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

"I can say anything I want to you, in public, Falconer Joanna! The proper question should be how dare you speak to me that way in front of them?"
"Sir, you claim to allow us freedom."
"Yes. I did not interfere in your battle with Ellis."
"You are not allowed to. You are not allowed to cross into the Circle during a dispute, unless invited."
Ter Roshak seemed momentarily disconcerted.
"Of course you are right," he finally said. "But it is a rule I would willingly break if it meant saving a life. If I had had any idea that you would—"
"What hypocrisy is this? You heard our bids. The battle was to the death, we both said it."
"But in an honor duel, that is figurative."
"Not in my understanding."
"Damn it, Joanna, you should not have killed him."
"That is a moral decision. By my morality, I had no choice. It is the way of the Clan. An honor duel must be fought by the arranged terms."
"It is not the way of the Clan to pursue personal vengeance."
Joanna looked ready to kill Roshak now.
"How dare you speak of personal vengeance? You, of all people? Did you not—"
Her words were stopped as Roshak hit her with the back of his false hand. The blow was hard and sent her reeling, a stream of blood coming out of the side of her mouth. She started to raise her hand, to touch the blood, then seemed to see that as a gesture of capitulation and dropped her hand abruptly. The blood reached the line of her chin and some drops fell onto her leather tunic.
For a moment, she stared at Ter Roshak, her body trembling with anger, then she composed herself and relaxed her body.
"Your orders, sir?"
"I would transfer you to another training unit, but we are already shorthanded. You are confined to your quarters until the start of the training day tomorrow. At that time, you will report to me."
"As you wish, sir."
Joanna strode right at the group of cadets, defying them to take any note of her. The sibko occupied itself with diversionary maneuvers, not one of them looking into Joanna's eyes as she passed through them.
Turning his back on the cadets, Ter Roshak loudly dismissed them. They returned to the barracks slowly, disconsolately, not speaking. In the barracks, the silence broke and most of them could not stop talking. Aidan did not join in but went to his cot instead. Looking at Marthe, his eyes invited her to join him. She shook her head no, with just the slightest, quickest movement.
Later, in the middle of the night, Aidan was sum-mmoned to the quarters of Falconer Joanna. Others, Bret the most often, had received such a summoning, but it was the first time for Aidan. He had always felt that her distaste for him as a cadet was carried into her sexual life. In fact, she rarely needed the sexual attentions of any member of the sibko, but once in a while the summoning came and had to be obeyed. Bret and the others said she always made them maintain the vow of silence the whole time. When the order came for Aidan to report to her, he considered refusing, defying her once more, treating her quarters as another Circle of Equals. However, sex—unimportant as it was, annoying physical compulsion that it also was—never seemed vital enough to put one's life on the line for, and so Aidan went to her. The night was, as Bret and the others predicted, silent. The coupling was perfunctory, athletic and combative, like most Clan sex.
The entire night with Falconer Joanna was almost silent. She spoke only twice, both times after the sessions of coupling were ended. The first time she said, ' 'I know your codex, and I know that, a few years ago, you killed a bandit, roughly and brutally. I was surprised by that, frankly, since I see in you a constitutional weakness, the seeds of failure. Maybe I have misjudged you. Time will tell, as the old saying goes. Until then, I will watch you, push you, punish you, have you close to me on nights like this. You will be with me like this often, until you do fail or you die or you choose to leave your sibko. Perhaps you will succeed." The second time she said, "I am the only warrior left from my sibko."
Even though, as a sexual partner, Aidan was allowed to speak freely with Joanna, he refused to say anything. He even suppressed sounds during the act. She did not seem to mind that.
Before leaving her quarters, standing in the doorway, looking back at the now strangely languid Joanna, he said, "I will not fail."
He may have been mistaken, but he thought he saw the hint of a smile prodding the corners of her mouth.
"You may not," she said. As he walked out the door, she added, "But I am afraid that you will."
If she had said that he definitely would fail, her words would not have bothered him. But she said, "I am afraid that you will," and he often stopped to wonder why she had used the word, afraid. Joanna showed no concern for anyone in the sibko, for anyone anywhere, for that matter. She could not possibly have concern for his success or failure.
Or could she?


7

Using a telescope that had been removed from some service battlefield weapon, Aidan had the freeborn in his sights. He could not kill him because the single weapon he had chosen for this exercise, a medium laser in the right arm, had been phased down and at best could only cause a mild stun, enough to make his opponent dizzy but not enough to render him or her unconscious. Perhaps choosing the single weapon had been a miscalculation, Aidan thought, especially since the others had made more conventional choices—machine guns and short range missiles.
The freebirth cadet he had centered on for his segment of the battle was a bland-looking boy, his hair cut so short that, except for the light gray stubble, he would have been taken for bald. Aidan had been told that his hairstyle was the current custom among freeborn cadets who defiantly wanted to distinguish themselves from trueborns as much as trueborns did not want any association with freeborns. Perhaps because of the grayness of the stubble, the boy's face seemed unnaturally red, giving him a demonic look in spite of his average features.
Anti-freebirth curses hissed through the staticky comm-link. All the members of his sibko were contributing their own creative denunciations in deliberately chosen language. Because of the immobility of his 'Mech, he could not see any of his sibkin in their own reconstructed 'Mech shells, but his hearing perked up whenever Marthe's voice came online. He had not been able to adjust to her newfound reticence, and in the year it had taken them to get to this point in training, the distance between them seemed to have grown. Sometimes they still met in his or her bunk, but even the coupling now seemed to separate them. It had become no better, and no worse, than sex with anyone else in the sibko.
Aidan still had the boy in his sights, not that the calibration of the view was particularly accurate. He was sitting in the torso of a partially reconstructed Wasp, an obsolete pile of junk, but still suitable for exercises early in the cycle, as Joanna had told them. It was more or less complete from the head through the torso, but had no legs, and so was not maneuverable. Testing the right-arm medium laser, he had found its effective range to be about a third normal and the power turned down so that he could only stun rather than kill any target. He would have bid to equip the machine with an LRM rack instead of the medium-range laser, if Joanna had not discouraged him two nights ago, when he had last been with her, from adding too much weaponry to his proposed battle plan. The lowest bids got the most strategic positions on the training field, the most protection from the surrounding landscape, the better chance to win the points that would mean the awarding of a victory from the training officers from other units who were there to judge each cadet's performance.
The 'Mech also rested on an insecure foundation, a specific difficulty factor that was a part of the exercise. It was claimed that if a real 'Mech became immobile and lost its stabilizing gyros in the field, its pilot would have difficulty keeping it upright, so the swaying of this 'Mech was deliberate. If Aidan made any kind of extensive move, he felt his machine rock slightly under him.
It was frustrating not to be able to employ BattleMech maneuverability, but—according to the instructors—the sibko was a long way from stepping into genuine 'Mechs. About all the combat activity he could manage was to move the 'Mech's arms or manipulate the laser weapon. He had sent one beam that he thought was well-aimed past the boy. It sailed over his head by a few meters. Another had done no more than create an uneven singe line across the ground in front of his antagonist.
The freeborns participating in this exercise were told that they were getting anti-'Mech training, while the trueborns' purpose was anti-infantry. But it was clear to Aidan that caste distinctions would never allow freeborns to have advantageous positions against trueborns, and so could not possibly be in BattleMechs against them. The freeborns, like Aldan's sibko, were allowed their own choices of weapons. This particular one had taken a couple of potshots in Aidan's direction with a conventional rifle, but had also missed completely. They had struck the lower part of the 'Mech torso but were not strong enough to do significant damage.
Inside the 'Mech, the cockpit was quite primitive, simplified for training purposes, as Joanna had told them. The nearly bare command console contained no monitors and not much in the way of recording devices, not even a minimal computer to go with the minimal 'Mech. All the recording of Aidan's performance was being done at command level, where the trainers were measuring and judging the performance of each individual sibko member.
The single cockpit device meant for his attention was I a gauge that allegedly measured the heat level of the machine. Though most Clan 'Mechs were equipped with double heat sinks that virtually made overheating impossible, the training cadre wanted all cadets to be made conscious of the danger of rising heat in the event of a malfunction or of an overeager warrior putting his 'Mech in such jeopardy. The gauge was fake, controlled by those who were guiding the exercise. They could arbitrarily place any cadet in a dangerous situation and announce that the 'Mech had overheated. Then the cadet was declared "dead" in his seat (unless he or she had cleverly anticipated the event and scrambled out of the cockpit before the controller noticed), and his mock battle machine judged as defeated and taken out of the exercise.
Still, frustrating as the test conditions were, primitive as the partial 'Mech was, Aidan was exhilarated by the experience of finally being in a cockpit after all the verbal abuse from instructors and the endless classroom tests and the 'Mechless combat maneuvers the sibko had undergone. This exercise—at last—began the real training, the training that he and the sibko had been looking forward to so desperately. Instead of pretending to be a warrior while shooting imaginary weapons from his bed or in the midst of rare sibko recreation, now he had the chance to operate a genuine machine with real, if decrepit and barely loaded or charged, weapons.
It was time to dispose of the boy. Leaning toward the front viewing window, all the while longing for a holographic display of the whole battlefield, Aidan took a bead on the freeborn, then slowly pushed down the button on the arm of his command couch that would direct a laser beam at the target. He wanted to relish his first training kill.
He relished it for too long. Joanna had drummed into the minds of the sibko that timing was critical, and Aidan had forgotten the lesson.
The boy, standing between two tall trees whose bark shone wetly from a recent rain, fired a flare right at Aidan's 'Mech. Aidan had not even detected a flare gun among his enemy's weaponry. Its projectile exploded, apparently against the 'Mech's left arm, where the laser was mounted. There was a long moment of fierce blinding light. Aidan shut his eyes tightly and watched, on the inside of his eyelids, large, abstract, dark blobs that seemed to be engaged in their own personal combat. At the same time, he considered his second mistake, regarding the freeborn as subhuman. Sensing the light of the flare dying out, he opened his eyes. With that, the dark blobs turned into blinding light that, for a moment, prevented him from focusing. As clearer sight returned, he sensed a hard knock against the front of the cockpit. The 'Mech seemed to shake on its already shaky foundation.
When he could finally focus on what was happening, Aidan saw the freeborn boy clinging to the outside of the cockpit, staring in at its bewildered pilot. He grinned in a way that might have seemed friendly from a trueborn, but was spookily turned into a malicious smirk on the face of a freeborn. One of the boy's hands firmly grasped the rim of the viewport, while the other clutched to his chest what at first looked to Aidan like a bundle.
Before Aidan could adjust to the boy's presence on his 'Mech's surface, the freebirth suddenly disappeared from the viewing window, leaving a streak of dirt behind him as proof that he had not been Aidan's hallucination. The last thing Aidan saw was the bundle, now held downward away from the boy's body, reminding Aidan of a suitcase.
It was a moment before Aidan realized the significance of the object. It was neither bundle nor suitcase. The little bastard was carrying a satchel charge and he was going to attach it to Aidan's 'Mech.
In her weaponry briefing, Joanna had said nothing about satchel charges, though she had pointed out that no weapon would be life-threatening; this boy's was undoubtedly powered down, like all the rest of the weapons in the exercise. Aidan felt cheated. A satchel charge seemed like a violation of the rules, but of course, as Joanna had also pointed out, this exercise had no rules. As she had said, all was fair in love and war, and on the training ground, "what's unfair is even fairer." One had only to win.