A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online

years. By that time she was already well advanced in her training. There were three reasons for her rapid progress. The first to be exploited by Pilnipott was that she was a particularly appealing-looking child with a pale, fine-boned face and enormous dark eyes. She quickly became the infant of choice by those who were leasing babies from The Fox as props, as it were. Thereby she was exposed earlier and far more often to the outside world than most of her comrades, to say nothing of the role models who were her de facto employers. The second reason (and one that soon supplanted the first) was that she grew quickly. Tall for her age, and an early walker, she quickly graduated to more advanced training, while most of the other infants were still little more than toddling props. She developed into a long child, as skinny and lithe and quick as a salamander. A dark child, with mahogany eyes and fine, straight hair the color of oiled teak.
    The third reason was her almost preternatural intelligence.
    The Judikha of these first few years was a quiet, introspective, shy child who never voluntarily mingled with her surrogate brothers and sisters. She neither made nor encouraged friends. This aloofness at first involved her in a good many brawls with her classmates, who understandably felt slighted. But in addition to her intelligence Judikha was as tough as spring steel and not the least loathe to fight with an imaginative dirtiness against which the mere physical superiority of her enemies was no match. She was soon left alone, which was exactly her intention.
    The Fox, after the first few years of his deanship, did not often thereafter take a great deal of interest in his pupils. The ministrations of the woman who may have been his mother, with the aid of trusties selected from the ranks of the eldest children, sufficed for all daily needs, such as they were. Every Friday morning, all were expected to file past his massive oak desk and render unto their master his rightful tithe. He took the offerings silently, entering the amounts in meticulous copperplate hand in the big ledger next to the appropriate names, otherwise neither acknowledging the receipt of the money nor the presence of the child, no more than someone would acknowledge receipt of a candy bar from a vending machine. He never questioned the accuracy of the amounts. They were always correct; on the rare occasions when they were not—when the child had held back a demipfennig or two for whatever purpose seemed important at the time, or for no purpose at all, perhaps, other than daring or rebelliousness—when there was even the slightest shortage, he knew instantly. There was never any need to count the coins. There was something about the way the small fist released its load of warm, moist coins, perhaps, a sense of haste, or of furtiveness, or of ill-feigned casualness, perhaps something entirely psychic—it did not matter because he knew and that was all there was to that. He never said a thing at the time because he never spoke to the children, but he made a mark beside the name in the ledger and later showed the book to the hag who might very well have been his mother. That same evening the miscreant was called from his or her bed and terribly punished. It did not matter whether the embezzled amount was a demipfennig—which was just barely capable of being traded for a piece of rock candy no larger than the end of one’s little finger—or an imperial eagle, the punishment was the same. And the punishment was always brutal because the woman who may or may not have been The Fox’s mother considered it an annoying chore and she disliked being annoyed even more than she disliked caring for the children.
    Pilnipott took notice of Judikha because, of all the children who had filed past his desk, hundreds upon hundreds of them, to fulfil their weekly obeisance, she was the only one about whose honesty he was not certain. Over the decades the children had been