You’ve been trained to obey, but this is one order you just can’t obey. It’s far too embarrassing. You’ve dreamed about what it would feel like for Terra to touch you, but not like this. You turn, but before you can even take a step, Terra grabs you by the back of the collar.

“Not so fast, cadet,” she says calmly as she pulls you backward, turns you and then tips you over her lap in one easy motion which strongly suggests she’s done this before. You find yourself balanced over her thighs, your crotch pressing against her right leg in a way which is… stimulating. Staring at the smooth floor, you can barely believe that this is happening to you. Terra wraps one strong arm around your waist. You buck instinctively when her palm smooths over your raised bottom. Her touch is essentially intimate, there’s no way it can’t be. Her fingers are inches away from all the most sensitive parts of you, and the feeling of her hand casually resting on your bottom makes your heart race and your body squirm.

“No cadet of mine takes her temper out on her cohort,” she says, lecturing you in that calm voice which makes you feel more ashamed than ever. “I don’t know where you’ve been hiding that temper, but we’re going to work through it.”

As she speaks, her palm is circling your bottom slowly. She hasn’t swatted you yet, but you know that’s coming.

“Do you understand, cadet?”

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Terra cocks her head and looks at you with her brow raised. “Oh, it’s not what it looks like? What is it then, cadet?”

“Boris always taunts me,” you start to explain. “He was mocking me for failing the test…”

“So you kicked him.”

Now you hear it out of her mouth, it doesn’t sound as justifiable as it felt when your foot met Boris’ shin.

“Are you looking for a combat rating, cadet?”

Her question is dry and possibly sarcastic but you take it literally. You didn’t join to fight. You joined because it was an opportunity to get off your far-flung little hovel and see some of the universe. You’ve signed up in a technical capacity, though all cadets get the same basic training.

You shake your head. “No ma’am.”

Terra plays the loop again, as you wish you could just sink into the floor.

“That’s the most effective thing you’ve done since you came in here,” she muses as you blush furiously. “No hesitation. Pure action.” She almost sounds admiring – until her next sentence. “Unfortunately, that action was to assault a ranking cadet. Do you recall the consequence for that as written in the disciplinary code?”

Of course you can remember. You know the disciplinary code forward and back. Upside down even.

“Yes, ma’am,” you say. “Section II, paragraph 4: Any cadet who engages in hostile behavior towards another cadet is to be put on probation and given corrective training.

“So you know you’re on probation now,” Terra says. “You check in with me three times a day. No matter what.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she nods. She turns off the loop and turns to the chair. You breathe a sigh of relief, glad that little interlude is over. Being on probation isn’t good, but at least it means you get to see more of Terra.

Wait, what is Terra doing?

She adjusts the chair, pushing the arm rests out of the way and sits in it. You’re surprised and a little confused. Shouldn’t you be sitting in the chair?

“And now for the second part of the punishment,” she says, the word ‘punishment’ sending a tingle through you. “Over my lap, cadet.”

“What!” Your eyes widen and your face is consumed with a heated blush.

“This is the corrective training,” she says. “A good, long spanking should sort you out.”

You thought the corrective training would be drills or extra study. You never knew you could be spanked for what you did. Terra looks at you expectantly, her eyes locked on yours, and crooks her finger in your direction.

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Deciding to get some study in before your next meeting with your instructor, you go back to the dorm and bury your head in your books. You’re pretty good at studying, and you love the material. You might not always get the practical stuff right, but knowing the theory has to help. It got you this far.

You get so deep into your books that before you know it, the dinner hour has come and gone. It’s not until your room mate and her girlfriend come back from their meal that you suddenly realize you’re running late! You scramble to run a brush through your hair, put a little mascara and lipstick on to look your best and rush down to the training chamber. There you find Instructor Terra waiting for you, her arms folded over her chest, an inscrutable expression on her face. She looks… hot, though you don’t like to think of her as hot. That seems sort of disrespectful. But she is a very handsome woman, and because nobody is in the cyber gym at this hour, most of the lights are off around the single chamber. It makes her look somewhat imposing and serious. You find your gaze lingering on her face as you try not to stare. Her eyes are stunning, the blue reflecting the solo light in the chamber. The shadows thrown from it show her face in profile. Her nose is straight and her cheekbones are high. Her face has a feminine strength to it which drew you from the beginning.

“You’re late,” she observes. Before you can get a word in, she keeps talking “But tardiness isn’t your only problem, is it, cadet?”

You don’t know what she’s talking about, until she activates a monitor. It shows a thirty second clip of security footage on loop. Footage showing you stopping to talk to Boris, then kicking him in the shin. There’s no audio, so it just looks as if you decided to kick him for no reason at all. Your eyes widen as you realize how much trouble you’re in.

“I can explain!” You blurt as Terra looks at you with a raised brow.

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“Please,” you whimper. “I’m sorry. It’s just, I get the headset on and I forget everything. And it’s not like pushing buttons at random is necessarily a good thing, you know? What if I were in the gunner’s chair and I just pressed buttons? I could blow up a planet!”

“You overthink things,” Instructor Terra says, her gaze softening. “These are simple exercises – and assessments. These tell us a lot about our candidates, their temperaments, how they think, what their strengths and weaknesses are. We don’t have much information on you, because you get hung up wandering around the room on the very first level.”

You’re losing yourself in her words. She has such a nice voice, smooth with just a touch of feminine smokiness in it. And she is beautiful. At least, to you she is. Other cadets have their own preferences, but you’ve had a crush on Terra, as you call her in your head, since day 1 at the academy. She seemed so strong and so elegant when she first called your name and ushered you into her unit, along with fifty other cadets. You were too tongue tied to speak to her, even when the other cadets were badgering her with questions. You’ve barely said two words to her since you got in a month or so ago. Truth be told, if it wasn’t for these single assessments, she probably wouldn’t know you exist.

“I’m sorry,” you say in a small voice. “But please… I can get it right, I know I can.”

Terra nods. “Listen,” she says. “I can’t do another assessment now. There’s another cadet waiting for the machine. But, if you come back after chow tonight, I’ll let you run through it again. Deal?”

“Deal,” you smile, relieved. “Thank you, Instructor Terra.”

She smiles back at you and helps you out of the chair. You feel a tingle where her hand lightly rests on your elbow, and your pulse races as her eyes meet yours.

“Try to relax, cadet,” she smiles. “You’ll do better.”

“Yes ma’am,” you nod, turning to leave. Just as you do, you feel a light swat land on your bottom. It sends a bolt of excitement racing through your loins. Blushing, you turn to see Instructor Terra smiling at you.

“I mean it,” she says gently. “You’re overworking yourself. No study for the rest of today.”

“Yes, ma’am,” you nod, not meeting her gaze. “Thank you, ma’am.”

You leave the room, grinning to yourself, and almost immediately run into Boris. Boris is another cadet in your unit, and he just so happens to be from your village too. You were both selected for the academy at the same time. He’s a little older than you, twenty five years old, to your twenty two. You’ve known him your whole life, and he’s like an older brother to you in some ways – a big, jerky older brother.

“Heard you failed again,” he sneers at you with his big, dopey grin.

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You turn from the buttons and examine the room. It is a large, empty space so there isn’t all that much to explore. The white walls are smooth, and taste a little like chalk. You run your hands around them to see if there are any hidden doors or switches, but all you end up with is a coating of white powder on your hands. It also tastes like chalk.

The floor is not much better. You jump up and down, hoping to detect any weaknesses or secret doors, but again, you come up without any kind of result. The room is a prison. A prison without doors, windows, or… hope?

Maybe the world is a dichotomy. Maybe you’re just going to have to push one of the buttons after all.

You walk back to the plinth and look at your options. Press. Do not press. Your path forward is clear. Press the blue button. But what if the blue button means something bad? What if the red button is the one you’re actually supposed to press? Oh god! What are you supposed to be doing? Why are you here? What is the thing of anything?

“TIME’S UP!”

The room fades and then the darkness is pulled from in front of your eyes. You blink a few times and find yourself looking into the disappointed face of your instructor, Ms Nina Terra. She is an attractive woman in her mid-forties, always impeccably presented with her dark hair swept up into an old fashioned chignon. When she smiles, her blue eyes are so warm. She is not smiling now.

“Well,” she says, her ruby lips forming the words carefully. “That was an… interesting approach.”

She takes the headset you were using and returns it to its place on the virtual training simulator.

“Remember,” she says. “This series of tests aren’t about right or wrong. They’re about reaction time. An ability to make decisions quickly and decisively. You didn’t make it past the first level. I’m afraid that’s a fail.”

You bite your lower lip to keep from swearing out loud. You just can’t seem to get the hang of these advanced simulations. If you don’t get your grades up soon, you will fail out of the academy. And if you fail out of the academy, you’re going back to your little village in a colony at the edge of the star system.

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