by Rick Partlow
“You’d rather have been riding outside in a suit?” the girl on the other side of him wondered, chuckling so softly I almost couldn’t hear it over the distant bang of the maneuvering thrusters taking us out of the docking bay of the transport.
As the shuttle emerged from the metallic womb of the ship, the light of the system’s primary star whited out the image in the passenger cabin’s overhead viewscreens for a second until it adjusted the contrast. The ruddy brown and algae green of Inferno came into focus as the merciless glare of 82 Eridani faded in the background and I sighed in anticipation of the misery. They’d warned me it would be hot. The Underground was never hot.
“There’s your view, buddy,” I said, nudging the guy who’d complained. “Get used to it. We’ll be spending a lot of time there.”
“Eden’s just an orbit over,” he mused, eyes fixed on the scorched desert and steaming jungles below us. “Temperate, comfortable, a paradise.”
“You been there?” I wondered.
“Me?” He shook his head. “Naw, I’ve never been off Earth. Just audited it a lot, virtual reality and stuff. That’s why I joined. To get away…from Earth, I mean.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “I guess most of us joined to get away from something.”
“Secure for boost in thirty seconds,” the shuttle’s crew chief warned us over the intercom. “Things are gonna be uncomfortable for a few minutes.”
I made a face, remembering the shuttle I’d taken from the Trans-Angeles spaceport to McAuliffe Station.
“I’m Randall Munroe,” the lean-faced kid told me, sticking out a hand.
I stared at it, cocking an eyebrow. Shaking hands was a rich people thing. He seemed to remember that suddenly and reddened, offering me a forearm. I bumped it with mine.
“Cam Alvarez,” I returned.
“Maybe I’ll see you around down there,” he said, grinning.
Rich people sure were talkative. He sounded lonely, though, and he also sounded like a guy who wasn’t used to being lonely.
“Yeah.” It wasn’t likely, but no use bringing him down any more. “Good luck.”
Then six gravities of boost kicked us in the ass and we weren’t in the mood to talk any more. I don’t know why going-down boost hurt more than coming-up boost, but somehow, it did. Or maybe it was just worse because I knew what to expect. It was like a boot on my chest…or maybe more like every boot of every asshole in the Underground who’d ever beaten me down standing on my chest at once.
The crew chief had said a few minutes, but I could have sworn it was hours and I couldn’t even keep my eyes open long enough to look at the viewscreen, I just had a vague impression of black turning to blue and white, brown and green, and then black again as we crossed the terminator to the night side of the planet.
Finally, God took his foot off my face and everything was black clouds for long minutes and not one of us said a word. It wasn’t like we’d been told not to talk, more like those black clouds had slipped through the fuselage of the shuttle and settled in among us, leaving each of us alone with their thoughts. We’d all said our oaths and signed on the dotted line, but once the shuttle touched down at the base, that was it. Our old lives were over.
Shit.
Now I was doing it to myself. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head, the same way I’d used to when I was sleeping in the maintenance tunnels because the gangs were looking for me at my apartment…well, at the closet the government had given me and called an apartment. One was as good as the other, except for the roaches and the rats. The tunnels didn’t have as many of either. The tunnels didn’t have a door I could lock, though, and every noise sounded like someone coming to kill me.
It still worked. When I opened my eyes, we were on the ground and the belly ramp was lowering with a whine of servos.
That was when all hell broke loose.
“Get out of my fucking shuttle, you maggots!”
I hadn’t actually seen the man board the craft, but I’d been trying to find the quick-release for my seat restraints and I’d just got my hand on it when the scream echoed off the fuselage like a sledge hammer. I yanked down on it reflexively and the straps parted ways from the hub at my chest, but I was still frozen in place by the shock.
He was short and wide, perhaps wider than any man I’d ever seen. I figured he must have been raised in a higher gravity field than Earth or Inferno because there was no way that was natural. His neck was about as big around as my thigh and he was nearly as broad at the shoulders as he was tall and the green and khaki dress uniform he wore must have been fabricated specially for him, because there was no way anyone stocked that size.
“Are you motherfuckers fucking deaf?” This time, the bellow was so loud it seemed to physically slam into my head, a sonic slap to the face. If you looked up the definition of “furious” on the net, you’d find this guy’s face. “I said, get out of my fucking shuttle and do it now!”
Munroe was the first one out of his seat, and after him. It was like someone had uncorked the bottle and we all rushed out in a sea of arms and legs and wide-open eyes. All I had to do was step out of my row and I was pushed along with the flood of humanity almost tumbling down the belly ramp to stumble onto the pavement below. It still radiated heat from the landing jets and between that, the ambient humidity, and the glaring floodlights surrounding the landing pad, I was sweating through my clothes in seconds.
I looked around, wondering where to go, instinctively watching the surrounding darkness for avenues of escape.
“What the fuck is this sorry gaggle of useless pieces of shit?”
It was the short, wide guy again…no, it wasn’t. There were more of them, coming in from all sides, dressed alike but shaped differently. A couple of them were women, though any one of them seemed large and mean enough to kill me with their bare hands.
“Get your goddamned feet on the footprints, you worthless maggots!”
“Feet on the footprints! We drew you a fucking picture! Can you not even read pictures?”
What footprints? The thought was desperate, and I looked around in the air like a moron, wondering what the hell they were talking about. But I saw other people looking downward and my face flushed with the heat of embarrassment, realizing there were yellow footprints painted on the ground off to the side of the pad. I scrambled over to the nearest unoccupied set and stood in them, daring to take a breath now that I was doing what they wanted.
That was a mistake. My shoulders had barely had time to sag when one of the human public-address speakers ran up to me as if he was going to tackle me and take me to the ground, though his arms were almost thrown back behind him to get his face closer to mine. I couldn’t describe what he looked like, because he was too close for my eyes to focus on him.
“Get your sorry ass in the position of attention, you fucking maggot! That means straight up and down, eyes forward, hands at your sides, chest out, gut in, heels together, don’t move and don’t say a fucking word! Have you got that?”
“Yes, sir…” I began. Mistake number two.
“I said don’t say a fucking word!” I could smell coffee on his breath and spittle hit my cheek like raindrops. “Don’t move, don’t say a fucking word! Is that clear? And don’t fucking call me sir, I work for a living! When you address me, it will be with one of three phrases! ‘Yes, Drill Sergeant,’ ‘No, Drill Sergeant,’ or ‘No excuse, Drill Sergeant!’ Now you may speak, do you fucking understand me?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant!” I barked the words as if my life depended on them.
“Out-fucking-standing! Now stay here until someone tells you to move!”
I sure as hell wasn’t going to move. My legs were quivering and I was sweating and bugs were flying around my head and landing on my neck. I felt one bite and wanted to swat at it, but I restrained myself. At some point, one of the sergeants yelled at all of us to get on the bus, except with a lot more expletives, and it was taken up like a chorus by the rest of t
hem. This time we all ran for it, not only wanting to obey their orders but also just to get the hell out of there.
We squeezed a good fifty people into a bus meant to hold about thirty-five, and now that I had the time to look around, I could see other buses loading down the line, from other shuttles landing. We weren’t the only late-night arrivals, and if this was a typical day…
“Jesus,” I muttered. “How many people are they bringing in here?”
What the hell had I gotten myself into?
“Get your lazy, filthy asses out of bed!”
The words were punctuated by the crash of a metal trash can on the bare cement floor of the barracks and the flare of sun-bright lights coming on overhead. I nearly fell out of the top bunk before I realized where I was.
“Platoon guide! I better have a platoon guide in front of me by the count of five!” That was one of the female Drill Sergeants. Her name tape read Benitez, but it didn’t matter. None of them had names except “Drill Sergeant,” as far as we were concerned. “Five, four, three…”
I didn’t know the poor son of a bitch who’d been appointed platoon guide, but his name was Williams or something, and he was dressed in a white T-shirt, underwear, and black socks and he looked about as ridiculous as anything I could have imagined and as scared shitless as I would have been.
“Yes, Drill Sergeant!” He screamed the words because if there was one thing we’d been taught in the last couple days, it was that we could never answer the Drill Sergeants loud enough to satisfy them.
“Get this pig-sty cleaned up, get your filthy bodies cleaned up, and get into your fatigues! I want everyone out in front of the barracks and ready to march in exactly one hour, and for every minute you’re late after that, you’ll spend ten minutes in the PT pit! Do I make myself clear, Private Williams?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant!” was the only acceptable answer.
Williams turned on the rest of us with wide eyes and a look of abject desperation on his hollow-cheeked face, his mouth working for a moment but nothing coming out.
“Assign one squad to clean the floor,” I murmured, “one to make the beds and two to go shower, and then swap them out and have the last two clean the toilets.” It was pretty fucking obvious.
He didn’t hear me, but I think the Drill Sergeant did. Her eyes narrowed as they fell on me, her mouth a thin line, and I thought she was going to light into me, but she said nothing.
“First squad!” Williams squeaked. “Get on the bathrooms! Everyone else get dressed and then make your bunks!” He squeezed his eyes shut and spluttered a correction. “I mean, everyone else get showered and dressed and then make your bunks!”
Oh, good God, he was screwing this up already. Oh well, it wasn’t my problem. I mean, it was, in that I was going to wind up doing push-ups and sit-ups and a bunch of other different exercises I had never heard of until two days ago out in the sand pit, in the brutal heat and humidity of mid-day on this half of Inferno. But I knew interfering with Williams’ pathetic attempt at organization would only get me stuck in his position, because that was exactly how he had wound up in charge.
If everyone was going to be blamed for the platoon guide’s screw-ups, I’d rather be hot and sweaty and anonymous than hot and sweaty, desperate and hated. I grabbed my shower kit and waited for the upcoming disaster.
It didn’t go as badly as I thought. We managed to make it outside before the hour was up, despite the fact that Williams’ screw-up meant we had to clean the bathroom twice. Of course, we’d probably fail the inspection the same way we had yesterday. That guy Munroe had told me on the flight from Earth that the Drill Sergeants always found a reason to fail you during inspections, no matter how hard you worked. He’d said the whole purpose of Basic Training was to tear down what you had been as a civilian and rebuild you into a Marine.
I wasn’t sure how well that was going to work with me. There wasn’t much there to tear down.
We marched to breakfast in the dark, ate it under the anemic lights of the dining facility, sitting at attention the whole time, then lined up again just as 82 Eridani was peeking over the horizon and marched back to the in-processing center. That was why they’d given us so much time to get ready, why they’d woken us up before reveille, why they hadn’t put us straight into the PT pit. Because we had yet another day of in-processing.
I’d been through a full medical and psychological exam before I’d left Earth, and I knew those records were attached to my profile, but for some reason, I had to do everything again here, just in case I’d developed a genetic disorder between Earth and Inferno. They scanned every centimeter of my body with lasers, MRIs, CAT scans, ultrasounds, alpha wave detectors, and other shit I couldn’t remember even though the techs had cheerfully informed me of each and every procedure. They took enough blood and genetic samples to clone bits of me if they had to, which I supposed made sense.
Then there were even more psychological tests. They put a neural halo on my temples and flashed pictures at me while the machine read my responses. I just sat there, helpless to fake anything because I didn’t even know what they were looking for. I don’t know that I would have tried to cheat even if I could have. If my artificial attorney had been telling the truth, they were desperate enough to take street criminals, so a little personality disorder probably wouldn’t get me shipped back to Earth for punitive hibernation.
We marched back to the chow hall for lunch, only getting screamed at three times for being out of step, though one of those times was my fault.
“Your other left, Private Alvarez! Do they not teach you Earther dumbasses your right from your left?”
It was hot by then. I mean, it’s almost always hot on Inferno. Half of the damned planet is uninhabitable most of the year, and the half the Commonwealth Space Fleet had taken possession of during the first War with the Tahni ranged from uncomfortably warm in a winter I’d only heard rumors of, to the oh-my-God-it’s-hot we were experiencing currently. But at mid-day, the too-close primary star added its convection-oven best to the Godawful humidity and beat the worst day I remembered from Tijuana. Of course, I had been a little kid then, and the heat didn’t seem as bad.
Nothing seemed as bad.
I couldn’t remember what lunch had been about two minutes after eating it. I mean, it was soy paste and spirulina powder, but I didn’t even notice what artistic representation of real food they’d tried to mold it into with the food processors. Something like pasta and maybe faux chicken? I had to keep my eyes straight ahead the whole time so I couldn’t even look at it, and we had about five minutes to get through the line and shovel down the food before we were back at in-processing again.
This time, the tests were different. They popped me into a Virtual Reality pod with a neural halo hugging my temples, controls in my hands and under my feet, and projected spheres of various colors in the haze of grey surrounding me, with an aiming reticle in the center like I’d seen in virtual reality games I’d played a few times. On other people’s game sets. I couldn’t afford one and didn’t have an account. I moved the controls in my hands experimentally and the reticle split into two, one for each hand, then I moved my legs and the view changed, the spheres growing closer or drawing farther away. I wondered if I was supposed to just keep trying to figure out the controls on my own, but the question was answered by what I assumed was an automated voice in my earphones.
“Place the left-hand reticle over the purple sphere and keep it there as long as possible, or until told to move it.”
It seemed simple enough, but when I tried it, the purple sphere began moving away and dodging to the right. I remembered what the foot controls had done and worked my heels up and down, gaining on the violet ball of light until I was able to put the left reticle into the center of it. It moved again but I moved with it, smiling through clenched teeth with a sort of childish satisfaction at the accomplishment.
“Now place the right-hand reticle over the green sphere, but try not
to lose target-lock on the purple sphere.”
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered.
The green sphere was bobbing and weaving and Mr. Purple was still trying to evade as well, and I wound up with both arms extended, seeing a hazy vision of the different targets out of the corners of my peripheral vision. My feet were moving as if of their own accord, keeping my view moving, twisting the virtual world around to keep both spheres just in the edge of vision.
“Disengage with the purple target and lock onto the yellow target while maintaining your lock on the green target…”
And so it went, getting harder and harder, for what felt like hours. It probably wasn’t hours because I would have keeled over from dehydration if they’d kept me in the pod that long, but it was enough that I really had to go to the bathroom by the end. About halfway through, I would have been willing to swear the computer-generated voice was replaced by a live human. There was something qualitatively different about the tone of the instructions, and it almost seemed as if whoever was guiding me was doing their best to get me to screw up. I didn’t though. I never lost target lock for more than a few seconds.
When the pod opened and I stepped out into the blissfully cool climate control of the simulator room, there was an officer standing in front of me. The techs who’d sealed me and the rest of my squad in had all been enlisted Fleet personnel, but this was a Marine major, dressed in utility fatigues. He had one of those pinched faces that looked as if all the features had been crammed into the center, and his too-broad forehead was wrinkled in thought as he stared at me.
“Alvarez, right?” he asked me as I accepted a squeeze-bottle of electrolyte mix from one of the techs. I braced to attention and answered with the bellow we’d been instructed to use when addressed by officers or trainers.