"The ship is your life," Corporal Greaves reminded him. "You have to become more comfortable in there than out here."
The man was hanging on the edge of the simulator pod. Oz nodded at him from the seat within, his hands wrapped tight against the joysticks.
"You find one target. You destroy it. You find the next. That's how this works. There may be a thousand things coming at you, friend and foe alike. But you focus on one target. You kill it. You move on. Understood?"
Oz nodded again.
"Learning through failure," Greaves said. "Let's go." He slapped at the control button.
The seat rumble forward as the pod sealed itself. There was a moment of darkness, and then the controls blinked to life. The view screen ahead of him flickered, and then showed the air field ahead of him, a perfect copy of the real thing.
The corporal's voice echoed around the pod, fuzzy from intercom static. "Take off pre-check. Let's go, private."
Oz worked his way down the list, reading off items as he verified them. "Cameras... not in order," he said, stopping suddenly. "Looks like the rear eight is out. Or, there's interference."
"What do you want to do about it?" the corporal, his voice giving away nothing.
Oz scrambled, trying to picture the training manual in his head, and the troubleshooting indexes.
"Running diagnostic now." When in doubt, reboot. The scan ran for a moment, then finished. The static still remained. "I think it's a cable loose."
"Can you see out of it?"
"Not well."
"Are you asking to scrap the mission?"
Oz weighed his options. It was some kind of protocol test. "Yes, sir. I want a mechanics check."
There was a long moment of silence. A sigh came through the intercom. "A good decision."
There was a click, and then the camera returned to normal. "Better now?"
"Yes, sir."
With the checklist complete, there was nothing left to do but to set the take off procedure in motion. The computer rolled him onto to track. At Command's word, he was sent rocketing forward down the runway.
The visuals might have been virtual, but the motion inside most definitely was not. Oz's body flattened into the chair as the force of take-off crushed against him. Before it had even settled in, an alarm was blurting against his ear. The sound of it was drowned out in the pressure that pounded through his ears. But something was wrong.
The floor trembled violently. There was a hard pull to the side, and then he was in a spiral. The world flipped upside down, then flipped again, spinning him wildly. The ground appeared and, with one final, violent shake, the lights were gone and the pod slid back open.
Oz unbuckled and crawled out on his elbows, vomiting onto the floor as he went. The training room was spinning around him, and he collapsed onto his back, shaking.
"Did you see what happened?" Greaves asked. He sounded far away.
Oz felt sick again as he tried to respond.
"Enemy clipped you as you left the ground. Did you hear them fire?"
"No," Oz grunted. He spat against the floor.
"And you never will. Listen for the alarms, check your screens, stay alert." The corporal watched him for a moment. "In this case, though, there was nothing to be done. Better get used to having your guts in your lungs and the world in freefall.
"It comes with experience. Fight through it, private."
Oz climbed to his feet. "Can we run it again, sir?"
"Absolutely."
By the third time, he was able to 'die' without getting sick. Either he was getting better, or his stomach was empty, he decided.
"No time for lunch," Greaves told them as they headed back down the hall an hour later. Their allotted time slot was complete and the floor outside the pod had been polished clean again.
"I made a list of chores that need to be done before we hit the gym," Greaves said.
He handed Oz a strip of paper. Laundry, polish boots, collect mail, it read. And that was only the start. Oz pocketed it and saluted as Greaves split off and headed toward the mess hall to eat.
Oz was lucky. He had impressed the man by pushing on, he could tell. Half the cadets in the training room had been driven to tears as their trainers bellowed into their ears. Some of them were being stripped and spanked in the open hall for their poor performances. More than one trainer had cut his new recruit loose entirely, and sent them off to work under someone else. Someone with more patience and lower standards.
But Oz realized he must not have impressed Greaves too much. If he had really done well, the man would have rewarded him.
It was only day one, though. There was time to get better, he reminded himself.
Oz ran through the chores quickly, ignoring his pangs of hunger. Between the previous day's workout, the sparring at night, and then a morning spent fighting controls in high gravity, his body was weak with hunger. The last item he had to do was to bring the mail in. He snatched it up and, when no one else was in the hall to see him, he sprinted at full speed back to the bedroom.
He was still sweating when Greaves returned. He had two other corporals in tow behind him.
"My God. He's a tiny thing," one of them said.
Oz put his back to the wall and saluted them all.
"Yes he is," Greaves said. "Private, you're to follow these men, do as they need, and return by fifteen-thirty."
"Yes, sir," Oz barked. He saluted again.
"Thanks for the business, boys," Greaves said to the two men.
Oz noticed for the first time that Greaves was carrying a new pair of boots in his hand, and a dog-eared book under his arm.
The two strangers spun and stepped out into the hall. Oz followed them out the doors of the 2B dormitory wing.
They didn't travel far, only one hallway separated their wing from Greaves'. They entered a room that seemed an exact copy of the corporal's, down the creaseless bed sheets and undecorated walls.
They were both shorter than Greaves, but broader. Both were shaved clean on their chins, with close crop buzz cuts on top. In their off-duty gray sweats, they looked nearly identical. They could have been brothers.
