“I’m Joker,” Joker said as we waited for the other platoons to assemble, “and this disreputable asshole is Stalker. Who are you?”
I smiled as we were told eight new nicknames. The woman turned out to have been nicknamed Sif, although I had no idea why. Joker kept chatting to everyone, trying to draw them out; it helped, somehow, to cope with our fraying nerves. By the time Southard bellowed for attention, I knew that four of the eight troopers - including Sif - came from the rim and the other four came from a handful of worlds in the Inner Ring. We didn't have much in common, beyond a shared desire to be marines.
“Blackmon,” Southard said, as he passed us. “You’re the Platoon Leader.”
“Yes, sir,” Blackmon said.
“And he does have the authority to kick you all in the ass, if necessary,” Southard added, addressing us all. His voice was still hard. “You’re not in Boot Camp now.”
I nodded. Recruits were given ranks within the platoons and told to assert authority, but they rarely had any real power. Bainbridge had explained, quoting a very old textbook, that no one ever saluted a recruit-officer unless the lighting was very dim. I hadn't understood until I realised that the idea was to develop personal authority, rather than positional authority. If we couldn't convince our fellows to follow us, we wouldn't be able to assert authority on the battlefield.
But this was the Slaughterhouse. Things were different here.
Southard cleared his throat for attention, an evil glint in his eye. “Are we all having fun, troopers?”
“YES, SIR,” we bellowed. I don’t think I was the only one thinking oh shit.
“Good,” Southard said. His voice took on a sweet tone that convinced me that I wasn't going to enjoy what was coming next. “Glad to hear it. Now everything is squared away, it’s time for a run. It’s five miles to the Chow Hall and if we don’t get there in time the food will all have been eaten by the REMFs.”
I was right. I didn't enjoy the run at all.
But, compared to what was coming, it was paradise itself.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The oddest thing about the Slaughterhouse is that it was technically independent of the Empire, even as it provided the Empire with its greatest warriors. Major-General Carmichael, the effective founder of the Terran Marine Corps, somehow convinced the then-Emperor to grant the planet a charter of perpetual freedom, allowing the development of a marine-civilisation on a very small scale. It was a world where few of the Empire’s laws were heeded yet, in many ways, it was the safest place to live.
Unfortunately, few other planets had the means to follow the Slaughterhouse’s example.
-Professor Leo Caesius
The first month at the Slaughterhouse went by in a blur. I only half-remember the details, even though I can look back at my personal logbook and see the number of route marches, shooting exercises and other pieces of training I did. It was thoroughly hellish; we were marched until we very nearly broke, carrying more than double our bodyweight as we struggled up mountains and through muddy swamps, then shot at as we carried out a tactical advance to battle (tabbing, we called it.) And then they gassed us, ran us through another set of Conduct After Capture exercises and then shot at us some more. It was not a pleasant time.
It would be wrong to say there wasn't any levity, I suppose. Joker did his best to keep us entertained, cracking jokes at one moment and singing songs the next. (I’d write the lyrics to his version of Rain, Rain, Go Away, but then this book would be banned even on Old Earth, where just about anything was considered acceptable.) Southard and his two demonic assistants thought of this as a personal challenge - “if you have enough breath to sing,” he’d say, “you have enough breath to walk faster” - and pushed us all much harder. It was a relief when we were finally granted two days of liberty in Liberty Town, with a warning ringing in our ears that it might be the last leave we ever had.
We found out what they meant when we returned to barracks and saw an ancient-looking spacecraft sitting on the launching pad. It was so outdated it actually used rockets to fly, rather than antigravity fields. We were given yet another lecture on what to do if things went wrong, then we were marched into the spaceship and sat down. Moments later, it took off with a roar like thunder and launched itself into orbit. I recalled the aircraft we’d jumped from, back on Mars, and felt a tinge of guilt. Compared to the spacecraft, the aircraft had been perfectly safe.
Disaster struck as we entered orbit. A loud bang echoed through the craft, followed by the tell-tale whistle of depressurisation. I felt a flicker of panic, but hours spent jumping from aircraft in increasingly flimsy parachutes - the less said about HAVLO parachutes the better - had taught me to keep my fear under control. We grabbed for our facemasks as the drives cut off, leaving us suddenly weightless. The temperature dropped rapidly as more and more air flowed into the icy vacuum of space.
“This ship is going down,” Southard said, quite calmly. “We don’t have the fuel to stabilise our orbit or even to hold position long enough for another shuttle to take us off. Ideas?”
I felt numb. It was a test. It had to be a test. And yet, I was scared.
“Get to the station,” Blackmon said. He was the only one of us who’d been born in space, the child of a spacer father and a RockRat mother. I don’t think he’d had a happy childhood, although he rarely spoke of it to us. “We have some EVA packs onboard. It should be possible to fly to the station. If we send a distress signal, they should have someone ready to catch us if necessary.”
“We could link them together and use the thrust to push us into a stable orbit,” Sif offered, grimly. She was always putting forward ideas, as if she was desperate to prove she belonged amongst us. “They should have enough thrust.”
“They’re not designed to be linked together,” Blackmon countered.
“We could don them, then get to the hull and fire in unison,” Bloodnok suggested. “We might just save the shuttle.”
“There isn’t time,” Blackmon said. “We’d have to calculate our trajectory - and if we burned out the packs before we made it into a stable orbit, we would have sealed our fate.”
There was a pause. I searched frantically for a better idea, but I couldn't think of anything. I was a brave man on the ground - it isn't easy to sneak forward when some asshole is pinging bullets bare millimetres above your head - but in space ...? I wasn't a coward, but space had always left me cold. It was the most hazardous environment I’d experienced since leaving Earth.
“If you’re not within reach of life support gear,” Bainbridge had said months ago, “pull down your trousers, bend over backwards and kiss your ass goodbye.”
Blackmon shook his head. “Get the EVA packs,” he ordered, as he checked his datapad. “I think we should have a reasonable chance of making it if we jump in five minutes, when we’re closest to the station. I’ll transmit the emergency signal.”
We nodded, then hurried to strap the EVA packs onto our backs. They had looked fun, when I’d first seen them, although they weren't much good on a planetary surface. The man-portable jetpack wasn't exactly a fantasy, not with antigravity units helping to reduce the mass, but a man wearing a jetpack made a distressingly easy target. I checked my shipsuit carefully, then checked Joker’s while he checked mine. They were, in theory, rated for long-term use in space, but no one cared to take chances. Space wasn't exactly safe by a long chalk.
“Check your radios,” Blackmon ordered. He waited for us all to sound off, individually, then led us to the airlock. “Get onto the hull, then prepare to boost on my command.”
The cold of space seemed to leech through the shipsuit as I stepped through the airlock and out onto the spacecraft’s hull. We were tumbling through space; the stars rotating around us, with the Slaughterhouse itself coming into view every forty seconds. It looked surprisingly normal from orbit, just another blue-green orb floating in the interplanetary void. But there was no sign of anything remotely human from orbit
, nothing like the angry grey-blue Earth with her orbital towers reaching up to low orbit ...
“On my mark,” Blackmon ordered. “Boost!”
I triggered my EVA pack and jumped off the hull. It was a leap of faith; one of the lights high overhead had to be the station, but which one? Stars don’t twinkle in orbit, not when there isn't any atmosphere to create the effect; they looked like pinpricks of light, blazing out against the all-encompassing darkness. There were people who worship the dark between the stars, I knew; now, staring into the darkness, I understood just how they felt. No matter how brightly the stars blazed, eventually entropy would take them and the whole universe would fall into darkness.
“Here she comes,” Blackmon said. The station loomed out of the darkness, illuminated by brilliant lights that cast her structure into sharp relief. She looked like a child’s set of building toys, a fragile network of cylinders held together by golden framework. “Get ready to latch on ...”
I braced myself, then used the last of the propellant to slow down as I closed with the station. Perception shifted; I was suddenly falling towards the station, rather than closing in on it. I fought down a sudden wave of disorientation, then caught hold as I hit the cylinder. There was no time to congratulate myself, I knew; I forced myself forward to the nearest airlock and keyed it open. Moments later, I was safely inside the station.
“Well done,” Southard said, once we gathered in the station's personnel compartment. “You all managed to survive.”
We beamed, even though none of us were particularly pleased about the test. It had been rigged, of course, and there had been no real danger ... but it had still been thoroughly unpleasant. A single misjudgement at the wrong time could have sent us spinning helplessly into interstellar space ... or down towards the planet below. The former might have been bad enough, but the latter would have been disastrous. None of our shipsuits were rated for re-entry and a shuttle might not be able to catch the faller before it was too late.
“There will not, of course, be any break,” Southard continued, as if it had been merely a minor bump in the road. “You’re due to spend two weeks on this station and by the time we return to the planet, you will have laid the groundwork for understanding operations in space.”
It was, in many ways, both the most fascinating and the most frustrating part of the time I spent at the Slaughterhouse. Space poses a whole new series of tactical problems; your enemy can come from any direction, forcing you to spread your defences thinner than you would prefer. You’re completely dependent on the starship, or battlestation, or shuttle; maintenance isn't a luxury, it’s an urgent requirement. Decompression or life support failure can become major threats at the worst possible time. And then there is the endless problem of forcing your way into a starship - or an orbiting battlestation - that doesn't want to surrender. A smart enemy, one who knew there was no hope of escape, might just wait for you to land, then trigger the self-destruct.
“Pirates know they have no hope of survival,” Southard told us. He didn't sound guilty at the thought of butchering pirates. “But what about their prisoners? Don’t they deserve a chance to survive?”
“They’re helping the pirates,” Bloodnok pointed out. “Shouldn't we be putting them on trial as collaborators?”
Southard pulled himself over to him. “Imagine that you’re a crewman on a trader starship,” he sneered. “Your father is the commander, you’re the chief engineer, your sisters are the crew chiefs, your mother is the medic ... imagine you have strong ties to your family. You love them dearly.
“And then you fall into pirate hands,” he added. “Your father is killed. You’re told that your mother and sisters will be raped to death unless you collaborate. What do you do?”
I groaned inwardly. It was my first introduction to a problem that would bedevil the Empire right up until its fall. Pirates were automatically sentenced to death when they were caught - no one had authority to do anything else - and it made them very unwilling to surrender. But blowing their ships out of space ran the risk of killing innocent hostages, while storming them meant risking a marine platoon or two. I had a feeling that most commanding officers - perhaps even including a few marines - opted for the first option. It was, after all, impossible to prove that innocent captives were killed.
“I like to think I would resist, sir,” Bloodnok said.
Southard was not impressed. “Imagine the woman who gave birth to you being raped, time and time again, by pirates,” he said. “Imagine your sisters with their teeth knocked out, then raped orally and anally until they died. Would you still resist?”
It hit me, then, that my sisters had died that way. I’d never been offered a choice to do something - anything - that would save their lives. Hell, I wouldn't have trusted the gangsters if they’d offered to spare them in exchange for a service or two. But if there had been the merest hope of keeping them alive and unhurt, I would have taken it.
“I don’t know, sir,” Bloodnok said.
“No one ever knows,” Southard said. He turned so he could see us all. “No one ever knows how he or she will react until they are forced to make the choice. It’s easy to say that you will do the right thing, but what is the right thing?”
He pulled himself backwards. “Years ago, a howling mob of rebels overran an imperial base on their homeworld,” he said. “They captured everyone on the base, including the base commander and his wife, then demanded the commander hand over the codes to open the safe or else. When he demurred, they threatened to rape and murder his wife right in front of him. Do you blame him for giving up the codes?”
I swallowed. It was easy to see why the commander had surrendered. It’s a great deal easier to endure physical pain than watch it happening to someone else, particularly a loved one. I couldn't really blame him at all. But, at the same time, his decision might have led to unfortunate consequences down the line. It would be easy to blame him if more lives were lost, even though I understood his dilemma.
“These days, we’re very careful about leaving potential hostages in places they can be snatched,” Southard said. “Why do you think we allow retired marines and their families to live on the Slaughterhouse?”
I felt an odd stab of envy. Joker and I had walked through Liberty Island, admiring the neat houses - so alien compared to the Undercity - and the confident men, women and children who made up the population. They lived without fear, knowing that they were allowed to stand up for themselves - and defend themselves with deadly force, if necessary. The contrast between them and my family, growing up in a nightmare, could hardly be more pronounced.
We completed our stay on the station with the first of many - many - orbital dives. In theory, it was very similar to parachuting - we had jumped from some impressively high altitudes on Mars - but in practice it was quite different. Civilians did orbital jumping too, but civilians tended to use tougher equipment. Marines preferred to remain unnoticed.
“The planetary defences are designed to track objects entering the planet’s atmosphere,” Southard told us, as we donned the first set of suits. “A marine in a suit is an easy target, if they detect and identify him in the first place. Accordingly, standard procedure is to pretend to be a piece of space junk re-entering the planet’s atmosphere. It isn't uncommon for pieces of hullmetal to make it all the way to the ground, even if they’re relatively small.”
He smiled. “Ideally, we'd want to use a meteor shower for camouflage,” he added, “but we so rarely get a perfect storm right when we want it. Pieces of space junk make much better cover.”
I cursed, mentally. I’d pretty much overcome the agoraphobia that had plagued my early days at Boot Camp, but I really wasn't mentally prepared to dive through a planet’s atmosphere. Not that I had a choice, I knew; there was no way to avoid making the jump if I wanted to be a marine. There was honour, genuine honour, in serving as a marine auxiliary, but it wasn't what I wanted. Besides, I wasn't sure I could offer many skills to the
auxiliaries, save shooting. I had trained hard, yet I was no engineer, or medic, or EOD officer ...
“One by one,” Southard ordered. “Joker; go.”
It was my turn to jump next. I walked into the airlock, then braced myself as best as I could as the exterior hatch opened, revealing the Slaughterhouse below me. This time, I didn't allow myself to show any signs of hesitation as I stepped out of the airlock and used my EVA jets to tip myself towards the planet. Unlike parachuting, there was no immediate sense of descent; it would have been easy enough, if I had wished, to remain in orbit. But I kept inching down until the planet’s gravity caught hold and pulled. My suit started to flash up warnings as the exterior armour heated up. There was nothing I could do, but wait and pray; there was no way to slow my fall until I was in the lower atmosphere.
First To Fight (The Empire's Corps Book 11) Page 23