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

by Christopher Nuttall

  -Professor Leo Caesius

  “So tell me,” Doctor Juliet White said. “Why did you want to join the Marine Corps?”

  I tried hard - very hard - to keep the resentment off my face, but I don’t think I succeeded. A week after the exercise in Shithole, the platoon had been rotated back to barracks and we’d been given a truly heroic reward of three days of leave. I was less than pleased at being told I had to talk to Doctor White first - and even less pleased when I discovered that Doctor White was a psychologist, rather than a medical doctor. Yes, she had been a marine auxiliary herself - not that anyone would know it if they looked at her - but I still didn't take her seriously. I had very little respect for any headshrinkers.

  “Because it was a chance to get away from my former life,” I said. It wasn't something I really wanted to talk about, but I had a feeling that any evasive answers would be counted against me. (And, by now, I’d practically been conditioned not to be openly dishonest.) “It was an escape from the Undercity.”

  “After your family was murdered,” Doctor White said. “How do you feel about that, after your encounter with another attempted rape?”

  I kept my voice as steady as I could. “What happened to my mother and sisters, Doctor, was hardly attempted,” I said. “They were raped and they were murdered.”

  “That doesn't answer my question,” Doctor White said. “And please, call me Juliet.”

  “I still feel guilty about being unable to save them, Doctor,” I said. I had no intention of calling her by name, not if I could avoid it. Looking at her brought back all the old resentments; she looked middle-aged, warm and protected. It was hard to believe she’d been within a light year of a combat zone. “But I no longer feel helpless.”

  “That’s good,” Doctor White said. “And how tempted were you to pull the trigger, when you thought you were witnessing another rape?”

  “Tempted,” I admitted. I had come within seconds of pulling the trigger. In hindsight, the limiters on the rifle would probably have cut in, saving their lives, but it had still been dangerous as hell. I didn't like Young and never would, yet it was hard not to respect him for taking his life in his hands. “But it was more important to take him for trial.”

  Doctor White smiled. “Do you really believe that, Edward?”

  “Yes,” I said, honestly. “We aren't angels, Doctor. We do have our bad apples. But if we punish them, if we are seen to punish them, we keep our reputation pure.”

  Bainbridge had said that, nearly a year ago. The Drill Instructors were good at recognising recruits who might go off the handle, but they weren't perfect. Some of the most successful marines had later gone spectacularly bad; not many, not enough to weaken us, yet even one marine who went bad would be remembered longer than a thousand dedicated marines who died honourably. Punishing the guilty - and making sure that everyone saw the corps punishing the guilty - was one way to save our reputation. Trying to hide everything, the standard practice of the Civil Guard, was pointless. Everyone knew the only real difference between the Civil Guard and the gangsters was that the Guardsmen wore uniforms.

  “And yet, it might have been better if you had pulled the trigger,” Doctor White said. “It would have saved us the cost of a trial.”

  By now, I had learned to recognise a deliberately provocative statement. Even so, it still made me angry.

  “I would have been charged with murdering another marine - two marines,” I said. Young and Hobbes were full marines, not troopers learning the tricks of the trade. “Even if my superiors believed me, believed that they deserved to die, there would still have been problems. And if they hadn't, I would have been executed myself.”

  “True enough,” Doctor White agreed. “Do you consider yourself ready to be a marine?”

  I cursed, inwardly. If I said yes, it would be taken as a sign of arrogance; if I said no, they’d take it into account (and hold it against me) when they considered moving the platoon into the final stage of training. There wasn't a good answer.

  Or so I thought. “Is there a good answer?”

  “There can be,” Doctor White said. “But it depends on how you justify your answer.”

  I took a breath. “I think I am, yes,” I said. “I no longer have any connections to the outside universe.”

  “That seems a sharp answer,” Doctor White said. “Do you have no empathy for the civilians? The ones you must fight to defend?”

  “I have a great deal of empathy,” I said. It was true enough. “But I don’t have any connections that would keep me from becoming a marine, or going anywhere in the service of the corps.”

  It was true - and, in some ways, it was a genuine advantage. Bainbridge had told us, before we graduated from Boot Camp, that prospective troopers were not expected to marry, at least before leaving the Slaughterhouse. It was difficult to maintain any sort of relationship with light years between you and your partner, Bainbridge had said, and no civilians were allowed onto the Slaughterhouse unless they were married to marines or auxiliaries. But, at the same time, it cut us off from the rest of the universe.

  “An interesting answer,” Doctor White said. “How do you feel about your brother?”

  I refused to allow myself to be shaken by the sudden change in subject. “I think he was a very weak person,” I said, curtly. “He had options for leaving the Undercity, if he’d been prepared to take them; instead, he intended to work his way into the local gang structure and forge a life for himself. In the end, his ambitions wiped out the entire family, save for me.”

  Doctor White nodded. “You may go,” she said. “There's a shuttle to Liberty Town in an hour, if you want to take it.”

  I blinked. “Did I pass?”

  “Your case is being constantly reviewed,” Doctor White said. “That’s true of every trooper, by the way. You are far from the only one with potential triggers in your past. We need men who can deal out staggering levels of violence at one moment and then switch instantly to a peacekeeping mode, if necessary. Some troopers are quietly removed from the course every year.”

  She gave me a faint smile. “You’ll have the answer soon enough,” she added. “You may go.”

  I nodded and left the office, my head spinning. Had they devised the test just for me? Or had they come up with a generic test for every marine, to see if we would cross the line when we were confronted with the ghosts of our pasts? It bothered me all through the two days I spent in Liberty Town - I wandered through the museum, drank in a bar and listened to some of the stories from the retired marines - and nagged at my mind, even as I boarded the shuttle to return to barracks. Just how carefully did they evaluate us?

  Part of the answer came two weeks later, when we were marched five kilometres to yet another anonymous building. Inside, we discovered an examination chamber, just like the ones we had used in Boot Camp. Our normal Drill Instructors stayed at the rear as an officer I hadn't met stood on a wooden box to allow us to see him properly. The fact that someone had written ‘explosives’ on the box was probably intended to catch our attention. It worked.

  “This is one of the most stressful parts of the Slaughterhouse,” he said. He didn't introduce himself, unusually; indeed, I never saw him again. “You are going to be writing peer evaluations for each of your platoon mates. There are basic forms provided in the individual terminals, which you will fill out as necessary. Do not leave any form unfilled. If you have nothing to say, say so.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. “From this moment on, you will not speak to any of your platoon mates until you have completed the peer evaluations,” he continued. “We have had too many problems with platoons deliberately trying to rig the system, either to avoid losing anyone or to pick on someone unpopular within the platoon. Any of you who speak from this moment onwards will be given, at the very least, a full week of punishment duty.

  “You will enter the cubicles, fill out the forms and then leave,” he concluded. “We strongly suggest you do not dis
cuss your answers with anyone else, no matter how flattering - or insulting - you were. There is no formal punishment for post-evaluation discussions, but you will have to deal with the consequences. They could severely weaken your team.”

  They could have warned us, I thought, as we were shown to our cubicles. But that would have given us time to plan our answers.

  The door banged closed as soon as I entered; I sat down at the terminal, poured myself a glass of water and keyed a switch, bringing up the first peer evaluation form. Joker’s name glared out at me, followed by a whole series of penetrating questions. Did I have confidence in this trooper? Did I trust this trooper? Would I share a foxhole with this trooper? What were this trooper’s strengths and weaknesses? Did I believe this trooper should be allowed to graduate?

  We could have planned our answers, I thought, sourly. This way, we get honest results.

  I worked my way through Joker’s peer evaluation form, then moved on to Sif. Oddly, despite my earlier fears, I did have faith in her. Sif might not be the strongest in the platoon, but she plugged on gamely no matter what the Drill Instructors threw at us. Privately, I had a feeling she would have kicked my ass soundly if she’d been a man. And she was easily the best sniper amongst us.

  But would I share a foxhole with her?

  Yes, I would; I decided. She'd shown no hint of weakness, no suggestion she might break when confronted with real bullets. (Or, at least, real bullets fired by people who genuinely wanted to kill us.) I tried to think hard about her strengths and weakness before doing my best to give honest answers. Her main strength was that she never gave up, no matter what happened; her weakness, perhaps, was that she tried too hard. But was that really a weakness? Joker and Bloodnok were just as good at suggesting alternate angles of approach as Sif. More to the point, we couldn't survive as a unit if we always took the direct route to the target. Charging madly into enemy fire would get us all killed.

  I was tired and headachy when I finally staggered from the room, having filled out nine separate peer evaluation forms. None of us looked very good when we returned to the lobby; Southard, who seemed to have forgotten that we were allowed to talk, growled at us to shut up as soon as we entered, then told us to sit down. We did as we were told, silently grateful to him. I didn’t want to talk about the answers I’d given and I don’t think anyone else really wanted to either. We had, after all, been honest.

  “The results will be evaluated over the coming week,” Southard told us, when we were all gathered in front of him. “Should any of you have failed to earn the respect of your platoon mates, you will probably be switched to another platoon or recycled for a second try through the Slaughterhouse. If you fail a second peer evaluation, you will be dropped from the course. It is likely you will be offered a chance to join the auxiliaries or transfer to the Imperial Army.”

  I swallowed, nervously. Who knew what they might have said about me? Joker was a friend ... but did he consider me a solid companion in battle? And what about Sif, or Bloodnok, or Blackmon? Did they think I was worth keeping around or had they urged my removal from the course? We’d all be walking on tenterhooks until we knew our fate. None of us, I suspected, wanted to believe that we’d wasted the last eight months.

  It wouldn't be a waste, I told myself, unconvincingly. I could join the army, if I wished, or even the Civil Guard ...

  The Drill Instructors, of course, didn't give us time to brood. They gave us several hundred push-ups (I calculated once that I’d done over a million, between Boot Camp and the Slaughterhouse), a whole string of exercises and finally led us into a lecture hall for a talk from another marine professor. This time, it was more focused on our current training phase.

  “A society works by certain rules, which can be both written and unwritten,” Professor Cunningham said. He was a tall man, with glinting eyes and a war record longer than my arm. He’d literally been there and done that. “You may discover, when you are inserted into a society, that the unwritten rules are more important than the written rules. The person who is formally in charge may not actually hold any power. Determining who actually holds power, who can actually make decisions that hold the force of law, is the most important aspect of understanding how a society functions.”

  He paused to let that sink in. “I was on Jeddah during the deployment,” he continued, after a moment. “In theory, the Emir had crushed the tribes and imposed a monarchy on his population; in practice, the tribal influences were still quite strong. A battalion of local soldiers might have a captain in command, but the captain would defer to a lieutenant who had better connections to the tribal power structure than himself. It was often quite hard to determine just who was actually in charge of any given unit - and to avoid giving unintended offence by asking the wrong question.

  “Just to make matters more complex, the Emir had imposed a draft and conscripted every firstborn son into a giant army. This army had little in the way of training that might have broken down the tribal links; naturally, if the headmen had called, their tribesmen would come running back to the tribe, weapons in hand. It took us longer than it should have done to realise that, apart from a relatively small force from his own tribe, the Emir controlled very little in the way of military force. Whatever might have been said on paper, the reality was quite different.

  “This caused us no shortage of problems,” he admitted. “The Emir’s bureaucrats had very little actual power, particularly when they were deployed to places that hadn't seen the Emir’s army. Trying to put them in command was a waste of time without enough power to overawe the local inhabitants. We would go there, discover that none of the people listed as having power actually had power, then waste months trying to figure out exactly who did. It generally tended to be shared between the headmen and the clerics. The only places that had effective governance were when the bureaucrats and the headmen were one and the same.

  “There was, in fact, an odd balance of power between the religious and secular authorities. A headman commanded the loyalties of his tribe, while a cleric looked to their souls. When they worked together, they managed to achieve wonders; when they disagreed, nothing was done. They tended to have limits to their power; headmen couldn't commit themselves to anything without the support of a majority of their followers, while clerics had to be careful not to step too far out of line. And they tended to be very careful about committing themselves.”

  It was an odd lecture, but one that turned out to have practical applications. Living and working inside a community, we discovered, gave us a chance to make friends and scope out who actually wielded power. We worked our way through a set of examples - including several that were obviously fictional, as one was based on a subgroup of humans who possessed magic powers - and prepared ourselves for the coming tests. The next set, I was sure, would be harder.

  But, oddly, I no longer doubted that I would pass through the Slaughterhouse and graduate as a marine. I had passed the hump; my confidence was unshakable. Whatever they threw at me, I would take it and carry on.

  I was never told just what my platoon mates had said about me - and I never talked about it to anyone, not even Joker. The whole subject was one we avoided talking about, even when it became clear that none of us had been switched to another platoon or recycled to a junior platoon. We talked a lot, about everything, but not that. None of us really wanted to know what the others had said.

  And I never looked it up, even when I had the rank to look at my own records. I still don't want to know.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Peer evaluations are rare outside the military - like everything from IQ to aptitude tests, they have been deemed unfair. However, they serve a valid purpose. If someone who joined the platoon failed to fit in to the group, it would be better to recycle them to another platoon rather than risk a major incident in a combat zone. That said, it is quite rare for a trooper to fail peer evaluation. By the time they face the test, they have generally mastered fitting in with the p
latoon, at least during training and deployment. There is no room for lone wolves in the Marine Corps.

  -Professor Leo Caesius

  We wasted no time in putting our lessons into action. Southard took us from one part of the Slaughterhouse to another, forcing us to march through hot deserts crammed with dangerous animals - I was stung by a tiny scorpion that put me in my bunk for four days, even though the little bastard wasn’t any bigger than my finger - and wade through swamps inhabited by man-eating alligators. Flies were everywhere, of course; we searched constantly for ways to kill them before finally giving up and letting them swarm all over us. (I'm sure the flies were genetically-engineered to suck human blood.) And then, still tired after the last set of exercises, we marched back into Chesty and practiced everything from urban combat to organising meetings with local dignitaries.