Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  I paused in my scrubbing, impressed. Sergeant Smith had given me a genuine answer, instead of the bawling out I had expected. I realized that I had not properly appreciated the qualities of the man—and that was embarrassing, because I, of all people, had no excuse for such misjudgment. I had turned off my mind too soon.

  Yet I resisted the logic. “In what way does scrubbing a clean hull with a toothbrush contribute to discipline that rigorous useful training would not?”

  “Rigorous training is proud work,” he said. “You have too much pride, Hubris. Your very name smacks of it; I dare say it runs in your family. In civilian life it can be an honorable quality, but here it amounts to arrogance. You assume that your personal standards are superior, even when you are in plain violation of reasonable regulations. We must expunge that arrogance, or you will never be a true soldier. And that would be unfortunate, because you have the makings of a fine one. So I have given you a task that deprives you of pride, because it has no meaning. Chicken shit is very good for abolishing hubris, the arrogance of pride.”

  He was making some sense. I realized, now that I understood him better, that I could trust Sergeant Smith. He was not the blind disciplinarian I had taken him for. He was a sighted disciplinarian. It was a significant distinction.

  “Will you keep a secret?” I asked.

  “No. I serve the Jupiter Navy, nothing else.”

  Did my quest for Spirit really have to be secret? It seemed to me now that Smith would understand, and perhaps it was best that I tell him. I could have told him before, and spared myself all this, had it not been for that very hubris he charged me with. Surely my surname was no coincidence; some distant ancestor had been so proud of his arrogance he had adopted its name for his own. This was, it seemed, a lesson I had needed. “Will you give me a fair hearing, even if it takes some time?”

  “Yes.” No fudging here.

  “Then I will tell you what you want to know, and I will promise not to break any more military regulations.”

  “Come with me.” He turned and walked away.

  I set down my toothbrush and followed him to his room. There I told him about the manner I had separated from my sister, Spirit, and how I had received news of her survival.

  “Then it was not pride so much, but need,” Sergeant Smith said. “You have to try to save your sister from the pirates.”

  “Yes.”

  “You should have gone through channels. The Navy is not indifferent to the welfare of the families of soldiers. You should have come to me at the outset.”

  “I guess I should have. I didn’t realize—”

  “Lot you have to learn about the Navy, Hubris. That’s why you’re a recruit. It’s my job to teach you, but you have to give me half a chance.”

  He was right. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I—”

  “Apology accepted.” He looked at his watch. “Chow time.” He touched his intercom. “Corporal, bring me dinner for two from the mess.”

  “Check, Sergeant,” the intercom replied. Startled, I looked at him, the question in my face. “I have obtained some of your private history, Hubris,” he said. “Now I’ll give you some of mine. We’ll eat here; what we have to discuss is nobody’s business but ours.”

  I nodded, still uncertain what he had in mind. And while we ate, Sergeant Smith told me his military background. It was amazing. He had been a master sergeant in a regiment, in charge of the specialized training the troops needed for a hazardous mission. The plan had been to make a covert raid to a planetoid in the Asteroid Belt where certain Jupiter officials were being held hostage. Smith had urged against the attempt, believing that the risk of precipitating the murder of the hostages was too great. He believed that negotiation was called for. The captain in charge had overruled him unceremoniously and ordered the preparation to be made. Smith had then gotten the job of training the men in the necessary maneuvers. He had tackled it honestly but pointed out that he needed at least two months to get the men in proper shape so that there would be no foul-ups. The captain, eager to get the job done, cut the time to one month. Again Smith warned against using this inadequately prepared force; again he was overruled.

  The mission was launched—and it failed. The hostages were killed, a number of the raiding personnel were lost, and Jupiter’s interplanetary relations suffered, exactly as Smith had warned.

  There was an investigation. Smith was found guilty of gross negligence, reduced four grades in rank, from master sergeant E7 to private first class E3, and reassigned to the lowest form of supervisory labor: the training of recruits. That had been four years ago; he now had won back two of his lost stripes and might eventually recover the rest if he kept his nose clean.

  “But it was the captain who should have paid!” I exclaimed.

  “Officers don’t pay,” Smith said. “Appearances must be preserved. They needed a scapegoat, and I was the one.”

  “But you were right and he was wrong!”

  “Right way, wrong way, Navy way,” he reminded me.

  I shook my head, confused. “You accepted wrongful punishment to support the military way?”

  “You accepted it to protect your sister.”

  “Yes, I suppose. But—”

  “When you are ready to do the same for the Jupiter Navy, you will be a true military man.”

  “I’ll never be that sort of man!” I declared.

  He smiled, somewhat grimly. “Hubris, when you finish Basic, I want you to put in for retesting, and then for Officer’s Training School. I believe you would make a better officer than the captain I served.”

  “You are going to all this trouble, just to get me to try to be an officer?” I asked incredulously. “Why?”

  “I owe it to the Navy to do my job the best way I know how and to produce the best fighting men I can. You have real potential. I want to straighten you out and set you on the right course. Hubris, you have a real future in the Navy, once you make up your mind to pursue it.”

  “A future in the Navy? I’m a mercenary, and I’m not even of age!”

  “I know that. But irregularities in the induction are excused if the rest is in order. As a resident alien you are eligible for any position in the Navy, which is more than can be said for your civilian opportunities. You have a clean record, Hubris; keep it that way.”

  “A clean record? But I—”

  “There was no court-martial. You accepted unit punishment. No officer was involved. It is off the record. Remember that: In the Navy, souls can be bought and sold for a clean record.”

  Probably true. “You expect me to be the sort of careerist you are? A scapegoat?”

  “I think you can do better, Hubris. Get your house in order, become an officer, and I will be proud to call you ‘sir.’”

  “I can’t do it,” I protested. “My first priority is to rescue my sister.”

  “I will help you do that.”

  Again I was amazed. “How? You can’t break the regulations either.”

  “I don’t have to break regs. I just have to enforce them.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “The transeex feelies are unauthorized,” he explained. “It is Navy policy to tolerate them as long as they don’t cause mischief. It is the prerogative of the Platoon or Company Commander to determine what constitutes mischief; in practice it’s left to the noncoms. If I raise an objection, I’ll get to the source quickly enough. They’ll figure I’m bucking for a bribe; they’ll be glad to settle for information.”

  I smiled. “Sergeant, if you do that for me, I’ll be the best soldier I can be. And the day I get my sister back, I’ll put in for Officer’s School.”

  “Deal,” he said. “But it’ll take a while to trace the supply route, because these people are cagey, understandably. They’ve been stepped on before. And I don’t dare check with the officer who pays for the chips out of general funds; he’s twice as cagey as the pirates are.”

  “I understand.” We shook hands, and t
hat was that. It was a great relief to me, in several senses.

  Nothing more was said in the following days. But the next week, when the assignments for trainee squad leaders were posted, I was the one for my squad. I had no real authority; all it meant was that I got an armband, marched at the head of my column of ten men, and had to relay minor directives and items of information. I also had to select the men for police call (routine cleanup of refuse) and such other stray chores as were assigned. But it was my first taste of leadership in the Navy, and a signal that I was expected to set an example of good soldiering. I intended to do so.

  A few days later, Sergeant Smith called me in for a squad leader conference, told me one of my men had reported for sick call twice when due for special duty formation, and to get him in line pronto. Then: “EMPTY HAND chips are distributed by the pirate fence, Chip Off the Old Block, who handles the more extreme entertainments. They’re into drugs, too, and they’ve got a security system the Navy can hardly match. That’s a dead end; we’d have to shut them down before they’d talk, and by the time that scene was done, they’d have destroyed all their records and skipped the base. Only if they get into murder, or if they seduce a general’s daughter, will the Navy move firmly against them.”

  “All I want is information,” I said.

  “I know. That’s why I call this a dead end. We’ve got to go another route, and it will take time. You don’t want the pirates to get any whiff of what you’re really after; your sis would pay the penalty. The Navy runs surveillance on the pirate ships in the Juclip; I’m sure there’s a record of every one that connects to the Old Block fence. But no enlisted man has access to that list. You need an officer. The right officer.”

  “What officer?”

  “Hubris, I can’t tell you. I know him, but I can’t violate his trust. I’ll have to ask him to contact you. If he refuses—”

  “I understand,” I said. “You can’t tell an officer what to do.”

  “This one’s special. Give it a couple of weeks; I think he’ll agree. When you meet him, you’ll understand.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant,” I said sincerely.

  “Just you be a credit to my platoon.”

  My squad was already doing well; in due course it would be recognized as the sharpest in the company.

  As it happened, the officer did not contact me during Basic Training, but Smith assured me that the man intended to, when he deemed the moment propitious, and I believed him. I had to wait, but I knew this was my best chance, and meanwhile there was plenty to keep me occupied. I was discovering that despite the hard work and dehumanization of training, I liked the military life. It was another kind of family, and once its ways were understood, it was a good family. The decent food and thorough exercise filled me out physically, so that I became an unimpressive but extremely fit individual, fast and strong and confident. I was, indeed, becoming a good soldier, and I was learning a lot.

  The weeks passed, and the months. The concluding exercise of Basic came in our tenth week. This was the Challenge Course. If we were true soldiers, we would make it successfully through; if not, we would be recycled for further training.

  There were other inducements. Our full cycle—the entire training battalion, three hundred recruits—would run the course together. There were many more people in the battalion, of course, but the rest were cadre, training personnel, officers, and staff. The recruits were the ones that counted. The nine platoons of the three companies would vie with each other for points, and the leading platoon would be granted an immediate three-day pass. That meant free time, and free time was the Navy’s most precious commodity. The leading individuals would be granted a jump promotion from E1 to E3, for performance in the Challenge Course was considered to be the measure of competence and potential. There would be nine such promotions—theoretically, one per platoon, but if all the top scorers were in one platoon, they’d get it. Sergeant Smith wanted our platoon to get the victory, for it would mean a commendation for him and facilitate his own promotion. Promotion was another great Navy lure.

  The course was through the special Challenge Dome, which was made up like an Earth wilderness. There was supposed to be jungle, desert, mountains, lakes, and snow. Also wild creatures of a number of types, ranging from gnats to crocodiles. And a tribe of headhunters, who would be out to get us. They wouldn’t really take our heads, of course, but anyone captured and ritually decapitated—stripes of red paint would serve to show the cuts— would be considered dead and out of the challenge. The headhunters, too, had passes and promotions to earn, so they would be alert, but they had to follow the rules and could not capture any recruit unless he made some sort of error. There would be about a hundred referees in there, personnel in distinctive black garb, who would mark individual injuries and deaths along the way and feed the information into the Casualty Computer. They would neither help nor hinder us; they merely observed, until the occasion came to mark the dead and pull them from the course. We were supposed to ignore them; to ask one for help or information was to forfeit the course immediately.

  Supplies would be issued when we entered the Challenge Dome: bug repellent, croc repellent, machetes, maps, and so on. The wild animals were real, but we were not supposed to hurt them; avoidance was the key. “Getting chomped by a croc is line-of-duty-no,” Sergeant Smith explained with a smile. Line-of-duty-yes was okay; sometimes legitimate accidents occurred, for which a recruit was not penalized. Line-of-duty-no mishaps were subject to reprimand. The course was supposed to take about three hours, but anyone who got through “alive” within six hours passed. Those who made it in two-and-a-half hours got a higher rating, and chances were that anyone who made it in under two hours would be among the winners of promotions. Last cycle’s winner had done it in one hour and fifty minutes, with his buddy right behind.

  For we were to use the “buddy” system. We would travel in pairs, with each one looking out for the other. Loss of partner was line-of-duty-no unless there was good reason, such as the death of the buddy under honorable conditions. If two people lost their buddies, they were supposed to buddy up with each other.

  I intended to score well in the challenge, for three reasons. First, I was really getting into the training and wanted to prove myself in the field. Second, I wanted to help Sergeant Smith’s platoon make the best showing. And third, I had discovered that though E2’s were not marched in formation to the Tail, they weren’t permitted heterosexual roommates; that was a privilege reserved for E3 and up. E2’s could use the Tail, or make private liaisons and clear them with their units. It was catch as catch can, not an ideal situation; most of them wound up at the Tail, anyway. I had had enough of that; I wanted to room with Juana. I was not emotionally involved with her in the sense of being in love, but I did like her, and the rooming arrangement would be more comfortable for both of us for any number of reasons. So I wanted us both to make E3 so we could do it.

  I knew that it was important, in any competitive situation, to plan ahead. So I researched the Challenge Dome, learning what prior layouts had been. It changed each time, but there was a certain broad pattern, since lakes and mountains weren’t easy to move. What they tended to do was use different segments of the dome, so as to include patterns with minimal effort. I found out what the pattern of patterns was, and so had a pretty good notion what to anticipate for ours.

  I consulted with Juana. We had not met in the Tail again, for the Navy policy was to change combinations each time, to prevent exactly such emotional attachments as we were forming, but we met in our free time. After the first month we were permitted to wear civvies during off time, so I saw Juana in a dress and a feminine hairdo. She was lovely! She had filled out in a beneficial manner, and she had been well endowed to begin with. No one could ever match my lost fiancée, Helse, in my heart, but I realized that as a sexual partner of convenience, Juana was all that I could ask. She could easily have paired with another man, but she had fixed on me because of the difficult
contact we had shared that first time. We understood each other in a special way.