Way Of The Clans

by Robert Thurston

  "You are Jorge, are you not?" Roshak asked.

  Astonished by the question and the fact that his commander knew him, Jorge merely responded: "Yes, I am. Sir."

  "I am pleased."

  "Pleased?" Jorge grimaced as the pain in his arm grew. He held onto the wound with his other hand and felt blood seep through his fingers.

  "Yes. If someone was going to avoid my little sabotage, I am happy it was you. It shows how well I chose for the person who from now on will be you."

  "Be . . . me? Sabotage. I do not understand."

  "It is not necessary that you do."

  Suddenly Jorge saw that Ter Roshak held a submachine gun at his side. Raising it quickly, the commander fired it point-blank at Jorge.

  Jorge stared down at his chest. With his good hand, he tore open his fatigue shirt and saw the holes on his chest. The bullets had entered him at six or seven places, little bloody circles that seemed to grow as everything else began to fade out. Before he died, he thought he saw only the six or seven circles, growing larger as he, for the last time, wondered what had happened, what had happened, and then the circles abruptly disappeared.

  33

  All right, all right, hawkheads, stuff some bullets in your craw and listen to me," the training officer shouted from the door to the barracks. His name was Falconer Othy, and he had a gravelly voice that went well with his bulky, squat body. By the slovenliness of his uniform, one could guess why he had been relegated to train a freeborn unit.

  His charges, the four of them still left at this late stage of training, quieted down gradually, going on a bit longer only to annoy Othy, for whom they held no great respect. Accustomed to their recalcitrance, Othy waited patiently, knowing that soon this duty would come to an end, freeing him from its prison.

  "This barracks looks like you have been using it as the Cave. Nobody goes to sleep tonight before the place has been scrubbed down."

  The group moaned in protest. Othy knew they would do the job perfunctorily, but at least the top layer of filth would be removed.

  "As you know, a tragic accident occurred out on the Number Five Obstacle Run. Some frees were killed— only one survived, in fact. The commander has seen fit to transfer the single survivor to our unit. He will finish training with you four."

  Looking at the quartet of sullen frees, Othy pitied the newcomer. If the young man had any potential, it would be disheartening to have to compete with this bunch. But being only a free, what potential could he have? Othy had heard of some freeborns who had distinguished themselves in Clan service, but he had yet to meet one.

  "Jorge, get in here," Othy bellowed, stepping away from the doorway. As the newcomer came into the barracks, the others stood and clustered together, a combined force meant to isolate the intruder. "Cadets, this is Jorge, His scores so far have been impressive, and you should be on your toes."

  Othy left the barracks, leaving his last statement as an exit line on purpose. He thought it might stir things up.

  Aidan glanced casually around the room, suppressing (as Roshak had instructed him) his distaste for his new companions. He wondered how he would ever get through the weeks ahead. Knowing that his second chance at the Trial came at the end of the time gave him hope and even confidence.

  One of the frees, a well-tanned young man with a strikingly handsome face, detached himself from the others and walked past Aidan to the doorway. He looked out for a moment, then turned to the others, saying, "All clear. The old bastard's gone."

  Suddenly, the freeborns showed an obvious physical relaxation, an easing of tension in the shoulders, a relaxing of posture, at the news. Two of them even smiled at Aidan, while the remaining one held back, staring at the newcomer from across the room.

  The freeborn at the doorway walked to Aidan, holding out his hand. "Welcome, mate. My name is Tom. I'm sort of the leader around here. Not boss, just leader. You want the job, it's yours."

  Aidan had been warned that freeborns used contractions defiantly. Even though he had heard them so often around Nomad, it still made him tense. But he had to act the freeborn now, so he must watch his own language.

  "I, that is, I'm glad to meet you, Tom."

  "So—Hor-hay, that's your name, quiaff?"

  "Aff. Sometimes they used to just call me George."

  "They?"

  "The others in my unit. They are . . . they're dead."

  "Yes. We heard about it. Tragic."

  "Yes, it was. I saw it happen."

  "Tell us."

  Tom gestured the others over. The two smiling ones came, but the other one still stood at a distance. Tom pointed to him. "That's Horse over there. He's never very friendly. He has a legitimate name that nobody remembers, but he's wild about horses, so therefore Horse. This here is Nigel." Tom indicated one of the smilers with a thatch of red hair and the lightest blue eyes Aidan had ever seen, but there was a toughness about his mouth that seemed threatening, especially when drawn into such a tight grin. "And the other is Spiro." The other smiler's look seemed to conceal nothing. He had dark hair, mud-brown eyes, and the most solid physique of the four free-borns.

  "About the accident," Tom prodded. "What?" Aidan responded. "You were to tell us."

  Ter Roshak had described the incident to Aidan, leaving out the part he had played in causing it. He also briefed him on Jorge's background. Aidan now gave his new colleagues an embellished recounting of the event. They listened with awe (again, with the exception of the one across the room) and seemed impressed with the pan describing his own escape from death. He got the impression that each envisioned his own death in Jorge's experience.

  As Tom gave him the rundown on the unit's record to date, Aidan was impressed with the pleasantness and politeness of the fellow. He had always expected all free-borns to be as sullen and crude as the ones he had seen in various exercises. Well, Tom was either playing a good role or was different from other freeborns. Most of them were probably like Horse, who remained in position across the room.

  Hauling a bunk from the storeroom, Tom and Aidan pushed it next to the other beds. Nigel and Spiro brought out bedding and equipment. Horse did nothing and, in fact, had barely moved since Aidan entered the room.

  As soon as Aidan had stowed his gear and finally sat down on the edge of his new bunk, he felt a touch on his shoulder. Looking up, he saw Horse standing over him. Though Horse's face was unextraordinary in its features, his fiercely red complexion the only odd thing about his looks, Aidan sensed something familiar about him. As if to verify his suspicions, Horse said: "I've seen you before. I don't know where, though. Do you?"

  "No, I don't remember you, Horse."

  But, in fact, Aidan did remember the sullen young man. Though Horse was thicker in body now, more muscular, with more meanness in his face, with longer hair that apparently obeyed current freeborn style, he was the same boy who had been Aidan's opponent on the long-ago day of the first 'Mech exercise. It had been Horse who had planted the mock satchel charge, had sent the 'Mech rocking on its foundation, had attacked Aidan with a homemade knife, and had—before Aidan had wielded a weapon that literally fell into his hands—damn near defeated him. With a catch in his throat, Aidan now remembered the fury in Horse's voice when he had called Aidan "trashborn."

  34

  Aidan wondered why Ter Roshak had not investigated the past history of this freeborn unit and discovered that it had participated in the same exercise as had Aidan's sibko. Well, the little cosmetic changes that Joanna had insisted on might be helpful, after all. His hair was longer, in the current freeborn style, and combed differently. She had lightened it, too, with some disgusting potion that had remained on his head for several hours, nearly choking him with its aroma. She had also ordered him to grow a thin beard along his jawline, a style adopted by many freeborns. (Spiro, in fact, had an almost identical beard.)

  "You look familiar but different," Horse said.

  "That covers a lot of ground," Aidan said. "Maybe I look like so
mebody you knew back home?"

  "It was a small village. I knew everyone. You don't look like any of them. No, if it is somebody else, it's somebody I've seen since coming here."

  Even though Aidan knew he was not moving a muscle, it felt as though he were squirming under Horse's gaze. Fortunately, Nigel sat down beside him and said, "You probably haunt his nightmares, Georgie. Don't be surprised when you hear him wake up screaming some nights."

  "I know one thing you're thinking," Tom said, rejoining the group.

  Aidan was startled and wondered if Tom had somehow read his mind, which now was filled with doubt that he could pull off this lunatic masquerade.

  "What?"

  "You're thinking that you have really drawn a hardluck duty here. An all-male unit. Well, don't think we regret it any less than you do. Nights are long here since Dominique and Cassandra flushed out at the same time. I hear that some falconers use cadets for their satisfactions. Was that true in your unit, Jorge?"

  Aidan's mind frantically assembled the information he had been given by Ter Roshak. What was that falconer's name? Then it came to him. "No, our falconer was usually too drunk to think much about coupling."

  "Well, it will probably make better warriors out of us in the long run. I hear another unit the other side of the camp has the same problem, except they are all female. We thought of petitioning for at least shared barracks with them, but we know Sourfaced Othy would not approve."

  The others nodded in agreement. Even Horse's face seem to relax at the thought of the shared barracks.

  "Othy?" Aidan prompted. "Is he pretty tough on you—on us?"

  The others seemed to approve of the way he had included himself in the group.

  "He's incompetent," Spiro remarked. "Fortunately, we have Falconer Abeth, who is on leave at the moment. She makes up for his mistakes. And she doesn't seem to hate us as much as Othy does."

  "I know what you mean," Aidan said, remembering the way the falconer had treated him ever since he had reported in. "He would barely talk with me on the walk over here."

  "That's Othy, all right," Nigel commented.

  Looking up, Aidan saw that Horse was still staring at him, apparently searching his memory for a clue to Aidan's familiarity.

  "We make a living hell out of Othy's life," Tom said, "or at least we try. We play the role of what he believes freeborns to be, slothful and uncooperative and disgusting and all the rest. Horse says it's stupid of us."

  "It is," Horse said. "If we want to be accepted, we should show them our best. Even Othy."

  "You may be right. But he brings out the worst in us. Abeth knows our true worth. She doesn't much like us either, but she's fair."

  The others muttered approval of Tom's words.

  As they told him about their training experiences so far, Aidan was astonished by the camaraderie among them. Until now, he had believed camaraderie to be a singular thing, found only among sibkin and warriors. It had never occurred to him that freeborns could have emotional ties and warm feelings. In fact, he would have to go back to his childhood days to recall a time when his own sibko had displayed the warmth that this quartet of freeborns did. And they all came from disparate backgrounds, which made their camaraderie even stranger.

  He had come into the room with his usual disgust for freeborns, wondering how he could ever play the role, yet these first moments were not bad. Freeborns looked all right, acted all right, smelled all right. Perhaps their genetic backgrounds did not supply them with the same skills and traits of sibko members, but they seemed human enough to do many things well.

  If it were not for Horse and his obvious suspicions, Aidan began to believe this masquerade was going to be easier than originally expected. But what to do about Horse? Should he wait for a moment alone and kill him? Or just tough it out? Aidan could let nothing and no one interfere with his progress toward a second chance at being a MechWarrior, even one from a freeborn unit. He would have to watch Horse carefully. Very carefully.

  35

  Falconer Abeth was all that the others had said she would be, and certainly the opposite of Othy. She had the competence he lacked, and more. She was not like Falconer Joanna either. Somewhat shorter and plain-faced, with hair cut short and a stocky body, she spoke more gently than any falconer Aidan had ever met. But she acted with a swiftness and efficiency characteristic of all good falconers, and with something of the tenaciousness of the bird that gave the Clan its name. When one of the freeborns erred, Abeth was quick to strike him painfully with a whip or plain staff. She accompanied the blow with no words, and her silence was more effective than long diatribes from others.

  Because Aidan had already succeeded at this stage of training, he soon led the freeborn unit in performance. Sometimes he wondered whether he should hold back and attain only at the levels of the others. But even when he tried, he could not contain his abilities. Tom offered to turn over leadership to him, but Aidan told Tom he was doing too good a job. Privately, he wondered why sibkos did not have leaders. He suspected that for beings who were created from the same genetic material, it might be difficult for one to emerge as a leader, but he also thought that his sibko might not have fallen apart so easily in its latter stages if he or one of the others had been a leader.

  Aidan eventually noticed that Falconer Abeth was observing him closely. He thought at first it was only the interest typical of a leader for a trainee, but as he achieved more and more, she was almost always, it seemed, scrutinizing him.

  Finally, she called him in to her quarters. Her room was different from the few other falconer rooms he had seen or heard about. It was not as spare or as casually kept. Indeed, Abeth's was neat and filled with items. On one wall she had carefully arranged a display of Clan weapons and on another were pictures from Clan history. Papers were evenly piled on a long table. In an open closet, clothes were not only hung meticulously, but arranged according to the type of uniform.

  Abeth smiled at Aidan as he entered. He thought that perhaps she had called him here for sex, although the other cadets had told him she never summoned any of them for coupling. She motioned him to a chair at the end of her bunk. She was seated in another chair next to the table with the papers on it, and she picked up a folder that lay open at the top of one pile. She gestured with the folder in his direction.

  "Jorge, this says that you led your former group in all categories. Your late falconer reported that you were almost certain to pass in the Trial if you did nothing foolish."

  Aidan, not knowing how to respond, curtly nodded his head.

  "Since you have joined us, you have also achieved the highest performance record for the group. I am impressed. And bothered. You see, your achievements here exceed what you attained in your former unit. Indeed, significantly exceed it. Can you explain this?"

  The tone of her voice was as gentle as usual, but the words felt like the harsh blows she was known to deal out.

  "I think," he said, "I think it is the tragedy."

  Her brow furrowed. "Tragedy?"

  "When . . . when the others were killed, I made a vow to try even harder to become a warrior. I suppose I am doing better because I want to bring honor to them as well as to myself."

  What an improvisation, he thought, impressed with himself. The intensity of Abeth's stare had not diminished.

  "That is an odd response, Jorge. Almost mystical. I am not used to freeborns, or trueborns for that matter, being mystical."

  "I do not understand the concept of mysticism."

  "I suspect you do. You even sound different from others, certainly your fellow freeborns."

  Aidan's heart was in his throat as he went from pleasure at his improvisation to fear of discovery. If Abeth found him out, it would ruin his chances at the Trial.

  "Different? No. I am just new. You will get used to me and I will soon seem like the others."

  She put the folder down. "You do not even talk like them. You talk like me, like a warrior. For one thing, you have
said several things and not once used a contraction. What kind of filthy freebirth does not use a contraction in normal conversation?"

  He struggled to remain calm. "I'm sorry. It's just that—that, when I'm nervous, I kind of, kind of get formal. Do you see?"

  "I can see that that could be an answer, yes. But I also take note that you reacted to my comment about contractions with the wrong kind of tension. I called you a filthy freebirth. I have not seen a freeborn yet who would not erupt into visible anger when called a filthy freebirth. Even during the earlier stages of training when they cannot address falconers, I have always noted a flinch in the eyes from any freeborn whom I have cursed like that. What do you say to that, Jorge? Is it not true, quiaff?"

  Aidan felt pushed against a wall, even though he sat comfortably in a chair. "Aff, Falconer Abeth. But in my former unit we had made a pact not to show emotion when insulted. We became skilled at it. I still retain that skill."

  Abeth stared at him a moment longer, then laughed quietly. "You are adept, Jorge, I will give you that. All right then, you are dismissed."

  When he reached the door, she said to his back: "I am not convinced by you, Jorge, but I will check you out as best as I can."

  On the other side of the door, in a long, dark hallway, Aidan let out a breath he had been holding since rising from the chair in Abeth's room. What would he do, he wondered, if she should find him out and confront him with his fake identity? Would he have the courage to kill her? He was certain he would.

  36

  'I remember you now," Horse said suddenly. He and Aidan were engaged in breaking down and cleaning the antiquated rifles that freeborns got to use in training. The parts of each rifle lay on a blanket in front of each cadet. Aidan noted that Horse's rifle was divided into precise parallels and right angles. His were more casually arranged, although organized according to the rifle manual. Both had been pushing a treated cloth though the bores of the weapons. Falconer Abeth demanded cleanliness in every single piece before she would allow a cadet to reassemble the rifle.