Way Of The Clans Page 3

  "Test them? Of course we will test them. I would do it myself but I can see in your eyes, falconers, that you would prefer to bid for the privilege."

  As Roshak strode toward his subordinates, Aidan realized why the man's arm had appeared odd. It was not his real arm, but a prosthetic creation. He must have lost his arm in battle.

  "It is not a bidding situation, Commander," Falconer Joanna said. "Twelve to one is too great odds even for warriors like myself and Falconer Ellis. However, I would be willing to divide them up seven to five. Seven for me, five for Ellis."

  Ellis grunted. Aidan could hear the insult in the grunt, but was not sure how to interpret it further.

  "Seven, Falconer Joanna? You are tired today, I suppose? I will take on eight of these paper-thin warriors, leaving four for you to toy with."

  "Eight might be a strain for you, but I will offer nine. What say, Falconer Ellis?"

  Ellis smiled and looked smug. "Nine? Bargained well and done, but I should add that I think Falconer Joanna has typically overstretched her ambition. So nine it is, Joanna. I will flick off the other three like flies."

  Gazing at the bemused expression of the new trainees, Ter Roshak shouted at them: "You three!" He pointed to Bret, Orilna, and Quenel, who had the most muscular-looking body of the sibko. Muscular-looking but, oddly, less adept at feats of strength than many of the others. "Those are yours, Falconer Ellis. All of you: Show me your best. No cowardly holding back of your blows out of misplaced respect to an officer. We do not accept ritualistic respect. That is for freeborns. We prefer only that respect due us, that we have earned. That should be clear enough, even for nestlings like you. Falconer Joanna? Falconer Ellis?"

  The nine chosen members of the sibko moved closer to each other, all of them facing Falconer Joanna nervously. About fifteen meters away, Ellis' trio was grouped similarly. Aidan felt Marthe's shoulder against his; the shorter Endo stood slightly in back of him.

  "You seem to cower, eyasses," Falconer Joanna said, a pleased smile on her face. "Are you screamers, taken too soon from your nest, tender of the hood, pulling at the jesse, unable even to be at hack safely?" The terms belonged to falconry. Being at hack was the time of liberty and exploration before the bird was trained to the hunt; a jesse was the leather thong that tied a hooded bird to its block during periods of inactivity. Aidan thought the comparison uncomfortably apt for cadets and even trained warriors.

  "You heard the commander. Fight, you freebirth mutants. Fight, you sib-bastards." Another low term, sometimes used when it was discovered that there were inferior strains in a sibko's genetic makeup.

  Aidan looked past Joanna at the many other groups of trainees in the huge field. Some of them were now in furious activity. Some were assembling to march, others were already marching away from the landing site. In the distance he could see a brawl going on. Closer by were two groups, whose members were lying on the ground, with training officers urging them back to consciousness and mobility. The wind had died down, but the air was still bitter cold. Far away he noticed for the first time a chain of ragged mountains that looked like a line of teeth—littered, he feared, with the bodies of erstwhile trainees.

  "You!" Falconer Joanna shouted, pointing to Endo. "There is no use in hiding behind your fellows. Step out, cadet!"

  Endo walked around Aidan. He was obviously trembling, though it was more likely because of the frigid temperature than fear. No doubt he did feel fear, like Aidan, but it would be unsib to show it, especially to a warrior like Joanna.

  Endo opened his mouth as if to speak, but Falconer Joanna's scornful glare made him think better of it. "Remember not to address me," she said softly, then, with a punch that was not at all telegraphed, she hit him in the stomach. Not just hit him, but dug her fist into his extra flesh as hard as she could while grabbing his hair and yanking his head back. She was still wearing her metal-studded falconry gloves. Recalling his own pain when Joanna had gut-punched him, Aidan winced to think how the blow must hurt Endo. "You are allowed to hit me, surat." Surat was a loathsome word, the name of a disgusting, monkey-like creature. "Hit me, surat. Hit me." Endo reared back and, grunting, attempted a roundhouse right that, if successful, would have addled Joanna's brain for a moment. But she was too quick for him. She blocked the punch and dug her fist into the exact same place on his belly. Endo's face turned red. She pushed him away. He stumbled backward, gasping for breath.

  Standing straight, Falconer Joanna ceremoniously removed her gloves and casually tossed them onto the ground. "I do not need these, not against nestlings like you." She squared away, her body loose and ready. Her eyes scanned the still-standing members of the sibko, who now had edged together. Passed out, Endo was splayed out on the ground in front of them.

  Suddenly Joanna ran at the group, yelling, "This is a free-for-all. Fight, you drooling fools!" She hit Bret with a forearm chop across the bridge of his nose, then she head-butted Tymm while kicking back at Orilna, making contact in a spot that might have been more painful to a male but nevertheless made Orilna double up.

  "Do you still suck the metal teat, cadets?" Joanna yelled. "Fight me!"

  Both Aidan and Marthe accepted the challenge. Aidan leaped at Falconer Joanna, his arms flailing as a diversionary maneuver. She brought up her arms to block the expected blow, but at the last minute, he drew his arms in, lowered his head and butted her just below the breasts. He had been aiming for her stomach, so when his head hit her at rib cage, he was momentarily stunned. Marthe, in the meantime, maneuvering from a position to Joanna's left, missed a grab at her neck but managed to get hold of her upper arm. As Marthe twisted the arm back, Joanna laughed. "Tug and tussle do not work here, whelp." With no trick, no diversion, with just a demonstration of her own strength, she brought her arm back to its former position, then—moving so quickly that

  Marthe was caught by surprise—Joanna flung her body at Marthe, knocking the cadet backward with a shoulder blow that caught Marthe at the tip of her chin. As Marthe reeled back, eyes dazed, the now-recovering Aidan saw that she was definitely out of the fight. With a yell that would have frightened an ordinary person, he rushed at Falconer Joanna. The cry did not, of course, faze Joanna.

  Leaping, letting out a scream that did scare Aidan, she sent him dizzy with a kick to his head. Around him the sibko had come to life, and as he fell, they all tried to pounce on the falconer. Reacting quickly to evade their smothering assault, she managed to make contact with her fists, elbows, knees, feet, head—all her destructive body parts dealing blows that bruised, stung, and pained, even injured, her attackers. Wading back into the melee once she was free, Joanna quickly dispatched the remaining sibkin and soon stood over a groaning, squirming mass of cadets.

  She stared around her, her cruel eyes daring any of the downfallen to try again.

  Aidan tried again.

  He stood and rushed toward her with all the strength left in his legs. As he reached her, she brought her forearm up to ward off a weak blow that he had intended as a feint, but then he brought around his other arm slower than he wanted and she dealt him a punishing backhand right without bothering to ward off his attack. Another couple of solid punches, and Aidan was down on the ground again.

  Above him, her eyes sent out the dare again.

  Aidan dared.

  Pulling himself to his feet, swaying from side to side, he clasped both hands together and, running forward, managed to hit Joanna on the side of her face with the joined hands. The impact seemed to surprise the falconer, who had arrogantly made no attempt to defend herself against his onslaught. She stumbled sideways, but regained her footing and turned to him, smiling. The smile was peculiar. Though her eyes retained their scornful cruelty, her smile was pleased. It seemed almost appealing. She walked toward him, the smile becoming friendly. She held out her hand.

  "I see you do not like me, cadet. Good. I admire your tenacity."

  With her outstretched hand, she took his and held it for a moment. Then, releasin
g his hand, without rearing back or giving any indication that a punch was coming, she jabbed him in the nose with her other hand, and he felt something break. She hit him again in the same place, and the pain was so bad he could not see straight—or, rather, he could see too well, in too many images. The third punch sent him back to the ground.

  He looked up to see Falconer Joanna standing over him.

  "Are you through yet, nestling?"

  He tried to sit up, and she gently pushed him down. This time he stayed there.

  "This one might test out all the way," she said to Falconer Ellis, who now stood beside her. As she spoke, she was putting on the falconer gloves, whose star-shaped studs caught some light and sparkled. She held each glove, palm side toward her, directly in front of her face as she pulled it on, grimacing as she stretched it tight. "He does not, as you saw, give up easily. Let us make his stay with us especially difficult."

  Her compliments gave Aidan no pleasure. He was not sure he wanted her approval. He was sure he hated her.

  She might have said more about him, but things blurred and he passed out.

  He was probably not unconscious long. The next thing he knew, he and the others were being hauled to their feet by their now businesslike training officers.

  Aidan felt around in his tunic pocket for something to wipe away the blood he tasted along his lips. He found nothing. He must be content to let the blood dry. His fellow sibkin were all standing now, looking confused and in pain.

  "Well," Falconer Commander Ter Roshak said as he strolled among the sibko, "Joanna and Ellis have taught you something already. There is more to combat than your acrobatic but rather absurd struggles. A BattleMech does not move gracefully, nor is its jumping particularly acrobatic. Entertain us no longer with your morning exercises. We expect real effort from you, not ballet. Falconers, line them up and march them out."

  Pushing and shoving, the falconers managed to get the sibko into two swaying but relatively even lines. Joanna saw to it that Aidan was beside her, at the head of one of the files.

  "It is a long walk to your barracks. You will march every step of the way. In double-time."

  Aidan could not imagine walking for long, much less marching, but as soon as Joanna gave the command, he put his left foot forward briskly, and with hatred of Joanna keeping him going, he somehow kept up with her. He had to. Whenever he did not, she kicked his nearest leg with the sharp metal toe of her boot.

  At one point, just after they had joined a mass of other marching cadets, Joanna tapped him with her glove and said softly: "You are mine, cadet. You may resist and I sincerely hope you do. I will destroy you or make you the best damned MechWarrior of all these sibkos. I will probably destroy you. You will fail."

  Her words angered him.

  "Never," he said defiantly.

  She pulled him out of line and threw him to the ground. "You are not to address me or any other officer. Understand?"

  He had not forgotten that rule. He had chosen to answer Joanna. Without looking at her, he stood up and ran to catch up to the others, retake his place in line.

  The march was long. There were times when Aidan felt such pain in his legs that he could only take one more step. Then another step after that. Every muscle in his body had discovered its own private, selfish ache and was competing with the others to be the biggest single pain of his lifetime.

  He began to walk with his eyes closed, sensing direction and pace from the sibkin in front and back of him. Finally, there was a shouted halt. The two falconers now stood in front of them, eying them with distaste. Ter Roshak had disappeared. Aidan could not remember seeing him at any time during the march. He tried to relax his body, but he could feel every bruise Joanna had left there, plus some pains that could not logically have come from her assault.

  Joanna took off her gloves and hooked them in her belt. A frail-looking man in a Tech jumpsuit brought her a towel. She pulled it out of his hand roughly, even though he was offering it to her. He seemed not to mind her rudeness. Methodically she wiped away sweat from her body, first burying her face in the towel, then scraping it against the back of her neck and vigorously rubbing down her glistening arms.

  She threw the towel down to the ground, where the Tech quickly picked it up and retreated. Joanna meanwhile eyed the new trainees contemptuously. For a moment her gaze stopped at Aidan and she nodded.

  For years he had spent most of his time with the sibko and their sib-parents, older warriors whose combat was behind them. They were in charge of the education and training for the sibko's childhood and adolescence. The sib-parents had been tough, but the sibko had come to love them. He felt he would never feel such affection for Falconer Joanna. He was too frightened of her for that. It was the first time in his life he had felt fear of another. Looking around him, he saw his fear duplicated on his sibkin's faces, as if imprinted there, a new expression upon faces that already resembled each other.

  They were assigned their barracks, a thin-walled wooden building with visible cracks through which the wind blasted. The falconers told them to get undressed and get some sleep in their assigned bunks. There would be uniforms in the morning and the beginning of training. "After tomorrow," Falconer Ellis said in his rough voice, "today's activities will seem like frolic to you."

  Inside supposedly indestructible boots, Aidan's feet felt less eternal. When he released them from the footwear, arches ached, toes were bloodstained, heels showed calluses the size of pebbles. After undressing, he literally fell onto his bunk, whose thin, uncomfortable mattress stank of the fears and misery of the generations of cadets who had been, it seemed to him, condemned to this place at other times. Even with a scratchy blanket wrapped around him, he could not get warm. He wished he could go to Marthe, snuggle up to her for warmth, take her in his arms and—Aidan was asleep before he could take this comforting, if not warming, fantasy to its logical conclusion.

  2

  "And that world was named Strana Mechty by Katyusha Kerensky. The name comes from her native Russian. What does it mean, class, in our language?"

  With the loud and forceful responding style that had been drummed into them since the first classroom session of their training eight months ago, the cadets of Aidan's sibko shouted, "Land of Dreams!"

  Aidan sat ramrod-straight in his chair. Slumping was severely and publicly punished by Falconer Instructor Dermot, who took great glee in whipping a chalkboard pointer against the back of students' necks. Aidan chose to mouth the response while facially faking the strained-tendon, angry look that should accompany such a yell. He wondered why chanting was acceptable to Jade Falcon training officers. Even though one could not address them individually, a chanted group response was allowed. What good was the procedure if it did not give the cadets any opportunity to ask questions, to engage in the kind of give-and-take exchange that would clarify information and ideas? The cadet class seemed, after all, so much in the dark about everything.

  At the first class session, Dermot had explained, "Intellectual questing is for the scientist caste and the teacher subcaste. Ambiguity is so much mental garbage in a warrior's mind. The mind that questions anything other than prebattle strategy, the mind that allows meaningless or extraneous considerations to interfere with bid-cunning, delays responses, therefore delays action. A passing thought might interfere slightly with the move of a thumb toward a control-board toggle, or the snap of reaction to an enemy counter-strategy, or lead to misperceiving a fellow officer's bid. Idle speculations waste time. Too much lost time and the battle is lost. To paraphrase an old Terran saying: For want of a thought, the battle is won. At least when the thinking intrudes on warrior instincts."

  Such views meant something to Dermot, but Aidan could not stop thinking, could not stop questioning. That had been his curse even when growing up in the sibko . . .

  * * *

  "Your eyes are layered," Marthe had said to him once when they were quite young. He could not remember what they had been doing or
what had provoked the comment. He seemed to remember that they held hands while sitting on a flat hillside rock, watching their sibkin fight a mock-battle with crudely crafted wooden weapons.

  "I look at your eyes, Aidan, and I always see something beneath them. Another layer that the eyes I see are hiding. Then sometimes that layer appears, and yet another layer seems to lie under that one. It is as if secrets are hiding secrets in your eyes, a whole network of deceptions and secrets in your brain that we only glimpse occasionally in your eyes."

  "I suppose that would be true of all of us."

  "No! No, it is not. No one here has eyes like yours."

  "What about your eyes, Marthe? We look alike, they say."

  "We resemble each other, true, but not in the secrets in our eyes. I have no secrets. You know that. You can see that. Come, Aidan, admit it. Look into my eyes. You see no concealment there."

  He nodded. "Yes, it is true. Your eyes are what they call open."

  "As am I. As are all of us, except you. I love you, Aidan."

  "We all love each other. That is the way of the sibko."

  "I love you beyond the way of the sibko."

  "You are talking about layers again."

  "I suppose I am."

  "Then you have secrets, too, after all."

  "I suppose I do."

  He had understood her well, had bantered with her only to avoid the subject. One of his secrets, one that he trusted was not revealed in his eyes, was that he loved

  Marthe in return, unreasonably, outside the way of the sibko. He dreamed of her and of them alone together. How unsib, the others in the sibko would have said. Un-sib or not, in his dreams they often no longer belonged to their sibko—or any sibko. He would never admit that to Marthe. With its implicit violation of siblaw, it might shock her too much, destroy the permissible closeness they already had.

  "We can't have such feelings for one another, Marthe. The sibparents say that love, even the passing desire to be alone with one specific person, is a freebirth feeling."