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the Consolidated Systems security apparatus at that time
apparently he d made himself invaluable to Sivi by repelling a number of
penetration schemes launched by the opposition, and his efficiency in defense
of Sivi had caught the eye of
Consolidated. They d bought out his contract with
SonnenSystem and taken him to their headquarters on Ricot.
From that point on there had been a slow rise through the
Consolidated security hierarchy as the Alpha performed, apparently well, a
number of routine tasks. He devised a number of means for keeping the Powers
biologically secure. He worked
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind out ways for vetting the large
number of foreign nationals that were on Ricot at any given time. He also
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married a woman named Wandis, who was an engineer specializing in Penrose-
tiling crystal growth. She was a recent graduate of the Ricot
College, ten years younger than the Alpha.
There was a photo in the dossier. Wandis was blond, short-
haired, dark-eyed. There was a scatter of gemstones implanted in a starburst
pattern around the left eye. She was smiling, and there was an air of
fragility about her.
Steward looked at her, frowned. He had no reaction to the face at all. The
Alpha had found someone as far away from Natalie s type as he could.
Within a few years the Alpha reached high enough in
Consolidated Systems to attract the attention of the Brighter
Suns hierarchy. De Prey, now a Colonel in the Pulsar Division, recognized his
name and photograph in a dossier and set about a recruitment scheme. De Prey
himself contributed to the dossier in an outline explaining his plan of
recruitment.
Ice touched Steward s nerves as he saw de Prey s words. He could hear the
Colonel s voice resonating in his mind as he scanned the page, absorbed every
cold, reasoned sentence.
Icehawk recruitment policy was directed at a specific kind of recruit,
intelligent enough to be able to think, act, and survive in the absence of his
superiors, yet with a cultivated devotion to authority, specifically to the
aims and goals of Coherent Light.
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind
The Icehawks were not to be mercenaries, soldiers, or assassins, but
intelligent warrior fanatics, able to credit no objectives other than those of
Coherent Light. Specific attempts were made to recruit rootless individuals,
mainly citizens of noncorporate
Earth nations, who had received no indoctrination from other policorps, or who
had come from backgrounds in which chaos and violence were common, and who
might therefore perceive
Coherent Light, by contrast, as a force for stability and order.
Icehawk indoctrination, rather than concentrating on formal ideological
training, substituted instead the cultivation of a religious-military
mystique. Zen mysticism, with its concentration on the perception of a vague
truth at the core of all things, a truth divorced from concepts of moral
order, was a useful tool in this indoctrination program.
Steward thought of Dr. Ashraf, remembering the psychologist s anger at the Zen
emphasis in the Icehawks training. Here were
Ashraf s ideas, coldly and precisely paraphrased by Colonel de
Prey.
The success of this indoctrination is evident on reading the history of the
Sheol campaign, in which the Icehawks followed their training to the extent of
conducting suicidal attacks on their CL-designated enemies, long after
concerns of mere survival would dictate an alternate course of behavior. That
the subject Steward broke his training before the others and became the focus
of a rebellion against his superiors who were still loyal to CL is less a
failure of indoctrination than evidence of another
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