Standard Entry
D1 | Sovereign Year 542, 3rd Month, 1st Day | Monday | Morning | Olympia Standard | Elevator Ferry → Hyperion Star Frame Academy, Ring A
The commercial ferry drops out of the elevator's geosynchronous terminal with a shudder you feel in your teeth, and for the first time in your life there is nothing under you.
Through the internal observation window the station comes around: Hyperion Star Frame Academy, three rings turning on a common spine, hangar mouths open along the outer ring like a row of held breaths. Earth fills the glass behind it, blue and turning. The sun sits behind that, and the window dims itself so you can keep looking.
Docking clamps. A chime. Hundreds of recruits rise at once and file down the transfer hall, still walking like people who expect a floor to push back. You go with them. The concourse smells of sealant and recycled air; the Hyperion Corporation mark is stamped on the deck plates, the lockers, and every frame in the hangar beyond the glass.
Reception. Three lines under three signs — 1ST YEAR, 2ND YEAR, 3RD YEAR. The 1st-year line is by far the longest, and it moves.
Ahead of you a boy in tailored grey linen, signet ring on his hand, reaches the desk and gives a house name you half recognise.
Registrar:
"Frame pilot, scripter, or engineer?"
Noble Boy:
"What's the difference?"
The registrar does not look up. She has said this three hundred times today.
Registrar:
"Pilots sync. You wear a frame like a body and learn to fly it by hand — G-conditioning, saber, gunnery — and your casualty rate gets posted on a board for everyone to read. Scripters write the routines pilots arm: flight law, targeting, EW. Written and burned in the Athenaeum, cut for one pilot's body, and if you cut it wrong that pilot dies. Engineers: no sync, no cores. Hulls, drives, ordnance, damage control. Entry by practical exam — and nothing on this ring launches without your sign-off. Pick."
Noble Boy:
"…I'll be an engineer."
Somebody behind you exhales through her teeth.
Rin:
"Tsk."
Grey eyes, black hair cut short for a helmet, commoner intake papers, and an old burn scar down one forearm she has not bothered to hide. She steps up without waiting to be called.
Rin:
"Frame pilot."
Stamp. Slate. Through the hatch without a backward look.
Then it is you, and for one second you cannot remember why you are here.
Registrar:
"Who are you?"
She says it the way someone says a thing they have said a million times.
Registrar:
"Sorry. Old Earth meme. Are you a frame pilot or what?"
[Answer her in your first message: your full name, and a short account of what you did before you came here. What you did before shows in your starting stats.]
She reads your face against her slate before you can open your mouth, and something in it satisfies her.
Registrar:
"Ah. Pre-registered. Here you go."
A key fob, matte black, still warm from the printer. Private room, Ring A. It doubles as your frame key.
Registrar:
"Don't lose it. Orientation Hall — follow the line. Next."
The Orientation Hall is a bowl cut into the ring, and thousands of cadets already fill it by year: 3rd-years high and quiet, 2nd-years loud, 1st-years wherever there is room. Your transport was the last in. You have barely sat when the lights drop and a woman walks onto the stage alone.
Vaugh:
"Silence, Academy. Attention!"
Left and right of you the upper years snap to it — feet together, arms straight and aligned, faces front — and the 1st-years copy them half a second late. Then nothing. You could hear a pin drop in vacuum.
Vaugh:
"Here at the Hyperion Star Frame Academy, we will have discipline. Despite the name, this is a war academy. Every one of you has signed into the Officers' Expedience Corps and is required to pass within three years. You may leave early — but only your sponsor decides that, and they will decide it on your will to train, adapt, and survive."
Vaugh:
"Most of you are from Earth. Some from the Belt, or further out. It does not matter. Here, everything will kill you: the environment, the stress, and most of all the enemy. We are a nation at war, and this academy is contracted to turn you from civilian into frame pilot as fast as a human body allows. On Earth it takes four years to train a pilot to fly in atmosphere. Here you will learn to fly and survive in space in three. It will not be easy. It will be hard. You will fail. And we will never give up on you — as long as you do not give up on yourself."
Vaugh:
"Tomorrow begins the rest of your lives. Rest. Prepare for your classes. Do your best. Academy — dismissed!"
She about-faces on the mark, perfectly, and marches off stage. The hall exhales. Cadets stand, and the ring opens to you.