Terms of Enlistment (8 page)

“Halley, you play attackers now. Form up your squad and move out to the staging point,” Sergeant Burke orders. “Ricci, have your squad pick defensive positions. Let’s see how you do on the defense.”

We spend the day killing each other bloodlessly.

Being on the defense is easier and more difficult at the same time. We can prepare our fighting positions, make use of cover and concealment, but we also have to wait for the other team to begin the attack on their terms. We get wiped out once, and beat the opposing team back twice, getting our revenge for our earlier defeats at the hands of Halley’s squad. At the end of the day, the score is even. One of Halley’s fire team leaders takes first place on the individual kill board, with fourteen kills to his name. To my surprise, I come in second, despite our lack of kills in the first two rounds of the day. I scored killing shots on twelve of Halley’s troops.

“Looks like you’ve found something you don’t suck at, Grayson,” Sergeant Burke remarks when he reviews the kill list with the platoon. “Just don’t think you’re a natural killing machine now. This shit ain’t real combat, you know.”

“You like that stuff too much,” Halley says back in the platoon bay head as we shower off the sweat of the day. “You were having a good time out there.”

“Maybe,” I shrug, as I try not to be too obvious about studying her shapely backside as she turns to rinse the cleaning agent out of her hair.

“You don’t watch out, they’ll mark you for the Territorial Army,” Ricci says from across the head.

“Is that why you sucked so much today?” Halley asks, and a few of the other recruits laugh.

“What do you think?” Ricci replies with a grin. “You think I want to give them a reason to mark me down as ‘Good With A Rifle’? That way lies a TA billet.”

“Well, you sucked at Land Navigation last week, too,” I say. “And I think you were near the bottom of the list in Combat Control. You waiting for the Office Management instruction to show your true skills, or what?”

“Funny,” Ricci says, and hurls a container of liquid soap in my direction. I swat it back at him, and it clatters to the floor between the two rows of showers. Ricci gives me a sour look as he walks over to the middle of the head to retrieve it. Halley lets out a mocking wolf whistle when he bends over to pick up his soap. He holds his middle finger up without looking back at her.

“What a turd,” Halley says under her breath.

I don’t do so well in the next phase of the training.

Our Air & Space week, as Sergeant Burke calls it, begins with a day of instruction on aeronautics, cockpit systems, and the basic principles of atmosphere and space flight. I can understand the theory well enough, and I manage to receive good marks on the electronic exam at the end of the classroom part of the training, but somehow my brain can’t translate that knowledge into practical ability very well. After the classroom instruction, we move on to simulator training, which takes place in a big room the size of our platoon bay. Every member of the platoon has their own sound-proofed simulator capsule. From the outside, it looks like a squashed egg with cables sticking out of its back, but when you sit in it, the inside of the shell turns into a giant display, and the seat and avionics in the capsule are exact replicas of those found in a standard Wasp-class attack drop ship. You take your seat, strap on your helmet, plug into the TacCom console, and the computer that runs the simulation does it best to make you believe you’re flying the real thing. The whole thing sits on hydraulic actuators, which can spin the capsule through three hundred sixty degrees of movement. When I do my first practice drop from orbit into atmosphere, the imagery of the planet below combines with the movements of the capsule to give me a disconcerting sensation of vertigo.

The theory is simple enough. The stick on the right side of the cockpit moves the control surfaces on the wings and tail of the ship. The throttle on the left side controls engine thrust, and the hat switch on its side fires the maneuvering thrusters for extra-atmospheric flight. Pull on the stick, the nose comes up--push on the stick, the nose goes down. Tilt it left or right, the ship tilts in the same direction. The rudder pedals under my feet control the yaw. Each control axis moves the ship around a different physical axis, and all the pilot has to do is coordinate his input on stick and throttle to move the ship where he wants it to go.

“A good drop ship pilot can thread a needle with a Wasp. A great drop ship pilot can do it with a fully loaded ship while under fire, with one engine and half a wing shot off,” Sergeant Burke says when he introduces us to the simulators.

Apparently, I’m not a great drop ship pilot. I’m not even a good one. After Day Two, I’d settle for being mediocre, but so far, I only manage to be abysmally bad. Somehow, my spatial sense gets all messed up by the unfamiliar sense of weightlessness, and my brain refuses to synchronize my control input on all three axis properly. The exercises consist of following a flight path to a drop zone, and the helmet-mounted tactical display helpfully shows the right vectors and navigation cues directly in my field of vision as I release from the simulated attack carrier and tumble towards the atmosphere of the planet below.

Without the automatic landing feature, I can barely get my ship pointed the right way. The throttle accelerates the craft, but it keeps moving according to the laws of physics, which means that tilting the nose merely moves it away from the axis of travel, rather than changing direction. Before too long, I end up flying sideways or backwards, and I can’t figure out how to coordinate my controls to make the nose point forward again. Flying a drop ship requires constant adjustments in all dimensions, like trying to run while keeping a ball bearing centered on a dinner plate you balance on your fingertips. It’s a skill that’s beyond my mental abilities, and by the end of Day Three, I have burned up in the atmosphere on every one of my drops.

“Recruit Grayson has destroyed a total of nine hundred million Commonwealth dollars so far,” Sergeant Burke says at the end of our third day, when he gives us his customary end-of-exercise critique. I feel my cheeks flush as some of the recruits laugh at his remark.

“Don’t feel bad, Grayson,” he tells me when he notices my embarrassment. “The rest of the platoon didn’t fare much better. We don’t expect anyone to actually land the ship, you know. We’re just trying to figure out which of you even have the talent to
begin
proper flight training.”

I don’t have to wonder about that, at least.

“How did you do?” I ask Halley when we sit on my bunk after the evening shower. We get a little time to sit and check our PDPs before the lights are turned off, and Halley and I usually stick our heads together to vent to each other.

“I landed the ship twice,” she says in a low voice, and flashes a proud grin.

“No shit? Did Burke say anything?”

“He said I seem to have a hand for it.”

“Looks that way,” I say. “All I’ve done all day was to turn my drop ship into a comet.”

“I’m just glad I’m good at
something
.”

It occurs to me that our disparate talents mean we’ll probably get posted to different services if we make it through Basic Training, and the idea of parting with Halley suddenly makes me depressed. I know it’s irrational--there are so many different Marine regiments and Navy fleet units that we would almost certainly not be serving together even if we ended up in the same service branch--but I can’t turn off the feeling. For a moment, I consider aligning my results with hers, slacking off on the infantry
training to not get ahead of Halley in that respect, but there’s no way I could match her skill in the simulator, and I’m not even considering asking her to throw her results for my sake. Besides, the military being what it is, there’s little method in the assignments anyway, and we may yet end up serving in proximity to each other.

Halley recalls her first successful simulated landing, and I listen to the story and watch the little dimples she gets on her cheeks when she smiles.

The last few weeks of Basic Training are a blur of PT, classroom instruction, simulator sessions, meals, and private little get-togethers with Halley, carved out of our unceasingly busy schedules while dodging the near-constant supervision. At night, the instructor on duty sleeps in the Senior Drill Instructor’s office, and by now we have learned which of our sergeants are light sleepers. Sergeant Riley practically sleeps with one eye open, Sergeant Burke stays up until the early hours doing paperwork and listening to the feed from the platoon bay’s audio monitoring system, but Sergeant Harris is usually fast asleep from lights-out to reveille. That means every third night is what we’ve come to call ’date night’, where Halley and I sneak off to the head in the middle of the night to get a little bit of time together, away from the eyes and ears of our fellow recruits.

Our arrangement is not exactly a secret. It only took so many people walking in on us in the head at two in the morning to make it common knowledge, and I suspect that word has gotten around to the instructors as well. For some reason, however, there are no enforcement measures to keep us from sneaking off to the head together two or three times a week, and the other recruits have entered into a sort of unwritten understanding with us. There aren’t many of us left. Our platoon has shrunk to twelve members just before graduation week. Our chow hall table is still well-represented, since we lost only Cunningham. Everyone else has made it through: me, Halley, Hamilton, Garcia, and even Ricci. Hamilton is still platoon leader, and she will be carrying the guidon of the severely reduced Platoon 1066 at graduation.

When we march to our last communal dinner in the chow hall on the evening before graduation, we are every inch the last-weekers: fit and trim, with mirror-polished boots, marching in a precise cadence and at brisk speed. We march past newly arrived platoons, herds of bewildered-looking , long-haired kids in civilian garb, and they look at us just like we gazed at the last-weeker platoons almost three months ago.

On our last night, the sergeant on duty is Riley. Halley and I are already getting over the disappointment that we won’t get to fool around in the head one last time when Sergeant Riley takes her PDP out of the Senior Drill Instructor’s office, and turns off the light.

“This is your last night,” she tells the assembled platoon, as we wait in front of our lockers for the order to hit the rack.

“You’ve made it this far. I trust none of you will be knuckle-headed enough to pull any stupid shit that’ll get you kicked out just before graduation,” she says, and gives us a little smile. It’s more of a smirk, but it’s the first time we’ve ever seen anything but her perpetual stern expression on her face.

“Have a bit of a party, if you want,” Sergeant Riley tells us as we look at each other in disbelief. “Just keep it down, and make sure you’re where you’re supposed to be when reveille comes around.”

She turns around, tucks her PDP into the side pocket of her trousers, and walks out of the room.

“Good night, platoon.”

We grin at each other as she closes the hatch behind her.

“Well, how about that,” Hamilton says with a chuckle. “I’d say let’s break out the good stuff.”

We’ve all brought back food from the chow hall before, despite the admonitions of our drill instructors. All the PT and quarterdecking has turned us lean and perpetually hungry, and the meal times are simply spaced too far apart to keep our metabolisms going. Every time the chow hall serves a dessert that’s easily portable, many recruits end up taking seconds, wrapping the contraband donuts or brownies into napkins, and tucking them into trouser pockets. The instructors aren’t stupid, of course, but they turn a blind eye.

We pool our hidden food reserves on one of the empty bunks. They amount to a decent sampler of all the desserts served in the chow hall in the last week. We have a good variety of donuts and cookies, lots of fresh fruit, brownies, and even a few slightly smashed pieces of apple pie. There are no drinks, of course, but the water from the fountain in the head is cold and clean, and we’re so elated about this unsupervised night and our impending graduation that it might as well be cold beer.

We eat the hoarded food, not minding the half-stale donuts that date back to the beginning of the week, and toast each other with cold water, using our toothbrush cups as drinking vessels. With the restrictions lifted for the night, we talk and joke around like we’re in the mess hall, only with less restraint. We’ve never had a chance to talk to our platoon mates without a Drill Instructor hovering nearby, and the experience is strange after twelve weeks of social hamstringing.

Later that evening, Halley and I retreat one of the empty bunks by the back wall of the platoon bay. We have to endure some good-natured ribbing from the rest of the platoon as we fashion a sight barrier out of the scratchy issue blankets by hanging them from the frame of the top bunk. When we have finished building our privacy booth, we slip into the bottom bunk, which is now shielded from view on three sides. Our ugly issue pajamas end up in front of the bed, and we finally have some time to enjoy each other on a real mattress, instead of coupling hurriedly in the corner of the head, listening for approaching footsteps in the platoon bay. There are some cat calls and comments from our platoon mates, but we’re too busy with each other to pay attention, and after a while, they go back to their business and leave us to ours.