“Hey. Alek.” One of his classmates. Another senior. Brian? Alek rested against his table. Were they friends? “You okay?”
“Not all of me is dust,” he said. Shaking his head clear, he shoved himself away and managed to descend the next two tier steps with great difficulty. He stood next to Gabriella’s table, swaying, trying to blink his vision into focus. On the stage below, Professor Kleppinger droned on about the Davion succession problem being considered by First Lord Cameron. Would House Kurita be given claim to the Davion throne? No one knew.
But not all of Alek was dust. He knew that. Within his song, safe from…from the worm…
“Did you want to sit here?” Gabriella asked, motioning to the seat at her side. She glanced up at Alek and her eyes widened. They were hazel with green flecks, quite stunning—funny how he’d never noticed before. Brown hair, ironed straight. Voice like song.
“Within my song,” he whispered.
Gabriella looked worried. She started to get up, and that was the last Alek saw. He clenched his eyes shut as the room spun on its axis, and he clutched at one last coherent thought as if it were a lifeline.
“Michael…?” he whispered.
Then he collapsed into dust.
• • •
Three days in the hospital under observation, they ran a dozen “routine” tests on Alek, including a CAT scan and an advanced EEG. It also allowed time enough for two different doctors, Michael Steiner, and the Dean of Tharkad University to pay him a visit to let him know what was wrong with him.
“Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” the doctor told him before being called out of the room.
Alek had resigned himself to looking it up when Michael showed to explain he had a cranial bleed putting pressure on his brain, but that he’d be fine. Later, Dean Caravel Albrecht nervously promised much the same thing, seemingly trying to convince himself as well. He’d also asked after who had done this to one of his students. Alek shrugged.
“Does it matter?” He spooned up some crushed ice to wash the taste of medicine from his mouth.
“Of course,” Dean Albrecht told him. “This is illegal.”
“Only by a matter of degree,” Alek said, still wielding his spoon. “If the law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits, doesn’t it justify, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits?” Even paraphrased, the administrator of Tharkad University should recognize Tolstoi.
He didn’t. “Commonwealth law would never condone such an attack.”
“And a new medical library would never purchase a C- in Political-Science,” Alek agreed with false bonhomie.
The Dean made his excuses and left not long after, no doubt wondering to whom Alek had been talking. Just as well he wasn’t there when Michael came back, smuggling in a thick book of free verse and some spicy Skye-style pizza—although it did not require much smuggling. Who was going to refuse the Archon’s brother?
“Not to worry, Pushkin,” Michael told him. “They decided not to drill into your head. The bleed will reabsorb naturally, and you’ll be out of here. That’s all there is to it.”
If that was all, then why run more tests? Psych profile. Reflex response. What more were they looking for?
He found out the next day when Michael came back accompanied by a Star League colonel and First-Cadet Luvon. The colonel wore an olive drab dress uniform complete with Nagelring sash and a ceremonial sword. Elias Luvon wore cadet fatigues and a look of distaste. Alek’s guard came up at once.
Michael introduced Colonel Baumgarten as part of the Eleventh Royal BattleMech Division, currently serving as commanding officer of the Star League’s Nagelring Academy.
“You’re in fine physical shape,” Colonel Baumgarten said, glancing closely at a noteputer screen. The small device looked fragile in his large hands.
“That’s reassuring,” Alek said with a grim smile.
“It says here that you’ve had heart surgery. Fully recovered?”
He looked to Michael, but found no help. The pale scar across his chest might have alerted the doctors. More likely someone had dug into his records back on Terra. “When I was three,” he finally admitted. “It took some time, I am told. I’m fine now.”
“Good. Good. We have strict demands on potential cadets, after all. The Nagelring more so than many training academies. I have to say, your academic scores and Martial Aptitude Test results place you in high standing.”
Which was when it dawned on Alek that Colonel Baumgarten—and Elias Luvon—were here to extend an offer into the prestigious Nagelring military academy.
Him! A Star League Defense Force military cadet?
“This is a joke, yes?”
Michael shook his head, but it was the colonel who answered. “No, son. No joke. When the local staff checked you over for cerebral damage following your fall, their examination recorded extremely well-developed motor-reflexes. They reported your results to us, as they are required to do, and we ordered additional tests while you’ve been laid up. Your nervous system is highly responsive. Perfect for a MechWarrior candidate.”
MechWarrior! Alek sagged back in his bed. The offer rolled over him so hard it took a moment to realize that the Colonel had mentioned his “fall.” The latest university euphemism for being soundly beaten, courtesy of Dean Albrecht and maybe even another donation by Lord Luvon, Elias’s father.
“No,” Alek said sharply.
Elias was all smiles and bright eyes. The colonel might have been sucker-punched, a feeling Alek knew very well. “You…you don’t want to think this through, son? We don’t roll out the red carpet every day.”
The last red carpet Alek had seen was the one he’d bled on. Now they wanted him to become one of them? “I understand the offer, Colonel Baumgarten. I have nothing but admiration for the Star League Defense Force as an entity.” Elias
