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  “Yes Sir!” the squad bellowed back, Donsaii’s voice louder than anyone else’s.

  “Donsaii?”

  “Yes Sir!”

  “You really think you’re ready for a ten mile run?” You could hear the grin in his voice.

  Even Phil, who by now was in great condition groaned at the thought of a ten mile run.

  To his amazement he heard Donsaii cheerfully reply, “Yes Sir!”

  Anderson grinned at her and said, “No shit cay-det?” Phil was astounded, upperclassmen never smiled at Doolies.

  “No Sir!”

  “Now you know you’re gonna be dyin’ before we go three miles and dead before we go eight?”

  “Not this time Sir!”

  Anderson threw his head back and laughed. “Gotta admire the attitude! Who’s gonna pick her dyin’ ass up and drag her along for the last half of this run?”

  “We will Sir!” the entire squad bellowed in unison as Ell grinned sheepishly. Phil was startled to realize that they all cheerfully meant it too. Somehow, while he hadn’t been paying attention, her constantly positive attitude had made her beloved by the squad!

  Sure as Hell, she cheerfully led the singing for the first half mile, then gasped out the chant for the next couple of miles, then different cadets started pulling up beside her to let her hold onto their shoulders. By the end of the run she was practically being carried with an arm over shoulders on either side of her. There were so many volunteers that Phil never got put on the spot to have to help her himself, though he did help a couple of the other weak links.

  An hour after the run she was actively making fun of herself for being such a whuss, and carefully thanking everyone who had helped her on the run.

  Zymonds came around to give her Hell, “Donsaii!”

  “Yes Ma’am?”

  “You’ve got to be the worst runner I’ve ever seen!”

  “No doubt, Ma’am!” she said cheerfully.

  Despite herself Zymonds found herself grinning. “Are you ever gonna do any better?”

  “Absolutely, Ma’am!” she grinned back.

  “But, you’re always gonna be terrible aren’t you?”

  “No doubt, Ma’am!”

  Zymonds toned her voice down. “I’m worried about you Cadet. You might not make it for the six minute mile at the end of Basic, you know that?”

  Ell’s shoulders drooped. “Yes Ma’am. I’ll just do the best I can and hope I make it.”

  Zymonds shook her head and wandered off to organize the marching drill. Phil shook his head. Anyone else but Donsaii, and Zymonds would have been ripping their head off and crapping down their neck. But it’s Donsaii, and she’s “worried” about her!

  On the next to the last day of Basic, Squadron Captain Andrews marched them out to the testing field where everyone passed their minimums of pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups and other fitness requirements. When it came time for them to do the mile run, Ell lined up at the back of the squad so she wouldn’t slow anyone else down. Cadet Lieutenant Johnson held up the start of the run and bellowed. “Donsaii!”

  “Yes sir?” she answered from her spot at the back.

  “Get up here. We have a spot reserved for you at the front inner corner of the track.” When Ell got there he leaned close and said quietly, “Zymonds has a theory that you need to start fast like you do on the obstacle course so you’ll have a lead that will let you drag the last lap or so and still make it under six minutes. What do you think of that?”

  The upperclassmen’s concern touched her and her voice was husky, Ell said, “That might help Sir.”

  “Ok, you go for it then. We didn’t want your classmates to block you from doing that. If it doesn’t work, I’ll make sure you get another chance to run it at a steady pace tomorrow.”

  After a summer of endurance activities Ell’d learned that she was good for about three minutes of activity at high performance but that beyond that she would lose steam until by ten minutes she would be having marked difficulty. If the requirement had been for two, or five or ten miles she probably wouldn’t have made it. Importantly, she had also learned that it only took a few minutes to recover even after long runs. Surprisingly, when she went deep into the zone and stayed there very long, it left her tired much longer than a long run did. So, she carefully repressed her zone and when the starting buzzer sounded took off at a fast pace for her non zone state though nothing like she could have run if she were in the zone. After a lap she saw that she was far out in front and worried that this was a bad strategy but resolved to keep to it since they had promised her another try tomorrow if it didn’t work. By the end of the third 400 meter lap she had actually lapped many of the slower runners but fatigue had began to slow her down. Part way through the last lap her stamina was gone and the slower runners started passing her again. When she finished the fourth lap plus a little to the “mile finish line” most of the squad had passed her slow slog but she was still well under six minutes and the members of the squadron that had finished were gathered to clap her across and help her “walk it out.”

  Cadet Lieutenant Johnson stopped by and said, “You should try out for the track team! You did that first 800 meters under two minutes, which would definitely get you on the team.”

  Ell, gave it little thought, her plan was to focus on academics.

  Chapter Three

  Basic Training hadn’t really gone on forever.

  It had just seemed that way.

  Eventually they graduated with a small ceremony and the school year began. The rest of the upper-class cadets came back and the doolies were formed into their real squadrons. Zabrisk and Donsaii’s squad from the Guts training squadron turned out to all be going into 22nd squadron. As expected, their new upperclassmen greeted the Doolies as if they couldn’t believe they’d been saddled with such losers.

  They settled into a school year made up of early formations, training runs, breakfast, classes from eight ‘til noon, lunch, and two more hours of study halls and special training, then physical training or intramural sports, then dinner, and then study ‘til lights out. Somehow, in the nonexistent time left over they were supposed to keep their shoes polished, their rooms spic and span and show motivation by performing various feats to indicate their motivation and esprit de corps.

  The upperclassmen dutifully made the lives of the mere doolies miserable, holding surprise inspections, taking them out for midnight runs and constantly yelling at them in formation. Meals were a hell where they ate at attention, recited inane details from the careers of previous members of the 22nd squadron from memory and were generally harassed whenever possible.

  “You squats, pull your plugs!” It was their “Table Commander” Cadet Captain Alston. Alston was at the head of the table and Phil was at the foot with two other doolies on either side of him. They dutifully pulled out their AI’s earpieces so that they wouldn’t be able to get any “answers” from them. “OK. Zabrisk. What rank did former 22nd Squadron Cadet Seddon achieve?”

  Seddon was a Medal of Honor winner who had come out of 22nd Squadron, that much Phil knew. Seddon’d died winning his medal though, going down with his stricken plane but keeping it stable enough that everyone else managed to bail out. Phil knew what plane he’d been flying, which engines were out, that there had been extensive damage to the tail control surfaces, and who his copilot had been. But what rank? No clue. So, he took a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) based on the fact that most pilots were fairly young and thus held relatively junior rank, “Captain, sir!”

  “Very good Zabrisk. If your two classmates are as knowledgeable, you might get out of this evening’s bombing mission.” He smirked, “I see we’re having fudge sundaes.” Shit! Phil’s heart sank. “Bombing missions” involved having one of the Doolies at the table serve as a “target,” head leaned back and mouth open. Another Dooley served as the “bomber.” Blindfolded with a napkin and holding a large spoonful of ice cream, the “bomber” waved the ice cream around in the air over th
e “target’s” face. The third Dooley served as the “bombardier” calling out directions to the bomber as to where to move the spoon and when to dump the ice cream, hopefully into the target’s mouth. It was a lucky “target” who got any of the ice cream in his mouth; generally it went all over his or her face. The “target” usually sat at the foot, where Phil presently sat. He had on his last clean shirt! “Smith!”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Who was Seddon’s co-pilot?”

  Mary J Mabry! Phil thought emphatically at Smith.

  Smith sweated a few seconds, then said, “Sir, I do not know, sir!”

  “One ‘sir’ to a sentence squat! Is that too difficult?”

  “No sir!”

  “Well, boys, it looks like they need to make a bombing run, eh? Zabrisk!”

  “Yes Sir!”

  “You’re sittin’ in the ‘target’ chair.”

  “Yes Sir!”

  “Now it don’t seem fair, you bein’ the target, when it was Smith that couldn’t answer the question, does it?”

  Damned if he did for getting his classmate “bombed” but the question had sounded rhetorical, “No Sir!”

  “So. You think Smith should be the target?” There was a dangerous tone in the table captain’s voice.

  “No sir!” Definitely the correct answer, he thought to himself.

  “So, you volunteerin’ to be the target?”

  “Yes sir!” Hell no, he thought to himself, but very quietly.

  Minutes later, Phil’s head was tipped back, a napkin inadequately covering his shirt and Smith was dumping loads of ice cream and chocolate syrup all over him to directional shouts from Dilinski. Not a drop went in his mouth and his only clean shirt was ruined.

  However, the upperclassmen were thoroughly entertained.

  There were bombing missions at a lot of tables that night and later he heard a guy from Donsaii’s table talking. She’d been assigned as bombardier. The guy telling the story had been the “target” and he spoke in awe of how only the first spoonful of ice cream partially missed his mouth. She had directed the “bomber’s” course and speed surely, then had him “drop” on the count of three. “I think the only reason the first one missed is ‘cause it came off the spoon slower than she expected. Course, I’m still a mess from the splashes.” The listening group was divided among those who thought she’d been very lucky and those who were trying to understand and comprehend her strategy in directing her bomber and dropping on a count.

  Phil? He tried to ignore the hair prickling down the back of his neck. Again!

  Ell had never needed a lot of sleep. Three or four hours had always been it, then she would be awake. She went to bed at midnight to keep from freaking out her mother but had taken a lot of her advanced math classes on the net in the early morning hours from three to six when she couldn’t get back to sleep. She’d learned not to talk about it with kids her age who typically slept a lot more and would think she was weird. When she slept over with friends she’d lay awake in the dark, working on her favorite problems in her head. Usually her attempt to create a dimensional math that could correlate quantum entanglement and the double slit experiment to reality. Reality, plus that one extra dimension thru which Ell hypothesized that the particles actually connected. The summer exertions of basic training had had her sleeping four to five hours except when they got her up for “night training.” Now that the school year had started, she had a lot less physical exertion tiring her out and was back to sleeping three hours a night. This gave her time to work on keeping her room and clothes really sharp before “lights out.” After lights out she put her pillow next to her head so the light from her HUD wouldn’t bother Joy Denson, who’d become her room mate. In this fashion she was able to study for her classes after “lights out.”

  She still had time that she could spend on her odd theories because keeping up with her studies didn’t take too long at the rate Ell could read. Until then she’d been trying to picture a photon going through the “double slit experiment.” When she’d pictured it in the past she’d viewed it as if it were two photons, or “half photons” going through the two slits but connected beneath the plane of the experiment by a kind of “U-shaped” connector through her additional dimension. Now she realized that she could picture the single photon in the slit experiment as spread out like thousands of photons all connected through her tiny dimension, allowing the thousands to act like a wave that then coalesced on a single location when they arrived at the receiver. This had her so excited that she succeeded in ignoring her alarm until Joy shook her shoulder and said, “Get up sleepyhead!” While Ell brushed her teeth Joy said, “We need to do some kind of ‘spirit’ thing for 22nd Squadron.”

  Ell spit in the sink, “We?”

  “Yeah, but something better than arranging sheets on the side of the mountain to spell ’22,’ that’s lame.”

  “OK, what’s your idea?”

  “I don’t have one. I just know we need one that’s not lame.”

  Phil woke to an insistent low knocking on his door. It was freaking 2AM! When he opened his door Ell was there with her trademark crooked grin. Jason and Joy stood behind her, looking about as exhausted as Phil felt. “We’ve had a great idea!” she started brightly.

  “There are NO good ideas at this time of night.” Phil grumbled.

  “I ordered this paint…”

  Soon Phil and Jason were holding Ell up at arms length against the west wall of the parade ground as she sprayed paint that she swore was water soluble onto the granite. Joy stood “lookout.” Then it was Jason standing on Phil’s shoulders as Ell scrambled up over both of their bodies and stood on Jason’s shoulders to lay some kind of “sensor device” on top of the wall.

  In the morning, despite still feeling irked at getting up in the middle of the night, Phil looked eagerly at the west wall. There was nothing there! Had it rained and washed it away? He looked at Ell. She winked at him!

  They were called to attention and his eyes were turned away but the sun was rising and as more light slanted across the grounds he began to hear some murmurs among the upperclassmen, then some chuckles amongst his own squadron. They were about to march to breakfast but the ripping sound of the string of firecrackers set off by Ell’s photosensor directed everyone’s attention to the west wall where the upper two thirds of neat letters spelling out “22nd Raptors” was now visible where the sun shone on the wall. A lusty cheer went up from 22nd squadron.

  Their cadet captain called them back to attention. With a tremendous frown he said, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out who was responsible for this defacement of Academy property so I’m going to be giving 10 demerits to every one of the Doolies in this squadron!” There was a long pause, then he broke into a big grin, “And I’m deducting 15 demerits from each of the 22nd Raptor Doolies for a ‘Kick Ass’ performance this morning!” A spontaneous cheer went up and they marched in to breakfast in high spirits. Sure enough, as they left breakfast they saw the groundskeepers successfully washing the “light activated” paint off the wall with a hose.

  Phil may have had his problems with Ell Donsaii but he seemed to be just about the only one who didn’t adore her. The upperclassmen hardly ever jumped her shit. Even Phil had to admit that she never seemed to have a hair out of place at inspections or, for that matter at any other time. Her uniforms fit as if they had been tailored for her, making her look so good people quietly said she should be on the Academy recruitment web pages. It was rumored that she actually tailored her uniforms herself at night, with a flashlight under a blanket after “lights out.” Joy Denson was her roommate and confided to Jason that Ell did practically all the work involved in keeping their room spotless for inspections. Denson was having trouble keeping up with her class work and Ell had volunteered to do their military spit and polish so Joy could study! Joy said that Ell was up all hours of the night doing extra projects, hardly seemed to sleep, rarely studied and, damn it, was always in a g
ood mood! Joy worried that Ell couldn’t be passing her classes with as little time as she spent on them but Ell had repeatedly reassured Joy that she was “doing OK.”

  Despite his mixed feelings about Ell, Phil thought she looked even better than when he’d first met her. All the physical conditioning made her leaner. Phil liked big breasts on women but admitted that they would have seemed out of place on her slender frame. He couldn’t help admiring her willowy yet muscular legs when they went out for training runs. Military short hair agreed with her, outlining her delicate features and somehow making those brilliant green eyes stand out even more brightly against her strawberry blond complexion. Her smiling at everyone and always seeming to be in a good mood meant that people just plain liked being around her.

  Phil couldn’t believe that Ell could be so constantly cheerful with the long hours she reportedly put in. The only time she didn’t smile was when she was being dressed down by an upperclassman. A smile during a scolding pissed them off. Since she rarely got in trouble by herself, almost all the “dressing downs” she received were as part of a group of other Doolies.

  It wasn’t all peaches and cream. Some of the other women Cadets were jealous and disliked her because of her good looks, but many of them also had tales to tell about how Donsaii had helped them with this or that problem. Because of this there were a lot of mixed messages in the rumor mill about Ell but they didn’t consolidate one way or the other.

  Even though Phil’s feelings about her weren’t all warm and fuzzy, it irritated him immensely when he stood behind a couple of the upperclassmen from 16th squadron at an intramural soccer game. “Hey, how about that ‘hot Doolie’ in 22nd squadron?”