She might have said more about him, but things blurred and he passed out.

He was probably not unconscious long. The next thing he knew, he and the others were being hauled to their feet by their now businesslike training officers.

Aidan felt around in his tunic pocket for something to wipe away the blood he tasted along his lips. He found nothing. He must be content to let the blood dry. His fellow sibkin were all standing now, looking confused and in pain.

"Well," Falconer Commander Ter Roshak said as he strolled among the sibko, "Joanna and Ellis have taught you something already. There is more to combat than your acrobatic but rather absurd struggles. A BattleMech does not move gracefully, nor is its jumping particularly acrobatic. Entertain us no longer with your morning exercises. We expect real effort from you, not ballet. Falconers, line them up and march them out."

Pushing and shoving, the falconers managed to get the sibko into two swaying but relatively even lines. Joanna saw to it that Aidan was beside her, at the head of one of the files.

"It is a long walk to your barracks. You will march every step of the way. In double-time."

Aidan could not imagine walking for long, much less marching, but as soon as Joanna gave the command, he put his left foot forward briskly, and with hatred of Joanna keeping him going, he somehow kept up with her. He had to. Whenever he did not, she kicked his nearest leg with the sharp metal toe of her boot.

At one point, just after they had joined a mass of other marching cadets, Joanna tapped him with her glove and said softly: "You are mine, cadet. You may resist and I sincerely hope you do. I will destroy you or make you the best damned MechWarrior of all these sibkos. I will probably destroy you. You will fail."

Her words angered him.

"Never," he said defiantly.

She pulled him out of line and threw him to the ground. "You are notto address me or any other officer. Understand?"

He had not forgotten that rule. He had chosen to answer Joanna. Without looking at her, he stood up and ran to catch up to the others, retake his place in line.

The march was long. There were times when Aidan felt such pain in his legs that he could only take one more step. Then another step after that. Every muscle in his body had discovered its own private, selfish ache and was competing with the others to be the biggest single pain of his lifetime.

He began to walk with his eyes closed, sensing direction and pace from the sibkin in front and back of him. Finally, there was a shouted halt. The two falconers now stood in front of them, eying them with distaste. Ter Roshak had disappeared. Aidan could not remember seeing him at any time during the march. He tried to relax his body, but he could feel every bruise Joanna had left there, plus some pains that could not logically have come from her assault.

Joanna took off her gloves and hooked them in her belt. A frail-looking man in a Tech jumpsuit brought her a towel. She pulled it out of his hand roughly, even though he was offering it to her. He seemed not to mind her rudeness. Methodically she wiped away sweat from her body, first burying her face in the towel, then scraping it against the back of her neck and vigorously rubbing down her glistening arms.

She threw the towel down to the ground, where the Tech quickly picked it up and retreated. Joanna meanwhile eyed the new trainees contemptuously. For a moment her gaze stopped at Aidan and she nodded.

For years he had spent most of his time with the sibko and their sib-parents, older warriors whose combat was behind them. They were in charge of the education and training for the sibko's childhood and adolescence. The sib-parents had been tough, but the sibko had come to love them. He felt he would never feel such affection for Falconer Joanna. He was too frightened of her for that. It was the first time in his life he had felt fear of another. Looking around him, he saw his fear duplicated on his sibkin's faces, as if imprinted there, a new expression upon faces that already resembled each other.

They were assigned their barracks, a thin-walled wooden building with visible cracks through which the wind blasted. The falconers told them to get undressed and get some sleep in their assigned bunks. There would be uniforms in the morning and the beginning of training. "After tomorrow," Falconer Ellis said in his rough voice, "today's activities will seem like frolic to you."

Inside supposedly indestructible boots, Aidan's feet felt less eternal. When he released them from the footwear, arches ached, toes were bloodstained, heels showed calluses the size of pebbles. After undressing, he literally fell onto his bunk, whose thin, uncomfortable mattress stank of the fears and misery of the generations of cadets who had been, it seemed to him, condemned to this place at other times. Even with a scratchy blanket wrapped around him, he could not get warm. He wished he could go to Marthe, snuggle up to her for warmth, take her in his arms and—Aidan was asleep before he could take this comforting, if not warming, fantasy to its logical conclusion.

2

"And that world was named Strana Mechty by Katyusha Kerensky. The name comes from her native Russian. What does it mean, class, in our language?"

With the loud and forceful responding style that had been drummed into them since the first classroom session of their training eight months ago, the cadets of Aidan's sibko shouted, "Land of Dreams!"

Aidan sat ramrod-straight in his chair. Slumping was severely and publicly punished by Falconer Instructor Dermot, who took great glee in whipping a chalkboard pointer against the back of students' necks. Aidan chose to mouth the response while facially faking the strained-tendon, angry look that should accompany such a yell. He wondered why chanting was acceptable to Jade Falcon training officers. Even though one could not address them individually, a chanted group response was allowed. What good was the procedure if it did not give the cadets any opportunity to ask questions, to engage in the kind of give-and-take exchange that would clarify information and ideas? The cadet class seemed, after all, so much in the dark about everything.

At the first class session, Dermot had explained, "Intellectual questing is for the scientist caste and the teacher subcaste. Ambiguity is so much mental garbage in a warrior's mind. The mind that questions anything other than prebattle strategy, the mind that allows meaningless or extraneous considerations to interfere with bid-cunning, delays responses, therefore delays action. A passing thought might interfere slightly with the move of a thumb toward a control-board toggle, or the snap of reaction to an enemy counter-strategy, or lead to misperceiving a fellow officer's bid. Idle speculations waste time. Too much lost time and the battle is lost. To paraphrase an old Terran saying: For want of a thought, the battle is won.At least when the thinking intrudes on warrior instincts."

Such views meant something to Dermot, but Aidan could not stop thinking, could not stop questioning. That had been his curse even when growing up in the sibko . . .

* * *

"Your eyes are layered," Marthe had said to him once when they were quite young. He could not remember what they had been doing or what had provoked the comment. He seemed to remember that they held hands while sitting on a flat hillside rock, watching their sibkin fight a mock-battle with crudely crafted wooden weapons.

"I look at your eyes, Aidan, and I always see something beneath them. Another layer that the eyes I see are hiding. Then sometimes that layer appears, and yet another layer seems to lie under that one. It is as if secrets are hiding secrets in your eyes, a whole network of deceptions and secrets in your brain that we only glimpse occasionally in your eyes."