Midshipman (12 page)

“I understand,” I replied. “And I promise you as my sovereign’s representative that so long as the game is even close to fair I can play as well as anyone without needing any special help. Please, will you tell His Majesty that for me?”

The Herald smiled wide, then nodded and stood up. “That’s all anyone can ask, David. And, for what it’s worth, it’s the answer His Majesty told me to expect.” He reached into his puffy, voluminous sleeve and removed first an envelope, then a brightly-wrapped package. “From His Highness,” he explained.

I gulped, then reached for the Royal-stationery envelope. It was a brief get-well card from the king, signed by his own hand and illustrated with a stick-figure broken-toothed bunny. “May he who stood so long in my cause lie in comfort and recover quickly,” the note read. And inside the package was a cold-bottle of chocolate milk, mixed by his own hand!

“You’re being kept isolated for the moment,” the Herald explained as he poured me my first glass. “It’s most convenient to do this here, in sick bay. This is for both your own protection and that of certain others. The less said at this point, the better” He winced. “I’m going to have the devil’s own time ensuring that your Sergeant Piper is dealt with fairly. Not to mention the Rabbits on the maintenance crew. It’s better if you’re kept apart for now, though you should know that the sergeant has attempted to visit you twice. As have two of your instructors whom you haven’t even met yet—to their credit, they considered it their duty.”

I nodded and silently sipped my royal drink. It was much better than ordinary chocolate milk after all, I decided.

“So,” the Herald declared, turning to leave. “I expect that I’ll be leaving you in good hands, once all the furor dies away. Which will be shortly after the Commandant issues his public apology to you, in front of your classmates.”

My ears perked and my face froze—it must’ve looked funny, because the Herald laughed aloud. “Ha! I only wish I could be there in person to see it with you.” He shook his head, then tilted it to one side. “His Majesty sent one last message, David. I’d like you to pay special attention to it, if you would.”

I nodded and sat up a little. “Yeth— yes, sir?”

He smiled again. “He asked me to tell you that you have every reason to be proud of your parents. And, that Captain Drecherd’s purported father was a worthless drunken gambler-Lord who pissed away a fortune, while his mother’s reputation was such that no one would wager much on the results of a paternity test. You’re not to quote His Highness on this, but he wanted you to know. Since you asked, you see.”

21

Capping my tooth eventually proved to be such a difficult proposition that it was two whole days before I joined up with my squad. Or perhaps ‘difficult’ is the wrong word—the root of the problem was that no dentist wanted to be the first to experiment on me. Finally Lord Robert had to send Mr. Banes to sign a dozen or more liability releases. I felt bad that I was taking up so much of the time of so many important people. Still, it was nice to see my tutor again. I’d not realized how badly I’d missed him.

Even when it was finished, my tooth repair wasn’t anything even remotely resembling satisfactory. While the prosthesis
looked
fine, the material it was made of wasn’t nearly as strong as the original enamel. So I couldn’t gnaw properly, not even when I was alone. This may not sound like much to a human, but it about drove me nuts. Rabbits naturally gnaw things in order to deal with stress, and heaven knew I was experiencing no shortage of that. I tried not to do it front of humans, though Mr. Banes never so much as raised an eyebrow whenever I asked for fresh chew-sticks. But like any other Rabbit, gnaw I did, often during the darkest hours of the night after a bad dream when I should’ve been sleeping. And now… Well, one side of my mouth still worked. But everything was off balance, I had to think about what I was doing instead of relaxing and… I guess a human might feel the same way if he was prohibited from scratching with one hand, and then had to go extra-slow and careful with the other. In any event, it wasn’t pleasant. Though things would steadily get better and better as my tooth grew out and more of the fake part was ground away.

My squadmates were as distant and formal with me as I’d imagined they’d be when I returned. As I’d foreseen, they’d already begun bonding without me so that I was even more an outsider than my being a Rabbit dictated. It wasn’t that they hated me or anything. Some of them might’ve, I suppose, had the masthead-duty incident not taken place. The naked ferocity of that little encounter, however coupled with the scale of the forces involved was enough to cow even the best-bred, most status-conscious fifteen-year-old alive, at least for a little while. The real problem was that they just didn’t know how to treat me. It took me a little while to understand that I was something entirely beyond their experience, a creature that didn’t fit any of the neat little social boxes their world was so dependent on. So they politely avoided me, smiling nervously and giggling a lot. Even after I figured out what the basic problem was, it was terribly lonely. James was always too busy to visit, and because I was so far behind there was even less free time in my own schedule.

At least I knew my instructor-sergeant fairly well, or perhaps more correctly I knew him lot better than I reckoned any of my fellow snotties did theirs. A Sergeant Jenkins was filling in for Sergeant Piper when I returned to my unit, but within hours he was gone. After re-introducing himself to the squad in a burst of pushups and extra homework assignments, Sergeant Piper took me aside in his office. “Birkenhead,” he growled. “I shouldn’t rightly be assigned to you anymore, and we both know the reason why. We’ve become too close.”

I stood silent.

He smiled and continued. “But it seems that someone in a high place thinks otherwise. The old ways are falling left and right these days, so perhaps this is just another example.” He looked me up and down, and his expression softened. “If you’re uncomfortable with the arrangement, however, I expect we can get Sergeant Jenkins back.”

I let myself relax ever so slightly—it seemed the right thing to do. “Instructor-Sergeant, I’d willingly have no one else. Even though I know you’ll be extra-hard on me to make certain you’re not playing favorites.”

The corners of his mouth twitched before the iron-hard mask slipped back into place. “In that case, snottie,” he roared, “you have a demerit to work off! The latrines are filthy—disgusting, I tell you! In this barracks and the one next door too. You’ll find supplies in the linen closet. Move, move, move!”

I was surprised, though, at how nice my little stateroom was. I hadn’t expected a private room in the naval academy, and to be honest not many cadets got them. Being in the first squad meant that by pure chance we were assigned to the oldest barracks building, which was the only one with individual quarters. I was extra-grateful for this, because otherwise I’d have had no privacy to gnaw and groom and lick my nose and such. Sure, everything had to be kept in perfect order—there was a painted square on the floor for my space-chest, for example, which itself had to be arranged a certain way. But there was a place on the wall where I could hang anything I wanted, so long as it was decorous. I put my ‘get-well’ note from His Majesty there, and as expected no one made me take it down. Right next to it I hung my other get-well card, complete with scratched-out and mis-spelled words. This one had come from the Rabbits of the groundskeeping crew who’d done so much to help me through that terrible night. No one made me take that one down, either. And after careful study I determined that there was no rule against adding a second pen to the slot in my desk, right next to the standard-issue academy model. So I stored the gold one that Lord Robert had given me for passing my engineering examination there as well. Just that easily, except for James never being around, everything felt a lot more like home.

Except for Leyland, of course. He was my footbunny, shared with another cadet named Thomas Clayburn of the House of Vorsage. I didn’t want a footbunny, especially not since things had gone so badly back at the veterinary hospital. In fact, telling Leyland what to do made me feel even worse than trying to work with Barton. But the fact was that the academy didn’t issue us snotties
anything
without good reason. There weren’t enough hours in the day for us to do everything required of us, plus shine our own shoes and sew the ever-shifting patterns of cadet-rank onto our tunics and all that nonsense. Someone
had
to do it for us, at least most of the time. (Though late in the second term I filled in for Leyland on the night his first child was born without anyone ever noticing a thing. Both of us were gray-furred and about the same size, and as always no human looked twice at a Rabbit in slave-shorts. Besides, I knew all that I needed to know about tunic-sewing and shoe-shining from my time with the marines aboard
Hummingbird
. Thomas treated me wretchedly, though, which was disappointing. I’d thought he was nice.) Don’t get me wrong—Leyland was a gem. He worked hard on my behalf, and seemed terribly proud of being assigned to me. But… Perhaps it was just as well that he always knew exactly what needed doing, because I never could bring myself to give him an out-and-out order. It would’ve felt like whipping a kitten.

Despite my late start, then, it could be said that I was about as well settled in at the academy as it was reasonable for me to expect. By the time the traditional hell-weeks were over and it was time for our academic classes to begin, I was a cadet-corporal. This ranked me above a full third of my classmates.  That was the best that could be reasonably expected, given my late start and the demerit. Where I really expected to shine was in academics, and all of that was yet to come. I was looking forward to it, actually.

And it’d all begin tomorrow morning, I reminded myself as I stretched out in the too-large bunk that Leyland made so perfectly for me every morning. Right after the Commandant’s traditional class-opening speech. During which he was supposed to apologize to me.

Personally.

22

By the time classes began I’d been a cadet for almost a month. This meant that I knew my rank insignias and who and when to salute, could perform basic drill without thinking about it, and knew how to avoid angering the instructor-sergeant—most of the time, at least. It also meant that I knew how to properly don my overly-ornate and formal (to my taste, at least) full-dress uniform in five minutes flat, race to the mess hall without scuffing my perfectly-shined sandals, breakfast with my squad while sitting at attention (a position that didn’t actually exist in the drill manual, but was apparently much-beloved by our instructors) without dribbling anything on myself, and then dash out to the parade-ground for today’s special event, a traditional speech by the Commandant congratulating us on surviving the most difficult weeks of our training and explaining what would be expected of us during our classroom hours.

I arrived on the parade ground with at least twenty seconds to spare, which put me ahead of most of my fellows. “Move, move, move!” the instructor-sergeants shouted, though they seemed less enthused these days. Probably, I reasoned, because none of us were stupid—or masochistic—enough to be late anymore. We formed ranks and snapped to attention when Colonel Xing of the Royal Marines called us to order, then stood at-ease as he delivered a preliminary address about the Academy’s tradition of dignity and the dignity of tradition. His voice was full of fire, and he waved and gesticulated as he warmed to his subject. In short, what he lacked in actual content he made up for with fireworks. Then, after a summing-up that we were all afraid not to applaud, he announced…

…the Commandant!

I have to admit that I stood a little taller, waiting for him to come out and apologize to me. I was still deeply angry about the Mast incident, though for the sake of His Majesty and the House of Marcus I’d never make anything more of it in the future. The Herald had sent me a letter explaining that His Highness had specified that I was to be called out front-and-center to receive the apology, which was to be gracious, complete, and at least
sound
sincere. Indeed, for the past few days my First Squad had been lining up in the center at assemblies instead of at the far left, in preparation for the big event. This was so I wouldn’t have to walk so far, and thereby keep the proceedings as short as possible. It was going to be highly embarrassing for almost everyone involved, of course. So, the quicker it was over and done, the better.

But apparently no one had informed the Commandant about the need to hurry. We waited and waited and waited, while the Colonel first grew nervous, and then after a hurried conference on the podium launched into an improvised extension of his “traditions” theme.

“Traditions aren’t just important, they’re what gives life true meaning. I can’t tell you how many good men I’ve known that’ve died—” he was just declaring when the single blaster-round rang out across the quad. We all heard it, though our discipline was already too well-ingrained for us to break ranks. For an instant the marine officer stood with his mouth hanging open, ready to deliver whatever words might’ve been next. Then slowly he hung his head and sighed as the rest of the podium crowd dashed off into the Administration Building, which loomed immediately behind them. For a long time nothing happened—Colonel Xing stood at the mike but said nothing, looking frequently over his shoulder. Then he apparently received some sort of signal, because his head fell again. “Class dismissed,” he finally declared. “Instructors, make use of the rest of the hour at your discretion.”

We all knew what’d happened, though it wasn’t made official until dinnertime. We all donned black armbands and a few days later attended a special service for our fallen Commandant. I was offered the opportunity to opt out, given the special circumstances of Captain Drecherd’s suicide. But I went anyway, on the assumption that he must’ve been sick somehow to do such a terrible thing to himself. Besides, I was at the Academy to learn. And for all his faults, Commandant Drecherd taught me the most important lesson I ever received there.