Old? How old? I have forgotten. I should be dead by now, felled in heroic combat. Or at least alive with a Bloodname. The Bloodname can come. It has to! She recalled when she had been young, twelve or thirteen (an eternity ago) when she had been a trainee herself—so eager, so determined, so certain. She had been the top trainee in her sibko, scoring high on every test, pummeling and flooring all the others in fights. In those days she had been cool, delivering blows with a smile, quite unlike the angry, sometimes furious warrior she was now.
Still, the two others in her sibko who had eventually won their Trials and become Mechwarriors along with Joanna had been less skillful than she, and yet they had advanced further. One had earned a Bloodname and the other would have, but for her valiant defense of a mountain encampment, holding back enemy ’Mechs while the encampment behind her emptied of valuable scientists who had escaped in time, just before she had been blasted to smithereens by a lucky shot; even then she had gotten a line in the Falcon Remembrance.
I need my chance. And how in a field of walking corpses like this Ironhold training camp am I going to get it?
She took a few steps into the room. The floor creaked. Not just creaked, groaned.
Flipping open the bedroll, she flung its mattress onto the squeaking bedsprings and sat down on it. She tossed the duffel bag to the head of the bed, then put her own head into her hands.
She had never felt this empty before. Angry, yes, but not empty. It was as if she had been flung out of a waste chute and, instead of ending in the vacuum of space, had arrived here.
I should probably make the best of it. I should just buy into what Ter Roshak just told me at his briefing. Talk about walking corpses. He is the prime example.
“Training sibkos may not be as exciting as staring down a ’Mech with only one PPC in operation,” he had said, as he rubbed his prosthetic hand with his good hand almost absentmindedly, “but you know what the manual says—it is just as important to the Clan as combat duty, quiaff? These kestrels are the future of the Clan. Few of them will succeed, not even enough to fill the vacancies available in Stars and elsewhere. But at least we know, if we do our job right, we will be sending out warriors so skilled that they will keep the Jade Falcon tradition the best and fiercest of all the Clans.”
He almost mumbled the speech. It was clearly one he gave to every new falconer, and some of it did not sound sincere, but maybe he had been right. Being a falconer was not the worst designation among Clan warriors, it just did not satisfy a real warrior, one who needed to slice a Dire Wolf in half with well-placed shots.
She sighed and began taking items out of her duffel bag. The few clothes—fatigues, field caps, old boots whose cracks were hidden by a thick coat of leather treatment—she carried to the bureau and deposited casually in drawers. Reaching into the duffel bag again, she felt her lock-box. Stupid savashri. No reason to lock up anything in this. Carefully lifting the box out of the bag, she put it down on the bed and retrieved her keys from her jacket pocket. Maneuvering the key into the lock, she held it still for a moment, then—with graceful wrist action—she snapped the key to the right and the box sprung open with a click that sent some flakes of rust on the spring flying.
Inside were the few mementos she had chosen to carry from place to place. It was her ritual to examine them on the first day at each new assignment. The items would not have drawn much interest from a casual observer, most of whom might have classified these apparently unexceptional things as junk.
She reached into the box and ran her index finger through the stuff. A picture emerged and she picked it up. It was that old holographic picture of Lyonor. Joanna did not remember Lyonor looking so happy any other time, although she did have an unfortunate cheerful strain in her personality. Her small body was erect in her characteristic pride, her crisp uniform was highlighted in a fiercely bright morning sun that, in the way she stood, cast her shadow in a long stretched silhouette behind her. Because of her thinness the shadow’s lines appeared to point at a distant high mountain. What in hell was the name of that mountain? For that matter, what was the name of that damn planet?
Walking with the picture to the dirty barracks window next to the cot, she looked out through its smudged panes at the training field beyond. In the distance a falconer leaned toward a pair of trainees and was clearly barking at them, probably telling them what a bunch of inept eyasses they were. It was a pleasant sight, reminding her of the first and only time she and Lyonor had fought. It was not long before the taking of this picture on some other godforsaken planet.
The photo
Lyonor had lovely eyes. Everybody said so, even though it was unlike Jade Falcon warriors to make a compliment about any physical feature. Something about the eyes—their near violet color,
