"I SEE THAT YOU DO NOT LIKE THIS, CADET."
"Get used to it," she said. "It is your training." Without giving any indication that a punch was coming, Falconer Joanna jabbed Aidan in the nose, and he felt something break. She hit him again in the same place, and the pain was so bad he could not see straight—or, rather, he could see too well, in too many images. The third punch knocked him to the ground.
He looked up to see Falconer Joanna standing over him.
"Are your through yet, nestling?"
He tried to sit up, and she gently pushed him down.
This time he stayed there.
"This one might test out all the way," she said to Falconer Ellis, who now stood beside her. As she spoke she was putting on the falconer gloves, whose star-shaped studs caught some light and sparkled. She held each glove, palm side toward her, directly in front of her face as she pulled it on. Her face grimaced as she stretched it tight. "He does not, as you saw, give up easily. Let us keep track of him— make his stay with us especially hard."
BATTLETECH
LE5101
LEGEND OF THE JADE PHOENIX
VOLUME 1
WAY OF THE CLANS
ROBERT THURSTON
ROC
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Roc, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
First Printing, August, 1991 10 9 8 7 6
Series Editor: Donna Ippolito
Cover: Bruce Jensen
Interior Illustrations: Jeff Laubenftein
Mechanical Drawings: Steve Venters
Copyright © FASA, 1991
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REOISTRADA
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To Rosemary and Charlotte
Prologue
A Kind of Fate
At different moments—say, the night before a battle begins or the night after a love affair ends—the Commander usually seeks a quiet place. Unlike most Clan warriors, he looks for isolation rather than camaraderie when in the grip of an emotion. This time he does not choose the cockpit of his 'Mech or a dark place in a forest. This time he goes to the inlet of a quiet lake with an abbreviated beach whose quietly lapping water is only four or five steps from the edge of the woods. He sits, back against the stump of a tree (burn marks and missing bark suggesting that the tree had once, like him, been a battle victim—except he had survived). He watches moonlight sketching intermittent highlights on the few ripples in the water, listens to the weak breeze almost shyly send ripples of sound through the woods behind him.
In a book that had been burned in battle, a book that the Commander had carried with him into the cockpit of a 'Mech whose shards had been scattered across the landscape of some embattled planet he no longer recalled, he had read a story that he wished he had memorized. In it a father mourned a son killed in battle. The battle had been primitive, a war over some nonsense about which side possessed some valued object, the death the kind of tragedy that was not quite a tragedy (no falls from great heights, no individual ravaged by a single, identifiable character flaw). The war had been a thousand accumulations of sorrow, a thousand rewardings of honor. Like most wars. The boy had died because someone else had made a mistake. After the boy had saved someone— a friend, a lover, a child, an enemy (there were so many stories, the Commander thought, how could puny details be remembered?)—he had been killed by a projectile from whatever weapon belonged to that era. His father dug him out of a battlefield pile of corpses, the smell of blood not yet become the stench of decay.
The father looked at the tortured face of the boy. His eyes still seemed to stare with life, but now they gazed at some point just past the father's shoulder and not into his eyes. A thousand memories, a thousand fragments of the boy's life, rushed into the father's mind. The moments went from the cradle and childhood frolics to the important experiences of growing up, through all the choices that seemed to lead directly to this pile of corpses, in a straight line of events with a strange sort of inevitability to them, a kind of fate. And of course, in the world of the father and his son, it wasfate that had guided them. Fate was the point. Fate was the last remaining expression in the boy's eyes, which the father now shut with gentle urges of his fingertips.
That was not the end of the story. Events had propelled the father into a deeply complicated plot where in some ways he redeemed himself from a taint and in some other ways reconciled himself to his son's death. Whether or not the father survived, the Commander could not recall.
The Commander, however, had survived. His special talent, survival.
His Clan upbringing had long interfered with his understanding of the story and, for that matter, many other stories in many other books from among the volumes he had so long ago discovered in that Brian Cache where he had done such dreadful and enervating duty. The concept of father had initially troubled him. What was a father? Naturally, he understood the technical meaning of the word, but what did it really mean? What had it meant for the devoted father of the story?
The Commander, the offspring of genetic engineering, of genes from a sacred gene pool, had several father figures but only knowledge without awareness of his actual father. All he could fall back on was imagination to understand any concepts about natural parents in the books he had read. He had been raised with others also genetically matched, in a sibling company, a sibko. He had a fine understanding of what siblings felt, but how could he have really comprehended the sorrow of a parent over a lost son or daughter? At least back then, the concept had puzzled him. Now he understood it better. Now it was easier even to feel. Now it was his own private sorrow, not only previously unknown but forbidden to be known.
The idea of fate was easier to comprehend. The Clans had a notion of fate, though it differed from the fate portrayed in the story. A Clansman tried to control his fate, measuring it methodically against the vagaries of chance. Everything in life required a bid. If a man was good at bidding, he controlled his fate. A successful bid in warfare meant he led his warriors into battle, planned the execution of their maneuvers, planned the battle itself, reacted to chance interferences with the skill of a battle-worthy strategist, beat chance with the action of his adept-at-strategy mind, overwhelmed what fate appeared to have in store. Of course, for the other warrior, the pilot in the cockpit who saw fate rushing right at him, the outcome of the engagement, the loss, undoubtedly seemed like fate.