Steelhands (2011) (9 page)

“Right,” I said. “Get all those papers and pens and inkwells and the like
off
the desks; there won’t be any note-taking in this class. Not today, and not for the next two months.”

I enjoyed the moment of shock they
all
displayed at that, then waited for the chaos of paper being shuffled and inkwells being bottled up to calm down, so I could have the rest of their full attention, or whatever half attention passed for it.

“I’m no professor,” I said. “If you learn only one thing this term, which you just might, I’m certain it’ll be that. I’m going to be calling on the lot of you at random, and the way you pass is through contribution. Thinking, then saying something. Extra points for anyone who says something not necessarily smart, but
interesting
. So I’m expecting you all to listen. You lot in the back, tell me to speak up if you can’t hear anything.”

Out of nowhere, a hand lifted. It was the first willingly raised hand of the term, and I quietly said a prayer that it wasn’t some know-it-all looking to impress the rest of the class while fluffing up his own ego. I took the owner of the hand in.

It was the girl I’d had hopes for.

“Well,” I said. “You there. Speak.”

“If you want us to think before we say something, wouldn’t it be better to call on those of us who’ve volunteered, instead of picking us out at random?” she asked. “Thinking on our feet, is … difficult, for some people, and it might be kinder to help them get the knack of it first.”

“Guess that all depends on how much of the class you want to take with you,” I said, not chewing on her question too long before firing back a proper response. If you gave some of these whelps an inch, they’d take the whole ’Versity Stretch. “A lot of strategy—good strategy—means knowing when to scrap your plan in the field and come up with something new. Something better. That kind of recalibration takes tactical thinking, and it’s
not
something you can learn by gnawing on your books and writing neatly in the margins.”

“So it’s a part of the class, then,” the girl said. “As much as anything else?”

I thought about that one for a minute myself, allowing a quick look around the room to see if the others were paying attention. It was about the ratio I’d expected, some listening in and others taking advantage of the distraction in order to do whatever they damn well pleased. That didn’t bother me, so long as they kept it to themselves and didn’t distract the rest of the class with it.

My expectations weren’t very high, and my hopes were even lower than that.

Time with the airmen had taught me that you had to pick your battles. And sometimes, having the attention of, say, no more than one-third of the class was better than trying to wrangle all of them at once. Divide and conquer. That was tactical thinking in practice.

“I guess that’s about right,” I conceded. “Maybe the most important part, even. Curriculum says you’ve got to take at least two exams to make up a proper grade, but the rest is up to me, and I’ve had enough classes now that this shook down as being the best way for going about it. Any better ideas?”

“It just seems a little different from everything else we’ve done,” said the girl. I was beginning to get tired of thinking of her as
the girl
, too, but I wasn’t the sort of professor who passed around a seating chart and made all the good little boys and girls write their names in their places so that I’d know who was who and who was showing up. That seemed like the mark of a doddering old fool who’d been teaching so long that his blood had turned to chalk and ink.

“There’s times when different’s bad, I’ll give you, but this isn’t one of ’em,” I reasoned back, settling into the discussion now. “I hate to keep harping on this one point, since it means you’ll figure out that’s my
only
point sooner rather than later, but in the heat of battle, adapting quickly to the differences that crop up—and bastion knows,
they will
—can mean you staying alive one more day ahead of everyone else.”

“What if you come up with a really good plan in the very beginning, though?” the girl asked. There was a skinny little scarecrow sitting next to her, I’d just noticed, and he’d begun to tug on her sleeve. Probably trying to get her to shut up, for all the good it’d do him. He looked like one swift right hook’d take care of him then and there, and something told me the redhead had at least one swift right hook in her. “Isn’t
that
the point of strategy? Planning ahead so that you’ll have the upper hand when it comes to dealing with your enemies?”

Somehow, against all odds, I found myself smiling as I leaned back against my desk, arms crossed like I was addressing a much smaller room of much larger personalities.

It’d been a long while since anyone had engaged me in anything
close
to what might be called a good debate—given me a reason not only to tell ’em I was right but to explain the reasoning behind it so that
they
believed it, too.

That was the only kind of teaching I’d ever wrapped my head around, and I’d managed it with loads more stubborn folk than this one. From somewhere behind me, I could hear Radomir give a slight, dry cough. He was always complaining about his constitution in winter, so I didn’t pay him any mind.

“Things always go to shit after takeoff,” I explained, and there was a collective creak of the desks as students either leaned forward or back in their chairs, depending on how they felt about colorful language. Some of the ones sleeping in the back had actually woken up from their dreams of being swaddled babes in arms, and they looked kind of regretful they hadn’t chosen a seat closer to the center of action. “The reinforcements you’re depending on don’t arrive in time, for any number of reasons that don’t matter because what counts is you’re fucked now. Or some idiot overslept and forgot to give your girl—your dragon—a good once-over before you left at night, leaving her harness loose. Little mistakes, the small things you don’t even think about—say the weather changes and all of a sudden the battlefield’s a mud pit, or you’re flying sideways through sheets of rain. You can’t always avoid ’em, but what you
can
do is train your mind to be ready. Keep calm in the face of everybody else feeling fucked sideways. That make sense?”

The girl sat back in her chair, silent, but I could see the cogs turning in her head, unlike some of the others who just looked dumbfounded, or a little too pleased by the naughty words I was using. She really was thinking it over.

Radomir cleared his throat again. I invoked the professor’s right of ignoring his lecturing assistant and kept my eyes on the girl instead.

“That does make sense,” she said finally. “Only … This doesn’t mean you’ll be moving the class unexpectedly to another room or—I don’t know—making it rain just to see what we do in a crisis, right?” She almost sounded disappointed, too.

I was surprised into laughing. She wasn’t making fun of me—at
least I didn’t think she was, mostly because of the look of pure suspicion on her face, like she wanted me to know I wasn’t going to get the jump on her and she’d show up to class in a coat and tall rubber boots every day for the next two months if she had to.

The boy sitting next to her hid his face in his hands.

Little did he know he had a real firecracker to contend with. Or maybe he
did
know, and that was why he looked so close to crying.

“No,” I said, once I’d finished laughing. “They’re pretty understanding here at the ’Versity that I don’t have the same training as the other professors, but I think they’d be mad as hogs before feeding time if I pulled a stunt like that. Not because of how much they care about
you
lot, of course, but out of respect to your parents, most of whom’re paying your way through this and don’t want to buy you any new clothes on top of every other expense.”

The truth was, since these kids were from the country and not the brats of the upper class, I probably
could’ve
gotten away with it, but I hadn’t taken leave of my senses enough for it to seem like a good idea just yet. I was going to be
that professor
sooner or later—the one no one wanted to be assigned to, more like a commander of troops than a teacher—which was exactly what I was anyway, so where was the harm in that? I’d like to see those in charge complain to me about that one. They wanted me lecturing here at the ’Versity for status’s sake. Now they had me, for all the good it’d do them.

Anyway, I’d keep it in the back of my mind for whenever I wanted to take an early retirement.

“Pardon me,” Radomir said. I wanted to commend him for finally finding his voice after all that throat clearing, but I wasn’t supposed to twit my assistant in front of the class, or so Roy’d told me. Something about fostering a united front, but I had a feeling it was because his boy had been made a lecturer’s assistant a few months back and he’d developed sensitive feelings toward everyone in that position as a result.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Well,” Radomir said, holding up the syllabus like a white flag, “I simply wanted to suggest that if you were
finished
, it might be time to continue outlining the requirements. Unless you had something else planned for the rest of the class that I simply haven’t been informed of. We
did
go over this together if I recall correctly.”

I could’ve thumped him on the head for that one, but he had the right of it, and anyway, the last thing I needed was for this girl—or worse, her parents—to decide I’d singled her out somehow even though she didn’t exactly seem like the type to take offense.

She even looked a little disappointed when Radomir checked us, like she’d been enjoying our little match as much as I had. That was more what I’d imagined teaching might’ve been like in the first place, which was the only reason I’d agreed to it, before I’d learned enough to know my mistake. That and not wanting to retire just yet, but nobody had to know it.

“Right,” I said. “There’s a whole list of books on here but there’s only one required reading, and that’s one with a whole mess of pretty little diagrams. Helpful, too. Pictures are good for visualization and, like I said, I’ll be calling on you lot at random. Best do your reading the night before. I know the look somebody gets when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, either, so tread careful. Everybody’s got that?”

It took me by surprise as much as anyone to find how little time was actually left in the class after that. It was a shortened day, of course, so as not to load too much into their soft, fragile minds at once, I imagined, but normally the first days dragged on
forever
. I wasn’t the kind of professor who had a lot of things to go over, and after my introductory speech we mostly spent the rest of the time staring dumbly at each other, and me using all the skills I planned to teach in order to avoid questions about what it’d been like to lead the airmen.

Somehow “a royal pain in the ass” never seemed to be the answer anyone was looking for.

Anyway, ready for it or not, the bell for class’s end rang while I was still explaining to some weed-brain why full frontal assault was never a good plan. Punctual as you’d like, my students started to shift in their chairs, all eyes turned uncannily in my direction.

“You can go when you hear the bell,” I told them, and refrained from adding,
My boys always did
.

The girl with the red hair had already packed her books and pens up, so it didn’t take her long to sling her bag over her shoulder and brush out her skirts. I saw her exchange brief words with her companion before making a beeline through the crowd toward me. The scarecrow
followed her but hung back. I didn’t blame him; even
I
was a little intimidated, though I knew better than to show it.

“Ah, the beginning of another term,” Radomir said, tapping his stack of papers against my desk so they all fell in line. “You know, if you planned your lectures in a more linear fashion beforehand, you might—”

Quickly, I made the decision between having a conversation I’d had at
least
three times before and meeting this girl head-on to see just how offended she was, on a scale of one to screaming mad. I held my hand up to Radomir, then left him in the dust.

To be fair, he’d be just as happy having that conversation all by himself.

“My name’s Laurence,” the redhead said, holding out her hand. Up close, she looked like one of those portraits in a locket that Raphael had collected, all fiery red hair and a stern gaze. The countryside, Raphael used to say,
did
breed them like that.

But none of Raphael’s girls, I was fairly certain, had ever sported a man’s name before.

“I have a brother named Laurence,” Radomir said from over my shoulder, suddenly showing interest. I knew that tone all too well, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

“Go file your notes,” I told him in no uncertain terms.

Radomir made a sharp, pained noise, but at least he had the sense to do as he was told.

“Anyway, the reason I’m here is, I wanted to ask you about something,” Laurence said, as Radomir shuffled off, probably feeling extremely sorry for himself in the process. If it’d really been important to him, he would’ve stayed and fought for it. Civilians took orders too easily or not at all.

“Go right ahead,” I told her. “But I was serious about the rules here, which means you don’t need to bring your parasol to class or anything.”

“Parasol,” Laurence said, and snorted. “More like an umbrella and a tarp, with all that mud you were talking about.”

I should’ve known she wasn’t a parasol type. I felt pretty close to ashamed and shrugged my apology. “That’d be more useful,” I admitted. “Now. About that question.”

She shifted the weight of her books from one arm to the other and
tapped her boot against the floor. I noted a strange smell suddenly—it reminded me of the Rue after a holiday night, when everyone had been up late drinking and leaving sour little presents all along the cobbles for those who were up early the next morning—but I didn’t know where it was coming from, and making a face while talking to a young lady was never considered good manners. “So you were Chief Sergeant of the Dragon Corps, right?” Laurence asked finally. “That’s what you said at the beginning of the class.”