Schism: Part One of Triad (22 page)

Boulders crashed on his legs. He was lost in a swirl of noise, tumult, and pain.

Gradually the noise lessened. Pebbles showered over him, then nothing.

Everything remained dark. He could hear nothing, feel nothing, move nothing.

He floated. His mind rose into the sky. Looking down, he saw himself crumpled beneath the broken remains of the cliff. Large boulders covered his legs, and his body lay twisted at an odd angle relative to them. Other rocks had hit his face. He felt sympathy for the dying man below, but he didn’t want to stay here. He drifted up …

A tall man knelt next to the body. Unease stirred in Eldrinson. That man—who was he? Vitarex. The Aristo pushed back his sleeve, revealing some sort of offworld gauntlet. He removed a slender tube and pressed it against the neck of the dying man …

“… come on, breathe.” Vitarex’s voice came through the fog in Eldrinson’s mind. “I order you to stay alive.”

Eldrinson would have laughed at the absurdity if he hadn’t been in such agony.

It crashed in on him, all that pain in his legs and back. Unbearable, it was unbearable.

“Gods,” Vitarex whispered. “Just how strong a psion are you?”

Other voices came to him, faint, hard to decipher. Someone pressed a cool object against his neck. It hissed like a syringe. He wanted to float back into the air, to escape this terrible pain, not only in his body, but also knowing that if his children

were ever captured by Aristos, they could suffer this way. That knowledge was far worse than the agony in his legs.

Another hiss from the syringe. His thoughts grew hazy.

He slipped into oblivion.

13

First Echo

n invisible fist punched Soz. She had been jogging with Jazar in an easy, steady rhythm. Now, suddenly, her legs buckled and she collapsed on the mountain trail. She felt as if someone had socked her in the stomach, on her legs, even in her eyes. The world went dark.

Jazar dropped down next to her. “Soz! Are you all right? What happened?”

Her sight slowly cleared. Bewildered, she sat up. Her legs hurt far more than mey should have even if she had run for hours instead of just the thirty minutes she and Jazar had gone today. The pain receded, but she couldn’t rid herself of a terrible foreboding.

“Something is wrong.” She climbed to her feet and took off again, gritting her teeth against the ghosts of pain in her legs.

Jazar caught up with her. “Did you hurt yourself?”

Soz glowered at him. “Pah.” She was hardly likely to hurt herself with the easy physical regime here.

He blinked. “Pah?”

Relenting, Soz said, “I’m fine.” Now that she was getting the hang of running in diis low gravity, it hardly strained her at all. So why had she fallen?

“Remind me never to make you angry,” Jazar said.

“Why not?”

“When you glare at me like that, I think you’ll flay me alive.” Mischief flashed in his eyes. “Might be fun.”

Soz smiled. “You’ll never know.” She wasn’t up to bantering with him, though. Someone who mattered a great deal to her had just suffered. The strongest empath couldn’t pick up emotions farther than a few kilometers away, and even that was rare; the fields produced by the brain fell off too rapidly from die body to detect much beyond a few hundred meters, and then only if the sender was a strong psion. As far as she knew, that narrowed the candidates for what she had sensed to Althor. Had he been hurt?

As they jogged, Soz spoke into her wrist comm. “Althor Valdoria.” Jazar glanced at her, but said nothing.

After a few moments, the comm buzzed. Soz toggled receive.

Althor’s voice came out of the mesh. “Heya, Soz.”

“Heya. You okay?”

A pause. Then he said, “Sure. Why?”

She noticed his hesitation. “I just wondered.”

“You sound out of breath.”

“I am not,” she answered, indignant. Jazar laughed.

“You running?” Althor said.

“That’s right. Are you sure you didn’t hurt your legs?”

Another pause. “How did you know they were bothering me?”

“I felt it.”

“I guess I ran too hard yesterday. I had some muscle spasms.” His voice lightened. “You going to feel sympathetic pangs for all my aches and twinges, sister dear?”

“I hope not,” Soz grumbled. He sounded all right, tired certainly, but otherwise fine. ‘Take care of yourself.”

He laughed amiably. “I will. See you at dinner.”

“See you.” Soz toggled off receive.

“What was that all about?” Jazar asked.

Soz shook her head. “Nothing, I guess.” She didn’t feel reassured but she didn’t know why.

She and Jazar were running through the mountains above DMA, following a rocky trail packed hard from all the cadets who had run here. They came around a loop and headed down to the training fields. Other cadets were returning from their morning run and gathering on a quadrangle below. Soz and Jazar came down the last of the trail and sprinted across the fields to the quadrangle. They joined the other cadets, falling into formation, four lines of eight each, a total of thirty-two novices. The spelling of their names in Iotic glyphs determined their place in the pattern. Soz thought it anachronistic that the academy used Iotic when everyone spoke Hag, but it had always been that way here and you never argued with tradition at DMA.

She took her place in the third line, next to Jazar. Grell stood a few places farther down, watching them. She winked and lifted her hand in greeting, then turned her attention forward before their instructors could catch them goofing off during formation.

So they waited, the entire incoming class, every one of them a psion, their group winnowed down to thirty-two out of several thousand applicants. No one spoke; being caught talking during roll call earned demerits, which could land you webtech duty or cleaning up the onerous holo-junk messages that flooded the meshes.

Pale blue sky arched overhead and hot wind blew across them. The spacious grounds extended all around, training fields widi synthetic surfaces mat mimicked various types of terrain and obstacle courses that went on for kilometers. Here in the center, they stood in a plaza tiled with large squares of white stone and the ubiquitous insignia of the J-Force. Two of their instructors, Jagernaut Secondary Foxer and Lieutenant Colonel Stone, were at the front of the formation, but Soz couldn’t tell what they were doing. It looked as if they were waiting for someone. She tried not to gawk. The moods of the novices washed over her like an ocean, dieir minds too well guarded for her to pick up anything specific, just a general sense of anticipation and intelligence.

They remained mat way for a while, longer than usual, enough that Soz grew restless. Why the holdup? She looked to the side and saw the anomaly: someone was going down the first line, hands clasped behind his back, his tan uniform bright in the sunlight. A gold someone. A gold giant. The blood drained from Soz’s face. It was Kurj. He had come to see the new crop of novices.

He went along each line, pausing often to speak with cadets. When he reached the third line, he walked slowly along it, nodding to the novices as he passed. He towered over them, seven feet tall, a massive figure with metallic skin, hair, and eyes. He had lowered his inner eyelids, shielding his eyes with a gold barrier that appeared opaque, but which he could apparently see through just fine.

He stopped in front of Jazar. “Name?”

Jazar stood up straighten “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 these questions? He was the one who had sent Tahota to fetch her.

“What makes you so sure?” Kurj asked.

Soz paused, uncertain. 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 brisde. “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 mat.

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 witii 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—diose 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 otiier 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 saints 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 me collar of her jumpsuit, which lacked climate controls and any other comforts mat 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 me 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.”

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.