By the end of the second week, nobody in Jim’s group was talking about Odin.
Not openly, anyway.
Tobias had run a few more searches from approved Academy terminals, each one returning the same blunt answer.
NO RECORDS FOUND
After that, even he seemed willing to leave it alone. Henry stopped telling the story. Isaac occasionally muttered something about secret ghost ships whenever an instructor mentioned restricted material, but the joke lost most of its appeal when nobody reacted.
Hale never mentioned the name again.
That was probably the strangest part, although ordinary Academy life made it surprisingly easy not to dwell on it.
Their days filled before sunrise and rarely seemed to empty before lights-out. Medical baselines, classroom work, physical assessments, systems familiarisation, emergency procedures, navigation theory, communications discipline, equipment inspections. The Academy did not ask what they believed they were good at and then politely organise itself around their ambitions. It exposed them to everything it considered basic and watched what happened.
Most mornings smelled of cold air, wet concrete and whatever the mess hall was attempting to pass off as breakfast. By afternoon, the training buildings had accumulated the warmer smells of people, equipment and overworked ventilation. At night the distant shipyards still filled the horizon with points of light, and the low vibration of departures sometimes travelled through the barracks floor long after the cadets had stopped noticing it consciously.
Odin had to compete with all of that.
It lost.
Flight training was the exception.
Nothing competed with flight training for Jim.
Caleb knew it and had made it his personal responsibility to ensure Jim enjoyed none of it peacefully.
“Eighty-eight,” he said over breakfast.
Jim looked up from a plate of eggs that had the texture of insulation foam and roughly the same emotional effect.
“What?”
Caleb smiled. “My first simulator score.”
“I know what it is.”
“Just checking.”
Tobias sat opposite him with a tablet propped beside his tray. “You know the first assessment isn’t cumulative?”
Caleb looked at his brother. “What’s your point?”
“The score becomes irrelevant once they assess you again.”
“It establishes superiority.”
“It establishes that you performed better once.”
“Which is superiority.”
Henry was attempting to cut a piece of toast that seemed structurally resistant to knives. He looked at Jim rather than Caleb.
“He’s been like this since he was nine.”
Caleb pointed at him. “You don’t get involved.”
Henry continued sawing at the toast. “When we were twelve he beat Tobias in a climbing race and talked about it for three months.”
Tobias glanced up. “Because he pushed me.”
“I encouraged you physically,” Caleb said.
“You shoved me off the platform.”
Caleb looked at Jim. “He still lost.”
Aisha arrived with a tray and stopped beside the table.
“Are we really doing this before six in the morning?”
Luc followed her, carrying a drink that smelled stronger than anything the mess hall had a legal right to serve.
“We’ve been doing it since five fifty-three,” he said.
Aisha sat down. “Why do you know the exact time?”
Luc looked genuinely confused by the question. “Because I was here.”
Daniel joined them last, carrying two cups.
Isaac’s chair was empty.
Daniel put one cup beside it.
Aisha looked towards the entrance. “He’s coming?”
“Eventually.”
“How do you know?”
Daniel sat. “He threatened to kill me when I woke him.”
Luc frowned. “That doesn’t answer the question.”
“It means he’s awake.”
Right on cue, Isaac came through the doors with his uniform half fastened and his hair still damp. He dropped into the empty chair, picked up the cup Daniel had left and drank before saying anything.
“Morning.”
Aisha looked at his collar. “You’re missing a fastening.”
Isaac looked down. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
He checked again.
“Oh.”
Daniel slid a small packet of sugar across the table.
Isaac looked at him with genuine gratitude. “I’ve decided you’re my favourite person.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“You woke me yesterday.”
“I woke you today.”
“Today you brought coffee.”
Luc leaned across the table. “Do you know what our first exercise is?”
Isaac drank again. “No.”
“Formation work.”
That caught Jim’s attention.
Caleb heard it too.
His smile returned.
Aisha saw both of them react. “Please don’t turn this into a competition.”
Caleb answered first. “It isn’t.”
Jim nodded. “Definitely not.”
Aisha looked between them. “Convincing.”
The flight-training hangar was one of the few places where the group became quiet without being ordered to.
The official flight programme was not what recruitment vids had encouraged them to imagine. There were real ships on MacArthur, of course, including training craft the cadets were not yet trusted to touch without supervision, but much of the early work was deliberately less glamorous. The Academy had simulator frames, cockpit facsimiles and training stations that could be configured around familiar Navy layouts. They had already spent hours learning where controls belonged in Gladius and Hornet cockpits and being asked what they would do when an instructor removed the one display they had been relying on.
Jim had been disappointed the first time he saw one of the simpler training frames.
That feeling lasted until he sat in it.
Once the canopy display closed and the simulation wrapped around the seat, imagination stopped mattering.
For the formation exercise, six stations were networked together under a Hornet training profile. The Academy did not pretend the simulation was identical to an operational F7 in every respect; the purpose was formation discipline, not qualifying them on a combat craft. The controls were close enough to make Jim’s palms sweat anyway.
Lieutenant Mara Venn stood at the instructor station with a tablet tucked against one arm. She was compact, grey-eyed and had the particular stillness of somebody who never needed to raise her voice because everybody had already learnt what happened when they failed to listen.
“Six craft,” she said. “One flight. You are not being assessed on individual heroics. If one of you decides to demonstrate how talented you are at the expense of the formation, I will personally make certain the score reflects your generosity.”
Luc lifted his hand halfway.
Venn looked at him. “No.”
He lowered it.
“I hadn’t asked anything, Lieutenant.”
“I’ve met you, Cadet Moreau.”
A few people laughed.
Venn turned to the assignment board.
“For this run you are Alpha Flight. Ward, Alpha-One and flight lead. Radcliffe, Alpha-Two. Rahman, Alpha-Three. Cross, Alpha-Four. Moreau, Alpha-Five. Morrow, Alpha-Six.”
Isaac looked at the display. “Why am I Six?”
Venn did not look at him. “Because there are five numbers before it.”
“I meant tactically.”
“Cadet Morrow, you have completed four flight assessments.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“You damaged your simulated craft in three of them.”
“Two.”
Venn turned her head.
Isaac paused.
“Two that I thought were my fault,” he amended.
“Alpha-Six. Take the station.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
Caleb settled into the lead simulator with the expression of somebody being handed exactly what he believed the universe owed him.
Jim climbed into Alpha-Two.
The seat restraint tightened across his chest. Fans somewhere inside the training rig moved warm air over his hands. The smell was a mixture of plastic, electronics and the faint human residue that no amount of cleaning ever entirely removed from equipment used by hundreds of cadets.
The canopy display darkened.
The hangar disappeared.
Pale sky replaced it.
A training valley resolved below, its terrain rendered with enough detail that his body immediately began treating the artificial horizon as real. The controls came alive beneath his hands. Status indicators populated the displays.
Five contacts appeared around him.
Caleb’s voice arrived over the headset.
“Alpha Flight, check in.”
Jim answered first. “Alpha-Two, ready.”
Aisha followed. “Alpha-Three, ready.”
Daniel’s voice came next. “Alpha-Four, ready.”
Luc answered, “Alpha-Five, ready.”
Isaac paused just long enough to be irritating.
“Alpha-Six, deeply offended but ready.”
Venn cut into the channel immediately.
“Alpha-Six.”
“Alpha-Six, ready.”
“Better.”
Caleb brought them forwards.
The simulated Hornets accelerated as a group.
Jim watched him too closely.
That was his first mistake.
Every correction Caleb made, Jim copied. A fractional bank. A touch of climb. A small change in throttle. For the first thirty seconds it kept him almost perfectly aligned off Caleb’s side.
It also meant Jim was flying Caleb’s craft instead of his own.
The route curved around a bank of cloud with rising terrain beneath it.
“Alpha Flight, left turn,” Caleb called.
He banked.
Jim followed immediately.
Too immediately.
The geometry compressed. Jim’s range marker tightened against Caleb’s.
Aisha’s voice came over the channel.
“Alpha-Two, spacing.”
Jim corrected backwards.
That correction affected Daniel behind him.
“Alpha-Two, Alpha-Four. You’re coming back on me.”
“Correcting.”
“Correct forwards.”
Luc laughed once over the radio.
Venn’s voice arrived before he could add anything.
“Alpha-Five. Operational traffic only.”
“Copy, Lieutenant.”
They stabilised.
His pulse had climbed without him noticing.
Jim was annoyed.
Not at Caleb.
At himself.
Jim knew what he was doing wrong. He simply had not understood it until the formation made the mistake visible.
Caleb did not need Jim to imitate every movement.
He needed Jim to occupy the correct place in relation to the whole flight.
The next turn came.
Jim forced himself to stop staring directly at Alpha-One and widened his attention.
Relative position.
Terrain.
Aisha on the other side.
Daniel behind.
Speed.
Spacing.
The formation stopped looking like six individual craft.
For a few seconds, Jim saw it as one moving shape.
Caleb chose where the shape went. The rest of the flight held it together.
The difference was immediate.
His corrections became smaller.
Jim noticed Aisha climbing a fraction high before it mattered. Luc was beginning to lag. Isaac had closed slightly on Daniel.
“Alpha-Five, you’re dropping,” Jim said.
Luc corrected. “Copy, Alpha-Two.”
Isaac’s voice followed. “Alpha-Four, you’re slow.”
Daniel answered immediately. “Negative, Alpha-Six. You’re close.”
A short pause.
“Copy,” Isaac said. “Correcting.”
Caleb came over the channel. “Alpha-Two, stop managing my flight.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
Aisha interrupted, calm as ever. “Alpha-One, Alpha-Five was dropping.”
Luc added, “For the record, Alpha-Five appreciates the assistance.”
“Alpha-Five,” Venn said.
“Operational traffic only. Copy.”
The valley widened.
Then three warning tones sounded.
Aisha’s engine output dropped on Jim’s display.
Her craft began losing speed.
“Alpha-Three, power loss,” she reported. “Forty-two per cent and falling.”
Caleb reacted instantly.
“Alpha-Three, descend. Rest of flight climb and clear.”
Jim’s hands had already started obeying when he looked ahead.
The terrain rose under Aisha’s projected descent path.
“Negative,” Jim said.
For half a second nobody spoke.
Caleb’s reply was sharper. “Alpha-Two, say again?”
“Terrain ahead. She can’t descend enough.”
“I can see it.”
Aisha checked before the argument could grow.
“Alpha-One, Alpha-Two is correct. Minimum clearance in twelve seconds.”
Caleb changed the order immediately.
“Alpha-Three, hold altitude. Reduce speed. Flight, compress and match.”
They did.
Aisha’s damaged craft slipped backwards through the formation. Daniel moved to create room. Isaac widened without being told. For several seconds it worked.
Then Luc drifted towards Daniel.
Daniel corrected away from him.
That pushed Daniel towards Jim.
The collapse was still small, but Jim could see where it was going.
“Alpha-Five, right.”
Luc did not respond quickly enough.
“Alpha-Five, right now.”
He moved.
Daniel passed behind Jim with less than the safe separation margin. A warning flashed across Jim’s display.
“Sorry,” Luc said.
Caleb’s voice snapped over the channel. “Alpha-Five, hold your position and cut the commentary.”
Luc went silent.
Aisha’s engine continued failing.
“Alpha-Three, status?” Caleb asked.
“Thirty-eight per cent thrust. Stable for the moment.”
“Can you hold altitude?”
“Twenty seconds, maybe less.”
Jim checked the route display. “Open ground in twenty-four.”
Caleb answered, “I know.”
“That was for Alpha-Three.”
Daniel’s voice cut in. “Alpha-Four to Alpha-One and Alpha-Two. Can the marriage counselling wait until after landing?”
Aisha laughed once.
Even Caleb did.
The tension eased just enough.
They cleared the valley.
Aisha put the damaged craft down on level ground and the rest of them circled according to Caleb’s instructions.
Then the simulation froze.
The false sky vanished.
The hangar returned around Jim with the sudden flatness of a room after a dream.
He could smell the warm electronics again. Sweat had gathered between his shoulder blades. His hands were still gripping the controls harder than they needed to.
Venn stood at the front of the stations.
“Alpha-One.”
Caleb removed his headset. “Lieutenant.”
“You reacted quickly to the failure.”
“Thank you.”
“Too quickly.”
His expression changed.
Venn continued. “You issued a descent order before checking the terrain. Radcliffe corrected you. You did not like that.”
Caleb glanced towards Jim. “No, Lieutenant.”
“Why?”
He considered the answer instead of reaching for the first one.
“Because I was lead. I thought he should follow the order.”
Venn nodded. “Good. Honest answer. Bad assumption.”
She looked towards Jim.
“Alpha-Two.”
“Lieutenant.”
“You identified the terrain conflict.”
“Yes.”
“You also spent the remainder of the exercise monitoring everybody else.”
Jim waited.
“You were not flight lead.”
“No, Lieutenant.”
“Yet you began behaving as though every deviation required your comment.”
“I was trying to help.”
“I know.”
That somehow made it worse.
Venn turned towards Aisha.
“Alpha-Three. Who performed best?”
Aisha looked mildly surprised. “In the flight?”
“Yes.”
She thought for several seconds.
“Alpha-Four.”
Daniel looked up. “Me?”
Venn ignored him. “Why?”
Aisha answered carefully. “He followed the lead, adjusted when the formation changed, made room when my engine failed and didn’t create another problem while trying to solve the first one.”
Venn nodded. “Exactly.”
Daniel looked almost embarrassed.
Isaac leaned towards him. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
Daniel muttered, “It won’t.”
Venn heard both of them.
“Cadet Cross did something inexperienced crews struggle to do. He remained useful.”
Nobody laughed.
“Remember that,” she said. “Being impressive and being useful are not the same thing.”
Her gaze moved to Caleb.
“A good pilot does not become a good lead merely because everyone else is behind them.”
Then to Jim.
“And awareness becomes interference if you cannot distinguish between information somebody needs and information you simply want to give them.”
That landed harder than Jim expected.
Venn turned towards Luc.
“Alpha-Five. What happened in the valley?”
Luc straightened. “I lost position, Lieutenant.”
“Why?”
“I was watching Alpha-Four because he was moving.”
“And stopped flying your own reference.”
Luc’s mouth tightened. “Yes, Lieutenant.”
Finally Venn looked at Isaac.
“Alpha-Six.”
Isaac sat straighter.
“You followed instructions.”
He smiled. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“Eventually.”
The smile weakened. “Yes, Lieutenant.”
Venn tapped her tablet.
“Again.”
They all looked at her.
“Same route. New lead. Rahman, you are now Alpha-One. Ward, Alpha-Two. Radcliffe, Alpha-Three. Cross, Alpha-Four. Moreau, Alpha-Five. Morrow, Alpha-Six.”
Aisha blinked. “Me?”
“Do you see another Rahman?”
“No, Lieutenant.”
“Then take the lead station.”
Caleb looked towards Jim.
Jim tried not to enjoy it.
Caleb saw that he was enjoying it.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t need to.”
Aisha lowered herself into the lead simulator. “Can we complete one exercise without the two of you comparing yourselves?”
Caleb said, “Probably.”
Jim said, “Unlikely.”
Daniel shook his head.
Luc pointed between them. “This is going to last years.”
None of them knew how right Luc was.
Aisha’s flight felt different from the first acceleration.
She was slower.
Not hesitant. Deliberate.
Caleb had flown the course as though it were an opponent to beat. Aisha treated it as a problem to finish with all six craft intact.
She called every turn early. She asked for status before the difficult sections. When Luc began dropping back, she corrected him before Jim did. When Isaac closed spacing, she moved him wider without sounding irritated.
The simulated failure came again.
This time it was Jim’s.
Two warning lights appeared together. Thrust dropped sharply.
“Alpha-Three, power loss. Forty-one per cent.”
Aisha answered immediately. “Can you maintain current speed?”
“Negative.”
“Flight, reduce to Alpha-Three’s sustainable speed.”
Caleb came over the channel. “Alpha-One, that’ll put us outside course time.”
Aisha did not argue.
“I know.”
“We’ll fail the timing target.”
“Copy. We fail together.”
Caleb went quiet.
Jim did not know why that stayed with him.
Perhaps because it was the first command decision he had heard from one of them that did not sound like a cadet trying to prove something.
There was no speech attached to it.
She simply decided that six craft arriving late mattered more than five arriving on time.
They finished outside the target.
Nobody crashed.
Venn gave Aisha the highest leadership assessment of the day.
Caleb hated that for approximately six minutes.
Then, while they were leaving the hangar, he caught up with her.
“How did you know when to slow everybody?”
Aisha glanced at him. “When Jim said he couldn’t hold speed.”
“No, before that. You were already opening the spacing.”
She thought about it. “Your left wing was compressing. If the failure had been somebody behind him, we’d have had nowhere to put them.”
Caleb absorbed that.
“Right.”
He did not make a joke.
That told Jim something about Caleb too.
He was competitive to the point of irritation, but he wanted to understand why somebody had beaten him more than he wanted to pretend they had not.
The Academy kept changing the question after that.
Once they became comfortable with flight principles, they moved into engineering exercises. When Isaac started enjoying engineering, they gave him procedure-heavy maintenance where improvisation was penalised. When Daniel began outperforming people in fault diagnosis, they gave him systems the correct procedure required him to isolate rather than repair.
He hated that more than Isaac did.
The exercise that finally made them argue took place inside a modular training compartment built to imitate the working constraints of a small ship machinery bay without pretending to be any particular manufacturer’s interior. Removable housings filled one wall. Power-distribution boards and coolant lines ran through transparent training sections so instructors could introduce faults safely.
The room was warmer than the corridor outside. Fans moved air across the equipment, carrying the smell of heated insulation and the faint mineral scent of coolant used by the training rigs.
A simulated leak had disabled one of two power-control assemblies.
They had twelve minutes to restore emergency power.
Isaac opened the damaged housing.
Daniel immediately said, “Don’t.”
Isaac looked back. “Why?”
“Procedure says isolate it.”
“Procedure’s slow.”
“It’s damaged.”
“I can bypass it.”
Daniel pointed at the timer. “We’ve got eleven minutes.”
“Exactly.”
Jim stood with Tobias at the fault board. Aisha had the checklist. Luc was trying to track the sequence without speaking over everybody. Caleb looked as if the lack of a flight stick were a personal insult. Henry was reading the emergency procedure faster than anyone else.
“Step fourteen,” Henry said. “Secondary bus can carry the emergency load.”
Isaac looked over. “Temporarily.”
Aisha checked the line. “Maximum seven minutes at full rated transfer.”
Isaac nodded. “We only need twelve.”
Daniel stared at him. “Do you hear yourself?”
“It’ll last seven.”
“We need twelve.”
“Then we fix the primary in seven.”
Daniel shook his head. “No.”
Isaac pointed inside the open housing. “I can bridge around the failed regulator.”
“And if that isn’t the only fault, you put uncontrolled load through the bus.”
Isaac turned towards Tobias. “Is there another fault?”
Tobias studied the board. “Nothing showing.”
Daniel answered before Isaac could. “That isn’t what he asked.”
Isaac frowned. “It’s exactly what I asked.”
“No. You asked if there’s another fault. Tobias said nothing is showing.”
For a second the only sound in the compartment was the training fans.
Jim looked at the board again.
Daniel was right.
There was a difference.
Isaac knew it too, which annoyed him more than if Daniel had simply quoted a rule.
“Fine,” Isaac said. “What’s your plan?”
Daniel pointed towards the secondary assembly. “Isolate primary. Transfer emergency loads. Leave non-essential systems offline.”
Caleb looked at the objective display. “That doesn’t restore full power.”
Aisha answered him. “It doesn’t ask for full power. It asks for emergency power.”
Caleb reread it.
She was right.
Luc looked at Daniel. “So we don’t repair the fault?”
Daniel hesitated.
Jim could see how much he disliked the answer.
Everything about him wanted to fix the damaged system. His eyes kept returning to the open housing as though leaving it broken were a personal failure.
Finally, he reached over and closed the panel.
“Not now,” he said. “We complete the task.”
Isaac looked genuinely betrayed. “You’re walking away from a repair?”
Daniel latched the housing. “I’m keeping the ship alive.”
They transferred the emergency loads.
The system stabilised with four minutes remaining.
The instructor marked the exercise complete.
Isaac spent the next ten minutes explaining why his bypass would have worked.
Daniel spent nine of those minutes explaining that would have was the phrase people used immediately before filling out an accident report.
Their first proper argument lasted until the mess hall.
It would not be their last.
Tobias’s ability emerged more quietly.
The Academy gave them a navigation exercise built around six simulated survey reports. Five were accurate. One contained corrupted data. Their task was to construct a safe route using the information provided.
Most of them started plotting immediately.
Tobias did not.
He read.
And read.
After several minutes, Caleb looked across at him.
“Are you going to do anything?”
Tobias did not look up. “I am.”
“You haven’t plotted anything.”
“I know.”
Henry smiled. “He does this.”
Caleb turned to him. “I know he does this. I’ve lived with it for eighteen years.”
Jim had already built half his route. Aisha had more. Luc was comparing transit times. Daniel was still checking the first reports. Isaac had decided there was probably a trick and was trying to work out what it was.
Tobias raised his hand.
The instructor approached. “Ward?”
“Report Four is wrong.”
Nothing in the instructor’s expression changed. “Why?”
“The timestamps.”
Jim looked back at his copy.
Tobias pointed to the first entry. “Survey craft enters the region at fourteen twenty-two local. First observation is fourteen thirty-one.”
The instructor waited.
“Second observation says the sensor sweep lasted eleven minutes,” Tobias continued. “But the third entry is fourteen thirty-seven.”
Jim saw it then.
Six minutes.
The report claimed eleven.
The instructor asked, “What does that tell you?”
“Either the timestamp is wrong or the duration is wrong.”
“Which?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why does it matter?”
Tobias indicated the plotted region. “Because the recommended route places us inside the area supposedly observed during the five minutes that don’t exist.”
Jim looked at his own route.
It passed directly through it.
So did Aisha’s.
Luc’s too.
Caleb had not reached that part and looked delighted by this technical victory.
The instructor addressed the room.
“The exercise is not asking whether you can calculate a route. It is asking whether you know what information you’re calculating from.”
Tobias sat back.
Henry whispered, “Show-off.”
Tobias replied, “You hadn’t noticed it.”
“I was about to.”
“No, you weren’t.”
Caleb looked between them. “You’ve been having this argument since childhood. Do either of you expect it to end?”
Henry smiled. “No.”
Tobias returned to the report.
Jim kept looking at Tobias for another moment.
Not because he had found an error.
Because he had found it before looking for the answer.
Most of them had treated the data as true because an instructor had handed it to them.
Tobias had treated it as information.
That was not the same thing.
For the first time in several days, Jim thought about the Academy terminal and its empty result.
NO RECORDS FOUND
He wondered whether Tobias was thinking about it too.
Jim did not ask.
Henry’s advantage was memory.
Unfortunately for Henry, the Academy discovered that almost immediately and began finding increasingly inventive ways to make memory insufficient.
He could reproduce whole sections of briefings after hearing them once. So instructors started giving them incomplete briefings.
Henry hated that.
“That’s unfair,” he said after one command exercise.
Hale had been observing from the rear of the room. He looked up. “What is?”
“You left information out, sir.”
“Yes.”
Henry waited for more.
Hale gave him none.
“We couldn’t complete the exercise correctly without it,” Henry said.
“You completed it.”
“Not correctly.”
Hale walked forward. “What did you do when you realised information was missing?”
Henry considered the answer. “We made assumptions.”
“Why?”
“Because we needed an answer.”
“Did you?”
Henry frowned.
Hale pointed towards the report. “You were asked for a recommendation, Cadet Voss. Not certainty.”
Henry looked down at the page.
“You remembered every number I gave you,” Hale continued. “You also invented three I didn’t.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hale’s voice softened slightly. “Memory is useful. Confidence in memory is dangerous.”
Something about the phrasing made Jim look at Hale.
For a second, he thought about Odin.
If the same thought passed through Hale’s mind, nothing showed.
Then the class moved on.
Luc found his place almost by accident.
It happened during a hangar-coordination simulation.
None of them were flying.
That disappointed Caleb and Jim immediately.
The exercise involved moving eight simulated craft through a launch sequence while maintenance crews, fuel teams and ground vehicles crossed the same deck. It was less glamorous than formation flying and, within thirty seconds, considerably more confusing.
Fourteen communications channels fed into the control station.
Luc stared at the board.
“Fourteen?”
The instructor nodded. “Correct.”
“At once?”
“Yes.”
“I can barely manage one conversation.”
Every one of them looked at him.
Luc paused. “Fine. Bad example.”
The exercise began.
Two craft requested clearance at the same time. A fuel vehicle reported a blocked lane. A maintenance crew needed access to one launch position. Another craft aborted startup.
Luc answered people in the order they spoke.
It failed immediately.
His voice became quicker. The radio calls overlapped. He tried to answer one channel while another interrupted. The board filled with unresolved movements.
Aisha leaned towards him. “Stop.”
Luc looked at her. “I can’t stop. I have three people waiting.”
“Not talking. Stop reacting.”
“That’s easy for you to—”
“Group them.”
Luc stared at the traffic display.
Something changed.
He stopped trying to answer every voice.
Instead, he started moving the problem.
“Craft Four, hold position.”
“Four holding.”
“Fuel Team Two, finish crossing Charlie and clear left.”
“Two moving.”
“Craft One, you’re next after Charlie clears.”
“Copy.”
“Maintenance Six, how long?”
“Two minutes.”
“You’ve got ninety seconds.”
“That’s not—”
“Ninety.”
He changed channel before they could argue.
Within a minute, the board looked different.
Not quieter.
Organised.
Luc began remembering which channel belonged to which problem. He anticipated conflicts before they happened. When a craft requested priority launch, he denied it because a service vehicle was approaching the same lane from the opposite side.
Jim watched him.
The man who could not walk through a corridor without talking to somebody had become the calmest person in the room because everybody was talking at once.
Afterwards, he stared at his assessment result.
“That’s my highest score.”
Aisha looked over his shoulder. “By a considerable amount.”
Luc seemed offended. “I’m better when everyone speaks at once?”
Daniel nodded. “Apparently.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Isaac shook his head. “No. It’s the first thing about you that makes sense.”
Luc pointed at him. “I’m taking that as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Too late.”
Aisha was harder to notice because she rarely did anything spectacular.
That turned out to be the point.
She was rarely the person who created the problem.
When a group panicked during an emergency drill, Aisha did not. When instructions contradicted one another, she asked which objective mattered. When Caleb and Jim became too interested in being right, she noticed before either of them did. When Isaac suggested something dangerous, she asked what happened if he was wrong. When Daniel became too focused on repairing one system, she reminded him what the actual task required.
None of it looked dramatic.
Groups simply worked better when she was in them.
Hale noticed.
Of course he did.
After an emergency-response exercise he asked her to remain behind.
The others slowed deliberately as they left.
Luc was the least convincing.
Hale looked through the doorway. “Cadet Moreau.”
Luc stopped. “Sir.”
“If you walk any slower, you’ll begin travelling backwards.”
Luc increased his pace immediately.
They waited around the corner instead.
Aisha emerged several minutes later.
Isaac asked first, “What did he want?”
Aisha kept walking. “Nothing.”
Caleb joined her. “He kept you behind for nothing?”
“He asked questions.”
Henry looked interested. “What questions?”
“Why I made certain decisions.”
Luc moved alongside her. “And?”
“And I answered them.”
Isaac frowned. “That’s it?”
Aisha looked at him. “Not every conversation is a conspiracy.”
Isaac glanced towards Tobias. “Some are.”
Tobias did not answer.
That was unusual enough for Jim to notice.
By then, another week had passed since the ghost-story conversation.
Odin had become one of those things they occasionally remembered when something reminded them of it. A joke. A search result. Hale’s unanswered question. Nothing more.
Then Tobias disappeared for three hours.
Nobody worried at first.
Cadets had study periods, extra instruction, medical appointments and disciplinary meetings. In Isaac’s case, all four could plausibly happen in the same afternoon.
But Tobias was never late without telling Caleb.
By twenty-two hundred, Caleb had checked his terminal twice.
Henry noticed. “He’s probably in the library.”
Caleb looked at him. “Why would he be there this late?”
“He likes libraries.”
“Nobody likes libraries.”
“Tobias does.”
Daniel was sitting at the communal table sorting a training toolkit back into its case. “He’ll be back.”
Caleb nodded. “Yeah.”
Five minutes passed.
The barracks door opened.
Tobias came in carrying his tablet under one arm.
Henry looked up immediately. “There he is.”
Caleb’s irritation came out faster than his relief.
“Where were you?”
Tobias closed the door. “Library.”
Henry smiled. “Told you.”
Caleb ignored him. “For three hours?”
Tobias did not answer.
That was when Jim noticed Tobias’s expression.
He did not look frightened.
He looked preoccupied, as if most of him were still standing somewhere else trying to solve a problem.
His eyes went briefly towards the corridor before he crossed the room.
Isaac noticed too.
“What happened?”
Tobias set his tablet on the table. “Nothing.”
Caleb stood. “That’s clearly not true.”
“I’m fine.”
Henry’s smile faded. “Tobias?”
Tobias looked at him.
For several seconds neither spoke.
Whatever passed between Henry and the twins belonged to years before Jim and the others had known them.
Finally, Tobias sat down.
“I found something.”
The room changed, not because anybody was scared, but because every one of them knew what Tobias meant before he said it.
Isaac moved closer.
Aisha lowered the tablet she had been reading.
Daniel stopped packing the tool case.
Luc pushed the door fully shut, then seemed to realise how dramatic that looked and quietly leaned against it anyway.
Caleb stared at his brother.
“Odin?”
Tobias nodded.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Henry asked, “What did you find?”
Tobias looked around at them.
“Not on a terminal.”
Isaac frowned. “We’re in a barracks.”
“I mean I don’t want to show it on one.”
Caleb’s face tightened. “What happened?”
Tobias rested both hands on the table.
“The record disappeared while I was reading it.”