With a sigh, I hooked the end of my light-line to a rock, threw it up to smack against a stone near the entrance to my cave, then grabbed hold and hauled myself up to the crevice so I could shimmy out and head to class for the day.

• • •

Roughly an hour and a half later, I shifted my helmet—which was chafing my head—then grabbed my ship controls and buzzed past an enormous floating piece of debris. In real life that would have been dropping in a fiery blaze, but in the hologram Cobb had suspended the chunks in midair for us to practice on.

I was getting pretty good at dodging between them, though I wasn’t certain how well that skill would translate once they started—you know—hurtling down from above with horrific destructive potential. But hey, baby steps.

I launched my light-lance, which burst from a turret on the underside of my ship. A glowing line of red-orange energy speared the large piece of space junk.

“Ha!” I said. “Look at that! I hit it!”

After I flew past the chunk, however, the light-lance grew taut, and my momentum caused me to pivot. My ship spun on the line—setting off my GravCaps—then slammed into a different chunk of floating debris.

When I was younger, we’d played a game with a ball on a string, connected to a tall pole. If you pushed on the ball, it would spin around the pole. The light-lances were similar, only in this game, the debris was the pole and I was the ball.

Cobb sighed in the ear of my helmet as my hologram went black upon my death.

“Hey,” I pointed out, “at least I hit the thing this time.”

“Congratulations,” he said, “on that moral victory as you die. I’m sure your mother will be very proud, once your pin is sent back to her as a melted piece of slag.”

I huffed and sat up, leaning out of my cockpit to look toward Cobb. He walked through the center space in the room, speaking into a hand radio to communicate with us through our helmets, even though we were all right next to each other.

The ten mockpits made a circle, and the floor in the center had its own projector, one that spat out a tiny reproduction of what we were experiencing. Eight little holographic ships buzzed around Cobb, who watched us like some enormous god.

Bim slammed straight into a piece of debris near Cobb’s head, and the shower of sparks looked kind of like our instructor had suddenly had a really great idea. Perhaps the realization that the lot of us were worthless.

“Zoom out your proximity sensors, Bim!” Cobb said. “You should have seen that piece floating there!”

Bim stood up out of his hologram and pulled off his helmet. He ran his hand through his blue hair, looking frustrated.

I pulled back into my cockpit as my ship reappeared at the edge of the battlefield. Morningtide was there, hovering, watching the others flit between chunks of metal. It looked like Gran-Gran’s descriptions of an asteroid field, though of course it was in atmosphere, not up in space. We usually engaged the Krell at a height of somewhere between ten thousand and forty thousand feet.