by Ian Douglas
As he stood at attention waiting for his turn with the barber, he decided that he could accept most of what was happening philosophically, though his run-in with Sewicki earlier still rankled. The stories he’d heard about boot camp were proving to be fairly accurate. The name-calling and constant, shouted verbal harassment didn’t bother him. He’d heard that in the old days, a couple of centuries back, drill instructors had actually been forbidden to hit their men, to use racial or personal slurs, even to swear in front of them or call them names.
That had been an ideologically charged era, a scrap of ancient history when the Corps had been forced by circumstance and a fast-changing American culture to adopt a politically correct attitude requiring that recruits be handled with gentleness, understanding, and respect.
“Damn you, maggot! Get those eyeballs off of me now if you want to keep them!”
Those days were long gone now. The purpose of boot camp had always been to reduce all incoming recruits to a common level, break them of their civilian habits and attitudes, and rebuild them as Marines. The breaking had begun the moment they’d stumbled off the bus, and it was proceeding apace, with no sign of letup.
It took all of twenty seconds for John’s longish brown hair to join the furry blanket on the floor. After that they ran to yet another building, this time to pass through a web of laser light while computers measured his body, then to receive a seabag and pass down a line of tables where still more bored civilians dropped item after item of clothing and gear into the bags as the recruits held them open and sergeants bellowed for them to move it up, move it up. The gear they were issued included everything from “Mk. 101 cleaning kit, M-2120, laser rifle, for care of” to “shoes, shower” to “cream, facial depilatory.” Uniform items included multiple sets of underwear, shorts, T-shirts, socks, shoes, work caps, and the ubiquitous utilities known as BDUs—battle dress uniforms—all but the underwear and shoes in the same shade of basic olive drab.
The sun was just coming up over the broad, silver-limned reach of the Atlantic Ocean when at last they were run into their barracks, exhausted, dazed, and drenched with sweat. Their course took them past a transients’ barracks, where young men leaned out of open windows with hoots, wolf whistles, catcalls, and cheerful cries of, “Man, you maggots are in a world of shit!”
Home for the next several days was a receiving barracks, a long, narrow room with ancient wooden floors, lined with beds stacked two high, each bunk separated from the next in line by a gray double locker.
Here, the recruits were again assembled on the floor, where they were given a long and detailed lesson in the strange and alien new language they were now required to use. It was not a floor, but a deck; not a ceiling, but an overhead; not a door, but a hatch; not stairs, but a ladder, not a bed, but a rack. You didn’t wear pants, you wore trousers; you didn’t wear a hat, but a cover. Upstairs was topside; downstairs was below deck. This area where they were assembled was the squad bay. The area just outside the drill instructor’s office at the far end of the room was the quarterdeck. A room was a compartment. The bathroom was the head. Left was port, right was starboard.
It seemed as though the Marines had a different name for everything, and the Goddess help anyone who forgot or slipped into his old patterns of civilian speech.
The drilling continued for another hour, followed by a session where they were assigned racks and gently instructed in how to lay out, fold, and stow the clothing and gear they’d been issued. Next, they were ordered to strip, and with shower clogs on their feet, a towel in the left hand and soap in the right, were marched to the head. “Let’s go, ladies, anytime you’re ready! Close it up! Close it up! Nuts to butts! Make the guy in front of you smile!”
Showering was done, literally, by the numbers, with Sergeant Heller looking on from behind a glass window in the bulkhead above the shower pit and barking orders over a needlemike. “First! Place your towels on the overhead bars. Next! Take your positions on the footprints painted on the deck! Reach up with your right hands! Grasp the shower chain and pull down, while standing in the stream!” Shrieks, groans, and giggles accompanied the icy torrent. “Belay that racket in there! No one told you to talk! One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Release the shower chain! Now! Lather up the soap and wash your head and face! Reach up with your right arm and grasp the shower chain. Pull down and rinse off. One! Two! Three! Release the chain!…”
It was a bizarre experience for John. The shower facility was downright primitive, with cold water dumped on their heads when they yanked on the pull chain. No temperature selector. Bar soap, for Goddess’s sake, instead of a disinfect mixture or dirt solvent or skin cleanser added to the water stream. No sonic wash or infrared bake. No pulsing spray or steam mist, and definitely no civilized ten-minute soak in the hot tub to finish off the ritual. And having someone barking out at them what to wash, when to wash it, and how long to rinse it…
“Next! Lather up your right arm…that’s your right arm, maggot…yes, you! Twelve from the end! Grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse…One! Two! Three! Release the chain!…”
They were being treated, he realized, like children…no, worse, like incompetents, like brain-damaged incompetents too slow to understand the simplest command. He could understand the need for this kind of guidance, intellectually, at least, but the process itself was humiliating in the extreme.
“Now lather your crotch. Do not be embarrassed. No one is looking. No one would want to look, believe me! Lather thoroughly! Now, reach up and grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse…One! Two! Three! Release the chain!…”
After showering and drying off, they marched nuts to butts back to the squad bay, where they stood in line, arms stretched out at shoulder level, while Sewicki, Heller, and a Navy corpsman walked down the line, inspecting each shivering recruit for wounds, cuts, abrasions, bruises, or signs of ringworm or other fungal infections. Only then were they allowed to don for the first time the uniform of their new service…olive drab BDU trousers, T-shirts, and utility covers. The only technical aspect to their garb was in the heavy black boondockers, smartshoes that sighed and hissed as they adjusted themselves to the size and shape of each recruit’s feet. There were no sensors in their BDUs, no fitting mechanism, no heaters or coolers, not even a link to a smart-garb channel for weather advice.
John thought about that pile of discarded electronics in the disposal bin. He’d always thought of the Marines as high-tech, with their armored suits and APCs, flier units and M-2120 lasers, combat implants and e-boosters. What they were wearing now was about as back-to-basics as it was possible to get.
Another hour passed as men who’d somehow missed getting vital items of clothing or gear or who’d ended up with extras were sorted out and discrepancies corrected. Civilian clothing was carefully sealed in plastic bags, labeled for storage, and collected. It would be returned when they completed boot camp…or when they washed out and gave up the new uniform.
Only then were they herded once more into ranks, then marched across the parade field outside—no, that was a grinder—to the mess hall. John thought at first that he would be too tired to eat, but found instead that he was ravenous. Even when he was eating, though, the constant barrage from Heller and Sewicki never let up. They paced among the tables, continuing the sharp-barked litany of correction, guidance, and downright bullying. “Food is fuel. You need good fuel to do what we expect you to do. No sliders! No rollers! No goddamn pogey bait! Good food, and lots of it! Regulations say three thousand two hundred calories per meal. And you will need it!…”
And there was a lot, but with just twenty minutes precisely in which to eat it. Chipped beef piled over toast, scrambled eggs, salad—a salad for breakfast!—orange juice, fresh oranges…
But as he wolfed down the meal, he was already wondering if he’d made a terrible, terrible mistake….
6
21 JUNE 2138
Building 12, Xenocultural Mission
Terran Legation Compound
; New Sumer
Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID
27:13 hours Local Time
“Come on, Moore! They’re coming over the north wall!”
Dr. Nichole Moore kept retrieving her data mems, pulling double handfuls of the domino-sized crystalline chips from the lab’s storage compartment and stuffing them into the Marine seabag Sergeant Aiken had given her.
“I’m almost done,” she replied.
Carleton, the senior PanTerran representative, pounded on a desktop with a clenched fist. “Damn it, they’ll be here any minute! Forget that crap!”
She whirled on him, eyes blazing. “This is five years of research, Carleton!” she yelled. “Five years of my life! I’m not leaving it to be burned!”
“Stay then!” Carleton snapped, and vanished into the passageway outside. She could hear the wail of the assembly siren over in the Marine compound. She knew Carleton was right. There wasn’t much time.
But she had to save her records. Five Terran years of patient work with the An and their human pets. She raked the last of the mems into the bag, added her personal recorder and the desktop computer, which still had several thousand photographs and several megabytes of notes that hadn’t been mem-stored yet, then sealed the opening.
The Marine seabag had little in common with the all-purpose stowage bags of centuries past. It was more like a square satchel, but with smartthreads woven into the fabric. A couple of tugs on the carry straps unfolded it into a backpack; as she pushed her arms through the straps and hoisted it into place, she heard the whine of servos adjusting the balance on her back and felt the grip of shoulder distributors snugging down over her shoulders. She had nearly thirty kilos of notes, mems, and electronic gear inside, and lugging it out of the compound would have been a real bitch without the technic assist.
Nichole took a last look around her office, feeling the tug of regret. Five years…
Damn Geremelet and his Destiny Faction anyhow…and damn the High Emperor for trying to appease them, and damn the Trade Mission for interfering with the millennia-old balance of social forces on this world, and damn the Humankind Party on Earth for stirring things up, and, yes, damn herself and her xenocultural team for digging into questions that perhaps should not have been uncovered. Of course slavery was immoral, unjust, and obscenely wrong…but when the slaves were actually happy with their lot, had been bred to be happy for generation upon untold generation…
Satisfied at last that she’d managed to grab the most critical of her research data, she accessed her neurimplants, logging onto the Legation network one last time. The main network AI was still offline, though, and all she could see within her electronically enhanced mind’s eye was the same warning that had been up and broadcasting for the past twenty hours—all civilian personnel were to gather a minimum of necessary belongings and report to the Pyramid of the Eye for evacuation. The base’s two ground-to-orbit transports had been shuttling up and down constantly for the past twelve hours or so, hauling people up to the relative safety of the Emissary, in Ishtar orbit. The evacuation was perhaps half complete. According to the posting on the net-cast, another transport would be lifting within forty minutes.
And she would be on it. She took a last look around the room, then, on impulse, used a stylus to scrawl a brief message on a notebook, leaving it on a countertop. Someday she might be able to return. More likely, though, it would be someone else, someone trying to figure out what had gone wrong here. The message might help. She hurried out into the hallway, palm-locking the door behind her. As if I’ll be back to work here at the next shift, she thought, bitter.
Building 12 was a gray, ground-extruded nanocrete dome near the east side of the XC Mission quarter, ugly as sin, as her grandmother back in Michigan used to say, but it had been home and office for five Terran Standard years. She emerged from light and air-conditioned coolness on the elevated walkway halfway up the side of the curved wall, plunging into the steamy heat outside.
Spread out below her within the tight perimeter of the Legation walls, the embassy compound was submerged in murky red twilight, with only the bright gleam of a handful of lights in scattered windows to show where Earthers had left them burning after leaving for the evacuation pickup. Gunfire crackled and snapped from the north, where a company of Marines was trying to hold off the incoming tidal flood of Anu god-warriors and their Sag-ura slaves. Smoke stained the red sky at a dozen different points—most of them marking burning ’villes outside the wall, but a few were inside, set by fanatics within the embassy compound or by firebombs lobbed over the wall.
It was late morning—not that the Terran Legation staff ever paid much attention to local time. Ishtar circled giant Marduk in 133 hours, which meant that its day-night cycle was five and a half Earth days long. The Legation’s work and rest periods were based on a standard twenty-four-hour cycle matched to Greenwich Mean Time on distant Earth, a necessary concession to the biological needs of a much different world’s evolution. In any case, the light from the primary, red-dwarf Llalande 21185, was so wan that the landscape always seemed to be shrouded in twilight, even at high noon.
At the moment, the sun was a red-ember pinpoint gleaming high in the eastern sky, well above the haze-shrouded Ahtun Mountains, too tiny and too distant to lend Ishtar more than a trickle of heat. In the west, above the black cone of God Mountain, Marduk hung against the deep green and purple sky, a baleful scarlet eye poised to fall upon the exotically lush landscape of Ishtar and crush it. Though gibbous and waning now, the sliver of Marduk’s night side visible at the moment glowed almost as brightly as the sunlit side. Stirred and stressed by the constant gravitational tug-of-war with its largest satellite, the gas giant radiated far more heat than it received from its star, heat sufficient to warm its Earth-sized satellite to tropical temperatures on the side forever facing Marduk in tide-locked captivity.
Nichole spared only a moment for the red-gloom beauty of the landscape. The gunfire in the north was growing steadily in intensity, and she could see the black sprawl of Geremelet’s hordes surging through the shattered main gate. A cluster of rockets rose from the jungle beyond, trailing orange flame. The flames winked out; moments later, a scattering of flashes popped and strobed across the northern quarter of the compound, followed seconds later by the dull thud of the explosions. The Marines wouldn’t be able to hold that army of Ahannu fanatics back much longer.
A Marine Wasp droned overhead, its insectlike body painted in stripes of yellow and dark blue-black. It angled across the compound toward the north, and she guessed that it was searching for the launch site of those rockets.
Shouldering her pack, she moved quickly down the stairway curving along the wall of Building 12. The streets of the city were almost lost in the near-darkness. Not for the first time, she wished she had microimplant optics like the Marines used, to help her pick her way through the shadows. Normally, the Legation’s streets and walkways were brilliantly lit, but the power had failed hours before and the streetlights were out. The ground was littered with debris—scattered chunks of rock and broken nanocrete from the Ahannu rocket barrages—and twice she nearly stumbled with her heavy load.
“Halt! Who’s there?” a voice demanded from the shadows to her left.
“I’m Dr. Moore,” she said. “Xeno-C Mission.”
A figure stepped forward from the shadows, man-shaped but bulkier, heavier, and clad in black military armor. Gauntlets grasped a massive laser rifle, which was connected to the armor’s backpack by a trio of thick cables. The armor was dented and scarred in several places. The name AIKEN, G. was stenciled across the top of the helmet, above where the visor would have been had it had one, and a master sergeant’s insignia decorated the upper left arm, painted in dark gray against the darker black of the armor.
“Hey, Doc,” Aiken said. His voice, amplified through the suit’s speaker system, echoed off nearby walls. “I hoped that was you. Lemme give you a hand.”
She pulled back. “I…I
can manage just fine, Master Sergeant.”
“Sure you can.” The speaker’s volume was lower now. “But I can do it faster.” He reached out and lifted the pack from her shoulders as lightly as if it were empty. “We’ve got to hustle.”
“What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you guys were holding the north wall.”
“That’s Company G. Companies C and E are checking to make sure all the civilians get out. And we’re late for rendezvous with our transport. Anyone else back there?”
She knew he meant the mission and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
The armored figure seemed to be listening or hesitating…and then she realized Aiken was talking to someone else on his radio. “Okay. The rest of my team will go through the mission, just to make sure. You come with me.”
He turned and strode down the rubble-littered street without looking back to see if she was following. She hesitated…but then realized he had all of her notes and records. She had to follow to keep her claim to them. Damn him.
Nichole didn’t like the Marines, didn’t like their presence here on Ishtar. She felt that militarism had no place on an alien world, had no place at all for a first contact with a sentient alien species. As far as she was concerned, the Marine contingent accompanying the science and diplomatic missions only increased the tension and mistrust between the humans on the one hand and the Ahannu on the other.
Even so, she had to admit that when things turned sour with the locals, the Marines were all that had stood between members of the civilian missions and death. She couldn’t help wondering, though, if things would have been different had there been no military to provoke Geremelet and his fanatics in the first place.
Well, the Marines were here, and the damage done. She wondered how things could be patched up with the locals, wondered if there was any way, now, to find a common ground with them. Goddess! Between Geremelet here and the Humankind Party back on Earth…