Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman-
The worn path on the commandant’s office rug was a testament to generations of anxious officers, and my boots were adding a few more microns of wear to the weave. Pacing was a useless habit, a physical manifestation of mental gears grinding against a problem with no immediate solution.
It did nothing for the low, throbbing ache in my back, a constant companion that flared into a sharp, stabbing reminder of my own mortality with every other step. The magitech implant felt like a shard of ice lodged against my spine, a failed miracle that had traded one kind of death for a slower, more precise variety of agony.
Commander Mike Jenkins, watching me from behind his impossibly clean desk, wore a grin that was equal parts pride and sheer, unadulterated terror. He was enjoying this a little too much.
“She did what?” I asked again, as if repetition could somehow sand the impossible edges off the answer and make it fit into a universe that made sense.
“She broke the Kobayashi punitive training scenario,” Mike repeated, the words still ludicrous. “Shattered it. We didn’t have anything bigger than a Titan coded into the threat matrix, Dave. It’s hardwired to be realistic. The heaviest rift breaks in recorded history have never vomited forth anything larger than a Titan-class bio-horror. You can’t even find anything bigger unless you head out into the intergalactic void, and whatever nightmares drift out there in the absolute dark would make a Chaos Lord shit his own corroded intestines.”
I stopped pacing, planting my hands on the cool, polished surface of his desk. The scent of lemon oil polish and stale coffee filled my nostrils. “But that doesn’t make any sense. It takes a full battle line, coordinated fire from a dozen capital ships, to even challenge a Tyrant."
"A Titan? The last confirmed Titan kill was during the Height of the First Empire, and the fleet that did it was lost to the last ship. Are you absolutely certain she didn’t just cheat the sim? It’s a time-honored tradition for tech adepts to find a backdoor in the software. It’s practically a final exam in itself.”
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Mike shook his head, the grin never slipping. “Nope. I ran the diagnostics myself, twice. Burrowed so deep into the code I could smell the quantum foam. Everything she did was completely within her registered tech affinity as an adept and her skill training. She’s just… obscenely, terrifyingly fast at improvisation. She’s been in that particular meat grinder more than any other student, knew about the graveyard of hulks in the Sargasso sector, and hit it for salvage before she even had to engage the first planet-killer."
"Admittedly, it’s just a simulation, and pulling that off in realspace is probably a physical impossibility, but by the time she polished off the Titan, she had a flotilla of ship-killer drones, over two hundred… uhh… cannibal builder SI drones rebuilding her munitions from scrap, and six battle drones I wouldn’t hesitate to label mega-dreadnoughts, using the planet-killer’s own armor-piercing shells as hull plating.”
He let out a short, incredulous chuckle. “The kicker? She custom-designed the dreadnought SI coding on the fly, in the middle of the firestorm. Sent one of them, this over-engined, barely coherent hulk, on a long-course slingshot around the system’s sun. Used a billion tons of scavenged metal as a makeshift relativistic kinetic kill vehicle against the Titan. Honestly, she called in, sounding genuinely confused, when nothing else spawned. We didn’t have a victory condition coded because we’ve never needed one for that simulation. The assumption was always a glorious, fiery death.”
“I told her she did ‘reasonably well,’” Mike continued, his tone shifting to something more pragmatic. “Joined the long list of graduates to crash the simulation with a clever stunt, no need to get a swelled head about it. People are watching, Dave. Eyes we can’t see.”
I nodded slowly, the implications settling in my gut like cold lead. People are watching. The most dangerous words in the galaxy. “Look, it’s not that I mind her doing the impossible. Stars know we need a few miracles. It’s not even about her getting credit. It’s that if this particular piece of insanity gets out, even to the lower admiralty echelons, it will be completely impossible to protect her."
"Even if we keep her true affinities locked down tighter than a vault on a banker’s world, the rest of her class is showing a four hundred percent efficiency increase over the fleet average. I can’t help but think her mere presence is a catalyst."
"When she gets assigned to a ship, she’s going to be under a microscope. If she pulls this kind of world-breaking scrot before we are ready… that’s it. The game is over. The cartels, the slaver worlds, even certain factions within the UPF… they’ll dissect her to figure out how she works.”
