Welcome to the Marines (Corporate Marines Book 2)

by Tom Germann

  It hits me then what we look like: haunted. I used to be into history and reading up on what had happened in the past. For some reason, horrible wars were really cool to me. Our faces looked like those survivors from concentration and prisoner-of-war camps from the twentieth century. There had been more recent conflicts, and the footage of survivors that had been through horrible torture or other abuses looked like us.

  I don’t get it. We shouldn’t look so bad after a few minutes or hours in sim.

  Heck, when we went out and lived in the big wide world during “survival training,” we came back after two weeks looking better than we do now. I had not felt this bad then, and after about six hours back we were all looking pretty good.

  It was so hard to think, though, that I stopped trying. I put one foot in front of the other and, like everyone else, made it back to my room.

  As we head down that last corridor, I have the horrible feeling that we are being watched. I just know that we are going to be thrown into the next level of training. It would follow that, after doing a sim like that, they would have actual combat robots come out and chase us through the complex.

  They never aimed to kill us during this training, but I could see them amping up the robots’ laser systems so that we were burned. The fastest way to make sure someone learns is to hurt them. If they weren’t smart enough to learn then, they shouldn’t be in this system and I could see that it only made sense to kill them off to ensure only getting the best.

  Why keep failures alive? Even with the contracts in place and the fact that we would be working as high-level somethings in the company, I had no idea what they would do with us at this point. Office manager? Riiiight. We know all this information on tactics and how everything works. We are the highest level of security risk, even if they had spent something like thirty million credits, or whatever they used as money, to get us to this level.

  The best thing they can do is to kill off anyone that doesn’t work out now.

  I can feel the others thinking along those lines too.

  Then it hits me. They need so many of us to survive out of each training group. If some of the others die off, then that means more openings for the rest of us. Even if we are failures, their system is probably like everyone else’s. If they have eight positions, then they have to fill those.

  So if my fellow candidates had a bad accident… or if I just slit their throats while they were sleeping… I know that they would overlook a few murders.

  I’m standing outside my room door and shaking and sweating so bad. I don’t remember walking the last few paces and then I realize that no one is in the hall. But someone is watching me. I look over and see Mouth, or Kellye or whatever. She is watching me carefully.

  I wonder if she is thinking about where would be best to put the knife blade in. She could easily take something from the cafeteria. I gulp and try not to throw up.

  She looks really good and doesn’t look as bad off as the rest of us.

  She calls out to me quietly, “Are you okay? You’ve been standing there for a few minutes. I just came out of my funk and realized that we were both standing in the hall.”

  I nod jerkily and stammer out, “Yup, right as rain. I didn’t really see all those kids get killed. There wasn’t blood all over and everything is good. I’ll see you later, okay?” and I duck into my room and close the door. I put a chair up against it as the only way to really secure it.

  I know there are some other candidates who are likely freaking out like I am. I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to come and kill me.

  I stop and sit down, shaking.

  The last thing I had seen in the hall was Kellye’s face and she looked shocked.

  I had blabbed out whatever and I shouldn’t have.

  I need to get a grip. But every time I close my eyes I see blood everywhere.

  I see the bodies and blood.

  I want to cry and scream at the same time.

  This is wrong.

  Then I am sobbing. In the back of my head I can hear a voice saying, “Stop it! This isn’t you! You didn’t kill them!”

  But I had. Bodies torn and lying there all because I hadn’t been there to try and stop them.

  I stagger to my feet and walk to the mirror and look at myself. I am horrified. I look even worse. Every one of my features stands out from my face and looks bruised and battered.

  What have they done to me? Are the nannites out of control? Have the instructors decided they don’t want me in the program anymore and fed me some slow-acting poison? Or something worse?

  I grab the garbage can just in time as I throw up.

  I look up and see some puke around my mouth and I know I am dead. I just don’t know what to do.

  Then there is a loud BING! And through the speaker system comes a cold robotic woman’s voice. “All candidates will report to the main auditorium now.”

  In my mind her voice is an executioner’s and she is calling us for a slow death. I consider ignoring the voice and hiding in the room. Then I realize that they would get me no problem. I start thinking about how to escape and evade my way out of the complex to the surface, work my way to some portion of the gate, and then slip over and out. But that won’t work. The gates are heavily manned. I could hop the fence and then work my way through the mines and whatever else was out there. If I run fast and hard, maybe I can get away and find someone to tell them what has been done.

  Her cold voice continues on. “I will say this again. You will report to the auditorium at once for briefing. You will head there now and be sitting waiting for debrief in three minutes or you can consider yourself a fail. A failure at this point means that you will be shipped off-world to work in radiation mines or on other equally dangerous work for the next decade. Ensure that you are properly turned out. You now have two minutes fifty seconds.”

  The voice clicks off.

  I grab a washcloth and run it over my face and rinse my mouth out. I am still dressed good enough for a muster inspection, barely.

  I leap to the door and open it. Everyone else is just gathering in the hallway and look bad. There are a few people that are looking worse than me, but not many.

  I still feel like running away but it wouldn’t make any difference. We have trackers in our blood so they would let me get as far as they wanted to and could tease me by letting me make progress or just stop me by the elevators up.

  As the last door opens and we are all in the hall I see one of the guys look around furtively like an animal. His mouth is set in a hard line and he is breathing through his teeth. He looks like he would attack anyone who comes in reach.

  He suddenly takes off at a sprint, heading deeper into the complex. I figure that he is going to the air handlers. If he can make it in and get through the inside safeties, then he can work his way up an airshaft and getting out will be easier.

  A part of me takes off after him to escape as well. But it is a small part.

  I had already considered the airshaft but it wouldn’t work. It would take too long to override whatever is securing it and then you would have to wedge yourself in and climb all the way to the surface slowly. Even in top shape, if you made it to the top, you would climb out exhausted and they would know exactly where you were. You were done then.

  I look around. Others had been considering running with him. I can see it in their faces. We turn and start walking the other way toward the auditorium when I can hear a faint snap-crack sound and what would have been an almost scream.

  I think it came from about three hallways over. I guess they knew that someone would run and had us boxed in. Every escape scenario leaves my mind and I start walking.

  If they wanted me or anyone else gone, then we were just gone. They hold all the cards, like they always have. Part of me hates myself because I had given them the leverage over myself. Most o
f the rest were volunteers, so could grump about it, but they could have left earlier and still have good, high-ranking jobs. I am trapped into going all the way through because of my actions.

  I try not to blink as I keep seeing blood and I can feel the cold body in my arms.

  I have to tune it out.

  We all march into the auditorium and move to the front row and sit.

  I have the feeling that we are all feeling like we are going to be executed. Again, I can’t figure out why this would happen or why we would feel this way. We are a huge expense to the company by this point.

  This auditorium had held three hundred of us on Day 1 and then we had dwindled in numbers. Now there are less than twenty of us. I shiver, wondering if they had lied to us all the way through. Every failure taken out and executed.

  I shake my head.

  The lights are on and then Armour comes out. The scary, quiet one that moves like an animal that I know has killed people or aliens or whatever.

  She walks out to the centre of the stage and then sits down. Just like that, dropping from a standing position to cross-legged in front of us. She is fast.

  Her one-piece coverall fits well and I find myself having inappropriate thoughts while I try to ignore her icy blue eyes.

  I give that up and then try to look her in the eye.

  Her face is cold, as always, and her eyes are moving back and forth over us, looking for something.

  She settles on me for a second and I feel like she is looking through me. She knows everything and I have been foolish to think that I could run from these people.

  I am shaking and can’t stop the tremors that are wracking my body.

  She stops looking back and forth and puts her head in her hands for a second and then sighs. She straightens up after a second and looks at us.

  She is smiling a little and almost looks understanding.

  She clears her throat. “During your time in the last combat sim, the time was compressed down. To properly judge your reactions, your nannites and body mods were manipulated in a specific way that can be done, but it is not good to do this for very long. In fact, there are nasty side effects. I have done the same artificial swings in combat for up to thirty seconds. It increases awareness and reflexes in such a way that you are like a god. As I said, there are side effects, though. We do not use it for long and we are monitored for the side effects as it is addictive.”

  She stops and looks around at us. “You have all heard about sim addiction, correct?”

  We nod; it is an increasing problem and the government agencies say that one day sim addition will surpass drug use. The worst-case situations are those who never come out of the sim as their brain leaves them in an artificial world. They are unable to differentiate between real and fake, and it is difficult to get people out of that.

  I shiver.

  They had put us into something like sim addiction on purpose?

  It’s like the instructor is reading my mind. “The purpose is NOT to get you sim-addicted. The purpose is to boost your system to as close to reality as possible for that sim. Your mind is telling you everything you experienced is REAL. You will be able to do that with your systems later after you learn more. What would sex be like in a sim? Or whatever your secret fantasy is. It could be more overpowering than the real world.”

  She stops and her face goes blank. Then she continues. It is like she has turned off the understanding side of herself and her voice is a bit harsher. “The Corporation needs to know how you would react in the sim as a final test, part one. Within a few hours of coming out of the sim, though, your mind is suffering the effects of the combat which it feels is still going on in an advanced and accelerated format. But it also knows that you are dead or maybe horribly wounded. This is part two of the final phase test. You were suffering from post-traumatic stress. How you responded to that was monitored at every step you took down the hall. There is a large team tracking your thought patterns. Past traumatic events will surface in your memories and become real. The amount of stress that you were put under in the last hour that you sat in your rooms was tremendous, and normal people are never asked to deal with that. Yet you were just forced to deal with it.”

  Again she is pausing and looking at us. “Your side effects include paranoia, psychotic breaks and assorted others, depending on who you are. If you had tried to hurt yourself, you would have been sedated and stopped. After all, at this point you are the property of the Corporation.”

  She takes several deep breaths and relaxes, even though her upright posture never eases a millimeter. “When I gave you the orders to show up here with the timings, that was the final catalyst of the testing. You would either come or you would not. Now you are all completed this phase of training. You are still not fully in until you pass the armour training that will be occurring over the next stage. Even when you complete that training and are fitted for armour and shipped off to a section that needs replacements, are used to stand up a new armour section, or are just kept here in Sol System for special security for a future project, even then you are not fully in until you are part of a unit and you are evaluated by your commander.”

  Her mask comes off and she smiles. “While you have been sitting here listening to my explanations, which are all correct, you have been gassed and had your systems eased down. How do you feel?”

  I blink. I felt better. Much better. My fear and paranoia is mostly gone and I find myself shocked that I had seriously considered killing others so that I could make it through. All the thoughts that I had running through my head had felt strange and foreign and when I carefully think out the inner checks through my mods, I can see, over the day, how out of sync my systems had moved and now I am mostly back to normal.

  I shudder again at the thought of all the blood that I had seen every time I closed my eyes.

  Normally Mouth is the questioner and I always hide. But I have to know.

  I put my hand up but don’t stand as I don’t trust my legs to hold me. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  She looks at me and her perfect eyebrow goes up while she considers me. “Go ahead.”

  I take my hand down. “Why are you the one briefing us on this and not one of the scientists?”

  She smiles. “Those eggheads? They can tell you all the technical mumbo-jumbo on how and why these changes are happening to your body now and why. They can tell you not to worry about it. I am here because I have been through that when I was a candidate, and the process was not as refined as it is today. Plus, I have combat time in a section. I have gone through the godlike powers that we seem to have and know how it can pull you in. It doesn’t want to let you go, either. If you end up weak in combat, then it would be so easy staying in that heightened sense of awareness and to just keep killing the enemy like a god of war.”

  Her voice had been almost dreamlike and she had been smiling.

  The smile drops away; the mask is back and her voice is cold. “If and when you stay there, you will let your section down and risk every armoured Marine. You will let the Corporation down, all the staff that have supported and trained you, and you will be letting yourself down.”

  Now her gaze is like a laser strafing over us. It is like she is burning this knowledge into our minds, or at least trying to. “Never do that, or you are a failure.”

  She lifts herself up off the floor with just her hands and then twists so her body is parallel to the ground. She slowly straightens her legs so that her whole body is parallel to the floor and then she brings her legs down and then pushes off with her hands so that she is standing staring on the stage.

  She wipes her hands on her pant legs and nods. “You are dismissed tonight. Tomorrow you begin hands-on armour training in different environments so that the sim knowledge is in line with reality. My suggestion is to get a good night’s sleep as you may have nightmares. This is a warning for you
. Your body and mind are damaged and will recover quickly. Do NOT open yourself tonight to each other or you are almost guaranteed to force a deep-bonded connection with each other. You are going to want to desperately. Normal humans can be dependent on each other. Armoured Marines cannot be emotionally dependent on anyone or they will be flawed. Dismissed.”

  We all stand up and file out of the auditorium and head for the cafeteria. For some reason we are hungry.

  I want to talk to just about anyone, but that warning is sitting there. So we eat quietly, avoiding eye contact and finishing quickly.

  We then head back to our rooms. None of us meet the others’ eyes.

  I am feeling bad for how I had desperately wanted to betray the others to make it. I’m pretty sure that they feel the same.

  I turn in my doorway and see Kellye looking at me, watching me. I try to smile and nod at her. She nods back and me and then steps back into her room and closes her door. I do the same. I go to lie down on the bed. I feel like I will never sleep.

  The next morning I don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow from the night before.

  ARMOUR TRAINING

  The next morning we get all cleaned up and then head for breakfast. After that, the scary trio shows up to take charge of us and we go deeper into the complex than we had ever been before. We go to an area that had been restricted to us before; we pass through several electronic checkpoints. We are programmed in by a lab coat-wearing guy we had never seen before. At the checkpoint are two wall-mounted boxes on either side of a shiny metal door. You come down a hallway and then stop in this small space; the doorway is offset from the hallway so it is not a straight line. You have to walk up to one of the two boxes and get scanned and answer security questions.

  This far inside and security is as tight as it is on the surface. We have to do a voice print, a retinal scan, and they scan our entire hand. The ever-present cameras are everywhere, like in the rest of the complex. Here there are five that I can see. One per corner, and one all-around model that is ceiling-mounted. I wonder what other sensors and defences are here that I cannot see.