Read Online Yoda by Sean Stewart - Free Book Online Page A

from that arm bar you put on me last week. You wouldn’t hurt a friend, right?”
    There were thirty-two apprentices entered in the tournament. An apprentice had to be at least ten years old to enter, with the majority of entrants in the eleven- to twelve-year-old range. The younger kids weren’t quite ready to encounter the big kids in full-contact sparring, and the older ones who had made Padawan were mostly busy with their duties. Lena hadn’t originally meant to enter, but they had needed one more to make an even number.
    The apprentices had been given the choice of a layered tournament or a sudden-death elimination format, in which the first loss meant you were done. Scout had been strongly in favor of single eliminations. In the real world, she had argued, no enemy offered to go best three matches out of five. Privately, she also felt the winor-go-home format would play to her strengths. As good as she was at the physical elements of combat, the Force was weaker in her than in anyone else in the field. For her to do well, she would need to out-think her opponents. Trickery was usually most effective the first time you tried it; the fewer matches she had to fight, the better her chances of winning.
    Master Iron Hand adjusted her tunic and picked her way to the center of the combat room, passing the Talkers and the Warm-ups sprinkled around the white chamber.
We look like so many weevils wiggling in a box of flour,
Scout thought. Where the Master passed, the apprentices fell silent. In the center of the room she announced that the first two rounds of the tournament would take place here, but when they were down to the Round of Eight, the remaining matches would be moved to less artificial environments. Students looked at one another, eyebrows raised. “You wanted lifelike,” Iron Hand said dryly. “We decided you should get it. Now—to determine the first-round matches.” She consulted her datapad. “Atresh Pikil and Gumbrak Hoxz.”
    Atresh, a lithe black-skinned girl of twelve, stepped forward, along with Gumbrak, a thirteen-year-old Mon Calamari boy whose salmon-colored skin was already speckled with excitement. The Mon Calamari was stronger, but he had grown a lot in the last year and still had a tendency to stumble over his webbed feet. If Atresh used her quickness to keep dancing out of range until he tripped, she should be fine. Of course, Atresh wasn’t a very calculating fighter. Like many of the more gifted apprentices, she tended to trust to her own strengths instead of doing the kind of detailed preliminary observations that had earned Scout her nickname. The other kids used to laugh at her relentless calculation, but then, they could afford to. Scout needed to do her homework. She had spent many hours over the last six weeks watching the other combatants spar, sometimes openly and sometimes in secret. She had a plan for tackling each of them, and, if not confident, she was at least
prepared.
    â€œFlerp, Zrim,” Master Xan called. “Page, Gilp. Horororibb, Boofer.”
    Scout wondered if the matches had been assigned by computer simulations designed to find the most even contests, or by some other criteria known only by the Masters, designed to test each student’s weaknesses.
    â€œChizzik, Enwandung-Esterhazy.”
    Scout’s heart sank. Pax Chizzik was an eleven-year-old boy of enormous spirit and charm. As a fighter he was strong in the Force, smart, a little chunky, and without the best footwork, but with exceptionally quick wrists. He had a very fast parry, and most kids his age with that gift scored their points on the counterattack, but Pax was also imaginative on the attack, with the hand speed and creativity to launch complex and rather beautiful feint-and-cut sequences. High-spirited and good-natured, he was a natural leader, born to play a dashing prince in some romantic epic of the last age. Everybody liked Pax. Scout liked him