The next two years passed slowly at Halden, in the quiet, unhurried way that everything at the reserve station seemed to pass.
Ning spent most of that time in the cockpit of a Rank 3 Mecha.
He flew them in the training ranges beyond the station almost every day, through formation drills and live-fire exercises and mock engagements against the other reserve pilots.
He learned the machines inside and out, their strengths and their weaknesses and every small quirk in the way they handled.
Within the first year, there was little left about them that he did not understand, and by the end of the second, the station's instructors had stopped trying to teach him anything at all and had simply begun asking him to help train the others.
Kovan's hostility did not fade quickly.
