Looking beyond her, Aidan saw Horse leaping out of his hiding place onto the back of the male cadet, who apparently had been ripe for ambush. The two wrestled briefly and Horse came up with the candidate's weapon, a short-barreled rifle that could be worn in a holster. Horse immediately pointed it at the young man's face and looked as if he was going to blast the trueborn's head off.

At the same time Joanna raised her pistol, and Aidan realized she intended to kill Horse. That was against all the rules of the Trial. An officer could not interfere with any part of it, not even to protect the primary candidates.

Leaping from his hiding place, Aidan's hands brushed against Joanna's arm just before she fired, and her shot streamed high into the air. He looked into the clearing. Apparently Horse had not been aware of Joanna's ambush, so intent was he on his own. The cadet had made a futile grab to get his weapon back, but Horse had merely kicked him to the ground. He shifted his aim from the trueborn's head to his legs and shot him there. The cadet grabbed his right leg in pain. Hurling the rifle away, Horse quickly vanished into the forest. The true-born tried to stand up, but his leg collapsed beneath him. Aidan could appreciate the look of disappointment on the young man's face.

"You rotten freebirth!" Joanna muttered. "You had no right to deflect my aim. What are you doing here anyway? I told you to stay—"

"You have no right to rebuke me, Falconer. I may not have followed orders but what you were doing was worse. You would have killed him, is that right?"

"Of course I would. He is only a freeborn. Why should I care about killing him? After all, he was going to kill a trueborn, a potential warrior."

"Not any more." He indicated the trueborn's sad, weary crawl out of the clearing. "At any rate, I do not believe you. You were not protecting the candidate. That was just a convenient excuse. You were here to kill Horse."

"Do not be ridiculous. Horse had the cadet's gun, a liveweapon. I was just protecting—"

"Save your excuses. I know what it is all about. I do not know how Ter Roshak discovered it but—"

"Ter Roshak had nothing to do with it."

"Another lie of yours. I told him I would abandon the warrior training if he interfered again. He has interfered again. Another convenient accident, with Horse the victim, and the Trial a fine place to create an accident."

"You cannot abandon—"

He held up his hand to stop her talking, for once giving his own order. "Take this message back to Ter Roshak. In a way he has won. I will go on. I realized in coming here today that I need to be a warrior too much to allow someone like him to drive me away from it with his manipulations. Tell him there is no need to interfere again. I will not fail this time."

The two stared at each other for a long while. Aidan despised the hint of victory in Joanna's eyes.

"Goodbye," he said suddenly and began walking away from her.

"Where are you going?"

"There is something I want to see."

Along the way, he found Horse and the two ran to the other end of the forest. At the rim, they were joined by Spiro and Tom.

"Nigel was killed," Tom said softly. "Blown up by a grenade. The woman had a grenade."

Nobody said anything else.

Aidan pointed forward. They could just see the female candidate running up a hill toward her 'Mech. She took long strides and Aidan marveled at the grace of them.

They watched her scale the heights of her 'Mech and then get it operational. They watched her rapidly initiate its trip up the hill. They watched the 'Mech take strides that were not as lithe as its pilot's, but had a certain grace of their own. They watched the 'Mech reach the crest of the hill and begin to descend the other side. Gradually, the legs, then the torso, then the head vanished behind the hill.

Aidan and the others stayed at the edge of the forest and listened to the sounds of battle. They could see some of the firing streak high through the air. Finally, they heard a 'Mech fall and were agreed in their hope it was not the female cadet's.

Later, back at barracks, Aidan stayed awake while the others slept—fitfully, it seemed. He was sorrowful. Now Nigel had been added to the list of victims scattered over his trail on the way to becoming a warrior.

39

The freeborn unit reached the Trial without any further loss of personnel. The last weeks of training were an odd combination of anticipation and boredom for Aidan. Having been through it all previously, the repetitions irritated him, as they were useful only for honing his skills. Even then, he had to pretend a difficulty he did not feel. Still, with each task accomplished, he was that much closer to once more occupying the cockpit of a Trial BattleMech.

During the fitting for his neurohelmet, he was disappointed that someone other than Alexander gave him the instructions. The new voice was not nearly as gentle and persuasive.

The last days came and went, and then the unit was loaded onto a skimmer and taken to the Trial field. Examining the maps they were given, Aidan was glad to see that he would confront a different area, a different terrain. There would be no run through a dense woods, just a race across an open field to the 'Mech and a trip across a river into hilly country, where they could expect to find their opponents. There would be no freeborn ambushes, they were told by Falconer Joanna. Freeborns were not wasted in the Trials of other freeborns.

Though Aidan was relieved that he would not have to face the duplication of the killing of freeborns from his first Trial, he deeply felt the insult, the knowledge that trueborn officers regarded freeborn cadets as so inferior that they were not allowed the complete Trial. From his previous life as a cadet, Aidan knew that freeborn candidates had a higher failure rate in the Trial. At that time, he, like the others, blamed it on the inferiority of the freeborn. Now, having seen the way freeborns were treated, he knew that the failure rate was as much lack of inadequate preparation and, as now, the selection of a more difficult site for their test. The system declared that freeborns were just as eligible to become warriors as trueborns, but the system saw to it that freeborns became warriors with only the greatest possible difficulty.

Or perhaps the system was not stacked against freeborns as much as Aidan thought. Perhaps they were the victims of trueborn attitudes. Trueborns were always in charge; therefore, the desultory preparation, the shoddy conditions, were not the result of malicious intentions but merely of deep-seated antagonisms.

At the Trial site, they drew lots. Spiro and Tom would go out in the first wave, while Horse and Jorge had to remain behind, waiting out the long time period before the first Trial ended and theirs began.

As Tom and Spiro raced to their 'Mechs, Jorge and Horse watched from a vantage point next to the skimmer that had delivered them to the site.

"Where'd Falconer Joanna disappear to?" Horse asked.

"I suspect she might be taking out one of the opposition 'Mechs. She's a fine pilot, I've heard."

"You don't have to use the contractions around me."

"I've gotten used to them. If I get in a trueborn Star, I will have to remember to drop them."

After a pause, Horse said: "I've looked for the proper moment to thank you. I think this is it."

"What do you mean?"

"I know what you did for me back at the other Trial site."

"You did? How? It is not possible."