* * *
Hansen took a critical look at his two companions on the practice field. He understood Shill’s bitter reference to armor now: the hirelings wore junk, little better than the suit in which Villiers had died.
Maharg’s suit might originally have been of respectable quality, but that was in the ancient past. Now the plastron was crudely patched, and the legs had sections of varied diameter where stock pieces had been spliced in to repair damage.
Shill’s armor didn’t even have a distinguished pedigree. It was a collection of bits of flimsy apprentice work, welded together by another apprentice. The join lines were obvious, despite Shill’s attempt to hide them with a pattern of horizontal black and yellow stripes.
“How did you guys survive the battle?” Hansen asked in genuine wonder. “Did you stick close to Malcolm?”
“Well, we were . . . ,” Shill said, the electronics robbing his voice of the embarrassment Hansen was sure was present. “You know, we watched his back.”
“I fought a guy,” said Maharg. “He didn’t, you know . . . he didn’t want to get real close.”
And his armor wouldn’t’ve been an improvement over Maharg’s present suit if the boy had managed to bring him down. There were a majority of hirelings like these in every army, fodder for the leavening of principal warriors.
That would change.
“Then you were smart,” Hansen said harshly, “because if you’d tried to be heroes before, you’d be dead. But now—” he pointed his finger at one man, then the other “—you’re going to do things exactly the way I tell you.”
“Why?” said Maharg bluntly.
“Because I’m going to make you a baron, boy,” Hansen said, glad for the harshness the helmet speaker put into his voice.
He turned his head to the older man. “And you, Shill,” he added, “because I’ll make you rich. Without me you’ll be slopping hogs in a few years, unless you get chopped despite the way you try to dodge around keeping outa trouble.”
The blank face of Hansen’s battlesuit couldn’t smile. He clapped the men on the shoulders instead and said, “Come on, let’s find a quiet corner where I can teach you what these suits can do. Even your suits.”
The practice ground was several hectares in size, plenty of room even now when most of the warriors in Peace Rock were involved in either practicing for the coming battle or proving their prowess to Taddeusz and the cluster of high-ranking warriors around him.
Hansen faced a post on the end as far from the warchief as possible.
“All right,” he lectured. “Your suits have both identification and designator capacity. Say, `Mark friendlies blue.’ ”
“Huh?”
In Hansen’s display, azure crests spiked from the top of the hirelings’ helmets. “Just do it!” he snapped. “Do you remember what I said about obeying orders?”
The warriors looked at one another. “Oh . . . ,” murmured one of them. “I din’t know it could do that.”
“Right,” said Hansen dryly. “Now, the AI can also designate. The way we’re going to win—the way we’re going to survive, I want you to be very clear on that—is by all three of us striking together. I’m going to mark the target with a flashing white light. When the light changes to red, we all three hit it. Together, that’s very important to overload the hostile system.”
“I don’ unnerstand,” said both the hirelings.
“Bring your arcs up,” Hansen said. “Practice, cut . . . ,” and his right gauntlet quivered with the vibrating power that shimmered in it. It was an insidiously pleasant feeling, the power of life and death in a glittering package. . . .
“Now, watch.”
Hansen centered the post in his helmet display and said, “Mark.”
A pulsing white corona gleamed on the electronic image of the post in his display and that of his two trainees, though the scene wouldn’t’ve changed to naked eyes.
“Strike!” and he slashed his arc weapon forward into the red glare marking the post, cutting the wood in a blaze of sparks and flying fibers—
While Shill and Maharg stood, with faces that were probably as blankly incomprehending as the painted fronts of their battlesuits.