by B. V. Larson
“You’re wrong,” she said. “She was emotional when I told her we’re both going. Earth is still new to her.”
“Well, if you already told her, why are you busting me about it?” I demanded, but as soon as I said it, I knew the answer.
She was feeling bad about leaving her daughter. Sure, she didn’t know beans about raising a kid, but she still had some of those mothering instincts buried inside somewhere. If there was one thing I knew well about women—besides the easy stuff—it was they didn’t like feeling guilty. She was lashing out at me, making it all my fault.
Sucking in a breath, I forced a tight smile. “Listen,” I said in a consolatory tone. “We’re going to be back really soon. I’ll call her right now and make sure she knows that.”
“Don’t even tell her that much. She’s not dumb. The only way we could return in a month is if we die out there and get revived back home.”
“Yeah… she might figure that out. Well, I’ll just tell her not to worry. You’re right, I should have talked to her myself already.”
That seemed to settle Della down. While I’d been talking to her, Anne had hung out of sight. Now, she came forward and kissed me.
“It’s hard to think of you as a father,” she said. “Are you a good one?”
“No,” I admitted, “but in my defense, Della isn’t the best mother, and I haven’t quite figured out how to get Etta to show affection.”
Anne laughed at me, hugged me, and ushered me out the door with a wrapped up breakfast burrito in my hand. I hadn’t even had time to shower. I had to get to New Dulles.
The skyways were full of stragglers and supply ships as I got to the lifter and my new unit strapped in. I’d taken the time to call everyone who I thought might care about my departure—including Etta. Just as I’d expected, my daughter seemed unconcerned about my prolonged absence.
“Can I sleep in your shack?” Etta asked.
“Yeah, I guess that’d be all right,” I grumbled.
“Good, because Grandma said you wouldn’t want me to.”
“Uh… on second thought, maybe you ought to stay in the house.”
She looked angry and stubborn. Here we go again. I sighed, because I knew what this meant. The girl was going to do as she damned well pleased.
After we said our goodbyes, I settled in for the flight up to orbit with the rest of the troops. One of the decks was sealed off from the rest.
“What’s going on?” I asked Harris as I moved to a porthole he was staring through.
The porthole looked into the sealed deck. There were troops in there—and they looked mighty young.
“Don’t you know?” he asked. “Don’t you remember this part?”
“Remember what? These troops look like kids…”
Then, all of a sudden, I did remember.
“Oh… new recruits…”
“You’ve got it,” he said, clapping his hands together joyously. “I’m here scouting out the best picks to flesh out our unit. We lost a few quitters after the Cephalopod War ended.”
Nodding, I watched the scene with him. It looked like a high school bus full of band geeks to me. They were messing around, punching each other and playing with their newly issued equipment.
The lifter took off, and we began our assent. Harris kept watching the recruits, chuckling at them. He seemed to really be enjoying the thought of what was coming next. I began to suspect, in fact, that he wasn’t really scouting at all. He was having a good time.
Finally, when we reached low orbit, there were odd sounds. The sounds of suction and hissing air.
The kids hadn’t been issued helmets, of course. They were strapped in tightly, too. As the air was pumped out of the chamber, they began to suffocate. I found this hard to watch, remembering the terror I’d felt when they’d pulled this same trick on me.
A trio of enterprising recruits freed themselves pretty quickly and approached our position. As I recalled, I’d used my physical length of body to reach the bulkheads and attempt to escape. This group did it the more conventional way, using teamwork.
The trio must have seen us watching them, so they came our way. Harris grinned at them, but I felt a somber mood come over me. I knew I was wearing a stony mask, the same expression Graves had worn as he’d watch me die for my first time.
The three struggled mightily, but they were running out of air.
“Ha!” Harris laughed. “These kids have heart, don’t they? They might even make it.”
Two of them formed a pyramid for the third, who was a girl. She climbed on top and reached the bulkhead wheel. She gave it a good try, and she had leverage, but although it shifted on our side, it didn’t open. She just didn’t have the upper body strength to do it—or maybe the lack of oxygen was getting to her by now.
Behind these three, most of the kids were out cold in their seats, dead or dying.
The girl looked at me, eyes pleading. I knew what she was feeling too—she had to be wondering why this officer wasn’t helping to save her? She had no idea it was a test, the first cruel test of many.
“Wow, does that little dynamo have the stuff or what?” Harris laughed. “She’ll make specialist by the end of her first year, mark my words.”
For some reason, his amusement rubbed me the wrong way. I put my helmet on and closed the faceplate. Harris didn’t even notice. He was too busy giggling about the dying recruits.
Then, I reached out my hand and spun the wheel on our side of the hatch. It helped that the girl was tugging on it with all her fading strength.
The hatch sprung open and this took Harris by surprise. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. Almost always, the entire chamber full of fresh recruits died. They were supposed to die. It was part of their training.
Harris hadn’t bothered to put on his helmet. That was a safety violation all by itself, so I didn’t feel too badly about what happened next.
The air in our small observation chamber depressurized explosively. I was braced for this, as I was holding onto the side of the hatchway. Harris was not. The hatch slammed open and took him by surprise. He pitched into the low-pressure chamber like a bug sucked into a radiator.
His face smashed onto the seats, and his body launched into the two boys who’d been holding up their companion. The boys were already convulsing and blue-faced by now.
As the girl was hanging onto the wheel which opened the hatch, she was the closest of them. I handed Harris’s helmet to her—he’d left that behind when he’d flown into the chamber. She pulled it over her head with numb fingers. Stray blonde hairs were pinched off, almost blocking the seal. She didn’t seem to notice.
Everyone in the chamber died in the end, except for the girl and Harris. The helmet had saved the girl, but the way I figured it, sheer cussedness had saved Harris. When air was finally pumped back in, he didn’t look too good, but Harris was still kicking.
“McGill…” he gasped. He came up to me with his hands on his knees. “That was very unprofessional.”
“What do you mean, Adjunct?”
“I mean you saved that girl just because she’s cute! That sort of thing is poison for morale. Once the troops realize their leader is only interested in flirting with certain members of the unit, they won’t respect your judgment. They’ll realize there are pets and favorites who—”
“Now, hold on,” I said. “I don’t play favorites. I let you suffocate, didn’t I?”
He glowered at me with bloodshot eyes. “I’m going to have to report this to Primus Graves,” he wheezed.
“Yeah… You run along and do that, but consider this: maybe I have my own ideas about building morale. Maybe our best performers need to be rewarded with survival.”
He eyed me angrily, puked, and glared at me some more. I grew tired of that, and so I helped the surviving girl to the infirmary.
The bio people looked surprised when I walked her into the med unit. They ran wands over her and clucked their tongues.
“I don’t know,” sai
d the bio in charge. She was a big-shouldered woman with the disposition of a junkyard dog. “This recruit appears to have too many ruptured alveoli. We should recycle her.”
“Aw, come on,” I said. “Give her a few hours, and give her lungs a shot of that artificial surfactant stuff. She’ll pull through.”
The bio eyed me and put her hands on her hips.
“What kind of a centurion are you?” she demanded in a lowered voice. “You’ll derail our training regimen if you baby these new grunts.”
“You let me worry about that,” I told her.
The girl recruit was named Sarah. She was still enduring bouts of painful coughing, but she gave me a grateful look. I have to admit, I’m a sucker for that.
The bio threw up her hands. “Suit yourself. It’s your unit Centurion—but if you interfere, you own it—or her, in this case.”
“Huh?”
“I’m recommending to Graves that this recruit be placed in your unit,” she said. “If she lags, that’s your responsibility.”
“Oh… okay.”
When I left the med center, Sarah followed me like a lost puppy.
“What do I do now, sir?” she asked.
“You head back to that chamber. There’s lots of blood, puke and bodies that need to be cleaned up. The rest of your people will return to help as soon as they catch a revive.”
Sarah shuddered a little at the thought of cleaning up a hundred dead bodies.
“Can you tell me something, sir?” she asked.
“Why we did it?” I asked. “It’s all part of the playbook here. Part of your desensitization to death.”
“No, no, I get that,” she said. “I figured that out as soon as you wouldn’t open the hatch for us. But what I’d like to know, sir… is does it get better after this test?”
I shook my head slowly. “Nope. Sure doesn’t. This is only the beginning. It’d be for the best if you toughen up right now in preparation for what’s coming.”
Sarah looked dazed and lost, but I knew I couldn’t coddle her any longer. I left her alone, standing in the hatchway. She stared at a mass of tangled bodies, all frozen in their last moments. Many appeared to be straining for life, even though they’d clearly lost the battle.
I felt a pang for her. I truly did. But Harris and that bitchy-bio did have a point. Everybody had to grow up sometime—especially if they’d made the grim error of signing on with Legion Varus.
-16-
The lifter took us to a waiting transport. Just one look told me Starship Nostrum was an entirely different class of transport.
The ship was beautiful. Her lines were sleek, whereas old Corvus had been lumpy and square-looking. Nostrum looked like a bird of prey built in flat planes and geometric shapes.
Soon after boarding, the officers for our cohort gathered together for an important meeting. I was new to being a centurion—but it seemed to me already that there were way too many meetings involved.
“Excuse me, Primus?” I asked, interrupting Graves.
He didn’t even bother to crane his neck around to look at me. “What is it, McGill?”
We were in the middle of planning out our training regimen for the flight out to Arcturus. We had a large number of fresh recruits aboard who had to be taught how to handle snap-rifles in very short order. That was a valid goal, certainly, but I’d been having trouble paying attention to the minutia.
The source of my distraction was the amazing view the conference room afforded us of the universe outside the ship. The walls depicted space around us, which was nothing new. Most ships I’d been aboard had contained what we called “observation rooms.” These were usually far forward in the prow of the vessel. Equipped with windows, they offered direct viewing of a star system when a starship was traveling at sub-light speeds.
But direct optics didn’t work in a warp-bubble. When you were truly underway, traveling between the stars at a significant speed, the imagery was all interpolated from navigational data and displayed on the windows artificially.
I’d always liked observation rooms. The best part was the fantastically high resolution. Equipped with nothing better than human eyes, you’d have to get out a magnifying glass and start doing physics calculations on your tapper to find the slightest flaw.
This new ship didn’t restrict such viewing pleasures to a single area, like an observation room. Instead, most chambers displayed the exterior view of the universe sliding past us to the stern.
“Sir,” I said, staring at the gorgeous display around us, “who built this new ship?”
Graves actually moved his head when I asked this. He turned to look at me.
“Why do you ask that?”
“Well sir, I haven’t seen a single Skrull running around. The crew seems human. And the tech—well, it’s just more friendly and natural than I’m used to. Even this ability to see outside the hull—it’s just plain fantastic. Not like the unimaginative Skrull at all.”
Graves stared at me for a second before answering. “This ship was built by a new trading partner. That’s the official word, and you’re not going to ask that question ever again. Don’t even bring that topic up.”
Some would call me thick-headed, but I can tell when I’ve pissed off a superior.
“Yes sir,” I said, and I lowered my roving eyes back to the briefing table between us.
The table was depicting the central exercising chamber. It was a lot like the region reserved for activities on every transport ship, but bigger. There were also new options for training scenarios.
“Here’s the deal,” Graves said. “The atmosphere will be toxic on this mission, but we aren’t going to tell the troops that. The plants and water features will all look healthy and safe. You can warn your troops one time to keep their helmets on—but that’s it.”
My lips worked, wanting to say something, but I resisted the urge. I can tell you—that was a real effort on my part.
“This is going to be a special drill,” Graves said. “Several teams of new recruits will be facing each other in open battle. The difference is both sides will be unarmed as far as conventional weaponry goes. The primary purpose is to teach them how to deal with enemy humanoids who are hostile, but who don’t possess weapons.”
That was more than I could take. I cleared my throat.
Graves ignored me and pressed on. “McGill, you’ll be assigned thirty regular troops with a few specialists in the mix. You’re to lead your team from the northeast corner to the center of the exercise area. You’ll have five full minutes alone in the room. You’ll take the flag at the center, set up a defensive line, and prepare for an incoming assault.”
“Sounds good so far,” I said.
“Three teams of the same size as yours will enter from various angles,” Graves continued. “These platoons are totally inexperienced, and they all need a good training. They’ll be led by your own adjuncts. Now, is all that clear?”
“It sure is, Primus,” I said, “but can I take along an adjunct of my own?”
Graves slid his eyes to Harris, then back to me. “You don’t have to worry about bringing Harris. He’s one of the new adjuncts who’ll be carrying out this assault against your position.”
“Say what?” Harris asked in surprise.
“That’s more than satisfactory, Primus,” I said loudly.
Harris crossed his arms and leaned back in disgust. He’d figured he was going to skate out of this one, but he’d thought wrong.
“But sir,” I continued. “I’d like to bring along Leeson or Toro to help me as well. We need to gel into a single unit as a leadership team. We’ll be outnumbered three to one already, so I don’t think it will unbalance the contest.”
“Right…” Graves said thoughtfully. “Okay, you can have both of them—as leaders for the other two teams against you.”
“Well Primus,” I said with a wide smile, “that’s close enough. It’ll have to do.”
This announcement of their involvement
shocked both Toro and Leeson. They’d been leaning back in their chairs until now. From that point forward, they became all ears.
“Primus Graves,” Toro said, speaking up for the first time. “Involving experienced adjuncts such as myself might throw off the balance of this exercise.”
He looked at her coldly. “All right. Since you’re in the hot-seat, McGill, I’ll let you hand-pick a few specialists to assist you. But no techs. Leave them outside.”
Toro shut up and looked glum. She’d finally figured out that every time anyone complained, Graves made it harder on them with his adjustments.
“After five minutes of prep-time,” Graves continued when everyone fell quiet, “we’ll let the other teams into the chamber. They’ll advance from every direction. At the end of thirty minutes, whoever has possession of the flag in the end is the winner.”
My mind wanted me to stay quiet, but I couldn’t quite manage it any longer.
“Sir?” I blurted out.
“What is it now, McGill?”
“Not even a little weaponry?”
“Our mission at Arcturus IV is to capture lab people who aren’t supposed to be formally armed. Accordingly, you’ll all be issued shock-sticks and combat knives. You can also use whatever you find in the exercise chamber itself.”
I grinned. “No way I could convince you to leave a rack of snap-rifles beside the flag, is there?”
He chuckled. “This isn’t going to be fair anyway, McGill,” Graves said. “Remember, these kids barely know how to fight.”
I glanced at Harris and smiled. “I hadn’t even thought of that, sir. Thanks for the reassurance.”
“Can I be excused, Primus?” Harris asked. “I’ve got a pack of snot-nosed children to turn into killers overnight.”
“Go for it, Harris,” Graves said. “I wish you luck—I really do.”
The meeting broke up after that. Harris had a determined look on his face, as did Toro and Leeson. I saw Leeson give the other two a private nod, and they left together.
I knew what that meant. There was going to be plenty of dying tomorrow, and they wanted it to be my team that got wiped out in the end. Well, let them plot—I wasn’t going to just hand that flag over.