Cobra Alliance

Any word yet on the tests?'

'Only that my headache's supposed to go away in a couple more hours.' The past three days had been genuine killers, with back-to-back tests running from seven in the morning to nine at night. General knowledge, military and political knowledge, psychological, attitudinal, physical, deep physical, biochemical—they'd given him the works. I was told they usually run these tests over a two-week period,' he added, a bit of information he hadn't been given until it was all over. Probably fortunately. 'I guess the Army's anxious to get new recruits trained and in service.'

'Uh-huh. So... you've said your good-byes and all? Everything settled there?'

Jonny tossed a pair of socks into his suitcase and sat down beside it on his bed. 'Jame, I'm too tired to play tag around the mountain. What exactly is on your mind?'

Jame sighed. 'Well, to put it bluntly... Alyse Carne is kind of upset that you didn't discuss this whole thing with her before you went ahead and did it.'

Jonny frowned, searching his memory. He hadn't seen Alyse since the tests began, of course, but she'd seemed all right the last time they'd been together. 'Well, if she is, she didn't say anything to me about it. Who'd you find out from?'

'Mona Biehl,' Jame said. 'And of course Alyse wouldn't have told you directly—it's too late for you to change things now.'

'So why are you telling me?'

'Because I think you ought to make an effort to go see her tonight. To show that you still care about her before you run off to save the rest of humanity.'

Something in his brother's voice made Jonny pause, the planned retort dying in his throat. 'You disapprove of what I'm doing, don't you?' he asked quietly.

Jame shook his head. 'No, not at all. I'm just worried that you're going into this without really understanding what you're getting into.'

'I'm twenty-one years old, Jame—'

'And have lived all your life in a medium-sized town on a frontier-class world. Face it, Jonny—you function well enough here, but you're about to tackle three unknowns at the same time: mainstream Dominion society, the Army, and war itself. That's a pretty potent set of opponents.'

Jonny sighed. Coming from anyone else, words like that would have been grounds for a strong denial... but Jame had an innate understanding of people that Jonny had long since come to trust. 'The only alternative to facing unknowns is to stay in this room the rest of my life,' he pointed out.

'I know—and I don't have any great suggestions for you, either.' Jame waved helplessly. 'I guess I just wanted to make sure you at least were leaving here with your eyes open.'

'Yeah. Thanks.' Jonny sent his gaze slowly around the room, seeing things that he'd stopped noticing years ago. Now, almost a week after his decision, it was finally starting to sink in that he was leaving all this.

Possibly forever.

'You think Alyse would like to see me, huh?' he asked, bringing his eyes back to Jame.

The other nodded. 'I'm sure it would make her feel a little better, yeah. Besides which—' He hesitated. 'This may sound silly, but I also think that the more ties you have here in CedarLake the easier it'll be to hold onto your ethics out there.'

Jonny snorted. 'You mean out among the decadence of the big worlds? Come on, Jame, you don't really believe that sophistication implies depravity, do you?'

'Of course not. But someone's bound to try and convince you that depravity implies sophistication.'

Jonny waved his hands in a gesture of surrender. 'Okay; that's it. I've warned you before: the point where you start with the aphorisms is the point where I bail out of the discussion.' Standing up, he scooped an armful of shirts from the dresser drawer and dumped them beside his suitcase. 'Here—make yourself useful for a change, huh? Pack these and my cassettes for me, if you don't mind.'

'Sure.' Jame got up and gave Jonny a lopsided smile. 'Take your time; you'll have plenty of chances to catch up on your sleep on the way to Asgard.'

Jonny shook his head in mock exasperation. 'One thing I'm not going to miss about this place is having my own live-in advice service.'

It wasn't true, of course... but then, both of them knew that.

The farewells at the HorizonCityPort the next morning were as painful as Jonny had expected them to be, and it was with an almost bittersweet sense of relief that he watched the city fall away beneath the ground-to-orbit shuttle that would take him to the liner waiting above. Never before had he faced such a long separation from family, friends, and home, and as the blue sky outside the viewport gradually faded to black, he wondered if Jame had been right about too many shocks spaced too closely together. Still... in a way, it seemed almost easier to be changing everything about his life at once, rather than to have to graft smaller pieces onto a structure that wasn't designed for them. An old saying about new wine in old wineskins brushed at his memory; the moral, he remembered, being that a person too set in his ways was unable to accept anything at all that was outside his previous experience.

Overhead, the first stars were beginning to appear, and Jonny smiled at the sight. His way of life on Horizon had certainly been comfortable, but at twenty-one he had no intention of becoming rigidly attached to it. For the first time since enlisting, a wave of exhilaration swept through him. Jame, stuck at home, could choose to see Jonny's upcoming experiences as uncomfortable shocks if he wanted to... but Jonny was going to treat them instead as high adventure.

And with that attitude firmly settled in his mind, he gave his full attention to the viewport, eagerly awaiting his first glimpse of a real star ship.

Skylark 407 was a commercial liner, the majority of its three hundred passengers business professionals and tourists. A handful, though, were new recruits like Jonny; and as the ship made stops over the next few days at Rajput, Zimbwe, and Blue Haven, that number rapidly went up. By the time they reached