When she mustered with the others on the tarmac, the man in the uniform of an Interplanetary Fleet captain looked her up and down, nodding appreciatively. “Not bad, Flight Cadet Amonkar. Lose a kilo or two and you’ll mass out just fine.”

As if in counterpoint, a roar crescendoed overhead before fading away again, as a two-man flyer buzzed over the flight school, its contrail a stark white banner against the bright blue sky that almost immediately began to fuzz at the edges as it spread. Amonkar fancied that the breeze kissing her cheek was the wind of the flyer’s passing, and resisted the impulse to smile. Back home in Bhopal, Arati Amonkar’s mother had always fussed over her during mealtimes, pestering her to eat more, to take second helpings. Amonkar’s older sister was tall, with wide hips and breasts that swelled under the silk of her coli, and for as long as Amonkar could remember their mother had gone on about how men always looked for such things in potential brides, indicators of fertility.

Amonkar, though, had always known that a few extra samosas or another bowl of rice was never going to give her a figure like her sister’s.

She’d always been smaller than the other children of her age, but even so it had seemed as if she’d stopped growing early, while the other girls in her class continued to gain a centimeter or two in height. But if she was short, she wasn’t exactly slender, more like compact. She’d never presented a particularly feminine profile in sadi and coli, and now that she wore the unisex light-colored tunic and pants of an Interplanetary Fleet duty uniform, with her black hair shorn close to the scalp, she might have passed at a distance for a boy just entering pubescence.

Amonkar saw it as a sign that she’d made the right decision to discover herself in the one place where her stature and shape were assets and not liabilities.

“Half-rations for you, Flight Cadet Bu,” the captain said to the Han woman standing beside her, shaking his head. “You’ll need to slim down if you want to make the cut.”

The woman stood only a few centimeters taller than Amonkar, but the swell of her breasts pressed against the fabric of her duty tunic. Amonkar’s mother would have been suitably impressed, as would supposedly the potential bachelors of Hind, but apparently the Interplanetary Fleet was less so. The attributes that made for a good wife and mother in the eyes of Hindi tradition did a potential pilot no favours.

The captain continued down the reviewing line, inspecting the men and women of the flight cadet company. The visual inspection was more a formality than anything else, of course, since later in the day they’d have their daily weigh-in and height check, after their physical exercises and before heading inside for their course work.

When Amonkar had been asked to step onto the scale when first visiting the recruiting office in Bhopal, she’d been confused, to say the least. As he’d checked her weight and height, clearly impressed, the recruited had explained.

Though the gravitational attraction of the red planet Fire Star was only a third that of Earth’s, its atmosphere was far thinner. As a result, any aircraft, whether fixed-wing bombers or rotary-wing fighters, had to offset the lack of lift in the thin medium by keeping its mass as low as possible. In the early days of the Interplanetary Fleet on the red planet, pilots had been selected first by their aptitudes and capacities with regards to flight skills—hand-eye coordination, depth perception and visual acuity, spatial relations and mathematical skill—and then narrowed down to those who either already were or could quickly become light enough in mass. The diminishing pools of potential pilots from such a process of selection meant that the Fleet was constantly short-handed, and always in need of qualified pilots.

Within a few years of the onset of the Second Mexic War, imperial decree changed Interplanetary Fleet recruitment policies, and in particular the pilot selection process. Now, rather than choosing those with the necessary skills and aptitudes and then winnowing down to those who fit the physical requirements, the Fleet would instead recruit those who had the necessary physical characteristics, and then train them to develop the requisite skills and aptitudes as needed.

When Amonkar entered the Bhopal recruitment offices of the Interplanetary Fleet, she was given sight and hearing tests, a battery of examinations designed to gauge her basic intelligence, and then asked to stand on a scale. And that was the extent of it. She had walked in the door wanting to become a pilot, and expecting that she would have to endure a long term of basic training before being allowed to take tests to determine her fitness for that duty. Instead, when she walked out the door she carried in her hand orders to report to the flight school in Guangdong immediately to begin training and evaluation.

The Interplanetary Fleet was the only branch of the imperial military that inducted women in any significant numbers, with the Eight Banners and the Green Standard Army employing women only in support and rear echelon capacities. What surprised Amonkar, on reaching the flight school, was how many women she found there. A moment’s reflection explained it. With the principal requirements for a flight cadet being their weight and height, women would actually have a statistical advantage over men, and thus be disproportionately represented in any class of flight cadets.

Everyone in the flight cadet company, men and women, were comparatively short in stature, and most of them relatively slender. Even the heavier of them were only a few kilos overweight, and heaviest would have looked slender when compared to most people in normal society. But Amonkar had quickly learned that flight school was anything but normal society, and on arriving all of them were informed of the weight goals they would have to meet before moving to the next stages of flight training.

Another flyer roared past overhead, echoed by grumbling in Amonkar’s stomach. She allowed herself a slight smile, the captain’s attention on another cadet in the line. Only a few more missed meals and continued high marks in the simulator, she knew she would be up there herself, not just feeling the wind, but making it.

---

PREVIOUS CHAPTER: Hexagram 8
Closeness
Below Earth Above Water
There is Water on the Earth. In the same way, the former kings established the myriad states and treated the feudal lords with cordiality.

NEXT CHAPTER: Hexagram 10
Treading
Below Lake Above Heaven
Above is Heaven, and below is Lake. In the same way, the noble man makes distinction between the high and the low and so defines how the common folk shall set their goal.

Return to Index.

Chapter 9 of Three Unbroken by Chris Roberson. Copyright © 2007 Monkeybrain, Inc. For more action from the Celestial Empire don't miss The Dragon's Nine Sons.

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