The Cadre, unlike the Marines, preferred deillseag тrd, also known as "the slap hammer." Despite its name, deillseag тrd was actually a "softer" style than espada del mano. Or probably it would be more accurate to say that it was a more … balanced, comprehensive style. Deillseag тrd had been developed in the Dublin System, and it was a synthesis of at least two or three dozen other martial arts. It included a much broader spectrum of weaponed techniques than the espada did, and it also included quite a lot more "soft style" elements.
Alicia had only begun to explore deilleag тrd, and the time she'd been stuck in the hospital hadn't left her much opportunity for training in it. She suspected that she was going to prefer it, once she'd had the opportunity to begin mastering it, but for now, it was better to stick to what she knew, and she began an espada training ejercicio, bringing herself totally to bear on the focus it required.
Hyde opened his eyes again. He continued "watching" her through his synth-link, but this was something he never tired of seeing with his own eyes. Something he'd always deeply treasured about his own period of active duty with the Cadre.
Alicia DeVries was the personification of the old clichй "poetry in motion," he thought. She moved with blinding speed, yet at the same time every motion seemed floating, almost slow. It was the perfection of each individual move, he told himself. The fact that there was literally no hesitation, no uncertainty. DeVries' total familiarity with the ejercicio was obvious, but there was more to what she was doing than practice. More even than the drilled-in muscle memory of the true martial artist. Every move she made, every shift of balance, was deliberate and conscious. Even as her hands flickered and flashed, she was thinking through each movement. Every single one of them was textbook perfect because, thanks to the tick, she had time to make them that way.
He remembered doing that himself. He suspected, if he was going to be honest, that he'd never been as good, even with the tick, as she was. The tick enhanced its users' natural aptitudes and talents. It didn't magically bestow the same plateau of ability-of speed, reflexes, balance-on all of them, and her starting point was simply better than his had been. And she was adjusting to the tick's vagaries faster than he had, too, he decided.
Well, fair's fair. She may be settling down to Old Speedy faster than I did, but I bounced back from the surgery a lot faster than she did.
He let her continue for another two or three minutes, which he knew seemed far longer than that to her, then nodded.
"All right, Alley. I think we've got all the data we need."
"Sure," she said with the odd tone everyone who spent any time working with drop commandos came to recognize. It was obvious that she thought she was speaking very slowly, enunciating her words carefully. For those stuck in a non-tick time stream, though, those words still came out quick, clipped-completely clear and unslurred, yet so fast that it sounded as if they ought to be garbled.
She floated back across the floor on those tick-inspired dancer's feet and settled gracefully, gracefully back into her chair with a smile.
"Yes," he said after a moment, completing his study of the diagnostics' recordings. "I think we're done for today. The preliminary data looks good. Unless we turn something up after the complete analysis, I think we can consider this aspect of your augmentation successfully completed and send you off to ACTS."
"I'm glad to hear it," she said in that tick-user's voice.
"And now, I'm afraid," he said with a sympathetic smile, "it's time for you to come down."
Alicia grimaced. This was the one part of the tick that she absolutely hated. Letting go of that sense of enhanced capability, that time-slowing near-godhood, was bad enough, but the tick's side effect made it even worse.
She sent the command to her pharmacope, reached for the basin sitting in the chair beside her, and sat back, waiting resignedly. The carefully measured dosage of the counteragent trickled into her bloodstream, and her senses and perceptions seemed to decelerate. It didn't happen as quickly as they had initially accelerated, but it still took only seconds. Seconds in which the rest of the universe seemed to speed up enormously even as her own movements and thoughts slowed to a crawl. The transition back into a world in which things moved-and she thought-at their accustomed rate left her with the feeling of suddenly diminished horizons and capabilities.
But she didn't have much time to reflect on that before the tearing spasms of nausea began.
It was just as violent this time as the first time. Dr. Hyde assured her, and she believed him, that there were no long-term deleterious effects to the use of tick. The only real danger that tick posed was dependency-addiction, really-and one of the mental qualities Major Androniko had been referring to in her interview with Alicia was a high resistance to addictive behaviors. But if there were no lasting side effects, the immediate short-term effect was enough to leave someone feeling as if her stomach had been turned inside out. Personally, Alicia wondered if the nausea had been deliberately enhanced as a means to make overindulgence in the tick even less attractive.
If it had been, no one was admitting it, she thought as she finished vomiting into the basin. Of course, she thought, wiping her mouth with the tissue Dr. Hyde courteously extended to her, if they have deliberately juiced up the nausea, they wouldn't be about to admit it, now would they?
"Done?" Hyde asked.
"Yes, Sir." She closed the cover on the basin before the odor could encourage her stomach to spasm again, then set it back down on the chair beside her with a shudder.
"That's … really unpleasant," she said after a moment.
"I see you're a woman of commendable understatement," Dr. Hyde replied with a smile. "Although, and you may not believe this, you actually have a much less severe reaction to it than quite a few of our people do."
"You're joking." She looked at him suspiciously, and he shook his head.
"Nope. You appear to have an unusual tolerance. I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that your father is an Ujvбri." Alicia looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. "We've been looking at tolerance factors where the tick is concerned for quite a long time," he said, "and there do seem to be certain specific genetic 'packages' which handle it better than others. For obvious reasons, we haven't had very many Ujvбris in the Cadre-in fact, I don't think we've ever had a full Ujvбri-so we don't have anything like reliable base data on response curves. I'm not really a geneticist, either, but from what I've been able to pick up about the Ujvбri mutation, that extreme stability apparently results at least in part from changes in the brain and blood chemistry of people who have it. And while you're scarcely a 'typical' Ujvбri-probably because of your mother's side of your genotype-you do express some of the chemical differentiation of the full-scale mutation. It's fascinating, really, if you don't mind my saying so."
"I don't mind," Alicia said, wondering even as she did whether or not she was being completely honest with either of them.
"Actually," Hyde continued, leaning back in his chair once more, "you're fairly fascinating in a lot of ways. By the nature of things, the Cadre attracts people who are way outside the norms, and every one of us is different. That's one reason we don't use the same sort of training techniques the Marine use-or, rather, why we go beyond those techniques. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that we specifically design and tailor each individual cadreman's training techniques to him. Because of our differences, that's the only way we can absolutely maximize the performance of every single member of the Cadre. I've seen other cadremen who could match or even exceed your physical dexterity, your stamina, your hand-eye coordination, your IQ. I don't know that I've seen very many of them who could match all of those qualities, but none of them are completely off the scale. Not for the Cadre, at least.