by Ben Weaver
I hustled toward the barracks, having fallen well behind the others. The trail wound tortuously along a cliff that afforded striking views of the academy lying below, all one hundred acres of her grounds cordoned off by towering mesas, some of which eclipsed the multihued bands of 70 Virginis b. The architecture of the academy’s classroom buildings and library sacrificed artistry for function and relied heavily on sloping, transparent roofs set upon circular, quickcrete walls. But the administration building took your breath away with its carefully planned assemblage of isosceles triangles. We first years rarely visited the place. Going to admin meant you were in a world of trouble, IDO, or dead. On the fringe of the academy grounds lay the barracks, unremarkable rectangular structures divided into four main sectors: first, second, third, and fourth year. First years billeted in the cleanest and most orderly sector in all of the barracks. The second, third, and fourth years kept us busy cleaning it by way of “surprise” inspections six to ten times every day. Earth’s military traditions had weathered the light-years quite well.
Inside the barracks and fully out of breath, I staggered to my gelrack, third down on the right, and dropped the rope and gear pack beside my footlocker. Barracks GY27 housed all three squads of the Twenty-seventh Platoon, though each squad had its own bunkroom and latrine. Any cadet venturing into another squad’s room could do so only with the express permission of that squad’s sergeant, which was why I frowned at Pvt. Carstaris from the Eightieth as she came up to me, her black utilities unzipped to the navel, her peach-sized breasts moving in an easy rhythm with her step. “I saw what happened,” she whispered in my ear. “Halitov paid someone to do it.” She turned and sauntered out, leaving nine dirty looks in her wake.
“What’d she say?” Halitov asked, wearing only his boxer shorts, sweat dripping from his steely pectorals. Of course his gelrack lay next to mine.
“Nothing,” I snapped, eyeing the deck as I unzipped my utilities.
Had I been facing Halitov, I would have seem him coming, not that I could have fended off his choke hold, but at least I could have braced for it. I hadn’t realized how much strength dwelled within those meaty poles he called arms. As he applied more pressure, I swore I felt a numbing electricity arc through my neck.
“Let him go,” came a familiar voice.
Halitov snickered. “Uh, let’s see. Fuck you, Forrest?”
From the corner of my eye, I spotted Pvt. Dina Anne Forrest, a tall woman with thick eyebrows, chestnut brown bangs, and a light sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. She folded lean arms over her chest and came forward wearing a look so combustible that I would’ve given her a wide berth were it not for Halitov’s grip. “What did you say?”
“I was asking why all the bitches come to this gennyboy’s rescue.”
“And I was asking why all of us bitches want to see you IDO. Couldn’t be the fact that you’re an ignorant, pompous ass who thinks teamwork means that he’s the team leader and everyone else works? No, that’s not it.”
“I’m helpin’ the squad here,” Halitov roared. “You been checking the scores? We’re in last place in everything. We won’t make the Order of Merit list. Why? Here he is.”
“We’re a chain. And if he’s the weakest link, then it’s our job to strengthen him. You forget about the code?”
“For nearly a year I’ve put up with this. No more.” Halitov’s foul breath warmed my neck. “Close your eyes, little man. I’ll do it quick. And you can still tell them it was an accident.”
Clarion, Narendra, Obote, and Yat-sen had gathered around my bunk and appeared unfazed by Halitov’s threat. Haltiwanger’s eyes glassed up and his Adam’s apple worked overtime; I knew my pudgy, redheaded friend wanted to help but was too scared. I’m glad that he didn’t because later on it made what I had to do to him a little easier.
Dina sprang on Halitov. He shouted, reached back with one hand to block her—
And I rolled out of his grip and spun back to face him, my neck on fire, my knees buckling.
Paul Beauregard, who had been standing somewhere behind Obote and Yat-sen, crossed in front of me, his arms drawn tight to his chest, his hands balled into fists. Like Halitov, Beauregard stood a full two meters but boasted the slender frame of a swimmer to Halitov’s wrestler. Even as Dina fought to place Halitov in a choke hold of her own, Beauregard struck a roundhouse to Halitov’s cheek, sending him and Dina crashing to the deck.
And then a strange thing occurred, something that made me believe that Halitov was a lot smarter than he let on. He tore out of Dina’s grasp and hauled himself to his feet. At that moment, I thought he would square off with Beauregard, but he simply fingered his reddening cheek, nodded to himself as was his wont, then returned to his gelrack.
Beauregard proffered a hand to Dina, which she accepted with a weary smile. His hand slid up her arm, behind her neck, and he began to loosen her tense muscles. I had to look away.
No one said a word. Dina and Beauregard returned to his rack across from mine, where they sat, and he continued his massage. He was madly in love with her. I wasn’t sure she felt the same. She always seemed a bit reserved. Halitov lay back on the therapeutic gel mattress, eyes closed, hands clasped behind his head.
We had about thirty minutes to kill before last mess formation. Trying to calm down, I glanced out the window and swallowed back the lump in my throat. Twilight crept over the sky, and 70 Virginis b shied toward the horizon. I thought of Jarrett, and part of me argued that my IDO would make everyone’s lives easier, maybe even mine. But that other part of me, the stubborn part that had driven me to South Point in the first place, had, well, other plans.
After sloughing off my utilities, I fetched my towel and headed for the latrine. Jane Clarion and Agi Narendra had already begun their showers in private stalls fenced off by neck-high walls. When they spotted me, they turned away, whispering. I showered in silence. They finished and left, then Mario Obote and Too Yat-sen came in, took one look at me, and did an about-face. Sighing hard in frustration, I dried off and padded to my rack. I collapsed on the mattress, and the gel seeped up around my shoulders as I stared at the ceiling, eavesdropping on Dina and Beauregard.
“But don’t you have to be a second lieutenant to receive Racinian conditioning?” Dina asked.
“Yeah, but rumor has it that they might put us through after first year. They want us to have more time to assimilate. My father told me there have been some problems.”
As we were all painfully aware, Beauregard’s father, Colonel J. D. Beauregard, commanded the Colonial Wardens, a special forces unit within the Corps. The Wardens were the most highly respected group in our military, bar none. Upon graduation, only one or two from our entire class would be selected to train for that unit. At least Beauregard downplayed the prestige, though I sensed that his modesty was merely in deference to us.
“Squad sergeant on deck!” Narendra shouted.
I sprang out of my bed as though it were crawling with shraxi and lined up in front of my rack, my towel nearly slipping off.
Pope marched down the aisle between our racks, paused in the middle of the room, then placed hands squarely on his waist. “You people smell. Mr. St. Andrew? Mr. Halitov?”
As we shifted front and center, Halitov elbowed me hard in the ribs. I bit back the pain and focused on the patch on Pope’s left breast: four equilateral triangles positioned at each of the cardinal points and pointing outward, with a ring of seventeen stars superimposed over them. That was the Corps’s simple emblem, the stars signifying the seventeen explored worlds, the triangles representing honesty, loyalty, courage, and determination. Just words to me back then.
After a loud hem, Pope began. “Gentlemen. During orientation we told you that we maintain surveillance in every facility on these grounds. Some of you have managed to get around that and meet for a little unauthorized coitus. I don’t see it and you keep it safe and controlled, it don’t hurt me. But anyone stupid enough to attack another cadet inside th
e barracks deserves an automatic IDO. Would you agree with that assessment, Mr. Halitov?”
“I would, sir.”
Though I wanted very badly to turn my head and watch Halitov squirm, I didn’t dare move.
“What about you, Mr. St. Andrew?”
I flushed. “Sir, I agree with that assessment, sir.”
“Did Mr. Halitov attack you?”
“Sir, not exactly, sir.”
“Would do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“Sir, I provoked him, sir. He asked me a direct question, and I refused to answer it. Sorry, sir.”
“I see. All right, then. It’s come to my attention that most of you have a problem with Mr. St. Andrew’s performance. That’s not only his responsibility, it’s yours. Mr. Halitov, I’m placing you in charge of Mr. St. Andrew.”
“Sir, thank you, sir.” Halitov never sounded more pleased.
“If Mr. St. Andrew fails to pack the gear to serve in my Seventeen, both of you will IDO.”
“But sir—”
“Sergeant Rodriguez has already approved this arrangement. Now then, gentlemen. Do we understand each other?”
We replied in unison.
“Very well.” He lifted his wrist, squinted at his tac. “You’ve got eleven minutes till last mess formation.” He shifted to go.
“Sir?” I called. “Have you seen my brother?”
A shadow passed over Pope’s expression. “You want to interrogate me? That it, Mr. St. Andrew?”
“No, sir. I just—”
“I didn’t think so.” He stomped out.
2
Dressed in fresh utilities and with eight minutes to spare before last mess, I sat up on my gelrack and skimmed through electronic pages of colonial history glowing on my tablet. A lot of the material was review from my secondary education, though my instructor, a captain who looked old enough to have fought in the pre-alliance biowars (that’s an exaggeration—he’d have to be over a hundred) expected us to know dates. Most of us were pretty cynical about the class. Why not slide those horseshoe-shaped cerebros onto our heads and let us spend just thirty seconds downloading a semester’s worth of material directly into our long-term memories? We would later learn a closely held secret: Downloaded data interfered with the conditioning, which was why only colos could attend South Point and not the more genetically pure Terrans. Most people living on Earth received their education through cerebros and participated in learning communities to discuss all of that stuff “they never knew they knew.” Education was about conversation, not memorization. We colos could never afford that extravagance, and we learned material the cheaper, old-fashioned way: lecture, group work, notes, discussion, surprise quiz, midterm, final exam, deep sigh, it’s over.
Of course, the alliances had their ulterior motives in making the cerebros so expensive. Our ignorance, especially in science and engineering, kept us weak and, in my case, hungry, which was another big reason I wanted to become a conditioned officer. After the conditioning, we had the option to hook up to a cerebro and download to our heart’s content. I would, in effect, enjoy the life of a fully educated Terran.
I tapped back to my favorite chapter, the only one that seemed relevant, a treatise that covered our first contact with the Racinians and the eventual development of the TAWT drive and skin technology.
On February 2, 2099, deep-core drillers working on Neptune’s third moon, Nereid, uncovered the ruins of an immense, subterranean hangar housing a small fleet of spacecraft estimated to be 1.7 million years old. Designed to accommodate human-sized travelers and engineered to be remarkably similar to our own sleek shuttles, the ships were at first mistaken for classified military vehicles. It took another six months to verify that they were, in fact, of alien origin, and months after, on September 3, all of humanity learned that we were not the only intelligent race in our galaxy—or, as some war critics would later put it, we learned that the Racinians were the only intelligent race in the galaxy.
Historians still note that the discovery was suspiciously too good to be true. We had not found some mysterious monolith or some completely unintelligible device that would frustrate us for centuries. We had found ships constructed of high-strength, low-weight alloys similar to our own. The only thing we lacked were the pilots to tell us how to operate them, though it took us only thirty years to decipher their language, navigation, artificial intelligence systems, and bits and pieces of a process they endured that loosely translated as biological conditioning. Strangely enough, nowhere in their information systems could we find data on their culture, religion, politics, or even their name. We called them the alien race, the race; then the media finally dubbed them “the Racinians.” Alarmists predicted the aliens were not long since gone but were carefully feeding us information for some diabolical purpose. Either way, we were hungry.
Because the discovery was so phenomenal—far more so than the microorganisms we had found living beneath Europa’s ice crust, it sparked a renewed and vigorous interest in space exploration. During the entire twenty-first century, we had ventured out only as far as Neptune, but within fifty years after the Nereid find we would leave our solar system. Round-the-clock study of the Racinian craft led to the development of the Tecnocabalistic Drive System, which in turn yielded a second-generation Telic drive: the Trans Advanced Wave Theory (TAWT) drive, responsible for getting me to Exeter in the first place. The text described its operation as follows:
Toroidal Curvature of the containment field allows the formation of the mediators and the establishment of a stable family of PSTM (Primal Space-Time Matter) particles. The main TAWT drive computers, networked in a Quantum Communication Array (QCA) allow the so-called faster-than-light computations to be made which in turn collapse the wave function of any and all present conditions. As the ship’s computer observes the conditions, it in effect can answer questions before they are posed.
By forming a PSTM, the Racinian Tecnocabalistic Drive System (TDS) can indeed create the initial conditions of the universe at a time before the big bang of creation. In this field/particle state, all matter and space-time are located in the same place at the same time of the same particle or mass. In this field time, space and matter lose all singularity. Space and distance have no meaning, for all matter is located in the same place. Time has no meaning, for all matter is one. Matter has no meaning, for all is unification. In that primeval time, as the universe entered its inflationary stage (but prior to its expansion), no effect was realized at the quantum level. And for all time the quantum bond would be present, but unmeasured—until the TDS was turned on.
“Holy shit,” Beauregard muttered.
I looked up from my tablet. Jarrett limped into the bunkroom, one eye swollen, both cheeks crimson, his utilities torn at the knees and coated with a thick layer of dust. He ignored the stares, winced as he leaned over and pulled a towel from his footlocker, then started for the latrine.
“Jarrett?” Beauregard called.
My brother waved off the colonel’s son and kept on. I slid out of my rack and followed my brother into the showers.
“Scott,” he said in a warning tone as he fumbled with the zipper on his utilities.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me.”
He sloughed off his uniform, revealing a half dozen purpling bruises on his chest. I grimaced and circled behind him to find at least as many welts on his back.
“Just get out of here.”
I couldn’t take my gaze off his injuries. “What did that bastard do to you?”
“What’s it look like? I came all this way to get my ass kicked. And for who? For my little brother who can’t hack it. You’re ruining this for us, Scott. You hear me?”
Someone gasped. I looked to the doorway, where Dina, Beauregard, and Haltiwanger stood wearing the same expression of concern. The others jockeyed for a gossip spot just behind them. My glower forced everyone back into the bunkroom.
Jarrett slammed the shower door and keyed on th
e water. I gritted my teeth and watched him a moment, the rage building until I suddenly blurted out, “I don’t want anything from you. Stop trying to help me.”
“Don’t know why I do,” Jarrett answered, grinding out his words. “I guess I’m your brother, and I’m supposed to help you, but I feel like I’m wasting my time.”
We lined up outside Mess Hall #3, double-checking each other’s utilities for condemning lint, wrinkles, and improper fitting. Squad Corporal Lysa Gorbatova, a nineteen-year-old second year, finally met us on the line, and in Pvt. Haltiwanger’s evening ritual, he muttered breathlessly, “Look at her. Just look at her.”
Gorbatova was not my type. Haltiwanger opted for short, strawberry blondes, and he often described in unwelcome detail exactly what he would do to our squad corporal. He questioned my own sexual preferences since I didn’t speak of women as basely as he did, but I came from Gatewood-Callista, where forty percent of the mining colony’s original colonists were fundamentalist Christians of the Colonial Church of Christ. My father had separated from the church after my mother left, but he still followed many of the church’s practices and had taught my brother and I to appreciate each individual’s value and to adhere to a code of conduct not unlike South Point’s. Sure, my father had been tough, but by sixteen I had realized that his efforts would only help me escape my heritage.
Thus, I had difficulty standing there, trying to repress a mental image of Corporal Gorbatova on all fours and barking like a dog while Haltiwanger sat on her back and slapped her bare and dimpled buttock with his riding crop. Just when I thought I had forgotten that one, I’d remember the one where he dressed her in a schoolgirl’s uniform, gave her a lollipop, spanked her, then threw her on his gelrack.