Max had scanned various minds from the work crew, but they all appeared to be honestly interested in the Cadets, who are seen as the elite of society. That’s relaxed Max and he’s about to exit this Mecha to grab dinner with the others when he senses that both Nico and Colonel Black are eating from the stored rations inside their mecha.

That makes him wonder what sort of test this trip might be. He watches the Cadets chat and mingle with the road crew and it becomes incredibly clear, how could the academy not know road conditions? They must have known before leaving that this road was blocked, so the test is almost guaranteed to be about something that happened after that. Chatting with the locals, out of their Mecha, guard lowered. The test is Operational Security.

It seems to be so harmless, but in a war zone you never know where a stranger’s loyalty lies.

So, Max heats up a ration pack and reclines his seat to get comfortable for the evening. At least Colonel Black has a cot inside the ten meter tall Crusader Class Mecha._.

They’re a beautiful machine to Max. The top of the Mecha is covered with a curved armor shell, much like a Turtle shell, extending over the shoulder joints, with a chest plate covering the torso from lower angle fire. The arms of the Colonel’s Mecha both have hard mounted weapons, though the other two escorts have one hand and one hard mounted weapon. The legs are also heavily Armored, the only true weak point is the cooling fins at the back of the torso, or possibly the sensors.

For that reason Crusaders often operate in groups of three, so they can stand in a formation that covers all the backs of their units.

Compared to them the headless humanoid forms and exposed mechanical design of the Line Mecha just looks inelegant.

It doesn’t help that the Line Mecha are all painted gray and orange for visibility and to identify them as Academy Mecha. It’s not exactly a flattering color combination.

After dinner, watches are assigned, with Nico and Max getting first watch, along with one of the Special Forces units and three of the regular class. Colonel Black will be awake as well, but he’s not officially on watch, since the students are supposed to be taking care of the duty. It’s a quiet time, nobody speaking or moving, and only the sounds of small creatures in the forest keep them company.

Two hours later they are replaced by the next shift, and Max decides to follow the lead of Nico and the Special Forces Cadets and nap inside his mecha, as uncomfortable as it might be, instead of rolling out his sleeping bag near the fire to get a good night’s sleep. That proves to be the best call, as just before dawn, the Instructors start waking everyone up, shouting at them to get a move on and that it’s time to go in ten minutes.

There was no set move out time when his watch ended, so this must be a thing they do to keep the Cadets on their toes. Since he’s already in his mecha, Max simply powers up and grabs the cleaning kit to wipe himself down before getting dressed. It’s not like anyone can see him in here, he could pilot naked if he wanted to, but he suspects that the worn material of the chair will be much more comfortable with a uniform on.

The Pilot suit is a form of the standard issue coveralls, so it only takes a few seconds to slip into it and put on his boots, the automatic laces adjusting them to his legs with the coveralls tucked into the top. It’s an odd thing that Nico does, but it’s really comfortable, and keeps from stepping on the hem of his coveralls when he’s in an awkward position during training. That leaves him some time to eat, and Max grabs a breakfast issue nutrient pack from the cabinet, finding that it’s a generic fruit flavored bar along with a pouch of some sort of dry cereal.

The cereal bag he rips the corner from, so he can pour it into his mouth while piloting later, but the fruit bar he bites into now. It didn’t look like much, but Max decides that the bars are actually pretty good. He just wishes that the breakfast pack came with a proper drink and didn’t leave him sipping from the Mecha’s drinking water supply.

The Military rations do come with more variety, but the Cadets are kept on a monitored diet by the Academy, designed by the central authority for optimal growth, supposedly. That’s not much consolation when what you really needed in the morning was a coffee, or even a glass of juice to go with an exceptionally dry bag of mixed cereals.

Colonel Black is impressed with this pair of Cadets that the General is training. He was informed that they didn’t know the field trip was also part of their scoring, and that the General didn’t give them any advance warning of procedures or anything else, but they both seem to have understood what they should be doing without anyone needing to tell them, a quality the Colonel appreciates in a potential officer.

Before becoming Senior Officers, Pilots are ranked by the Mecha that they are qualified on. Line Mecha Pilots are almost all Corporals, with the squad leaders being Sergeants. Once qualified on the Corvette Class Mecha, they will be promoted to Second Lieutenant and usually given command of a wing of light mecha. Most commonly in a fully mechanized Battalion that would be twenty Line Mecha, though depending on troop numbers it might be more or less.

If they make it to the Crusader Class Mecha, they will start at Captain and become Majors with experience. After that it all starts to turn into politics, as the senior officers lead much larger units than wings of Mecha. Most armies don’t do things quite the same way, but in Kepler, they claim that skill is paramount, so the type of Mecha a Pilot uses determines their rank, treatment and even wages within the Empire.

It’s understood that there’s still a hierarchy though. An infantry Sergeant might outrank the average Line Mecha Pilot, but he will still never get the same treatment and respect as the pilots of the mighty war machines.

Colonel Black doesn’t much care for the tiered system, but as an Academy Principal on one insignificant planet out of hundreds, his opinion doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

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