by Kali Altsoba
“Get the fuck up, soldier!”
She can’t move her legs.
“Move it, now!”
She struggles to her knees, then to her feet.
“Back on the line! Run the course again.”
She does, but she’s so groggy that the holoman stuns her and knocks her down again. He was behind a different boulder, prone and not crouching like last time. Her own shot goes wailing into air, way over his neon blue head.
“Get the fuck up, soldier!”
She can’t move her legs.
“Move it, now!”
She struggles to her knees, then to her feet.
“Back on the line! Run the course again.”
She shoots first this time, anticipating where the blue holoman will shift. He explodes in a shower of sparks and with a satisfying, electric banshee screech.
“That’s better. If you’da missed a third time, it was the red bag for ya.”
Tedi’s whole cohort is excited to move to heavy weapons in Week Six. They learn how to quickly unjam clogged, acoustic levitation nozzles on assault hovers and armtraks. How to manual fire a Mammoth main gun using jury rigged exterior commands. They get to actually drive a medium Mastodon and smaller Elephant, although they’re not allowed to take them off ground tracks and into hover mode. They learn to take over whole batteries of slaved bot guns, in case all the human loader-drivers are killed. Tedi and her mates enjoy driving real armtraks, not just running behind the simulator types. They thrill to the vibrations and rumble in the ground the heavy machines send shooting up their legs as they race past. There’s something primal in their sheer bulk and weight, an intimidation captured perhaps in mammut names that also tower over simple nitōhei. They revel like the youths they are, for the first time controlling powerful war machines that can spew out immense destruction and pain and death. Tedi really likes armtraks.
It’s not all fun and adventure. Recruits sweat so much water, and sometimes a little blood, they always piss dark urine at night. They bathe in cold water troughs each morning before running double time to a firing range. Then it’s 100 minutes of parade exercises and more running. Sergeants shout at them all day. “Forward march! ... Halt! ... Stand still! ... March!” Or they blow ear splitting whistles to call individual nito out of line for devilishly tormenting punishments. They make mind confusing, long distance marches in full kit, the intense and brilliant Carmé sun arcing overhead in the humid equatorial zone on central Daegu. Always, they come back at each day’s end trailing pikes of exhaustion. At night, they leap into another cold water ablution, eat greedily in a massive Doughnut dining hall, settle into rigidly enforced dorm silence, and fall into instant sleep.
They learn how to apply a smart field dressing. How much suspend to jab into a wounded girl you need to keep alert so she can help you in an ongoing fight. How much to jab when you need to shut her down cold, so she doesn’t bleed out. How much is a lethal dose and how to give it. They pretend to be wounded, carried on collapsible carbon fiber stretchers for a klic or more by squad mates. Then they switch places with the stretcher bearers and do it over and over and over, in ten klic circles of blisters and fatigue. They don’t know anything about Robobears or Trauma Pods or other auto medics of the kind their enemy deploys on the other side of the black, on multiple contested worlds where the war is. That’s not how Rikugun does things. Its machines are all lethal or ammo and cargo carriers. Get wounded for Rikugun, and other nito will have to bind you up and hump you out.
Once a fortnight, four times in all, they’re put on 48 hour combat stimulants and told to complete a hard run around the whole 124 klic base perimeter, in full battle dress, with all weapons and combat kit. They’re each given three salt tablets and an empty water bottle.
“Ya ken fill that at any ah four pumps along the pah’rimeter.”
“Where exactly, sergeant?”
“Ya gotta find ‘em.”
“How far apart, sergeant?
“Thirty klics ap’aht.”
‘How fucking far?’
“Forward march! March!”
They have a 10 minute window to refill at each pump before the water is cut off. Not everyone makes it in time. They curse dry pumps and the NCOs but learn the lesson intended: survival in this war depends on small unit cooperation. Next time, each squad sends its fastest runners ahead with all the empty canteens. In a relay system variation that Tedi invents, 1/4 of filled canteens are left behind at each pump, so that all the stragglers can finish too. Her initiative is noted and approved.
Yet, three times Tedi is made to wear a punishment bag filled with heavy, red laterite. Along with most recruits in WCB Three Company, her new assignment, she incurs NCO and even officer wrath and is ordered to carry a dead weight red bag on her back, while also wearing full battle kit. The first time she “wears the bag” they get her just for “talking in the ranks.” It’s true. She cried out when some lummox stepped on her foot, nearly breaking her toe under his steel shod boot.
“You! Yeah, you. The yelper. You wear the bag!”
The second time it’s for not saluting a lieutenant she didn’t see 150 meters away. He’s not much more than 20, and leers at her the whole time, undressing her with his eyes as he dresses her down with his tinpot but unchallengeable authority. He wholly disapproves of the new WCBs, and wants to break them.
“I’m sorry sir. The sun was right behind you, I didn’t see…”
“Something wrong with your fucking eyes, you go to Infirmary! But first you wear the bag! Speak again and I’ll double the run.”
The third time, she really deserves it. She’s daydreaming inside her physical exhaustion and drops a maser crystal from her ammo pouch while reloading. She winces as it clatters loudly on a cobbled section of parade ground, stopping only to rest against the fat sergeant’s black boot.
“Punishment bag!”
Tedi weighs barely 57 kilos, all wet. The punishment bag of shame and red dirt weighs 40 kilos, and the bastard NCOs water it down to add 10 more. Each time, she totes it for 20 circuits around a 50 meter punishment square. Four klics per violation. Always in the worst, late afternoon heat.
Each time, she perseveres.
Each time she overcomes.
But it’s hard. Real hard.
Each time, she determines not to let the dog cooker sergeant see her go weak in the knees. Or let it show to any NCO that the straps are cutting into her shoulders. Or let the lieutenant see that she’s close to passing out.
At least Tedi is never ordered to the “Dog House,” where they send recruits they want to wash out. It’s elegant in its simple brutality: an open sided, stilted hut, grilled base one meter above the blacktop parade ground. Looks harmless the first time you see it, but it traps all heat inside. Punished recruits must stand at attention inside the shimmering hut for a full shift, regardless of temperature or weather. Sit or squat or kneel or lie down and you’re fucked. Instant washout, which is what the bastard NCOs want. So stand up all shift, son. After, you go to the Infirmary for stimulants. But no excused duty. Which means you’ll fuck up again. And that means washout, or a lot worse.
Sometimes, they don’t want to wash you out. Sometimes, they want to make an example of you. So you go in and out again, getting weaker each time. Four trips to the Dog House is the limit. The 5th time you fuck up badly enough to go in, they assemble your battalion to watch you die by a firing squad organized from your own company. No appeals. Bodies are tossed in the camp incinerator, without ceremony. Then the Division HQ sends a set of broken “dog tags” to your parents, a sneering message that a son or daughter failed Gross Imperium. Failed Rikugun and the Imperium; failed Tennō Pyotr Shaka Oetkert III.
The first time a Dog House execution is carried out in Tedi’s sight it’s of a whimpering boy NCOs drag to the stubby, black shooting post at the exact center of the hole in the Doughnut. He dies fast but real bloody, slumping down into a dark paste of sand and red grease. After that, all ni
tōhei know fun time is over and that Rikugun training is damned serious. There are four more executions over the next few weeks. Tedi’s lucky. Her number is never drawn when they’re choosing cadets for the firing squads. She helps three kids overcome and survive, so no one from her company gets shot. Her initiative is noted and approved.
Not everyone in Division HQ is convinced the WCB experiment will work or is even worth trying. But the order to enlist women comes direct from Main HQ on Kestino. Even elite Gross Imperium has no choice but to attach a WCB. That doesn’t mean they can’t try to wash the women out of Kolno Barracks. Rikugun is testing the women especially, seeing what they can and can’t do, matching them against the males. Especially hard for Tedi, given her petite build, is a Week Seven drill where recruits have to carry a wounded man 500 meters. Tedi’s not sure how she manages it, but she does. She slings a big male over her shoulder and stagger carries him the full, required distance. He taunts her the whole way, making filthy remarks about her hairless body and what he’ll do to her later. So when she crosses the finish line on the blacktop she drops him hard, on his ass. Nearly breaks his tail bone. Even the instructors laugh.
“Fuck you, mister,” she says standing over him. ‘I must be a lot stronger than when I first got here.’ She is, but it’s more about character and will power. That’s why her instructors are testing her in special situations now. She caught their eye on the heavy weapons course and perimeter marches. They think she might be a NCO grade recruit. She has no idea. She thinks they’re picking on her. That makes her mad, and even more determined to succeed. ‘I will NOT wash out of Kolno!’
To simulate combat aftermath they take turns carrying each other through holo and real obstacle courses that are differently lighted and configured each time they enter. Craggy, with explosions and rapido blue balls hailing down all around, it’s pretty damn close to the real thing. Or so recruits think. Sometimes, an instructor suddenly appears around a corner that wasn’t even there the last time a squad went through, and knocks a wannabe nito flat on his face or on his back or his ass, with a low powered stun maser. The shot also sends the ‘wounded’ soldier he carries tumbling and complaining loudly. It happens to Tedi twice. Hurts like hell. She’s hit the first time in the right leg, second time in her upper arm. It makes her realize how completely exposed she’ll be if she ever stands up on a battlefield.
Tedi does better with personal weapons and small unit tactics. She excels in a mock trench assault in Week Eight, despite hundreds of e-inhibitors that interact like velcro hooks with semisolid holograms, snagging trainees as if to real jagged metal or broken trees or downed, burning machines. She darts and dashes among odd shaped, virtual wrecks and blockhouses. She climbs over or under irregular, shifting, jagging holo shapes, using her smallness to advantage. Bigger males get stuck when e-inhibitors snare and pin them against a jutting image as they work passage through the holo wreckage. They hold them in place to be kicked and hit by screaming, berating, livid instructors. Whenever the NCOs act like that to her, Tedi imagines them turn into wooden soldier clones with stiff legs and black hats.
At the end of Week Eight Tedi is pulled aside by a watching officer. Captain Leyla Celik is career Rikugun. She transferred into the Women’s Combat Brigade from the Women’s Auxiliary. Before that, she was assistant to Gross Imperium’s commanding general. She’s as tough as they come and used to holding her own among misogynist officers. Not least because she’s an extraordinary beauty who must wave off swarms of male officers who gather around her like fat flies around an open honey jar. She has clear, olive skin and startlingly intelligent, azure eyes. She’s unusually tall, finely muscled, and square shouldered. Her narrow, childless waist almost looks unnatural, and she has legs that go on to sundown. Her full and perfect figure is revealed to Tedi by a taut, form hugging uniform that finds every sensuous, womanly curve and crevice of her athletic and utterly hairless body.
“You show real promise, nitōhei.”
“Thank you, taii.” It’s the first time anyone in authority on the black practice fields of Kolno Barracks called Tedi Shipcka a nitōhei, or second private, instead of a “newbie” or “dog cooker” or “pig dog” or “shit face” or “stupid bitch.”
“Keep it up and you could make jōtōhei in the WCB, maybe even gochō.”
Tedi glows with pride. ‘First private! Maybe corporal! Me!’ Something more. She feels a warm wetness between her legs whenever the olive captain looks at her, unsmiling but making Tedi blush scarlet under her deeply penetrating gaze. The praise from Taii Celik comes after Tedi alone, of all recruits in a 2,000 strong cohort, male or female, dodges every maser shot by the “chief sniping instructor.” No one ever did it before her! He’s furious afterward, apoplectic with rage and humiliation. Especially as Tedi hit him square in his aiming arm with a reply shot, barely a micro second after he missed her head by no more than 5cm. A hit would have stunned Tedi senseless, knocked her down and probably knocked her out. Leyla laughs when the instructor spins in place instead, cursing and shaking his numbed arm. Then she calls Tedi over and says what she says.
The chief sniping instructor is a superior marksman. Over the two weeks he has to train each cohort that passes though his obstacle course the dangers of being sniped at, he tags every private with a 1/20th powered down rifle. It has can’t miss liquid crystal sights, tied in to a dozen sets of triangulators. His maser is supposed to be set at no more than 1/35th power, but in addition to being the most accurate sniper maybe in the whole Rikugun, he’s also a real prick. He likes to hurt people. Especially women. He tags and hurts every kid who tries to make it through the impossible holo obstacle course he designed to bring runners only and always to where he waits, sights cool and golden, rifle humming. Several are hit more than once, always painfully. More than the usual number, after Tedi embarrasses him.
Other armies don’t exceed 1/50th power on training weapons. Not the titanium hard Rikugun. It trains recruits brutally, like it means them to fight, seeking what its trainers calls “combat realism.” Even at 1/35th power, shots send every recruit at some time to one of the Infirmaries that line five spoke roads running outward from The Doughnut. Usually with burns and contusions that are patched over so quickly the recruit returns to the parade square the same day. Sometimes injuries are more serious, especially when hit by the stun force of a weapon all the way up to 1/20th full power. After Tedi show up the chief instructor, one recruit has half an ear singed off when he raises his head to navigate the last 50 meters of the holo maze, and the bastard deliberately tears it off with a winging shot. It will take two weeks to grow him a new one, and he can’t take pain killers and stay in the course.
“Suck it up kid. Or you can start the whole course over when you get your new ear. Either that or you can wash out Main Gate right now, and we’ll send you down to Rudimina. Your choice. Make it now.”
“I’ll stay the course, sir.”
“Good for you. Go get that ear bandaged and be back here in 30 mikes.”
“Yes sir.”
Women are washing out at much higher rates than the men. Two girls from Tedi’s company break leg bones when shot by the a-hole chief instructor. They’re rappelling down a 20 meter wall when he shoots them both in the back. They miss nearly a week, so they’re ordered to start the training course over, assigned to an incoming cohort due to arrive in an hour. Some males get badly treated, too. One too nice, too gentle, kid loses his right eye when he turns abruptly into the sniper’s beam. Then he makes a worse mistake, bawling out of his good eye and whinging about the terrible pain and how unfair it all is. He’s instantly washed out, expelled from Gross Imperium. They don’t even Dog House him first, just frog march him to Main Gate and hand him over to military police. Tedi hears a rumor much later that the one eyed boy was shipped straight to Rudimina, to retrain as a cargo loader with 32nd Supply. She forgets about him soon after. He’s not elite like her.
The one that gets to Tedi is a boy she l
ikes who’s hurt real bad by a head shot. No one knows what happens to him after that, after the medics pick him up and cart him unmoving on a gurney to the closest of five Infirmaries. He never comes back to The Doughnut and Tedi never sees him again. The whoreson sniper never says a thing, but he smirks at the recruits more than before. The bastard orders all Three Company to run the maze again, after he hits total reset and it vanishes and reappears with completely altered traps, obstacles, and escape routes. He tags five more kids before the end of that day, including Tedi, in her left arm. That night a fresh faced kid is in the missing boy’s bunk. No one speaks of him again.
Most recruits are perfectly innocent, perfectly ignorant, and properly afraid. That is, if ever they stop to think about anything but the next hard task the NCOs put in front of them. Usually, they’re too tired or too busy to think about anything. They do whatever they’re told, whenever they’re told, however they’re told to do it. Including when to sleep, talk, eat or shit. But they can’t stop random thoughts flooding in when they take off their helmets in cavernous halls of The Doughnut, at the end of each day of brutal physical and mental training. After weeks of easy, exhausted sleep, insomnia is creeping back into dorms as everyone realizes they’re getting closer to graduation. And that means they’ll soon be heading into real war.
