TEXT: BATTLECORPS
  HIGHLANDER CHRONICLES
  Occum’s Choice 
  By Randall N. Bills
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Occum's Choice • Page 2
  Northwind Military Academy, Aerospace Annex 
  Halidon, Northwind 
  Chaos March 
  4 August 3059
  The 
  aerospace 
  fighter 
  spiraled down in an ever-
  tightening 
  turn. 
  Blood 
  pooled up in a sickening 
  sensation, raising bile that 
  threatened to spew acidic 
  chunks, starting the red-out 
  that would end it all.
  Inertia pinned Cameron 
  Baird to the left side of the 
  cockpit. Blood pumped at 
  triple 
  speed, 
  adrenaline 
  smashing his heart into a spasm that seemed to claw at his chest. 
  Demon claws of hot fire pierced his flesh, shattering ribs and throt-
  tling his heart, until wet-slicked salt tracked myriad topographical 
  lines across a pain-wracked face.
  As though detached from his body, the fingers of Cameron’s left 
  hand fought against the viscous gravity, hammered a staccato 
  across the controls interface, while his right hand tried through 
  palms slick with sweat to wrench the yoke into his groin. 
  He tried to focus, to bring the knowledge they’d been drumming 
  into him back to the forefront of his oxygen overdosed brain, tried 
  to save face. 
  Lost cause…for the third straight time.
  The canopy around him turned inert as his heart. He let go of the 
  controls, breathing heavily as the aftereffects of so much adrena-
  line and pressure took its toll. His panting sounded too much like 
  the labored breath of the desperate.
  Cameron wished it would stay black. A warm cocoon of dark-
  ness to shield him from the stabbing eyes of superiority. Finally 
  getting his breathing somewhat under control, he let the red-out 
  recede and gingerly leaned back to center. His ribs creaked. It 
  never ceased to amaze him how painfully realistic the simulators 
  could be. Or how painful the after-brief.
  
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  Occum's Choice • Page 3
  Occum’s Razor. 
  Karlotta loved that term. And the way it fell from her lips, twisted 
  into ugly, sarcastic ruin. 
  After all, boy, the simplest choice for you. Quit.
  But no matter the searing eyes or the jagged words, he couldn’t. 
  Never had a choice but to go on. 
  At times he almost wished for the hazing his older siblings had 
  told him about. The beatings. The physical pain. He was strong, 
  he could’ve survived such brutality. 
  But sugary venom? Malice without a name and a point of ref-
  erence? How could you defend yourself against a façade of 
  camaraderie that never reached their eyes? If you didn’t have a 
  target, how could you land a blow in defense?
  He tried to breathe deeply. Once, twice; hissed at the hiccup of 
  pain which sat low on his left side. Knew his refuge couldn’t last—
  it never did. Knew he’d never find the answers. 
  Why they hated.
  At least, not in here.
  The canopy top hissed with pent up pressure, causing him to 
  wince as his ears popped to the equalization. Blinked away sud-
  den tears at the too bright bank of halogens, which covered the 
  area.
  Burning away any ability to hide.
  “Well, boy, that is the most sorry ass set of scores it’s been my 
  sorry ass pain to witness.” The voice of Instructor Jim (in caps, 
  always said in caps) cut with as much severity as the overheads, 
  creating as much heat, as Cameron tried desperately not to flush. 
  Please, god, don’t let me flush. 
  How often had that tone spurned him to quitting as much as 
  Karlotta’s nectared words of death? Reaching out with his left 
  hand, he grasped the outer edge of the flight training simulator 
  and heaved himself up and out onto the small scaffolding, next 
  to the multi-gimbiled machine. A soft whistle sucked through 
  clenched teeth was his only sign of trying to hide the pain. 
  But if her oratory nightshade couldn’t make him quit, Instructor 
  Jim didn’t have a chance. Right? He kept believing that.
  
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  Cameron drew himself up, took a deep breath, raised his chin 
  and marched off to war. At least, what he imagined intense com-
  bat must be like. The whine of numerous gyrostabilizers, as the 
  rest of the class continued their training, drowned out the sound 
  of his steps and rang in his ears like shouts of reprimand. 
  Dignified. Grace in loss. He hadn’t listened much, but his mother 
  managed to hammer that through his thick skull. Along with other 
  baggage.
  Coming to a stop at the base of the scaffold, he turned towards 
  Instructor Jim and opened his mouth to respond. But no words 
  would form. He could as soon talk as he would graduate this class.
  Instructor Jim loomed before him like a Valloire airship—bloated, 
  overloaded and ready to spew at any moment. It was a running 
  joke among the cadets that the man filled both seats on the side-
  by-side training fighter and only a heavy fighter had the thrust to 
  get him airborne. Cameron tried to forget the rest of the mean-
  spirited comments about the offworlder. Never mind the man had 
  been on Northwind for over thirty years. To Karlotta and her brood, 
  if you weren’t born here, you’d always be an offworlder.
  Right about now, however, the man filled Cameron with the de-
  sire to spew. Though equal to his height, the man’s mass gave him 
  the ability to loom, something Jim did with relish.
  More significantly, regardless of disparaging talk in the barracks, 
  the man could out-fly just about anyone Cameron could think of. 
  Even his mother. That admission always hurt.
  And that look of scorn. Pity. Pity! Made him sick. Though he’d 
  managed it coming down the ladder, Instructor Jim’s look turned 
  his cursed white skin into a traitor once again. Jim’s look only 
  deepened, increasing Cameron’s flush—he’d be the color of the 
  snake’s flag if this went on much longer.
  “The fighter won’t do what I want it to,” Cameron finally 
  managed. 
  “That, my boy, is the problem.” Jim swept his arm forward as 
  though giving orders to the entire class and moved back over to 
  the instructor’s computer console. Plopping into the chair with 
  a noxious fart (for just a moment, the squeal of the chair made 
  Cameron wonder if it would finally give up the ghost after so many 
  horrendous assaults of mass), he reached forward and tapped the 
  screen. As though that explained everything.
  
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  Moving over to read the screen (while carefully staying as far dis-
  tant as possible), Cameron saw once again that it might as well 
  have been snake-speak or even Sanskrit. The jumbled lines of color 
  created a fluorescent, random-appearing series of waves, which 
  cascaded across the screen in a language Cameron didn’t speak.
  A language he had slowly come to realize he’d never speak. At 
  each such admission, his stomach clenched. 
  All his mother had ever wanted for him. Push, son. Push. Don’t 
  quit.
  Cameron twisted off the spigot for such thoughts. He waited pa-
  tiently, peering intently at the screen, hoping Instructor Jim would 
  get on with it.
  “A fighter’s like a woman boy,” the odious man finally began, 
  leaning back in his chair and defying gravity all in one ungraceful 
  move. “You don’t tell her what to do, or she’ll bite off your hand. 
  You help her see what you want done, is what she wants done. 
  You wrangle your machine like it’s a ’Mech!” Cameron glanced 
  momentarily at Instructor Jim, the sarcasm came ladled thickly 
  even for him.
  Looking into the pudgy eyes, surrounded by a halo of florid flesh, 
  Cameron once again went blank. 
  The man squinted as though viewing something he didn’t wish 
  to touch. “Boy, why you taking this class?”
  Cameron straightened up quickly (ignored the slight rib-jab 
  again), and tried to keep the shock from his face. Had he actually 
  heard a tone of compassion? Couldn’t be. He struggled to speak.
  “I—I want to be an aerospace pilot.”
  “Oh?”
  The man leaned a little farther back, spread arms the size of 
  Cameron’s thighs wide in a stretch that looked to unhinge bones 
  and actually belched and farted at the same moment. He didn’t 
  even have the grace to look embarrassed.
  Cameron almost smiled (just kept himself from the instruc-
  tor’s wrath) as the rank odor of the man’s interior reminded him 
  of his sister’s haggis. The strange humor, regardless of the dis-
  gusting source, nevertheless managed to unhinge his tongue 
  more than usual.
  
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  “Yes. Yes, I do.” A long ago summer day with mother momen-
  tarily eclipsed his vision, her dream for him a reality she’d thought 
  dashed for so long.
  “No, you don’t.”
  The frank statement rocked him back to the here and now and 
  he stared, incredulous. He’d never liked the man, but such words, 
  coming after the hell he’d gone through to clean himself up (the 
  markers his mother had called in!), brought on hate he thought 
  he’d only reserved for snakes. 
  And Karlotta.
  Maybe he’s a snake-lover at heart. Fury finished what the brief 
  hilarity of a moment before began; he actually managed to raise 
  his voice slightly.
  “What do you know? You know nothing about it. I want to be 
  an aerospace pilot. That’s why I’m here. Why I’m living through 
  this—“ He bit down on his tongue, almost drew blood.
  Quicker than he believed possible, Jim rocked forward, face flushed 
  with an emotion Cameron couldn’t pin down. “What? This hell?”
  The other man laughed uproariously, only driving the stake 
  deeper. 
  “I have to take it from my classmates,” Cameron said, amazed 
  he’d not yelled—perhaps he truly had cleaned it out of his system. 
  “But I don’t have to take it—“
  “The hell you don’t, boy,” he cut back. “I tell you to jab yourself 
  with a pen and by-god that’s what you’re going to do. But I’m 
  not stupid, boy. What would that get me but a mess I’d have to 
  clean up and paperwork to file? I’m also not blind—Miss Karlotta 
  is some fine looking ass, but she comes with fangs in all sorts of 
  places. Course, being a Senn could do that to anyone; they have 
  a way of thinking about themselves.” The man actually looked at 
  him companionably, and for once, in his entire stay at the acad-
  emy, past the bulging face and pudgy eyes, such companionship 
  reached deep. For just a moment, before The Instructor returned.
  “What way?” Cameron said. He grasped onto the tossed lifeline.
  Jim looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Then his features 
  abruptly reminded him of the time his cousin Jimmy ran head-
  long into the tree during the Highlander games. “Damn, boy. Your 
  
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  mother could fly a paper airplane better than any skirt-wearing 
  Highlander. In a fighter, well, she was damn near unbeatable.”
  “You knew…my mother,” he said softly. Too many hurt memories.
  “Damn straight, boy. Knew her during her academy days. More 
  importantly, knew she had the same problem you do, though how 
  the hell you both grow up so ignorant, with it all around you, I’ll 
  never know. Should start calling you ‘oblivious boy.’”
  “What’re you talking about?”
  “The reason they hate you?”
  “Uh?” For a moment Cameron wondered if he’d started speaking 
  ‘aerospace.’
  “Damn boy, I know you’re not stupid, but wake up. Take a look 
  around. You’re hated cause your bloodline joined the Highlanders 
  late. Way late. While Miss Fangs, well, the Senns are part of 
  those few families can trace their lineage back to Founding. The 
  Founding, boy. Seven hundred years will give anyone the feeling 
  they can’t sling their ass into pants any smaller than a DropShip’s 
  cargo hold.”
  Cameron stood within a stream of knowledge, buffeted by the 
  events of so many years tumbling past in white water rapids. He 
  wanted to deny it as stupidity, but whether it emerged from the 
  mouth of this blustering fool or not, it rang too clear. Too true. 
  Even Karlotta’s cuts against offworlders.
  The stabbing eyes—it all made a terrible sense. 
  Push, son. Never quit. Always push.
  Cameron didn’t know how long he must have stood there before 
  a slapping hand almost knocked him down. In hindsight, the in-
  structor probably thought it a companionable gesture.
  “But that still don’t answer the issue, does it, boy? You still don’t 
  want to be an aerospace pilot, no matter what your mommy dear 
  may have poured in you.”
  He tried to find some ire within at such an affront, but couldn’t 
  find the energy. He felt the disappointment any child feels, no mat-
  ter his age, at the failure of a parent.
  “You want to ’Mechjock; got the instincts for it. Stupid, clumsy 
  handed instincts,” Instructor Jim said with a disparaging, yet light 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Occum's Choice • Page 8
  chuckle. “A ’Mech you yank around by the joysticks and it does 
  what you want. A ’Mech’s a man, boy and that’s what you want.” 
  He laughed even harder at his own joke.
  As laughter finally petered out, silence filled the entire room. 
  Cameron knew the other cadets were unlimbering from their pods. 
  Would be moving this way. Would once again see him long out-
  side the cockpit simulator, in front of the instructor for a dress 
  down. Could hear the snickers from here.
  Never quit.
  However, for the first time in long weeks, the ridicule didn’t cut. 
  Or perhaps to say it did, but in a way they might not understand.
  Not Occum’s Razor. Occum’s Choice. It wasn’t enough to see 
  the simplest answer. Deep down he’d known it for some time, but 
  could not accept the failure. Could not accept what it would do 
  to his mother. But even not making a choice was a choice itself, 
  albeit a worthless one.
  No, regardless of Karlotta’s biting words, she’d been correct all 
  along. He’d tried to pull on the ill-fitting call of a pilot, tried to live 
  the dream again for his mother. Yet a ’Mech had always called to 
  him.
  Cameron glanced at the instructor and actually managed to peer 
  past the disgusting, cantankerous façade to see the good man un-
  derneath, and saluted smartly. He heard a round of soft, snide 
  chuckles. 
  Some would call it quitting—all the hate-eyed cadets. Perhaps 
  even his mother. But you pushed forward and never quit, even if 
  that meant serving the Highlanders in your own way.
  Turning about, he moved with alacrity, only pausing for a moment 
  to meet the flashing blue-eyed, towheaded beauty of Karlotta. “You 
  were right all along, Karlotta. Can’t thank you enough.” He almost 
  laughed out loud at the stunned look that washed her features, be-
  fore he walked toward the far door, the pain of his rib forgotten.
  You had to make a choice. And that would have to be good 
  enough. 
  For mother. 
  For himself.
  
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