We floated free as the force of our acceleration ebbed. I found myself at a small porthole, catching a glimpse of the Calysta as she spun away—from my point of view—from us. There were huge wounds in her belly, punctuated by the gradual fragmenting of her exposed bones as new missiles from the mantis armada continued to home in on and decimate the frigate.
Then the Calysta flashed. Her reactors going up.
I jerked away from the porthole, having been strobed almost to blindness. There was a human coughing sound behind me, and the additional noise of mandibles skittering and scratching out the mantis native language.
I rubbed my lidded eyes and then opened them, seeing through purple spots that it was only the captain, myself, the Professor, and the Queen Mother aboard.
We were alone.
CHAPTER 20
Earth, 2153 A.D.
MY TIME IN RECEPTION PASSED QUICKLY, THOUGH I RAPIDLY came to understand why Thukhan had been so eager to be out of a job. The bay sergeant occupied a more or less powerless, thankless position where he was punished for everyone else’s mistakes as much as he was punished for his own. Thus I became well acquainted with the various and devilish forms of so-called corrective training that the NCOs could dish out. This punishment went by names such as The Chair, The Plank, The Flutter Kick, The Cherry Picker, and on and on. Almost none of it hurt if you only did it for a few seconds. All of it was agony after fifteen minutes—though I considered myself lucky if they let me off in that short a time. And the corporals seemed to delight in initiating multiple twenty- and thirty-minute punishment sessions per day, for the smallest of infractions.
By the time Pickup Day arrived, I was positive that every muscle in my body had become a purple lump of overstressed, tenderized gelatin.
But I’d managed to avoid any further confrontations with Thukhan. In spite of the fact that I slept over the bastard every night. Mostly we didn’t talk to each other and we worked to keep out of each other’s way. Ergo, if I was brushing my teeth in one sink during morning prep, Thukhan was brushing his teeth in the sink farthest opposite me. And vice versa.
Those holdovers who seemed loyal to Thukhan—such as the always-grumpy Gorana—didn’t speak to me either. Though I was pleased to see that Cho, Capacha, and Jackson seemed to have turned it around.
All three of them had had some disciplinary dust-ups with the corporals, which had previously caused them to be held back for reevaluation. Through them I learned that, aside from the regular IST battalions, there was a special, supposedly “hardcore” training battalion where the truly hopeless cases would be sent. The corporals called it Alcatraz, and being sent to Alcatraz was a threat held over the head of every recruit—even the ones like me, who did their best to get things right.
Of course, no recruit could ever be right. About anything.
Most of the punishment was conducted en masse, with the entire bay on its face or rolling over on its back, legs scissoring and quad and abdominal muscles screaming, the corporal in charge counting off the strokes, “One, two, three,” while the bay had to reply back with the repetition count, “ONE”!
“One, two, three—”
“TWO!”
“One, two, three—”
“THREE!”
And so on, and so forth, until the NCO was satisfied that the recruits had been properly and judiciously pulverized.
It occurred to me—once, during a particularly brutal evening session—that none of us recruits had to perform the exercise. There was no gun to our heads, and even though I’d seen and been the recipient of an NCO slapping, cuffing, and even hitting a recruit who got too far out of line, nobody was being threatened under penalty of death. There was only the threat of Alcatraz, and, failing that, being sent home with a dishonorable service letter sealed permanently into our citizen files.
These twined threats—combined with the perpetual smoking—served to more or less keep everyone in line.
Through more medical testing and hole-poking.
Through hellish mornings and afternoons spent on the infernal cement in front of the hall, practicing the basics of marching, columnar movement, and facing movement.
Through quiet hours spent awake in the middle of the night, pulling seemingly pointless guard duty at exits and doors, everyone rotating on and off shift according to a roster that I’d had to fill that first day.
There was also cleaning. Endless, endless cleaning. Cleaning things that were already clean. Cleaning things that probably should have been cleaned a long time ago, and somehow weren’t. Toilets. Showers. Sinks. Under the bunks. Under the lockers. Between the lockers. Up and down the stairs. Up and down the hallways between the bays, and the gyms where we did daily PT, and the massive chow hall where we ate.
Meals. Now, that was a whole project unto itself.
For whatever reasons, the Fleet seemed to think it important that every recruit learn to function as a mess peon. Something—we were all told—which would continue long after reception.
So once a morning, several dozen people were selected from all of the male and female bays, and were sent down to work in the kitchen. It was work that on many worlds was ordinarily handled by machinery, but at Armstrong Field, it was done by hand. Either because of budget cuts or, as I suspected, just because the NCOs liked to see recruits worked until they dropped.
And drop we did. Lots of people had to make multiple trips to the triage and infirmary center. For blisters. Cuts. Dehydration and heat injury. Broken bones. And the mysterious plague of so-called Barracks Crud that seemed to have invaded our ranks.
On Pickup Day almost half of the group I was with were coughing, sneezing, and wiping their noses. Some people looked pale and about near to passing out. Nobody dared go see the doc, though, because it was rumored that anyone who went on sick call on Pickup Day would be left behind, thus becoming a holdover, and nobody wanted that.
I kept looking at the slowly-vanishing bruises on my thighs where the injector guns had struck, and wondered if there wasn’t a correlation between whatever inoculations we’d been given, and half the bunch of us winding up dead-dog sick.
Still, the air on Pickup Day was somewhat electric. Everyone had secured their gear in their duffels, turned in their linen, and given the bay one final, superb cleaning before shuffling out onto the cement in front of the reception hall—just as the sun was starting to peek up over the horizon. Those who would be held over had already been sorted from the press—and sent sulkily and sometimes indignantly—back to the building, while everyone else—including Thukhan—was outside.
There were three thousand of us now, a number which I couldn’t believe had been crammed into the reception center—and we had been lined up alphabetically by last name in a gargantuan mass formation one hundred columns wide and thirty ranks deep. Each of us stood at attention in front of our duffels, the bottom of the duffel facing upward while we each secured the duffel by its shoulder straps—to keep it from falling.
Corporals and sergeants with e-pads and huge wax pencils walked down each of the ranks, double checking the name on the breast of the recruit in question before tapping on the e-pad a few times and quickly marking a cryptic series of letters and numbers on the bottom of each of the duffels.
When the sergeant for my column got to me, he wrote the letter C and the numbers 414 on my duffel, then moved on without a word. I looked to my left and right, and didn’t see anyone with the same letter or numbers. Which was fine. During my time as bay sergeant I’d not been able to really get to know anybody, mostly because I was so busy acting as abuse-interlocutor between the corporals and the rest of the bay. So I was glad to have been relieved of duty, during a ceremony which amounted to nothing more than someone with stripes saying to me the words, “You’re fired.”
Now I could try to—hopefully—find out how the blissfully anonymous half lived.
Droves of familiar buses—which we’d not seen since coming to Armstrong Field the first day—rolled
up.
Men and women stepped off the buses. Unlike the reception NCOs, these men and women all wore sunglasses and were dressed in the ultra-sharp-looking uniform known as Dress, Type 2. Their black shoes were similar to flat business loafers, but shined like patent leather. Gray slacks were pressed, with the seams razor sharp. Similarly pressed, white, short-sleeved shirts all had closed collars. Over the obligatory Fleet emblem on each soldier’s chest—the emblem now reduced to a smaller brooch-type color pin, instead of the subdued, sewn-in version on the GFF—there was a crazy pastiche of badges and rectangular ribbons.
Each of the NCOs was at least a sergeant and several were staff sergeants or sergeants first class. Instead of soft caps on their heads—like reception NCOs—they wore a curious sort of black, round-brimmed and bevel-topped hat that leaned at a ferocious angle over their eyes; the hat’s rear strap seeming to be the only thing that kept the odd headgear from blowing away in the light morning breeze.
First Sergeant Klauski appeared and went out to shake some of the staff sergeants’ and sergeants first class’s hands. Then he went to stand up in front of the mass formation, and—this time with megaphone to his lips—hollered, “BRIGADE, AHTEN-SHUN!”
All three thousand of us snapped rigid.
“Okay, recruits,” Klauski said, the megaphone blasting his already massive voice across the formation, “I am happy to say that each and every one of you standing here today proved me wrong. I said that none of you—not a single damned one of you—had what it took to be in the Fleet. Well, look at you now. You’re standing tall, and looking good. You’re alert, and a titch leaner than when you first got to Armstrong Field. Doesn’t take long, does it, recruits? I look in some of your eyes and I can already see the change happening.
“Today is Pickup Day, when you pass out of my old hands and into the care of these fine drill sergeants from some of Armstrong Field’s finest IST battalions. These men and women are unlike any human beings you have ever known in your lives. They are harder than steel, sharper than razors, and they will not quit, nor will they compromise. Nor will they—I should add—expect anything less from all of you.”
Klauski stuck out a paw and swept his thick, pointed index finger across the mass formation for emphasis.
“Everything up until now has been rehearsal. An attempt to prepare you for your journey ahead. Induction Service Training is the crucible through which you will be taken and hardened into a new kind of being. The kind of being that is capable of defending our planets and our race. If you survive IST you will be passing into a new fighting community with new history. Fleet doesn’t just defend a single country. Fleet is truly international. Fleet defends both the Earth and her colonies, and is peopled by the finest soldiers you could ask for. From every walk of life, every ethnic background, every belief and creed.
“Good luck, recruits. As your first sergeant, I wish each and every one of you the best possible outcome. It’s all up to you now.”
One of the round-brimmed sergeants first class stepped over to Klauski, the two saluted, and Klauski handed him the megaphone before stepping away. The sergeant first class spun and put the megaphone to his mouth.
“It begins now, recruits,” the sergeant first class said.
“Each of these buses out here has a letter and a number on it, and each of these buses has a team of Fleet’s finest NCOs waiting to take you aboard. When I give you a right-face you will conduct a right-face, and you will wait for the drill sergeant at the head of your column to give you the signal. When you have been given the signal you will run—not walk, run—to one of the designated buses. Show some motivation, recruits, otherwise it’s gonna be a long damned day.”
The sergeant first class scanned down to the right of the mass formation and waited until other NCOs with round-brimmed hats, e-pads and megaphones had taken their places.
I suddenly felt like a racehorse in the starting gate. I itched to move.
The sergeant first class, satisfied that his people were where they needed to be, went rigid and put the megaphone back to his mouth.
“BRIGADE . . . RIGHT-FACE!”
Then he looked down to the heads of the columns.
“Drill sergeants, take charge of your columns and move ’em out.”
Immediately, each of the thirty drill sergeants—one at the head of each column—began to bark names. As a name was barked, the drill sergeants would point to one of the many, many buses, and the recruit at the head of the column would bolt off towards the vehicle.
Some people were a little too amped up, and tripped somewhere along the way, or dropped their very heavy duffels. They got back up, however, scrapes and bruises aside, and charged onward. As each column moved forward, I could feel the familiar sweat moving down into the small of my back, the sun gaining in the blue sky and the heat beginning to build. It didn’t matter, though, because I felt like I’d survived the first test. For one whole week—seemingly the longest I’d yet experienced in my young life—I’d managed to hang on to my sanity, and was now being ushered off to the next, toughest challenge.
By the time I was at the front, I was practically jumping up and down with anxious tension. The drill sergeant looked at me, the number on my bag, and punched something on his e-pad, then pointed to one of the buses with a line of recruits filing on, and shouted, “BARLOW, CHARLIE FOUR-ONE-FOUR, BUS NUMBER TWENTY-EIGHT, GO!”
I took off.
Ten steps out, I tripped and did a faceplant as my duffel swung wildly.
I was up in an instant—ignoring the pain in both hands—grabbing the shoulder straps of the duffel and hefting it onto place on my back, then running—well, slow jogging really—over to the bus with the large orange 28 on it. I was soaked with sweat when I got there, and felt it sting my raw palms. Two drill sergeants flanked the doors of the bus and were screaming at each recruit as he or she approached.
“DUFFELS ON THE FRONT, RECRUITS! DUFFELS ON THE FRONT!”
One of the drill sergeants had to yank a small female out of line and manhandle her duffel off her back and put it on her front-wise, so that it stuck up so far she had to crane her head around the side in order to see. She shakily grabbed the handrails on the bus and started up the stairs to where rowed seating awaited. I promptly took my duffel off and slung it around front, straps over the backs of my shoulders in the same fashion, eyes just able to peek over the duffel’s top. One of the drill sergeants yelled, “THERE YOU GO, GOOD JOB, RECRUIT,” as I stepped onto the stairs and began to go up.
For some reason, I felt a tiny spark of pride. Compliments from the NCOs had been practically nonexistent until now.
More drill sergeants hollered for the oncoming recruits to move to the back and take a seat. I did as ordered, not seeing the faces or identities of any of the others, stopping only when I noticed that I was the last one at the middle of the aisle, standing. I turned and slumped into the bench seat, huffing and breathing heavily.
When enough recruits had boarded and sat, one of the two drill sergeants onboard stepped over to the pilot’s chair and began warming up the engine. The bus was a multi-wheeled, multi-axled affair with an enormous motor, and I felt the hum and rumble through the seat of my GFF trousers while the drill sergeant who was still standing ordered us to observe absolute silence.
“Noise discipline,” she had called it.
No problem, I thought. I had no idea what I’d say anyway.
Then I turned to my right, to examine the face of the person sitting next to me.
The corner of Thukhan’s mouth curled upward ever so slightly.
“Eff me,” I breathed.
CHAPTER 21
THIS FAR NORTH OF THE EQUATOR, THE NAMELESS PLANET WAS arid and unremarkable—with barely enough oxygen and nitrogen to support a grown man.
A heck of a lot like home, I thought bitterly.
Hours after our ejection from the dying Calysta, our lifeboat had plummeted into the atmosphere. There’d been no sense trying to
figure out who was winning or who was losing. The lifeboat had no tactical data nor any theater sensors with which to ascertain the progress of the battle. Every once in a while lights in the sky would sparkle and flash—ships exploding in the emptiness of space, their fantastic vanishings observable even in the daylight. Human. Mantis. All perishing together in one pent-up orgasm of long-delayed, hateful fury.
Death.
That was the thought that most concerned me as I trudged back up the broken-scree slope upon which the lifeboat had come to rest. The lifeboat’s yellow-and-orange-striped parachutes drifted and fluttered on a cold breeze, their cords stretched out across the crumbled and rocky bluff. My old survival training told me I’d best collect the chutes and tuck them away. But now it didn’t much matter. Human or mantis, whoever found us, there’d be hell to pay.
I climbed up the side of the lifeboat and dropped in through the top hatch, closing it behind me so as to preserve the batteries that were keeping the interior warm. The captain sat with her arms folded tightly across her stomach—back hunched and head down.
The Queen Mother was still helpless, her disc a dead weight while the Professor attended her with the gentleness and focus of a lover. Had they, I wondered, ever mixed seed? He the drone and she the recipient of his genetic lineage? There was still so much about the mantes’ culture and society of which I could only guess.
The Professor and the Queen Mother were engaged in gentle conversation, her mandibles clicking and chittering while he held one of her forelimbs in both of his. I’d once asked him to try to teach me their alien tongue. It had proven to be an almost impossible task.
“How is she?” I asked.
“Not good,” the Professor said, his disc rotating so that he could face me. “The internal systems of her carriage have all failed. If we do not get her to a mantis physician soon, it’s probable that she will pass from life.”
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