He was blunt, perhaps too blunt. If the speech became public knowledge, he might well be forced to resign. But he went ahead anyway, showing the moral courage I’d been taught to develop on the Slaughterhouse. It was only with the benefit of hindsight - after Damiani exiled me and my company to Avalon - that I realised he must have known the Empire was doomed, no matter what we did. He was planting seeds for a post-Empire universe that wouldn't fall into barbarism.
“You will see the very worst of humanity,” he said. “You will watch helplessly as the darkness falls over countless worlds. But you will also see brave men and women, pinpricks of light, fighting desperately to hold back the darkness. We exist to support them, to help them, to make it possible for them to save us all from chaos.
“You - the poor bloody infantry - are the heart and soul of the Marine Corps. I salute you.”
He saluted. We saluted back.
Damiani reached into his bag. “Marine Kehormatan, come forward.”
Sif stepped forward to a roar of approval from the crowd. She was the only one whose name I remember - and only then because I thought it was unusual. It wasn't until much later that I realised her entire family had been serving with honour for hundreds of years. Damiani pinned a badge on her collar, then shook her hand. Sif looked overwhelmed, almost, as she stepped back into line.
It was my turn soon enough. “Marine Stalker, come forward.”
I found it hard to walk up to the Commandant, who was holding a dull gunmetal-grey box in his hand. I’d inched forward against overwhelming fire, but this was harder ... somehow, I stepped up to him and stared as he opened the box, revealing a golden badge. The Rifleman’s Tab glowed faintly against the metal; he picked it up, gently pressed it against my collar and secured it in place. I was a marine.
There are a whole series of myths surrounding the Rifleman’s Tab, mostly nonsense. The only important detail is that they’re made for each marine individually and the only way to get one is to graduate from the Slaughterhouse. If a marine dies, on active service or in bed with his wife, the badge is returned to the Slaughterhouse and added to the memorial for fallen comrades. Humans being humans, a single Rifleman’s Tab is worth billions of credits on the black market, but very few are available at any price. The corps has a legal right to seize any stolen badge without warrant or compensation.
And it was mine. No matter what happened, no matter what I did, it couldn't be taken from me until the day I died.
Damiani shook my hand. It was the last time we met, face-to-face, until I was stationed on Earth. Maybe he saw something special in me, maybe he didn’t; it doesn't matter. He would go on to become Commandant of the Marine Corps - and, perhaps, the last person to bear that title. And he was a good man.
“You are dismissed,” Damiani said, when every last one of us had received their tab. “There is now two days of leave, after which you will be given your first assignment.”
The rush from the parade ground - also traditional - was probably best described as undignified. Somehow, we ended up in the bar, where we found ourselves being congratulated by dozens of current and retired marines; they bought us hundreds of drinks, but none of us got drunk. (I was relieved to discover that one of the treatments we were given negated the effects of alcohol and hard drugs; sadly, I think I was very much in the minority.) The rest of that leave passed in a blur; two days later, feeling oddly unhappy to be bored, I found myself being shown into another office.
“Stalker,” Captain Garfunkel said. I’d met him, briefly, during one of the psychological tests we’d undergone. “Please, be seated.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Call me Sam,” he said. “We’re both marines now.”
I doubted it. I’d developed the habit of looking the instructors up on the datanet, when I had a free moment, and Sam Garfunkel had a combat record longer than my arm. If he hadn’t suffered a major injury, judging by his file, he would probably have stayed on the front lines and left evaluating new-minted marines to others. The idea of considering him to be anything other than my superior was absurd.
“You were assessed thoroughly as you passed through the course,” Garfunkel said. “Your Drill Instructors agreed that you showed definite signs of leadership potential, although you would also make a good NCO. You were quite good at taking the lead and equally good at offering ideas to your superiors, when you weren't in command. However, we cannot send you to OCS until you have had at least five years in the field.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I’d known as much. Every marine is a rifleman first; there was no way I’d be given a command assignment without first having served as a lowly rifleman. It wasn't something I could argue, either. A person without field experience in command is asking for trouble. “Am I going to the field?”
“We believe there is no room for you to develop a more focused MOS” - Military Occupational Speciality - “at the moment,” Garfunkel said. “You were not interested in serving as a combat medic, a combat engineer or an EOD officer. Therefore” - he made a show of consulting his datapad, although I was sure he had it memorised - “we would like to offer you a posting to 453th Company, otherwise known as Webb’s Weavers. They’ve lost several men on deployment recently and are in desperate need of CROWs.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Whatever he said, I knew I wasn't really being offered a choice. “When do I ship out?”
“There’s a supply ship leaving for Moidart in two days,” Garfunkel said. “You and the other CROWs will be on it. Once you arrive, you will be integrated into the Weavers as soon as possible. Captain Webb may wish to have you flown out to join them or have you wait at the base until the Weavers are rotated back behind the wire. Dare I assume you wish to accept this assignment?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Very good,” Garfunkel said. He tapped his terminal, then produced a datachip. “You’ll report to the ship by 0800, Tuesday. There’s a list of everything you’re expected to bring on the chip; if you’re having problems finding any of them, talk to the supply sergeants.”
He took a breath. “Make sure you don’t miss the deadline or you will be in deep shit,” he added. “At the very least, the cost of arranging transport will be taken out of your pay. Trust me, that’s enough money to rent an apartment in Imperial City for a month. You can report now, if you wish, or spend some more time in Liberty Town. I’d advise taking the leave, myself. You’ll find yourself wishing you had once you depart.”
I took the datachip when he held it out to me. “Thank you, sir.”
“Thank me when you get back,” Garfunkel growled. He cleared his throat. “Do you want a word of advice?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“There’s a good chance that some of the CROWs travelling with you will be from your platoon,” he said. “We do try to jumble platoons up as much as possible, but that isn’t always easy. In the event of that happening, I advise you to spend time with the other CROWs too. You may end up serving with them on the surface.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. I'd learned how to get along with my fellows, even if we cordially disliked one another. “I’ll do my best.”
“Just make sure your best is good enough,” Garfunkel said. “Good luck, marine.”
I stepped out of the office, torn between two different sets of emotions. On the one hand, I was finally going to get a chance to put my training to work; on the other, I was going to go into very real danger. There wouldn't be any Drill Instructors rigging the tests to make the prospect of a deadly accident less likely, not on a real battlefield. There wouldn't be any simulated enemy soldiers or IEDs that blasted out ink, rather than terrifying explosions. And an injury might be real ...
“Hey,” Joker said. He was waiting outside. “What did you get?”
“Moidart,” I said. I knew nothing about the planet, save for its name, but it sounded like excitement, adventure and deadly danger. Could it beat the Undercity? I rather doubted it; I'd checked a
nd even Terra Nova, humanity’s first colony world, didn't have anything like the crushing population density of Earth. “Want me to wait for you?”
“Sure,” Joker said.
As a child - or a teenager - I would have leaned against the wall, but as a marine I stood at parade rest and waited. Everyone who passed greeted me as marine - I doubted I would ever get tired of it - and saluted, formally. I had to salute back, every time. By the time Joker emerged, grinning from ear to ear, I was getting tired of saluting. But it had to be endured, at least as long as we were in safe territory.
“Moidart,” Joker said. “They want me as a CROW.”
I nodded. “Did he give you the warning about befriending the others too?”
“Yup,” Joker said. “Be nice to our fellow CROWs - or else.”
He shrugged. “Do you want to get our supplies now, then go back to Liberty Town?”
It was easy to get our supplies; we presented the supply sergeants with the list and ten minutes later we had a pair of knapsacks, carefully packed with everything we wanted. I checked mine anyway, just in case; the Drill Instructors had told me to make sure of everything for myself before I signed for anything. And they’d even issued the wrong gear from time to time, just to make sure we knew to check. This time, everything was in order; we stowed the bags in lockers, then headed for Liberty Town. I could hear the siren call of wine, women and song, perhaps not in that order, calling for me.
Two days later, we boarded the shuttle and were duly shipped up to MTS Walter Gold, a huge Marine Transport Ship. The officer who greeted us when we stepped through the hatch pointed us to our quarters, warned us to stay out of restricted sectors and not to try to leave the ship without authorisation. We agreed, walked to our quarters and discovered that they were nothing more than another set of barracks, complete with bunks, shared facilities and little else.
“Terrible conditions,” Joker said, deadpan. “I’m totally writing them up online.”
“They’d sue to get you to take down the review,” I said. Actually, it looked better than some of the apartments I’d seen in the Undercity. Marines are clean and tidy, after all, and none of us would have dreamed of leaving the barracks in a mess. “And it beats hiding in a hovel while Snowstorm Elsa rages overhead.”
Joker shivered, dramatically. Spending three days in the midst of a howling snowstorm had been the low point of the Slaughterhouse - or it had been, until the Drill Instructors found something worse to throw at us. The corps was good at preventing bullies from becoming Drill Instructors, but there were times when it was hard to tell the difference. We’d wound up huddling together, sharing heat, as the temperature plummeted rapidly. And it had been hard to prepare our weapons to fire afterwards.
“They couldn't sue me,” he pointed out. “What do I have for them to take?”
“Your salary,” I countered. Actually, I had a feeling the corps would ensure our salaries remained firmly with us, at least until we decided to spend our money, but it wasn't something I wanted to test. “And your life, if there is nothing else to give.”
The hatch opened, revealing two more newly-minted marines. They rapidly introduced themselves as Hatchet and Sawdust, both from a different training platoon. We introduced ourselves, shook hands and spent the next hour swapping lies about our experience in the Crucible. (Actually, we then spent the next couple of hours arguing over who’d had the worst experience (it was us, of course), but the ship’s departure from orbit interrupted before we could start trading blows.) By then, we had been joined by Trajan and Whisper, a female marine.
“I meant to ask,” I said, when Whisper and I were alone together. “What is Boot Camp like for women?”
She gave me a cross look, which relented slightly as she realised I was honestly curious. “It’s pretty much the same as the one for men,” she said. “We just get additional training in dirty fighting and dire warnings about what might happen to us if we fell into enemy hands. But we lose more recruits than you.”
“So we get told,” I said. “Why did you join?”
Whisper shrugged. “I grew up with an uncle who liked to touch me,” she said. “It was one of those shitty little planets where everyone knows everyone else, so there wasn't anyone who’d believe me if I complained. My parents had died when I was six. One night, I hid a knife in my sleeve and stabbed him when he came to my bed, then ran. The corps was the only place I could go.”
“At least you killed him,” I pointed out.
“Yes, I did,” Whisper said. “And you can bet your ass they would have executed me, if they’d grabbed me before I was shipped off-world. It wasn't a good place to grow up without a family.”
“You have a family now,” I said. I couldn't help being impressed. “Coming to spar?”
Chapter Thirty-One
Whisper’s story was not, alas, unusual. The Empire took a dim view of any of the peons engaging in self-defence, preferring instead to urge anyone under attack to scream for help from the police. Earth’s staggeringly high rate of theft, rape and murder sprang from a simple inability to protect eighty billion (at least) inhabitants, a reluctance to punish criminals who were caught and a refusal to tolerate any form of self-defence. Those who did try to defend themselves often discovered that they were prosecuted for trying.
The net result was, perhaps, inevitable. For the last fifty years before the Fall of Earth, no female candidates from Earth made it through Boot Camp. Indeed, the rate of men passing through Boot Camp was also dropping. The only women who made it through - and then took on the Slaughterhouse - were women raised on worlds that took a more sensible attitude towards self-defence.
-Professor Leo Caesius
Moidart was a planet that should have worked.
According to the briefing notes, it had been founded three hundred years ago by a wealthy nobleman who’d invested in a great deal of development before the first colonists had landed on the surface. The combination of settlement opportunities - including interest-free loans from a local bank, rather than one of the interstellar corporations - and the prospects for skipping a couple of colonial developmental stages attracted thousands of settlers, all of whom eagerly pledged allegiance to the nobleman, who crowned himself King Henry I. By the time Henry died, leaving a controlling interest in the planet to King Fredrick (the son he’d considered most like him), Moidart had a growing population, a handful of major industrial estates and even a handful of tiny asteroid mining operations.
And then disaster had struck. A routine survey mission had found traces of a dozen rare elements - including several used to make Phase Drives - under populated farmland. Fredrick, in need of money for various reasons, sold mining rights to one of the interstellar corporations, which promptly landed a large number of miners and displaced thousands of farmers from their fields. The farmers didn't take it calmly and began a revolution, aided and abetted by Prince George, Fredrick’s older brother, who bitterly resented being passed over by his father. King Fredrick, feeling the noose tightening around his neck, had screamed for help from the Empire, which had responded by dispatching a regiment of imperial troops to back up the locals. Just to complicate matters, the Hammersmith Corporation, which had bought the mining rights, also shipped in a vast number of mercenaries, which promptly made themselves even less popular than the royal troops.
Fifty years of intermittent warfare later, the planet was a horrendous mess. King Fredrick controlled his capital city (and very little outside it,) Hammersmith controlled the mines, the Imperial Governor (appointed after Fredrick had failed to pay back his loans) claimed to control the entire planet and the warlords, operating outside the capital, controlled everywhere not heavily garrisoned by the off-worlders or the royal troops. The briefing notes had concluded with a grim observation that Hammersmith, which was getting tired of being unable to carry out its mining operations in reasonable safety, had urged the Grand Senate to do something. After a considerable number of bribes had exchanged hands, th
e Grand Senate had detailed two companies of marines to reinforce the Imperial Army.
“Looks a right fucking mess,” Joker commented, as the starship approached Moidart. “Are you sure we're on the right side?”
It wasn't a pleasant thought. King Fredrick had betrayed his people, Hammersmith had forced them to leave their farms (while poisoning the land for miles around), but the warlords weren't any less brutal. Fifty years of warfare had left a mark; they were quite prepared to do anything, anything at all, to win. There were reports of entire villages and towns wiped out for refusing to send men and supplies to the rebel armies, women kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery to fund the war (and keep the soldiers entertained) and far worse. Whatever ideals the warlords had started with, they’d lost them long ago.
I wasn't surprised. We’d studied the subject intensely at the Slaughterhouse. The longer a rebel faction had to fight, the greater the chance its leaders would become ruthless men (or were replaced by ruthless men). By the time they won, if they won, they no longer had any respect for the rule of law; indeed, they’d lost sight of why they’d started the war in the first place. They tended to impose dictatorships rather than democracies.
First To Fight (The Empire's Corps Book 11) Page 29