I can say without pride that my skills in the 'Mech increased with each session. If only I had been as confident of my skills outside the machine. As comm officer I handled an immense load of signals. For weeks I confused call signs and the units to which they belonged. With the Dragoons changing unit compositions and organizational structures on what sometimes seemed a daily basis, a certain amount of confusion was inevitable. I understood some of the restructuring, but other arrangements were clearly experimental. Occasionally, I suspected that the Wolf made some of the changes just to relieve his own boredom. Maybe he enjoyed watching me make mistakes.

At least the Wolf was patient with me. I never rated extra duty more than twice a month. Other members of his staff were not so lucky. He drove them increasingly harder, always finding fault with their performances. Perhaps his frustrations owed as much to his inaction as to any failings on the part of his subordinates. Looking on, I often thought the staffers didn't deserve some of the chewing-out they got.

They say a good commo officer is invisible, a transparent filter for his commander. Maybe so. I know there were times I felt like a mechanical fixture in the command center. Increasingly, that was the way Jaime Wolf treated me. Over the months I seemed to have become for him little more than an extension of the radio, laser, optic, and hyperwave commlinks spanning the distance between him and his troops. Wanting to be a good commo officer, I told myself not to worry, to take that kind of treatment as a compliment. I told myself that I didn't mind, and I believed it until the day he first called me William.

I was shocked. And frightened. Had the strain become too much for the Wolf? I had heard that old people sometimes lived in the past, seeing their surroundings as some other time or place and speaking to those long dead. Was the Wolf so old that he was falling prey to such a weakness of the flesh? He had become snappish, another trait they say is common to the old. I didn't know what to think. Warriors do not normally have long life spans, and I had had little experience with old people.

I sought out Stanford Blake, with whom I had come into extensive contact in our common service to Jaime Wolf. The senior intelligence officer had been helpful, more times than I could count, and I had come to rely on him when I was confused. Though he was older than me by far, I found him a good companion. He had an easy manner and had even told me to call him Stan, as long as there were no customers around.

That day I found him studying the reports from Alpha Regiment's deployment in a raid on Brighton in the St. Ives Compact. The Capellans had offered a premium on the contract, paying for the entire regiment's services when the mission profile required no more than a reinforced battalion. Stan had told me that he suspected the Capellans had misrepresented the situation. Epsilon Regiment was pulling garrison duty on Relevow, a system only a jump away. The Capellans were renowned for their deviousness, and I suspected from the communiques I had been ordered to route to his console that Stan was trying to find some hint that the Capellans were setting up a sucker punch.

"Any sign of trouble?" I asked as I tapped on the divider that separated his desk from the main ops floor. Even in my agitated state, I knew enough to be respectful of my superior's concerns.

"Nothing yet," he murmured absently. He waved me in without looking up from his datascreen. I waited, unwilling to interrupt his thoughts. After scanning a few more documents, he flicked the screen to hold, leaned back in his chair, and gave me a grin. "What can I do for you, Brian?"

"You've been with the Wolf since the start, haven't you?"

"Yes." Stan surveyed me thoughtfully. "What's happened now?"

His easy recognition of my agitated state bothered me, perhaps unreasonably. I heard the defensive whine in my voice as I spoke. "Who said anything happened?"

"You did," Stan said, far too cheerily. "Whenever something happens that you don't understand, you open with some variation on that line about 'since the start.' Why don't you sit down and tell me what happened?"

I sat.

"Is it something about Jaime?" he asked.

"Not exactly. The Wolf-"

"Stop calling him 'the Wolf.' "

I sat back, surprised. "It's what everyone in the sibkos calls him."

"Well, they shouldn't be doing it either. But we can't very well issue an order for them to stop. Around here, where he can hear, call him Colonel Wolf or just Colonel. That was good enough for William."

"But I'm notWilliam!"

He was taken aback by my sudden vehemence. "So that's it."

"What?"

"I've been waiting for this to happen." Stan shook his head slowly, a sad smile on his face. "In some ways I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner."

So, I concluded, he shared my worries about the Wolf. My fears had been justified. The Wolf was old, more than seventy years, maybe close to eighty. He was older than than any other commander in the Dragoons. And now it seemed that he was finally succumbing to the cowardly leeching effects of age. I didn't know what this portended. If the Wolf was failing, what would happen to the Dragoons? Most people seemed to expect that his blood son MacKenzie would take over the Dragoons. But MacKenzie Wolf was not his father. He lacked . . . something.

"What are we going to do?" I asked in a whisper.

Stan shrugged. "Ignore it."

I was shocked. Stan's callous attitude was more disturbing in some ways than the Wolf's failing. "How can we?"

"It'll pass. You're doing William's job almost as well as he ever did. That would have been enough. But your resemblance to him makes a slip almost inevitable. I'm surprised I haven't done it myself. Don't worry, you'll make your own mark soon enough."

"My what?" I felt my face flush. I had misunderstood Stan's remarks. While I was fearing senility in the man who still held the Dragoons in his hands, shaping them as a potter does clay, Stan had seen the truth. I had been toogood at filling the founder's shoes. My only failure had been interpreting a slip of the tongue as evidence of a slipping mind.

As all the oldsters liked to remind me, I was still young.

"You'll get over it, Brian. We all grow up having to deal with other people's pasts, needing to be ourselves instead of some imposed image of perfection—or even the image of our blood fathers. Didn't you know what you were headed for when you entered the Honorname competition?"

"I guess I didn't."

"But you're learning now, aren't you?" I nodded.

"Don't be afraid of growing up; it's the only way to be yourself instead of someone else's idea of what you should be." His serious expression melted into a smile. He laughed. "Now if we don't stop this philosophizing, we'll get reclassified right out of the warriors. That's something I'm not ready for. Did you get a signal from Beta command yet?"

Stan's sudden question reminded me that I was a warrior, too. I suppressed my feelings and anxieties and sat up straight.

"Routed through to your commdeck at 1130. Colonel Fancher reports no action on planet since the initial skirmish with the planetary militia. She is expecting bridgehead defense complete by dawn local. She will upscale patrolling at that time."

"No reports of Kurita activity on the continent?"

"Neg."

He frowned. "Hard to believe the Snakes aren't squirming all over Beta."