"Battletech.-.Jade.Phoenix.01.-.Way.Of.The.Clan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Battletech)

Suddenly someone grabbed his arm. His head turned sideways laboriously, as if his neck muscles had gone rusty. He looked into the badly sculptured face of Falconer Commander Ter Roshak. Glancing down, Aidan saw that his arm was being clutched by Ter Roshak's false hand. That might explain the pain that was now surging through his arm, unless of course it was simple weakness that would have suffered from the least grip. In a way, Aidan was glad it was Ter Roshak's prosthetic hand that held him. He would have had to try to wriggle out of anyone else's grip; with Ter Roshak, it was a clear impossibility so Aidan could relax in his bondage and merely wait to see what would happen next.
What happened next was that Joanna wheeled upon Ellis, in her eyes and voice a hatred so intense that even Aidan, groggy as he was, could see that the emotion was not born at just this moment. It had been building up for some time.
"An honor duel then, Falconer Ellis?" Joanna said.
"It does not have to be."
Ellis' response was mere ritual, the offer of an opportunity to settle a dispute without conflict. This allowed a warrior who was either under the influence of an overwhelming emotion, a bad substance, or a mistaken notion to withdraw honorably from the issue of the duel. Warriors, however, rarely took a step back, and Joanna had always made it clear that a weak act of honor was to her an act of dishonor, whatever the Clan codes said.
"An honor duel then?" she said.
"Honor duel," Ellis responded, nodding.
"Mechs fully armed."
"No. The woods, a single weapon, your choice."
"No. No weapons. Just you and me. Here. Now. To the death."
There was a slight hesitation on Ellis' part before he said, in a voice louder and firmer than hers, "To the death."
"Well bargained and done."
"Well bargained and done."
Aidan had never heard the bidding process spoken so rapidly, concluded so easily. There had been no sense of strategy, just offers from instinct.
"See what you have done, cadet?" Ter Roshak whispered. "Fate allows fools like you to precipitate events that end in futile catastrophe."
Aidan wanted to protest that he had not precipitated anything, that Joanna had wrenched him out of a classroom for her sport. But it would be his head to address the Falconer Commander, especially when Ter Roshak was in such a foul mood.
"Fool!" Ter Roshak cried. He tightened his grasp of Aidan's arm, then lifted him off the ground and hurled him away, over the line of the Circle of Equals, into the midst of his fellow sibkin, who now backed away from him as if he were suddenly diseased. Even Marthe kept her distance, her feet shuffling nervously as though she could not decide whether to direct them toward Aidan or away from him. He hated that. Before, she would never have considered away.


6

For a long while Aidan just sat on the ground, his gaze fixed on an odd pattern of rocks that seemed deliberately centered between his legs. Aware that no one in the sibko was allowed to comfort him, and probably did not want to, he ignored them by concentrating on getting his head cleared and on watching the rocks. His head stubbornly refused to clear, and his vision went in and out of focus. Whenever the rocks came into focus, he tried to look up to see what was happening around him and in the Circle of Equals, but the slightest movement of his head returned him to dizziness. The sensation was something like looking into firelight: everything became hazy and there was pain where intense illumination struck the retina. He would have tried to shake his head clear, but after doing it once, the pain it caused had nearly knocked him out completely.
The pattern of the rocks was irregular, which fascinated Aidan. He realized that if one were to isolate any group of rocks strewn across the ground of this exceedingly rocky planet, one would find any number of irregular patterns. The regular pattern would be the exception. Nevertheless, everything else about life was in such a fixed pattern that he never, until now, thought much about irregularities. Growing up in the sibko, days and nights were arranged, schedules were kept, a regular process of regular progress was meticulously noted and recorded so that a warrior's codex, his or her lifetime in a collection of data, could be maintained. If this entire process were to be significantly violated, Aidan was certain that the Clan would devise some other pattern to replace it. Patterns were all, all was pattern. Had not Dermot said that last week? The sibko itself was a pattern, created out of patterns in a gene, itself a pattern in a cell. Their differences were minimal, their similarities praiseworthy. A sibko joke: DNA means Don't Need Anything. (The use of the forbidden contraction seemed, to childish minds, a bit of rebellion, and they loved to say it.) They did not need anything because all was planned for them. Their lives were table arrangements, utensils in the right place, at the right angles next to a perfectly arranged set of plates. Training on Ironhold merely continued the regular pattern.
He could discover no pattern in the rocks, and that troubled him. With his training, he should be able to see the pattern in anything. He picked up one rock and placed it down again so that it formed a triangle with the two other rocks, so that there was at least one pattern amid the anarchy. But it didn't satisfy him, the triangle. It was more out of place than the irregular setup had been. Because he had formed it, he could not help but concentrate on it. Now the triangle was taking on too much importance among the other rocks. He picked up all three rocks and tossed them away, refusing to note where they fell.
The sounds coming from the Circle entered his consciousness, but he refused to look up. He did not want to see what was happening there, not even when it was Joanna who screamed in pain. Her pain gave him no satisfaction. By rights, he should want to see her writhing in agony on the ground. He should want to see her deeply tanned skin stained with her blood. He should want to see her neck broken or her limbs hanging uselessly. But those prospects were just as repulsive to him as was Joanna herself. He did want to see her dead, or even hurt.
What he would have liked would be for her to tell him that he had done something well. It was wrong, he knew, to wish for credit from anyone because after the nurturing stage came the warrior training stage; after the pattern, the pattern—and there was no praise for achievement. There was, in fact, only one achievement—the victory at the Trial of Position that waited for the few who survived the training to the end. By that time, praise was no longer necessary. Dermot had said that a kind word could alter the quickness of a warrior's response and that could mean the laser blast could catch you in the throat instead of your enemy.
A wave of surprise swept among the sibko, punctuated with gasps that were sudden enough to make Aidan finally look up.
Ellis now knelt on Joanna's chest. With terrific thrusts of her torso, Joanna was rocking Ellis while trying to squirm out from under him, but she could not dislodge him. A cruel look of triumph came into Ellis' eyes as he suddenly locked his hands together, shifted his body back along Joanna's legs. Bringing his hands down, he directed them at her head in what should have been a killing blow, or one that would at least have knocked Joanna out if it did not fracture her skull.
How she did it, Aidan was not sure, but instead of trying to avoid the blow, Joanna, whose arms were pinned, blocked it with the top of her head. In spite of the block, the force of impact of Ellis' hands against her head should have knocked her out and made it easy for him to dispose of her.
Joanna had always said she had the resources of the kind of mythic beast that, in Clan myths, came back to haunt heroes. Perhaps she did possess such power because, not only did she retain consciousness, but she took advantage of a slight shifting in Ellis' pressure on her torso to roll sideways and free one arm. She faked a backhanded punch toward his stomach, one whose weakness could not possibly have hurt Ellis. Nevertheless, in instinctive reflex, he moved to block it, and she opened her hands. Eluding his defense, and reaching above it, she grabbed the lower end of his leather tunic and pulled his close to her. In another situation, the move might have been that of a lover drawing to her the object of her sexual desire, but in this case it was the move Joanna needed to break Ellis' leverage. Artfully squirming through his legs as he struggled to regain equilibrium, she shot out the other side of his legs, rolled over, stirred up a lot of dust, and came up on the attack.
Ramming him from the rear, she knocked the already off-balance Ellis onto his face. He quickly curled up his body, however, and somersaulted to his feet, a maneuver at which Ellis had always been particularly adept. Unfortunately, Joanna anticipated it. She made no move toward him and instead scooped up a rock from the ground and hurled it at his head while she was still bent over. To Aidan the rock seemed to sail slowly toward Ellis' head, when in fact the missile was thrown with some force and speed. Later, he would remember this as the first of many moments in his life when movement around him seemed to slow down, to occur at some different speed from that of reality. There were times when he doubted that any change had occurred and attributed it to some dislocation of memory rather than time.
The rock caught Ellis, who was turning around at the moment and consequently stepped right into its path, on the side of his forehead, just above his temples. He blinked hard a couple of times after the impact, looking for a moment as though he might pass out, then he growled fiercely and charged at Joanna.
Until his last step, Joanna stood her ground, a look of arrogance on her face and a scornful smile on her lips. In a sense, the fight was over. She had won. All she had to do was finish Ellis off. She could have done that with a well-timed jab at his stomach or a strike to the side of his neck. Simple procedures would have done the job.
But Joanna eschewed simple procedures.
In a move that seemed to Aidan more dancelike than warriorlike, Joanna deftly sidestepped, allowing Ellis, who apparently expected some other response, to stumble his way past her. His attempts to regain his footing would have been comic to Aidan if he had not seen, and correctly interpreted, the killing look in Joanna's eyes. Joanna had often told the sibko that feeling her own killing look, at the time when victory was certain and disposal of the defeated only a matter of routine, was the greatest intoxication a warrior could know.
Aidan had wanted to ask her if she did not also feel disgust at the results of carnage. But even if he had been allowed to speak it would have been unnecessary. A Clan warrior could not look back, could not care what thought or feeling might preoccupy his or her victim. To be warriors, they must, in fact, stop thinking about such minor details.
Joanna's killing look must have been obvious to Falconer Commander Ter Roshak, for he rushed forward from his observing station toward the combatants. But his move came too late.
Joanna rushed at Ellis. Leaping feet-first, she kicked at his backside, sending him sprawling and sliding across the ground. Joanna came down on balance and ran to Ellis' now-crawling body. He was trying to get to the rim of the Circle, which meant capitulation. It was shameful, but sometimes worth the discredit. Warriors were more concerned with the art of victory than the shame of defeat, and a disgraced warrior could always erase the memory of a loss with a convincing victory the next time around.
If Ellis could pull himself across the rim, Joanna could no longer press the attack. His fingers were stretched out, the tip of his middle finger only a centimeter away from one of the stakes that formed the rim, when Joanna landed on him. Aidan's view of the kill was partially obscured as Rena, screaming with delight, slipped in front of him. As he maneuvered for a better view, he saw the result of Joanna's assault. Descending from what seemed a great height, she landed on Ellis' back, crushing Ellis' neck with her left knee. It was probably a broken neck that killed Ellis, though Aidan never learned. It could also have been another blow. Perhaps his back had been fractured. At any rate, Roshak ordered the body taken away, and after Ellis' death had been officially announced, the rumor mill furnished many causes of death, including the idea that Joanna had ripped out his heart. Some of the sibko even seemed to believe that absurdity, despite having been witness to the actual event. It was just that Falconer Joanna seemed capable of anything.
After ordering the disposal of the body, Ter Roshak wheeled on Joanna. The emotion in his angry face, the tension in his body, seemed a complete reversal of his normal demeanor. Aidan had never seen wrath erupt so suddenly or with such full involvement of every part of the body.
"Falconer Joanna, I cannot let this pass. Ellis was a fine warrior, a—"
"I am a warrior," Joanna said softly.
"Too much a warrior. There was no need to kill him."
"It would have been dishonorable not to."
"There is no dishonor in mercy."
"You would have had me maim him, paralyze him, disable—"
"You know what I mean! We have had this out before. We are not fighting a war. We do not have to—"
"How dare you criticize me publicly, old man? Here, in front of them!"
She gestured toward the cadets, all of whom were lined up and watching so intently that they seemed partially to form a second outer rim to the Circle. Taking quick glances to both sides, Aidan thought he could see in the stances of his sibkin a definite split between supporting Joanna and clear antagonism toward her. He tried to show neutrality. He was not sure why. He was clearly against Joanna, yet he did not want to join that faction, because a part of him considered any insubordination to be wrong for a warrior. For the first time, as he watched Joanna gather her resources and stand up to Ter Roshak, he realized that he had a grudging admiration of this officer who had provided such hell for him. But then he decided it must be one too many blows to the head, and that this feeling would pass.
Ter Roshak's anger had grown, apparently due to Joanna's defiance. He seemed to waver on his legs and his prosthetic arm gestured threateningly, as if he wished to dispatch Joanna with the same ruthlessness she had used for Ellis.