“Is someone hurt?” Kayla asked. She couldn’t see much as Masey blocked her view, but blood was soaking into the sand where the body lay still.

“The situation is under control. Go sit back down. I’m not kidding—now, please.”

The girls did as they were told and waited while the tall woman bent over the injured surfer. Eventually she finished working, and the prone figure sat up. Kayla recognized Urtiga, wearing a red-stained bandage around her head and her usual grin. The tall woman helped her to her feet and walked her towards the girls, despite Urtiga’s attempts to wave her off.

The memory of the night they had met popped into Kayla’s mind. There had been something unnatural about Urtiga’s speed and agility, and now she was shrugging off a serious head wound. Kayla exchanged a glance with the others. Christie raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

“That was like the inside of a washing machine,” Urtiga explained as she sat down next to Thandi. “Surfboards were flying everywhere, and I got lucky.”

“Can’t you take a break for like, twenty minutes?” the tall woman asked.

“Haha, yeah I guess, since you’re asking nicely,” Urtiga said. “Girls, this is Cara Favre. She’s a medic. Sit with us, Cara. Introduce yourself.”

“Hello.” Cara shook their hands and flopped down in the sand. “I’m a pararescue jumper. That means I jump out of fast-moving vehicles in a bid to prevent someone else from dying.”

“We call Cara and her teammates PJs for short,” Urtiga explained. “They are also the only unit in the organization that are allowed to call themselves Valkyries, because they’re awesome.”

“Which we never do, because that’s lame,” Cara objected.

“They totally do it all the time.” Urtiga kicked sand at Cara, who ducked away. “But it’s cool, because of the whole ‘not dying’ thing.”

Cara shrugged. “I mean, if you were all dead, then surfing out here alone would be super boring.”

“Cara has to do a bit of everything. She might have to jump into the middle of whatever catastrophe me and my friends created to get control of the situation, fight off anything dangerous, and provide emergency life-saving treatment to the dumbass,” Urtiga pointed at herself, “who got herself blown up.” She turned to Cara. “Did I miss anything?”

“Orbital insertion is pretty cool,” Cara said to the girls. “That means you jump out of a spaceship and enter a planet’s atmosphere in a wing suit. You get to do your best meteor impression.”

“Oh god, I love doing that,” Urtiga said. “I wish we could practice it as much as you do.”

“Horrendously dangerous though.” Cara grinned. “Anyway, I’ll give you some advice that will serve you well in your time here; avoid at all times intersecting with moving bullets, projectiles or shrapnel. Follow this guidance, and we will hopefully avoid an on-the-job encounter.”

“So…um… do you have any tips for bootcamp?” Thandi asked.

“Sure, I have a tip for bootcamp,” Urtiga said. “Do what you’re told and don’t quit. What, do you want a manual for how to pass?”

“Oh no, but I do a lot of sports and I like to optimize my training routine. If there’s a top recruit trophy, you can bet I’m going to win it.” Thandi chuckled. “I’m just hypercompetitive.”

“Sure, aren’t we all?” Urtiga said. “But bootcamp is not a competition. It is a gut check, meant to test your resolve while they grind you down. Actually, a lot of sporty girls quit on their first day once they figure out what they’re in for.”

Kayla inspected her fingernails as a wave of frustration shot through her. Thandi might call herself a colonist, but Intaba had been settled more than a century ago; long enough to become completely safe for its citizens.

“I guess people get into sport for a sense of personal accomplishment,” she said without looking up. “It’s about fame and money rather than self-sacrifice.”

Thandi nodded. “Oh totally. Most athletes are in it for themselves, and I hate that. I’m just saying it’s good to have that competitive edge. I mean, I don’t really care if there’s a trophy. I just… well whatever, bring it on, you know?”

“Okay,” Kayla said, avoiding her gaze.

“All we want to know,” Urtiga said, “is that you really want to be here. It’s a lot harder to say that when you’ve been walking for three days, you haven’t slept or eaten, and you’re expected to perform like your life depends on it.”

“The girls in last night’s presentation video looked really broken up,” Kayla said.

Urtiga nodded. “Yeah, of course—how can we know you have the right character if we don’t push you to the point where you want to curl up into a ball and cry every day?”

“I cried like a baby,” Cara said happily. “Definitely thought I might die from exhaustion in Stress Phase. It was fun.”

“Type-three fun. I had to recycle—rolled my ankle towards the end and had to go through the whole thing again.” Urtiga said, and laughed. “You should have seen my face when they told me.”

“Oh God, that really sucks.” Cara turned to the girls. “Yeah, don’t do that.”

“What is type-three fun?” Christie asked.

“Type one fun is just fun,” Urtiga said. “A delicious chocolate cake, or a kickass concert. Type-two fun is kind of terrifying and painful at the time, but awesome when you look back on it.”

“Like climbing?” Kayla said.

“Exactly. Then there’s type-three fun. Terrifying, immensely painful, and not something you want to think about happening ever again,” Urtiga said.

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Christie frowned. “So, actually not fun at all?”

Urtiga shrugged. “Depends on your perspective. You could choose to see the glass as half empty. We prefer to throw the glass away and find something dangerous to do that no-one’s ever done before. You only get one existence, after all.”

“You forgot type-four fun,” Cara said. “Which is type-three fun, but in combat. That’s usually the time they call me in, unfortunately.”

“Hello losers.” Masey and another woman arrived and dug their boards into the sand. “We’re in search of food and alcohol.”

“In my truck,” Cara said. “Want to give me a hand?”

Masey sighed. “You can’t just wait on me hand and foot? I guess I’ll have to knock a star off my review of this place. Toska, why don’t you introduce yourself while me and Cara set up the barbeque?”

“Toska is my call-sign,” the woman said as she shook their hands and sat down. “I am both the mother figure and social glue without which these fine ladies would just fall apart. You could say I’m their mentor, moral compass, guiding light—”

“Mooch, tattletale, gossip,” Urtiga interjected.

“A balanced person,” Toska continued, unperturbed, “not perfect, but as close as anyone in, say, a hundred-foot radius could be. I’m a fighter pilot, naturally.”

“It’s always a good feeling to see a Shrike jet overhead,” Urtiga said. “Our lives often depend on it.”

Toska nodded. “Gives me something to do between refueling. Oh, and I should probably tell you girls about the Navy, because I’m closest to that. There’s a lot to do in the Navy, like working on consoles, or shooting big guns at planets. Um… and cleaning—lots of cleaning.”

“I’m not in the Navy,” Urtiga said, “But I have been informed that sometimes they fly spaceships from place to place.”

“Yes, that as well,” Toska said. “I mean, I should be more respectful, because those ladies keep my jet flying, and give me a place to land in the middle of nowhere, and keep me stocked with bombs and bullets, and fuel.”

“And then a combat controller tells you where to go and what to do. So, you’re really just the middleman?” Urtiga said.

“Basically. And they keep talking about replacing me with an Artificial Intelligence, so uh… I probably shouldn’t get too comfortable.”

The others returned with a grill, and the girls waited patiently while the smell of cooking meat mingled with the sea breeze. They ate burgers, drank beer, and listened to stories from the small crowd that formed until Kayla’s head began to swim. She was struck by the sheer number of different roles they performed, and how monstrously complex an operation it was to put an armed woman on the surface of a planet.

“Anyway,” Toska was saying as she wiped grease off her hands, “I just get particularly respectful around PJs because if I were to crash, they would have to come and get me. I would be completely useless in the face of all the horrible things you all deal with on a daily basis. That’s even assuming my legs aren’t lumps of spaghetti at that point.”

Cara waved a hand dismissively. “You had Ranger training. I don’t even know that we would send people to get you.”

Masey laughed. “You’re getting a radio message telling you to walk back.”

Kayla worked up her confidence to say what had been growing in her mind over the last hour. “I have a question. Why exactly did I have to sit through that horrible school, learning calculus and studying literature with people that hated me? Why did I need to be one of the top students just to earn an invitation here?”

“Uh… you’re welcome,” Masey said, “because the organization just gifted you a first-class education.”

“But… I didn’t need to do all that to be a soldier,” Kayla said.

Masey nodded. “Okay, I get it—you wanted to spend more time partying and kissing boys?”

Kayla’s cheeks flushed. “I mean… no, I just—”

“No, it’s fine. If you don’t like hard work, you can take the shuttle back tomorrow, no big deal. Enjoy the incredible start to life that you earned. I went to that school, got top grades, and frankly it made me a better person, but whatever.”

“It was a difficult experience for me,” Kayla insisted.

Masey stared at her for a moment. When she spoke, she had replaced her air of easy arrogance with an undercurrent of anger. “It was a cakewalk compared to what’s ahead of you,” she said. “And I don’t just mean boot camp. Nothing that you’ve been through will prepare you for how awful combat can get. I promise you that from tonight until the day that you retire, you will go to bed every night knowing that you are not good enough.”

Kayla looked away. Couldn’t one person just sympathize with her for how unfair her life had been?

“Masey’s a hardass, but she’s right,” Urtiga said sympathetically. “Anyway, Valkyrie can’t control what the schools do with our invites. Caldera is such a young colony. Short of setting up a recruiting office, that was realistically the only option available.”

Kayla turned back to Masey with a new plan of attack. “You seemed really bored when you gave that speech. I don’t see how it benefited any of the students.”

Masey shrugged. “Yeah, I didn’t like the place, didn’t like the people, and I hate going back there. That’s not the point, is it?”

“I just feel like you could have said something more…helpful. Maybe try to push them out of their elitist mindset,” Kayla continued.

Masey held Kayla’s gaze. “The thing is,” she said eventually, “those girls have no idea who we are or what we’re about, and nothing I say is going to change that. You heard the rumors and most of it is fantasy; technocratic elite feminist utopia or whatever. What can I say to that? ‘Hi everyone, please excuse my voice, but I’m still recovering from being shot in the throat a week ago.’”

Out of the corner of her eye, Kayla saw Urtiga frown at Masey.

“Forget it,” Masey continued, as though she hadn’t noticed. “At the end of the day, it’s their school. They choose who to send, and we can’t tell them who or what we need. They chose you and Rose, and frankly, I think we got a pretty good deal out of it.”

Kayla felt hot lead settle in her gut. “I hate her,” she said darkly.

“Is that so?” Urtiga said. “Well, you never know what someone’s capable of. When things get really bad, they may surprise you.”

A silence descended on the group.

“So,” Christie said innocently, “at what point in the training do you all get baseball caps glued to your head?”

Urtiga gave her a puzzled look. “What are you talking about?”

Once the sun began to set on the horizon, Urtiga drove the girls back to the hotel and dropped them off.

“Good luck,” she said. “If I don’t see you again, have a nice life.”

“Thanks for everything,” Kayla said, as butterflies whirled through her stomach.

Urtiga shook their hands. “Nothing is going to happen tomorrow that you can’t deal with. Keeping reminding yourselves of that, and you’ll be fine.”

Kayla laughed. “Sure.”

Urtiga looked embarrassed for a moment, then pulled Kayla to one side. “I know you’re coming from a dark place. It’ll give you an advantage the others don’t have.”

She looked away, as if searching for what to say next. When she looked back, Kayla saw the stony reserve she wore when she wasn’t talking to anyone.

“You’ll be better off if you learn to start tapping the brake a little more. It hurts, I know, but you’ll need it.”

Kayla didn’t know what to say to that, but she smiled and nodded, and thanked her for her advice.

Once back inside the hotel, the girls followed the others into the half-empty auditorium. On the writing table attached to each chair was a paper form and a pen.

Kayla sat down and read the text. It asked her to confirm she was of sound mind and body, and that she agreed to enter recruit training under her own volition. A section near the bottom reminded her that she’d be exposed to physical danger and death. She signed on the dotted line, then sat back in her chair. Thandi and Christie also signed, and though they were acting aloof, there was obvious anxiety in their eyes.

Rose was sat a few desks over. Her friends were laughing and joking, but she only stared at her hands. She glanced up and locked eyes with Kayla, but quickly looked away. On her desk was a signed form.

Kayla blinked tired eyes and wondered if she was dreaming.

A group of uniformed women showed up to collect the forms. The girls were told to collect everything from their rooms and wait in the lobby. Eventually, they were loaded onto buses and driven out of the city towards an unknown destination in the mountains.