CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

RYKOR, TOO, WAS happy. Wild arctic seas boomed in her mind. Waves climbed toward the gray, overcast sky as glaciers calved huge bergs.

She rolled as she surfaced, exultantly spouting, then crashed her flukes against the water, and leapt free from wave to wave in powerful, graceful dives. There was a gentle tap on her shoulder.

Rykor rolled one eye open and sourly looked up at Frazer, one of her assistants. "You want?" she rumbled.

"There's a vid for you. From Prime World."

Rykor whuffled through her whiskers and braced both arms on the sides of the tank. She levered her enormous bulk up and over into the gravchair. Folds of blubber slopped over the sides until the frantic chair tucked them all safely in place. She tapped controls, and the chair slid her across the chamber to the main screen. Frazer fussed beside her.

"It's in reference to that new Guards recruit. The one you put the personal key on."

"Figures," Rykor muttered. "Now I'll get more walrus jokes.

Whatever a walrus is."

The screen was blank, except for a single line of blinking letters. Rykor was mildly surprised, but touched the CIPHER

button, and added the code line. She motioned Frazer away from the screen.

It cleared, and Mahoney beamed out at her.

"Thought I'd take a moment of your time, Rykor, and ask you to check on one of my lads."

Rykor touched a button, and a second screen lit. "Sten?"

"Now that'd be a good guess."

"Guess? With your personal code added to the computer key?"

"That's always been my problem. Never known for bein'

subtle."

Rykor didn't bother with a retort. Too easy a target. "You want his scores?"

"Now would I be bothering a chief psychologist if all I needed was a clerk to recite to me? You know what I'd like."

Rykor took a deep breath. "Overall, he should be what I've heard you call a ‘nest of snakes.'" Mahoney looked puzzled, but decided to let it pass. "Exceptionally high intelligence level, well integrated into temporal planning and personnel assessment.

"Which does not compute. He should be either catatonic or a raving psychopath. Instead, he's far too sane. We can test more intensively, but I believe he's primarily functional because his experiences are unassimilated."

"Explain."

"Analysis—bringing these problems, and his unexpressed emotions into the open—would be suggested."

"Suggested for what," Mahoney said. "We're not building a poet. All I want is a soldier. Will he fall apart in training?"

"Impossible to predict with any certainty. Personal feeling—probably not. He's already been stressed far beyond our limits."

"What kind of soldier will he be?"

"Execrable."'

Mahoney looked surprised.

"He has little emotional response to the conventional stimuli of peer approval, little if any interest in the conventional rewards of the Guard. A high probability of disobeying an order he feels to be nonsensical or needlessly dangerous."

Mahoney shook his head mournfully. "Makes one wonder why I recruited him. And into my own dearly beloved regiment."

"Very possibly," Rykor said dryly, "it's because his profile is very similar to your own."

"Mmm. Perhaps that's why I try to stay away from my own beloved regiment. Except at Colors Day."

Rykor suddenly laughed. It rolled out like a sonic boom, and her body moved in undulating waves, almost driving the chair into a breakdown. She shut the laugh off.

"I get the feeling, Ian, that you are tapping the Old Beings Network."

Mahoney shook his head.

"Wrong. I don't want the boy coddled through training. If he doesn't make it…"

"You'd send him back to his homeworld?"

"If he doesn't make it," Mahoney said quietly, "he's of no interest to me."

Rykor moved her shoulders.

"By the way. You should be aware that the boy has a knife up his arm."

Mahoney picked his words carefully. "Generally the phrase is knife up his sleeve, if you'll permit me."

"I meant what I said. He has a small knife, made of some unknown crystalline material, sheathed in a surgical modification to his lower right arm."

Mahoney scratched his chin. He hadn't been seeing things back on Vulcan.

"Do you want us to remove it?"

"Negative." Mahoney grinned. "If the instructors can't handle it—and if he's dumb enough to pull it on any of them—that gives a very convenient escape hatch. Doesn't it?"

"You will want his progress monitored, of course?"

"Of course. And I'm aware it's not a chief psychologist's duties, but I'd appreciate it if his file was sealed. And if you, personally, were to handle him."

Rykor stared at the image. "Ah. I understand." Mahoney half smiled. "Of course. I knew you would."