She hugged me. “You’re such a sweetheart, Alice. If you end up getting certified for engineering we’ll be happy to have you. I just want you to explore all your options before you commit to anything. No one is expecting you to become an expert spacer overnight.”
I had to admit she had a point. What else was there to study, though? The merchant classes were so boring I nearly fell asleep the first time I tried one. There were a million specialized classes on stuff like cargo handling and underway replenishment, but I couldn’t see making a career out of something like that. The only topic that really seemed as deep as engineering was security.
Good girls aren’t supposed to resort to violence.
I wasn’t exactly a good girl, though, was I? I hunted animals, and I’d already managed to get myself into three different fights. Besides, hadn’t I already decided all that preaching from the matrons was just another way to turn kids into sheep? I was a predator, darn it. It would be perfectly natural for me to study how to fight.
I still felt dirty just looking at the titles of those classes. Why were there so many of them, anyway? The ship’s library had more than a thousand modules just on unarmed combat. Do normal people need to be taught how to put someone in a joint lock? Weird.
I tried one anyway, and it turned out to be even worse than that. Apparently normal people need to be taught how to throw a punch, how to fall down without getting hurt, and a million other things that seemed blindingly obvious to me. Then they had to practice doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, like it was too complicated to just pick up the first time?
Ugh.
I skipped ahead to the exam at the end of the class, and sure enough I aced it without even trying. Okay, not wasting any more of my time on that nonsense. What else was there?
Marksmanship classes. Lots of them. Yeah, same deal as the martial arts. Although it was interesting to see just how bad normal people are at putting rounds into a target. My physics sense always tells me exactly where a moving object is going to end up, and it interlinks with my kinesthetics and motor center to give me basically perfect aim. Apparently that was unusual.
Twelve hundred modules on actual security, as opposed to fighting. How to set up everything from shipboard air monitoring systems to mobile sniper interceptors, how all these systems worked, how to penetrate them and how to spot people trying to sneak things past, and more complicated stuff I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Alright, that might actually be interesting. It might also make me really paranoid, though.
Military history. Someone must have thought that was important, because there were hundreds of classes on topics going all the way back to old Earth’s ancient history. I bit my lip. That sounded really…
Interesting? Dirty? Embarrassing?
I pushed aside the whirl of confused feelings, and went on to the next subject. Space combat.
Oh, wow. Lots of classes, but that was the boring part. There were simulators. Hundreds of them. I could play as anything from a gunner aboard a tramp freighter, to an admiral for one of the great powers of the Inner Sphere. All in simulators rated for training-quality realism!
Pretending to kill people would be really evil, wouldn’t it? I should feel bad about it. But I probably wouldn’t, and that would feel even worse. Wait, there were sims about the Kami War. I could pretend to shoot space Nazis without feeling guilty, couldn’t I?
If I was going to live on a spaceship it was only logical to learn something about space battles. The Kami War ended just eight years ago, so that was recent enough that the technology would be about the same. It would be educational.
Eleven hours later I’d finally gotten the hang of piloting a fast attack boat, at least with the difficulty turned down. Most of the small craft in that war had been bots, which the Swarmlords had cranked out by the billion in their automated factories. But the Dominion expeditionary force had fielded some sweet little ships in the ten thousand-ton range, with an interesting variety of payloads. I had to admit the Mirai Kingdom had some amazing looking hardware too, although I hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to try it out. Pretending to fight for the bad guys would be kind of weird, wouldn’t it?
At any rate, it had taken some real work to get the hang of fighting my way through the swarms of interceptors and sniper platforms that always surrounded an enemy fleet. I’d finally managed to break through, though, and I was lining up an attack run on a Rakurai class strike cruiser. The long, slender ship was pointed towards the station I was supposed to be defending, its spinal mount RKKV cannon firing off another two-kilogram projectile at just below the speed of light. But they’d have to run a cooling cycle before they could fire again, to bleed off the megatons of waste heat produced by the weapon. The huge cloud of superheated coolant boiling away would mask me from their weapons for just long enough to make my attack.
I deployed my last plasma bubble to block any laser fire the interceptors behind me might turn my way, and slammed my drive to full power the moment the cooling cycle started. Ten seconds, twenty, and I was coming up on twelve thousand kilometers from my target. Close enough. I ripple-fired my whole magazine of anti-ship missiles, and slewed my vessel through a ninety degree turn with the drive still at max thrust. Even with that sideways acceleration I’d pass within eight thousand kilometers of the cruiser, but their point defense weapons would have more urgent targets than me.
Most of my missiles carried thirty megaton Casaba howitzer warheads, capable of generating a superheated jet of plasma that would damage a ship from up to two thousand kilometers away. The strike cruiser’s flanks boasted four hundred centimeters of armor, more than enough to protect against them. But they’d saturate the ship’s deflectors momentarily, and burn off any sensors or point defense weapons near the impact points. That would create blind spots that the next wave of attack drones could take advantage of.
But the real threat was the three missiles whose warheads were designed to act like a single-stage Orion drive, launching a shotgun spread of antimatter pellets towards the target. Each of those was following a group of the conventional missiles in, ready to launch its payload in the brief interval when the bolts of plasma from the Casaba howitzers would hide the projectiles from enemy sensors.