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The anger returned again when the decisions of the evaluators was a
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Joa
"What rage do you have?" Aidan asked. (He talked to her when they were alone together, and had been doing so for some months now.) "You were just an observer today. What rage can you feel?"
"Eyas, I am never without it."
In a strange way, what she requested happened. The rage left him as he and Joa
8
Falconer Commander Ter Roshak had kept a journal ever since his cadet days on Ironhold.
There are times, he wrote, weary times when my mind stops working and the boredom of this training camp seeps in to fill the empty spaces. That is when I begin to think that growing old is the worst thing that can happen to a warrior. Being a survivor is, on one hand, a mark of honor—proof that one has been a fine warrior, wi
Perhaps that is what I should have done instead of joining this training command. But there is a certain stubbor
Guiding the fates of half a dozen sibkos is an awesome responsibility. Sometimes I would wish to be a simple training officer, a falconer concerned only with training the surviving members of a sibko. Three years is a long time to oversee the development of warriors. Some say it is too long, that we should just put the youngsters in BattleMechs from the outset, give them minimal training, and thus balloon our forces instead of leaving them perpetually understaffed. With this, I ca
At any rate, I remain here with younger warriors, like that darned malcontent, Falconer Joa
She will be reassigned to a combat unit. That should please her. She is so desperate to earn a Bloodname that she will do anything to get it. And get it she will. She only has to finish her penance on Ironhold, exonerate herself for whatever infraction or failure sent her here in the first place. I have never consulted her codex to find out what wrong she did, but her fine service here must certainly pay for it in full. I have never written such glowing reports for an officer. Except for her killing of Ellis, a foolish eruption of anger, her service here has no mark against it. Besides, the upper echelons tend to admire victory in any kind of conflict, even when unjustified. They prefer her kind of toughness, which wins battles, to interservice ethics.
It is a pity, really, that she will leave my command. Despite her unpitying ferocity and the way she treats the cadets, she is the best training officer I have seen. And she really does hate these hopefuls. It is not just a pose for the benefit of training, a faked hatred to stir up the sibko and turn its members into good soldiers. She ca
I have never been one to obey the custom of not discussing the sexual part of our lives. I agree that it is of little import, and if a drug were developed to suppress such urges, I would eagerly feed it to our warriors. What need have we to couple? Procreation is not a concern, and merely amounts to the occasional birth of worthy freeborn bastards for other castes. Worthy, but abandoned and forgotten. The genetic program that supports the warrior caste has much better results than the awkward contortions and inconvenience of the physical act.
Yet when I was young enough and combative enough, I could never free myself of the urge. Even now, at an age when such moments of desire come only rarely, I am tempted to employ command privilege and order one of the women in the training cadre to my quarters for some silent intimacy. When I am in a particularly foul mood, I am even tempted to summon Joa
The irony, of course, is that—in spite of her hatred of the cadets, in spite of the fact that her sexual appetite exceeds the usual lusty hunger of a Clan warrior (perhaps the reason for her exile here)—she would nevertheless choose a cadet for a bed partner over me. She would come to my bed begrudgingly if I were to order her, but she would never choose me on her own. Cadets are young and to be preferred because she hates age even more than she despises incompetence.
I have read that once was a time when my age—forty-two years—was not considered excessively old. Indeed, among other castes, it still is not. But here, among warriors, I might as well be roaming a pasture, fit only to supply fertilizer for growing fields.
I am meandering again. The privilege of age—to allow one's thoughts to wander, to bid erratically for the chance to keep living. I am still alive. In that respect at least, I have won the bid.