Jim Morrish has a mathematical and engineering background, and is following in the family tradition of naval service.

Both of them are accepted, and get their travel warrants: by air to São Tomé, up the beanstalk, then an orbital ferry to L4. While waiting for the beanstalk, they end up at São Erasmo, a bar named after a patron saint of sailors, pyrotechnicians, and those who work at great heights. There they run into a couple of fellow proto-cadets, a woman enthusiastically using both the vodka and the velcro wall, and a fellow who tries to get involved in fights.

On the beanstalk trip to GEO, they spot another cadet who looks oddly familiar – she looks a bit like Captain Helena Stark, one of the VC winners of the last war. A grand-daughter perhaps?

One fellow in the group at the GEO station distinguishes himself by not looking green as the stars whirl past in zero-G; he’s Kenneth Piper, from the de la Warr colony (“had to get off the farm”). The OTV trip to L4 takes a few more hours, and the Britannia Royal Naval College comes into view: a large spine anchoring a variety of spin habitats of different speeds and radii. Most of them are still fairly dropsick, but they get shown to barracks in spin gravity, then to an auditorium to meet their training officer, Lt Commander Rattle. “I thought I had seen them all, but every year…”

Our heroes will be in Quarterdeck Division, under Lt Slade (but more directly CPO Harris). Gretton is asked to help with lectures on hyperspace physics.