Intergalactic Wizard Scout Chronicles 1: Wizard Defiant Read Free

really paid much attention before, but he suddenly realized cadet 215 was quite pretty. Her blue-steel eyes, short-blonde hair, and freckles made for a nice combination. He wondered if the fact she was no longer a cadet made a difference on how he viewed her. He wasn’t sure.
    There was an awkward silence for several seconds. Finally, she set her duffle bag down and looked at Richard with a serious expression on her face.
    “Were you trying to kill me?” she asked bluntly.
    Richard hesitated only a second before replying. “No. I only put a third of the battery in the crease on the neck seal of your armor. It would only have cracked the seal. I just wanted to remove your helmet so I could knock you out. I won’t lie, it would’ve hurt. But you wouldn’t have been seriously injured. I give you my word of honor. I was not trying to kill you. I was only going to disable you.”
    She seemed to mull over Richard’s answer for a few seconds. Then she thrust out her free hand and said, “I believe you, 832. If by some miracle TAC Officer Gaston Myers lets you become a wizard scout, take a hard look at the pilot whenever you’re on a shuttle. You might see a familiar face.”
    Richard gave her a strong handshake in return and said, “Good luck, 215.”
    “No,” she said. “Not 215. I’m no longer a wizard scout cadet. I’m worthy of having a name again, and my name is Ensign Elizabeth Bistos. You can call me, Liz. I know you’re still a cadet lower than a worm and not worthy of a name,” she said with a grin, “but if you did have a name, what would it be?”
    “My name would be Sergeant Richard Shepard,” he said with a grin of his own, “formally of the 43rd marine recon detachment.” Then he added more seriously, “The Academy’s system for filtering cadets is screwed up in my opinion. You’ve been in the top of the class in just about everything we’ve done during the last two years. To D.F.R. you based upon one simulation is wrong. I’d say it’s not fair, but nothing involving TAC officers is fair. But, it’s still wrong. I don’t even understand why our quads were matched against each other. My quad was in leather. Your quad was in full-body armor. The whole basis behind the simulation is for everything to be equal except for the skill of the cadets. I think someone made a mistake, Liz.”
    Liz looked at Richard a moment before answering. “Richard, I’m not a cadet anymore, so I’ll let you in on a little secret. I mean, what are they going to do to me? They’ve already kicked me out of the Academy.”
    Her comment piqued Richard’s curiosity. “What secret is that?”
    “I think the whole thing was a setup from start to finish, Richard,” she said. “We had four hundred and thirty-two cadets who were supposed to be randomly divided into one hundred and eight quads of four cadets each. I had cadets 212, 87, and 316 on my quad. All modesty aside, we were probably the four top-performing cadets in the class. You’re normally rated somewhere in the middle of the class. I personally think you could do a lot better, but I’ve always had the impression you could care less about scores.”
    Richard shrugged his shoulders at her comment.
    “In any regard,” she continued, “you were teamed with 114, 187, and 605. Don’t get me wrong, they’re good. No one gets into wizard scout training unless they’re good. But they were consistently the bottom three cadets in combat scores. What do you think the odds are that the four highest-scoring cadets would be randomly teamed together while the three lowest-scoring cadets would be randomly teamed with you?”
    “Pretty low, I guess,” said Richard.
    “Astronomically low,” Liz said. “And on top of that, my quad had full-body armor, phase rifles and grenades. Your quad had light-leather and quarter-power phase rods which were incapable of penetrating my quad’s armor. Doesn’t that seem suspicious, Richard?”
    “Well,” Richard said