"Battletech.-.Jade.Phoenix.01.-.Way.Of.The.Clan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Battletech)
Nicholas Kerensky took over his newly won dominion armed with a plan to forge a new society out of the disparate populations that made up the Exodus survivors. By mining the resources of its own diversity and channeling the energies of its warlike inclinations, the reborn society would unify his people into a force capable of achieving his greatest dream—a return to the inner Sphere to reestablish the Star League, the form of government that had once existed there. Everything directly connected to the Inner Sphere was suddenly banned, while nationalistic ties to the past were discouraged.
The Clans themselves had their origins earlier, during Nicholas' exile on Strana Mechty, when he had reorganized his armies into twenty groups, or clans, of forty warriors each. Within each clan, Nicholas decreed smaller units, what another age would have called platoons. Each of these sub-units was composed of five warriors and was eventually termed a "Star," the image presumably based on the conventional five points in the usual star symbol. Later, when the Clans had grown to their present massive proportions, the star imagery was continued and much of the organization was still based on quintuple segments.
The reorganization of society involved resettling outsiders into the various clans, a move that tended to further destroy nationalistic leanings. (Dermot's voice was itself resettling down into its deepest, most boring register, the voice whose vibrations Aidan seemed to feel so deeply through his body that they gave him back pain).
As the class recited the names of the Clans in unison and in precisely clipped words, Aidan's thoughts drifted off again, even as he stayed right in rhythm with his classmates…
Only a few days before the sibko had left for the training cycle, Aidan and Marthe had gone grave visiting. First, they went to the grave of Warhawk, whom Aidan had buried just outside the cemetery fence, then marked with a stanchion so that he could always find the site again. Warhawk's death had been unfortunate, the result of a malicious member of another sibko who thought he could bring honor to his own group by flinging a stone at the falcon. If Warhawk had not lost the sight in her right eye in a brutal skirmish with a renegade hawk, she might have seen the stone coming and executed one of her incredibly beautiful swooping arcs away from it. But the shot had been true, and Aidan watched her seem to come to an abrupt stop in the air, then drop to the ground like a lead weight. When he found her, her body still, her neck twisted and seemingly stretched, he had gone into a rage, found Warhawk's murderer, and nearly sent him to his own grave. For a while, an unpleasant feeling between the two sibkos led to many skirmishes (which Aidan's sibko usually won, led by his fierce charges, his punishing blows), but the conflict" ended abruptly when the boy who had killed Warhawk was himself slain in a fight within his own sibko.
Now, he found, it was difficult to tell exactly where Warhawk lay beneath the ground. The mark was still on the stanchion, but it seemed to Aidan that something about the ground had changed, that in some way its configurations had shifted or that the way he remembered them had altered. Now there was grass where none had previously been, and that complicated his search even more. He wanted to place his feet along the sides of the burial site, a silly ritual that he always performed during each visit to Warhawk, but this tune it was impossible. As he stared at the spot where the grave might be, he fingered the edge of his leather vest at the place where Warhawk had often bit and nibbled. Bite marks were still there, rough and frayed to Aidan's touch.
"Do not be sad," Marthe advised. "We are leaving here soon and may never come back. If we do, the fence may even be gone or rearranged to suit new dimensions of the graveyard. We lose boundaries all the tune, quiaff?"
Next they went into the cemetery and searched out Glynn's grave. Dav, the most artistic member in the sibko, had carved out a fighting sword on top of the grave marker, so it was easy to locate. In the shelter of a bushy tree, the sword seemed to thrust out of the ground, as if the corpse beneath was holding onto the hilt from inside the tomb. The shadows cast by the tree created the illusion of fresh bloodstains along the blade.
Standing silently by the grave, Aidan thought of Glynn's wasted death. One day a roving band of bandits had come too near the sibko, which was undergoing extended wilderness-survival training, camped in some geodesic domes abandoned by another sibko whose members had gone on to the next stage of their training. Gonn, an insecure military strategist at best, had panicked and set up a perimeter defense outside the encampment. It was clear to Aidan that the bandits might have passed them by if Gonn had not drawn their attention.
Aidan remembered lying on the ground, his hand tightly clutching the low-powered laser pistol that had become standard issue for the sibko after its tenth birth-noting. It could not kill, but it could cause extreme discomfort, as Aidan learned when Peri, the sneaky little runt of the siblitter, had shot him during a mock infantry exercise. The beam caught Aidan in the neck, sending a steady pain through it that was worse than any headache or muscle spasm he had ever endured. The pain made his eyes tear up and he fell to the ground. Peri, fearful that her toy had been set too high, ran over to him. When she saw that he was still alive, she laughed triumphantly. That was Peri's way; she exulted in her victories and let her victims know that she was happy to have defeated them.
In spite of his pain, Aidan had grabbed Peri about her legs, tipped her over, and disarmed her of the toy laser pistol, which he then held to her head. At that moment he had wanted to give her a headache the equal of the pain she had inflicted upon him. Fairness won out, however. Aidan accepted the skirmish victory as his due, sending the now-frowning Peri back to the assembling area with other defeated child-warriors, all waiting for their next turn in the battle game.
Aidan watched the bandits come toward the entrenched sibko. He could hardly make out the features of their faces, so begrimed were they with the dirt of the road that it looked as though they'd been wallowing in mud. Their clothes were mostly old and ripped, though here and there a bandit wore relatively clean, new-looking garments, probably booty from their most recent raid. The hair of the man at the head of the pack was tightly wrapped in a trio of short pigtails that bounced against his forehead with each step. Three pigtails identified him as the antikhan, a title that marked his rebellion against the warrior caste (he had no doubt been a disgraced warrior or failed warrior cadet). The word itself showed contempt for the rigid political structure of the Clans, each of whose leaders was called a khan, while the leader of all the Clans was given the exalted title of ilKhan.
Each member of the attacking horde seemed to grow in size as he or she came nearer. It was an optical illusion, Aidan knew, but the front ranks of the bandits were nevertheless populated by bulky, thick-muscles brutes who looked like warrior caste flush-outs.
Aidan, remembering Glynn's latest Mifoon adventure, took aim at the bandit leader's forehead and waited for him to get as close as possible before firing. Sibparent Gonn, who was in charge of weaponry training, had told Aidan that his main flaw as a marksman was that he was always the most eager to fire and most ready to fight in the entire sibko. Therefore, Gonn said, he should train himself to use proper caution. Aidan was now trying to be cautious, while his finger longed to pull the trigger and blast the bandit leader between the eyes. (According to Gonn, Aidan was one of the two or three best shots in the sibko, too).
He would have fired, and he would have stunned the leader and perhaps averted the attack if it were not for Glynn. No one ever had a clear notion of why she did it, though Gonn would later say the fanciful tales she told had chipped away too much battle armor from her mind, and that she probably thought she was some roving yo-jimbo out to save the local community from ravagers.
At any rate, Glynn marched past the line of sibko-defenders. With her height, she seemed like a giant stepping over ordinary people, especially with all the members of the sibko prone and looking up at her with awe. As though her long legs propelled her with a life of their own, she headed right for the advancing horde, which came to a halt at a signal from the tri-pigtailed leader.
The leader watched Glynn's approach, no doubt noting that the only weapon at her disposal was a sheathed sword that bounced rhythmically against her thigh just as his pigtails had danced against his forehead. He smiled, revealing surprisingly white teeth. With the rest of his face obscured by dirt and grime, the smile seemed to exist on its own, almost as if it floated in front of his face, an eerie smile without a link to anything else.
A few steps in front of the leader, Glynn stopped and said something to him. Her words did not carry back to the sibko, most of whose members now stood and, defying Gonn's cautioning, had begun to move toward the bandits. While not losing sight of Glynn and the bandit leader, Aidan chose one of the bandits, a surly-looking, stocky, bearded man on the right flank, as his quarry if a battle erupted.
The bandit leader's killing move was nearly undetectable. His right hand had rested in front of a scruffy vest, quite casually, then suddenly he had drawn a knife from somewhere in his clothing and raked it across Glynn's neck. Aidan got a sense of some blood spurting as Glynn fell, but by then his rage had taken over and he rushed toward the stocky bandit he had selected. As he came close, he realized he could get a shot at the bandit with his pistol, but he also knew he did not want that. It would be too easy. For his own sense of revenge, he had to make the man suffer.
The bandit came at him. He, too, had found a knife somewhere on his clothing and was brandishing it like a tiny sword. Knife or sword, no conventional weapon could frighten Aidan. In their hand-to-hand combat training lessons, he and the other sibko members had been well-drilled to respect a weapon but not to fear it.
Switching the pistol to his left hand, Aidan used it to deflect the downward arc of the bandit's knife. Before his adversary could recover, he grabbed the man's wrist with hands whose muscles had been strengthened by long calisthenics drills supervised by sibparent Gonn. Aidan had squeezed resilient materials, performed a dozen types of exercise ritual, hardened the skin in martial-arts demonstrations. As a result, he—like the others in the sibko— could do wonders with just bare hands. Aidan could feel the bandit's wrist break as he snapped it backward violently. The knife fell out of the man's hand. Kneeing the stocky man in the stomach and doubling him over, Aidan quickly snatched the knife off the ground and waited patiently for the man to straighten up. It would have been too easy to plunge the knife into the bandit's back. That would have been too much like a proper Clan death, the noble demise of a warrior who, even though a member of the bandit caste, could die in battle. But if the man were to die, there must be shame attached to it, especially after the bandit leader's almost casual slaying of Glynn.
As the bandit straightened up, he made a quick lunge at Aidan, who neatly sidestepped the man, sending him plunging forward and down, his face in the dirt. Ironically, it was Glynn who had drilled him in this very same battle-footwork.
Aidan stepped backward. He sensed, out the corner of his eye, a movement toward him. Another bandit, a short, thick-legged woman with fire in her eyes, raced toward him. Her fighting skills were no better than those of the man on the ground, and Aidan was able to strike the side of her head with the barrel of his pistol. He could have stabbed her, but he was saving the bandit's knife for its owner. She collapsed and he saw, as the fire in her eyes went out, that she would be at least momentarily unconscious.
Turning back to the bandit, he saw the man trying to heave his bulk upward. With no further reason to toy with him, Aidan kicked him in the side, sending him back to the ground. Assuming the look of contempt taught him by Gonn, he forced the bandit to roll over with further kicks, then stared into the man's now-frightened eyes. Aidan was revolted by the man's look of fear. Showing such emotion had no doubt contributed to this man's failure as a warrior, if indeed this particular freebirth had ever been a warrior.
Looking around him, Aidan saw that the battle was over and that they had won it. The survivors among the outlaw band were running from them, and the bodies of the less lucky were strewn about the improvised battlefield. Like Aidan, other members of the sibko were standing and surveying the damage they had done. Many of them hovered over the corpse of the bandit leader, who had more than the requisite wounds in his body to bring about an agonizing death.
For a moment, he saw the scene as it might have looked from the viewpoint of the enemy. The bandits had lost a fight with a raging horde of children. That would damage the pride of the survivors. It was the first battle, other than planned ceremonial skirmishes, that Aidan's sibko had ever won. And the cost of it was Glynn's death.
When Aidan arrived at the side of Glynn's corpse, where the sibko was assembling, his body was still trembling and his stomach still bouncing around inside his body from the exhilaration and disgust of his first killing. Looking at Gonn, he saw that lines of tears ran out of the corners of Gonn's eyes. Aidan could not tell whether they were angry or sad tears. No one ever could, or did, know what went on in the group leader's mind.
Their other sibparents had seen to it that Glynn was given a proper ceremonial funeral, marked with a few rituals that normally belonged to those who had attained warrior status. After the funeral, Gonn was severely reprimanded and removed from command over the sibko for having lost control of it at a key moment, even though the sibko itself was praised for its bravery. He was demoted to menial tasks, which he did desultorily. Then, one day, Gonn drowned in a river alongside which the sibko was camped. Some wondered if he had committed suicide, although direct suicide was rare in the Clans. Few clansmen or women ever chose to kill themselves, except through recklessness in battle.
Though Aidan had despised Gonn for his cowardice against the bandits, he nevertheless felt some grief upon hearing of the man's death. A few years earlier, a different kind of Gonn had taken Aidan under his wing—under his falcon wing, a catchphrase he used often—and helped with the training of Warhawk.
One day Gonn had found Aidan trying to pull some broken feathers from Warhawk's wing. The falcon had been in a mysterious fight somewhere, apparently with a bird nearly as tough as she, and she had returned from the fray much the worse for wear. Many feathers were tattered, with others severely damaged and attached by only a few remaining strands of quill.
"Silly child," Gonn had said. "Do not pull out feathers that way, no matter what shape they are in. Do you not know that when they are taken completely out, you can be sure that they will not grow again at next molting, and perhaps at no future molting?"
"No, sir. I did not know that. I—"
"None of your excuses. Warriors do not try to find reasons for their failures. That is not the way of the Clans." The way of the Clans, another catchphrase, was one all the sibparents used. "As you do in so many other ways, you show yourself not ready even to imagine yourself a warrior. I doubt that you will go that far, for all your fancy achievements. And you will not answer now, quineg?"
"Neg."
"Now here I will show you what to do. It is called imping."
Gonn took Aidan, who held and soothed Warhawk, to his quarters, at that time in their existence a hastily put-together shack, whose sides and roof were made of the durable caldo leaf, which grew abundantly on trees in that particular part of Circe. The shack was like all the places Gonn had ever lived, cluttered and strewn with debris from his life. Using a set of needles that he kept in the kit-bag that always hung from his belt, he selected some three-sided needles of various sizes. Reaching into a box under a strange-looking work-desk cluttered with tools whose uses Aidan could not begin to imagine, Gonn took out a spray of falcon and hawk feathers. He told Aidan he had saved them from the molt of many of the damned birds that the sibko kept.
Taking the first needle and holding it up to the light streaming in from the open doorway, Gonn examined it closely, then measured the old feather against it. He told Aidan they would match old feathers with Warhawk's real feathers. As Aidan clutched Warhawk firmly but gently, Gonn went to work on the bird. With the delicate strokes of a surgeon, working the knife slowly, he cut away the feather at the point where the fracture occurred, then on the remaining section he fashioned an oblique edge. Leaning away from Warhawk, he took the old feather and sliced its edge off. With nimble fingers, he checked to see that the edges of the true feather and the old feather fit together neatly and that the remade feather would be about the same length as those around it. Inserting the needle into Warhawk's real feather, he fastened the old one to it, gently pushing the false feather onto the real one until the break between them was hardly noticeable. Satisfied with his handiwork, he leaned back and said:
"There. That will suffice until Warhawk's next molting. The needle is treated so that it will attach to the inside of each feather and hold it securely. Now, let's do some of the others."
Aidan and Gonn worked together for several hours. It was the only time when Gonn had seemed even remotely human to Aidan. His grave lay somewhere in the graveyard, but Aidan and Marthe refused to visit it.
For three years afterward, Aidan dreamed of the man he had killed in battle. Variations on the act made the dreams even more frightening than the actual experience.
In some dreams, the victim fought better and was not so easily killed. In the ones from which Aidan woke up in a cold sweat, the victim was about to win.
The other graves he and Marthe searched for and found that day were of the sibko's dead, the ones who had died in trials or been the victims of disease or accident. These were few, however. Most of the now-absent members of the sibko had simply foiled tests and been sent to other areas where they were integrated into other castes. No one ever really lost face in Clan society. Any momentary shame was made up for by assuming a useful life in another caste.
Now there would be shame, Aidan thought, as he tuned back in to Dermot again. It is a bad thing to have to leave a sibko before training, but it was a lifelong embarrassment to be dismissed from warrior training. True, one could join a new caste like the earlier
flush-outs from sibko training, but the knowledge would always remain that one had been on the verge of becoming a warrior, the highest caste of all. People who talked to you, however cheerfully and respectfully, would never quite be able to forget that you had suffered the ultimate ignominy, the removal from warrior status. The few failed warriors whom Aidan had met while growing up had seemed to be exoskeletons covering no body, as if the inability to be warriors on the outside had dried up the inner self and turned it to dust. These individuals performed their caste roles well enough, even admirably, but something was always missing. Aidan did not want that kind of life. He could only be a warrior.
Dermot was describing the controlled breeding program, telling how the exalted Nicholas had seen the need to go beyond the normal birthrate to quickly create a race of the finest warriors. All the strife had severely depopulated the Clan worlds, and drastic action was necessary. Therefore, Nicholas had created the systematic eugenics program by which the 800 warriors in the Clans donated genetic materials to a type of baby factory that the scientists euphemistically called "Homes." These Homes specialized in combining the best traits from individual genes in the sperm and ova to make children who, it was hoped, would become warriors with the skills of their donors and without the negative characteristics that had caused so much strife and rebellion among the early settlers of the Clan planets. Raised in artificial wombs, each generation would, with the process of testing and re-testing, become even freer of defects and more able than the generation before it.
With each Clan raising children assigned to sibling companies, or sibkos, the population growth that Nicholas envisioned began occurring quickly and in exponential fashion. Though not everyone in a sibko actually made it through the years of grueling tests to become a warrior, and some died trying, those who were assigned elsewhere made important contributions to the rest of society. As strong leaders and super-intelligent citizens, they tended to take control of other castes. It was axiomatic that a trueborn was more likely to succeed in Clan society than a freeborn.
Aidan could barely keep up with the chanting responses that Dermot required. He was thinking of the trueborn-freeborn conflicts throughout society on the various settled planets. Out there, he had heard, where the life was nonwarrior and nonsibko, there had been some blemishes on the visage of Nicholas Kerensky's idealized society. For the most part, the basic divisions of society, trueborn/freeborn, the hierarchy of castes, service castes/worker castes, scientist caste/all other castes except warrior, warrior and everybody else, were maintained. Some planets were run so well that, it was said, very little trouble occurred. Critics of the social structure, and there were many, especially among the educated class who stayed on at universities, complained about the urge toward conformity that the caste system seemed to foster routinely and the lack of freedom for the individual. However, nobody ever listened to anyone in the teacher class, and so their ideas were merely additions to the clash of theories and philosophies that interested no one but the academics.
Dermot's current drone was on the subject of the codex, the meticulous record of a warrior's life from his first successful test to the day he died in a cockpit or in some other useful social role. It was in the analysis of the codex that scientists found genetic histories so worthwhile that the individual warrior's genetic materials might be retained for the gene pools.
© 2026 Библиотека RealLib.org
(support [a t] reallib.org)
(support [a t] reallib.org)