael pursed his lips, then continued. “I don’t know what Baron Vogel or the absent professors have in mind. I’m here, not there. But I know this: the Draconis Combine doesn’t know about the academy ’Mechs. At least, that’s my assumption. It’s a good assumption. Especially since there’s a pair of new ’Mech simulators sitting at the spaceport right now. If our MechWarriors have a plan that includes the academy ’Mechs, we don’t want the enemy to know they’re here.
“We also don’t want them to know about you. Any of you. You’ll be considered enemies, resources, or unwilling recruits. That’s why we’re on lockdown. That’s why, despite being proud of the school, we don’t have any flashy pennants or giant symbols on the school grounds that say we’re anything special. I know the ’Mech bay and the vehicle bays might give it away, but since we aren’t under attack and our ’Mechs haven’t been confiscated, we’re practicing security through obscurity. It’s the best we have for the moment.”
No one else raised their hands. Jasper raised his.
“Yes?”
“If we’re under attack, why….” Jasper stopped, then pressed on. He didn’t want to think about what he remembered from Hoff, but this “attack” wasn’t anything like what he’d and Nadine had experienced. “Why isn’t there more noise? We haven’t heard anything. No explosions. No weapons fire. Haven’t seen anything light up the sky. This isn’t… When Hoff fell…” He shook his head. “It’s not the same.”
Sir Michael let the whispers grow for a few seconds, then hushed them with a gesture. “I don’t have the answer to that. I’ve been on a planet that needed evacuation, too. My only thought is that the fighting must be elsewhere. If there’s fighting at the spaceport, I think we’re too far away to hear or see anything.” He looked around the room. “That’s enough questions for now. A truncated class schedule will be posted on the boards in the morning. Every single one of you is expected to be in class. No excuses. Dismissed.”
Jasper stayed where he was as everyone else filed out of the common room. Cadets left in clumps of two and three. Some went back upstairs. A couple went out the back or front of the building—possibly to see what had been said in the other dormitories. He watched Sir Michael as he watched the cadets leave. There was a story in the man’s face; one Jasper couldn’t understand.
Sir Michael caught him looking and beckoned him over. “What is it, Roux?”
“This is wrong, sir. Everything is wrong. When war came to Hoff, it was all we could do to survive. The Kuritans murdered people in the streets. There was noise for days. I don’t understand this.”
The man shook his head. “I don’t either. But you have to trust that the cadre and your sponsor know what they’re doing. In the meantime, do what you’re told. It’s the best way you can help them and us. Don’t give us another headache to deal with, all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jasper watched Sir Michael meet Lady Ruth and Dame Ivy at the entryway to Dewitt. The three of them exchanged glances, then left together without saying a word. Jasper couldn’t decide whether the professors knew what was going on and refused to tell anyone, or they didn’t know what was going on and were as lost as the rest of them. He didn’t know which option was worse.
With a heavy sigh, he headed back upstairs to his dorm room, and wasn’t at all surprised to find Nadine sitting on his bed.
“Fire escape?” he asked.
“Fire escape,” she confirmed.
Every dorm room had access to the fire escape ladders on the outside of the building. On the front side, they were simple iron bars built into the concrete that looked more like decoration than a safety measure. On the backside of the building, they were a traditional zigzag stair that offered the cadets a pseudo-balcony to sit on in the hot summer months. That made the backside dorm rooms all the more popular and traditionally reserved for upperclassmen.
In truth, cadets weren’t supposed to use them for other than emergencies, but it was one of the few areas the professors and other academy authorities chose to ignore unless the cadet in question was already in trouble for something. This allowed the cadets to move between rooms on the sly. But heaven help the cadet who got caught out of their room after curfew.
“Who made the announcement in your dorm?”
“Dame Ivy.” Nadine looked around the room. “Read a statement. Didn’t say who the statement was from. It sounded like it was curated from either the cadre or Baron Vogel or, maybe both.” She focused in on her brother. “It was a lie, you know.”
Jasper nodded. “Yeah. Either they made it up—the professors who are left—or…” He left the sentence dangle. If the professors didn’t make it up, it either came from Baron Vogel or the enemy the cadets hadn’t seen yet.
“We have to do something.”
“Like what, Nadine? We don’t know anything.”
“We do. We know there are enemy commandos at the outlying estates.”
“Where’d you get that from? Your little spy ring?”
Nadine scowled. “Why do you always call it that? I’ve got contacts all over the houses and in the capital. And they’re telling me soldiers in powered armor are taking control of the estates. All the nobles are being rounded up. My New Ex sources say a curfew’s been enacted. We’re…Emporia…is under attack.”
Jasper hated how reasonable she sounded. The mention of commandos made his stomach churn. He didn’t want to think of it and shook his head. “It’s all just a game to them. To you. Gather the most interesting information you can. No way to verify it.”
“They knew something was going on at the spaceport. Garnet says the road into the spaceport has been locked down.”
“Kids. Playing a game.” Anger overrode his fear. He didn’t want to be at war. He didn’t want any of this to be real. Clenching a fist, Jasper saw the hurt on his sister’s face before she hid it and knew he shouldn’t let his anger get the best of him. He took a breath.
Nadine scowled. “We were kids at war. We did what we had to survive. My ‘little spy ring’ is made up of more than kids. Jean helped me start it, and he’s still involved. It’s got guards, groundskeepers, nobles, and other people in the know. Maybe they started working with me because it was a game. It was easy money. But it’s not a game now, and we’ve got to do something. They’ve got all our MechWarriors. They’ve got our ’Mechs.”
“Not all of them. They don’t have the academy ’Mechs. If Baron Vogel is working on something, he might be counting on the academy ’Mechs to help.” Jasper turned to the window and stared at his ghostly reflection. “If the enemy knew the ’Mechs were here, they would’ve taken them by now.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We know the cadre has a plan. Do you have a plan? What ‘something’ do you want to do?”
Nadine stood and paced the room. “I have part of a plan. That’s why I’m here. We know everything’s centered on the spaceport. We need to get in there and see what’s really going on.”
He scoffed. “Not with ’Mechs. Not if we don’t want to advertise to the world that they’re here.”
“All the nobles know they’re here.”
“So?” Jasper shrugged.
Nadine pushed on. “At least we should do some sort of recon. Get actual trained eyes on the spaceport. Garnet is trying to, but she’s not trained like you or me. Or any of the academy cadets. Opal couldn’t tell me anything about the commandos other than what they looked like and were armed with. She didn’t tell me anything about insignias, and I didn’t think to ask. If someone trained had had eyes on them, we would’ve logged it automatically.”
Jasper held up both hands. “No. Stop. We’ve been given our orders. The academy’s on lockdown. I’m not going to break the rules to go running off on a wild scheme that might mess up what the cadre has going on. I’m going to back their play. You should, too.” He turned to her. “I can be taught, as you pointed out. I’m going to listen to my superiors. You need to as well.”
“I’m scared.” Nadine sat on his bed again. “I feel like I need to do something. I don’t want to lose my home again. Our home.”
He sat next to her and leaned into her shoulder. “It’s like you told me when we were processed to come here. We have to trust that they know what they’re doing until we find out otherwise. Officers don’t tell their enlisted everything. What makes you think they’re going to tell cadets?”
Nadine leaned into him. This was one of the real reasons she’d come here: to make sure he was okay and give herself someone else to focus on. “That’s exactly why I think we cadets need to do something. They aren’t going to tell us everything. By the time we know what’s actually going on, it’ll be too late.”
“We have to trust them.”
“I just don’t. I can’t. Not if I want to make sure we survive.
The dorm room door burst open, and Noah stopped in mid-stride. “Oh, hey. Sorry…” He paused. “Oh, it’s just you, Nadine. I thought Jasper might actually be gettin’ some.”
Jasper scowled as he stood. “Not appropriate and not appreciated.”
Noah took half a step backward. “Sorry.”
Nadine glanced at the clock. “I have to go anyway. Lights out soon.” She climbed out the window. Ducking back in, she pointed at Jasper. “Think about what I said.”
“You think about what I said, and don’t do anything stupid.”
Nadine rolled her eyes then disappeared down the fire escape.
Jasper closed the window and threw himself on his bed. He covered his face with one arm and tried not to think about Nadine, her spy ring, the thought of curfews in the capital, or commandos in the outlying estates.
Noah cleared his throat. “So…what was that all about?”
“Nothing.” He smiled. Jasper knew it was going to be a long night. Part of him knew Nadine was right. But what could a bunch of cadets do if they were at war again?