He stopped in front of Jazar. “Name?”
Jazar stood up straighter. “Jazar Orand, sir!”
“Where are you from, Cadet Orand?”
“Humberland Space Station, sir.”
Kurj considered him. “How do you find living on a planet?”
“I like it, sir.” Sweat ran down Jazar’s face.
“Good.” Kurj inclined his head. “Carry on, Cadet.”
“Sir! Yes, sir.” Relief flickered on Jazar’s face that his first interaction with Skolia’s mighty Imperator had been benign.
Kurj stepped over to Soz. She stood as tense as a board, her jaw clenched, her gaze directed forward. Kurj stood in front of her, his mind guarded much the way he guarded his eyes, with an opaque shield that revealed nothing.
“Name?” he asked.
“Sauscony Valdoria, sir.” She didn’t add the last name they shared. Skolia.
“So, Sauscony Valdoria.” His face was unreadable. “You think you have what it takes to be a Jagernaut?”
“I’ve no doubt, sir.” She felt strained with him, but at least this was better than their usual conversations. This one was supposed to be strained, whereas usually they were trying to behave like brother and sister.
“You have no doubt?” He looked her up and down as if he were measuring her worth. “Quite a boast.”
Why all these questions? He was the one who had sent Tahota to fetch her.
“What makes you so sure?” Kurj asked.
Soz frowned at him. He hadn’t done this with any other novices. “I did well on my tests, sir.”
“Did you now?”
“Yes, sir.” He knew that.
He took his hands from behind his back and crossed his massive arms, straining the gold cloth of his uniform with his gigantic biceps. “You think tests make one damn bit of difference when your life is on the line? The Traders don’t give a whistle in hell how fast you can solve math problems.”
Soz looked straight ahead. When she realized he was waiting for a response, she said, “Yes, sir.”
Everyone had gone eerily quiet. Their instructors, Foxer and Stone, were standing back. They exchanged glances and Foxer shook her head slightly, her forehead furrowed, making Soz wonder just how far off this was for typical behavior when Kurj viewed the novices.
Kurj was still watching her with that that grueling intensity. “You think you’re ready to fight Traders?”
Soz didn’t bristle. “No, sir.”
“You think you’re ready to be a Jagernaut.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Today?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I need to train.” Soz wondered what he was after.
“That’s right.” He stood there, massive and uncompromising. “You aren’t ready, Cadet Valdoria. Get cocky out in space and you die. You understand me?”
“Sir! Yes, sir.” Perhaps he came down hard on her to toughen up his heir. It wasn’t necessary. She knew she had a lot to learn. She had never doubted that. She looked forward to proving herself.
Kurj finally went on to the next cadet. Soz remained still until he had gone a ways down the line. Then she let out a breath. She glanced at Jazar, and he mouthed gods almighty.
No kidding, Soz thought. She wondered if Kurj had greeted Althor that way when her brother first showed up at the academy.
After Kurj finished meeting the novices, he moved off to one side with Foxer and Stone. Soz had looked up the bios of all their instructors. Foxer was a former Jagernaut pilot. She had graduated from DMA thirty-eight years ago, taking her commission as a Jagernaut Quaternary, the same rank Althor and his classmates would have when they graduated this year. After ten years, Foxer had advanced to Tertiary. Twelve years later she received her promotion to Secondary, among the highest ranks in ISC. Most Jagernauts retired as Quaternaries or Tertiaries—those who survived. Only a few stuck it out to become Secondaries. Almost no Jagernaut Primaries existed, a rank roughly equivalent to an admiral in the Imperial Fleet or a general in the Pharaoh’s Army.
Kurj had been a Primary before he became Imperator.
Dayamar Stone wasn’t a J-Force officer, but a lieutenant colonel in the Advance Services Corps. The ASC had begun on the world Raylicon as naval units that went ashore as advance scouts or foot soldiers. When the people of Raylicon regained air and space travel, roughly four centuries ago, the ASC became an independent interstellar force, the advance scouts for planetary landings. DMA commissioned Jagernauts, but it drew its faculty from all the ISC services, including the Pharaoh’s Army, Fleet, and ASC. Jagernauts often acted as defenders, escorts, or commandos for the other branches of ISC and were expected to develop familiarity with all of them. Kurj, Stone, and Foxer stood a distance away from the novices, conferring about gods only knew what. Finally they came back, and Kurj went to stand before the front line of cadets. Soz wondered what was up. A trickle of sweat ran down her neck and soaked into the collar of her jumpsuit, which lacked climate controls and any other comforts that might have made life easier.
Kurj stood in front of Obsidian and spoke. Obsidian answered with what sounded like “Sir! Yes, sir!” Soz couldn’t tell for certain what he said from so far away, but given that they spent all day long responding with those words, it was a good guess. When Obsidian set off jogging toward one of the training courses, Soz understood; they were to do demonstrations for the Imperator.
Obsidian ran hard around the oval track and jumped the various gates, bars, barrels, and other obstacles set along the way. He tended to slow down between the gates, but he made reasonably good time. When he finished, he jogged back to his place in line. Kurj spoke to him a moment and Obsidian drew himself up straighter, pride on his chiseled face. Soz would have to ask him tonight what Kurj had said. From Obsidian’s response, she gathered it had been positive.
It went that way over the next half an hour or so, Foxer or Stone walking with Kurj down the lines. The Imperator stopped often, sometimes at their suggestion, other times on his own, and called on cadets to demonstrate their abilities on the training fields. Finally he reached the third line. Soz stared straight ahead, but she could see him in her side vision. He was headed toward either her or Jazar. Closer. Closer, now—and he passed Jazar. Damn.
Kurj stopped in front of her, with Stone on one side of him and Foxer on the other. The opaque shields of his inner lids covered his eyes.
“So,” he said. “The cocky cadet.”
For flaming sakes. She waited for him to ask a question.
Kurj motioned toward an obstacle course about half a kilometer away on a southern edge of the DMA grounds. “Think you can run that one? The Echo?”
Soz peered across the fields. She hadn’t tried the Echo, but she knew about it, having read everything she could find on these fields during her minuscule free time when she wasn’t studying or training. It was a difficult course, one that required skills her class hadn’t tackled yet. To do it well, she needed the physical augmentation that cadets received their third year at DMA. She wasn’t sure if she could finish the course, but she didn’t want to lose face in front of Kurj or her classmates.
“I can give it a good try, sir,” she said.
“A good try.” His voice had an edge. “Is that what you will do in combat, Cadet Valdoria? Give it a good try?”
Soz tried not to stiffen. “I’ll do my best in all situations, sir.”
“Good. Go.” Kurj motioned toward the course. “Show me.”
“Sir! Yes, sir.” Soz took off, jogging toward the course.
“Cadet.” Kurj’s voice rumbled behind her.
Soz swung around, wondering if she had violated some rule. She didn’t think so. Every other cadet had responded in the same way when Kurj sent them to run a course.
Her brother was watching her with a closed expression.
“Yes, sir?” Soz asked.
“I want you to run the course in eight minutes.”
&nbs
p; What? Soz stared at him. The record time for that course was over nine minutes, and that by a senior who had spent four years training on it. No way could she come close to that record, let alone beat it by more than a minute, especially given her unfamiliarity with the gravity on this planet. Yes, she could run now without mistiming her steps or stumbling, but jogging a mountain trail and executing the Echo were two very different matters.
Secondary Foxer started to speak, but Kurj held up his hand, stopping her. His posture, body language, facial expression—nothing showed any sign of his relenting. “Well, Cadet?” he asked Soz.
Ah, hell. What could she say? “I’ll do my best, sir.”
“See that you do.” His voice brooked no excuses. “I hope your best is good enough.”
“Sir! Yes, sir.” Soz waited a moment, but he said no more. So she set off toward the Echo. Eight minutes. Hell, maybe he wanted her to create a few new universes, too. And she had feared he would show her special consideration. Right.
At least she felt good now, her muscles warm from her workout this morning, her body healthy and fit. She veered toward the entrance to the Echo, a simple dirt path. As she reached it, she started her wrist timer. From her research, she knew the path hid numerous sensors that would evaluate her stride, weight, pulse, brain waves, and any other data it could glean as she ran along its length.
Soz didn’t run down the path. Instead she went along the narrow bar that bordered it, moving fast to keep her balance on the precariously curved surface. The less the Echo knew about her, the less effective its obstacles. It could still glean information with her running along the bar, but it wouldn’t be as accurate. Every small advantage she gained would help.
A vaulting horse blocked the end of the path. Soz jumped back onto the path and ran hard. She leapt into a vault, her palms hitting the horse as she flipped over it like a gymnast. It was an awkward flip. She hit the edge of the path when she landed and tripped, losing time. Then she caught her balance and sprinted for the scaffolding, a multistory structure of metal struts that resembled the climbing gyms her father had built for her when she had been a small girl.
At the thought of her father, Soz felt dizzy. Her sight clouded over until she couldn’t see. She had tried these past days to push away thoughts about her exile; now, it hit hard.
As her sight cleared, she ran harder, hit with a drive more intense even than her usual determination. She had to master this course, every course at DMA, every demand they threw at her, so she could go out and defend her family against the Traders. Why it hit her so hard now, she didn’t know, but it pushed her to sprint faster than she would normally have done this early in a course.
Soz reached the scaffolding and jumped up, grabbing a bar. It immediately bent, trying to throw her off, the mesh components in its structure acting with rudimentary intelligence. She compensated, grabbing new bars as the ones she held sagged, vibrated, and jerked. She made it to the top, but when she tried to cross the scaffolding, the bars shook until she lost her balance and slid down among them, into the lively center of the structure. They bent and rebounded like kinetic echoes, throwing her this way and that. Soz swore, grasping at the chaotic pipes. The harder she tried to regain her grip, the more entangled she became.
Pah. She tried the opposite approach and let her body go limp. The scaffolding quieted a bit, but she fell faster, hitting crossbars on the way down. She managed to grab one, wrenching her arm as she jerked to a stop. Instead of climbing the scaffolding, she went through it, scrambling as fast as possible, trying to outrun the echo. The bars hummed and vibrated all around her like crazed tuning forks. She barely kept her grip.
In desperation, lest she lose her hold, she slowed down. The echoes eased. Finally she reached the end and threw herself out of the cursed thing. She hit the ground hard and set off running. The path bucked under her, trying to throw her off balance, but it had trouble judging her stride, probably because she had evaded its sensors at the beginning. She lost more time but she managed to stay on her feet.
She was approaching the lake, a pool with oil covering its surface so it resembled a mirror. If she hadn’t looked up this course, she would have plowed through the water, covering herself with oil. Instead, she tried running around the edge of the pool, staying on the stone lip. She could see herself in the water, a sort of visual echo. Keeping her balance on the uneven edge proved almost impossible, though. Her foot slipped and hit the water, sending out an oily ripple. She started to fall, but she was going fast enough that she reached the other side of the pool before she lost control. As she toppled sideways, she tucked and rolled, but her arm still hit the rim of the pool. She grunted as pain stabbed through her elbow.
Tired now, Soz climbed to her feet. She wanted to walk and probably would have, except Kurj was watching. For all she knew he wanted to prove that the heir the Assembly had forced him to choose, the daughter of a man he hated, wasn’t up to the title. Soz had no idea what he thought, given how well he guarded his mind, but it killed her to know that her estrangement from her father came as a direct result of her new status. She would be damned if she let Kurj add insult to that injury by humiliating her on the Echo.
So she kept on, too proud to falter before her indomitable brother. She approached the aural labyrinth in a stumbling run. It rose up before her, an enclosed maze of tunnels and passages that echoed, making it hard to judge direction. It didn’t matter. This was an old configuration, one posted for cadets to study. Soz had memorized the maze for the heck of it. She kept running, pushing herself hard, gasping in the thin air. It took only moments to clear the maze, but she came out staggering.
The rebounders crashed and bounced ahead of her, a series of gates that operated in complex patterns, snapping open and slamming closed again. She had a vague idea of the timing that would let her traverse the rebounders without hitting the gates, but her body wasn’t responding well now. Only sheer orneriness kept her going. She was too damn stubborn to drop.
Soz dodged and feinted as she reeled through the clanging gates, but they caught her anyway, over and over, slamming closed on her body. The only reason she didn’t fall over was because they hit her from both sides, holding her up. She gritted her teeth and kept going, the endless gates bouncing, snapping, bouncing, snapping. After an eternity she found herself before the last one, her chest heaving, her body aching. Twice her height and as thick as her body, the black portal thundered open and smashed closed. She recalled the key to this one; it opened and closed five times, rapid fire, then paused for a few seconds before repeating the pattern. When the pause came, she stumbled through and out into the sunlit stretch of sand beyond.
As Soz collapsed onto the sand, she hit the stop panel on her timer. Sweat was running into her face. She lay sprawled, gasping for breath. After several moments, she rolled onto her back and saw Stone standing above her, his face creased with concern. He offered her a hand.
Soz took his hand and pulled herself up, acutely aware that Kurj was waiting at the edge of the sand trap, watching, always watching. She dropped Stone’s hand and squinted at her timer. Gods. Fourteen minutes and forty-three seconds. That was truly appalling.
“Cadet Valdoria.” Stone spoke quietly. “You may return to the formation.”
“Sir.” Soz heard how tired she sounded. “Yes, sir.” She couldn’t read him well; like most officers who worked with Jagernauts, he knew how to guard his emotions. At least he didn’t seem dismissive of her paltry effort here.
Soz turned to Kurj and saluted tiredly, raising her arms straight out from her body, her fists clenched, her wrists crossed. He nodded, his eyes hidden behind their gold shields. Dismissed, Soz set off at a walk, skirting the edges of the Echo.
It took her ten minutes to trudge back to the quadrangle where the rest of the cadets waited. Everyone was staring at her. Well, how the blazes was she supposed to break an academy record on a course she had never done before? She glared at the first cadet she passed and the
girl averted her eyes. When Soz reached Jazar, she glowered at him for good measure. To her surprise, he smiled.
“What are you smirking about?” she muttered. She knew Stone and Kurj were coming back, but she didn’t think they would hear her from so far away and she doubted they bothered to monitor cadets in the quadrangle. “I didn’t break the damn record.”
“No. But you completed the course.”
“So what?”
“After you left, Foxer told Imperator Skolia that no cadet in the last ten years has ever finished the Echo on their first try.”
Whoa. That hadn’t been in the specs. Damn Kurj. He had set her an impossible task, knowing she would fail. It served him right that she had finished the course.
Stone and Kurj were crossing the quadrangle now. Foxer called an order and the cadets fell into a new formation, shifting their four lines into two columns. Then they marched across the plaza to a wing of the academy building. Although Soz was recovering her wind now, her legs ached. Despite the pain, she refused to limp.
They entered into one of the large common rooms, with tables where cadets could sit and socialize in their nonexistent free time. The paneling on the walls was genuine wood accented with holo-panels of landscapes that showed scenes of Diesha and the academy. Very attractive. Too bad none of them ever had time to enjoy the place.
Kurj was standing behind a console on one side of the room, speaking with each cadet as he or she filed by him. Soz had never realized he took such an interest in the incoming class, but she supposed it made sense. The Jagernauts would be his elite pilots, officers with rare talents, crucial to ISC operations, the empaths who melded their minds with their ships to become human weapons. He would want to meet the novices, see who was who. He took the time to talk to each person. As she drew nearer, she heard him asking about their homes, families, simple facts that transformed a stranger into an acquaintance. A known quantity.