Durrik Adjusts the Curriculum

Durrik ran me through the same battery at zero eight hundred the next morning, starting with the reaction-time apparatus, a rack of sensors arranged at head and shoulder height that lit in sequence and required a touch response. He'd used it in Chapter 6's assessment and I'd clocked what he considered a respectable but unremarkable score. He'd said so in the same flat tone he used to say everything.

He didn't say anything now. He ran the sequence, watched the display, ran it again, and then looked at the readout for a moment longer than the first assessment had required.

"Again," he said.

I ran it again.

He pulled up the first assessment's numbers on his handheld and set it beside the current display without comment. The difference was there in the columns. I could read the numbers from my angle without straining, which itself told me something about the visual acuity change Sonn had described.

"Spatial positioning," Durrik said, and moved to the next station.

We went through the full battery over the next hour and a half. Reaction time, spatial positioning, the confined-space navigation exercise with the movable wall panels, the target identification sequence with the overlapping civilian-combatant figures. On the last one I'd scored poorly in the initial assessment because the identification window was shorter than felt natural and I'd been conservative, waiting for certainty before committing, which meant slow. I ran it the same way this time.

Durrik looked at the score and then at me. "You still wait."

"I don't miss when I wait."

He didn't respond to that. He took the results from each station, transferred them to his planning unit, and spent four minutes doing something with the data while I drank from the water ration on the equipment rack. The training deck was empty at this hour except for us, the equipment humming at standby levels, the overhead lights at their full operational brightness. My eyes handled it without the adjustment time I'd needed three days ago.

"Here," Durrik said, and turned the planning unit so I could see it.

He'd built a revised training schedule. Two weeks, broken into four-day blocks. The first block was close-quarters movement and cover usage. The second was fire discipline and communication protocol. The third was unit integration exercises, which he noted with a single bracket and the word "theoretical" because there was no unit for me to integrate with yet. The fourth was scenario-based assessment, which was his way of testing whether the prior three blocks had done what he'd intended.

"The numbers moved," he said. "The curriculum moves with them."

He took the unit back and added one line to the first block's objectives. I read it while it was still facing me: "relearn cover habits from new baseline."

I looked at him.

"Your spatial awareness is calibrated to your old physical processing speed," he said. "The two things are related. What felt like adequate cover three days ago may not be adequate cover now because your movement speed has changed and your threat-detection range has changed and the margins that kept you safe before have shifted. Until you relearn the margins, the increased capability is a liability." He picked up the session clipboard. "People with new tools who use them with old habits get killed."

He wasn't wrong. I'd been thinking about it since the bunk the previous night, the way the corridor had resolved at a different resolution level than I was accustomed to, my instinctive spatial positioning in the narrow station hallway still calibrated to the buffer distances I'd learned as a person moving at my old processing speed. The math on that was not complicated: if I could now detect a threat at greater range and react to it in less time, but I was still choosing cover positions based on the old threat-detection range, I was buying margin I didn't need at one end and leaving gaps I couldn't afford at the other.

"When do we start," I said.

"You're standing in the training deck at zero eight hundred," Durrik said. "When do you think we start."

The first block ran four days and was genuinely unpleasant in a way the initial assessment hadn't been. The initial assessment had been Durrik measuring what he had to work with. The first training block was Durrik systematically dismantling every cover habit I'd built on the old baseline and rebuilding them from the measurement numbers. He made me run the movable-wall exercise repeatedly, changing variables: entry angle, obstacle density, the number of simulated contact points. He watched where I went for cover and told me when I was wrong.

"That position," he said, after one run where I'd taken cover behind a panel cluster, "puts your sightline at forty degrees off the primary approach vector. Your detection range means you will know contact is coming at thirty meters. From that angle, you cannot engage until it closes to twelve. What happened to the other eighteen meters."

"I gave them up."

"Why."

"Habit."

"What is the correct position."

I looked at the room. I'd been in the exercise enough times to have the layout detailed, every panel cluster, every gap, the angles of approach built into the scenario parameters. I'd been taking the cover position because it was the closest when I entered, a fast drop that put solid material between me and the expected contact vector.

"Four meters back and left," I said. "Higher angle on the approach. More exposure on my flanks but I don't need flank cover from that position because the second contact vector is behind the panels anyway, and at my detection range I'll know if that changes before it becomes a problem."

"Run it."

I ran it. The position was more exposed in the way he'd described, and the cognitive adjustment of trusting the detection range I now had rather than the one I'd operated on before was work, a deliberate override of the conservative instinct to put as much material between me and the unknown as possible. The known was no longer as unknown as it had been. I had to use that.

I ran the scenario correctly. Durrik moved me to the next variable set.

By the end of the first block he'd stopped telling me when I was wrong in the simple cases. He just watched, and when I ran a position correctly he moved the variable. When I ran one wrong I could tell by the fractional pause before he moved to the next setup, a half-second of not-quite-silence that I'd started reading as his version of noting the error without dwelling on it. He didn't say the same correction twice. He'd said it once; if I made the same mistake again, that was a retention problem rather than an instruction problem, and he didn't treat retention problems with repetition.

The second block started with communication protocol, which was worse than the cover habits because cover habits were spatial and the old spatial instincts had at least been rooted in real experience. My communication habits were rooted in nothing because I'd never trained with a unit. I'd hunted alone, worked the land alone, and the only operational communication I'd done in my life before all this was the occasional deer-stand hand signal with my grandfather, which was a vocabulary of about eight gestures covering direction of movement, hold position, shot taken, and variations on those themes.

Durrik had a standard Compact tactical communication overlay that covered vocal, visual, and interface-integrated channels, and I could operate exactly one of those three in any functional way.

"The interface channel," he said, "is not sufficient. Units under fire have multiple channels running. The interface integration is a specialist tool, not a replacement for basic radio and visual discipline. You will learn all three."

"I know basic radio."

"Compact military radio," he said, with a weight on the adjective that communicated the full distance between what I'd described and what he meant.

He was right. The Compact military protocol had a specific structure: call sign format, status encoding, position reporting conventions, authentication sequences, channel discipline rules that governed who spoke when and what information had priority. It was a language with grammar, and I was starting from the vocabulary's first page.

He drilled me on it the same way he drilled the cover positions: variable substitution, no correction of the same error twice, the measuring pause when I got something wrong. I ran the protocols against a training simulation that generated incoming traffic and required me to process and respond while simultaneously tracking a physical scenario on the training deck. The first two days I was managing one or the other adequately and both of them badly. By the third day I'd stopped running them as two separate tasks and started running them as the same task, which was what Durrik had been waiting for.

"Better," he said. It was the first evaluative word he'd used in the whole second block, and it was exactly as warm as everything else he said, which was not warm at all, and I filed it as high praise.

The pattern recognition that the calibration had dialed up made the communication protocol work more tractable than it might have been otherwise. Processing incoming radio traffic while tracking a scenario was fundamentally a two-stream attention task, and the calibration had improved my ability to hold multiple simultaneous positional variables with something left over for the verbal channel. I was using the new capability for something it hadn't been designed for, the system routing what it amplified in my brain toward whatever problem I was currently solving, which was exactly what Sonn had said it would do.

Sonn checked in every two days during the training blocks. Not formally, not through any schedule Durrik set up; they simply appeared in the doorway of the training deck at the end of the session day and asked how I was doing, by which they meant how the integration was processing rather than how I felt about the training. I answered in the terms they were actually asking about: spatial resolution level, communication-task load tolerance, any anomalies in the pattern recognition output. Sonn took notes on their monitoring unit and asked follow-up questions and then left.

After the fourth check-in, Durrik said, without looking up from the session schedule he was revising: "The Thuvari runs more observations than any researcher I've worked with."

"They want to make sure the integration is processing in range."

"I know what they want." He made a notation. "I'm saying they're thorough."

"Is that a problem."

"It's a data point." He flipped the schedule to the next block. "Unit integration exercises start tomorrow. Theoretical, as the schedule says, because you don't have a unit. Which means I run opposition."

That was the third block, and it was the most useful one. Durrik playing opposition was a different experience from Durrik running a scenario simulation, because Durrik was an actual trained combatant with eleven years of Solvari military instruction behind him and the kind of spatial intelligence that required to train other people's spatial intelligence. He was also not using the Aeluun integration, which meant he operated at baseline Solvari parameters, which were physically different from human baseline in specific ways, and fighting something physically different from what you'd trained against was its own lesson.

The first run, I took cover behind a panel cluster at the position I'd recalibrated in the first block, correct for my new detection range, good sightline, appropriate flank coverage. I held it for twenty seconds and then Durrik appeared from an angle that put him through a gap I'd identified as low-priority because the spatial read had suggested the primary approach would come from the left.

He tagged my position and the simulation marked it as a contact.

"Your read was correct about the primary vector," he said, resetting to start positions. "I came from the secondary because I knew you'd identified the primary. I'm a known opposition with a training history you've observed for two weeks. What does that tell you."

It told me that an opposition who had time to observe your habits would route around your defenses precisely because they knew where your defenses were strongest. The cover position that was optimal against an unknown contact was not necessarily optimal against a contact who had been watching you work.

"Position variability," I said.

"Specifically."

"If the opposition knows my habits, optimal position is the second-best position they won't expect me to use."

"Depending on what the second-best position costs you in sightline and coverage."

"Right."

He ran it again. This time I took the second-best position deliberately, the one that covered the primary vector adequately and the secondary vector better, at some cost to the primary coverage. Durrik came through the primary gap, which he'd left because he expected me to cover the secondary better now. I had him at twelve meters and held the position advantage.

"Better," he said. "Now do it without knowing which adjustment I'll read from last time."

The third block ran five days because the unit integration problem was genuinely complex without an actual unit to train with. Durrik solved this by running the opposition at different scales: solo, then with a training simulation running two additional contacts that I had to manage alongside him, then with three. The communication protocol work from the second block was load-tested against the multi-contact scenarios, and I dropped it badly on the first two before I found the rhythm.

The rhythm, when I found it, came out of the pattern recognition processing multiple simultaneous movement signatures and routing the high-priority ones to my active attention while backgrounding the lower-priority ones. I wasn't doing this consciously, at least not in the way I made conscious decisions. It was the system amplifying what it had mapped, applying the contact-prioritization logic to a multi-contact scenario because that was the problem my nervous system was currently stressed by. The communication protocol sat on top of that, a separate channel, and once I stopped fighting to hold them as two tasks, they ran together.

Durrik watched the replay of the fourth scenario run, where I'd managed him plus two simulation contacts and gotten the communication protocol right on all three status calls. He didn't say anything during the replay. When it ended he closed the display and said: "You plan your exit before you plan your entry."

"Every time."

"I watched it in the assessment footage from the cover exercises. You identify the exit route before you commit to the position." He set the display down. "That is not a habit I teach. I have removed it from trainees who had it wrong and tried to rebuild it. You have it correctly. Where did it come from."

"Hunting."

He waited.

"Every position I've ever taken in the field, I know how to leave it before I settle into it. Because animals aren't predictable, terrain closes on you, and if you have to think about the exit when you need the exit, you're already wrong." I picked up the water ration from the equipment rack. "My grandfather was specific about that. Every stand, every position, you know your three ways out before you touch the rifle."

Durrik made a note. He filed things in notes the way I filed them in memory: not for sentiment but for reference. "What was he hunting."

"Whitetail, mostly. Some turkey."

"Big game, small game."

"And he trapped. Smaller stuff, fur-bearing animals. Mostly in the winter."

Durrik looked at the scenario readout. "He sound like someone who could keep soldiers alive."

I thought about my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table in January, running a line of traps through a grid map he'd drawn himself on graph paper, marking exit routes from each trap position because he'd once been caught in a hollow during a flash flood and spent the night in a tree. "Yeah," I said. "Probably."

Durrik nodded once and moved to the next session setup. He didn't ask anything else about it, which was correct and was also why I'd answered at all.

The fourth block was assessment, and Durrik ran it against the scenario parameters from the block beginnings, the same exercises, so the comparison was clean. I ran the cover exercise, the communication protocol under load, and the multi-contact unit integration scenarios. He watched, he ran the data, and then he spent ten minutes doing something on his planning unit that I didn't ask about because he'd tell me what mattered when he was done.

"Two instincts I'm keeping," he said. "Exit planning and positive identification before engagement." He looked up. "Every other trainee who has the exit-planning habit has it wrong in some specific way. You have it correctly. Positive identification is a liability in pure speed engagements but it will keep you from contributing to friendly-fire incidents and it will keep you from burning ammunition on shots you cannot confirm, which in a sustained engagement is a resource problem." He turned the planning unit toward me. "The tactical communication score has moved significantly. The cover positioning is calibrated correctly. The unit integration is functional at three contacts, which is adequate for a first operational attachment."

He hadn't said anything that wasn't an assessment. That was still all it was.

"When does the operational briefing start," I said.

"That's Vasht's timeline, not mine. I give the training assessment." He pulled the planning unit back. "But you'll hear about it within the week. The Caleth Corridor situation is not improving and Command is not patient." He stood, moving toward the equipment rack to log the session end. "What I will tell you is that when I give Vasht this assessment, it will say you are operationally functional in a narrow set of conditions that we've specifically trained for, with significant gaps in extended unit communication and conventional infantry movement that a longer program would close."

"That's honest."

"It's accurate." He tagged the session closed on the equipment log. "Honest is when I tell you the part that's not in the written assessment."

I waited.

"You think like a hunter," he said. "I said that in the initial battery as a tactical deficit. It reads differently after two weeks." He hung the logger back on the rack. "Hunters wait. Hunters use terrain. Hunters take shots they can confirm and don't take shots they can't. In a conventional infantry engagement against a conventional infantry opposition, that is a liability because conventional infantry doctrine runs on aggression and speed and coordinated pressure." He turned toward the deck exit. "Against Dominion-gifted soldiers who are faster and more durable than anything conventional infantry can field, it is not a conventional infantry problem. It is a different kind of problem." He reached the door. "That's all I'm going to say about it."

He went through the door. I stood in the empty training deck with the overhead lights at full brightness and the equipment running its standby hum and the spatial information of the empty room registering at its new, higher-resolution baseline.

I thought about the Caleth Corridor briefing I hadn't received yet, and about the Dominion soldiers Vasht had described in the initial briefing, faster and more durable than biology alone produced, and about what it meant to hunt something faster than you.

You didn't outrun it. You outread it.

I drank the rest of the water ration and logged the session from my end and walked out of the training deck, the left hinge gap on the door registering at two point three millimeters as my hand passed it, same as it had been for two weeks. The station's main corridor was its usual early-evening traffic level, crew members moving between stations, the maintenance rotation coming on. I registered each of them at the edge of my pattern recognition, movement signatures distinct and backgrounded, not threat assessments, just presence.

Sonn was in the research bay. I could see the light under the door from the corridor, and when I pushed it open, Sonn looked up from the monitoring display with the expression that meant the data had been running while I'd been in the training block.

"Good session?" they asked.

"Durrik ran the full assessment block."

"Yes." They turned the monitoring display so I could see it from the door. My integration readings, across the fourteen days, graphed against the Thuvari case data they used as reference points. The line that represented my development sat significantly above the reference band. Not alarmingly, they'd said, but distinctly. Fast and consistent. "The readings match what I'd expect from what you've been doing," Sonn said. "The multi-contact tracking exercises have pushed the pattern recognition into territory I was projecting for later development. Apparently practical application accelerates the process."

"Apparently."

"There's a specific read from today's assessment scenarios that I want to walk you through, if you have a few minutes."

I had a few minutes. I stepped into the research bay and let the door close behind me, and Sonn pulled the monitoring display fully toward me and began explaining what the pattern recognition had been doing during the three-contact scenarios, in the careful and precise way they explained everything, pausing before statements that carried weight.

Outside the research bay, the station's systems ran their evening routines. The forty-nine-second air cycle counted its intervals. Somewhere in the forward section, Durrik was writing an assessment report for Vasht that would say, in the spare and factual language he used for everything, that the project had produced something functional. He would not say it warmly. He would say it accurately, which in Durrik's vocabulary was the same thing.

I listened to Sonn explain the pattern recognition data and the room's details ran at their new baseline resolution and the integration, which would not stop, processed the research bay the same way it processed the training deck and the corridor and the empty early-morning station: not as threat, not as target, just as the space I was in, its geometry precise and present.

What Durrik had put in the written assessment I'd see when Vasht briefed me. What he'd said at the training deck door, I'd carry differently: not filed the way I filed operational information but held in the specific way you hold someone else's honest assessment of your particular usefulness, which is not gratitude and not pride and not anything with a clean name, just the fact of being seen accurately by someone who had no reason to lie.

That was worth knowing. In the Caleth Corridor or anywhere else, it was worth knowing.

Sonn asked me a question about the sensory processing change from that morning's session. I answered it accurately and asked my own question about what the three-contact data showed about the pattern recognition's upper processing range.

We worked through the data together. The monitoring display tracked its lines. The system ran its permanent inventory. And the question of the Caleth Corridor, and what Durrik's assessment would set in motion, sat where all the next-things sat: present, not yet arrived, and worth being ready for.