First To Fight (The Empire's Corps Book 11)

by Christopher Nuttall

  I stared. How the hell were we meant to do that? I could just reach the barrel, if I stretched, but I couldn't hope to pick it up. If someone was on the other side ... no, we’d break our wrists if we tried. They wouldn't have given us an impossible task, would they? There had to be a solution, but what?

  “We could try to pick our way through the minefield,” a recruit offered.

  “Bang,” Nordstrom said, coolly. “You’re dead. Drop and give me twenty.”

  “Can we set up a pipe?” Another recruit asked. “Drain the barrel without moving it?”

  Nordstrom smirked. “With what?”

  I looked back at the coil of rope. They wouldn't have left it there by accident, would they?

  “Here,” I said, as everything fell into place. I picked up the rope and uncoiled it. “Wrap the rope around the lid, then use it to lift up the barrel and get it to the edge of the square without touching the ground.”

  “Try,” Nordstrom said.

  It was the hardest thing I’d done so far. I’d never seen myself as a leader and getting everyone organised wasn't easy, but somehow we managed to lift up the barrel and manoeuvre it to the edge of the square and over the line. Bainbridge congratulated us briefly, just enough to make me flush with pleasure, then mustered us for the march back to the barracks.

  “It isn’t enough to fight,” he said, as we started to march. “You have to be prepared to solve problems too.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Terran Marine Corps has a strict cap placed on manpower, thanks to the Grand Senate’s paranoia. Therefore, every marine has to be trained extensively to ensure that he or she is as adaptable as possible. Marines are expected to be capable of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, if you will excuse the metaphor, at a moment’s notice.

  -Professor Leo Caesius

  The remainder of Hell Week passed in a blur.

  There were endless exercises, forced marches, constant tests of our mental agility and an infinite number of push-ups. We worked our way through the obstacle course, time and time again, and learned to swim in the pool, dire warnings ringing in our ears that there would be far nastier water tests in the future. I had never learned to swim - I’d honestly never seen the value - until I entered Boot Camp, an oversight I rapidly came to regret. Perhaps it would have been easier to master the skill if I’d started as a child ...

  ... But, given just what happened in swimming pools, perhaps I should be relieved I hadn't.

  The Drill Instructors watched us constantly, but they seemed to have different roles. Bainbridge, the Top Hat, played the strict father; Nordstrom, the Black Hat, was the disciplinarian; Johnston, the Hard Hat, seemed to be the technical expert, always there to offer advice on how to complete a task ... if, of course, we needed to ask. It was hard to like any of them, but we were definitely starting to respect them. We wouldn't have made it through Hell Week if they hadn't been pushing us along - and, I realised later, helping to separate those who couldn't get much further from those who could. By the time Hell Week was officially at an end, the platoon had lost half of its recruits and was merged with another platoon to keep the number up.

  “I don’t know what they’re putting in the water on Earth,” Bainbridge sneered. “We have bugger-all recruits from that shithole these days and hardly any last the first week.”

  He was right. I discovered, later, that Earth produced the smallest number of military recruits in the Empire, even though it had easily the largest population. Even the Imperial Navy - widely regarded as a cushy billet by everyone else - recruited only a few thousand Earthers every year. There were even calls to abandon recruiting on Earth altogether, although they never came to anything. The manpower crisis was just too acute to turn down any prospective source of new recruits.

  I understood, but it took me a long time to articulate it. Earth’s population, thanks to a combination of social engineering and emigration, was effectively divided into two subsets: sheep and wolves. The sheep couldn't lift a hand to defend themselves, let alone defend others; the wolves, the gangsters, were more interested in preying on the sheep than defending them against other wolves. Even the smarter gangsters, the ones bright enough to realise the dangers of killing the geese that laid the golden eggs, weren't really interested in spreading security. They were just interested in their share of the booty. There were only a handful of sheepdogs in Earth’s entire population and most of them chose to immigrate to new worlds rather than stay on Earth.

  Does that sound absurd? Consider this - on Earth, there was no right of self-defence. Beat the tar out of someone who threatened your family and you might wind up in deep shit yourself. It was a great deal easier for the police to pick on the lone defender than try to take on the might of the gangs. Or, if you lived in the Undercity, you’d just make a whole string of new and deadly enemies who would stop at nothing to make a horrific example out of you, just to keep resistance from spreading. And, if you thought you could better yourself, it wouldn't be long before taxes and regulations defeated you. How could I blame anyone for fleeing Earth?

  There was no real let-up, of course, just because we’d passed Hell Week. I honestly don’t think the Drill Instructors respected us that much more, although we had survived a test intended to weed out the quitters from those who just wouldn’t quit. All that changed, I think, is that we developed a little more confidence in ourselves. We’d survived the first test and we could go further. And yes, we were doing more and more push-ups too.

  With the recruits more settled, I actually started to get to know my squad. (A recruit training company has three platoons, each one approximating thirty to forty recruits, which are further divided into squads of ten recruits each.) The later exercises we were given were deliberately designed to force us to work together, even if we didn't like each other. There is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ as Bainbridge pointed out. Each of us had different strengths and weaknesses, which was perhaps unsurprising. There were only four recruits from Earth in my platoon and I was the only Earther in my squad.

  Joker rapidly became my best friend in the squad, even though we had very little in common beyond being human, male and marine recruits. He was a thin lanky young man, a year older than me, who kept cracking jokes at the worst possible moment. Apparently, he had an older brother in the corps who told him that Drill Instructors appreciated recruits who tried to show that they had a sense of humour. He was somewhat lacking in common sense as it seemed to me that the Drill Instructors only used it as an excuse to pile more push-ups on him, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Thanks to the intensive physical training, we were all developing more muscles than any of us had ever enjoyed in our lives.

  (I knew his name. Of course I knew his name - I knew all of them, by the time we completed Phase One. But, as God is my witness, I honestly can't remember any of them. I only remember the nicknames - some complementary, some insulting - they earned.)

  Professor was an odd one, a student at Imperial University who’d quit for an undisclosed reason and joined the marines. I didn't think much of him at first, but after he completed Hell Week it was clear that he might be weaker than the rest of us, yet he had an icy determination to keep going no matter what the Drill Instructors heaped on him. He was easily the best-educated of the platoon and later, when we completed Phase Two, he was one of the recruits tapped to help with educating the other recruits. When he started, he was slightly overweight - not enough to put him in the special platoon, just enough to be noticeable - but that flab was replaced by muscle soon enough. It was just a shame they made him wear a pair of dorky glasses. He didn't have a hope of being laid while wearing them.

  Posh, in some ways, was even stranger. He didn't talk about his life at first and it was only when we pressed, after sharing some of our own stories, that he confessed. His father was a relative of a Grand Senator, which placed him solidly in the upper class; he’d grown up on Island One, a giant space habitat orbiting Terra Nova. But, for some
reason, he'd grown disenchanted with the aristocracy and chosen to join the marines. I later found out that his father expected him to help shape the Marine Corps in the future, a difficult task for anyone who didn't graduate Boot Camp. Luckily, by the time Posh did graduate, he’d absorbed enough of the marine ethos to keep him from becoming a major problem. It wasn't until much later that I understood why he’d wanted to leave.

  Thug was a simpler case. A short man who had shaved his head long before entering Boot Camp, he’d grown up on Terra Nova in one of the slums surrounding Landing City. He liked to fight and, after a run-in with the law that had put him in front of a judge, he’d chosen military service instead of being exiled to a distant colony world. I was surprised the marines had taken him, but I had to admit he was a good man to have on your side. He wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, yet he never stopped coming.

  Bandit had a similar story, in a way. He’d been a dealer on New Washington when a deal had turned sour, leaving him running for his life - and straight into the recruiting office. By his own admission, he’d nearly been rejected and he’d been given a strong warning, before he’d been shipped to Boot Camp, that the charges against him would be resurrected if he stepped away from the straight and narrow. I’d met too many people like him before - Trevor had been fond of bragging about his connections - to like him, at least at first, but if the corps wanted to give him a second chance it was none of my business. Besides, he had a devious mind and no reluctance to use it.

  But it was Viper who bothered me.

  He was a reject, someone held back from completing the first phase of training. The Drill Instructors added him to the platoon shortly after Hell Week, informing us that he knew most of what we had to learn and we might find him useful. They were wrong, I figured; Viper might have mastered some of the skills we hadn’t - yet - but he moaned and whined about everything. I honestly didn't understand why he didn't quit. A month or two of recruit training, we’d been told, could be parlayed into a better deal, if one wanted to go to a colony world. God knew we’d already picked up enough discipline - it was astonishing how motivational push-ups and the threat of more push-ups could be - to actually make something of ourselves, if we left. But Viper seemed reluctant to either stay or go.

  It might not have bothered me so much if we hadn't been in constant competition. My squad was in competition with the rest of the platoon, the platoon was in competition with the rest of the company and the company is in competition with any other companies on the base, if they’re at the same level. (Mind you, if a junior company outshot a senior company, their Drill Instructors would engage in achingly polite gloating at the officer’s club.) It didn't take us long to realise that Viper was a weak link. He did the bare minimum to pass each test and each of us, even Professor, rapidly started to surpass him.

  “Maybe he’s just a loser,” Thug snarled. “He’s not even trying!”

  I nodded in agreement. I’d seen people like Viper on Earth, people who knew they had no hope of anything in their future, but I didn't think it could be tolerated in the corps. They just drifted through life, doing nothing. Most of them were on some kind of medication because it was easier for the state to drug them than admit their lives were utterly meaningless ... and there was no hope of meaningful reform. They spent their lives in front of the viewer, watching the latest programs. Why not? They had nothing to live for.

  But Viper was a marine recruit. His lassitude, for want of a better word, wasn’t just dragging him down (we could have ignored it, if that were the case). He was dragging us down with him. We were sinking down the competition tables within the platoon and we knew - we just knew - that it wouldn't be long before the Drill Instructors started to ‘counsel’ us to do better ... with push-ups, of course. But how could we do better when we had Viper pulling us down?

  “Go talk to him,” Professor said, looking at me. “He might listen to you.”

  I was tempted to ask why me, but I already knew the answer. The Drill Instructors praised those who took the lead, who saw a problem and leapt to grapple with it. I’d done that once and been rewarded; now, we all tried to take the lead, except Viper. And besides, overall, I had the best scores in the entire squad. Thug was better at some tests, Professor was better at others, but I had the best overall score. (I was third in the entire platoon.)

  That night, Viper made a head call. I followed him as soon as he entered the chamber. This wasn't uncommon; we’d all grown used to sharing a communal toilet, even if the jokes had to be heard to be believed. (And the less said about the stench the better.)

  “Tell me something,” I said. I’d rehearsed the moment as best as I could, in my head, but now the time had come I decided to go with my instincts. “Why the fuck are you dragging us all down?”

  Viper stared at me, sullenly. “They held me back.”

  I felt a flicker of pure rage. We’d been told that if we really had to have it out with one another, we could do it in the field with fighting sticks. Picking fights inside the barracks was strictly forbidden. The best we could hope for, if we were caught, was a long session of Intensive Training. But I wanted to slap some sense into him before it was too late.

  It was all I could do to keep my voice down, but I really didn’t want to alert Johnston. “So you’re holding us back?”

  I gritted my teeth. “They didn’t hold the rest of your squad back,” I pointed out. I didn't actually know it for sure, but I had a feeling that Viper was the only person who’d been held back. He was definitely the only one who’d joined the platoon. “Why would they hold the rest of us back, when the time comes, if the only one who’s a real problem is you?”

  It was, I later learned, one of the weaknesses of the training program. A person could quit, or commit one of the headshots, but they couldn't be dismissed without good cause. The Drill Instructors had plenty of ways to urge someone to quit, yet they couldn't force them to take that step. As long as Viper met the bare minimal requirements, it was impossible to do more than keep holding him back until he got the hint.

  “I don’t care,” Viper said.

  “Well, you fucking should,” I snapped. “Every fucking day, we go out into the exercise grounds and fucking depend on each and every fucking one of us to do our fucking share!”

  Viper smirked. “Do you get a credit for every time you swear?”

  I clenched my fists. Maybe he’d had extra training, but I could take him. I was sure I could take him ...

  ... And then what? Burn up my career just to take down his?

  “Tell me something,” I said. “There isn't a person in the platoon who doesn't know you’re a fucking loser. What do you think is going to happen when you get out there in the pit and face all of us? Either shape the fuck up or quit. You can go to the Drills now and quit. No one will think any less of you.”

  Viper’s eyes flashed. “Do you think I want to be here?”

  That, I have to admit, stunned me. Who in their right mind would go to Boot Camp if they didn't want to go to Boot Camp? Even Posh, despite his background, freely admitted he’d hoped for a military career. Hell, it wasn't as if it was difficult to get into the Civil Guard - although, if the Drill Instructors were telling the truth, Viper was probably overqualified on the grounds he could string more than two words together into a reasonably coherent statement.

  “If you don’t want to be here, then quit,” I snarled. I didn't want to hear a sob story. I’d heard enough of them on Earth. Viper had more opportunities than I’d ever had and if he didn't want to make use of them ... well, that was his problem, not mine. “Go to the Drill Instructors and quit! But don’t keep fucking things up for us!”

  I turned and strode back to my bunk, cursing him under my breath. We were supposed to get somewhere between seven to eight hours of sleep each night, but the Drill Instructors had a nasty habit of sometimes waking us up early, just to see who would snap. I was just closing my eyes when Viper stalked past me and climbed into his own
bunk. He didn't look happy ... I wondered, suddenly, if it was a mistake to sleep so close to him. But there was a Drill Instructor at the far end of the room ...

  In hindsight, maybe we should have complained about Viper. He wasn't physically weak, unlike Professor, or mentally challenged; he was deliberately not giving us his all. There were no excuses for his conduct - and besides, he’d had over two months of training before being held back. But none of us really wanted to go sneaking to the Drill Instructors, not when the situation was so sensitive. Bitching about our fellows might not make any of us look very good.

  And, when Viper started to shape up, I told myself that our little talk had actually worked and maybe we’d actually get some use out of him. Maybe the thought of being completely isolated, of being completely alienated from the rest of the squad, had convinced him to put his own problems aside. I liked to think I’d made a very real difference ...