The command chair console beeped, notifying Kaia that her navigational analysis was complete. She rubbed her heavy eyes. Even that simple motion was draining. With monumental effort, she opened them again and checked her monitors. The three mega freighters in her convoy were still proceeding along their original course. Positioned above the convoy, her ship—a Phalanx Class corvette—could swiftly respond to threads from multiple axes. The circular bridge configuration brought back memories of serving on the Basilisk all those years ago. By her left elbow, the ship’s status display showed all green, unchanged for the past two hours.

It had been an excruciatingly long day. It started with a speed run in the canyon, followed by a full day of navigating the Cloud. When she returned to base, sleep was already calling her name. Instead, a cadre member intercepted her and brought her to the tactical simulator. Her orders: protect the convoy, which she’d been executing ever since, despite nothing happening.

Lights out back at the barracks came and went. She wondered if she was the only candidate going through this. She had seen no one else all day, even during the debris navigation legs. In fact, the frequency of interactions over the last few days had been going down. She wondered if that meant they had eliminated more candidates. Mealtimes had become a lonely, introspective time, with only one other candidate sharing the slot. Yesterday, she’d crossed paths with Rilleta as she was hurrying off to the skiff pad. They couldn’t pinpoint when their schedules shifted, but they agreed the cadre were intentionally spreading out everyone’s trials. The end result was a near continuous series of sorties. Now Kaia suspected she knew why. The base only had two of these big bridge simulators.

A beeping from the navigation station woke her up. Kaia looked around with a mix of surprise and embarrassment.

When did she fall asleep? Not once in her career had she fallen asleep on duty, even when pulling the middle of the night “guts” watch. A cautious glance around didn’t reveal any judging eyes from the cadre manning the other bridge stations, so she bit her lip hard to stay awake. They were finally doing a trial where she actually felt confident in her abilities and she screwed it up by falling asleep! Or had that been the point of slotting it in so late in her day? Everything about this Qualification was designed to make her fail, and she hated it.

“Status report, Tikux,” she asked of the cadre posted to the navigation station.

“A contact just appeared on the scope, Yellow Six,” Tikux replied, using her callsign for the day.

“Do we have a vector yet?”

“CIC reports it’s angling in on an intercept with the lead freighter.”

Finally, the point of this long and excruciating exercise! Kaia couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief.

“Do we have anything on their size and make?” Kaia asked the tactical officer, another cadre by the name of Sciekhi.

“Gravimetrics put it at the size of a Phalanx corvette,” Sciekhi replied. “CIC is designating it Target Alpha.”

“Go to active scanners and confirm that,” Kaia ordered, as a chill crept through her. Those weren’t favourable odds. It would be an even match. It would come down to the quality of the crews.

“CIC is reporting ninety-five per cent confidence.”

A pulse of adrenaline coursed through her veins. She could do this. She had commanded the Hawk numerous times, though not into combat.

“Nav, set an intercept course that puts us between the target and the convoy. Comms, send a challenge to the bogie.”

“Aye, Yellow Six,” Kasra, the female cadre at the communication station, said. Then she turned back to her station and addressed the intruder. “Unidentified vessel, you are entering restricted space, identify yourself and alter course or you will be fired upon.”

Kaia brought up a top-down view of the engagement on her personal display and watched as her vessel altered course. The bogie, as expected, did not respond.

“Tactical, send a pair of recon drones as indicated on the plot.” She marked a vector on the other side of the freighters, mirroring the incoming bogie. If someone was trying to be sneaky, she would find them.

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“No response to our challenge,” Kasra said.

“Tactical: two shots, dorsal turret. Two kilometres off the target’s bow.”

“Copy that. Two shots, two klicks off target’s bow.”

Kaia watched as the turret fired the tungsten slugs. Their radio frequency tracers showed the course of the slugs as they closed the distance to the bogie. The target didn’t flinch. Instead, it loosed a half dozen angry markers that set off a slew of alarms.

“Vampire, Vampire, Vampire!” Sciekhi called out. “Fast movers inbound. CIC says their target is the lead freighter.”

So much for holding their attention. Kaia positioned her ship to interpose itself between the oncoming swarm of missiles and her charge. Then she opened up with her own missiles, launching four in reply. She was about to issue more orders when a new, fuzzy dot appeared on her screen. It blinked in and out of existence, with a large cone of uncertainty spreading out along the suspected vector.

“Recon One has spotted a second Phalanx operating under EMCON.”

“Shit,” Kaia let slip out.

It was an unfortunate situation to be in. If she had stayed in her original position, she could have engaged both, but she had moved. And now she found herself pinned against the freighter with missiles incoming. She needed to finish Target Alpha, and fast.

As incoming missiles entered her defensive envelope, she ordered the launch of the corvette’s sparrow missiles. The interceptors raced out to collide with the enemy missiles, destroying four of them. The last two slipped past the interceptors and entered the inner Close-In-Weapons-System range. Hundreds of rounds of tungsten spat out each second as the CIWS tracked and finally cut down the last two missiles.

Just as the last enemy missile vanished, her ship’s return fire reached the first target. Sciekhi said, “New target, designation Charlie. Coming from astern. Target Beta has exited EMCON and is launching missiles. Tracking says they are targeting the second freighter.”

Kaia muttered another curse.

How was her single ship supposed to fend off an attack from three different directions? She checked the plot and ran a quick calculation in her head, her grin taking on a predatory edge. The Immortal Emperor had smiled on her. That last manoeuvre placed her in an optimal position to engage this new threat.

“Tactical, Target Charlie, flush the racks. Time on target.”

Sciekhi nodded. “Flushing racks, time on target.”

“Navigation, rotate us thirty degrees positive. Tactical, engage Target Alpha with autocannons.”

Kaia’s corvette emptied its remaining eight missiles with staggered engine start times, so would hit the bogie as a single force. Her best bet was to strike hard and limit the damage that the enemy could do. Her original strike on Target Alpha had landed two blows, yet Alpha continued to engage the freighter with suicidal single-mindedness, now raking it with autocannon rounds. Kaia’s return fire struck home, ripping away the armoured plating and digging deep into Alpha’s core.

Target Charlie’s interceptors raced out and knocked out half of Kaia’s birds. But that still left four high-yield warheads, and they penetrated the corvette’s armour and detonated from within, ripping Target Charlie apart in a series of flashes.

Then Kaia’s monitor dimmed as an enormous explosion overwhelmed the sensors. She checked her display in time to see the second freighter disappear. Target Beta, not having slowed, blasted through the expanding cloud of debris and fired on Kaia with its autocannons and CIWS. At the spacecraft equivalent of knife range, the rounds easily found their targets and Kaia’s screen lit up with red damage reports.

“Navigation, roll three-six-zero and come about to one-eight-six! Tactical, focus fire on Beta!”

But it was too late. She had been so focused on the other two targets that she let the third outflank her. Her ship display turned crimson and alarms blared across the simulator before everything went black.

She was dead. And with it went her chances of joining the Division. It surprised her at how calm she felt. There was no anger or self-recrimination at failing. Only serenity. A bubbling laughter broke through the weeks of stress and she waved away the questioning looks of the cadre. It figured that here and now, at the end, she finally got a reaction out of them.

“Yellow Six,” a new cadre member appeared at the simulation hatch. Kaia closed her eyes, still giggling, and waited to hear the words that would send her home.

“You are done for the day,” the cadre member at the hatch said. Kaia’s eyes snapped open, her laughter stolen away as quickly as air through a hull breach.

“What?” was all she managed. Her mind unwilling to accept what the cadre member said.

“You are done for the day,” the cadre member repeated.

No, no, no, no! This is wrong! Her mind raced. She had failed. Her ship had been destroyed. Couldn’t they see that? She was supposed to go home now.

Kaia stood up, holding onto the chair to steady herself, then proceeded to walk off the bridge. Back behind her, the cadre worked to reset the simulation for the next candidate. As she passed through the hatch, the cadre member held up an arm to block her way.

“The simulation parameters are confidential and are not to be shared with other candidates.”

When Kaia nodded, he let her pass back into the well-lit hallway of the simulation bay. Off to the left, Kaia spied Rilleta being led into the second simulator. Their eyes met and Kaia gave a slight nod, to which Rilleta smiled in reply. Against Kaia’s better judgement, it seemed that the Division wasn’t through with her yet. Then her shoulders slumped as the weight of Qualification fell back down upon her.