Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty

by Jean Johnson

  Some would-be wit once suggested that shaving off everyone’s hair isn’t so much a matter of efficiency and uniformity as it is a way to give the new recruits a common traumatic experience over which to bind them together as a family. I can’t say if it worked or not. I was too busy trying to get things right the first time around, so I wouldn’t have to waste my time on trivial repeats.

  ~Ia

  Ia nudged Kumanei and Forenze, getting them moving. At least they didn’t seem to be required to respond to the Regimen Trainer’s orders. Yet. Following behind Ia and the other woman, the dark-skinned male whistled softly as they entered the changing room. “V’dayamn. She’s as cold as a comet!”

  “Watch your language,” Forenze warned him, tugging her suitcase around the end of a gear-crowded bench. “I’m half V’Dan on my mother’s side. Don’t be taking the Empire’s name in vain around me.”

  “Then what the junk are you doin’ in the Terran military?” one of the other men in the room asked. From his damp hair and half-clad state, he had already taken his appointed shower. The room smelled of soap, steam, and freshly manufactured plexi, the ubiquitous, recyclable material that had long ago replaced less environmentally friendly substances. Bunching up a sock, the recruit slipped it onto his foot. “Me? I say, if you’re in the Terran military, you shouldn’t give a V’damn about the V’Dan.”

  “You tell ’em, Akhma!” someone else called out. “We’re in the Ma-reens now, sojers! Hoo-rah,eyah!”

  “You’re locosh’ta, meioa,” Kumanei retorted, giving the speaker a dubious look as she dumped her things on the empty end of one of the occupied benches. “You’ve seen too many episodes of Space Patrol.”

  “Not to mention ‘eyah’ is a V’Dan word,” Forenze pointed out tartly. She found an empty bench and dumped her things on one end of it, leaving room for Ia and the man who had followed them to the changing room. “And it’s ‘eyah, Hoo-rah,’ in that order. It comes from when the Terrans and the V’Dan hooked up and fought together during the Salik War two centuries ago. Try to get it right.”

  The recruit who had joined them gave the women in the changing room a wary, wide-eyed look. “Are we really supposed to . . . change . . . in front of women?”

  “Don’t worry, Lackland,” Forenze reassured him. “We won’t bite.”

  “’Scuse me? Speak for yourself. I certainly bite,” Kumanei shot back, before eyeing the men with a smirk. Laughter echoed off the plexcrete walls. “. . . But not during Basic, so you can relax, meioa-o. At least until we graduate.”

  Half of her attention on the others, Ia unpacked her kitbag to lay out the required change of plain brown clothes and boots, and fished out the necessary toiletries. She repacked everything else swiftly, neatly, and started removing her civilian clothes. Changing in front of mixed company had never bothered her; Ia had always shared a bedroom with her two brothers, back home. With the military’s strict views against unwanted copulation, she had no worries that anything would happen.

  Someone let out a low whistle right after she pulled her lightweight, long-sleeved blouse over her head. It turned out to be Spyder. “. . . Sweet Jovian rings! Lookit th’ muscles on ’er! Ey! Ia! Whatchoo do onna colonyworld all day, practice ferra bodybuildin’ show?”

  Ia looked down at her arms, which looked like they always had. She glanced up at Forenze, whose own arms were somewhat muscled, but not like her own. Craning her neck, she looked back at the green-haired colonist and shrugged.

  “I’m a heavyworlder. Where I come from, everyone grows up looking like this.” She paused, considered her words, then added lightly, honestly, “Well . . . most of them are shorter than me. But they’re all just as muscular, if not more so.”

  “How much shorter?” one of the other recruits asked. Mendez, that was his name. Ia knew him from the timestreams.

  She held up her hand at bra-level. “Most of ’em are about this tall, on average. Very few ever reach as tall as my shoulder.”

  Mendez held up his own hand at about the same level, eyed it, then lifted it to the top of her head, eyeing her dubiously. “. . . That much difference? If everyone on your homeworld is so short, heavyworlder or not, how come you’re so tall?”

  She shrugged, turning away so she could have room to shuck off her flats and remove her pants. “Good genetics, I guess.”

  “Whoa, looka’ that! Choo an Afaso?” Spyder asked, pointing at her other arm. “F’real?”

  Ia glanced down at the tattoos on her right deltoid. They were so new, they still stung a little if she flexed her arm the wrong way, but not so much that she noticed it. “Yeah, they’re real.”

  The spiral galaxy was the symbol of the Unigalactan movement; the sword piercing it, point-down, was the symbol of the Afaso Order. Below and to the left of the sword edge were two humanoid figures. One represented the mark of the Junior Master, the other the mark of the Full Master. To the right were spaces left for Senior Mastery and Elder Mastery, and above that would go the tattooed representation of High Mastery, the highest rank anyone could attain outside of the Grandmastery of the whole Order. She might one day attain Senior Mastery rank—and thus be eligible to teach all the martial arts that she knew—but she would never attain High Mastery. Not in this life.

  She could, but she wouldn’t. Ia didn’t have Time for it. The best she could do was learn just enough to keep herself and those around her alive. Nor did she have the time to fuss with Order politics.

  Her tattoos were plain black line art, lacking the full color found in the tattoos of someone who was a fully Vowed Afaso monk. That kept her out of the hierarchy of the Order, which would give her the freedom to give orders to the Afaso in the future, without having to take them, too. Grandmaster Ssarra would help see to that. He had helped her improve herself to the point where she had earned the second rank of Afaso Mastery, and he would help her to preserve and pass out her instructions for the future.

  Without him and his successors, her plan wouldn’t work.

  “So, what kind of genetics?” Mendez persisted, sitting down so he could unlace his own footwear. “I’m Hispanic, from a longstanding military family, but you . . . You got white hair, but you also got light brown eyebrows. And I never saw an albino with brown eyes, never mind brown hair elsewhere. You also look kinda Asian, but not really.”

  “Sanctuary’s a new colonyworld,” Ia hedged, stripping off her underwear. “They’re not sure if I’d been affected by something local while I was in utero, or if my hair is just some sort of random genetic quirk. All I can say is, I was born this way. White hair, brown lashes, light brown eyes, and I tan fairly easily.”

  “Yeah, but what’s your genealogy?” Mendez pressed. “Your ethnic background? You got any V’Dan in you, or just Terran, or a mix?”

  “My biomother’s part Irish, part Greek, and she said my father looked Asian, possibly Japanese.” Ia shrugged. She pulled the tie off the end of her braid and started loosening the plait in preparation for washing it. “Beyond that, she couldn’t say.”

  Lackland, still looking a bit timid about removing his clothes around women, stared carefully at her face. “Your mother . . . didn’t know what your father was? Weren’t they married?”

  “No, but my mothers were. My father was just some guy they met in a park one day while having a picnic to celebrate their second wedding anniversary.” Selecting the cleaning gel from among her new toiletries, Ia headed for the shower stalls.

  “That’s . . . very different from how I was raised,” Lackland stated. “Where I come from, parents are married to each other. And they don’t involve outsiders in . . . in that sort of thing.”

  Halfway to the showers, Ia turned back and leaned over the low wall separating the dry half of the room from the damp half. “My parents were first generation first-worlders on a backwater colony so far from Terran space, it might as well have been inside the Grey Zone. They had neither the time, nor the money, nor the resources to get to a fertility clinic. If
they wanted kids—and they did—that meant doing it the old-fashioned way. Since it was fully informed and fully consensual, agreed upon all the way around, I don’t see what the problem is.”

  Spyder clapped his pale hand on Lackland’s sun-browned shoulder. “Welcome t’ th’ real universe, yakko. Takes all sorts, dunnit? Whachoo need t’ do now is t’ grow up ’n open yer mind. More’n one road int’ Rome an’ all that, right?”

  Turning away, Ia left Lackland to process his fellow recruit’s heavily accented words. Grabbing a washcloth from one of the stacks on her way, she picked an empty stall, flipped on the water, and started scrubbing herself from head to toe. She was already accustomed to taking short, efficient showers, thanks to the joys of having only one bathroom for five people back home.

  It didn’t take her long to get clean and rinsed, nor all that long to scrub herself dry with one of the age-roughened towels waiting in neat stacks at the border between stalls and benches. Just as she returned to her waiting gear, a familiar, crisp voice called out over the noise of forty-five people trying to organize themselves, their new gear, and their efforts to be clean and dressed in a timely manner.

  “Alright! Listen up, Recruits!” Sgt. Linley called out, startling most of the men and women in the locker room. She lifted something over her head; from the small, silvery size, it might have been an archaic stopwatch. “ZeeZee, here, is the last member of Class 7157 to be processed and receive their dispensary goods. Let’s move it, people! You have exactly twenty minutes for everyone to hit the showers, dress in plain Browns, pack up your civvies for mailing, ready your kitbags for travel, and be lined up out in the hall, toeing the blue lines in five rows of nine each!”

  Clicking the stopwatch, the tall sergeant marched back outside.

  Ia grabbed at the underwear waiting for her on the bench. Her “plain” Browns were indeed a plain, dull, dirt shade of brown, unornamented save for the black stripes down the short sleeves and the long pant legs, denoting them members of the Space Force. All four Branches had their own distinct colors, brown for Marines, blue for Navy, green for Army, and grey for Special Forces, but all four Branches also shared the color black.

  Black showed they were all under the aegis of the Space Force together. She knew from both the news Nets and her forays onto the timeplains that the semiformal dress uniform for each Branch was that section’s color, but that full, formal Dress Blacks were what all Branches wore on special occasions. The lattermost wouldn’t be issued until they survived and passed Basic Training, though.

  For now, everything she wore would be either brown or mottled shades of brown. One day, her gear would be blue, then grey, but for now, brown. Freshly spun clothes, freshly molded toiletries, freshly minted recruits, all brown. Even her skin would end up browned by the hot Australian sun, protective lotions and all.

  A glance to her left showed Lackland still seated on the bench. He had removed his shirt, but was holding it over his chest and still giving the women in the room a wary look. She hadn’t probed deeply into his background since he wasn’t that important to the future, but she vaguely remembered something about him coming from some conservative religious background. A fact which would hinder him, if she didn’t do something now.

  Shrugging her bra into place, Ia leaned over him, putting her tan nose almost against his brown one. “Get into the showers, soldier. There’s no longer any room for modesty in Basic Training—now! Move it!”

  Jumping in his seat, he hastily put his shirt down. Moving away so he had room to stand and strip, Ia finished dressing. She spent a few moments re-braiding her waist-length hair to make it look tidy—not that she’d have it for much longer, but it was one of her few points of childhood vanity—a few more minutes applying the various patches issued by the dispensary, then rolled up and repacked her kitbag. Her civilian clothes she wadded up into a bundle, stacked her shoes on top, and dumped all of it into the recycling bin by the entrance. There was no point in shipping them anywhere for storage when she wasn’t ever going to wear them again.

  A survey of the room showed people still chatting with each other, slow to shower and slow to change. “I suggest the rest of you get moving, meioas! You have twelve minutes to be changed, packed, and out in the hall. Get your canteens out, too. We’ll probably be walking all over this place, and that means we’ll need water. Move!”

  “Who died and made you God?” someone called out from the far side of the room.

  There were far too many ways she could have answered that. Picking the safest reply, Ia pointed at the doorway. “Simple logic says, the more we pay attention and the faster we cooperate, the easier it’s gonna be for us. The more we slack off and the less we pay attention, the harder it’ll be. It’s your choice, meioa. Don’t cry up a meteor storm because of the bad choices you choose to make, when you could be making smarter ones. Eleven minutes left. Let’s move it!”

  “Slag off!” “Yeah, right . . .” “V’shakk that!” “What are they gonna do, spank us?” Laughter accompanied that last quip. Some of the others moved a little faster, but most of them moved at their own pace.

  Rolling her eyes, Ia finished packing her kitbag, remembering to extract her canteen from the rest and clip it onto her belt. They’ll learn soon enough.

  Forenze asked for Ia’s help in rolling up her kit again. Spyder wandered over, saw how she was doing it, and requested help as well. That took up all the time Ia cared to give, though a few others did ask some questions. Exiting with her bag on her shoulder, Ia lined up with a minute to spare, toes of her brown regulation boots just touching the blue paint on the floor, facing their patiently waiting Regimen Trainer. Mendez, Spyder, Forenze, and a couple more joined her, including ZeeZee and a man named Brad Arstoll. Him, she had foreseen in the timestreams.

  If she played things right, Arstoll and Mendez would end up helping her career. If she played them wrong, the two could become a hindrance. But that would have to unfold when it happened. Right now, Ia kept her eyes on Sergeant Linley. The neatly uniformed woman checked her stopwatch as a few more bodies came out of the changing room, raised the archaic timepiece over her head, and clicked it.

  “Time’s up!” she called out, her voice echoing up and down the hall, pitched loudly enough to carry into the changing room. “I see thirteen people out here, on the line and on the time! That’s thirty-two of you who can’t be v’shakked to follow orders. For each minute you slags waste in getting out here, that number will be multiplied by thirty-two push-ups, which you will all have to do. On the double! Move!”

  The others twisted their torsos and craned their necks, watching as their classmates scrambled out of the changing room. Ia didn’t look behind her; she could see it clearly enough inside her head. She also didn’t have to see the other woman’s stopwatch to know that Kaimong was the last to amble out—amble, as in to saunter, stroll, walk at a causal pace—and join the rearmost line.

  “. . . Three minutes, two seconds.” Sgt. Linley looked up from her watch, her dark eyes gleaming like gun oil. “Congratulations, Class 7157. Looks like Recruit Kaimong is your new best friend. He just earned all of you the dubious joy of doing one hundred twenty-eight push-ups.”

  Bodies twisted again, this time with their owners glaring rather than glancing behind them.

  “Since you soft-bellied sons of slag and daughters of drek can’t do one hundred twenty-eight push-ups in a row . . . yet . . . you will do ten now, and ten every half hour, for the next seven hours. Drop and give me ten! Count ’em out!”

  Her voice cracked over the assembly like a whip. Ia dropped her kitbag and herself to the floor of the wide corridor, angling her body so she wouldn’t take up too much room. Tightening her stomach, she called out the numbers. “One! Two! Three . . .”

  Others copied her, but their voices weren’t nearly as loud. Sergeant Linley walked down the awkward rows. “I can’t hear most of you sorry slags counting off. Start again from one, and make it loud!”

 
Ia pumped herself off the floor, starting again from one as directed. Her efforts went ignored as Linley lambasted the others, forcing all of them to start over twice more, until Ia figured she personally had done about twenty-five push-ups. Most of the others had done at least thirteen or fourteen, and some as many as eighteen.

  When they were all on their feet again, many of them rubbing at their arms and a few grumbling under their breath, their regimen training sergeant resumed her place in front of Ia’s row. “. . . As you can see, you survived ten puny, pathetic little push-ups. Beyond that, most of you are worth less than the spit on a sidewalk. You’re flabby, weak, and undisciplined. On the plus side, if you can survive your basic instruction, you just might make it as Marines. On the minus side . . . either you’ll wash out, or we’ll ship you off to the Army. They don’t mind taking in losers and rejects. This, however, is the Marine Corps! Right Face!”

  Ia turned crisply to her right, yet another thing she had practiced over and over with her brothers. The others managed to follow the direction without too much trouble, though she could hear a few extra footsteps as someone who turned left hastily turned the other way around. When they were more or less in position, Linley moved to the front of the five lines.

  “In a few moments, we will proceed to the barbershop, where you will literally shed the last remnants of your civilian lives. Once you have been given your regulation SF-MC recruit haircuts, you will place your broad-brimmed caps on your heads, fill your canteens with water from the sinks at the far end of the shop, and line up outside the doors beyond.

  “You are required to drink a minimum of seven liters a day, and that means whenever we stop to fill up your canteens, you will have already drunk them dry, or you will be instructed to do so on the spot,” Linley instructed them. “Right now, I want you sorry slags to take a good look at who all is sharing your line with you. This first row will be A Squad. You get that distinction because you actually followed orders. Next will be B Squad, followed by C Squad, D Squad, and E Squad.