Newly turned fifteen, Lotta Alsnor was becoming a rather pretty young woman, her once-carroty hair now auburn red, her old freckles mostly gone, her complexion faintly tanned, with pink highlights. Small, fine-boned, she would have been slight, had it not been for ballet and gymnastics and the strong-slender muscles they'd given her.
She stepped into the mail room after lunch. She seldom received mail, seldom went in to look. When there was something for her, she usually knew it. Almost invariably it was a letter from her mother.
Today it wasn't. She looked at the return address and headed for the veranda to read it. At Lake Loreen, autumn was considerably less advanced than in the Blue Forest, and today was almost summery. Slim strong fingers tore the end of the envelope, withdrew and unfolded the paper inside. She read:
Dear Little Sister,
I hope that getting a letter from me doesn't give you heart failure. I wish you were here. I'd show you around and we could talk a lot. In fact, I'd send you a cube instead of this letter, but I put all my bonus in the bank, and I don't want to wait till we get paid. I've never sent you a letter before, unless you count the three-line notes at Winter Solstice that were all Mom could get me to write. But I never felt like I had anything to write about before. It's as if all my life I've been waiting for something to happen. Now it has, and you're the one I want to tell it to.
It's funny how you've been my favorite person in the family, considering that since we were little kids, I only got to see you once or twice a year for a few days, and we never spent much time together even then. But I always thought of us as being more alike than most brothers and sisters. Even when you were still at home, when we were really little, I could tell you stuff and you didn't go and tell Mom or Dad. You were different. And when you'd been away and came back, even that first time, you were more different than ever. You were still you, but you'd changed, and I was impressed. It was as if you'd outgrown the family somehow, but you were easier than ever to be around.
Now I've left home too, not for the reformatory like Mom and Dad worried I would, but for the mercenaries. Has Mom written and told you about that? It isn't the army, although the government is doing it. It's under something called the Office of Special Projects. I'm at a place in the Blue Forest, getting trained. And our cadre, the guys training us, are T'swa! Real genuine T'swa!
I got put out of school right after you were home last, and got in trouble on the job I got, which I didn't like anyway, because this guy gave me a hard time and I knocked three of his teeth out. I had to pay to get them fixed and had to borrow part of it from Dad. But I only got charged damages, no amends, because the judge said the guy had provoked it. Then a guy came to my apartment one evening and talked to me about joining the mercenaries. He told me I'd been selected because my school personality profile said I'd make a good one. The pay isn't too bad—it's the same as the army—and I get my meals and a place to live, and he offered me a signing bonus of DR300. When I agreed, he offered Dad 300 for his signature of approval because I'm not eighteen yet.
As far as I know, all the guys here, all the recruits that is, are pretty much like me. They always got in trouble at school and things like that. There's even a few guys who came here from reformatory.
So here I am. I've been here two weeks now, and you're not the only person that changed a lot being away from home. This isn't a bad place. It's way out in the country, in the forest. At first I thought I wasn't going to like it. You wouldn't believe all the stuff they make us do. Sometimes I can hardly crawl from the shower to my bunk at night. But most of the time I like it, and most of the time I like the T'swa. And sometimes I hate it all, for a few minutes, but when I'm hating it, I know I'll like it again pretty soon. Strange, huh?
They make us do stretching exercises for twenty minutes in the morning, right after our run. Next week they're going to give us rifles; so far we haven't even seen any, but in a few weeks we'll learn how to shoot them. My intestines get excited thinking about it! So far all they've given us to carry are packsacks with sand in them. To build our strength. We hike with them and do pushups with them on our backs. When we get stronger, we'll do our chinups with them too. A few guys do already. You start doing them with sand after you can do twenty without any. I'm up to twelve.
The T'swa say they're going to make White T'swa out of us. There was a guy named Varlik Lormagen that they called the White T'swi back in the Kettle War. But we'll be the first regiment of White T'swa.
I hope you'll answer this letter, Little Sister who's not little anymore. Actually, you're the only person outside the regiment I really want much to be connected with. Not that I don't appreciate all that Mom and Dad did, and put up with, but the guys here feel like my real family to me, except I don't have any sister here. You're my sister, and you're too far away to suit me.
I'll probably send you a cube when I've been paid. There's hardly anything around here to spend money on, and talking is faster than writing.
With love,
your brother
Jerym