C.R.O.W. (The Union Series)

by Richards, Phillip

  ‘Just got here?’

  I nodded, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You know where we’re going?’ He asked, as if he presumed that I didn’t know and would be surprised if he told me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied. Everybody knew, our training staff had dropped enough hints, and our training had been geared toward it. It was inevitable that the Union would return to New Earth to seek revenge. New Earth, a symbol of mankind’s future in the stars, and the first settled world outside of the solar system was once again to be ripped apart by war.

  Interested now, he leaned closer and others in the queue turned to listen to what I had to say, ‘What have you heard?’

  I blushed under the sudden attention, ‘Nothing, really,’ I answered, ‘Just rumours.’

  ‘About what?’

  I shrugged, ‘We’re here for a few days to pick up fresh recruits and supplies, we’re then forming up just outside the system before heading for New Earth.’

  ‘That’s it?’ He sounded disappointed.

  ‘That’s it.’

  The trooper sighed, deciding that I had nothing else useful to tell him and then everybody went back to ignoring me again. A sink had freed up anyway, and it was my turn.

  I shaved the tiny bits of stubble away from my boyish face, rinsing the razor blade in the puddle at the bottom of the sink. I wasn’t capable of growing a beard yet, I reckoned I could probably get away with not shaving for a day or so before anybody noticed. I never tried of course, it was drummed into me that shaving was an essential part of my daily routine wherever I was. Facial hair could affect the seal between a trooper’s face and his respirator, a mistake that on most Earth-like worlds would result in death.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing this morning?’ a gruff voice asked from next to me. I looked at the man shaving beside me, it was the heavily tattooed man who had switched the lights on in my room.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve got morning PT at zero-eight. Breakfast is at zero-six thirty. After that you have a ship’s brief while we work with the stores.’

  ‘What PT is it?’ I hoped my PT kit hadn’t creased up in my bag. We didn’t press our kit on ship, but we were still expected to look presentable.

  ‘Just shuttles, I think, shorts and trainers.’

  ‘Okay, thanks, mate.’

  The man bristled, ‘I’m not your mate.’

  ‘S- sorry,’ I blurted awkwardly, but he was finished and walking away. Another trooper took his place at the sink.

  ‘Work out who people are before you start calling them mate,’ the trooper said coldly, ‘He’s an NCO, and you’re a crow.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, my face reddening.

  ‘Get a move on, crow!’ somebody shouted from behind. I realised that it was me being shouted at and I was taking too long at the sink. I drained the sink and dried my face quickly before making my way out of the ablutions. As I passed the queue I saw Greggerson waiting, towel wrapped around his tiny child-like frame. He looked especially sheepish as he caught my eye, but said nothing. None of us wanted to attract attention to ourselves.

  I knew what ‘crow’ meant, it was a word our instructors had often used to address us on Uralis. It was used as an offensive word that stood for Combat Replacement Of War: the new guys, replacing much better troopers who had promoted, left having served their time, or worse, died.

  Thankfully nobody was in the room when I returned, so I quickly changed into my PT kit and made my way out onto the circumference corridor. I decided to find my way to the galley by following the crowds of troopers spilling out of the accommodation.

  The galley was around the opposite side of the wheel that was the circumference corridor, and as I had suspected it was almost identical to the galley on board the Fantasque. It was a square hall a good fifty metres across with long neat rows of plastic tables and chairs. The interesting thing about the galley was that unlike the smaller rooms on the ship it had quite an obvious curve, much like the circumference corridor, and could appear quite odd when it was full of troopers, some apparently standing at unnatural angles against my own perspective.

  On one side of the galley food was being issued to a growing queue from a window in the wall. Nothing on board the ship was cooked like you might expect, instead it was heated by a kind of microwave inside a white ration box, not entirely unlike the sort that we would be issued to eat on the ground. The box was often referred to as a ‘horror box’, which simply came from the expression upon the faces of people when they first looked inside one, or took their first bite. Nobody could ever claim that space nutrition was pleasant.

  I slowly inched forward with the queue as the galley slowly filled with drop troopers, the room resonated with the sound of their chatter, angry exchanges and laughter. I kept myself to myself, being careful not to make eye contact with anybody lest I attract unwanted attention.

  It didn’t work.

  ‘Oi mate, does your mum know you’re here?’

  I cursed in silence, turning to confront the voice from behind. A tall trooper looked down at me, his friends behind him grinning maliciously.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied flatly.

  He chuckled, ‘Well aren’t you all grown up now, then, eh? You ready for New Earth, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he smiled, though more out of amusement than friendship, ‘What platoon are you?’

  ‘One platoon,’ I answered.

  ‘One platoon?’ He shook his head in mock dismay, ‘Enjoy that, mate.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  A ‘horror box’ was thrust into my hands. Startled, I realised I had reached the window. A trooper stared back at me through the opening, the next ration pack in his hands ready to be handed out. He looked fed up, and probably was since you only got microwave duty if you were being punished for something. His scabbed knuckles suggested his crime was probably fighting.

  The trooper frowned at me, ‘Well go on, then!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I made my escape whilst the queue behind me laughed.

  I ate by myself on a table out of the way from everyone else, occasionally scanning for my mate, Peters. I saw a couple of lads I had known from training, but none chose to acknowledge me. I presumed jealously that they were probably getting on with their platoons far better than I was, and in the end I gave up and concentrated on my food.

  I was quite used to eating space food after over a year spent outside of the solar system. Each horror box was divided into six sections, each containing a different colour slush that could be eaten using the spoon attached to the lid. The green one was the worst and I always ate it first, it tasted like peas and perhaps it once was - but I hated peas anyway - which didn’t help. The brown and the red sections were probably my favourite, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what they were, only that they tasted like some kind of meat. We were taught to eat all of the sections, supposedly they made up a perfectly balanced diet and not eating a section resulted in poor nutrition. I would never know the truth of that, but the horror boxes were surrounded in rumours and conspiracy theories. Some people said they contained drugs to make us more obedient, or chemicals that could be combined with a gas released by the ship’s life support system to render us unconscious in the event of mutiny. In reality, they were probably just really cheap food mass-produced to be fed to the millions of men that made up the Union military.

  ‘Mind if I sit down?’ a tiny voice asked, causing me to look up. It was Greggerson.

  ‘Yeah, have a seat, mate,’ I gestured to a chair, trying to sound nonchalant. Secretly I was grateful to have some friendly company, no matter who it was.

  ‘What are the lads in your room like?’ Greggerson asked, sitting awkwardly with his hands on his lap.

  I shrugged, ‘Alright I suppose.’

  ‘My room’s alright, I think.’

  Greggerson watched while I ate, then finally began to eat his own food.
>
  ‘Kind of weird isn’t it, being here.’

  ‘I guess so,’ I replied between mouthfuls, ‘But then what have we done for the past year that you haven’t found weird?’

  Greggerson nodded with a childish grin, ‘Yeah, you’re right. We’ve done some pretty mental stuff.’

  I could feel him thinking about what to say next as I ate. But I didn’t mind the poor conversation, it was still company.

  ‘You think they’ll tell us about New Earth soon?’

  ‘I dunno, mate. To be honest I don’t think anybody knows anything, it’s all just rumours. A bloke was asking me for gossip from Uralis earlier on.’

  ‘In the ablutions?’

  ‘Yeah that’s right, the bloke with the ears.’

  ‘His name’s Stevo, he’s in my room. Apparently he should have been dropped off on Earth a few months ago when Challenger stopped to re-supply. It’s the end of his five years, but they refused to let him sign off, though.’

  I raised an eyebrow, ‘Really? What, for New Earth?’

  ‘That’s what he thinks. Sounds like it, coz apparently there were loads of blokes who couldn’t go. But he was saying it puts all the platoons above normal manning.’

  ‘Extra blokes?’

  ‘Yeah, now we’re here one platoon is three men over strength.’

  I knew where Greggerson was going with this, ‘Spares.’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  There was something chilling in the revelation. In the military you were a number. Oh, of course you were encouraged to use your initiative and develop your own character as a trooper, but in the end you were still just a number. Challenger carried more drop troopers than it needed to carry because the Union knew that men would die, and so the more the merrier.

  I saw that Woody was walking toward us, the trace of a grin on his face. He was a big lad, far larger than me or Greggerson and probably in his mid-twenties, with a rounded face and a thick mop of brown hair.

  ‘Hurry up, you two. The toilets don’t clean themselves.’

  My heart sank, should have seen that one coming. Even in space you had to clean the ablutions, and conveniently the platoon now had extra pairs of hands to help out.

  ‘We’re just finishing off,’ I said, trying to sound like it didn’t bother me.

  ‘Well hurry up, coz I’m not doing it.’

  So there we ended up, on our first day aboard a warship orbiting a planet in a star system light years from Earth, cleaning out toilets and sinks like we’d done everywhere else. All five of us new lads had been rounded up for the task and had been left alone to do the job without help.

  ‘This is pump,’ Gilbert summed up what everyone was thinking.

  That was when the doors to the ablutions slid open. I only had a couple of seconds to see as a gang of troopers charged into the room wearing respirators to hide their faces, each with a pillowslip filled with boots slung over his shoulder like a crude weapon.

  None of us had time to defend ourselves, we were quickly overwhelmed by a flurry of blows that forced me to fall to the ground and curl into a ball. I didn’t say a word, I just took it. What else could I do?

  ‘Welcome to Challenger, crow bags!’ Somebody jeered.

  They were gone as suddenly as they came, whooping and laughing as they made their exit from the ablutions, leaving us battered and bruised on the half-mopped floor.

  Welcome to Challenger, I thought, Home sweet home.

  4: PT

  The other new lads, including me, followed the platoon to a circumference corridor at the stern end of the ship, our battered sides still smarting. I pretended it didn’t hurt, not wanting to give anybody the satisfaction of seeing me in pain. Occasionally somebody in the crowd would look over at us whilst we walked and smile. They whispered amongst each other, no doubt talking about what they could do to us next. I tried to ignore them and focused my mind on what was coming up instead; my first fitness session with my new platoon.

  Physical Training for troopers on board a troopship was a serious business for obvious reasons. Without constant training a company could rapidly become unfit, and so their ability to fight would suffer as a consequence. The age old saying went ‘a drop of sweat in training is worth a pint of blood on the battlefield,’ and it was true. Not only did poor fitness affect our ability to run and to fight, it also increased the risk of medical complications during the high G-forces of a drop or caused problems for us breathing with the respirator.

  There were two types of fitness training carried out on ship. The first was gym sessions using the comprehensive equipment kept in the ship’s gymnasium. The problem with the array of machines, however, was that no matter how good they were they couldn’t replicate the true motions of running - which was something we would do a lot of by the very nature of our job as dropship infantry - and they also became awfully boring.

  The solution to this was the second option - running. Because the ship had so many circumference corridors it was easy for the Physical Training Instructors to close one of them off and get us to run around them. Still sounds boring, right? Well, it was the job of the PTIs to make PT the opposite of boring - as absolutely horrible a thrashing as they could make it.

  It was enough to make me forget my bruised body seeing our PTI for the first time though. Even in battalion they fulfilled their stereotype, with slick gelled hair - how did they get it up to the ship anyway, and more importantly - why? And their unnecessarily tight t-shirts that barely contained their bulging muscles.

  ‘We’ll be doing shuttle runs today gents, relatively simple,’ the PTI rubbed his palms together gleefully in anticipation of the session he had planned for us, ‘Nobody is to jog around the corridor. Sprint the whole way. I’ll be watching you, so don’t cheat! Cheating equals pain!’

  We listened intently, jogging on the spot to warm our muscles up.

  Not intently enough, apparently, ‘Am I boring you…?’ A mischievous smirk grew on the PTIs face.

  We shook our heads, all thirty or so of us. Somebody chuckled from within the huddle, knowing full well that we were to be thrashed whether we looked interested or not.

  ‘Oh, so now you think it’s funny - two laps sound funny?’

  ‘Yes, Staff,’ somebody replied.

  The PTI smiled. It was all part of the session, he was going to send us anyway. I never fully understood how a PTIs mind worked, and I probably never would.

  ‘Two laps, then. Last fifteen go again...GO!’

  We sprinted around the corridor and my battered body protested painfully as I went. I focused on rotating the giant wheel that was Challenger with my feet as I desperately tried to get to the front of the pack. Although they had spent four months on ship from Earth, and then a whole week of shore leave on Uralis, the platoon were surprisingly fit. Instead of being right at the front as I had expected to be I found myself fighting to stay in with the middle of the pack.

  The PTI appeared again over the horizon, calling out to us as we ran, ‘Come on, let’s go, don’t be the last fifteen and go again! It pays to be a winner, gents! Get up there, you!’ The PTI shouted at me as I passed him for my second lap as fast as my legs would take me, trying to overtake the man in front.

  I pushed myself harder, as it was the first time I had taken part in fitness with my platoon I was eager to show off how fit I was, but in the end I only managed to just scrape in with the first fifteen. The remainder were sent around again as I fought to regain my breath.

  ‘You’re crow, aren’t you?’ The PTI was talking to me, I realised, and I straightened to attention automatically, as had been drummed into me by months at the mercy of the training staff on Uralis.

  ‘Yes, Staff!’

  ‘You should be at the front, then, shouldn’t you,’ he scolded.

  ‘Yes, Staff,’ I panted.

  Out of all of the new arrivals only me and Greggerson had managed to avoid going round the corridor again, but I doubted it would be wise to mention that to the P
TI. Why was I the one being gripped?

  Once the unlucky fifteen had finished their second lap and stood gasping for breath, the PTI began the explanation of his PT session. We were lined along the wall in two ranks and paired off. The man stood at the front of the pair was the number one and the man behind was the number two. The number one did a lap of the corridor, whilst the number two performed an exercise dictated by the PTI, press-ups for instance.

  ‘Nice and simple, today, gents,’ the PTI summarised, ‘Let’s burn some of that shore leave off them bellies!’

  I was the number one, so it was me who would run first while my partner exercised.

  ‘You better be fast, man,’ my partner threatened from behind, ‘Or you and me will fall out big time.’

  ‘Number two’s will be doing wide arm press-ups! In position - ready!’

  The number two’s dropped to the ground and adopted the wide arm press up position, ‘One lap! Stand by………..’ we braced ourselves to run, ‘……..GO!’

  Half of the platoon, including me, sprinted around the corridor as our partners did press-ups. The idea was that the fear of letting down your team mate drove you to push even harder than you might normally, because the faster you were the less exercises he had to do. It was a simple yet effective method of getting troopers to annihilate themselves whilst the PTI barely had to do a thing.

  ‘Every single day we do this,’ the young blonde lad from my room moaned to me as we ran.

  ‘You must be sick of it,’ I replied between gasps.

  ‘Shut up!’ a young skinny man hissed from beside me. I shook my head in disappointment at myself, I should know better than to talk during PT. If I had the breath to talk it meant I wasn’t working hard enough.

  The PTI emerged over the horizon again along with the line of troopers in the press up position.

  ‘All the way in!’ he called, ‘Don’t jack on your mate!’