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

by Christopher Nuttall

  I didn't give him the chance. I struck him in the chest, then brought my knee up and slammed it into his nose. Bone crunched as he toppled forward and hit the ground. I spun around, just in time to evade a swipe from a makeshift sword. The gangster thought of himself as fast, I was sure, but I’d had six months at Boot Camp and he might as well have been crawling towards me. I caught his arm, applied pressure and smiled as he yelped in pain and dropped the sword. It was easy to snatch it out of the air - the balance was appallingly bad - swing it around and slice it into the side of his neck. I didn't think the blade was particularly sharp either; I’d hit with all my strength, but I hadn't managed to behead him. Still, the fountain of blood was enough to prove he was dead, unless he got immediate attention.

  The last gangster, the leader, was sneaking backwards, holding his sword in a suddenly limp hand. I felt a flush of anger and came at him, carrying the sword I’d stolen in one hand. He tried to parry my thrust, but he didn't really have any proper training at all. His sword was so badly designed that it shattered when I slammed my blade against it. I shoved him against the wall, then used my sword to impale him. He let out a gurgle and died.

  I felt nothing. My training had sunk in too deeply for me to enjoy what I’d done, even though I’d just carved through five gangsters within minutes. They’d deserved it, I told myself; they’d raped, murdered and looted in the certain knowledge that no one would dare to stand up to them. They were wolves and I was a sheepdog. Killing such vermin was what I was born to do.

  And yet I still felt nothing, even when the children started to clap. They knew better than to show anything other than delight; hell, maybe they were delighted. I turned to look at them and they started to flee. Maybe they’d go to their parents and tell them that the gangs could be beaten - or, more likely, they’d tell them that a new gang was moving into the CityBlock, one that was utterly ruthless. I took one last look at the gangsters - their bodies would be fodder for the rats soon enough, if the cannibals didn't get them - and then started to walk back to the shaft. No one tried to block my way as I returned to the surface and headed to the nearest elevator. It was high time I returned to Mars.

  Once I returned to Boot Camp, I did two things. First, I downloaded a complete guide to the Slaughterhouse, along with a number of books from the recommended reading list. It would take at least two weeks to reach the Slaughterhouse, even on a marine transport, and I had no intention of wasting the time. Second, I contacted the personnel department and requested permission to change my name. Two hours later, I had a new set of ID paperwork and it was done.

  For reasons I never fully understood, marine nicknames sometimes became official names. I think it was a tradition that dates back to the first foreign legion, but no one knows for sure; I suspect it was intended to draw a line between civilian and marine that would be harder to cross in the future. That, at least, was how it was for me. My old surname no longer fitted the person I had become. As far as anyone would know in the future, I was Edward Stalker.

  And the person I had been, the scared Undercity rat, was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  No one can fault Edward for killing the gangsters. As he correctly points out, they were vermin, monsters who made it impossible for anyone to have a decent life. However, his actions made no difference. The dead gangsters were replaced within hours and whatever flickers of hope were sown in the hearts of men were swiftly quenched. It was the whole system, the refusal to bring law and order to the Undercity, that was guilty - and it was quite beyond repair.

  The children Edward saw might have lived long enough to sire the next generation. Their children did not.

  -Professor Leo Caesius

  The Slaughterhouse is the strangest world in known space.

  At least in my opinion. It’s certainly the most brutal. The first terraforming attempt failed spectacularly - that’s only happened twice in all the thousands of years mankind has been exploring space - and the successive attempts to tame the world only made it nastier, more unwelcoming to human settlement. Someone introduced animals from a dozen different worlds and let them fight it out for dominance, just to see what would happen. By the time the Terran Marine Corps bid for the planet - and purchased it for a song - the Slaughterhouse was a mess. No one believed the marines would keep the planet for long.

  “Welcome to the Slaughterhouse,” Commandant Jeremy Damiani (yes, that Damiani) said, once we were escorted off the shuttle and into a large hanger. “Welcome to hell.”

  I kept my face impassive as he looked us up and down. There were nearly four hundred troopers - we were no longer recruits - in the hanger, men assembled from a hundred Boot Camps scattered over the length and breadth of the Empire. Joker stood beside me, of course, along with four others I knew who’d been selected for the Slaughterhouse. The remainder were strangers. Some of them looked tougher and more capable than I had ever dreamed of being, back when I’d first heard of the marines. Others had the calm professional look we’d been taught to present at all times, even when the shit was hitting the fan. It kept the civilians from panicking.

  “You can leave this place in one of five ways,” Damiani continued, calmly. I don’t think he paid any special attention to me - and really, why should he? I was just one out of four hundred new candidates for the Rifleman’s Tab. “You can quit, as you know; you can die, you can commit one of the Headshots, you can join the auxiliaries or you can qualify as fully-trained marines. There aren't any other options.”

  He paused, studying us all coldly. “We search for four things in our candidates,” he said, after a long moment. “We want our candidates to be adaptable, to be smart, to have grit and - perhaps least of all - to have muscle. Many find this unusual, but the truth is that we can use augmentation and genetic engineering to produce any number of muscle-bound morons. The first three qualities are often more important to us. That you are here, on the Slaughterhouse, is testament to the fact we believe you can make it. You would not be here if we thought otherwise.

  “The Slaughterhouse is deliberately designed to be a foretaste of hell. Those of you who aced Boot Camp are in for a nasty surprise. You will be pushed right to the limits - and beyond. If you pass, you will have achieved something that no one will ever be able to take from you, whatever happens. And, if you fail, there is no shame in trying.”

  I wasn't sure I believed him. But then, I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to be a marine.

  “The basic rules have not changed from the days of Boot Camp,” Damiani said, slowly. “But there is one difference that needs to be hammered home. This is the first time you will train alongside two very different groups of people. There are those from outside your sector - and those of the opposite sex. You are to keep two things in mind at all times. First, they have passed the same Boot Camp as you; second, sexual contact of any sort between marines - even troopers like yourselves - is still strictly forbidden. We have ways of finding out the truth and I will not hesitate to break anyone guilty of crossing the line. The very best any of you can hope for is a dishonourable discharge that will ensure you never serve in the military again.”

  I glanced around as best as I could, without making it obvious. Were there women in the group facing the Commandant? I couldn't see any; hell, as far as I could tell, we were all men. But he wouldn't have kept the women segregated any longer, would he?

  “I hope to be the one who pins the Rifleman’s Tab on your collar, the day you graduate from the Slaughterhouse,” Damiani concluded. “Until then, I wish you the very best of luck. You’re going to need it.”

  He returned our salute, then stepped out of the hanger. A grim-faced man wearing another Smoky the Bear hat - this one black as night - stepped up to take his place.

  “Greetings,” he said. His tone admitted of no weakness whatsoever. “I am Drill Instructor (Slaughterhouse) Larry Southard. For my sins, I have been placed in charge of the latest intake of prospective marines. With me are Drill Instructo
r (Slaughterhouse) Gaige Mosher” - a thin wiry man with a faint smile, standing next to a short man who seemed to have muscles on his muscles - “and Drill Instructor (Slaughterhouse) Jim Seibert. It is my task to shepherd you through the course and turn you into qualified marines. You heard the rest of the speech at Boot Camp, so I won’t bore you with it again.”

  “Thank God,” Joker muttered.

  “You are troopers now, not recruits,” Southard continued, coldly. “We will not be peering over your shoulders at all times, not like the Drill Instructors did at Boot Camp. You have proved you can be trusted to handle yourselves. However, if you are caught slacking off, you will regret it. This is the one and only warning you will get.”

  He paused to allow that to sink in, then spoke on. “You will now report to the medics, who will carry out a series of tests before you are cleared to enter the training grounds,” he told us, his voice never wavering. “While you are waiting, you should read the documents that will be handed out to you. They will give you a basic introduction to the Slaughterhouse and how we expect you to comport yourselves during training. There will be a test on it later.”

  I groaned, inwardly. I’d had enough of such tests at Boot Camp. Professor had been an expert at drawing information from documents and summarising it for the Drills, but I’d always had problems. Professor had even complained that the person who’d written the documents was an idiot. It wasn't until much later that we’d realised they’d done it deliberately.

  “Follow me,” Southard ordered.

  We marched through the door, across a parade ground and into another medical building. It looked identical to the one on Mars; later, I learned that was deliberate, a way of preparing the recruits for the Slaughterhouse and Marine FOBs. All of our prefabricated buildings were identical, just waiting for us to slot them together. Inside, we lined up, took a copy of the induction briefing from the pile by the door and waited impatiently for our names to be called.

  “Stalker,” Joker hissed. “Look at her.”

  I looked. For a moment, I thought Joker might be mistaken. The trooper on the other side of the room didn't look very feminine. She had no breasts, as far as I could tell; she looked very much like a thin muscular man. Her hair was shaved close to her scalp, like mine. Indeed, I would have taken her for a male if it hadn't been for a faint hint of uncanny valley around the trooper, as if there was something about her that wasn't quite right. She looked up, caught me staring and glared back at me, challengingly. I had been told that Boot Camp was harder on women than men, but I hadn't believed it until that moment.

  “Stalker,” the medic bellowed.

  I nodded as respectfully as I could to the woman, then headed through the door and into the examination room. (Or, as we came to call it, the chamber of tortures.) The doctor ordered me to strip, poked and prodded me in a number of delicate places - I barely managed to keep myself from asking if he was going to buy me dinner afterwards - and then took another set of blood, urine and stool samples. I stayed on the table and waited as patiently as I could until the analyser came back with the results.

  “You’re clean of anything dangerous or incriminating,” the doctor said, gruffly. He didn't seem intimidated by me at all. Like most of the planet’s staff, he was probably either a marine or an auxiliary serving a term on the Slaughterhouse before returning to the front lines. He'd seen far worse, I suspected, than a trooper who had a high opinion of himself. “I believe you visited Earth, correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, automatically.

  “Generally not a good place to visit without broad-spectrum vaccines,” the doctor said. “Luckily, the jabs you got at the start of Boot Camp covered you against any threats.”

  “I was born on Earth,” I protested.

  “Some quite nasty bugs loose on the planet will see their chance to strike at you again, if you leave Earth for a few months,” the doctor said. “It’s the most disease-riddled planet in human space.”

  I shuddered. I’d had the basics of field hygiene and sanitation drilled into me in Boot Camp and, in hindsight, it made me sick to realise just how badly we’d been fouling our nests in the Undercity. A sewer bursting and releasing its contents into the corridors was seen as a chance to play games, not something to cause a panic; hell, there were places you couldn't visit without stumbling over dead bodies, left where they’d fallen. If we hadn't had some genetic engineering worked into our bodies, most of us would probably have died a long time ago.

  “Personally, I blame it on the Nihilists,” the doctor added. “They’ve been looking for a way to slaughter millions of people overnight for years.”

  He looked me up and down, then nodded. “You’re dismissed, trooper,” he said. “Go through that door” - he pointed to a door on the other side of the room - “and wait until the Drill Instructors corral you.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Outside, there were a handful of benches and not much else. I sat down next to a couple of troopers I didn't know and started to read through the short briefing document. It wasn't anything like as bad as I had feared; it was a brief outline of the planet’s history, a guide to the areas we could visit and a number of stern warnings of precisely what we could expect if we tried to enter any of the high security areas. Joker emerged next, looking obscenely cheerful; I rolled my eyes as he sat down next to me, then leaned over to whisper in my ear.

  “I think she likes you,” he hissed.

  “I think she isn't worth getting the boot,” I hissed back.

  It was an odd thought. The idea of a woman actually fighting was new to me, let alone a woman joining the marines. In my experience, women either sought protectors or simply gave it up the moment someone pressed. But then, all else being equal, the average man will always be stronger than the average woman. It isn't sexism, just cold hard biological fact ... yes, training and weapons can even the odds, but both training and weapons are in short supply in the Undercity, certainly not the kind of weapons women can use without a great deal of practice.

  You could clean up the Undercity within days if you handed out pistols to each and every woman above the age of ten, I thought. But their lords and masters prefer to leave them defenceless.

  It was nearly an hour before the Drill Instructors entered the compartment, by which time all four hundred of us had seen the medics and I’d read my way through the briefing documents twice. The Slaughterhouse had one large island that had been completely terraformed - Liberty Island - and a number of training facilities scattered around the main continent. We would be granted permission to go on leave to Liberty Island every so often - unless we were on punishment duty for one reason or another - but we were expected to abide by the rules while we were there.

  Southard explained it to us while we were marching to our next destination. “Every marine - and every auxiliary - has the right to spend his or her retirement on the Slaughterhouse,” he told us. “They often bring their families here, to a place where safety is guaranteed and children can be raised without fear of two-legged predators. There is even a Boot Camp facility for any of their children who wish to become marines.

  “There are facilities at the lower tip of the island - Liberty Town - for anyone who is not a permanent resident,” he continued. “You can visit the brothel, if you wish, or spend the day gambling in the casino. Those facilities, uniquely in the Empire, are owned and supervised by the corps. The safety and security of those who go to visit is guaranteed.”

  But you’ll know who develops a gambling habit, I thought. Everything was a test, we'd been told, and Liberty Town was just another way to see how we behaved. And who starts treating the whores badly.

  “However, you are not permitted to develop a relationship with the partners or children of serving or retired marines,” Southard warned. “I don’t care if it is one hundred and fifty percent consensual, I don’t care if your lover is well over the age of consent; you’re not allowed to have any form of sexual contact wi
th the partners or children of serving or retired marines. Should you graduate, either as a marine or an auxiliary, things will be different.”

  I puzzled over the restriction for a long time. There had been some girls in the Undercity no one had dared touch, if only because their fathers had been gangsters or strong enough to take bloody revenge on anyone who soiled their daughters. I wouldn't have cared to touch the daughter of a serving marine ... or even a retired one, someone who could call on friends and allies if necessary. Later, I learned it was a standard precaution; a trooper might be on the planet one day, then gone the next. We weren't meant to date, let alone marry, until we knew where we stood.

  Southard stopped as he reached a building, then started to bark out names. I found myself assigned to a training platoon with Joker and eight other troopers I didn't know, including the woman. She regarded us all impassively and said nothing as Southard informed us that we were the latest Slaughterhouse Training Platoon #37 and that we had a long and proud history of producing marines to live up to. His companions showed us to our barracks, a cramped room that looked even less comfortable than the barracks on Mars, then directed us back outside.