First To Fight (The Empire's Corps Book 11) (18 page)

They’re trying to confuse you
, my thoughts warned me. 
And it’s working
.

I gritted my teeth and endured as best as I could.  They kept shouting questions, then hitting me when I refused to answer.  Words hovered on my lips - maybe the pain would end, if I talked - but I was too stubborn.  I had come too far to simply give up.  But they were getting frustrated too.  I tasted blood in my mouth after one of them slapped me across the face.

“We cannot attempt to tell you when you should talk,” Bainbridge had said.  “Everyone has their breaking point.  You will not know yours until it is too late.”

I clung to his words - and my determination to make him proud of me - as the interrogators closed in again.  This time, they were holding a blowtorch; I stared in numb horror as they held it in front of my eyes, just so I could see what it was, and then lowered it until it was pointed right at my balls.  The heat rose rapidly; I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were going to mutilate me.  I’d heard horror stories, but ...

What if this isn't a test
?  My thoughts asked. 
What if you’ve actually been captured by the enemy
?

“Talk,” the interrogator said.  “Tell us what we want to know.”

I tried to cringe backwards, but there was simply no room to move.  They could move the flame forward any moment they liked.  I looked into his eyes and saw ... nothing; no sense of concern, no sense of enjoyment.  He was a sociopath, someone who would do whatever was necessary to make me talk.  I had no doubt of it.  In some ways, he was more terrifying than any of the sadists who’d ruled the gangs with iron hands.  He would never lose sight of his goal.

But I was damned if I was giving in.

“Fuck you,” I said, again.

There was a stab of pain, then blackness.  When it cleared, I was lying in a bed.

“Congratulations,” Bainbridge said.

I stared at him numbly, then sat upright and lifted the covers.  My unmentionables were still there, still unmentionable.  My body ached, but no worse than it had done after the forced marches, or the unarmed combat training sessions, or any of the other exercises we’d done to prepare ourselves for war.  There was no sign of any bruises.

“You kept quiet despite the pain,” he said, as I sat upright.  “You passed with flying colours.”

I wanted to hit him.  Only the certainty that he’d kick my ass, then throw me out of Boot Camp held me back.  Nordstrom had repeated his challenge - a chance to actually
hit
a Drill Instructor without punishment - at every unarmed combat session, but so far no one had actually managed to land a punch.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.  “I ...”

He
must
have been in a good mood.  I only got fifty push-ups for saying ‘I’.

I tried again.  “This recruit would like to know how far they were prepared to go?”

Bainbridge gave me a sarcastic look.  “Do you really believe that
real
terrorists wouldn't go much further to extract information?”

I shook my head.

“Then you should really understand that we had to push you as far as we could without causing permanent damage,” Bainbridge added, sternly.  “No one would have faulted you for trying to dribble out the information, or even for breaking after they started getting physical.”

That wasn't true. 
I
would have faulted myself.

Bainbridge studied me for a long moment.  “And one other thing?  Don’t compare notes with your fellow recruits.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.  “Did we all pass?”

“You all did very well,” he said. 

I learned, later, that all of us passed the basic requirements.  We’d either flatly refused to talk or misled the interrogators.  No
wonder
Bainbridge was in such a good mood.  Indeed, he was in such a good mood that he let me have an extra hour in bed before I was sent back to barracks.  A small thing, perhaps, but in Boot Camp ...

... Well, let’s just say it was worth its weight in gold.

Chapter Eighteen

One might ask, as many do, why the marine recruits weren't subjected to any form of chemical interrogation.  There are, after all, no shortage of drugs designed for interrogation purposes.  However, marines - and many other military personnel - are given special enhancements to render such drugs either harmless or lethal.  Smart interrogators know better than to risk using them. 

-Professor Leo Caesius

The third phase of Boot Camp was, in many ways, the best.

It’s hard to explain why, at least to a civilian.  We were still being pushed hard, we were still being punished with innumerable push-ups - I’m sure Nordstrom invented a few new numbers just so he could inflict them on us - and there was still a very real danger that some of us would quit.  But, at the same time, we had earned a considerable amount of respect from the Drill Instructors.  I won’t say they were gentler, because they would probably come back from the grave to kick my ass if I did, but they were
slightly
more patient with us.

And that wasn't the only thing.  Having decided we were worth the investment, they started offering us other treatments.  Professor’s eyesight - so bad he wore the dreaded Birth Control Glasses - was corrected in a short, but expensive operation.  He looked odd after three months of seeing him with his glasses, but I had to admit it would make his life easier.  I’d been wondering how he intended to serve in combat while wearing a pair of spectacles that made him a spectacle.  Others received their own treatments; I received a handful of DNA modifications that removed some of the hackwork inflicted on my ancestors and added a handful of new enhancements.  I did ask if they could compare my DNA to the Empire’s master database, in hopes of identifying my father, but there were no matches.  The half-assed fantasy I’d had of discovering my father had been a marine - or something I could respect - vanished like a snowflake in hell.

The downside was that we were expected to assist with the newer recruits, something I think we would have preferred to avoid.  We weren't, of course, given a choice in the matter.  I enjoyed some of it - playing hunter while the newer recruits played prey - was fun, but I disliked other parts of it.  I hadn't expected to
loathe
the new recruits when I laid eyes on them, as part of their unarmed combat training, nor did I expect the chaos when one of
their
Drill Instructors started to bark orders and we obeyed without thinking.  Bainbridge was
very
sarcastic about
that
little mishap. 

It was an open secret - we heard it from someone in the fourth phase - that the Drill Instructors were evaluating us, now that we had proved we had staying power.  Some of us would go to the Slaughterhouse, some of us would go to auxiliary units ... and some of us, alas, would be directed towards the Imperial Army.  It seemed a fate worse than death, as far as we were concerned; we’d heard so much crap about the regulars from the Drill Instructors that we took it as an article of faith that the Imperial Army was a pool for losers.  Hell, we’d been told more than once that when the army was on the hunt, the safest people in the region were the targets.  They just couldn't shoot for toffee.

(That was, of course, a base libel.  But we believed it at the time.)

The most fun part of the whole phase, however, was the introduction to military vehicles.  I didn't know how to drive - very few people on Earth knew how to drive, when the lucky few who owned aircars had to submit them to traffic control - but I learned quickly.  It helped that the Empire believed firmly in standardising everything; if someone happened to master a military jeep, it was fairly simple to scale up to a Landshark Main Battle Tank.  Yes, the steering
was
a little more complex; the basic principles, however, were still the same.  We started with basic vehicles, then moved all the way up to AFVs and tanks.  It was unlikely we'd be using them, we were told, but one never knew.  Besides, it was good for our confidence.

“You are only expected to know the basics,” Bainbridge told us, after we’d driven a dozen Hammerhead tanks around the exercise grounds.  The Hammerhead was a light tank, designed to provide mobile firepower; they were definitely more nimble than the Landsharks, allowing us to take them into places a Landshark couldn't go without smashing its way through buildings and streets alike.  “The experienced crews will be far more capable than you.”

We didn't believe him, of course, until the instructors took a tank out onto the field and really let themselves have fun.  I’d never believed a tank could move so sharply and fire so accurately, not until I’d seen the results of thousands of hours of practice.  The Imperial Army wasn't keen on allowing anyone to practice - again, every requisition of ammunition and supplies had to be accounted for - but the tankers had their ways of getting around the system.  Given a chance, they would be formidable foes.

“You should never assume that a tank is an unbeatable opponent,” Bainbridge explained, as we learned their weaknesses as well as their strengths.  “A tank can dominate the battlefield, but a smart enemy can still disable it.”

He was right, we discovered, as we worked our way through more realistic exercises.  A company of tanks could crush resistance, but they couldn’t hold the ground; that, it seemed, was still the task of the infantry.  There was no shortage of wars in history, we were told, where the tanks were cut off from their support and overwhelmed.  Learning how to work
with
the tanks - and aircraft, assault helicopters and orbiting starships - was a complicated task, but we managed it.  None of us wanted to give up now.

It was Viper, oddly enough, who asked the question we were all thinking about.

“Sir,” he said, as we made our way back to the barracks, “this recruit would like to know why our technology is so primitive.”

Bainbridge lifted an eyebrow.  “You think our technology is
primitive
?”

“This recruit has seen aircars and hover trucks, armoured combat suits and antigravity lifters,” Viper said, refusing to be cowed.  He was still a malingerer, but he
had
made it into phase three.  “There shouldn't be any need to use tracked vehicles that are largely identical to the designs used a thousand years ago.”

“An interesting question,” Bainbridge said.  He studied Viper for a long moment, then explained.  “Yes, it is well within our capabilities to produce more advanced weapons and vehicles.  You will discover, as you go on to later courses, that there
are
more advanced weapons and yes, you will be trained on them.  However, such weapons have their limitations.  Would you care to suggest what those might be?”

Viper hesitated, then shook his head.  

Bainbridge tapped the rifle he carried, slung over his shoulder.  “At its core, this weapon is very - very - simple,” he said.  “A dunderhead can learn how to use it; more importantly, perhaps, he can learn how to
maintain
it.  You can pour a great deal of abuse on the MAG-47 and it will continue to take good care of you.”

I smiled, inwardly.  We’d had a handful of incidents where a weapon was dropped and the Drill Instructors had gone ballistic.  None of the weapons had actually been
damaged
, but that hadn't stopped them from tearing us new assholes.  We’d had to recite the Rifleman’s Creed hundreds of times, while stripping our rifles down and rebuilding them, just to make sure the lesson sunk in.

“If you break a component beyond repair,” Bainbridge continued, “you can replace it with one from another rifle.  Or, for that matter, one can be sourced from a mobile support ship, one of the handful of starships we use to support our deployments.  If worst came to worst, a civilian-grade fabricator could be used to put one together, if you overrode the safety features designed to keep people from churning out weapons.  The rounds you fire off, too, are achingly easy to produce.  Even a mobile support ship can churn out hundreds of thousands within a day. 

“That’s true, too, of most of our
simple
vehicles.  You can repair a jeep, or a tank, relatively easily, provided you have the spare parts on hand.  Again, sourcing them isn't exactly difficult.  A stage-two colony world shouldn't have any difficulty producing replacements if necessary.  None of the hours you spent practicing were wasted; you should have no difficulty carrying out necessary repairs.  You may, of course, discover that the entire vehicle is beyond repair, but that would require a significant level of damage.”

He paused.  “But something more complex, even something as simple as a hover tank or aircar, can be a right bastard to repair while on deployment.  A relatively simple problem would force the crew to send the vehicle all the way back to the repair yards, which would render it completely useless until it was sent back again.  Something as minor as a flaw in the antigravity system would reduce your mobile firepower quite considerably.  The more complex a system, the easier it is to break down and the harder it is to repair on the spot.  A sniper rifle, capable of picking off a target three kilometres away, can break down quite easily and be a right pain in the ass to repair.”

There was a second pause as his words sank in.  “There is no shortage of systems that are, on paper, far superior to everything we use in the field,” he said.  “Sometimes, someone comes up with something that is actually usable, so we work it into our deployments; more often, the systems have major problems that only show up when a bunch of marines - or terrorists - start looking for flaws.  There was a device, once, that monitored the number of humans in a given zone.  It looked brilliant until, one day, it started screaming about how there was a
billion
enemy soldiers advancing on the command post.  Someone had pissed on it and that was the result.”

He gave a rather thin smile.  “A brand-new command and control system gets hacked ... and the enemy uses it to call down fire from orbit on our positions.  A brilliant new encryption program ends the requirement for microburst transmissions ... apart from the minor detail that the
reason
we use microbursts is to avoid giving the enemy targeting information on a plate.  A new piece of body armour is damn near indestructible, but anyone who wears it will overheat so rapidly that they’d be useless for anything within minutes ...

“Not that that’s the only problem,” he said, dryly.  “If I had a credit for every time a new system went over-budget and ended up costing the taxpayer twice as much, I’d have enough money to buy my own planet.”

I stuck up a hand.  “Why do people keep
buying
them?”

Bainbridge laughed.  “Politics,” he said.  He spoke the word as if it were a curse.  “Stalker.  What makes the universe go round?”

“Power, sir,” I said.  The Undercity was a perfect example of just how power could be used to shape the world.  Those with power would use it to take whatever they wanted, including money; those with money but without power would have to either hide it or lose it.  “Not even money comes close.”

“Correct,” Bainbridge said.  “You can look up the details later, if you like, but the military budget is one of the biggest slush funds in creation.  Everyone wants a share of that money, so they use their power to force the military to buy expensive new weapons systems it doesn't need, weapons systems which might not work in any case.  Someone at the top of the heap is unlikely to give a damn about our lives when there’s billions upon billions of credits at stake.”

He shrugged.  “That's why the marine corps fights so hard to keep control of procurement,” he added.  “Given half a chance, we would find our MAGs replaced by pieces of crap that, if we’re lucky, will fire a couple of rounds before breaking into pieces of biodegradable plastic.”

Joker coughed.  “It can't be that bad, sir.”

“Go look up the Shrunken Tree massacre, when you have time,” Bainbridge ordered.  “The short version of the story is that some corporation wanted trace elements in the trees, which happened to be defended by a tribe armed with nothing more dangerous than spears.”

I scowled, inwardly.  We'd been told, time and time again, that there were no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.  A man with a spear, a man willing to use it, was potentially
much
more dangerous than a man with a gun.  We’d been taught not to dismiss someone because he was unarmed ...

“The regiment dispatched to deal with the tribe, either by convincing them to move or simply exterminating them, had the latest in modern weapons,” Bainbridge continued.  “Their rifles had been tested extensively under laboratory conditions.  They had everything from air support to orbiting starships, ready to provide additional firepower if necessary.  There should have been a very quick massacre, ending the whole affair.”