Vanguard Word Update

2k words

***

“No, Sir,” Cadell replied, knowing it was better to take it on the chin than try and find an excuse. He tried to ignore the gloating Samiha, watching him be tutored by the Lieutenant while she went about her own task without any visible difficulty, but he felt embarrassed all the same.

After too much time, the Lieutenant finally put him back on track, leaving Cadell to assemble the weapon by himself. He was maybe a third of the way through when there was a noisy clatter against the bench, Samiha dropping her weapon onto its surface with an air of satisfaction.

“Finished, Lieutenant,” she said, proudly. Cadell looked in her direction with a disgustedly confused expression. While everyone’s coilguns were in pieces, hers was completely back to together without so much as a missing screw.

“Already?” Marek asked, sharing the same hesitancy. Samiha gave him room, and Marek picked up the weapon to study it. He slid back the bolt, checked the mag well and battery, then gave a final nod.

“That’s almost record time, recruit. Well done. Shaliyya told me you were quite the tinkerer, and you haven’t failed to impress.”

Samiha saw Cadell’s slack-jawed expression before he could hide it, and she grinned even harder. The day on the range had taken a real turn for the worse.

“Since you’ve got the time for it, recruit, why don’t you give Private Cadell some help? He sure needs it.”

Cadell slowly closed his eyes, cursing himself for jinxing it. When he next opened his eyes, the Balokarid was stood beside him, her smirk as exaggerated as Cadell’s frown.

“You might be able to shoot straight, human,” she said. “but you’re running in loops back here, eagle eyes.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, her using his own insults digging harder into his skin that he wanted to admit. “How’d you even do that? Did someone give you the manual or something?”

The words sounded petty in his own ears, and he instantly regretted saying them.

“These coilguns are as alien to me as you are,” Samiha answered. “Which is strange, one would think you would have the advantage in here. How ironic.”

“Just shut up and help me put this together, will you?” he sighed.

Her lack of an answer was a dig at him in of itself, the alien giving herself room with an errant handwave. Cadell wasn’t too proud to just ignore what she was doing out of spite, he didn’t want to look bad in front of Marek like that again, so he paid as much attention as he could, which was harder than it looked – Samiha was so bulky he couldn’t get around her to look at what she was doing.

“Could you move over? Come on, Samiha, give me some space.”

“How much room do you need, Shi’ahk?” she asked.

“What did you call me?”

Samiha didn’t answer, continuing the assembling from where he’d left off. She gave him room to watch her work, fortunately, and her dexterity was worth a sliver of praise. Her hands were constantly in motion, she never seemed to hesitate, her fingers flowing over the weapon frame in a way that came off as oddly mesmerizing.

Cadell could track her steps a little bit, but Samiha was following the Lieutenant’s orders to help him to the least of her ability. She didn’t give him any words of advice, she didn’t talk him through her process, and at times her feathery wing blocked his vision in a way that came off as distinctly on purpose.

“There,” she said at last, thrusting the completed coilgun into his hands.

“What do you mean, ‘there’?” he demanded. “You didn’t show me anything! You were supposed to teach me how to put all the pieces together.”

“It is not my fault your human eyes couldn’t keep up,” she scoffed, clicking her beak. The sound was like two bones clapping together.

“Are you always such a bitch, or is it just around me?” he asked.

“What’s the matter, squad leader?” she asked, making no attempt to mask her sarcasm as she leered at him. “Am I embarrassing you in front of the other humans? Maybe if you’d had some proper combative experience, you wouldn’t be fumbling around like an incompetent apprentice.”

“You’re way out of line, Samiha,” he replied. “you talked like that to a ranking officer, and you’d be charged with insubordination.”

“Then it is a good thing I’m not talking to a ranking officer, am I? You’re not our leader, Cadell. You were chosen out of chance, stop pretending it was otherwise.”

They stared one another down, or up in Cadell’s case, the tip of her beak barely a few inches from his nose.

“How are we going over there, you two?” Marek announced, and Samiha broke off almost instantly.

“I showed him all I could,” she answered. “if there’s nothing else, I will return to the range for practice.”

“And outstanding Idea, recruit.”

As the alien was dismissed, Cadell loosed a frustrated sigh, rubbing on eof his eyes absentmindedly. He had proved himself to be hopeless by failing to take apart the coilgun by himself, and Samiha was lapping up every moment of it.

He considered going to Mark, or maybe even the Kith’sla, Shaliyya. He might be able to convince them that Samiha was disloyal, maybe get her out of the program. And yet, that would only make him look petty if he went straight to them rather than sort her out himself. And if he did that, that would only prove Samiha’s point that he wasn’t cut out to be a squad lead.

No, he wouldn’t talk with his superiors. Not for the moment, at least, though the idea was well on the table by this point.

Chapter 3: Boiling Point

“Wake up, Cadell,” a voice said, and a ball of pressure was driven into his side. He snorted, opening his eyes to find himself slouched in a metal chair, the whitewashed hall of the training center stretching away to either side.

“What’s up?” he asked, blinking his eyes until he saw Hunter in the seat beside him. Kurtis and the aliens were beyond him, the latter of which sitting ins tool that were appropriately upscaled.

“It’s our turn next,” Hunter explained. “How the hell did you drift off so fast? I can barely catch some shut-eye in the bunks.”

“When you’re workin’ the land twenty-four hours a day, you learn to take every chance you can get for rest,” Cadell replied. “How’re the other squads doin’?”

“See for yourself,” Hunter said with a gesture. There was a huge flatscreen built into the wall on the opposite side of the hall. Typed upon it was a descending list starting at one, and ending at eleven. All of them except for the last two had time stamps labelled beside them, ranging from six minutes to eight.

“Squad four killed it,” Kurtis mused. “No one’s beaten their time yet.”

“That’s cause we haven’t had our turn yet,” Hunter replied. “I had a VR headset when I was a kid. If it’s anything like Battle Badass 3, I think I’ll do just fine.”

“Are we really being tested by a game?” Samiha scoffed from the far end. “How does that translate to an actual battlefield?”

“Sims aren’t really games,” Hunter explained. “they used to be a long time ago, but they’ve evolved to the point only military companies are allowed to access the higher-end software. Shit’s so realistic we’ll probably die in real life if we die in the scenario.”

“Our forms of media took a much less… drastic path than yours did,” Kazlu added, suppressing a flutter of her feathers.

“What else did you expect?” Samiha asked her. “War seems to be the one thing they can do well.”

Soon there was a crackle over the intercom, Lieutenant Marek’s voice coming through on the overhead speakers.

“Elevens, the stage is clear. Proceed through to the training room.”

The five of them stood, Cadell leading the way up to a nearby door, the bulkhead around it surrounded with warning signs such as: No Tapping on Door, and: Authorization Required, Sensitive Equipment Within.

The steel slid apart to reveal a very nondescript room, about ten meters across and just as wide. Every surface was the same matte-white as the rest of the station, the floor feeling somewhat like smoothed concrete as Cadell walked inside.

There was a cavity on the wall just beside the door, and laying within it were several firearms and armoured vests, each one coloured in a sleek gray. Cadell glanced up at the ceiling. There seemed to be a giant network of pipes creating a bubble over the top of the room, the metal forming a web that draped down the upper half of the walls, before they fed into the wall and disappeared from sight. The segments formed patterns of hexagonal shapes, and Cadell thought that each one held a pane of glass, but couldn’t be quite sure.

“Hunter, what is that?” Cadell asked, pointing up at the netting.

“Think those might be projectors of some kind,” he answered. “Never seen anything like it, though.”

“Elevens,” Marek’s voice announced. There must be microphones in the room, but Cadell couldn’t see any. “Your equipment is on your left. Put them on and stand in the middle of the room.”

They made their way over to the cavity, Cadell picking up one of the five bundles. There was a helmet that covered one’s brow, a vest, and a coilgun, though they weren’t exactly the real things. The helmet and vest looked like surplus gear, but wasn’t actually made of Kevlar or ceramics.

The coilgun was like a replica gun one might find at a toy store, though it was a very faithful copy. Back on their visit to the shooting range, they’d been allowed to tailor their coilguns to their specific wants and needs, Cadell opting to fit his with a foregrip and a scope, swapping out for a longer stock to tailor into the role of an assault rifle.

This replica was an exact copy of his weapon, which was sitting in his locker at this moment.

“Someone was taking notes of our builds,” Hunter stated, fishing out his own weapon. He hadn’t strayed far from the default coilgun, but Kurtis on the other hand had built a monster of a machine. It was just short of a meter long, the barrel nearly half of said length and packed with twice as many coils as Cadell’s. It was equipped with a stability bipod and a dual-drum magazine, with heat sinks that may as well be called heat bricks due to their size.

Cadell had expected the Balokarids to follow the same design, they were bigger and stronger, and carrying heavey weapons would cause no issue, yet both Kazlu and Samiha had gone the opposite direction. They’d swapped out their barrels for shorter ones, and fixed the stocks with simple, foldable pads, not unlike submachine-guns that could be drawn comfortably with just one hand.

As was becoming the usual, the bundles that were clearly for the humans were almost identical, but the two for the aliens were not. Instead of helmets, they had faceplates shaped like an upside down ‘U’ that left their eyes and beaks exposed. Their vests were similar, secured to their slim chests by Velcro, but they also had one other pice of gear that Cadell and the others did not.

“What you got there, Kaz?” Cadell asked, the alien holding up a strange device. The main component was a hollow cylinder of metal, with two glass crystals on the upper and lower sides, glittering in shades of blue. It didn’t’ seem to be part of the rest of the kit, it looked custom made.

Its shape was not unlike an armband, and Cadell was proven right as Kazlu slipped her arm through the cylinder. There was a groove in the metal that made it so her wing didn’t chafe against it, the device almost as long a shirt sleeve.