Free Steelhands (2011) by Jaida Jones, Danielle Bennett Page B

for.
    “Well,” I said. “You there. Speak.”
    “If you want us to think before we say something, wouldn’t it be better to call on those of us who’ve volunteered, instead of picking us out at random?” she asked. “Thinking on our feet, is … difficult, for some people, and it might be kinder to help them get the knack of it first.”
    “Guess that all depends on how much of the class you want to take with you,” I said, not chewing on her question too long before firing back a proper response. If you gave some of these whelps an inch, they’d take the whole ’Versity Stretch. “A lot of strategy—good strategy—means knowing when to scrap your plan in the field and come up with something new. Something better. That kind of recalibration takes tactical thinking, and it’s
not
something you can learn by gnawing on your books and writing neatly in the margins.”
    “So it’s a part of the class, then,” the girl said. “As much as anything else?”
    I thought about that one for a minute myself, allowing a quick look around the room to see if the others were paying attention. It was about the ratio I’d expected, some listening in and others taking advantage of the distraction in order to do whatever they damn well pleased. That didn’t bother me, so long as they kept it to themselves and didn’t distract the rest of the class with it.
    My expectations weren’t very high, and my hopes were even lower than that.
    Time with the airmen had taught me that you had to pick your battles. And sometimes, having the attention of, say, no more than one-third of the class was better than trying to wrangle all of them at once. Divide and conquer. That was tactical thinking in practice.
    “I guess that’s about right,” I conceded. “Maybe the most important part, even. Curriculum says you’ve got to take at least two exams to make up a proper grade, but the rest is up to me, and I’ve had enough classes now that this shook down as being the best way for going about it. Any better ideas?”
    “It just seems a little different from everything else we’ve done,” said the girl. I was beginning to get tired of thinking of her as
the girl
, too, but I wasn’t the sort of professor who passed around a seating chart and made all the good little boys and girls write their names in their places so that I’d know who was who and who was showing up. That seemed like the mark of a doddering old fool who’d been teaching so long that his blood had turned to chalk and ink.
    “There’s times when different’s bad, I’ll give you, but this isn’t one of ’em,” I reasoned back, settling into the discussion now. “I hate to keep harping on this one point, since it means you’ll figure out that’s my
only
point sooner rather than later, but in the heat of battle, adapting quickly to the differences that crop up—and bastion knows,
they will
—can mean you staying alive one more day ahead of everyone else.”
    “What if you come up with a really good plan in the very beginning, though?” the girl asked. There was a skinny little scarecrow sitting next to her, I’d just noticed, and he’d begun to tug on her sleeve. Probably trying to get her to shut up, for all the good it’d do him. He looked like one swift right hook’d take care of him then and there, and something told me the redhead had at least one swift right hook in her. “Isn’t
that
the point of strategy? Planning ahead so that you’ll have the upper hand when it comes to dealing with your enemies?”
    Somehow, against all odds, I found myself smiling as I leaned back against my desk, arms crossed like I was addressing a much smaller room of much larger personalities.
    It’d been a long while since anyone had engaged me in anything
close
to what might be called a good debate—given me a reason not only to tell ’em I was right but to explain the reasoning behind it so that
they
believed it, too.
    That was the only kind of teaching I’d