“Yes, sir!” they all responded at once and as one. Nobody had to feed them that response. Every member of Glain Wathen’s squad was driven to excel, and their gods preserve them if they weren’t. Glain added her own voice. She stood even taller, even straighter. She was in her element here.
Jess envied that. Right now, he desperately missed the quiet comfort of his books. This, he thought, is going to be hard. Feng hadn’t set up a special challenge for them for the fun of it, and Jess had no doubt at all that it was going to be a brutal affair.
“Squad!” Glain called, and they all gave back a deep-chested “Sir,” in response. Even Jess. “We lead by two points in the rankings. This is not enough. We will bring in this exercise with a comfortable five-point lead, and we will finish with the top score! Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir!” Jess barked, in unison with the rest. He wanted to finish this bloody training in first position as much as Glain did, but having attracted the attention of Captain Feng was a mixed blessing at best.
Feng walked slowly up and down the row, but he looked into the blank middle distance as he said, “Your assignment today is a confiscation. Your job will be to enter and search a home for contraband books, and, if found, tag and recover them for the Library. You may meet resistance. Be ready.”
That sounded deceptively easy. Glain and Jess had been on real book-confiscation missions as postulants competing for their current positions; every person in the squad had qualified on situations much harder than this. In fact, it sounded so remedial that it was utterly out of place, given where they were in their training.
Jess shot a look to his right, where a Scandinavian girl named Helva stood at rigid attention. Helva’s glancing look told him his unease was shared. Not right at all. If Glain thought the same, she gave no indication of it, but, then, she’d always had the best face for secrets that Jess had ever seen.
Glain swiveled to face her squad. “In the carrier,” she said. “Move!”
They scrambled in. It was a tight fit, but the carrier was designed for a full squad and gear. Jess found his seat as the steam engine hissed and gears engaged to rattle the carrier forward. It picked up speed on the flat ground. No windows, so Jess couldn’t tell where they were going except far and fast. The parade ground itself was enormous, and held close to twenty different environments and set pieces around the edges. He’d been in most of them during training, including one that doubled as a set for an Alexandrian street. He assumed that was where they were being driven.
He was wrong.
When the carrier jolted to a stop and the squad jumped out, Jess found they were at the farthest western edge of the High Garda compound: a restricted area near the edge of the field where trainees were not allowed to venture. Jess’s misgivings twinged again as the squad lined up behind Glain’s rod-straight form. Not right, he thought. The entire area was surrounded by a high stone wall with just one visible gate.
Behind them, the carrier’s bubbling hiss rose to a gusting sigh as gears engaged again and it raced away. The tracks spat a long plume of sand over the squad. As Jess blinked grit away, a solid man in High Garda uniform with two Horus eyes on his collars—a full centurion in rank—looked them over with a bleak, unforgiving gaze. “All right,” he said. “Gear to your right. Get it on. You have sixty seconds.”
Jess joined the rush to the equipment piles off to the side. A High Garda flexible armored coat emblazoned on the back with the Library symbol, and a heavy black weapon. No reloads for it. Jess was all too familiar with the gun; he’d carried one in Oxford, when he was still a postulant. Even after all the practice he’d had with it over the past few months, it felt like a hot alien creature in his hands, unfamiliar and hostile.
It brought back such bad memories.
“Live rounds?” someone behind him asked as Jess checked his weapon.
“You have live stunning rounds and half-strength regular rounds,” the centurion said. His accent had the lilt of southern Africa, Jess thought, and it matched with the burnished darkness of his skin. “They’re still dangerous, so pick your targets and try not to kill each other.”
Jess shook his head; they weren’t beginners. They were a tight, trained squad now, and they’d all gotten to know how the others moved. He could pick up cues from body language through peripheral vision. They hadn’t had a targeting mistake since the first week together. Well, except for that incident with Tariq, but that had been orders, not accident.