The fourth and final day was the practical engineering portion. Each cadet was given a broken piece of equipment and a limited time to diagnose and repair it.
Some were given communication devices, others damaged sensor arrays or small power units. They were judged on how much of the fault they could identify and how much of it they could fix before their time ran out.
Jason finished his before anyone else in the room and spent the remaining time quietly reorganizing his tools.
Naysha finished soon after, with a calm, unhurried efficiency that made the instructors supervising the exam glance at one another. Ning did what was expected of him, and no more.
And then it was over.
It went by more quickly than any of them had expected. After months of preparation and weeks of anxious anticipation, four days seemed almost absurdly short.
When the cadets left the final exam hall, many of them looked as though they could not quite believe they were finished.
