Moment of Truth by Michael Pryor Page B

for a moment. When he looked up, he said, ‘Before you know it.’
    Aubrey was one of the few close enough to hear what Craddock added under his breath. ‘And before you’re ready, most likely.’

Nine

    One month. Four weeks. Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours. Lying on his bunk in the dormitory, Aubrey thought he had an aching muscle or a bruise for every one of those hours.
    He had been looking forward to the training because he thought it could give him another chance to investigate the copy of the Rashid Stone. Or perhaps he’d have an opportunity to work with magical suppression, or to inspect the golem-making machine he’d captured and sent back from Holmland.
    Instead, with the other Department recruits, he became accustomed to being ferried most days via motorbus to a Directorate facility an hour away. On the edge of the city to the east, near where the Harwell River came down through the hills, in essence, it was a combination parade ground, firing range and hell on earth.
    Soon, Aubrey felt as if he’d been sent back to his cadet training at Stonelea School – or perhaps the school’s notorious Physical Education classes. Except that instead of mildly sadistic masters propelling him over vaulting horses, he had instructors made of some bulletproof material whose main delight, in all weather, was shouting.
    So much shouting. Shouting while he ran over broken ground. Shouting while he scrambled under barbed wire. Shouting while he swung from ropes. Shouting while he crawled through mud. Shouting while he assembled and disassembled a variety of firearms and then used them to blast away at targets that were eye-strainingly far-off and – sometimes – startlingly close.
    Hand-to-hand combat produced the most bruises and, unsurprisingly, as he was flung through the air again by another shouting instructor, it reminded him of Caroline. Her skills in unarmed combat came from early instruction with a variety of oriental masters, friends of her father. When Aubrey picked himself up from the mats, time after time, he knew that a handful of sessions wasn’t going to bring him up to Caroline’s standard, but he was willing to do his best. He had a new appreciation for her, as if he needed any extra grounds for such a thing.
    The shouting, thankfully, disappeared during explosives training. The instructors here were just as intense – older men, often with a disturbing number of missing fingers – and somehow managed to make their whispers just as effective as the bellowing of the others.
    He was thankful that his explosives training was brief, a mere introduction to the discipline, and was sorry for the recruits who showed aptitude for this sort of work. They were whisked off for more intensive training, the prospect of which made Aubrey shudder.
    Another relatively quiet session came from a mildfaced, older man who was the instructor in disguises. When he explained how to change appearances subtly and with a minimum of artifice, Aubrey was embarrassed at his own earlier efforts. With a deft application of tiny strokes around the eyes and some tightening wax inside the cheeks, an effect was created that would have taken Aubrey hours and laborious amounts of makeup. In hindsight, his Tommy Sparks alter-ego was embarrassingly crude.
    Aubrey excelled in the communications training. He picked up the telegraphic code easily, tapping away with alacrity, never confusing T and P. His earlier experimenting with ciphers held him in good stead. While other recruits around him spent much time on head-scratching, he knew the theory and practice of one-time pads and was able to encipher and decipher at a rate that impressed the instructors. They whisked him off for advanced training and introduced him to the encoding machine, a recent advance that sped up the process and, if intercepted, made messages even harder to crack. After some familiarisation, Aubrey was able to