Page 33 of Reformation
“No. He was reassigned.” Blake’s lips tightened. “To Captain Uris.”
“You think the general is on to something?”
“I think I’m going to obey my orders and get my ship’s crew straightened out. And I think I’m going to be a lot more careful about how I go about my business for the rest of this deployment.” He glanced at her. “I suggest you do the same.”
Chapter eighteen
Darrel
Actually helming a starship wasnothinglike the sims.
After his first session shadowing Lieutenant Reyes on the second set of controls, acting as her backup but not given actual control of the ship, Darrel was convinced that whatever he’d been doing at the Academy so far was designed to frustrate, not educate. He watched Reyes look at her gravity map and adjust thrusters andtriedto see what she was seeing, tried to get a handle on what he should be doing to compensate, but it completely evaded him. There were no consequences for his poor response time other than an amber light briefly flickering on Reyes’s control panel, but it was embarrassing to see her turn and look at him assessingly—again—like she couldn’t figure out his dysfunction.
Well, fuck it—he couldn’t either.
Darrel just wasn’t a natural pilot, not like Cody was. He could read the schematics of a ship until he was blue in the face,understand the physics of landing and takeoff and increasing speed, adjust for gravitational waves and the firing lines of other ships, and he understood it all. Intellectually. Actuallydoingsomething with it was a whole other story, and his acceptable performance grades in the sims did him almost no good on a real ship. By the end of his eight-hour shift, he was about ready to fry the secondary control panel, just so he didn’t have to sit there and suck so badly again.
“First shift dismissed, second is ready to take control.” General Caractacus’s voice was as calm as ever and went a good way toward calming Darrel down. If the general had noticed how lousy his second pilot was, he hadn’t mentioned it yet.
That didn’t mean he wouldn’t, though. They were headed for a fight, and if Darrel couldn’t figure out how to simultaneously manage input from his implant and sensory data from the ship itself as they headed into battle, he might fly them into the path of their own fleet’s missiles. Fuck, what would his family have to saythen? The grandson of an Alliance hero, a famous pilot, destroying his own ship in a mistimed maneuver. He’d be posthumously disowned.
Darrel pushed back from the control panel and headed for the exit. He needed some more time in the on-board sims, and dinner, and some time with Grennson. The Perel was pulling overtime in the infirmary as a counselor, his empathy giving him a huge advantage when it came to diagnosing and settling nervy cadets, and he enjoyed and was well suited to the work, but he’d take a break for Darrel.
“Cadet Parrish!”
Darrel stopped in his tracks with a little internal groan. That was Reyes. He turned and faced the senior cadet, already a tabbed lieutenant with a promised placement on a ship as soon as this action was over. “Ma’am.”
“Where are you off to so fast?”
“Simulators. Ma’am,” he added. “I obviously need to get some more time in before anybody lets me near the real deal.”
“Aw, you’re not so bad.”
Darrel couldn’t stop his eyebrows from rising. “You must not have been watching the same performance as me, ma’am. All of my reactions were off. I didn’t respond within the same parameters as you did more than ten percent of the time, and even when I did, my responses weren’t always accurate. I basically—”
“Sucked harder than a black hole?”
Darrel nodded stiffly.
“Good lord.” Reyes threw an arm around his shoulders—not the easiest thing since Darrel had at least eight inches on her—and guided him down the hall. “No, you’re not going to the sims. You’re going to come eat with me and let me talk your ear off for a while, okay?”
“Will listening to you talking my ear off make me better at the helm?” Darrel asked a little morosely, and Reyes laughed.
“Maybe not, but it might make you feel a little better. I don’t want to send you back to your friend looking like you have the weight of the universe on your back. He’ll think we’re abusing you on the bridge.”
Darrel shook his head. “Grennson knows better than that.”
“He knows a lot, huh? Thanks to the empathy thing, I mean.”
“Kind of. It’s not exactly like mind reading, though,” he added in case she was nervous. A lot of people were. “There’s no actual telepathy except between bonded individuals, and even then it doesn’t reach that level very often. But it does give him a lot of insight into the emotional states of different beings.”
“I’m surprised the brass isn’t training him up to be military intelligence,” Reyes commented as she steered them into the mess. “All our advancements, and we still don’t have an unbeatable lie detector. Someone who understands emotionalresponses to stress and subterfuge would be a huge asset for them.”
“Yeah.” Darrel smiled a bit smugly as they got into line for their food. Looked like … beige glop today.
Mmm. Glop. The worst thing about living on a ship, after sucking at his job, was the food. Darrel was ready to kill for one of Grennson’s muffins.
“They’re not allowed to use him that way,” he explained as he accepted his bowl of glop. “It’s part of the treaty with Perelan, and it carries a lot of penalties if they try to break it. Grennson is probably the most protected person at the Academy, in a way. He’s got two different governments looking out for him so that they can keep talking to each other. He doesn’t let it go to his head, though.”
