Clan officers met before a battle and bid for the honor of fighting it. It was an intricate and complex procedure. The first officer to bid removed one or more of his units from the battle strategy. The next bidder had to duplicate that move, then up the ante by eliminating a unit or more of his own or by replacing a strong unit with one ranked below it. A 'Mech could be substituted for an aerospace fighter or five Elementals, the Clan's genetically bred, battle-suited infantry. Bids flew back and forth until one commanding officer was left with low bid, the bid below which no fellow officer could commit personnel and materiel. But a bidder could not hold back a low bid for too long. An opponent might beat him to it, making the winning bid he had intended and leaving him back on a DropShip, watching his rival lead his forces into battle. There was no position so uncomfortable as sitting in a plush DropShip chair observing the military triumphs of the officer who had beaten you bidding.

All Clan men and women took delight in the victories of others, but no success was more satisfying than that of the warrior doing the winning. A certain regret inevitably crept into one's praise for others. It was not envy that fueled it, nor was it loss of face. Every Clansman respected the wagering skills of a good officer, and there was no shame attached to losing a bid. But there was another kind of loss of face, a kind the Commander well understood. It was the loss of face within oneself: the realization that one had not quite made the grade. That was the true loss of face, when you gazed at yourself in the mirror of your mind and had to look away.

The Commander remembered a fellow warrior who had graduated from all levels of training spectacularly, had risen through the ranks rapidly, had become one of the youngest Star Captains in the history of Clan Jade Falcon. But he had proved to be inept in the prebattle ritual of bidding. Too often he gave away too much manpower in his desperate attempt to gain the bid. Undermanned, he fought too many losing battles or marginal victories, endangering his troops and materiel. Though one of the fiercest warriors ever to charge an enemy, the man's bidding deficiencies finally cost him his command, even lost him his 'Mech. When he finally met his death in battle, he was not a victim of fate but of destiny. The Captain's genes were not passed on in the gene pool so sacred to all warriors. But what point was there in a warrior's living and dying if his genes were not judged worthy of the gene pool?

The Commander knew that when one controlled the key aspects of his destiny, fate did not matter. There was no fear of fate among the Clans. As he had read in a Clan saga, in a passage he could not quite remember accurately:

Fate sits high in the bidder's chair Trying to subdue the Wolf Clan And failing;

Trying to outbid the Ghost Bears And losing;

Trying to make the Jade Falcons listen to reason And listening instead.

What was he doing, thinking about fate at all? He always tended to become dangerously reflective before battle, allowing his mind to wander around his past. Too many books, too many stories with unsettling doubts in them, too much reflection altogether. His life had been difficult, much of it, with failure, shame, loss, hard success. But he had struggled through it all. Survived.

Some people said they would change nothing if they had their lives to live over. As for the Commander, he would not repeat a moment of it—well, maybe a moment here and there—even if it meant forsaking his present high position in the Jade Falcon chain of command. Too many events had warped his thinking, too much hardship had made him the perpetual outsider. Of the Clan, yet outside of it.

I have read too many books, he thought. I am beginning to think like one. And we cannot have that.

Still I would like to go back in time, confront myself at the moment I began training, tell myself the mistakes to avoid. I could bargain for myself a more ordered life, bid for the kind of existence I should have had.

Ah, the training.

They had been young, so young, mere children. He might have been wise beyond his years at the beginning of training, but still only a child when the rough-hewn, rough-clad instructor-officers had taken him and the others in hand. Sculptors of people, yes, even more sculptors of the mind, they had remolded him, part by part constructing him and the others like the vaulting of a great cathedral, making them the buttresses of their units, their Star Clusters.

In the Commander's memory, the others were young, too, but (at least in his mind, now) somehow younger than he. Where were most of them now? Some, of course, were dead. The Clan did not recognize the sanctity of life, one of those Terran and Inner Sphere concepts he had read about; all Clan warriors could be fodder, and rightly so, as long as their deaths forwarded the goals of the Clan. War and the Clans made a good combination, especially in their heartlessness toward human life. There was no sanctity to it all, only survivors. The 'Mech won or the 'Mech fell, that was what happened.

But if a messenger were to bring him word now that Marthe had been killed, if he had had to meditate on her passing while sitting on this beach and staring out at this roughly sketched lake, he would have been sad. Un-Clanlike, he would have been sad.

The Commander had survived. That was the final resuit. The Clan was as proud of its dead warriors as its live ones. The courage of all justified the Clan. He had learned to accept the Clan, his Jade Falcon Clan. He had even come to love it. It had taken time, but it had begun the day he and the others stepped off the hoverbus onto the cold (even through heavy boots) ground of the training center on the Jade Falcon planet of Ironhold.

1

Across the great expanse of a grassless, rocky plain, other vehicles were also arriving, each dumping new trainees—from uncharacteristically anxious sibkos—onto the landing site, where in threatening packs, the training officers awaited their charges, their next set of victims. These strange-looking men and women hardly seemed to notice the newcomers. Instead, they talked among themselves, their barked-out words frequently interrupted by raucous laughter. They often pushed against or elbowed each other in ways that looked to Aidan neither friendly or even human. They were more like hawks crowded together in a cage, each ready to start a bloody battle if nudged out of place by another.

In spite of the cold, the blasts of wind that had reached even into the hoverbus to chill its passengers, these warriors, these combat survivors, were scantily dressed, unlike Aidan and his sibko, who had snuggled into tunics of thick animal hide, broad-brimmed fur hats, and light but well-insulated leather boots.

Each training officer wore what had apparently once been a fatigue jumpsuit, but with ragged holes in the sleeves and torso and with the legs cut off unevenly, exposing lower limbs that were bare down to light, low-slung boots. Sleeves were shortened, too, just below the elbow. Over the cutaway jumpsuits, some wore fur tunics, the only apparent concession to the intense cold.

On the chests and sleeves of the jumpsuits were many patches, some indicating rank, some indicating past units in which the warriors had served, some indicating battle achievements. A few of the officers wore thick gloves, the well-padded kind used in falconry.

It made Aidan recall the first day he had launched his favorite bird, a peregrine he had named Warhawk. Standing on the crest of a promontory, he had been sending her out to hack—to fly free and obtain that sense of liberty so essential to a bird that would spend most of its life tied to blocks or carried on the wrist-end of a padded glove. Hawking was a practice of all those in the Jade Falcon Clan who had chosen to honor their name by cultivating the ancient art of falconry.