The reception was so clear and the sound reproduction so natural that it sounded like Morgan was right there in the suit with him.

**Systems check, please.**

Jack Tyler’s eyes danced across the various readouts in his helmet visor’s HUD. He’d gotten to know them very well over the past few weeks.

“Uh, power is green, main systems green, secondary systems…I’ve got a red light on the, looks like the chromatography thing.”

He could hear the sigh on the other end of the line, followed by, **One moment…yes, it looks like the laser burner/reader unit is out. No worries. It won’t affect anything for our purposes today.**

“Well, that’s comforting,” Jack replied. Standing on a rocky shelf overlooking the eastern slope of Mt. Elbert, he thought he could see clear to Kansas. He realized with a chuckle that, if he activated the advanced optics built into the helmet, he probably could.

**What was that?** Morgan asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Jack replied. “I just thought of something funny, that’s all.”

**Well, let’s focus on the test, shall we? We’re not here to sightsee.** That was Morgan – all business.

Jack did his best not to sigh. Thomas Morgan had given him a tremendous opportunity, but at times he could really be a bossy techno-dweeb. It wasn’t the first time he had a voice in his helmet pushing his buttons, though, so he put it out of his head and set himself to his reason for being there.

“Right, sorry. Okay…all systems showing green now. I’m ready when you are.”

**Great. I’m sending you a series of waypoints that lead to your first objective. I want you to get there as fast as you can.**

As Morgan spoke, a small flashing yellow indicator told Jack that the suit computers had just received a new set of data. The pupillary tracking system keyed in on his eye movements and through a highly complex translation protocol figured out that he wanted to see the data displayed. A semi-transparent topographical map of the surrounding one-hundred mile radius was suddenly superimposed on his visual display. A series of waypoint markers traced a line southeast. He saw the last marker ended at Pike’s Peak.

“Got ‘em. I’m on my way.”

There was a blue-white burst of energy from his boots and shoulder blades and the armored form of Paladin streaked into the crisp Colorado sky. He climbed rapidly, struggled a little to flatten his trajectory, but once he was righted Paladin was lancing eastward like an arrow for his target.

----------------

“Easy, Jack. It’s just like in the simulator. If you try forcing the flight controls they’ll overcompensate and throw you off balance.”

Standing in the small tactical monitoring room he’d built into the Guardians’ HQ, Morgan tracked his protégé’s progress. The suit continuously streamed data back to it’s owner regaring systems statuses, and thanks to links built out to AEGIS’s technological assets he was able to view everything in real time via satellite imagery.

“That’s it…good…” Morgan was pleased to discover that Jack was not only a fast learner, but his athletic skills translated well in helping Jack master the more physical aspects of being Paladin. Flying was by far the hardest discipline to master. For someone like Iron Maiden for whom flying is an innate ability, the learning curve is much less severe. Controlling a flying suit is much less natural and far more trying physically.

He’d started Jack in the large basement swimming pool, practicing maneuvering in three-dimensional space. They’d stayed in the pool, practicing turns and dodges, until Jack could avoid the faster underwater drones relatively easily. Then they moved to the simulator, basically a Paladin suit hooked up to a computer that could manipulate the pilot’s readouts and physical sensations.

Jack’s first live flight had predictable results. Taking off is easy, maneuvering less so. Landings are always the problem. Nobody nails their first landing. Jack came close, though, he had to admit. He had come in too shallow and fast, and the suit’s inertial dampers couldn’t compensate. Normally that translates into a face-plant and a long skid on one’s chest or chin. Jack was able to recognize the error in mid-tumble and turned it into a forward roll, from which he sprung up onto his feet. The degree of body control required to pull that off while wearing a metal suit was impressive.

Which, of course, led them to today’s exercise. Clearly, Morgan thought, he’d underestimated Jack’s ability to think on his feet and his physical skills. It was time to ramp things up a bit, and increase the pace of his training.

**Paladin to base, destination reached,** came through Morgan’s headset. A look over at the tracking monitor showed the suit was at the correct GPS coordinates. The satellite imagery showed that Jack had found the present that Morgan had left for him.

----------------

Jack studied the odd sight in front of him. Someone had climbed all the way to the top of one of the tallest mountains in the United States and set up a television tray? What the hell for? He looked and the only item on the TV tray was one of those small novelty puzzles where you have to slide the jumbled squares around to make a picture, in this case the AEGIS crest.

“What’s this all about?” he asked.

**Call it an unannounced quiz,** Morgan replied over the communications link. **Your task is to solve the puzzle on the table.**

Jack’s natural suspicions caused him to wonder, “What’s the catch?”

Morgan pressed a signal button and almost smirked when he answered nonchalantly, **Look over to your left.**

Jack turned as he did a warning indicator began flashing in his HUD. From a peak a couple of miles distant he saw something leap into the air trailing a white string that slowly bent in his direction.

“Um, Morgan, what’s that?”

**That,** Morgan replied, **is an AEGIS LAA-C16 rocket. It’s a man-portable anti-air weapon designed to track and intercept small, fast-moving targets such as you. It’s got a concussion-based warhead, so, while it won’t physically damage you or the suit, it’ll sure knock the crap out of you. The five AEGIS agents spread out in the mountains surrounding your position will stop firing when the signal chip in the puzzle indicates you’ve completed the picture. I’m showing eight seconds until impact, so you might want to get moving.**

But Jack was already in motion, having read the disguised blitz. He swiped the puzzle off the table and hot-fired his thrusters. He just cleared the peak when he heard the rocket obliterate the table and rock the area in which it had been perched. The impact was close enough that his armor’s gyroscopic stabilizers reacted to the shock wave.

“Not funny, Morgan,” Jack angrily grumbled between gritted teeth.

**Not meant to be,** came the reply in his head. **As Paladin you’ll be operating under far more pressure than any football game. Whoops – eight o’clock, Jack.**

Jack whipped his head around just in time to see another rocket close the last few dozen meters to his side. The explosion wasn’t fiery yet the blast hit him like a freight train. He went pin-wheeling across the sky. By the time he regained his bearings he was nearly on the ground, and still falling.

He fired his thrusters and kicked out in front of him to start a radical climb, just in time to get caught by a third rocket coming in from the northeast. This one exploded in his face and knocked him almost straight down into a grove of thick western fir trees. He pin-balled among them all the way down to a sloppy, dragging crash along the mountainside.

Jack lay still, counting his bones. He’d taken some monster hits before but these things were in a class by themselves. He was dazed and it took a few moments for him to remember that he couldn’t be more than just shaken up. But the human side of him still waited for that pain which told him that something was damaged.

**Stop lollygagging, Jack.**

Jack stood up and steadied himself on a tree. “Hey, Morgan, why don’t you go – damn!”

**What?**

“I dropped the damn puzzle.”

Jack blistered at the chuckle that came over his radio. **Those things sure do pack a wallop, don’t they? Anyway, the puzzle has an integrated GPS tracker emitter that you should be able to pick up.**

Jack activated his onboard radar and sure enough he picked up a single signal coming from half a kilometer to the northwest. Back in the tactical center, Morgan’s readouts showed the same signal.

**That’s it. The fire teams won’t shoot while you’re on the ground, but anytime you’re ready, ma’am.**

“Go screw yourself,” Jack replied. “This wasn't part of today's gameplan.”

**And??** Morgan’s tone wasn’t pleasant. **When you went to the NFL after college were you ready for that? Of course not – how could you be? Until you play at that next level you can’t possibly be prepared. This is no different. Super Bowl pressure is for wimps, Jack. This is the real big leagues. Now were you serious about taking that next step and making a real difference in this world, or was that just some philosophical bullshit handed me by a middle-aged old-timer looking at a forced retirement?**

Morgan was pushing buttons, but they were the right ones. Jack bit his lip and felt like a damn rookie all over again. He shook his head once roughly to clear the cobwebs and steeled himself.

“I’m on it.” His thrusters propelled him aloft and back into the sky. This time he stayed low, as close to the trees as he could manage.

He wasn’t airborne more than a few heartbeats before another two rockets appeared on his radar. Two, not five – which meant that staying low kept at least some of the AEGIS teams from tracking him well enough to fire. And the radar thing should’ve been obvious from the start, he realized.

He was coming up fast on the puzzle’s signal, flying at top speed. One of the inbound rockets was ahead and one was behind, according to his radar. He reached and then passed right over the puzzle, not even slowing.

**Jack, you overshot...**

“Keep your shorts on,” the ex-quarterback broke in. The rocket ahead of him was in sight now and he bee-lined right for it. He considered his maximum range and then reached out towards it. A focused pulse of electromagnetic energy launched from his armored bracer. Jack air-braked as hard as his thrusters could, grunting with the G-forces, and reversed his direction.

The rocket didn’t digress and met the EM pulse with a flash of released energy. Its internal mechanisms couldn’t handle the blast and it fell from the sky, tumbling into the tree line.

He got to the puzzle before the trailing rocket could meet him, but he knew it was going to be super-close. He spotted the puzzle on the ground and landed there. He had just enough time to snatch it up and tuck into a kneeling ball before the rocket impacted the ground ten meters in front of him.

The blast wave was intense, but this time he was prepared. Powerful micro-servos built into the suit gave him the strength to hold his ground as the blast pounded him. When the dust cleared, he’d been pushed back along the ground, but he was still in formation. There were no other rockets on his radar. He quickly stood up and tried working the puzzle but the pieces wouldn’t slide.

**Uh-uh,** Morgan said. **The puzzle can detect altitude and speed. You can only complete it while airborne.**

“Copy that,” Jack replied in his business-like QB mode. He looked around and considered his options before launching himself skyward once again. He climbed straight up, this time drawing the attention of all five fire teams. A quintet of blips appeared on his radar, all closing on him.

Jack let his flight slow to a crawl as he stood in mid-air. He quickly assessed the puzzle and began moving pieces; up, down, left, up, right, down, left… The blips on is radar were rapidly closing the distance on his relatively non-moving form.

**Fifteen seconds to impact, Jack. You better get moving.**

…right, down, right, up, left, down, right…a proximity warning claxon sounded in his ears.

**Ten seconds, Jack.**

Jack’s gauntleted thumbs hesitated over the puzzle in front of him. He almost had it. Left…no, right, down…no…shit…

**Five seconds! Make a move, Jack!**

Without taking his eyes off the puzzle, Jack cut his thrusters completely and went into freefall. Both hands gripped the toy solidly and he braced himself for the impact that followed only a few yards above his head as the missiles collided. The concussive force released blasted him head over heels backward and down. He let himself go limp and rolled with it. After a second or two he reinitialized his thrusters and activated the suit’s autopilot feature. The gyroscopic balancing leveled him out in mid-air, well before he was in any danger of another crash.

…left, down, right, down, right. As the completed image of the AEGIS crest fell into place with the last shuffled piece, the puzzle quorked twice in response.

**All fire teams standing down.** Morgan let go a deeply held breath and unclenched. **Objective complete – well done, Jack. I’ll send you a waypoint. C’mon home for post-exercise analysis.**

“Roger that,” Jack replied. He fed the new waypoint into his autopilot and let the suit take over. Paladin arced across Pike’s Peak’s southwestern shoulder and made time for Denver. In his mind, Jack quashed any anger he had felt at Morgan for setting him up and chastised himself for his irritation. It wouldn’t happen again. Morgan had been absolutely right, after all.

Back in the tactical center, Morgan was already pouring through the scathes of computer data produced by the training session. Adaptation, improvisation, determination…Jack Tyler still had a long way to go with regards to gaining the proper perspective, but he certainly had all the right tools. And perspective could be taught.

Whatever doubts Thomas Morgan might have had about choosing Tyler as a successor were rapidly fading.