There’s no point in raising a whole new army if we don’t give them proper training before shoving them into the sharp end. If you qualify for the Specials, they’ll probably ship you to the front straight away, but at this stage, I’m still out of the loop, information-wise, so I’m not sure.”

She turned to smile at him. It wasn’t a nice smile at all. It was more like the smile of a tiger or even a crocodile.

“Which means we’ve got plenty of time to put you grubs through the wringer.”

Andrew decided that she was trying to intimidate him. Well, she’d find that it took a fair bit to put the wind up Andrew Harris! He remembered something else she said.

“So they’re Japanese like the news people are saying, only from another world.”

“Yes, they’re definitely not Japanese from our world. Our Japan is still very sparsely settled because of all the radioactive hot spots. They’re definitely from some other world, and it must be a pretty horrible place to live, apparently.”

He cocked his head slightly. “Why?”

“Well, as far as we can tell from the few prisoners we’ve taken, every person except the male Lords at the top get a chip put in their head to control them at age eighteen, not just the cyborgs.” She shuddered.

“What? The women as well?” When he saw her frown developing, he added quickly. “I mean noncombatants, not soldiers.”

“They don’t appear to have women soldiers. Or at least they didn’t. As far as we can tell, from the limited information we’ve been able to gather, it’s a very patriarchal society, almost medieval. We don’t have much firm information about them, just observations our scouts have managed to make and a couple of prisoners with which we’ve been able to capture who we have managed to make talk. I was told we have seen armed women recently, but the powers that be seem to think that their using women on the front line is more about their shortage of manpower than anything.”

“Our troops have to keep at least twenty meters away from theirs because of their powers. They call them Mentalists, apparently. About one in ten cyborgs is a leader who has some mental power, and then they have these non-cyborg officers who are the real Mentalists. Nearly all of them can control people within ten to twenty meters, which is why we have to keep back. The cyborgs and any of the other chipped people can be controlled from much further away. The few prisoners we’ve managed to take, we have to keep at least a hundred kilometers away from their mentalists to avoid them taking control of our prisoners.”

Andrew whistled as he considered the information the Captain had just imparted. His grandmother’s notes had mentioned things like being able to detect people with power from a considerable distance, but all the spells she mentioned were relatively short range. Even twenty meters seemed a bit long, although there were some things she said could reach a hundred meters if you concentrated and had enough power. The chip must be the thing that controls them and allows them to be controlled so far away.