It didn't take long for Ryke and the others to realise that it would be a while before they were piloting anything. Before they took to the cockpit at all the instructors were doing their best to push the newcomers to their physical limits in preparation for piloting the deadliest war machines ever designed. It wasn't as simple as getting fit, however. The regimen of training was not focusing on ordinary physical prowess, but on specifically tailoring their bodies to interface with the Hunter-Killers.

Out on the main concourse of the Stamm Basin, Ryke stood where the Drill Sergeant had placed them. The first order of business had been to divide the group into four 'squadrons' of ten recruits each. Then they'd been colour coded.

"Listen carefully, greasers," the sergeant said. His voice seemed to carry up into the dust-ridden air with little to no effort. "Look at the people to your left and right. They are your family. You will work with them, live with them – and fight with them." He strode back and forth, glaring at them from behind a pair of opaque sunglasses. "Understand this: until you complete your training you are not Hunter-Killer pilots. You are rookies, fresh fuel for a Scraegan furnace. You have colours and numbers, and that is how you will be identified until you prove yourself to be more than that. Do you understand?"

"Sir, yes sir!"

"Then get ready to sweat: we have a lot of work to do! Everybody line up, east-facing. Your training starts now."

What came next was a vicious regimen that Ryke realised would be their daily warm up. As a group they ran the entire perimeter of the main concourse – a distance of well over a kilometre – five times in full view of the ferocious morning sun. While they'd all been treated from birth to be protected against burns and skin cancer the treatments didn't deaden the heat, and it wasn't long before rivers of sweat were flowing down his face and arms.

Before long the physical prowess of some of the others began to show. Half a dozen of them broke away out in front – Jarrko among them – natural runners who easily outpaced their companions. Ryke held his own, charging along side by side with Brigg in the main body of the group while a handful fell behind. A glance back told him that the pink-haired girl didn't have the legs to keep pace and he wasn't surprised.

When they finished the final lap Ryke stumbled to a halt, leaning forward and resting his hands against his knees, sucking in huge gulps of the warm air. The others arrived all around, some slumping to the ground, exhausted. Trailing along at the back was the girl, her pink hair now drenched in sweat, her breath coming in sobbing gasps.

"Who passed her for the Hunter-Killers?" he heard someone mutter. He glanced up and saw two lanky males in with red wristbands giving the girl pitying looks. She was too busy fighting to get her breath back to notice. He straightened up.

"What are you doin'?" Brigg asked, catching his arm. "We don't want to go starting a fight on our first day." Ryke looked at him for a moment, his jaw tight. Then Brigg spoke again. "She'll have plenty of time to prove she's got what it takes. You just need to worry about yourself."

He shook off the other boy's hand, but instead of approaching the naysayers, he turned and walked over to the girl. Stooping down, he put a hand on her shoulder.

"You alright?"

Between coughs she forced out: "I don't know."

"What's your name?"

"A...Amelia..."

"Okay, Amelia." He patted her shoulder. "Just take deep, slow breaths and try keep moving. Otherwise you'll cramp up. We can't all be track stars."

"Thanks." Running a hand through her hair she straightened up to look at him. Her brown eyes were bloodshot and watering from exertion. "I feel...disgusting."

"You'll get used to it, princess," he chuckled. "Just try and keep up."

*

Ryke quickly discovered that honing their motor skills and balance took precedence over brute force. There were plenty of recruits that would have had the door slammed in their face applying for any other armed force. Here, however, it was their other skills that made them elite. All around him new-bloods launched into training, with sets of exercises designed to focus on accuracy, precision and reaction.

Paired up with Jarrko, he followed the sergeant's commands of basic hand to hand combat – but there was something odd about the combat techniques. He could already tell that the kind of blocks and counters being employed did not seem to focus on conventional weak points. It was all about disengaging, rotating, changing position – doing everything you could to gain a positional advantage from the side or back.

It felt like hours had passed before the sergeant finally allowed them to take a break. Ryke slumped down next to Jarrko and Brigg, taking a long drink from his water canteen and splashing some of it over his sweat-soaked face. The twin suns beat down on them without respite, the sky a cloudless, searing blue.

"Sometimes I wish this planet had more than one fekking season," Brigg muttered, wiping the film of sweat from his forehead.

"You from Brekka?" Jarrko asked.

"Born and bred." Brigg grinned, tipping an imaginary hat to them. "What about you two?"

"Yep, I'm a home-grown local," said Jarrko.

Ryke shook his head. "I was born out in the badlands: Rukker's Quarry."

"I heard about that." Brigg's tone lost some of its playful confidence as he continued. "So you were there when...?"

"Yeah, a Scraegan attack wiped it off the map."

"I'm sorry."

"Not your fault." Ryke shrugged. "I'm not the first person those things have hurt and I won't be the last."

The trio fell silent after his words. Around them the other recruits chattered away in their squadrons, laughing, joking, exchanging greetings; Amelia lay off by herself, flat on her back as she poured half a canteen over her face. Their respite didn't last long, however.

"Everyone up!" the sergeant bellowed. "C'mon, greasers, up off your backsides, it's time to see who's got the dead-eye in this sorry bunch."

Mercifully, the drill sergeant released them from the blazing sunshine and took them inside one of the smaller cube-complexes in the base. The corridors were dark, but they passed through a set of heavy black metal doors that opened out into a large chamber. Within it were two long rows of bulky cylindrical chambers. They stood open at the moment, and Ryke could see inside there were harnesses not unlike the gyroscope arrangement that they'd been tested on. This one was more elaborate though, with a full body brace and control sticks protruding from the left and right sides.

He also noticed a familiar face when they entered. Corporal Malewicz was waiting for them, staring at a holographic control pad the size dustbin lid. He looked up as they filed in.

"They're all yours, Corporal," the drill instructor rumbled. "Try not to break any of them."

Malewicz saluted. "Very good, sir." The instructor stomped off, leaving him smiling mischievously. "Morning, recruits."

"Morning, sir."

"I trust you'll all remember our little test when you first applied?"

A ripple of assent passed through the group.

"Good. Try and keep that in mind." He made a sweeping gesture towards the pods. "This is a testing ground. When piloting a Hunter-Killer at full speed in combat you'll be disoriented. You need to be able to maintain the balance required to effectively pilot a Hunter-Killer but still hit the bulls-eye. These machines simulate Hunter-Killer motion patterns and generate targets every zero-point-four-seven seconds. It's your job to take out as many as you can in the allotted time. Whoever picks up the most targets gets the bragging rights – platoon Dead-Eye."

Looks were exchanged and some nudging rippled through the group. Ryke gave his companions a wolfish grin.

"Alright then," Malewicz shouted. "Squadrons Red and Blue, you're up first. The gentlemen behind me will help you get strapped in then you're on your own. Good luck."

Ryke tried not to show his disappointment at not being part of the first group to use the simulators. The twenty recruits of Red and Blue surged eagerly forward like children on the first day of school.

He watched intently as the attending instructors buckled the first batch of aspiring Hunter-Killer pilots into position, noting every movement and motion. The faces of his compatriots displayed a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Everyone in the room wanted their shot at proving their worth, but he knew there was a niggling thought in the back of all their minds.

What if I'm not good enough?

He rammed that thought away as soon as he felt it. He hadn't come this far to be let down by his own doubts.

Instead he tried to glean what he could from watching the other squads as the training programme began. A few seconds passed as the occupants of the gyros oriented themselves, then the targets started flashing thick and fast – red spheres that whirled and taunted before being blasted out of existence by the gyro weapon simulators.

Not long after the exercise started the targets began increasing in frequency, and with them came a string of quite remarkable profanity as the members of Red and Blue Squadrons tried to keep pace. The five minutes of the training course felt like an eternity to him, but at last the gyros powered down, and with them the growls, curses and yelps of frustration faded away.

The twenty recruits extracted themselves from the seats and staggered unsteadily back down the corridor towards Corporal Malewicz, their inner-ear temporarily knocked out of kilter by the wild spinning of the gyros. By the time they'd reached the far end of the room they looked more or less recovered, but Ryke could see a couple of green-tinged faces among them and a smile crept over his face.

"Alright," Malewicz declared. "Squadrons Green and Yellow – you're up!"

He made sure he was at the front of the queue, bounding forward with Brigg and the others in hot pursuit. Skidding to a halt he clambered eagerly into the gyro's central cradle and tried to contain his impatience as the attendant strapped him in. His forearms were encased in two metallic cylinders with full-fist trigger mechanisms – lighter, simplified versions of the real Hunter-Killer firing mechanisms.

Second crawled by as he waited for the other nineteen recruits to be safely ensconced in their respective chambers.

Directly opposite him he could see a dark-skinned boy named Kazem – part of their training group – a scrawny, long-limbed individual with his hair cut into a thick black ridge down the middle of his head. An enormous, yellow-toothed grin cracked the other recruit's face and he raised one hand in a lazy salute. Despite the smile, Ryke returned the gesture. The people in this room were the ones he would need to get along with, one way or another, in the coming months.

But the time for bonding quickly came to an end. With the last of the group buckled securely into place the attendant at the far end of the room raised a clenched fist, looking back down the room at Malewicz. Ryke tried to regulate his breathing, concentrating on the rhythmic inhale; exhale. All at once a spherical canopy shimmered into existence around each of the cradles; a meshed lattice of cobalt blue lines. Directly ahead of him two reticules hovered, synched up to the training guns.

"The drill will commence in five..."

He steadied himself, trying to ignore his heart thundering in his chest. Then the whole cradle started to rotate.

It moved slowly at first, sweeping gently left and right; up and down. After a few seconds targets began flashing into existence around him. He had a window of less than half a second to react, fire and reset before the next scarlet circle would appear. One thing that linked all the recruits was their natural sharpness. While a normal human took between 150 to 300 milliseconds to react, those selected for the Hunter-Killer programme averaged below one hundred. They were already elite in their own way.

He dispatched the first three, alternating left and right with ease. The occasional curse from someone else in the squad told him that not everyone was finding it as straightforward.

He shoved those considerations from his mind as the machine continued to buck and roll, swinging him left, right, up and down, in some cases completely upending him. Despite the wild motion he tried to keep his mind focused on only those red spheres but they seemed to be coming faster now. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he kept up his running tally of hits, but it wasn't long before he started missing the windows.

He didn't know if the programme was designed to be deliberately impossible, so he tried not to think about the misses, instead just trying to rack up as many hits as possible in the time allotted. A violent swing of the cradle left two four targets ahead, and he only tagged three before the last one winked out of existence again. Biting back a curse, he turned his attention the next set. He managed to clear five of the seven in the next batch with blistering speed, but his last two shots were off the mark.

Frustration boiled in his gut but he suppressed it. Just focus, he told himself, wiping off another four targets in a clean sweep. He got into a rhythm, just clearing everything he could hit on each crazed rotation. By the time their five minute slot was finished his whole body was wound tight with concentration and gleaming with sweat.

The blue canopy fell away, revealing him to the world once again. Ryke let out a long, gasp of breath and let his head loll back against the cradle. The attendants quickly hustled them out of their cradles and he found himself wobbling dangerously as his feet settled against the solid ground once again. With a concerted effort, he joined the tottering flow of recruits from groups green and yellow, back towards Malewicz at the head of the room.

The young pilots gathered in a loose semi-circle, some looking a little greener than others after their ride on the simulators. Ryke had to admit, his stomach felt pretty wobbly after the constant buck-and-roll, but he contained himself, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. Anticipation crackled in the air as they all looked to their instructor.

"Alright then," Malewicz murmured, squinting at his enormous data pad. "All in all, not a bad run, kids. Everyone scored within acceptable margins for your first pass at this."

Ryke bristled. He didn't care about 'acceptable margins'. He wanted to know who'd done the best. His own attempt had felt smooth and fast, as good as he could realistically have hoped for having never tried the machine before. Although he tried to temper his own confidence, he couldn't help thinking that he was at least in with a chance of scoring the coveted 'Dead-Eye' title. A glance left and right showed him a sea of hungry faces, all thinking exactly the same thing.

"But I suppose you're all wondering who's topped the charts," Malewicz continued. He looked up from his pad, scanning the group through narrow eyes. Ryke's heart juddered as the corporal's eyes passed over him.

"Amelia Lockhart," their trainer snapped suddenly, making everyone in the room flinch. "Front and centre."

Ryke's eyes widened as he, along with everyone else in the room, turned to look at the girl. When he'd heard the name he'd instantly made the connection, but not quite believed it. Now, watching the slim, pink-haired girl reluctantly detach herself from the group and shuffle forward his mouth dropped open in surprise.

He wasn't the only one. Murmurs of amazement and disbelief rippled through the assembled recruits as she stepped forward, eyes downcast, unwilling to raise her head until she stood directly in front of Corporal Malewicz. The man looked her up and down, evidently surprised himself. Then a smirk slipped across his stubbly features.

"Well then," he said gently taking Amelia by the shoulder and turning her to face the other recruits. "Let this be a lesson to all of you. Looks can be deceiving."