"Marthe, think of the history we have been taught. They tell us tales of armies shaped into fighting units, of Stars whose warriors think each other's thoughts so closely that they are precisely aligned. But what do they do here? They find ways to separate us."
"I do not know what you mean."
"We come here as a unit, as a sibko that has grown up together, formed such an intimacy that we can almost read each other's minds. Frequently we do read each other's minds, to the point of saving lives. Now, after all this training, those of us who have survived hardly speak to one another. Bret and Rena have formed a kind of alliance, and the rest of us are on our own. They have split us up, the training officers."
"And I am certain, if you are right, that it is done with an excellent purpose."
"Then you admit that I am right."
"I admit nothing."
"And once you would have. Once we would have talked through the night if there was a problem."
"You spend your nights with—"
"Do you think I would if she did not order it?"
"I do not know what you would do."
"And once you would have known everything I would do. Do you not see? We are being trained to be isolated in the cockpit of a BattleMech, to be on our own, bid on our own, cheat each other if necessary, destroy each other if-"
"Is that why you hesitated when you had a chance at a clear victory today?"
"I might have killed Peri."
"And would that have mattered to you?"
"I do not know anymore. I think it would. Yes, damn it, I think it would. I remember playing at warrior with Peri when we were all children. That may have prevented me from taking the risk of killing her."
"Then you are a fool."
"Then I am a fool."
His response seemed to stop her for a moment, even to soften her hard gaze. It was only there for an instant, but he thought he saw the old kindness in her eyes, the old closeness that would have led at least to a brief touch. When was the last time they had touched like that?
"Look, Marthe, maybe there is some sense to what they are doing. Maybe we have to experience the, I do not know what to call it, the isolation of the pilot inside his cockpit—and from that we will learn the new closeness, not that of the sibko, but that of the warrior whose concern will be to an assigned unit. It almost makes sense to me—until I see that you are no longer—"
He stopped. He did not know how to say the words to her anymore. She was as remote to him as Falconer Joanna, but unlike Joanna, he was no longer able to embrace her.
"I am sure, Aidan, that even if you are right, everything is being done for our good. We should not question it, but merely, as ordered, become the best warriors we are capable ..."
"Stop! That is what they want you to think. That is why we are not friends any longer."
"You are foolish to think of friendship now."
He wanted to say more to her, but Joanna was walking toward them, and he went past Marthe into the control tower. Glancing back, he saw that Joanna was speaking rather severely to Marthe, but he could not hear the words. In the old days Marthe would have repeated them to him later.
Perhaps Marthe was right. It was foolish to think of friendship now. He had to eliminate those traits that were interfering with his progress as a warrior. The next time he had anyone from his sibko in his sights, with live ammo in his weapon and the orders sanctioning the act, he should shoot, kill. Even if it was Marthe.
10
You are angry with me for criticizing your performance in today's exercise." Joanna's voice was matter-of-fact, a tone unusual for her. "Go ahead. You need not wait for me to tell you to respond when we are alone together here."
He was acutely conscious of the stench in Joanna's quarters. Beneath the permeating scent of the sex act they had just completed were other odors, foul ones. Joanna, for all her discipline on the training fields, was not concerned with hygiene when she was alone. The debris she left on the floor might have remained there for days, had not Aidan regularly picked it up because he could not stand the disorder. The accumulated odors in her bedclothes, whose origins he could only guess at, were not pleasant to contemplate.
"You remain silent, eyas. Why?"
"You never call me by my name here."
"And that is why you are silent. How odd!"
"No, it is not why. I just noticed. You called me eyas, one of your nicer derisive terms."
She smiled. Like the matter-of-factness, another rarity.
"You are considering who you are. Let me tell you right now that you should not. Who you are is not important. You are a machine, just as much as the machine you will inhabit—if indeed you do succeed in becoming a warrior.
"The word is MechWarrior, correct? However you say it, the emphasis is on the first syllable, on the 'Mech. The warrior of the 'Mech, MechWarrior. The warrior who serves the 'Mech. The warrior who is the 'Mech.
Does that sound like someone who should worry about whether or not someone says his name?"
"I suppose not."
"That sounds suspiciously like sullenness, another trait unbecoming in a warrior. You have problems, eyas, quiaff?"
"Aff. As you continually remind me."
She sat up suddenly. The frayed old blanket she used as a bedcover fell away from her chest. Once he had viewed her small, well-shaped breasts with some interest, but too much time with her had removed any sensual reactions. Now he noticed more the sweat dripping from her chin onto her chest. There was a long scar running from just below her neckline to the side of her left breast. He had touched that scar so many times, but had never asked how it had come about.
"Sometimes," she said, her voice quiet, a third phenomenon of the night, "I question my choice to allow you to talk to me when you are here. In my room it might be better to continue the customs of the parade ground. What I am going to tell you now, I will tell you only once, and never again, not for the rest of time."
She grimaced and reached for her tunic, which she had casually thrown onto a bedside table before getting into the bed. Pulling it over her head slowly, she began her little speech while clothing still hid her face.
"Eyas—Aidan, I chose you the very first day you arrived here. I saw in your eyes, in the way you held yourself, in the slight hint of defiance even when you thought your face was completely at rest, that the warrior's potential was in you. I was also intrigued by your seriousness, by the look of an adult in your face even when in the midst of that childish team tussle. You revealed an intensity that never let up. I liked that, was even attracted to it. That is why I tried to beat you to a bloody pulp that day. But you never lost the intensity, and you showed your defiance. I liked that, too."
The tunic on, she pulled on the partial jumpsuit that had become her trademark for the cadets. It was a faded silver garment with combat patches on pockets.
"In my own sibko I was the defiant individual, I think even more so than you. I never liked any of the others, while you show a certain vestigial loyalty to your sibkin, what is left of them. All I ever wanted was to become a warrior and get away from the others. I thought I would find genuine camaraderie in the ranks of real warriors, but all I found was even more people in the universe I could cheerfully hate. And I have accepted that, instead of wondering, as others might, if something was wrong with me rather than the others."
She smoothed out the wrinkles in her clothing with a device she had bought in a bazaar on some other planet. It was a round cylinder with a handle. It set off small electrical sparks when it touched the cloth, but she attacked each wrinkle methodically with smooth even strokes, and they smoothed out.
"I have used my hate well in my military career; it has given me a certain, well, impetus. And, frankly, I suspect it is easier for one to hate everyone rather than to struggle with the problems that other, kinder emotions can bring.
"But once in a while, I have a different feeling about someone. I suppose it is just a lesser form of my hat
e. Whatever it is, I have been cursed with you this time around. What this means is that I would favor one of two things happening: I would like to crush you, bash you into the ground so hard that your subsequent mental deficiencies allow you only the most menial, dirt-swallowing job when you leave here. Or I would like to see you become a warrior, fulfilling your potential instead of letting your personal defects conquer you.
"Oh, I recognize that you are different from the rest. And I know that you have formed an unnatural, shall we call it affection, for Cadet Marthe. I have, I think, ruined that, for her good as well as yours. She will become a warrior, and you will not stop that with your silly, romantic yearnings. And for you, she is no longer an obstacle.
"I saw the bond between you two immediately, and I struggled to break it. I am happy that I did. No, do not even comment. It is not for you to question what I do, even the secrets I reveal to you. I have gone out of my way to be cruel to you, to make the training hard for you, to defeat you. That is the only way you will succeed, and I know it. You think too much, Aidan, and that will be your downfall."
She stood up, finished with the dewrinkling device. Her long hair, as it usually did, miraculously fell into place, as if there had been some sort of device to iron out its irregularities.
"I see the hatred in your eyes. Good. I want that from you. This is the last time we will be together here. I will not summon you again. From now on, we will talk only under formal conditions. Leave now, without saying anything. I hope you fail. It would fulfill the curse I have put on you."
Aidan was happy to escape from her quarters. Her words had made him hate the place even more, hate her even more.
He spent the next few hours wondering why she had spoken to him in the way she did. Dawn came and went, but he still had no solution for it. All he knew was that he had to prove to Joanna that he could become a warrior. And on that day, the day he succeeded at the final trial, he would spit on her highly polished boots.
11
In rare, light-hearted moments, Aidan thought of the quickly passing days as so many fusillades from an autocannon, with him the target. They moved too fast for him to dodge the time-projectiles and they got him dead-center every time. Later, had he been challenged to write down an accurate time sequence of events, he would have failed.
From the day after Joanna had talked to him so openly, everything that happened seemed to separate him even further from others. From the sibko, from Marthe, even from himself. What Joanna had said about him needing to be a machine became true, at least partially. He deliberately concealed any feeling, performed training exercises by the book, snapped to when spoken to—in short, became the ideal cadet. The more he accomplished, the more Joanna berated him in front of the others. In the past her derisive criticisms might have angered him, because he had cared how the others in the sibko regarded him. Now that mattered no longer.
In his bunk at night, exhausted or not, he could not get much sleep. He almost welcomed guard duty, because it gave him something to do with his wakefulness.
One night on duty, he saw the rare sight: a figure out walking on the parade ground. As no one was allowed there overnight, he challenged the stroller.
Only then did Aidan recognize that he was questioning Falconer Commander Ter Roshak. He had heard that Ter Roshak often wandered around the facility at night. Briefly, Aidan wondered if he was making a mistake in confronting the commanding officer, but guard-duty rules stated that anyone, no matter what rank, must explain his presence to the guard if challenged.
Ter Roshak had been deep in thought. When he looked up, he squinted and said blearily, "Ramon? Is that you?"
Aidan challenged him again, and the commander appeared to clear his mind of whatever debris had made him speak so strangely.
"Falconer Commander Ter Roshak. Sibko training supervisor. Very good, cadet. I had forgotten the time. I have been out inspecting various sibkos. I was about to visit your barracks. Would you accompany me? Respond."
"Permission to leave my post, sir."
"Permission granted."
In the barracks, Roshak carried through one of his classic, surprise night inspections, and Aidan had to stand by and watch. The commander kicked Bret out of bed and gave him a hard knock to the side of his head with the artificial arm before telling him that his foot locker was scarred and needed repainting. He held Rena up in the air with the prosthetic limb while informing her that her last session in the training 'Mech was an embarrassment not just to her sibko but to his whole training Cluster. Tymm and Peri were treated similarly, one chewed out for his clothing deficiencies, the other for what Roshak called the set of her sullen mouth. Only Marthe was spared real punishment. Instead, he turned to the others and told them that they should emulate her. Aidan saw a glint in his eye that seemed to indicate a satiric element to his praise. Marthe was the highest scorer of the group, and by pointing this out, Roshak was planting the seeds of little jealousies and resentments into the psyches of the surviving members of the sibko.
Aidan vowed he would not react to Roshak's strategy. He would, instead, provide countermeasures to it, do everything he could to reunite the sibko.
Outside, after the commander ordered Aidan back to guard duty, he eyed him strangely, then said, "You. You are the worst in the bunch. You think too much of yourself, I can see that. You think you can beat the system. You cannot. Respond."
"I have no response, sir."
"I cannot fight you here, not while you are on duty.
Report to my quarters when you come off duty this morning. Respond."
"Yes, sir."
However, when Aidan arrived at the commander's quarters, the man was asleep. Without permission to address him, Aidan could not wake him. He waited at the entrance until reveille, but Roshak did not wake up. Nor did he mention the order again.
* * *
Aidan cornered Marthe after midday meal, backing her up against the barracks wall.
"The sibko is collapsing. We cannot allow it," he said.
For a moment the hint of derision in her eyes made her resemble Falconer Joanna, then she frowned. "Why are you saying this to me?"
"Because we were once . . . close."
"You have listened too much to the myths. Our closeness, as you call it, was part of the play of children. We are not children now."
"What are we then? Warriors?"
"You need not be sarcastic. It is a bad trait of yours. How often has Falconer Joanna said—"
"I do not give a damn what she has said. She wants the sibko destroyed."
"If you are telling the truth, then no doubt the sibko should be destroyed."
"Then what has it meant, all of our times together? I do not mean you and me, I mean all of us. Those who have survived and those who have died and those who have been reassigned to other castes."
"It means that we have developed properly, that we have first joined together to find the warriors among us, that we have awaited our own fates, each of us, that we—"
"But that is only what they want us to think."
"They?"
"Joanna. The others. Our sibparents. The training officers. All of them who have steered us, educated us. made us think the way they wanted us to think, influenced—"
"Really, Aidan, you have shut down mentally. You know the way of the Clan as well as any—"
"I am not speaking against the way of the Clan. I do not know about the Clan. Neither do you. Our world has been circumscribed by our sibko ever since we—"
"And is not that an argument against what you originally said?"
"I do not understand."
"You say the sibko must be preserved. Now you add that it is the sibko that has limited us. Therefore, the dissolution of the sibko is a necessary phase of our development as warriors. Therefore, the sibko is created so that it may be gradually phased out."
Aidan wanted to shake her.
"That is nonsense, just recital of lessons. You sound like Falconer Dermo
t when you—"
"Not so. If I sounded like Dermot, then you would be asleep."
The humor of the remark, plus the gentle way she spoke it, disconcerted Aidan. It reminded him of how she used to be, when they were still youths in the still-intact sibko. What bothered him even more was that he wanted her to speak to him like that all the time, and he knew that was not possible.
"Aidan," she said, the kindness still in her voice. "I miss those old days, too. Some of them, anyway. But I like now just as well. More. I want to be a warrior and I am willing to make any change, personal or otherwise, to achieve that."
"Well, I want that, too."
"Do you? Do you really?"
"Yes!"
His response sounded overdramatic, forced, even to him.
"I cannot believe you, Aidan. If you wished that, you would not be trying to convince me the sibko must be preserved."
"But . . ."
"Please. There is no reason to continue this conversation."
He tried to force her back, push her against the wall. She pushed back just as hard and knocked him off balance. In all their time in the sibko, they had never fought physically, except in the team tussle and other play. With her forearm, she hit him in the throat, just below his Adam's apple. He was angry enough to strike back at anyone else, but not Marthe. She waited for him to finish his coughing fit, then walked away.
In the ensuing week Aidan also tried to persuade the other members of the sibko that they should restore their former group feeling, that they should not let training officers divide them. Bret did not even understand Aidan's argument. He said he thought the sibko was as close as ever. Peri claimed there had never been a feeling of closeness in the sibko, not for her at least. She had, she said, always wanted something else. Rena would not even talk to Aidan, while Tymm merely looked as dazed about the subject of the sibko as he generally did during training.
* * *
Tymm, in fact flushed out a few days later. His scores had always been the lowest of the six survivors. Aidan never knew exactly why Tymm was found unworthy, but he suspected that Tymm's tendency to get his training 'Mech's feet entangled in undergrowth and his slowness in employing his weaponry must definitely have contributed to the young man's failure. Like many of the other sibko members who were gone, Tymm did not even say goodbye. One morning the sibko survivors awoke to find Tymm's bunk empty, its bedclothes properly rolled up and secured. That was always the sign. Soon a pair of orderlies entered the barracks and took the bunk and bedclothes away. Tymm's bunk had been at the end of a row, and now only a large gap remained.
Way Of The Clans Page 11
