First to Fight (5 page)

“People, you are about to be tested,” Singh continued. “Shake all the civilian dust from your shoes. We are a proud force. We can go anywhere in Human Space and do more with less than anyone else. We go to places no one else has ever been. Beginning right now, we are going to find out which of you are good enough to qualify for membership in my Marine Corps.”

All eyes were intently trained on Singh. Dean stood aghast with his mouth hanging open. For the first time he thought that maybe he should have stayed with the army’s female recruiter instead of following Riley-Kwami and Bildong down the corridor.

Carefully, very carefully, McNeal nudged his new friend and, braving the wrath of Corporal Singh, whispered ever so quietly into his ear, “You trying to catch flies, your mouth open like that?” Dean’s face turned beet-red for the second time that morning.

“You!” Singh shouted, and pointed his finger directly at McNeal.

McNeal’s eyes widened, and he looked around. “Me?” he asked.

“Yes, you, recruit! Get over here! Now!”

McNeal stood at attention before the table.

“What is your problem, recruit?”

“I have a big mouth, Corporal!” McNeal answered immediately.

“Yes, you do, young man,” Singh replied in a fatherly tone of voice. “Now assume the position!” he shouted, pointing at the floor. McNeal just stood there, uncomprehending. “Get down on the floor, on your belly, hands flat on the floor under your shoulders,” Singh said in a patient, schoolmasterly tone of voice, “and do push-ups. Count each one off as you do it. Now begin. That’s right, that’s right. Good.”

To the sound of McNeal’s steady “One, two, three, four,” Singh addressed the remaining recruits. “You will form up in ranks there.” He pointed to the side of the large room, where there was a bare space, bereft of tables and chairs. “From here I will march you to the bus that will take you to the shuttle that will lift us to the CNSS
Private Thomas Purdom
in docking orbit. Do you understand?”

A few voices said, “Yes, Corporal.” A few more voices quickly chimed in. Singh looked at the group expectantly. Someone got the hint and shouted, “Yes, Corporal.” This time more than half of the assembled recruits echoed the reply.

“Let’s try it again. Do you understand?”

This time nearly all of them yelled out, “Yes, Corporal.”

“The
Purdom
is in a stable orbit. It can wait up there for a long time if it has to. Now let me hear it. Do you understand?”

Everybody shouted back, “Yes, Corporal.”

“All right, then, do it. Over there, four ranks. Tallest to my left, shortest to my right.”

The cafeteria erupted into a chaos of movement as all fifty-five recruits scrambled to get to the open space Singh ordered them to.

“Not you,” Singh snapped to McNeal, who had joined the scramble. “You’re doing push-ups.” McNeal groaned and rubbed his already aching arms before dropping back into position.

Many of them knew how to line up in ranks, but the concept of lining up by height wasn’t familiar to all of them, and that caused confusion in getting lined up. More important, though, nobody wanted to be in the front row, where they’d be close to the corporal with the fearsome voice. Instead of getting into something resembling a military formation, they wound up huddled in a mass against the wall.

Singh looked at them with an expression of amazed pain and lightly dropped off the table. He stalked toward them with slow, deliberate paces, stopped a few feet in front of the middle of the mass and drew himself up erect, facing them. “What are you trying to do to my Marine Corps?” he began softly. “Are you all political appointees? Is that it?” He began moving with brisk steps and sharp movements, bent forward at the hips, head jutted forward, sticking his face into the faces of the unfortunates in the front of the mass of recruits. His voice rose in volume as he paced and spoke. “Are your daddies and mommies influential? Influential enough to get around the law and have you enlisted into my Marine Corps even though you aren’t qualified? Did they even manage to get some politician to promise that you’d get commissions, even though the law requires that no one be commissioned an officer of Marines until and unless he’s proved himself as an enlisted Marine? Well?” He stopped in front of one edgy recruit and almost shouted that last word directly into his face.

The recruit looked nervously side to side, tried to press himself farther back into the bodies to his rear, but they were too tightly packed for him to squeeze through.

“N-n-no, Corporal,” he finally stuttered. “My parents didn’t do that. They don’t have any political friends.”

Singh pulled back from him, looked disdainfully at the others. “Any of you? I want to know who the political appointees are so you can be washed out of my Marine Corps now, before you have a chance to become a blight that will rot this Corps at its core!”

Nobody spoke up.

“You’re sure,” Corporal Singh said. “None of you are political appointees. We’ll see. I guarantee you, anyone in this room who isn’t fit to be a Marine won’t last out the training on Arsenault. Now, form up on me. Four ranks. By height. Move!”

The recruits milled and shuffled about, but came no closer to getting into formation—nobody wanted to be in that front rank.

“Aargh!”
Singh finally cried out. “You, you, you, and you.” He pointed to the four tallest. “Over here.”

The four reluctantly went to where he pointed and clustered against the wall.

“You.” Singh pointed to one of the four. “Stay where you are. You,” he pointed to a second, “stand three feet in front of him. You,” he pointed at the third, “three feet in front of him. You,” the last, pale recruit, “three feet in front of him. Now,” he said when the four were lined up as he directed, “that didn’t hurt, did it?”

Singh returned his attention to the others. “You, you, you, and you.” He pointed to the next tallest. “Line up next to them, an arm’s length away.”

One of the four sprinted to stand next to the one against the wall. The others saw him and ran as well. The slowest looked aghast as he realized he was going to be in the front row.

Singh turned back to the remaining recruits. “See, it’s easy. Now, look around you, see who you’re taller than, who you’re shorter than, and line up accordingly. If you don’t see anyone shorter than you, get to the end of the line.” He moved back several paces to give them as much room as they needed and stood easy with his arms folded over his chest. It took longer than it might have, but less than it could have, before they were standing in formation. It was a sloppy formation. Hardly anybody was directly behind anybody else, and their left-to-right dress was as crooked as a broken-backed snake. But it was a formation.

“I’m not going to give you proper marching orders,” Singh said when the recruits stopped milling about and were all standing still, facing him. “You wouldn’t understand them and I’d only have to repeat myself.” He still used his parade-ground voice, but it held no trace of anger or frustration. “You will do what I say, when I say, and how I say, and we will all be on the bus in a few minutes and on our way to the shuttle port. Once we are aboard the
Purdom,
the next stop will be Confederation Marine Recruit Depot, Arsenault. Welcome aboard, people. Start walking through the door. You too, bigmouth.” McNeal scrambled to his feet and joined the rear of the formation.

On the way out of the cafeteria, Dean realized that Corporal Singh had walked into a room full of noisy, energetic young men—none of whom knew him, and most of whom were bigger than he was—and gotten them all to be quiet, listen to him, and do what he said. Singh had not hit anyone nor threatened violence—he had done it all strictly with the force of his voice. Suddenly, he knew this was something he wanted to be able to do himself, he wanted that parade-ground voice—and everything that went with it.

CHAPTER

THREE

When the fifty-five recruits finally boarded the shuttle and the flight attendants checked that the restrainers holding them into the acceleration seats were fully deployed, the recruits’ anxiety about Corporal Singh changed to excited anticipation. Many of them had been off Earth before, visiting one of the orbiting recreation parks. Some had been to the moon. A few had toured Marshome on the fourth planet, or Amoropolis, on Venus. One claimed he’d been to Ceres Station in the asteroid belt, but not everybody believed him.

Joe Dean had never been higher above the surface of the Earth than a short-hop in an atmospheric flier on a class trip that took him from the shores of Lake Ontario to New Columbia District. McNeal claimed never to have flown in anything, but that was harder to believe than the kid who claimed to have been to Ceres Station. Just one day earlier, when he’d decided to sign up, Dean had taken the biggest step of his life; then he’d taken another when he swore his oath of enlistment; now he was aboard a nearspace shuttle to take the longest trip he’d ever been on, three hundred kilometers straight up and halfway around the world to a waiting starship.

A starship that would take him on a journey so far that, even though the trip would last only a month, the light he saw from the star at his destination wouldn’t be seen on Earth for nearly two centuries. Later, as a Marine, he expected to journey even farther, probably to stars so distant his great-grandchildren might not live long enough to see the light that would shine on him. The thought made him feel cosmically insignificant.

Joe Dean desperately needed to believe that at least one of the recruits he was embarking on this journey with had been at least as far as Ceres Station, even if none of them had ever been on a starship. None of the recruits had even visited a real starship before, and soon they would be boarding one.

Without warning, the shuttle began to shake as its jets whirred up. Dean looked out the nearest porthole. The air was shimmering around one of the atmosphere-jets that would lift the shuttle to the top of the stratosphere, where its ram jet would take over to lift it the rest of the way to docking orbit.

The public address system clicked, and the recruits stopped to listen—no matter what any of them claimed about familiarity with space flight, none of them had been lifted into orbit enough times to have become jaded about it.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen—” The P.A. voice laughed, then said, “Well, I guess it’s just gentlemen on this flight. This is Captain Wu Chalmers. It’s my pleasure to welcome you aboard United Atmosphere’s orbital shuttle, Flight 402. We’ll be lifting off in a few moments.” His well-modulated voice exuded confidence and calm. “Our flight plan today calls for us to take off on a southeasterly heading and climb to Launch Point, which at this hour is a few hundred kilometers east of Bermuda. Don’t bother looking out the portholes to see that island paradise, because we’ll be close to fifty kilometers up and it’ll just be a speck in the ocean. At Launch Point you’ll experience a moment of weightlessness, but don’t let that disturb you. It’s normal to go into momentary free fall when the shuttle switches over from atmosphere-jet to ram. When we reach orbital altitude, which is way up there in the thermosphere, and the engine cuts off, we’ll be in null-g for the rest of the trip. Along the way we’ll pass within visual range of the interplanetary shipping docks. I’ll let you know when we do so you can take a look. One third farther around the Earth we’ll reach the interstellar docks. Flight time from takeoff to docking should be approximately seventy-five minutes.

“Take a nap, read, whatever. Just, please, remember, the Confederation Aviation and Orbital Administration rules require that you remain in your seats for the duration of the flight. If you must relieve yourself during this time, draw the privacy curtain around your seat and use the convenience console in the seat. Your flight attendants will demonstrate how to use them when they show you the emergency procedures. Thank you for flying United.”

There was another click and the senior flight attendant came on to give the emergency instructions, which were almost the same as those on an atmosphere liner; hardly anybody paid any attention.

“There it is!” someone gasped.

“Where?” another recruit asked, excited.

“There,” McNeal said, awed.

As the pilot maneuvered the shuttle craft, the passengers got an excellent view of the starship where it hung silhouetted above the terminator.

“My God,” someone whispered.

“Is it the
Purdom?
” another asked.

“Yeah, I can see the name,” his companion responded.

“How can you see the name?”

They’d all seen images of starships: trids, holos, even two-D’s. But mere images couldn’t do justice to what was floating before them. The ship was vaster and far more ugly than they’d imagined. The CNSS
Private Thomas Purdom
was an enormous ebony conglomeration of metal nearly two kilometers along its main axis and several hundred meters at its greatest girth. Dozens of tenders and service shuttles swarmed busily about her sides, doing maintenance or delivering passengers and supplies. On the shadow side, work parties encased in protective suits scuttled over her hull, laboring under lights as brilliant as tiny suns.

As the
Purdom
loomed larger and larger through the ports, the recruits’ exuberance turned gradually into awed silence. They were overwhelmed by the sense they were in the presence of a leviathan that could live only in deep space where it had been born, never to make planetfall. When the ship became outmoded or was damaged beyond repair in the unimaginable ferocity of battles fought in the farthest reaches of Human Space, she would be returned to an orbital port like this for salvage and her reusable components incorporated into another vessel.

Gradually, as the shuttle entered the enormous shadow cast by the starship, it was engulfed in darkness. Closer up, the activity about the
Purdom
seemed to be even more frenetic. They passed by tenders shuttling back and forth, and Dean flinched at their passage, afraid they might crash into one of these other craft that so ponderously maneuvered about their mysterious business around the starship’s hull. An enormous square of light loomed larger and larger in the hull as the shuttle neared, and almost before its passengers realized, they were inside an enormous berthing compartment.

Guided by two silver-suited sailors, an accordion tube snaked out of a bulkhead forward of the shuttle’s wing. A loud bang reverberated through the shuttle’s hull as the tube made contact with the hatch’s locking ring. Thunks and pings penetrated the hull as the tube was locked into place. A flight attendant undogged the hatch and a sailor inside the tube opened it from the outside.

“Listen up, people,” Corporal Singh called for their attention. “Stay in your places until someone comes to move you. I don’t care how many times you’ve been to a disney, this is a navy ship. It’s different. Very different. Stay where you are until I tell you to move.”

“I’ll take over now, Marine,” a khaki-clad navy chief petty officer said as he swam aboard during Singh’s little speech. He gave a slight push against the hatch frame and drifted out of the way of two sailors who swam through behind him. Each pushed a large, spoollike object ahead of him. “Hook ’em up,” the chief ordered.

“Aye aye,” replied one sailor. He hooked his spool to a stanchion and led the other sailor, who kept his spool, to the rear of the shuttle. Using well-practiced movements, the sailor with free hands pulled out the end of the thin cable wound around the spool. He attached a clip on the end of the cable to the man in the outermost portside seat. The sailor pulled out more cable. Two meters along was another clip, which he attached to the second man, and so on. The cable was studded with clips at two-meter intervals. In moments every recruit on the port side of the aisle was attached. Back in front, the sailors retrieved the other spool, took it to the rear of the cabin, and repeated the hooking process on the starboard side.

“We’re going to disembark in an orderly manner,” the chief announced when the sailors had completed hooking up the recruits. “As you might have noticed when the shuttle was in final approach, this ship is big. It’s easy to get lost if you don’t know your way around—and you aren’t going to be aboard long enough to learn. That’s why the tether, so nobody gets separated on the way to the troop area. Now, when I give the word, you,” he pointed to the recruit in the port-side aisle seat, “will go with this sailor,” he indicated one of the two ratings who’d hooked the recruits together. “When the last man on the port side reaches me, you will all stop so the first man on the starboard side can be hooked to him.” He looked at the chief flight attendant for the first time since boarding the shuttle. “They’re ready to be unlocked, ma’am.”

The chief flight attendant did something outside the sight of anyone in the shuttle’s seats and all the safety restraints unbuckled and retracted.

“All right, you, move,” the chief ordered the recruit in the first seat. The recruit gripped the arms of his acceleration seat to keep from drifting away. The chief gave him a hard look. “I said ‘move.’ That means now. Go.” The recruit looked back over his shoulder at Corporal Singh.

“Time to move out, people,” Singh said. “Do it like the chief says.” He grinned at the chief petty officer as the recruits started stringing out, floating not quite under control behind the sailor leading them.

The chief glowered at Singh, then returned his grin. “Maybe you got yourself a good bunch here.”

Beyond the tube that connected the shuttle to the interior of the ship, they were immersed in the sounds and smells of a starship preparing for flight. The continuous stream of shuttles arriving and departing sent clanks echoing through the interior of the ship. Incoming cargo being shifted about in the airless loading bays clanged harshly through the metal bulkheads. The crews working on the ship’s outer hull made a steady rain of pings. This exterior cacophony overlay the constant thrumming and thudding of machinery deep within the ship’s bowels. Dollies, hoists, and monorails whined and screamed and whirred as they moved cargo and people about. Men at work shouted and chief petty officers barked a constant string of orders. The odor of fresh lubricants taxed the ship’s air scrubbers. The body smells of sweaty deckhands wafted over the recruits as they rushed by them in their work.

One of the sailors grabbed a downward-passing elevator cable and hauled the first recruit in line with him. The cable only went “down” in the sense that it ran perpendicular to the deck they were on, and as far as anyone could be sure, it went “down” according to how the shuttle was oriented in the docking deck. Singh helped the chief and his other sailor link the rest of the recruits onto the cable until the chief signaled him to grab hold and go.

It seemed like a long time before the sailor in the lead stepped off the cable and started unlinking the following recruits and pulling them into a passageway that was empty of anything but them and a monorail car. Most of the noises that had assailed them on the loading deck were muted down here.

Wasting no time, the chief and his men crowded the recruits into the waiting car. As soon as everyone was aboard, he pulled himself into the front of the car, grabbed a handhold, and picked up a microphone. The handhold wasn’t for decoration—the car lurched forward immediately and the chief would have sailed down the car’s length if he hadn’t had a grip on it.

“Listen up,” he said into the mike. “This ship has twenty-five decks—that’s ‘levels’ to you landlubbers. You’re on Deck Twenty-three. You will not leave Deck Twenty-three for the duration. Remember that! Your training area for this flight is half a kilometer sternward, in Area Whiskey. Remember that! You will be confined to that area for the entire voyage. Don’t worry, it’ll be big enough for all of you. When we arrive there, I’ll hand you back to your corporal and won’t have to worry about you until it’s time to jettison you on Asshole.”

The monorail disgorged the fifty-five recruits into a huge, well-lighted bay. To their surprise, at least 150 other recruits were already there, gripping handholds sticking out from what Dean thought of as the ceiling. They faced a raised dais behind which a group of Marines managed to hover without seeming to hold on to anything. They were dressed in green jackets and trousers with khaki-colored shirts. Each wore a brown-leather “Sam Browne” belt over the green jacket—the Class A uniform, as the recruits were soon to learn. That was the only uniform they were to see, except for garrison utilities, until after they graduated from Boot Camp and were assigned to the Fleet. Each of the Marines on the dais wore a kaleidoscope of ribbons fastened above his left jacket pocket.

Corporal Singh nudged and pushed his group into the rear rank of the bobbing recruits already holding on there and made sure each grabbed a handhold. He nodded toward an officer on the dais, a captain, judging by the gold orb that graced each shoulder strap on his jacket.

“At ease!” the captain shouted. “That means, shut up and listen up, in civilian,” he added. He spoke with a distinct but unfamiliar accent. Silence, punctuated only by the humming of the air ducts, the creak of expanding and contracting metal, and vast booming noises far within the hull—sounds that would accompany them all the way to Arsenault and soon go unnoticed—was immediate.

The captain smiled and nodded approvingly. “You’re learning. My name is Captain Tomasio and I am your company commander. Welcome to Company A, First Battalion, Fleet Training Regiment. These Marines up here with me are the company executive officer, the company first sergeant, and your drill instructors. Your squad leaders and fire team leaders—you’ll learn what all those are very soon—will be selected from among you, once we get organized and get a few things straightened out. We are all going to get to know each other very well over the next six months. Now, painted on the deck in front of each bulkhead—that’s ‘wall’ in civilian—you will see large yellow squares numbered one to four. When your name is called, you will move smartly, and I emphasize smartly,” a ghost of a smile flickered across his lips, “to your designated number. That will be your platoon assignment. Later, you will be organized into squads and fire teams by your drill instructors.” Captain Tomasio turned to one of the other Marines. “First Sergeant.”