Gino woke me in the middle of a vivid dream. One moment, I was negotiating with a horde of Germanic mongooses to save the Roman Empire, and the next I was shivering in crisp air and darkness. Gino turned his back so that I could dress, and then, without a word, lead me out through the quadrangle and past the fives' court. We reached the chapel. Passed it.
"It's chilly," Gino said. "Let's run."
And with that, he took off at a leisurely pace that still forced far too much freezing air into my lungs. While I imagined myself coughing up blood, Gino spared a little breath to point out the sights. Dunwich's students used a corner of the schoolyard for fights. They'd chosen it well; most of the masters lived on the other side, and didn't pass the place in the afternoons. Further on, a field bordered by trees hosted most fire-team and squad practice. Beyond that, we passed a small island complete with a moat.
"You want to slow down?" Gino said.
I growled something like "no" between wheezes. He patted my shoulder. On the bright side, the cold did seem to have dissipated a little. Steam rose from the tops of our heads. Looking back on it now, white cotton probably wasn't the best material for school exercise uniforms in the New England winter.
We passed through a final copse of trees. An enormous field greeted us. Perhaps it had once been green, but now cracked trees, muddy gouges, and knightmare-sized foxholes extended for thousands of yards. Gino flicked out his wrist and checked his watch.
"Just in time for scrimmage," he said. "Good thing, too; Naoto's ghastly particular about punctuality."
"Who?" I said.
"Naoto Stadtfeld," he said.
…Ah, yes. Naoto Stadtfeld. Idealistic, pigheaded, infinitely gullible Naoto Stadtfeld.
I didn't know him then, though I would come to soon enough: cock of the school and provocateur extraordinaire from his perch atop the Dunwich Student Chronicle. My favorite plaster saint. If you've read your history books, I suspect you're looking askance at the spectacle of a half-Japanese integrationist leading Britannia's best and brightest. I still get the question from biographers, at any rate – mostly the younger ones.
The simple answer, of course, is that the Britannia of those days was not the Britannia of the Great Pacific War. Not yet. My father had just concluded his first treaty with the Diet. On Wall Street, businessmen smoked thousand-pound notes and watched the share price for Nippon-Britannia Sakuradite skyrocket. In the Kantei, Prime Minister Kururugi mulled over the possibility of sticking his kid in a flannel suit and sending him westward. Every Britannian schoolboy knew that the Euros were the enemy then. Plastic panzer-hummel figures in toy stores sold accordingly.
Most of all, Britannia in those days still had uses for its 'half-breeds'. As long as a half-Japanese Britannian touched his forelock to the right people, he could make a pretty good life for himself. Especially if he was a natural leader – and Naoto was.
How times change.
"He runs these scrimmages," Gino said. "Well, he commands our side, anyway. C'mon…I'll take you to the field and get you suited up."
As we ran, Gino regaled me with stories of boys who'd broken collar-bones, legs, and other assorted appendages in scrimmages past. I considered remarking on the wisdom of allowing unsupervised knightmare practices with a group of schoolboys, but ultimately decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The knightmares seemed cruder, older, and more heavily padded than the Glasgows I'd seen during Father's military reviews. Very early training models. Military castoffs. They also looked as if they'd had several unpleasant encounters with steel wool – most of the paint had been scoured off, and the rest was chipped.
The group assembled under a cluster of elms. Aside from Gino, I recognized a few other faces from the lower years.
A red-haired young man hopped down from a knightmare frame. Like the rest of us, he wore white, but dust had already browned his pants around the ankles. He looked at us with his hands locked behind his back.
"Naoto," Gino whispered to me.
Our leader's shoes crunched the gravel as he paced.
"Right, you lot," Naoto said. "I'm not in the mood for a long speech today. Your instructors have drilled you till you could do most of your tasks blindfolded, which is good. Remember teamwork, though. If the Target Simulation System counts one of your friends as wounded, don't leave him behind. This isn't a shooter game, guys. You can only win as a team."
He cleared his throat. His breath condensed in a little cloud.
"That's all."
For the first time, I noticed a goal on our end of the field. It wasn't large when seeing it from a knightmare frame – two twenty-foot metal poles with a crossbar ten feet above the ground running between them. The crossbar had a flag hanging down from it, and was detachable; apparently, the other side would win if they could steal it and take it home. Capture-the-flag scaled to ogreish proportions.
"The other side has one, too," Gino said.
"Yeah, I figured."
I learned later that the structure's design had descended from the rugby field that had once stood there. Fortunately, rugby's endless drop-kicks, punts, places, and off-side rules hadn't survived the transition. You just pointed your weapon and killed the other side. Nice and simple.
A few minutes passed, and the crowd thickened. Larger boys sauntered out from their dorms with the impressions of their sleeping surfaces still on their faces. Stadtfeld sent for more knightmares and more weapons. At last, the hour struck. The boys assembled in a line, perhaps forty of them all told.
I felt a cold twinge in my stomach when I saw a few of the guys from sixth form: I'd swear that half of them were six feet tall if they were an inch, with stubbly faces. If they bullied younger students here like I'd heard they did, I was in for it.
"Quiet," someone called.
A man in a robe began the calling-over. Each of us answered "here" in our turn. The lower-form boys threw acorns at each other while they waited, until the air was full of them like hornets from a broken nest.
Prefects milled around as if they had nothing to do. They occasionally waved their canes at suspected acorn throwers, but the real culprits had usually ducked out of sight, and the innocent victims of the scoldings usually bobbed their heads immediately. I must have wondered aloud whether they could be a little more vigilant to prevent desertions, since Gino replied:
"Nobody would cut this practice."
Then again, they did sweep the outer group into the center when the calling-over concluded. Perhaps they didn't share Gino's faith.
"Move!"
Boys rushed to their knightmare frames. For a few minutes, the hydraulic whirr of knightmare cockpits filled the field, and then the boys divided into three masses. The first group headed for our goal, and the second for what I assumed (but still could not confirm visually) was the goal on the field's opposite end.
The largest mass clumped in the center. Each house had its own color. Their knightmares ranged from lime green to fuschia; the crowd looked a bit like a pile of sugar candies. I zoomed my targeting system toward the group. Stadtfeld and his enemy counterpart had dismounted. Something copper-colored flickered between them.
Cheers on our side. Both groups dispersed.
"Naoto's won the toss," Gino said.
"What's that mean?"
"We attack first."
Belatedly, I realized that my cockpit didn't have climate control. The heat from the run had already worn off. As usual, the white regulation pants might as well have been nylon leggings for all the warmth they retained.
A diagram appeared on my display. That's when I realized that it wasn't just two chaotic masses after all. Both sides were organized into rudimentary platoons – three regular squads, one weapons squad, and a "headquarters" each. No medics, though…
Gino took the last seconds before contact to introduce me to the other members of our fire team: Roderick Laglen, a freckled kid with brown curly hair; Jason Corkran, black-haired, broad-shouldered and slightly fatter than average; and Arnold McTurk, a pale, red-headed guy who was about my own height and weight – which is to say, slightly small and borderline emaciated.
They all gave me toothy grins in turn. If they minded the presence of a fifth member in their four-man team, they weren't showing it.
While I checked my remaining systems, Gino and his compatriots discussed their plans for the upcoming match.
I soon found that many of the tactics and techniques I'd learned for conventional knightmare handling were only used in simulator training. The hard-won lessons of knightmare combat from the past few years – not to mention infantry and armored combat from the previous hundred - went out the window in "scrimmages".
More fun that way, apparently.
Still, Dunwich had left its mark. When they communicated, my classmates did so in a common patois of acronyms and technical terms. Point fire was still point fire. Rushes took three to five seconds. When students looked at Dunwich's charming knolls rising from the morning mist, they all saw the same avenues of approach, obstacles, and cover as their adult counterparts. Combat was still chaos, and the boys needed a way to impose order on it. Even the ritual of triple-checking equipment had endured. A half-hour inspection would conclude the scrimmage, complete with a debriefing.
"PLAY!"
Stadtfeld shot forward like a rocket. His fire team closed five hundred yards in seconds. The tonfas came out. They smashed into the foremost group of enemies before they could bring any fire to bear; only the lucky ones spun out of the way.
Stadtfeld lead from the front, it seemed.
A silver-and-black knightmare swung at Stadtfeld's head. He blocked the blow with his tonfa trailing downward as if he was playing singlestick. As soon as he'd caught the blow, he flicked his wrist around in an arc. His knightmare's front foot pivoted with it. Stadtfeld's tonfa struck his opponent's head dead-center. The enemy's knightmare powered down as the System recorded a kill.
My radio hissed.
"Watch the flanks!"
There's an old Britannian proverb that the king must lead if he expects his pawns to follow. Here's the problem with taking that advice too literally: if you get too far forward, you can't see what's happening around you. Stadtfeld had sacrificed his control of the battle for surprise. I filed this information away for later use.
Six or seven enemy knightmares approached us from a low ridge on our right.
"Right," said Gino. "Let's go."
We all set up a very hasty firing position while I clicked my autocannon's laser rangefinder. Our targets hugged the ridge, just low enough that we couldn't get clear shots.
"Corkran?" Gino said. "Grenade."
A euphemism from the days when our General Staff had adapted infantry tactics to knightmares. What Gino meant was "mortar shell". And he got one.
FPLUNK!
Our onboard computers tracked the simulated shell as it plummeted toward the enemy. They scattered. Their own knightmares' microphones must have been simulating the whistle of an incoming round.
"Heh," Gino said. "That's flushed 'em out…"
We all fired. Gino's target rifle did most of the damage.
BLAM!
Kill confirmed, a female voice droned over our intercom. The empty shell casing plinked off a rock.
BLAM!
Kill confirmed.
They broke and ran. Gino whooped and drew his tonfas. A collective groan rose through the rest of the fire team. Apparently, Stadtfeld wasn't the only one who liked to lead from the front.
Corkran fired another shell – smoke this time; a lot of it – and a white cloud descended on the base of the hill. We charged. Corkran loaded another shell as he tore after us – here was a guy who could rub his stomach and pat his head at the same time.
Rush and counter-rush followed. We soon found ourselves deeper into enemy territory than expected.
All very ragged-looking to an outsider, perhaps. Fair enough. So is a real battle.
Three or four of our enemies had fled to a redoubt of packed earth. Corkran went down. The rest of us scrambled behind our own cover and waited for Laglen. He soon arrived, diving into the dirt beside us and setting up the heavy autocannon. A few moments later, he opened up. Our microphones fed us the simulated thwumps of large-caliber shells hitting the earthworks.
BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM…
"Move," Gino said.
We did. Knightmare frames can move quickly in short bursts – so quickly that they find themselves in hand-to-hand combat far more frequently than their flesh-bound counterparts.
Gino slammed through one of the apertures, widening it into a knightmare-sized hole that wouldn't have looked out of place in a cartoon. One of our enemies pointed at us. His knightmare's shoulders had a chevron. Gino went for him.
That's when another knightmare plowed into me. My stomach took a centrifugal plunge as we rolled in a cloud of dust to the sound of scraping metal. My opponent reached for a tonfa. I grabbed his hand and released a chaos mine above us.
"DOWN!" I screamed.
My companions ducked. My knightmare's targeting display lit up as the chaos mine sprayed blanks like fireworks. The knightmare on top of me absorbed its fire. It went silent. Mine was unharmed. It only took a moment to roll it off.
Dust clung to Gino's knightmare like powdered sugar on a donut. It had entered the fight purple and red. Now, it was brown. I must have looked the same.
I heard on the radio that our opponents were retreating across the line.
We joined another fire team.
Here's your time, Stadtfeld. I thought. While your men are fresh…
The other team fired whenever we moved. We returned the favor.
Come to think of it, Stadtfeld kept a surprisingly tight leash on everybody when you consider that he was in combat himself. I noticed a change in Gino's voice over the radio when he spoke to Stadtfeld. He'd had abandoned the sarcastic warble he'd used over dinner. His replies dropped an octave; became leaden. A boy's idea of sternness.
I peered over the hill's crest. Our forces seemed deeper than usual after a simulated artillery shell had scattered them. At that distance, they were colored spots on dirt. Stadtfeld was inching toward the enemy's left, though. It was weaker there.
Stadtfeld struck. He and his companions lanced straight inward, racing past a cluster of willows that had somehow escaped demolition.
PLUNNNNNNG!
Even from the ridge, my targeting computer treated me to the simulated ricochet of a shell glancing off Stadtfeld's armor. But only glancing. His knightmare "staggered". One of his companions grabbed his shoulder. He was heaved upright again. The charge continued.
Gino's deep-voiced calm went out the window.
"Ha!" Gino said. "Hahaha! Forward the House, eh!? Foxhole ahead. See if you can't pot one."
Mind you, I'm not my little sister. As hard as our tutors had tried to fashion both of us into killing machines, I could never wear a knightmare frame like a second skin. Nor had I acquired Nunnally's knack for zapping targets at far, far beyond normal standoff range. And never in a thousand years could I have replicated the time she'd thrashed Guilford like an amateur in knightmare-to-knightmare sparring.
Still, I could shoot things pretty well.
I checked my tactical computer for range and wind estimates. Ver-ry good.
I squeezed the trigger, and down he went. The rest of the enemy ducked. By that time, Gino's skates were already tearing up dust and turf as he zigzagged toward the position.
I also started noticing a rhythm in the boys' communications. Each knightmare acted as a sensor; a node in a communications network. Schoolboy slang disappeared over the radio. They rapped out information concisely and then left the line.
"Stadtfeld has the bar with the flag!"
I looked around. Only three of us left: Gino, McTurk, and me. No; that was premature. Something caught McTurk's knightmare in the breastplate with an unholy crash. His knightmare's eyes dimmed. The machine slumped.
Gino spared a few colorful words for the enemy sniper.
Entertaining though it was, the stream of profanity froze on his lips. His knightmare's gauntlets clenched around the tonfas.
I looked at the field. An enemy knightmare was skating on an intercept course toward Stadtfeld and his bodyguards. Its landspinners threw up so much dust that one would have thought the display was intentional.
Unlike its compatriots, this particular knightmare frame had a bronze-colored cape on its shoulders. The fabric's surface was unmarked. It must have been one of the tougher synthetic fibers. Expensive.
"Lelouch."
"Mmh?" I said.
"My marksman's down," Gino said. "I need fire support. Was that shot back there a fluke?"
"Try me."
He did. Not for the last time, I found myself pining for the special match-ammunition that Nunnally preferred. Or its computer-simulated equivalent.
Flashes of light winked from the enemy knightmare. It must have been firing, since Naoto Stadtfeld's first companion tumbled into the dirt. The fallen knightmare plowed a furrow fit for a trenchline. Naoto's own weapon flickered back. And missed.
BLAM!
My own shot went wide of the mark. Naoto's assailant – whoever he was – whipped his head toward my position. He pulled out an automatic cannon and fired it back at me one-handed. The motion was almost absentminded – he barely seemed to be looking when he fired. And he was moving.
I use the word "seemed" with care, though. The line of ricochets he'd drawn in the sand two feet in front of me sorta scotched that possibility.
"Drat," I muttered.
I ducked again. Gino was halfway there. Knightmares are amazingly quick beasts when they have a mind to be. He wouldn't make it, though.
Naoto's last guard went down. The attacker tossed his autocannon aside and drew his own tonfas, bearing down on Naoto. An opening. I squinted through my sights and tried again.
BLAM!
Everything hung in the air for a moment – Naoto's jump over a slope, the enemy's near-pirouette, and Gino pulling up from two hundred yards away, a tonfa poised between his gauntlets like a throwing knife. No more ammo, apparently.
And then, the enemy knightmare went limp in mid-flight. Its body spun. Arms whirled around its axis like helicopter blades. The tonfas flew in opposite directions. One buried itself up to the hilt in the ground. The other took out a line of trees near the battleground's edge.
Cue a roar from our team.
The rest was an afterthought. Gino escorted Naoto the remaining distance, placing his own machine between Naoto and any would-be snipers.
"AND…MATCH!"
I winced at Gino's shout when they crossed the requisite line.
While the others added their own ear-splitting thoughts, I zoomed my scope in on the enemy knightmare I'd dropped.
The hatch opened with a puff of dust. The first thing I saw was a shock of red hair. Its owner hopped down, nearly catching his orange-and-gold cloak on the hatch. He nearly fell over when he landed.
The enemy pilot swayed for a moment. His hand nearly shot out to steady itself on the knightmare, but he paused at the last minute. A black glove hovered near the dusty side without touching it.
Like rats crawling out of the sewers, Dunwich's students were already out of their knightmares. A few had brought picnic baskets. They tossed oranges, apples, and ginger-ale bottles to their classmates. Note the careful choice of words: ginger-ale bottles. I had my doubts about the contents. Gino chugged one of them in a couple seconds.
I pressed a button. The cockpit's roof opened, and I peeked out over the rim with a pair of binoculars.
The pilot I'd shot down looked like an older student. He straightened and shook his head. It must have worked, too, since he spun toward my position with alarming speed. Green eyes narrowed and glared across the battlefield.
Indulging my insolent streak has seldom done me any favors. Strangely enough, this knowledge never seemed to stop me.
I waved.
Even from across the field, the pilot must have seen the movement. He went very still for a moment. With deliberate slowness, he raised his hand, pointed at me, and drew the finger across his throat.
Crap.
I jumped back into the cockpit and sped for the hangars.
Gino was waiting for me.
He seemed a little woozy, which might have been related to the alcoh—er, ginger-ale I smelled on his breath. I got a slap on the back and promises to make me the squad's marksman during "real" practices.
I inquired about the pilot I'd beaten.
Alas, hearing that I'd shot "that psycho Bradley" did not fill me with confidence. Scary pilot, too. At almost eighteen, he was already on the short-list for the Knights of the Round.
Nor did listening to Gino's bloodthirsty account of the other seventh-years he'd shot in duels – oh yeah, he was a seventh-year, all six feet and thirteen stone of him – do much for my growing anxiety. I even learned a bit of trivia. Drowning in rivers was only Dunwich's second most common cause of death. Your faithful correspondent had apparently just pissed off the first.
Not that Gino noticed the slight shiver in my shoulders. Or if he did, he probably blamed the cold and adrenaline from the scrimmage. At least his chatter kept my mind off the obvious.
"Soooo…What's being a royal like, Lelouch? Know anybody else in Dunwich?"
I shrugged.
"Not much to tell," I said. "I'm afraid I didn't have friends before my sixth birthday. Still don't, I suppose. Aside from Winston and the cats, I mostly dealt with my relatives."
"Wait. You don't mean Winston MacMillan?"
"Er, no."
"Winston Oxton? Or—don't tell me he was Winston Drakesw—"
I twiddled my thumbs.
"None of those people."
"Ohhh…" he said. "Gotcha. Parvenu family, huh?"
"Well, he didn't have a family exactly…" I said.
"So he was illegitimate?"
"What? No! I mean, he didn't…um…have parents."
Gino tilted his head to the side slightly.
"Oo-kay. What did he look like? Maybe I met the kid at one of mom's society dinners."
"He was sort of…invisible," I said.
Gino raised an eyebrow.
"You had an imaginary friend?"
"Not exactly."
"Right. A 'real' person," – Gino made little quotation marks with his fingers – "who didn't have a family, didn't have parents, was invisible..."
I felt my jaw tightening.
"Winston was real," I said.
Gino's smile only widened. I felt a major headache coming on.
"Awww...Did your widdle fwiend have a birthday, at least?" Gino said.
"OF COURSE he had a birthday, you intoxicated cretin!" I snapped. "I incorporated him myself!"
"How cuuuute, that's…Wait, what?"
I noticed belatedly that my teeth were grinding. I took a breath and affected an offhand shrug.
"You know how corporations are considered people under Britannian law?" I said.
He nodded.
"Er…Well, I was lonely for a while when Nunnally injured herself climbing a tree, so I figured, hey, why not make myself a friend? I filed articles of incorporation with the secretary of state and got Winston."
Gino's brow wrinkled, and he scratched his chin.
"Is that even legal?" he said.
I waved absently.
"It's debatable," I said. "You can incorporate for any legitimate purpose, and the secretary doesn't look too closely at royals' business anyway. I incorporated Winston as a child counseling service and paid him a couple pounds a month. He was a good listener. Gave me dividends occasionally."
"That's…pretty disturbing, actually."
"And then my harpy of a little sister got jealous and killed him," I growled.
"You know what? Forget I asked."
"You should have seen her!" I said. "It was disgusting…waggling those sad, puppy-dog eyes at the secretary of state. Of all the gall. Ultra vires doctrine my-"
"Seriously, I'm not even curious anymore."
I sighed again. My feet dragged in slow semicircles as I shook my head.
"I don't care if he was just a legal entity," I said. "It was murder. Pure and simple."
"Uh…"
"Not that I'm bitter or anything."
The next couple moments were spent in silence, for some reason.
In retrospect, I probably should have seen it coming. The improper incorporation, I mean. Nunnally was unusually litigious as preschoolers go.