The introductions were done by a lieutenant, whose name Jorl forgot almost as soon as he said it. That process started after they were called to attention, which the new recruits performed raggedly, other than those that were already in the military. Next, they were listening to a litany of names and ranks, that had little meaning to the civilian candidates in the group (formerly civilian now, Jorl supposed), although some were straight from the regular PU Army or Navy.
When they were permitted to sit again it was after the base commander was introduced, a Colonel Michel Dearborn. He was in fatigues, and was a tall man, who seemed a bit bulky to be the commander of an ultra-physically fit Special Operations unit, until Jorl caught a glimpse of the black exomuscle suit he was wearing under the uniform. That was when a sleeve pulled back slightly, exposing the black Booster Suit at his wrist when he pointed to a holo screen that contained the layout of the camp. There were two clearly marked areas, which trainees were not allowed to enter. Jorl assumed these were locations of interest for the TGs.
Before leaving the stage with the lieutenant and another officer that had not spoken after the introductions, Colonel Dearborn yielded the podium to an NCO he referred to as “Top”, also introduced earlier, First Sergeant William Crager. They were told they would be hearing a lot from him.
The first thing they heard from him as he reached the podium was, “Atten-Hut!” He bellowed, not needing the amplification of the extruded boom mike on the podium. The trainees bounded to their feet as the officers left the stage.
“At ease and be seated.” He looked around the room of ninety-six black jumpsuits. His eyes darted particularly to some faces in each row of eight, twelve in all, and he paused on each of those, for a second or two. One of the faces, Jorl was certain, was his.
Jorl had heard that the spec ops troops on Poldark had eye implants and IR detection capability. What he didn’t know was that his face, the other two TG’s faces, and thirteen or fourteen other men had been designated for Crager by his onboard AI, as men to watch for possible team leadership roles in the training unit. It was unlikely that even half of those present would make it through the entire course.
Crager thought three of the faces might be running a bit of a fever, which considering the typical immune systems of today shouldn’t last long. It was likely something they were recently exposed to, with so many people mixed from all over Human Space, and placed in crowded conditions, under physical stress for the last week at Port Andropov.
He started forthright, and blunt. “I know most of you are here to contribute to the fight against the Krall. A handful of you just want to become one of the alleged supermen of spec ops. That handful will not complete the training. They never do. If that’s your current motivation, your attitude will change or you will be weeded out. If you will not place the team’s goals first, and you try to go it alone, to excel as a superstar, then like a failed star, you will fizzle out like some sorry-assed brown dwarf. At some point, you will need help, and no team member will be willing to offer it to you because you will have been identified as a selfish loner.
“The Krall mostly fight that way, as loners, because they are physically superior to us in every way and distain teamwork. They seldom come to the aid of another warrior, and frankly seldom need to do so. No matter what you have heard about Special Operations troopers, and I‘ll tell you that many of the rumors you hear are true, we do have extraordinary capabilities that the typical soldier can’t match. However, we must normally team together to beat even one of the enemy warriors.”
He placed his hands on the sides of podium. “I doubt many of you have seen a Krall warrior up close, in detail. Or else you might not be alive to be here. Let me show you one of our opponents, we keep it in a stasis field for safety. Study him carefully.”
A humming sound came from the stage as a Krall warrior lifted on an elevator platform at front center stage, long knives in each taloned hand. It was frozen in a shimmering charged stasis field, poised right at the front edge of the stage, as a fully red-skinned mature and massive warrior. The men in the front row, feeling almost under the forward leaning figure, actually pulled back a bit from the over two-meter tall alien. It was that tall despite its slightly crouched posture, appearing prepared to leap from the stage. The red pupils in black orbs were glaring, hate filled, down into the center of the mass of seated men and one woman, frozen in electronic stasis, yet ready to leap into them and cut their hearts out.
“Unarmed as you are, this single warrior, if released, could certainly kill everyone in this room if we were trapped in here with it, the unarmed spec ops training staff included. If there were a single door or window for escape, and a few of you made it out, you might think you had survived. Consider this. It can run much faster than you can, and its sense of smell can track you down, even days later, and find you in total darkness. It can react and move five times faster than you can, and tear you limb from limb without effort.”
The room was transfixed on the savage evil looking figure. Suddenly, the misty stasis field flickered, and went off. With a deafening roar, the warrior leaped from the stage into the midst of the front rows, slashing left and right with blood spattering high, and the men there screamed and recoiled, or fell to the floor. Those to the sides leaped to their feet to run when the sound and motion stopped instantly, The Krall stood frozen again, with a human body held aloft and impaled on one of the long knives. The victim was dressed in civilian clothing, not a black jumpsuit.
“As you were,” Crager bellowed as the gory image winked out. The recorded attack, played for the intended effect, was a state of the art hologram. Shaken, but with nervous laughter, the men reseated themselves in any empty seat. Some had leaped over rows of seats to get out of the way. The Top Sergeant had been studying their reactions before and after they regained their composure and seats.
Not showing amusement, Crager made an observation. “What you just saw was a recording of an actual attack made on a civilian population, in an urban setting on Fjord some years ago. This attack was by one of the berserker warriors the Krall sometimes send there to die on a single warrior raid. This is apparently done as some form of punishment for the warrior, yet gives it a fighting death. This one was armed only with the knives you saw. It came alone in a stealthed single ship, released by a clanship from orbit. It killed or wounded almost two hundred civilians before it could be killed. Its single ship detonated and killed another hundred and nine people in the building on whose roof it landed.” He nodded as the men finally were reseated.
“That recording was not speeded up in the slightest. The movement of the Krall was real time, and happened as fast as it appeared that it did. That is what we are confronting. Some of you have been recruited from the PU Army, and may have been in combat before. This demonstration might not be necessary for you. However, we have many present here that have never seen video of a Krall in full slaughter mode, because the PU government wants to shield the public from such horror,” he paused. “That’s pure bullshit!”
“That Krall would have done exactly the same thing if it had been rampaging through a preschool. We are nearly useless animals to them, valued only for our ability to fight back, and not very highly valued at that. There are no such things as fair rules of war to them.”
He amended that slightly. “Outside of no weapons of mass destruction that can be used by us against them, that is. They certainly are not held to that rule, if you remember Rhama and that single Eight Ball impact.
“Hell, there were no such rules in human wars of the past. At least any that was followed consistently, despite international or interplanetary agreements to the so-called rules. However, humans did not aim for the complete destruction of all of humanity in our wars. Sometimes ethnic groups of humans have been targeted for destruction by another group, but obviously not our entire species. The only time we even came close to that was the Gene War, and that was unintentional.”
We have to fight them a
t any cost, and offer them no quarter, because we will not receive any. There is no surrender possible, no truce to be had. It is win, or die, and we are not winning right now. Not even close.”
He looked back around the room, and noted that some of the previously designated possible leadership faces had moved to a new seat, based on the facial recognition of his AI. The three with possible fever had not moved from their seats, but only the one in the center of the second row was a surprise. Breaker (the name appeared as he looked at the young man) was calmly sitting where he had been seated before, smiling, even though the four faces on either side of him had changed seats, per the AI’s flags. He must have retaken his original seat.
In fact, had he checked, none of the three (fevered) faces had even left their seats when the realistic looking Krall leaped from the stage. For Fred and Yil, the threat to them, from their positions midway back in the auditorium wasn’t imminent anyway. However, just as had Jorl, they instantly recognized the moment the solid looking figure leaped into the air that it couldn’t be real. It lifted too high, and went in too slow an arc in this high gravity to be anything but a hologram recording, an event that had happened in a lower gravity field. They also noted that its eyes were focused in the wrong place in the audience (too far back) than where it should land in 1.41 g’s, and the knives swung at wrong targets among the potential victims in jumpsuits. The final confirmation, when the heavy body came down, was that it didn’t actually displace or crumple anyone. All the movement seen and noise heard came from the trainees shouting and lunging aside.
Fred and Yil were watching the panicked reactions in front of them with calm interest. Jorl on the other hand, was engaged in physically holding people off himself, or deflecting their hands and feet from his face and groin as they tried to climb over him. He kept one man from diving headlong into the row behind him by his gathered jumpsuit fabric before the demonstration was frozen. He was amused to see that his own head, when he leaned to the side to see better, had been buried in the ass of the Krall’s holographic image. He erased his grin when he noted Crager looking his way as he lowered the man he’d held aloft, shortly after the hologram projector shut down.
After the demonstration, everyone was as awake as they could be made now, and two of the other NCOs had a few things to pass along in this morning’s indoctrination.
Sergeant First Class Robert Norris would be in charge of much of their training, and outlined their expected progression over the next few months, and what they would do later this morning.
Staff Sergeant Juan Eldridge was in charge of supply, and he was the company quartermaster. He discussed the uniform issue they would be receiving later that day. They would also receive some toiletries, but unless anyone had mutations that permitted facial hair, or had applied topical ointments to grow such, no one would require shaving materials. He noted, as they surely knew by now, that their bunks were in the same Smart line of materials as the fabric of the uniforms were, and the furniture was Living Plastic. There would be no training time wasted on issuing fresh bedding, since their bunks were self-cleaning and sanitizing, and never needed to be “made.” Forestalling the questions often heard early in training, he told them they would not be issued Chameleon Skins for the first two months, and the fitting for the black Booster Suits would not come for four months. It was unsaid, but there was no need to provide these more expensive items before the physical training and team building had weeded out many of those that were not going to last long enough to justify the expense.
When this part was over, they were ordered to stand at the back of the auditorium while it reconfigured itself into twenty sets of desks and chair combos, with side chairs, and sound baffles for visual and audio privacy. Then “hurry up and wait” went into effect as twenty at a time entered the cubes and provided a range of personal health history, and answered questions, some psychological in nature about fears they might have of enclosed spaces, high places, fire, water, insects or animals, or nearly any phobias. There were standard ways of addressing these issues, some of which were drug related solutions, and others employed mental exercises and preparation.
Genetics had eliminated many chemical imbalances in the brain and body hundreds of years earlier, but which could sometimes reappear due to environmental effects and minor mutations. Jorl was again one of the first twenty to be seated, going in alphabetical order.
As he entered the indicated cubical, he was met by an attractive mature woman who introduced herself as Dr. Lisa Markel. Jorl immediately noticed her accent in Standard sounded like that of Carson’s dad, Dr. Dillon Martin, and that of Dr. Maggi Fisher, both of whom he knew were from Rhama. For the first time in his life, Jorl wondered what sort of accent he had.
Naturally, he never considered he had an accent at all. His father, who had only a brief one-year marriage contract with his mother in Prime City, was an early captive from a small courier Jump ship, and a former Jump Drive engineer from New Glasgow, a Rim world. His mother was a mousy woman who was the widow of a man killed in combat testing on Koban. She simply wanted a child to fill the void of her two children left behind on her home of Fjord, when she had arranged to go on a business trip with her husband. Surrounded by people from so many planets, Jorl had a conglomerate of their speech patterns, as did nearly all of the kids raised in Prime City. A few TGs from Hub City were born of parents already paired when they were captured on their passenger liners, and their children often sounded more like their parents.
He decided to show his presumed sophistication, and said, “You sound like some people I know from Rhama.”
She merely smiled at him, and asked him to sit. She took her seat, a swivel chair that she angled to see him better, as he sat beside her desk. The desk was naturally only a simulated one, and the only feature was a screen incorporated in the top, which was a raised wide panel screen that only she could see.
Unknown to Jorl, the chair he was using was loaded with sensors that fed his physiological responses to the screen Dr. Markel could observe. It wasn’t anything like a lie detector, but she was interested in his responses to her test questions. She asked a number of health related questions, asking about any accidents he may have had, broken bones, regrowth procedures, and so forth. His answer to all was “none.”
Even before he became a TG, he was born an SG, and had a lifelong respect for the gravity of Koban, and a body well adapted to its conditions. He had not been a daredevil, but did display better than average coordination, and sense of spatial awareness that had led him to some carefully managed gymnastics as an SG. That skill stood him in good stead now that he was a TG.
She seemed to be looking at his responses with considerable interest. Jorl was being completely honest. Knowing in advance some of the types of questioning they would undergo (based on TG1 Taps of spec ops troopers on Poldark); they had decided being truthful was the best course, concealing only details, if asked, about their home world. Spec ops claimed not to be interested in that anyway.
She quickly moved on to the battery of psychological questions, inquiring about phobias he might have. He admitted he once had a fear of heights, which he had overcome with gymnastics training. True. Falling very far in 1.52 G’s was serious, but here on Heavyside it was only slightly less so. With his TG coordination and strength, he felt there was very little that he feared now. Again, as she made her way down the list of questions fed to her on screen, she seemed rather studious after his replies. She didn’t look skeptical, nor were there raised eyebrows or doubtful glances towards him, but she focused on whatever she was seeing. He was burning with curiosity, and had noticed that she made almost no notes into the system by keyboard, nor did she speak to the AI system Jorl was certain must be involved. She only tapped a scroll key to get to the next questions.
It didn’t take long, and in less than twenty minutes, they were through. She stood, ushered him to the opening in the cubical, and told him to speak to the corporal at a desk at the end of the h
all formed by the line of cubicles. That corporal handed him an electronic chit, and gave him instructions for finding the Supply depot, next to the auditorium. He walked out with two other trainees.
He took his ditty bag of toiletries, and his new wrinkle proof fitted uniforms to the barracks. He placed the toiletries on a top shelf in his clothes locker exactly as a chart told him to do, and arranged his two uniforms as a chart directed. He would be staying in his jumpsuit for most of this “hell week,” but it was already 0700, and it had been a slow day.
That ended abruptly when a corporal stepped in and sent the six men inside the barracks out to the obstacle course, to start their “familiarization” with a layout that was promised to grow more difficult as they progressed. Jorl hoped he wouldn’t get bored.
****
As Dr. Markel finished her fifth and final interview, she now had two examples of the same anomaly on her monitor. Jorl Breaker had been the first, and a Fred Saber had sent the signal levels from the chair sensors to the top of her display. The shape of the response curves themselves looked normal, and didn’t display any spikes in the answers to the psychological questions, nor did she or the AI find any contradictions in stated answers that failed to match a physiological response. For example, neither man had said they don’t fear stinging insects while their left or right brain said they really did. They had not tried to fool her, or hide any phobias. Actually, that was a slight abnormality, because her interviews normally found one or two examples of hiding a minor known fear of something, or a person’s brain revealed they had a fear or revulsion they were not consciously aware they had.
A spec ops soldier that was infiltrating through enemy lines and had a fear of snakes, or an absolute revulsion of feces in a drainage ditch touching him, needed psychological preparation to confront these emotions, and learn to control his response. Part of that control could come after the electrical nerve implants were added, and were linked through the AI embedded under the skin. If a person’s phobias were known in advance, there were ways to suppress an involuntary reaction, which otherwise might give him away at a crucial moment.
Koban: Rise of the Kobani Page 35
