by Tom Kratman
“Off the bus, twats.” Franco, with help from a few others, pushed the women into a kindergartenish double line, that being about the limit of their ability at the time. Then he led them through one of the metal huts. There, their clothes and suitcases were taken from them and locked in tiny double-locked compartments. They left the hut bare-ass naked, with only a wallet to call their own.
Predictably, the sight of all that naked female skin had no perceivable effect on Franco or any of the other trainers. The Tercio Gorgidas was—mostly—homosexual. The Amazon candidates didn’t really exist for them, not as women, not as possible sexual partners, apparently not even as human beings.
There were, on the other hand, a few women in the group who seemed, no, not delighted, but…interested.
“Get your fucking eyes off me,” Marta told another woman, bunching her fists. That woman made some apologetic sounds and backed off, keeping her eyes carefully away from Marta.
Haircuts came next. As poor as she’d been, Maria had always kept her hair long. But, no, they didn’t ask how the women wanted their hair styled, although a few of the men in the Tercio Gorgidas did just that for a living when they weren’t on active duty. A smiling Franco watched over them as some men detailed to barber duty swiped their scalps clean. “Buzz ’em, Pedro.”
When Maria looked in the mirror afterwards, she felt like crying, she thought she looked so ugly. Some women did cry. They stopped when they realized no one in a position to help cared in the slightest.
Before they were issued any clothing, the women were marched us into some mass showers, placing their wallets along a shelf on the way in. Most everyone in Balboa took cold showers, at least sometimes. It was no big deal in a place so hot. The water for these showers, it turned out later, was specially chilled to be icy. Maria screamed when they turned on the water. They all did.
Marta and Gloria complained out loud after the water was turned off. They were just swatted for their efforts and pushed on to the next station.
As the women left the showers, they were asked for their sizes. Each woman was then handed one sports bra, in approximately her size (Marta was a tight fit even in the biggest size they had; the man passing out the bras made a note of it), two pair of boxer shorts, physical training shorts, two pair of socks—not stockings—and running shoes. It wasn’t such a bad outfit, except for the boxers.
Franco gave the women a very few minutes to dress. Then he lined them up again and led them to their barracks. This was a long low arching metal hut with few amenities to speak of; three bare light bulbs and forty pairs of bunk beds. On each bed were a thin, useless pillow, a pillow case, two sheets, and a very light and unnecessary blanket.
“Gather ’round, girls,” Franco ordered. The women, all of them still in something like shock, clustered in a circle. “Sit down.”
He began to pass out red felt-tip markers. When everyone had received one, Franco began to speak.
“Okay. I want you to take your markers and I want you to draw a dotted line just like the one I am drawing on my wrist.” Franco drew a six inch long series of red dots lengthwise down his left wrist. “Everyone done with that? Good. Now draw another one on the other wrist…Done? Good. Let me see. Very good. Now there’s no excuse.
“You see, women threaten suicide and even act it out rather frequently, but you fail so often to carry through that I am forced to question your sincerity and competence as a sex. Therefore…”
Franco turned toward the door. He tossed a package of razor blades to the floor on his way out. “Trujillo!” he called over one shoulder. “Collect up the markers in that box and put them by my office door. Anybody who wants a razor blade, just help yourself. ‘Cut along dotted line.’ ”
* * *
Marta and Maria stared at the package of razor blades slack-jawed for a few moments. All the women did. “Cocksuckers,” was all Marta said. Maria said nothing.
Since they knew each other’s names already, Marta and Maria gravitated to the same set of bunk beds. Marta asked, “Do you care which bunk you get, Maria?”
From Maria’s point of view the top bunk looked awfully high. Her doubts showed on her face.
Seeing those doubts, Marta said, “I can boost you up if you want the top. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
“I don’t care…”
“Let’s flip a coin on it.” They did, and Maria ended up on top, Marta giving her rump a push to get there. Most of the rest collapsed as soon as they could. None of them bothered to make her bed.
Some of the women, more than a few, cried themselves to sleep.
Maria’s last thoughts, as she drifted off, were of Alma. In her imagination, she pictured the life they could hope to have together if this Amazon thing worked out.
* * *
Garcia snickered as Franco distastefully told him about the women’s reaction to the razor blades.
Franco asked, “Was that really necessary, Balthazar? Poor girls.”
The senior centurion nodded, saying, “I think so. See…we’re going to be putting them under a lot of pressure, pressure worse than anything they’re used to. And we can’t watch ’em all the time, not and let ’em grow too. Eventually one of ’em’s going to try a play suicide. Problem is, she just might succeed even though she won’t be serious about it. This way’s a risk, sure. But now, at least, there’ll be none of those ‘attempts’ that might go too far.”
Franco just shook his head doubtfully. “You’re the boss.”
* * *
Morning came incredibly early and impossibly loudly. One moment the women were peacefully asleep. The next they were sitting bolt upright, eardrums thumping from piped-in music. And—horror of horrors—the music piped in was from bagpipes. The next moment and Garcia, Franco, and eight other men were on them like gnats, big hairy gnats with muscles.
“Get up! Get up, you lazy little maggots. Dressed and outside for PT. You! That’s right, honey, YOU! Move your lazy, skinny ass!” A couple of quick pushes and Marta and Maria ended in a tangle of arms and legs, a mattress over them.
Half crawling, half running, the women made it outside. More than a few of them did so with stinging buttocks where an instructor’s baton had met with a tardy posterior.
Once outside, the two centurions, four sergeants, and four corporals began to push and prod them into some semblance of a formation. There followed a very brief class in “Assuming and Maintaining the Position of Attention.” That was possibly the easiest thing any of them learned to do at Camp Botchkareva. It was so easy, in fact, that the instructors called on some very tiny assistants to help them determine if they were doing it right.
Maria would hate sand fleas to her dying day. The little demons crawled up her legs, into her eyes and ears, inside her nose…more personal places, too. They bit her everywhere except for where her shoes covered her feet, each bite like the point of a tiny hot needle. And she had to just stand there and take it because, while the sand flea bites were painful and present, the instructors were infinitely menacing.
Maria had expected physical training to be worse, somehow, than it was. Not that it wasn’t hard, or that the women didn’t raise a sweat. It was and they did. And some of the women couldn’t do the exercises very well. Failure to exercise properly usually got a snarl, a whack on the fanny, and some direct, hands-on, correction, but no more than that. And the instructors didn’t have them try to do anything they really couldn’t. It was all “doable,” if barely.
After calisthenics Garcia ordered, “Assemble to the Right…Move.” The women crowded back to the shallow block formation they’d started in. Then it was, “Right…Face. Forward…March. Double Time!—that means run, you stupid twats!—March! Left…left…left, right, left.”
The run was worse than the exercises. It wasn’t fast; Garcia knew they were too new for that. But it seemed long to all of them and it was intentionally painful. The women’s newness made it more painful still, as none of them really knew
how to keep in step, even though Franco called the cadence, “Left. Right. Left.” The women still kept tripping each other up.
“I’m sorry; I’m so sorry,” the girl behind Marta repeated every time her toes landed on one of Marta’s heels. Though Marta was concentrating on trying to keep in step, that woman’s toes continued to foul her up.
An instructor named Salazar trotted up. He whacked Marta’s thigh with a stick, hard.
“Get in step, dummy…Left, right, left. Your tits can do it. Why can’t you?” Then he whacked her again.
And the instructors let no one fall behind. They didn’t try to encourage anyone with kind words. They hit and kicked those who stopped trying until they were willing to try some more.
Two women simply stopped and lay down in the road.
“Diaz! Salazar! Take care of ’em,” Garcia bellowed.
As the platoon rounded a bend, a brave soul might have looked over her shoulder to see Salazar kicking one of the dropouts while Diaz lifted the other to her feet by her ears. That brave soul might have seen the latter of the two drop right back to the dirt as soon as Diaz’s grip relaxed.
Neither of the dropouts was seen on the island again. By the time the rest had returned from the run, those two had already been dishonorably discharged. The remainder heard later, and at the time believed, that the dropouts were paddled pretty badly before being thrown off the island.
Eventually the platoon turned around to head back to camp. All were pretty much nauseated as they passed through the front gate. After they halted and were dismissed, Marta immediately fell to one knee and began to throw up. Maria walked over and put her arm around Marta’s shoulders to help her back up.
Marta shrieked, “Get your fucking hands off me!” When she saw how shocked Maria was, she tried to apologize. “I’m sorry, Maria,” she said. “It isn’t your fault. I just can’t stand to be touched by anyone.”
Though he was nearby, Garcia either didn’t notice, or pretended not to notice, Marta’s outburst. He knew some things about Marta that the women didn’t.
Marta and Maria were joined by another girl, Inez Trujillo, the tiny one, and her bunkmate, Catarina Gonzalez.
Inez said, “Come on, you two. Let’s go hurry and freeze. Garcia’s only given us five minutes to shower before breakfast. And I don’t know about you two, but I’m starving.”
They raced through the icy water as quickly as minimal sanitation needs permitted. Then, dressed again in the same sweaty clothes, they began a slow trot to breakfast.
Breakfast? Gloria, sitting at a nearby table, snorted at it, saying, “This is certainly not what I’m used to.”
Truthfully, it wasn’t anything special: hardboiled eggs, sausage patties, sliced cheese, bread and butter, fried chorley tortillas, some fresh fruit. There was also a broad, shallow bowl of the gray, plum-sized Terra Novan olives. It was believed they were native to the planet, rather than genengineered like the Noah’s tranzitrees, bolshiberries, and progressivines.
To many, the sheer quantity of the food dished out was amazing. Maria, for example, after years of scraping pennies to try to feed Alma and herself, was shocked that the cooks gave them as much as they felt like eating, barring only the sausage, cheese and eggs, which were rationed.
Since no one had bothered to feed the women the night before, most of them fairly pigged out.
Cat, Inez’s bunkmate, took over dividing the rations. The way she did it reminded Maria a bit of her own mother, especially in the way she played favorites. Somehow or other, Cat seemed to have adopted Inez as her substitute baby. Maria noticed, anyway, that if there was an odd amount of one of the rationed items, it seemed to end up on Inez’s plate.
Maria didn’t complain. After all, Inez was the smallest and thinnest girl at the table.
There was a can of a thick, rough paste on the table. Gloria, several seats down from Marta, took a slice of chorley and then used her knife to spread some of the paste on it. Marta, who’d been around the legion for a while, started to caution her but then decided, Screw the arrogant bitch.
Gloria took a bite, chewed twice, and then her mouth opened, panting, as her eyes widened. “Holyfuckingshit!” she gasped, reaching for a glass of water. “What is that?”
Marta smiled and answered, “Well, among other things…”
* * *
The morning of that first full day the women drew their equipment; all ninety-five distinct items required for the first five weeks of basic training. With a little help from the four corporals and one of the sergeants they managed to stow everything in their rucksacks. Later in the day, and with a little more help, they managed to put together the fifteen items that went into their load-carrying harness: four empty drum magazine pouches (another magazine was generally to be kept in their rifles, when issued, or in a cargo pocket), two plastic one-liter canteens with covers, first aid pouch with bandage, bayonet and scabbard, “butt-pack,” suspenders and belt.
Everything else was stuffed into the rucksacks including, at that point, the helmet, its liner, and its camouflage cover. In all, their Phase One BCT load was about forty-five pounds excluding water, food, and any ammunition they might be carrying.
Sergeant Castro brought out several rolls of thick green tape and, using Marta’s set as a model, patiently showed them how to tape all the metal pieces to ensure they stayed together…and didn’t dig into their skin.
“Look, girls,” Castro said, “no matter what we might call you, or how we might treat you, we’re here to help you. Don’t let it go to your empty heads, but yes, we’re almost always going to be pretty damned patient with the technical and tactical things you need to learn. After all, this is all new to you.
“On the other hand,” he intoned, “if you fail in any way that so much as touches on a matter of character or discipline, kiss your little butts goodbye. We really don’t assume you are precisely stupid…but you are, literally, ignorant. We are not assuming you are innately bad…but you have been poorly brought up. It’s fair to say that so far as your becoming soldiers goes, you haven’t been brought up at all. And you are weak, soft, and unrealistic. But don’t worry; we’ll fix all that.”
* * *
The women spent that first day, when they weren’t actively involved in fitting and stowing their gear, learning close order drill: “square bashing,” the instructors called it. The sun was hot, but water and rest breaks were fairly frequent. They knocked off just after sundown.
Marta and Maria had dinner together, facing each other over the table. Things had remained a little awkward between them since Marta’s outburst of that morning. Still, since they were bunking together, they tended to stay together.
Inez sat down next to Maria. Cat, who was the oldest of them, sat down next to Marta. They were all soon chatting just like old friends. It turned out that Cat was a widow. Her husband had left her with three kids—one just a baby—very little money, and no marketable skills. Only the Tercio Amazona offered her a way to have her kids cared for while training and earning a ticket to a better life.
Cat missed her babies terribly, she said. Then she reached over the table to rub Inez’s scalp, saying, “But I have a new one to take care of right here.”
Inez rolled her eyes and sighed.
Since dinner was better than breakfast, and the mess hall blessedly cool after a hot day in the sun, the women lingered over it, in relaxed conversation.
It came as a considerable surprise, then, when they returned to their barracks and found the doors had all been locked, their packs dumped in a pile outside, and a cross-armed Centurion Garcia standing guard at the landing in front of the main entrance. The other nine trainers, likewise, stood at ground level with their arms folded.
“Girls, girls, girls,” Garcia chided. “The legion gave you a clean barracks this morning. I looked at it about two hours ago and what do you suppose I found? Dirt! Filth! Disorder!
“Obviously, you people are not fit to live in civilized su
rroundings. You had time to clean the barracks after breakfast. You had time during the very frequent breaks you were given this afternoon. You had time after dinner. Obviously, you do not know or care enough to take advantage of time. Therefore, tomorrow your breaks will be halved. Tonight you will move into the tents where you will live until further notice. Platoon! Tench…’Hut! Squad leaders, put your filthy girls into the tents.”
And so the women moved, though every morning one of the corporals supervised them in cleaning and re-cleaning the barracks they couldn’t live in.
* * *
The sun was down but only one small moon had risen. Outside the camp, the nasty antaniae called out, mnnbt, mnnbt, mnnbt. From somewhere in the surrounding trees a trixie cawed on its nightly quest to kill and eat as many moonbats as possible.
By the faint light of the one risen moon, Maria, Cat, Marta, and Inez sat in the dirt outside the tent they’d been put in. It was dark in the tent; no lights, no beds either.
“It’s so damned unfair,” Cat said. “Why didn’t they tell us to clean the barracks? I don’t mind cleaning.”
“Because they wanted to put us in these tents,” Marta answered. “Men…just bastard men. They’re all alike.”
Maria had reason to share Marta’s opinion on men. To some extent, maybe, she did share it. She was too embarrassed to mention Piedras, though, so she just said, “Well, no matter how bad things look”—and those tents looked dismal indeed—“I guess things could be worse.”
Cat asked, “What do you suppose we have to do to get back in the building?”
Gloria must have overheard Cat. From somewhere inside the tent she answered, “Kiss those bastards’ asses, I imagine. That’s what they want.” Gloria had been a little bitter since early that morning when Centurion Garcia had knocked her on her posterior for trying to answer back.