In Fury Born (ARC)

by David Weber

"Stand easy, Sergeant," the major said after a moment. "In fact," she pointed at one of the two chairs in front of her desk, "why don't you go ahead and sit down? This is in the nature of an entry interview, and it's probably going to take a while, so I believe we can probably afford to dispense with military formality for the moment."

  "Thank you, Ma'am," Alicia said, although to be honest, she wasn't positive she wanted to abandon the comforting familiarity of proper military conduct. Androniko smiled faintly, as though she knew exactly what Alicia was thinking, and waited while her visitor settled herself into one of the chairs and its powered surface adjusted to the contours of her body.

  "Now then, Sergeant," Androniko said then, "I'm sure you have a lot of questions. People always do at this point. So why don't I give you the quick ten-credit virtual tour, and then we can address any questions that remain unanswered?"

  She arched one eyebrow, and Alicia nodded.

  "Very well." Androniko tipped back in her own chair, propping her elbows on the armrests and steepling her fingers in front of her.

  "First, as it says right here —" she unsteepled her hands long enough to point at the nameplate on her desk "—I'm Major Aleka Androniko. For my sins, I am also Brigadier Karpov 's executive officer, which makes me Camp Cochrane's second-in-command."

  Alicia managed not to gawk at her, but it wasn't easy. The thought that a facility is important as Camp Cochrane could have someone as junior as a mere brigadier commanding it seemed bizarre. For that matter, the number of people she'd already encountered, assuming her experience so far represented anything like an average density for the entire base, seemed awfully high for any brigadier's command she'd ever heard of. And a major wasn't usually a brigadier's XO, either.

  Or, she admonished herself, not in the Corps, anyway.

  "No doubt," Androniko continued, "you've noticed what appear to be rather a large number of cadremen and cadrewomen about the place, given the statutory limitation on our total manpower. Actually, those people represent a certain amount of Senate-approved cribbing on our part. Most of them—all of the ones in civilian dress—are technically civilian contractors, not cadremen. In fact, virtually all of our senior 'civilian contractors' are, like Colonel Gresham, retired cadremen and cadrewomen. Many of them were invalided into early retirement, but their own time in the Cadre gives them invaluable experience and skills which we badly need. The Senate has decided we can put them on retainer as civilians to provide the trained manpower we need, especially here at Cochrane and our other central command and control nodes.

  "Despite that . . . accommodation on the Senate's part, however," the major continued, "the sad truth is that the Cadre is always short of personnel. We have a far lower ratio of tail to teeth then any of the other services, including the Marines. In fact, we don't have all of the logistical capability we actually need to support our shooters out of our own resources, which is why we call on the Marines and the Fleet for support for many of our operations.

  "The reason we're always shorthanded has less to do with any sort of constitutionally-mandated limitations than it does with the fact that the supply of suitable manpower is, frankly, severely limited. Finding and recruiting Cadre-quality men and women is a constant challenge, Staff Sergeant. The popular view that the Cadre consists of supermen and women isn't just a matter of the 'Cadre mystique,' I'm afraid. We're not really superhuman, of course, but drop commandos—and over eighty percent of our personnel are drop commandos—require certain very specific physical and mental qualities. Some of those are similar to those required by Marine Raiders and Recon, which is one reason we tend to use those duty assignments as a filtering system. Others are qualities which no standard Marine specialization requires. And others, quite frankly, have more to do with motivation, attitude, and loyalty which go far beyond any purely physical capabilities."

  Androniko paused, as if to permit Alicia to digest what she'd already said. After a moment, she resumed.

  "I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about those 'specific physical and mental qualities' just now, Sergeant. To be totally honest, until we've completed your medical and you've been processed through the standard testing regimen, we can't be absolutely positive you possess them in the combination the Cadre requires. Our screening process has been steadily improved over the years, but there's simply no way to make it perfect, and we still lose about eight percent of all of our prospects at this stage. I don't expect that to happen in your case, however, because our pre-recruitment dossier on you was exceptionally thorough."

  "It was, Ma'am?" Surprise startled the question out of Alicia, and Androniko smiled slightly.

  "I think you might say that, yes," she said. "You first came to our attention when you were only fourteen. The standard battery of tests given to all students in their final form of high school often picks up potential Cadre recruits, and yours were . . . fairly outstanding, I think I might say. And you have an interesting personal pedigree, even for a Cadre recruit."

  Alicia frowned, and Androniko smiled again.

  "Oh, but you do! Take your mother's family—New Dubliners for over three hundred years. Loyalty to the House of Murphy's practically a planetary fetish for New Dublin, and then there's your grandfather —the most highly decorated Marine on active duty, I believe. Or your Uncle David, one of the youngest Fleet commodores in imperial history when he was killed. And your mother, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Johns Hopkins/Bethesda of Charlotte, and very highly thought of in her field.

  "And that's only the O'Shaughnessy side. Your father is just as 'ineresting,' isn't he? A farm boy from Silverado, and an Ujvári, to boot, with three doctoral degrees, and G-20 rank over at the Foreign Ministry. One of the top three or four people in the Ministry's permanent policy formulation staff."

  Alicia suppressed another, deeper frown, surprised even now by Androniko's familiarity with her family history, and the major shrugged.

  "We do a thorough background when we get test results like yours, Sergeant. It only makes sense to eliminate as many potentials as we can as early as we can, so we can concentrate on the ones who're going to make good prospects. And we tend to take the long view when the indications are good. We have to, because of how stringent our standards are and the limitations on how we can recruit.

  "We're legally prohibited from actively recruiting anyone, regardless of test results, before they're at least eighteen standard years old, and the Cadre's policy is that we won't accept anyone who hasn't completed at least one combat tour in either the Marines or Fleet. We've made a few exceptions to that policy, primarily when we've seen someone with qualities we need in Cadre staff officers, given how we're always starved on the support side, but the age requirement is set by law and can't be set aside. However, when someone's test results are sufficient to pop through our filters, we generally flag that individual for future consideration. When, as in your case, they eventually join the military, we keep an eye on them and occasionally intervene to . . . customize their career tracks."

  Alicia blinked. Was that why she'd received the Recon assignment she requested out of Camp Mackenzie? Sergeant Major Hill had warned her she probably wouldn't get it—were her high school test results the reason he'd been wrong?

  "One thing you have to understand, Sergeant DeVries," Androniko said, "is that all of your life, like every man or woman who ever joins the Cadre, you've been one of the 'one-percenters.' You've always been in that rarefied top one percent of the people doing whatever you were doing at any given moment in your life. But here in the Cadre, that level of capability and performance is the norm. You may or may not continue to stand out from those around you, but if you do, you'll find that doing so just got much more difficult. The Cadre comes as close as any organization in the history of mankind to being a true elite. The scores we require for our enlisted personnel are higher, by a very considerable margin, than those required for admission to the Fleet Academy on New Annapolis or the Marine Academy on New Dublin. T
here isn't a single cadreman or cadrewoman who doesn't have the inherent capability and talent to be a Fleet admiral or Commandant of the Corps. Indeed, one of the regular service branches' most persistent—and, in many ways, best taken—complaints about the Cadre is the way in which we skim off their own potential officers for our own use.

  "I'm telling you this not to give you an inflated opinion of your own capabilities—one of the mental qualities we require is a certain resistance to delusions of grandeur—but to warn you. If you pass the medicals, you will find yourself working, quite possibly for the first time in your life, with people who are every bit as capable, self-motivated, and accustomed to succeeding as you are yourself."

  She paused again, then chuckled.

  "One reason why I tend to emphasize that point during these little interviews is that it was one I had trouble with, myself. I regarded myself as an extraordinarily capable human being before the Cadre put the arm on me, and I suppose I was. But it was a well-deserved humbling experience to discover that in this group, my level of capability was taken for granted, not marveled at.

  "And now, let's move on to some of the nuts and bolts. First, among the physical qualities I mentioned before are synth-link capability and the ability to multitask at a very high-level, even under conditions of maximum stress. In addition to that —"

  Chapter Fifteen

  "Any time you're ready," Dr. Hyde said.

  The civilian (these days) physician sat comfortably tipped back in the chair behind his desk, wearing his synth-link headset as he watched Alicia. With his eyes, that was; the diagnostic hardware tied into his synth-link, she knew, was busy doing the same thing, in considerably more detail, from the inside out.

  Frankly, Alicia was getting just a little bit tired of the whole hospital bit.

  She'd faced the battery of tests Major Androniko had warned her of and completed them with flying colors just in time to become an official Cadre recruit for her nineteenth birthday present. She got the impression that that was unusually young for admission to the Cadre—not too surprisingly, she supposed, given that the Cadre routinely required completion of a combat tour before it even considered a potential candidate. Any feelings of superiority that early selection might have engendered, however, had been quite handily quashed over the course of the next four months.

  She'd spent all four of those months basically where she was right now—in the hands of the Cadre's medical staff. Dr. Hyde, who'd reached the rank of major during his own active-duty Cadre days (and carried the civil-service equivalent of a full colonel's rank as a civilian contractor these days), was reassuringly brisk, professional, and competent, but he was totally untainted by any trace of a tendency to coddle his patients. Which, Alicia admitted to herself, was the way she preferred things, actually. It was just that she hadn't realized how much surgery was going to be involved.

  Thanks to the quick-heal therapies, she'd recovered quickly from the physical effects of the profound changes which had been made to her original Marine augmentation package. In fact, her recovery time from each round of surgery had been considerably better than it had been at Camp Mackenzie. The problem was that there'd been a lot more surgery this time . . . and she'd had more trouble adjusting to some of the changes.

  When Major Androniko had warned her that the ability to multitask was an important Cadre qualification, she hadn't been joking. Alicia had never had the sort of difficulty some of her fellow Marine recruits had experienced in adjusting to her neural receptors, but at that point, she'd only had one synth-link to worry about at a time. Now she had three, and her instructors insisted that she learn to use all three of them simultaneously. She'd done it, but also as Androniko had warned her, she was no longer leaving fellow recruits in her dust. She'd finally been tapped for something that was genuinely hard for her, and the people around her were disinclined to show much sympathy, since they'd had to do exactly the same things. It wasn't that anyone had given her a hard time about it, but she simply wasn't accustomed to laboring this hard to accomplish her goals.

  That was the bad news. The good news was that—just as she had at Mackenzie, when she'd been unable to match the PT scores of the people who had turfed her out of the lead in that category—she'd found herself responding to the challenge by embracing it. It hadn't been as much fun as some of the Mackenzie challenges, but it had been even more deeply satisfying.

  The basic augmentation for sight and sound had also been replaced with even better enhancement. Indeed, the augmentation she had now was powerful enough to be illegal on the civilian market, and they'd added tactile enhancement, as well. That was an expensive refinement the Marines had passed on because of cost-effectiveness considerations.

  The implantation of the neural web which the doctors assured her would actually provide significant protection against neural disrupter fire had been more straightforward, although the recovery time from the necessary surgery had actually been greater than that involved in the additional synth-links. And the new processors installed in her basic augmentation had presented problems of their own. There'd been a glitch in the hardware the first time around, and the escape and evasion package built into them had activated when the techs initiated the test protocols. Finding her own body moving under the control of a computer package expressly designed to kill anything between her and escape in the event that her conscious mind was taken out of the circuit had been . . . unpleasant. And if the techs involved in the testing program hadn't been prepared for hardware hiccups along the way, it could have been considerably worse than that . . . for them.

  That little misadventure had required a return to surgery to replace the malfunctioning unit. Everyone had assured her that things like that practically never happened and that everything would be just peachy the second time around. By that point, she'd cherished some dark suspicions about their breezy assurances, but aside from the time required to heal, this time they'd actually been right.

  # There'd been some other changes, of course, the biggest of which was undoubtedly her new pharmacope. Her perfectly good Marine-issue personal pharmacopeia had been surgically removed and replaced with a new, larger implant whose reservoirs contained everything the original had, plus a few additions all the Cadre's own.

  One or two of those additions had given her more than a few qualms when they were explained to her, and imperial law had required that at least one of them had had to be explained—in some detail—before she could be allowed to officially join the Cadre. That was the bit about the suicide protocols built into her shiny new augmentation.

  Alicia hadn't liked that thought one little bit. In fact, she'd actually seriously considered declining the Cadre's invitation when she heard about it. The idea that her own pharmacope contained a neurotoxin which would automatically kill her, even under the most carefully defined and limited of circumstances, had not been reassuring. But, in the end, it hadn't stopped her, either. Mostly because she'd considered what was likely to happen to any Cadre drop commando who found herself in the hands of the Empire's enemies. The chance of long-term survival in those circumstances was small, at best, and she understood exactly why the Empire needed to make certain that someone who knew everything any member of the Cadre would have to know could never be wrung dry by someone like the Rish. Then too, she was forced to admit in her more honest moments, part of the reason she'd accepted it was probably that somewhere deep down inside, despite all she'd seen and experienced since joining the Corps, there was a part of her which believed that she was so good, so smart and competent, that however much the possibility of being captured might bother other people, it wasn't something that would ever arise in her case.

  And to be totally honest, she'd decided, it was actually reassuring, in a bleak sort of way, to know that she would always possess the means for a final escape, no matter what else happened.

  Yet in some respects, the other totally classified addition to her pharmacope was almost more disturbing than the suicide
package. Not because of the threat it represented, but because of the temptation it offered. When they'd first explained the effects of the drug the Cadre called "the tick," she hadn't fully grasped everything that explanation implied. In fact, she doubted that she fully appreciated all of the tick's ramifications even now, but she could certainly understand why the drug—it was actually half a dozen different drugs, all working together in minute, individually designed dosages for each drop commando's specific physiology—was on the Official Secrets List.

  Now she looked back at Dr. Hyde, smiling slightly at his expression of exaggerated patience, and cautiously initiated the proper pharmacope command sequence.

  Nothing at all seemed to happen for a moment. And then, so quickly and smoothly the transition appeared almost instantaneous, the universe about her abruptly slowed down.

  Alicia sat very still in the chair in front of Hyde's desk, watching him, and her augmented vision zoomed in on the large vein at the base of his throat. She watched it pulsing ever so slightly to the beat of his heart, and she counted his pulse rate. She had plenty of time for counting, because that was what "the tick" did. It bought the person using it the most precious combat commodity there was—time.

  The tick enhanced Alicia's physical reaction speed only slightly. She moved a bit faster, a little more quickly, but it didn't magically allow her to move at superhuman rates, or let her snatch speeding bullets out of the air with her bare hand. What it did do was to accelerate her mental processes enormously. She might not have superhuman reaction speed, but she had all the time in the world to think about possibilities and threats, about actions and reactions, before she actually took them.

  She turned her head—slowly, so slowly it seemed—looking around Dr. Hyde's office through the crystal-clear armorplast of the tick's syrupy time stream. It seemed to her as if it took at least a full minute to turn her head all the way to the right, but she knew better. She'd seen holovids of people riding the tick. Indeed, she'd seen holovids of herself moving under its influence. She'd seen the way that heads turned and limbs moved in a fashion which defied easy description but which could never be mistaken for anything else by anyone who ever saw it.