by Jay Allan
The South American Empire had a tiny group of colonies, but they were clustered together and highly defensible. The Empire rarely aligned with anyone in the major wars, preferring an opportunistic neutrality. Their forces frequently served as mercenaries for the other Powers, and they would often fight on both sides at different times in a conflict - sometimes even at the same time.
Though there were only eight superpowers on Earth, there were nine in space. The Martian Confederation was formed when the early colonists of the red planet broke away from their terrestrial parent nations during the later stages of the Unification Wars and banded together to form a loose union. The Confederation controlled the largest group of developed colonies in Earth's solar system and a small collection of interstellar settlements as well. While only a fraction the size of the other Powers in population, the Confederation had the most advanced technology of any of the Superpowers, and its forces, while small, were well-trained and equipped. Mars tended toward neutrality, but when the opportunity presented itself they were a welcome ally.
All of the Earth governments were authoritarian to some extent or another; only the Martian Confederation was a real republic. The Alliance national bodies - the U.S., the U.K., Oceania, and Greater Canada - outwardly retained republican forms, but they were really oligarchies run by entrenched political classes. Office holders had to be graduates of the Political Academies, and the politicians controlled who was admitted, creating an almost hereditary class system. The occasional outsider could work his way into the upper classes, but such an individual would require the sponsorship and patronage of someone already powerful.
The middle classes, mostly educated professionals of one sort or another, lived a fairly spartan, but moderately comfortable, existence much like my parents had. Few made any trouble because they were terrified of losing their position and falling into the underclass, again as my parents had. It was a system that worked, at least after a fashion and, if innovation, creativity, and freedom were not what they once had been at least civilization survived. It almost hadn't.
For most people a tiny apartment in an area protected from the worst crime, an adequate supply of rations, and cheap entertainment was enough. For those who wanted more there was space. The colonies of most of the Powers enticed those who craved more freedom, those who were driven to create and build. The new worlds attracted many of Earth's best and brightest, and these fledgling societies, so much smaller than the terrestrial nations, tended to be significantly more democratic than the home governments. They were each a part of their Superpower of course, and they relied upon the parent to provide protection and support. But as long as the stream of vital resources flowed back to Earth, the colonial governments were pretty much allowed to do as they pleased.
Most of us in the military were castoffs from Earth society in one way or another. The Corps looked for recruits with a strong independent streak, something that was not conducive to success in the mainstream world. We weren't the mindless robots in serried ranks of armies past. A modern soldier, operating 20 meters from his closest comrade and 20 light years from the chain of command, had to be innovative and ready to take the initiative.
So the traits and behavioral patterns that made for good, well-behaved citizens on Earth tended to produce poor soldiers in space. Most of my comrades were plucked from the gutter or saved from the executioner just as I was. The system worked. It removed people from Earth who were likely to be a problem for the established order and, conveniently, these same individuals made excellent soldiers and, later, good colonists.
In the streets, when I was terrorizing the Cogs as a gang member, I thought of the government as the enemy. They hunted the gangs and executed any members they caught. It wasn't until I got to the Academy that I learned that the government basically ran the gangs.
It all made sense. The gangs served a definite social purpose within the system, keeping the underclass so beaten down there was little chance of rebellion from below. The urban hell they created outside the protected cities also kept the educated workers in line lest they be cast out themselves.
In retrospect it was obvious. The government could have eradicated the gangs any time it wanted to. Just about everyone, including the Cogs and gang members, had the same GPS spinal implants that the rest of the population did, so tracking was no problem. And while the gangs were well armed to prey on helpless workers, a company of powered infantry could have swept the Bronx clean without losing a man.
Which brings us to the questions posed in my military psychology class. Why would the Corps provide us such an honest view of how rotten and corrupt the system was? And the follow up question - knowing the truth about what we are fighting for, why do it? Why climb into that lander to risk our lives for such a monstrosity?
We bounced around a bunch of answers for most of the semester, but in the end I think I understood. They were honest with us for a few reasons. First, we were all misfits in Earth culture anyway, but what I hadn't known was that every recruit inducted into the Corps was also in the top quintile of intelligence in the population. Not many of us were going to have a propaganda-induced belief in the system. If we're going to figure it out anyway, or at least partially figure it out, why not just tell us?
But it was deeper than that. The reason they taught us all of this was so we could truly figure out the answer to the second question, "Why do we fight?" Sure, you could go with the argument they'd make back on Earth, that whatever faults our system had, it had saved humanity from extinction. That was good enough for engineers and administrators willing to tow the line to hold onto their marginally comfortable lifestyle. But most of us had suffered on the underside of that system, often in conditions that left us relatively unafraid of extinction.
So why do we fight? We all thought we had the answer to that from the first time we blasted out of a ship and put our lives in the hands of the men and women strapped in beside us. We fight for each other. That's definitely part of the answer, but it isn't the whole thing. Certainly, having decided to fight we do so for our comrades in arms, those who share the mud, blood, and hardship with us. If my brother and sisters are going in, I'm going in. No questions...no ifs, ands, or buts.
But that's a private's answer. Yes, I'm going if my comrades go, but why do any of us do it? Not so the politicians can maintain their power and privilege, certainly. Sure, you can make an argument that the system back home, deeply flawed though it may be, was superior to some anarchic, post-apocalyptic horror, but that isn't the answer either. Not for us. For many of us that nightmare had been home.
We fight for these colonists. Because they are brave and daring and deserve to be protected. Because they are the future. Because the societies they create, small and struggling that they may be, are far superior to the clusterfuck back on Earth, and they are the one thing that gives us hope for a future, for a better system...for one truly worth fighting for.
The colonists are also us, it turns out. Ninety-seven percent of retiring military personnel choose to settle on a colony world. In fact, less than one in three ever return to Earth, even for a visit. The colonial militias of most of the worlds are leavened with retired combat veterans who settled there. This was by government design in the early days, when a system of military settlers was crucial to defending colony worlds, and it simply continued because it worked for all parties.
So here I was, a man who'd seen his family destroyed by the government; who'd crawled through the rubble-strewn streets as a child, eating rats to survive; who hated and despised the political leaders back home. Here it was, in Military Psychology and Motivational Studies class that I realized I actually did have a country, and one worth fighting for too.
Not that mess I left, but the promising and vulnerable infant that had sprung from the dying body of Earth. Those miners on Carson's World, where I made my first assault and marveled at the courage of the colonists who stood up to armored infantry and held them at bay until we arrived. The
inhabitants of Columbia, who dug trenches and built defenses and finally grabbed whatever weapons they had and fought alongside us to save their world. The inhabitants who were now trying to rebuild their pleasant community around the radioactive dead zones and other scars of war.
The training at the Academy was definitely not what I expected. I was surprised by all the soul-searching philosophy. In the end, though, I think I understood the reasoning behind it all.
As a private I had no responsibility other than to do my duty and fight like hell. A corporal or sergeant does command others who may live or die as a result of his orders, but typically he is with them and shares their fate closely.
An officer, on the other hand, commands a larger number of troops deployed over a greater distance. Where a sergeant might follow orders and lead a squad in a suicidal attack, an officer may have to command a squad to make that charge, knowing he is sending them to their deaths while he remains at a safe distance.
A good officer has to love and care about his troops, while also being ready and willing to commit them to whatever is necessary, even if most of them won't come back. Even if none of them will come back. And having done so, the officer must stay focused on the rest of the battle without losing any intensity or concentration. Reflection, guilt, and self-loathing had to wait until everyone was safely back aboard ship. The officer needed a clearer picture of what we fight for so he could reconcile why he was sending those troops into a hopeless place.
There was also a lot of training on strategy and tactics of course, and there was military history. Lots of military history. We studied the tactics of every conflict from the Punic Wars on. We reviewed the campaigns of Napoleon and close order squad deployments in the Second Frontier War. I've wondered at the probabilities that took me from gutter rat in the badlands of the Bronx to an expert in Gustavus Aldolphus' volley fire techniques.
I did well with all of the classroom training, and I aced all the exams. But the coursework was only part of the program. There was physical development as well, and if I thought the basic training regimen was tough it's just because I'd had no idea at the time how badly they tortured cadets. We ran and climbed and swam. We did survival marches and pushed ourselves to the limits of endurance, braving heat, cold, hunger, and exhaustion. Officers in the Corps did what they commanded their troops to do, and they led by example.
The Academy was located on a breathtakingly beautiful world called Arcadia, the third planet in the Wolf 359 system. Half a dozen small island continents were dotted across two main oceans. The temperate zones were covered in massive forests of what appeared to be close relatives of Earth pines, though the Arcadian versions were 100 meters high. The windswept, rocky coastlines were dotted with settlements that seemed perfectly blended into the terrain.
The campus itself was situated on a small peninsula along the western ocean, about 100 kilometers from the capital city, also called Arcadia. The buildings were modern and well-equipped, but they were designed to resemble older structures. The exteriors were mostly covered in the gray native fieldstone, and the buildings were connected by stone pathways winding through neatly tended gardens and clumps of woods.
The western edge of the campus ran along a rocky cliff about 20 meters above the crashing surf, and the commandant's office and a number of other buildings were situated along the edge of the cliff with breathtaking ocean views.
We spent plenty of time on the idyllic grounds of the campus, but we also saw our fair share of the planet as well, especially its least accessible, most inhospitable corners. We did training exercises in the arctic northern wastes, conducting war games across the glaciers, without scanners, in blizzards that reduced visibility to two meters or less. We baked in the hot equatorial sun building a makeshift fort to prove we'd been paying attention in combat engineering class.
We did endless computer war game simulations, but we also got out into the field and moved real troops around, mostly local militia pretending to be regulars. As a veteran of Achilles and Columbia I had more experience commanding troops in the field than most of the other cadets. Those two campaigns had the dubious distinction of the highest casualty rates of any in the war so far. I'd seen a lot of my commanding officers taken out, moving me up the chain of command too quickly for comfort.
Fighting with low-power training lasers and simulated blast radii was like a picnic by the lake in comparison, and I accumulated a 6-0 record as pretend commander. I also managed to keep simulated casualties minimal, which was gratifying but also poked at my guilt. My non-simulated casualties hadn't been nearly so low, and a lot of the troops I'd commanded for real never came back...except as ghosts tugging at my conscience in the dark.
The games were useful training exercises, I guess, but I couldn't decide how much so. No question, a hit with a training laser would have been a hit with a mag-rifle, and the battle computer could accurately simulate a blast radius for a fake grenade. But there was just no way to simulate the tension, fear, and stress of the battlefield. I was scared to death when I got blasted out of the Guadalcanal for my first assault, and I was only worried about myself. Oddly, I felt that fear focused me, maybe even made me a better soldier.
But when I had troops under my command the stress was a hundred times worse. It's crucial to be decisive and clear minded, but inside I doubted every decision and second-guessed every order. How does an officer handle that when he has 49 other men and women in a platoon, all depending on his judgment? Our troops were all well-trained. If an enemy popped up in front of them they knew what to do. But when things got out of control and the battle plan started to unravel, they looked to the officers and expected them to have all the answers ready to go. I know, because that's what I had done. My officers had been ready with those answers, and they had pulled me through my battles. I wasn't so confident I would be able to fill their shoes when the time came.
I had served under some outstanding officers, and I was always reassured how they seemed so in control no matter what was happening around us. Now I started to wonder if they were as wracked with doubt as I was? Of course they were, I started to realize. I was scared when I made that first drop, but I did my job because I was trained to do it. I'm sure my officers were plagued by their own fears and doubts too, but just as I did when I was a private, they did their jobs. Because it is what they were trained to do. It is what I was being trained to do.
We were also fitted for our new fighting suits, and we started a rigorous training program in how to use them. Yes, we'd all been fighting in armor for years, but officer suits are different. The sheer amount of data streaming into and out of the suit is staggering, and it takes a lot of training and experience to learn to handle it effectively.
We learned how to prioritize the data and interact with the command AIs in the suits, which were vastly more sophisticated than the ones in our non-com armor. We spent hours, days, weeks going through command net protocols and how to organize communication so the orders and data that had to get through did get through. Interaction with ship-based combat computers, procedures for requesting orbital bombardments, evacuation procedures, nuclear battlefield management, disciplinary codes...we studied it all.
And we studied it all on a highly condensed schedule. We were at war, and worse, we were losing that war, or at least we were hard-pressed and suffering heavy casualties. The Corps needed officers, and it needed them now, so we completed the three-year training program in sixteen exhausting months, with the commandant riding us every step of the way.
The commandant when I was at the Academy was General Oliver Carstairs, and he was a veteran of the First Frontier War. Carstairs must have been over 110 when I was at the Academy, and he had forgotten more about battle tactics then any of us ever knew. The Commandant was old, but he was a marine, and between rejuvenation treatments and sheer tough-as-nails stubbornness he could still put in a respectable performance on the obstacle course. He might not have been able to keep up with a group of bat
tle-hardened 20-something cadets, but he'd have run most civilians into the ground. And he'd seen at least 75 years of action in every war man had fought in space.
I spent a lot of time at the Academy pondering how the Corps had so many men and women of such quality. There was stupidity and foolishness in the military; Operation Achilles proved that if it accomplished nothing else. There was laziness, corruption, and cowardice too, no doubt. But not much.
Before I went through the Academy it always amazed me that the Corps could be as confident and capable as it was when the nation itself was jaded and corrupt and withering. Of course we were the military of that dying superpower which had so long outlived its prime. But we were also the military of a dynamic new nation, based among the stars, and one with which most of us came to feel far more affinity.
When I got back from my first assault I realized I had found my home. That was when I learned how to fight for my brothers and sisters in arms. But it was at the Academy that I found my pride...and learned how to fight for myself.
The months I spent in officer training did wonders for me, and I felt more confident and capable than I ever had. It was also a pretty good time for our war effort. Despite the fact that we'd managed to hold Columbia - virtually destroying it in the process - the war had been pretty much a disaster right up until I put on my cadet grays.
We'd been standing alone against the Caliphate and the CAC, except for some fairly minor Russian-Indian support, and we were outnumbered and getting overwhelmed. But a few months after I left the hospital and got to the Academy, the navy won a crushing victory at the Vega-Algol warp gate. Two-thirds of the CAC battleline was destroyed, and the remainder was forced back on the defensive. The victory must have been enough ammo for our ambassadors in Tokyo, because the PRC came in on our side just a few weeks later, and our battered forces joyfully welcomed fresh allies to the fight.
The enemy had obliged us by making the same mistakes we had, and they expended their momentum on costly offensives against worlds like Columbia. Eventually the cumulative attrition caused operations on both sides to slow to a crawl, giving the PRC time to mobilize and reinforce our battered forces.