Old Man's War

by John Scalzi

  I would. I did. Asshole spewed out details at high speed on each recruit as I ran. By the time I made it to the comm tower, I had narrowed the list to twenty candidates; by the time I was nearing the base, I’d parceled out the entire platoon among squad leaders and sent mail to each of the five new squad leaders to meet me at the mess hall. That BrainPal was certainly beginning to come in handy.

  I also noted that I managed to make it back to base in fifty-five minutes, and I hadn’t passed any other recruits on the way back. I consulted Asshole and discovered that the slowest of the recruits (one of the former Marines, ironically) had clocked in at fifty-eight minutes thirteen seconds. We wouldn’t be running to the comm tower tomorrow, or at least not because we were slow. I didn’t doubt Sergeant Ruiz’s ability to find another excuse, however. I was just hoping not to be the one to give it to him.

  The five recruits saw me and Alan coming and snapped, more or less, to attention. Three of them saluted immediately, followed somewhat sheepishly by the other two. I saluted back and smiled. “Don’t fret it,” I said to the two who lagged. “This is new to me, too. Come on, let’s get in line and talk while we eat.”

  “Do you want me to light out?” Alan asked me while we were in line. “You’ve probably got a lot to cover with these guys.”

  “No,” I said. “I’d like you there. I want your opinion on these guys. Also, I have news for you, you’re my second in command in our own squad. And since I’ve got a whole platoon to babysit, that means you’re really going to be in charge of it. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “I can handle it,” Alan said, smiling. “Thanks for putting me in your squad.”

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s the point of being in charge if you can’t indulge in pointless favoritism. Besides, when I go down, you’ll be there to cushion my fall.”

  “That’s me,” Alan said. “Your military career air bag.”

  The mess hall was packed but the seven of us managed to commandeer a table. “Introductions,” I said. “Let’s know each other’s names. I’m John Perry, and for the moment at least I’m platoon leader. This is my squad’s second in command, Alan Rosenthal.”

  “Angela Merchant,” said the woman immediately across from me. “Of Trenton, New Jersey.”

  “Terry Duncan,” said the fellow next to her. “Missoula, Montana.”

  “Mark Jackson. St. Louis.”

  “Sarah O’Connell. Boston.”

  “Martin Garabedian. Sunny Fresno, California.”

  “Well, aren’t we geographically diverse,” I said. That got a chuckle, which was good. “I’ll be quick about this, since if I spend any amount of time on this it’ll be clear that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. Basically, you five got chosen because there’s something in your history that suggests that you’d be able to handle being a squad leader. I chose Angela because she was a CEO. Terry ran a cattle ranch. Mark was a colonel in the army, and with all respect to Sergeant Ruiz, I actually do think that’s an advantage.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” Mark said.

  “Martin was on the Fresno city council. And Sarah here taught kindergarten for thirty years, which automatically makes her the most qualified of all of us.” Another laugh. Man, I was on a roll.

  “I’m going to be honest,” I said. “I’m not planning to be a hard-ass on you. Sergeant Ruiz has got that job covered, and I’d just be a pale imitation. It’s not my style. I don’t know what your command style will be, but I want you to do what you need to do to keep on top of your recruits and to get them through the next three months. I don’t really care about being platoon leader, but I think I care very much about making sure every recruit in this platoon has the skills and training they’re going to need to survive out there. Ruiz’s little home movie got my attention and I hope it got yours.”

  “Christ, did it ever,” Terry said. “They dressed that poor bastard out like he was beef.”

  “I wish they had shown us that before we signed up,” Angela said. “I might have decided to stay old.”

  “It’s war,” Mark said. “It’s what happens.”

  “Let’s just do what we can to make sure our guys make it through things like that,” I said. “Now, I’ve cut the platoon into six squads of ten. I’m top of A squad; Angela, you have B; Terry, C; Mark, D; Sarah, E; and Martin, F. I’ve given you permission to examine your recruit files with your BrainPal; choose your second in command and send me the details by lunch today. Between the two of you, keep discipline and training going smoothly; from my point of view, my whole reason for selecting you folks is so I don’t have anything to do.”

  “Except run your own squad,” Martin said.

  “That’s where I come in,” Alan said.

  “Let’s meet every day at lunch,” I said. “We’ll take other meals with our squads. If you have something that needs my attention, of course contact me immediately. But I do expect you to attempt to solve as many problems as you can by yourself. Like I said, I’m not planning on having a hard-ass style, but for better or worse, I am the platoon leader, so what I say goes. If I feel you’re not measuring up, I’m going to let you know first, and then if that doesn’t work I’m going to replace you. It’s not personal, it’s making sure we all get the training we need to live out here. Everyone good with that?” Nods all around.

  “Excellent,” I said, and held up my tumbler. “Then let’s toast to the 63rd Training Platoon. Here’s to making it through in one piece.” We clunked our tumblers together and then got to eating and chatting. Things were looking up, I thought.

  It didn’t take long to change that opinion.

  EIGHT

  The day on Beta Pyxis is twenty-two hours thirteen minutes twenty-four seconds long. We got two of those hours to sleep.

  I discovered this charming fact on our first night, when Asshole blasted me with a piercing siren that jolted me awake so quickly I fell out of my bunk, which was, of course, the top bunk. After checking to make sure my nose wasn’t broken, I read the text floating in my skull.

  Platoon Leader Perry, this is to inform you that you have—and here there was a number, at that second being one minute and forty-eight seconds and counting down—until Master Sergeant Ruiz and his assistants enter your barracks. You are expected to have your platoon awake and at attention when they enter. Any recruits not at attention will be disciplined and noted against your record.

  I immediately forwarded the message to my squad leaders through the communication grouping I had created for them the day before, sent a general alarm signal to the platoon’s BrainPals, and hit the barrack lights. There were a few amusing seconds as every recruit in the platoon jerked awake to a blast of noise that only he or she could hear. Most leaped out of bed, deeply disoriented; I and the squad leaders grabbed the ones still lying down and yanked them out onto the floor. Within a minute we had everyone up and at attention, and the remaining few seconds were spent convincing a few particularly slow recruits that now was not the time to pee or dress or do anything but stand there and not piss off Ruiz when he came through the door.

  Not that it mattered. “For fuck’s sake,” Ruiz declared. “Perry!”

  “Yes, Master Sergeant!”

  “What the hell were you doing for your two-minute warning? Jerking off? Your platoon is unready! They are not dressed for the exertions to which they will soon be tasked! What is your excuse?”

  “Master Sergeant, the message stated that the platoon was required to be at attention when you and your staff arrived! It did not specify the need to dress!”

  “Christ, Perry! Don’t you assume that being dressed is part of being at attention?”

  “I would not presume to assume, Master Sergeant!”

  “’Presume to assume’? Are you being a smartass, Perry?”

  “No, Master Sergeant!”

  “Well, presume to get your platoon out to the parade ground, Perry. You have forty-five seconds. Move!”

  “A squad!” I bellowed an
d ran at the same time, hoping to God my squad was following directly behind me. As I went through the door, I heard Angela hollering at B squad to follow her; I had chosen her well. We made it to the parade grounds, my squad forming in a line directly behind me. Angela formed her line directly to my right, with Terry and the rest forming subsequently. The last man of F squad formed up at the forty-four-second mark. Amazing. Around the parade grounds, other recruit platoons were also forming up, also in the same state of undress as the 63rd. I felt briefly relieved.

  Ruiz strolled up momentarily, trailed by his two assistants. “Perry! What is the time!”

  I accessed my BrainPal. “Oh one hundred local time, Master Sergeant!”

  “Outstanding, Perry. You can tell time. What time was lights out?”

  “Twenty-one hundred, Master Sergeant!”

  “Correct again! Now some of you may be wondering why we’re getting you up and running on two hours of sleep. Are we cruel? Sadistic? Trying to break you down? Yes we are. But these are not the reasons we have awakened you. The reason is simply this—you don’t need any more sleep. Thanks to these pretty new bodies of yours, you get all the sleep you need in two hours! You’ve been sleeping eight hours a night because that’s what you’re used to. No longer, ladies and gentlemen. All that sleep is wasting my time. Two hours is all you need, so from now on, two hours is all you will get.

  “Now, then. Who can tell me why I had you run those twenty klicks in an hour yesterday?”

  One recruit raised his hand. “Yes, Thompson?” Ruiz said. Either he had memorized the names of every platoon recruit, or he had his BrainPal on, providing him the information. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to which it was.

  “Master Sergeant, you had us run because you hate each of us on an individual basis!”

  “Excellent response, Thompson. However, you are only partially correct. I had you run twenty klicks in an hour because you can. Even the slowest of you finished the run two minutes under the cutoff time. That means that without training, without even a hint of real effort, every single one of you bastards can keep pace with Olympic gold medalists back on Earth.

  “And do you know why that is? Do you? It’s because none of you is human anymore. You’re better. You just don’t know it yet. Shit, you spent a week bouncing off the walls of a spaceship like little wind-up toys and you probably still don’t understand what you’re made of. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that is going to change. The first week of your training is all about making you believe. And you will believe. You’re not going to have a choice.”

  And then we ran 25 kilometers in our underwear.

  Twenty-five-klick runs. Seven-second hundred-meter sprints. Six-foot vertical jumps. Leaping across ten-meter holes in the ground. Lifting two hundred kilos of free weights. Hundreds upon hundreds of sit-ups, chin-ups, push-ups. As Ruiz said, the hard part was not doing these things—the hard part was believing they could be done. Recruits were falling and failing at every step of the way for what’s best described as a lack of nerve. Ruiz and his assistants would fall on these recruits and scare them into performing (and then have me do push-ups because I or my squad leaders clearly hadn’t scared them enough).

  Every recruit—every recruit—had his or her moment of doubt. Mine came on the fourth day, when the 63rd Platoon arrayed itself around the base swimming pool, each recruit holding a twenty-five-kilo sack of sand in his or her arms.

  “What is the weak point of the human body?” Ruiz asked as he circled around our platoon. “It’s not the heart, or the brain, or the feet, or anywhere you think it is. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the blood, and that’s bad news because your blood is everywhere in your body. It carries oxygen, but it also carries disease. When you’re wounded, blood clots, but often not fast enough to keep you from dying of blood loss. Although when it comes down to it, what everyone really dies of is oxygen deprivation—from blood being unavailable because it’s spewed out on the fucking ground where it doesn’t do you a goddamned bit of good.

  “The Colonial Defense Forces, in their divine wisdom, have given human blood the boot. It’s been replaced by SmartBlood. SmartBlood is made up of billions of nano-sized ’bots that do everything that blood did but better. It’s not organic, so it’s not vulnerable to biological threats. It speaks to your BrainPal to clot in milliseconds—you could lose a fucking leg and you wouldn’t bleed out. Most importantly to you right now, each ‘cell’ of SmartBlood has four times the oxygen-carrying capacity of your natural red blood cells.”

  Ruiz stopped walking. “This is important to each of you right now because you’re all about to jump into the pool with your sacks of sand. You will sink to the bottom. And you will stay there for no less than six minutes. Six minutes is enough to kill your average human, but each of you can stay down for that long and not lose a single brain cell. To give you incentive to stay down, the first of you that comes up gets latrine duty for a week. And if that recruit comes up before the six minutes are up, well, let’s just say that each of you is going to develop a close-up and personal relationship with a shit hole somewhere on this base. Got it? Then in you go!”

  We dove, and as promised, sank straight down to the bottom, three meters down. I began to freak out almost immediately. When I was a child, I fell into a covered pool, tore through the cover and spent several disoriented and terrified minutes trying to break through to the surface. It wasn’t long enough for me to actually begin to drown; it was just long enough for me to develop a lifelong aversion to having my head completely enveloped by water. After about thirty seconds, I began to feel like I needed a big, fresh gulp of air. There was no way I was going to last a minute, much less six.

  I felt a tug. I turned a little wildly, and saw that Alan, who had dived in next to me, had reached over. Through the murk, I could see him tap his head and then point to mine. At that second, Asshole notified me that Alan was asking for a link. I subvocalized acceptance. I heard an emotionless simulacrum of Alan’s voice in my head.

  Something wrong—Alan asked.

  Phobia—I subvocalized.

  Don’t panic—Alan responded. Forget you’re underwater—

  Not fucking likely—I replied.

  Then fake it—Alan responded. Check on your squads to see if anyone else is having trouble and help them—

  The eerie calm of Alan’s simulated voice helped. I opened a channel to my squad leaders to check on them and ordered them to do the same with their squads. Each of them had one or two recruits on the edge of panic and worked to talk them down. Next to me, I could see Alan make an accounting of our own squad.

  Three minutes, then four. In Martin’s group, one of the recruits began to thrash, jerking his body back and forth as the bag of sand in his hand acted as an anchor. Martin dropped his own bag and swam over to his recruit, grabbing him roughly by the shoulders, and then bringing his recruit’s attention to his face. I tapped into Martin’s BrainPal and heard him say—Focus on me on my eyes—to his recruit. It seemed to help; the recruit stopped his thrashing and began to relax.

  Five minutes, and it was clear that extended oxygen supply or not, everyone was beginning to feel the pinch. People began shifting from one foot to the other, or hopping in place, or waving their bags. Over in a corner, I could see one recruit slamming her head into her sandbag. Part of me laughed; part of me thought about doing it myself.

  Five minutes forty-three seconds, and one of the recruits in Mark’s squad dropped his bag and began heading for the surface. Mark dropped his bag and silently lunged, snagging the recruit by the ankle and using his own weight to drag him back down. I was thinking Mark’s second in command should probably help his squad leader with the recruit; a quick BrainPal check informed me that the recruit was his second in command.

  Six minutes. Forty recruits dropped their bags and punched to the surface. Mark let go of his second in command’s ankle and then pushed him from underneath to make sure he would break the surface first, and get the latrine
duty he was willing to get for his whole platoon. I prepared to drop my sandbag when I caught Alan shaking his head.

  Platoon leader—he sent. Should stick it out—

  Blow me—I sent.

  Sorry, not my type—he replied.

  I made it through seven minutes and thirty-one seconds before I went up, convinced my lungs were going to explode. But I had made it through my moment of doubt. I believed. I was something more than human.

  In the second week, we were introduced to our weapon.

  “This is the CDF standard-issue MP-35 Infantry Rifle,” Ruiz said, holding out his while ours sat where they had been placed, still within protective wrapping, in the parade-ground dirt at our feet. “The ‘MP’ stands for ‘Multi-Purpose.’ Depending on your need, it can create and fire on the fly six different projectiles or beams. These include rifle bullets and shot of both explosive and nonexplosive varieties, which can be fired semiautomatically or automatically, low-yield grenades, low-yield guided rockets, high-pressure flammable liquid, and microwave energy beams. This is possible through the use of high-density nano-robotic ammunition”—Ruiz held up a dully gleaming block of what appeared to be metal; a similar block was located next to the rifle at my feet—“that self-assembles immediately prior to firing. This allows for a weapon with maximum flexibility with minimum training, a fact that you sad lumps of ambulatory meat will no doubt appreciate.

  “Those of you who have military experience will remember how you were required to frequently assemble and disassemble your weapon. You will not do this with your MP-35. The MP-35 is an extremely complex piece of machinery and you cannot be trusted to fuck with it! It carries onboard self-diagnostic and repair capabilities. It can also patch into your BrainPal to alert you of problems, if any, which there will be none, since in thirty years of service there has yet to be an MP-35 that has malfunctioned. This is because, unlike your dipshit military scientists on Earth, we can build a weapon that works! Your job is not to fuck with your weapon; your job is to fire your weapon. Trust your weapon, it is almost certainly smarter than you are. Remember this and you may yet live.