Amantus
Copyright© 2026 by QM
Chapter 2
The following morning ... though it was the second part of the diurnal cycle based upon the time at the central plaza of Vreekoos and hence on the planet, the sun would be setting. Amantus and the group were woken by an alarm and ordered to shower, dress in gym gear, and tidy their bunks and kit. They were then jogged to the mess hall for a breakfast that looked similar to the meal they had yesterday, though tasted different, though none could identify just what it tasted of, but at least it was edible. They were then taken to a large training hall and put through their paces with a series of exercises that taught Amantus, at least, that there was a stark gap between what he considered fit and what Fleet considered fit. Fortunately, the fitness regimen Amantus had followed before enlistment kept him up with the Petty Officers, unlike a few of the group. However, he was still drenched in sweat after they’d finished. However, the Petty Officers looked relatively fresh after the session.
“Every morning after breakfast, we will go through this regimen,” Jazrin informed the group. “Every evening before the main meal, we will run the circuit, which is about five thousand pacemarks.”
“Jog back to your barracks,” Petty Officer Glinna, the female Petty Officer, ordered. “Shower and change into your fatigues. You have sixty rotations.”
The shower, unlike the morning shower, was cold, not freezing cold, fortunately, but still cold enough to shock. It refreshed Amantus and cooled him, then he dried himself, put the towel on the drying rack, and changed into the silver-grey fatigues with a green band on the sleeve that marked him a recruit.
Outside, he stood at ease as the rest of the group joined him, the most tardy getting a punishment jolt, male or female alike. They were then marched to a classroom, and lessons began. Unsurprisingly, the first information imparted to Amantus was the colour system, along with the stippling codes imprinted within it. Green meaning training/education facilities. Blue, support/recreation. Red, command. Yellow, engineering. Black, armed forces. There were other distinctions, too, all of which Amantus memorised.
It was explained that the area they were in wasn’t the whole base, but an internal replica, one of many within the base that was based on the configuration of a battle cruiser. This, it was explained, was to get the recruits used to a ship’s interior and, eventually, to make it easy for them to find their way to anything in it.
“Why not use a real ship?” Amantus asked after raising his hand, having found out that not doing so got you a punishment pulse, though fortunately, he wasn’t the one who received it.
“You’d get in the way of the real crew,” Glinna replied. “Plus, you’re less likely to walk out of an airlock here.”
“If you pass this basic, you go onto advanced basic,” Jazrin added. “That takes place on a real ship.”
Other lessons followed, though it was all pretty basic stuff; it covered the command structure, lines of command within it (who could order whom), along with ship types, fleet structures, and mission types, all without going into any great detail. Yet it was obvious to Amantus, who had grown up within the elite nobility, that there were several glass ceilings in place, all designed to keep the nobility at the top.
Of his class, Amantus only really became acquainted with Mirra and Harrn; the others, though not being particularly standoffish, viewed his involuntary status as a potential hindrance in any path to promotion. Mirra and Harrn, however, wanted to survive their five-year terms and return to a higher-status existence. This meant they really didn’t give a damn about Amantus’s status as a pariah in Fleet, particularly when he aided them in the various tests and tasks they were given as part of their training.
“So, what do you plan to do in your twenty years, Amantus?” Mirra finally bluntly asked the question that had been bugging her for over a binary cycle.
“Yeah, you’re smart, smarter than me,” Harrn nodded. “You could probably make it to captain a ship, at least.”
“I don’t know if that is an option for me,” Amantus replied after a moment’s thought. “I haven’t a clue what Fleet’s orders are about me.”
“They could stop you getting promotions?” Mirra asked.
“You possibly don’t know, as you haven’t grown up amongst the nobility, but no one of your rank ever makes it past Executive Officer,” Amantus replied.
“I thought that was because you needed to serve two terms to get the experience?”
“In theory, yes, in practice...”
“You mean there’s some sort of block on non-nobles?” Harrn asked.
“Yes,” Amantus nodded. “Look up the Fleet records on dispositions and promotions, it’s in plain sight.”
“Only you spend time on your perscomp looking through the libraries and documents,” Mirra giggled. “The rest of us chat to families or play games.”
“I don’t have a family,” Amantus sighed. “At least not one who will talk to me ... or even acknowledge I’m alive.”
“Bitter?” Harrn queried. “Only you don’t outwardly seem to be.”
“Pointless wasting my time being so,” Amantus chuckled. “Not like I can do anything about it ... yet.”
“So you think somewhere in Fleet there are orders not to let you progress to real command?” Mirra asked.
“If they have any sense, yes,” Amantus grimly smiled.
“Whoa, a potential mutiny brewing here,” Harrn chuckled.
“Heh!”
“You’d need more than just Fleet command, though,” Mirra replied thoughtfully. “You’d need at least a couple of sector governors to side with you.”
“I suspect there are some unhappy at being sidelined out in the boonies just to keep the elite of Vreekoos at the top of the pile,” Amantus chuckled. “Whatever the Protectorate is, it’s not a meritocracy.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Harrn nodded. “There are paths forward, like what Mirra and I are doing, but they’re limited.”
“And that’s how you’re controlled,” Amantus replied, remembering the lessons he had received from his tutors.
“What of the surrounding realms, any mutiny or rebellion would likely draw them in,” Mirra pondered, treating the conversation as political theory.
“Well, we watch them, as they watch us,” Amantus replied. “The biggest threats out there are Trema Confederation, the Tronek Federation and the Emirate, and none of them are expansionists ... not by way of conquest, that is.”
“But our Protectorate is,” Harrn frowned. “I’m surprised we haven’t had a war yet.”
“The Protectorate picks off failed realms,” Amantus corrected him. “It actually avoids wars.”
“So ... anyone we conquer has already lost?” Mirra asked hesitantly.
“That’s what I was taught,” Amantus chuckled.
“Not what’s taught at school,” Harrn grimaced. “It’s all heroic deeds performed by valiant crews led by nobles ... always nobles.”
“Just another form of control,” Amantus shrugged.
“Should you be telling us this?” Mirra asked nervously.
“As I’m not a noble ... not any more, I’m no longer obliged to follow the code nobilis and not give away the secret of how we control the Protectorate,” Amantus chuckled.
“Well, if you do succeed, remember your friends,” Harrn laughed.
“Sure,” Amantus smiled.
Several days later, the recruits were surprised when they were taken to a new area outside the training facility. Once inside, Petty Officer Jazrin told them the task was to reach the other side of the facility by any means possible, then left through the door they’d entered and locked it. That was when the gravity turned off, surprising the recruits and leaving a few of them in a tangled mass of limbs as they tried to control their movements.
Though initially grabbed by a panicking recruit, Amantus freed himself and used the momentum gained to glide across the room towards the far door, noting various objects that could be grabbed for stability and control. Grabbing one of these, he reached out and pulled Harrn to the wall, the man looking rather green-faced from the lack of gravity. Mirra was harder to find, though Amantus eventually spotted her amongst a tangled group and launched himself across the space to grab her collar and wrench her free from the panicking mob to the other side of the room and then launch them back across the space to where Harrn was.
“You ok?” Amantus asked.
“Yeah, damned fools were clinging on like drowning rimphoks,” Mirra grimaced. “What’s with Harrn?”
“Motion sickness via his inner ear and lack of gravity,” Amantus replied. “As long as he holds his breakfast down, he’ll manage.”
“Let’s go then,” Mirra nodded, grabbing a handhold.
The three rapidly moved across the wall, gliding from handhold to handhold until they reached the door. Once through, they found themselves in a 3D maze that tested their agility and teamwork, often having to cross vast spaces without a tether, relying on each other to grab and steady themselves. Amantus found it to be fun, as did Mirra, though it was clear Harrn did not enjoy weightlessness at all. Still, as long as he concentrated on a fixed point, he was coping.
It took nearly two hundred rotations for Amantus, Mirra and Harrn to reach the other side of the maze, the first of the recruits to do so. There, they were examined by a medic, and Harrn was given a motion sickness shot that soon had his complexion looking normal and him looking less like wanting to throw up.
“That was fun,” Amantus smiled.
“Easy for you to say,” Harrn groused.
“Wonder what it would be like to fuck in there.”
“Is that all you can think of?” Mirra laughed. “And no, we won’t, I like you too much to potentially wreck our friendship by complicating it.”
“I know,” Amantus nodded. “Besides, Harrn’s the one carrying a torch for you.”
“Mant!” a red-faced Harrn hissed.
“I know,” Mirra smiled. “And the answer is no for the same reasons.”
“Well done, you three,” Petty Officer Glinna congratulated them. “You hold the unofficial record for the quickest crossing.”
“Unofficial, PO?” Amantus asked, already suspecting the answer.
“Kemilo Trannt holds the official record, and always will.”
“Figures,” Amantus chuckled. “I wonder if he even exists?”
“You aren’t the only one,” Glinna grimly smiled.
Others of the group gradually made it through the door, some having to be patched up by the medic, mostly bruising, strained joints and tendons. Then Jazrin spoke into his perscomp, requesting a clean-up crew to rescue those who could not make it.
“Will anything happen to them, PO?” Mirra asked Jazrin.
“They’ll be evaluated,” Jazrin replied. “Some were just unlucky, others totally unsuited to a weightless environment and will be transferred to planetary command training.”
“Helping run the recruitment centres?” Harrn asked.
“That’s one of them; it means you don’t get to serve on ships, is all,” Jazrin added.
“Reliable as grav-tech is?” Mirra queried.
“A hyperbeam stiletto through a ship’s power plant will wreck that delusion,” Amantus chuckled.
“True, which is why we train you to cope with it.”
“That was training?” Harrn asked.
“Sorted the hargonts from the rimphoks,” Glinna chuckled.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“We’ll show you various techniques to cope once the initial shock wears off. Then you’ll be assigned suits and train doing it in a vacuum with the extra hazard that entails,” Jazrin informed the group. “You’ll also learn how to get into a suit quickly and under any conditions.”
“Sounds fun,” Amantus chuckled, realising that he had never been bored since he ‘volunteered.’
“Oh, it can be,” Glinna wryly smiled. “Now form up and let’s go.”
The group jogged back to the training area where they normally lived, pausing only once to salute a higher command officer who apparently ignored them. However, Amantus was not fooled; he realised the officer was testing them.
The next lesson covered XD navigation principles, and it was where most of the class struggled. The maths were daunting: the class had to chart a position through the hostile dimension that ships used to avoid the light-speed limit, without a perscomp. Amantus was fortunate in that the calculations used came easily to him, though they were tediously time-consuming. Still, he understood the reasoning behind doing it that way, even if he hoped never to have to do it for real.
Amantus found himself having to tutor Mirra and Harrn to assist them in their attempts to cover all the variables involved in plotting a course through a dimension where distance and speed could throw a ship light-years off course if not calculated down to several decimal places. Even then, the manual-math only produced a rough area of where the ship would emerge, and gravity eddies could also affect the outcome.
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