Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (6 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

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Occasionally, Tae snapped orders for whomever it was to speak up louder when answering his roll call, otherwise he spoke crisply, but not loudly. When he got to her name, he hesitated.
“. . . Ia?”
“Here, Sergeant.” A step to her left put her outside the half-sized line. She made sure to speak just loudly enough to qualify as obeying orders as she turned to face him.
No sense in shouting needlessly.
“Ia. Just Ia? Where the
slag
is the rest of your name, Recruit?” he ordered, stepping up to her. He was seven centimeters shorter, and lifted his chin belligerently to look up at her. The brim of his camouflage brown hat almost brushed her forehead with the move.
She didn’t flinch. “That
is
my entire name, Sergeant.”
“What did you do with the rest of it, Recruit?” Sergeant Tae demanded. “
Nobody
has just one name.”
“When I turned sixteen, I emancipated and legally changed it. My name, therefore,
is
Ia. Nothing less, and nothing more. Sergeant,” she added, doing her best not to flinch as he swayed a little closer.
Studying her for a moment, he grunted and drew back. “You got any luggage, Recruit
Ia
?”
“No, Sergeant. Just the clothes on my back.”
“Good. Get on the bus. Kaimong, Wong Ta!”
“Here, Sergeant!”
Once inside the bus, Ia claimed the next empty seat, not wanting to sit right next to anyone. It was old, a relic that had seen better days, but the bucket seats still had their cushioning, even if the overlying fabric was worn and faded with age. It also smelled of dust, heat, and bodies beginning to sweat, given the door was open to the sun-broiled air.
Kaimong took the seat across from her, rather than joining her. Ia didn’t mind. What she knew of him from her trips onto the timeplains, well, she didn’t see a point in making friends with him.
When the last recruit—Georgi Zpiczeznenski, whose name gave their Drill Instructor fits of pronunciation until they all heard Georgi saying, “Look, just call me ZeeZee, Sarge, it’ll be easier,” and hearing
Sergeant
Tae ordering him to do ten push-ups for daring to shorten his title—had made his way onto their transport, the silent, brown-uniformed driver started up the engine.
The only indication it had started was the slight shiver of the vehicle’s frame; hydrogenerator technology was quiet and efficient, its fuel cheap and ecologically friendly. The air vents made more sound than the engine did, hissing quietly as they worked to cool the ground bus. Sgt. Tae stepped inside, grabbed the handle on the back of the first seat, and nodded at the driver, who closed the door and pulled away from the curb.
“Welcome aboard, Class 7157! Now that we’re all on board and underway, it is my sorry son of a duty to pound into your civilian heads the rules and regs of the Terran United Planets Space Force, Branch Marine Corps. Here are the very first things you sorry sons and daughters need to know: When I address you and ask you a yes or no question, you will respond by saying ‘Sergeant, yes, Sergeant!’ Or ‘Sergeant, no, Sergeant!’
“You will preface all other answers to my questions by first saying my rank, which is ‘Sergeant,’ and finishing again with my title, which is ‘Sergeant.’
Not
‘sir.’ If you are asked a question by someone with a command rank, such, you will address them by
their
rank and title in a similar manner, such as ‘Lieutenant, yes, sir’ or ‘Captain, no, sir.’ Do I make myself clear?”
“Sergeant, yes, Sergeant!” Ia snapped out. Hers was the strongest among a smattering of responses. Most of the others were neither loud nor clear. Only the voice of one of the recruits seated behind her, Bob Nedder, was as crisp as hers.
It didn’t satisfy Sergeant Tae. “I cannot
hear
you! There are forty-five bodies on this bus, and I
will hear
each and every one of you. I said,
is that clear
?”
“Sergeant, yes, Sergeant!”
“. . . You
will
work on mastering the appropriate responses during your time in Basic Training. Rest assured, we
will
pound everything you need to know into your sorry, slagging, asteroidthick heads. You
think
you want to become soldiers, and your MAT scores
suggest
you might even make it as Marines . . . but we will see.” Sweeping his gaze across the recruits on the bus, Tae grunted. “Well. You are now on your way to Camp Nallibong. The
edge
of this particular TUPSF-MC training facility lies twenty kilometers from the nearest point of civilization. It will take us two hours to drive there. During those two hours, you will listen as I explain what will happen. There will be opportunities to ask questions, but I suggest you keep your mouths shut and your ears open.
“The actual Camp comprises more than one thousand six hundred thirty-three square kilometers of Northern Territory bush,” he continued. “It includes bombing ranges, live combat ranges, and the Camp itself. This is some of the toughest, most inhospitable landscape on the Motherworld. It’s dry in the winter, but down here, it’s now summer, and it’ll be unbelievably hot and muggy, and very, very wet in certain parts of the Camp, particularly if we have a cyclone roll through. If you’re thinking of going walkabout—that is, wandering off without supervision—you can and probably
will
get into trouble.
“
Some
of you are here because your psychological evaluations state that you’re
good
little boys and girls, but that you just need
discipline
in your lives to become actual citizens. If you think you’re gonna light out of here and go AWOL when no one’s looking, sentients still
die
every year when they head out into the bush in this corner of the world. Even if they’re prepared, or
think
they are. Not only is the terrain against you, but there are plenty of things that will slither, crawl, climb, and fly at you, intending to sting, bite, or otherwise eat you alive.”
“Ey, ’zat mean somma th’ Salik are down ’ere lurkin’ inna bushes?” Spyder piped up from near the back of the bus.
His joke fell flat. Sergeant Tae glared at him. Ia tried not to think about what he had just implied. She didn’t want to trigger the wrong future-echo.
“The Salik,” their Drill Instructor enunciated carefully, his tone colder than the air blowing through the vents of the bus, “have been confined to their planets of origin and colonization for the last two hundred years. It is the job of the TUPSF-Navy and the TUPSF-Marine Corps, in conjunction with the other military forces of the Alliance, to see that they
stay
confined for at least two hundred more.
If
you survive being turned into a
real
Marine, one of these days you won’t find that possibility so
funny
anymore!
“Now. The first thing we’re gonna do is register you. Since you pansy-soft civilians have all had your twenty-four-hour cooling period to reconsider, yet you are still here, it is my sorry son of a duty to make sure you go through with your Oaths of Service. When we arrive at the processing center, you will grab your gear, line up in alphabetical order, and march into building A-101 to be processed. You will divide up into five lines of nine people. You will step into the processing arches one at a time, where you will place your civilian wrist units into the receptacle to verify your identity, undertake the Oath of Service as prompted by the machinery, remove your civilian wrist unit, and replace it with your military-issued ident unit. However. While the Space Force doesn’t care which arm you wear your unit on in your civilian life, in your military life, you will wear it on your
left
arm at all times.
“Once you have undertaken the Oath and been issued your military wrist unit, you will continue forward to the dispensary booths, where you will present your unit for scanning, and be issued your gear. The only civilian objects you are allowed to take with you are prescription medications authorized by military medical examinations performed during or directly after your Military Aptitude Tests, education transcripts, marriage, divorce, custody, or child support documentation, a small vidframe with its internal maximum of memory allotment, and no jewelry beyond wedding rings. Be advised that the Marine Corps reserves the right to review and censor inappropriate vidchip materials.
“Which brings me to my next happy little lecture,” Sgt. Tae drawled, baring his teeth in an approximation of a smile. “This is a mixed-gender Camp. There will be
zero
sexual fraternization with anyone while you are Recruits here at SF-MC Camp Nallibong. You will be quartered together, train together, eat together, and even shower together, but the closest you will
sleep
with each other is sharing the same bunkhouse and the same tent when on maneuvers.
If
you’re lucky enough to get a tent, and
when
you’re lucky enough to sleep.
“Each of the meioa-es will undergo a medical evaluation during your Oath of Service to ensure that you are not pregnant, and all of you, meioa-es and meioa-os, will be administered quarterly beecee shots to ensure such things will not happen. Your training will be difficult enough without adding the stress of accidental procreation on top of everything else.
“The modern military, in its infinite wisdom, has declared rape to be one of its Fifty Fatalities. If you are
lucky
, you will receive a court-martial, cross-examination under telepathic truth-testing, and fifteen strokes of the cane for raping a fellow soldier. If you are
stupid
, you may end up facing thirty strokes or more, followed by incarceration in a military penal colony. Particularly if your victim is a superior officer, a civilian, or—God forefend—someone underage. You will therefore learn and memorize this and the other Forty-Nine Fatalities during the first three days of your instruction. There are plenty of other, lesser rules and regs that you might stumble over and break if you don’t pay attention and keep your slagging noses clean, but you do not
ever
want to cross one of the Fifty Fatalities.
“Now. Are there any questions so far?”
A few hands rose tentatively. Their owners were told sharply, “You’re in the
Marines
now, Recruit!” and ordered to raise their hands firmly. Ia listened with as much patience as she could muster. These were things she had heard before, skimming through her potential futures over and over while preparing for what she had to do. Now that she was finally here, Ia just wanted the bus to move faster. Not for time to go any faster—time wasn’t something she had in surplus—but for the bus to go faster, the lectures to be shorter, and the events to move quicker.
So. I get into Camp Nallibong, and become the best soldier I can be. Better than expected of me. Graduate from Basic Training with a good, solid reputation so that I’ll be placed into the right Company. Work my way up the ranks in that Company so that I can be field promoted at the right moment in time. And keep my mouth shut on everything I know, for as long as possible . . .
By the time they rolled to a stop in front of building A-101, they had been given a brief rundown of all Fifty Fatalities, a list of what penalties and fines would be levied if they chose to quit at any point during their Basic Training and their mandatory three years of service in the military, the information that, once sworn in, they would have to refer to themselves in third person unless and until they were given permission otherwise, “. . . as a means of breaking down any pointless self-centeredness you may think you still need to cling to,” and an outline of how their days would go.
The first three days would be “easy” ones, filled with orientation and instruction on how to do things the military way, from folding and storing clothes in their kitbags to performing their daily calisthenics correctly. After that, their schedule would be crowded with lessons on everything from parade maneuvers to mechsuit drills, vehicular operations to orbital mechanics. That last one was mandatory—they were entering the Space Force, and they would be expected to know how to handle themselves in the airless, weightless void awaiting them.
Filing out of the air-conditioned ground bus, Ia followed the others into the processing center. She ended up in the middle of her line and waited patiently while the three recruits ahead of her were scanned, prompted into reciting the long-winded passages of the Oath of Service, issued their new units, and directed forward. She waited patiently, but nervously. Not because she regretted her decision to join—regret wasn’t even an issue—but because this was her final moment of civilian freedom.
Listening to the others stumble their way through their vows felt like she was listening to the
clank
and
snick
of manacles being locked in place. When it was finally her turn, Ia lifted her chin and stepped forward, placing herself in the chains of military life of her own free will.
For the Future, I will do whatever I have to do. For nothing else, and for nothing less.
Sticking her left arm in the slot, she waited while the beams swept over her body, measuring her through her clothes and probing her tissues for signs of pregnancy, drug dependency, and other potential complications.
The machine beeped, and the same pleasant neutral-female voice that had addressed the other recruits addressed her. “Please state your name, Alliance identification number, and planet of origin.”

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