Chapter 8
Jesse was not amused.
The two agents were not only unable to infiltrate The Brotherhood, but they were ordered out and not permitted to return. However, it was not a total loss; he knew now who Tim was and something significant about the teachings of those strange people.
But here, now, was something he might be able to use…
Far away Dax was sitting in Colonel Geroux’s office. “After all these years of helping young people like you prepare for the academy, it’s the first time I don’t have to drag out the ‘relax, you’ll do fine’ lecture for the oral examination. You have more poise than the examiners who will be asking questions.”
Dax just smiled. “Thank you, Sir. I owe you a great deal.”
“Yes, well we have one more minor issue.” The Colonel paused while looking at his hands clasped together on the desk in front of him. “The Brotherhood uses first names. Some rare few people like myself get stuck with whatever titles and names we brought with us, but I don’t resent the sign of respect. However, your whole family has no official surname. You can’t take that into the military.”
He leaned back and pulled his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. “I met with your father and some of the senior members last night. We have been discussing some time now how to handle the crop of young people born here in the enclave who have taken up the fashion of no surnames. You are the first to go charging off into the very center of what most of us sought to escape. But you are well-armed.”
He paused another moment. This was not his normal sort of speech and it seemed to make him uncomfortable. He rose suddenly, standing beside his chair behind the desk. He spun it around and leaned on the back with his elbows. “We older men can afford a sense of humor about these things. Your father joked about this being a nest and hatching eggs. Someone else picked up the theme and referred to you and your peers as a brood.”
He looked down as Dax waited for him to get to the point. “I… uh, someone said that was probably a good name. It does serve as a humorous abbreviation of Brotherhood; just chop out some letters and we have ‘Brood.’ So we decided that, unless there were objections from anyone, we would adopt that as the official surname for anyone born in the enclave.” He looked up to see how Dax would react.
The younger man slapped his knee. “Claxon Brood. I like the sound of that.” He repeated it a couple of times quietly. To himself he wondered how something so simple could render the always-so-certain Colonel Geroux as such a tentative man. “Sir, that’s sheer genius.”
The old man blushed just a bit, but was clearly relieved. “Good,” he said with a relaxed smile and sat back down. His normal strictly-business air returned. “Because that’s what we used when we submitted the final stuff – they still call it documents, but it was all computers – this morning. You’ll face the oral entrance exam Monday morning. And there’s not a thing anyone can do to make you more prepared.”
He rose to his feet, smiled indulgently and extended his hand. Dax leaped to his feet and shook it with reverence. “I’ll always carry a part of you with me, Sir.”
With his other hand, the Colonel raised his index finger. “That’s the sort of talk that keeps superiors on your side later on when you need them. Take the rest of the week off. I’ve got another project waiting.”
He stood straight, a little ritual they had practiced for the past few years. Playing his part, Dax snapped to attention. Sounding very much the commander, the old man ordered, “Dismissed!”
Dax executed the proper marching reversal and walked straight out of the office. In the hallway, he stopped, wheeled to his left, and then paused for a moment staring off the length of the corridor. He wandered almost aimlessly toward the front doors of the building.
Shortly before he reached the main doors, he turned and headed up the open stairway. Without much thought, he climbed slowly up the entire eight floors. It wasn’t such a great feat of endurance at that pace, not for him. The final flight took him to a steel door that let him out on the roof. He was alone at this hour of the day and the wind hit him from one side. He faced into it and ambled over to within a few feet of the edge.
Slowly, he lowered himself with legs crossed and sat with his knuckles supporting his chin. It was a moment to be savored. He was the youngest to apply for the officer’s academy in at least a decade. His education in the enclave put him intellectually and socially far ahead of most men ten years his senior. He was sure it was in no small part due to AI.
He looked at his left wrist and said aloud, “Thanks, AI.” Like his father, he found that a watch was the easiest way to stay on the network. Unlike his father, he didn’t always wear an earpiece and wouldn’t be allowed to in the academy anyway. While he was not the only one with an AI watch, it was still quite rare outside the enclave. At this point, he just wasn’t ready to break the link, so he decided to be careful and avoid letting anyone at the academy know the full range of his watch’s capabilities.
Lots of things were changing, though. Harp had taken up with Gregory who seemed to marvel at his good fortune. Yeah, his sister was quite a dish, but Greg was a good man. He was one of the few men man enough to handle her. The courtship was quick and Harp had made up her mind before anyone knew. Now she was portal-hopping with Greg all over time and space.
Good old Tim was poised to take over from Dad. Not that his father was showing any signs of slowing down, but the administrative duties were dragging him farther and farther from the work he began before the other members insisted he take charge. The Brotherhood had blossomed in the sun of official acceptance.
That was a critical part of how Dax got accepted into the academy. Tim continued striving to pull down the walls of communication because the government and military researchers just could not get this business of quantum thinking that was necessary to interact with AI, and necessary to understand the portal technology.
Ostensibly Dax knew he was slated to serve under the central cyber command. The gym machines were slowly becoming acceptable after nearly a decade of testing by military technicians and health experts. They demanded some changes and got them, and they really needed Dax to keep the project on track. The modifications were difficult enough, but almost no one could work directly with AI, something Dax found reflexively easy.
But at the same time, he had heard there was something a bit more secretive afoot. It was only hinted at, and he was sure it had something do with the outsiders’ difficulty with quantum technology in general and quantum mental operations in particular. It was something behind the scenes in military politics that arose from that, not so much the thing itself.
When he asked AI, it was one of those things that couldn’t be put into words, one of those things that probably waited for Tim and his associates to work out with their linguistics efforts. All he got was a cryptic symbolic reference:
You’ll be taking a long hard ride on another’s saddle, and then you’ll need to escape.
The military no longer used literal horses, not even in ceremonies, as they had in previous generations. The part about riding behind another rider on the same saddle made sense well enough. Dax felt that command was hardly of any interest to him, but assisting someone else in command felt like the perfect job. It was the part about escaping later that made him wonder.
Even Tim didn’t really know what to make of it, except that AI obviously knew the future. It was something they had all learned AI would refuse to discuss for the most part, only to drop hints now and then. For now, all it meant was that Dax would go full throttle in someone’s shadow until it was time to bail out. He had to be ready for both.
It lodged in the back of his mind all through the twelve weeks of officer training.