Terms of Enlistment (28 page)

In Week Four, we get a break from the classroom. For the Shipboard Safety Training, we move to another building on the base. This one houses a full-sized simulator of a Lancer-class fleet destroyer. It’s a complete and utterly convincing replica, a five hundred foot long hull with navigation lights, antenna arrays, missile silo covers, and armor plating. The whole thing looks like it could be towed into space and added to the fleet if needed.

Shipboard Safety Training is like starship kindergarten. We learn how to properly move in the narrow aisles and gangways of a Navy warship. As big as the destroyer hull looks from the outside, there’s very little space on the inside.

There’s a lively part of Shipboard Safety Training, and that’s the firefighting and evacuation drill portion. We all get to don sealed vacsuits with oxygen tanks, and the shipboard systems do a convincing job of simulating a major fire on board. We take turns connecting flexible hoses to wall-mounted valves, and dragging our fellow students to safety through smoke-filled corridors. Outside of the Quarterdeck hall, this is the first time I actually get to work up a good sweat in Indoc, and I enjoy doing something physical for a change. I have the feeling that the evac drills are largely a feel-good measure to make the enlisted personnel feel like they have some control over their fates when their ship is on fire and adrift in deep space, but I suppose it’s better than sitting on your hands and waiting to burn or suffocate. So I learn how to direct fire suppressant, operate the thermal imaging gear built into the vacsuit, and search smoke-filled spaces for victims.

We spend a whole day doing emergency drills on the simulated destroyer, culminating with a full pod evacuation from low alert status. Navy ships have life pod systems that are distributed all over the hull, so that no crewmember has more than a compartment or two to cross before reaching a pod in an emergency. When your ship breaks, you’re supposed to find a pod, launch away, and hope that the expeller motor doesn’t fire the pod into the gravitational pull of a gas giant.

The pods on the simulated destroyer don’t launch out of the hull, of course. We rush to the nearest escape hatches, slide down into the pods, and activate the hatch controls. The pod gives a little jolt to simulate a successful launch, and then the exercise is over. I notice that everyone’s pod makes it off the ship and into space, and I wonder just how often a pod evac results in a hundred-percent evacuation rate. The instructor in charge of the exercise just smiles when I ask him that question on the way out of the simulator, and I draw my own conclusions.

At the end of our fifth week in training, we take a battery of skill tests and written exams to verify that we haven’t slept through Indoc, and most of us are pronounced fit to join the Fleet. On graduation day, we get to dress up in our new Navy dress uniforms and pass in review before the training division commander. Then they hand us ball caps and declare that we’re now welcomed into the Fleet.

I receive a merit promotion at the ceremony. The Navy grants me a bump to E-2, because I had the highest combined test scores of my training company. I should feel good about finally receiving a promotion and getting a rank device pinned to my bare collar, but all I can think about is the fact that I would have been an E-2 in the TA by now as well. I shake the Commanding Officer’s hand, and smile when he puts the E-2 chevron on my collar. I carry the platoon guidon as we march out of the review hall, but I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything at all in the last five weeks.

>Did you feel a bit let down by Indoc after Basic?
I ask Halley through MilNet later that evening.

>Sort of,
she replies.
It was a bit of a snooze, wasn’t it?

>I just don’t feel like I’ve actually earned those chevrons. That was like public school with uniforms and better food.

>I hear you. Don’t worry, things will be different in A-school for you. If yours is anything like mine, you won’t have much free time most of the week.

I very much doubt that Neural Networking school is anywhere as demanding as Combat Flight School, but I also doubt that it’s as relaxed as Indoc. Anything less formal and strenuous would have to involve the trainees spending all day in their beds and eating hand-delivered meals.

The next morning, I haul my new duffel bag onto a shuttle to Luna.

I’ve never been religious. My mother was raised Catholic, like two thirds of the people living in our corner of the Greater Boston metroplex, and she tried to raise me in the faith as well, but I never went to church again after my first communion. Seeing the planet from orbit, however, is the closest I’ve ever come to having a religious experience. The shuttle takes off, climbs through three hundred thousand feet of ever-thinning atmosphere in ten minutes, and then rolls over onto its back, giving its passengers a perfect view of the planet below through the windows along the dorsal ridge of the ship. Small shuttles like this have no artificial gravity system, and we’re strapped into our seats with six-point harnesses. When I feel the pull of gravity lessen, I have to resist the temptation to just unbuckle my harness and push off the floor to bounce around the inside of the shuttle.

From this altitude, Earth looks like a lovely place. I take in the vastness of the planet below, the swirling cloud formations that look like they’re floating on the
shimmering waters, and the gentle arc of the horizon. I can see the thin, bright layer of atmosphere that separates the brilliance of the planet from the blackness of space, an almost insignificant film of air that keeps out the cold darkness beyond. For the first time since I signed my transfer papers, it occurs to me that this may be the last time I get to see my home world. If I get killed somewhere in the expanses of the explored galaxy, my first glimpse of Earth from orbit will also be my last.

I’ve seen pictures of Earth taken from space, but a mere image doesn’t come close to conveying the sheer size and majesty of the planet. I take in mountain ranges, lakes, and big swaths of ocean through the windows of the shuttle, and I realize that I’ve spent all my life confined to just a few square miles of all that vast terrain spreading out below. I’ve never climbed a mountain or crossed an ocean on Terra, and if things go well for me in the Navy, I never will.

I tell myself that there are plenty of colonies out there with mountains and oceans and clean air, and that all those familiar continents below are merely random collections of carbon, but as the shuttle speeds along its path along the curvature of the planet, I admit to myself for the first time that I’ll miss the place just a little—not the place where I grew up, the smelly urban mess that is my home city, but the concept of Earth itself, all the places that may have kept me from wanting to go into space, if only I’d had the chance to see them with my own eyes.

Neural Networks school is my fourth duty station in eight months. Once again, I am getting used to a new building, a new duty schedule, and a new group of instructors and fellow students.

The school curriculum is devoid of anything that doesn’t have to do with networking. There’s no PT, no firearms instruction, no drilling, and no memorization of rank structures or military history. Instead, we spend eight hours a day learning the functions of a typical shipboard network, and how to manage and control it with our admin decks. Every week, we start a new subject, and every weekend, we have a skill test that covers the material from the week before. I haven’t spent this much time in a classroom since Public School. With the artificial gravity and the lack of windows, it’s easy to forget that we’re actually on Luna, and I occasionally have to remind myself that there’s a hard vacuum outside when I feel like going for an evening run in fresh air.

The week before graduation, I receive a mail container.

I check for the coded label on the sealed container, and see that it came from the Territorial Army’s 365th AIB--my old unit. I remember Sergeant Fallon’s promise to send me a Combat Drop Badge, and I open the seal of the container.

In the box is not just a single award case, but three. I open the first one to find a shiny new Combat Drop Badge, Basic level. In the second box is a Purple Heart, and the third box contains a Bronze Star.

Underneath the medal boxes, theres a neatly folded message form. I open it and see that it’s a hand-written note, penned in Sergeant Fallon’s precise block script.

Andrew,

here are some things of yours from the battalion. They’re legit, and by the time you read this, they will be reflected in your Navy personnel file. Every member of the squad got the same set except for Priest, who missed out on the Purple Heart because he had the misfortune to come out of it without a scratch. I sent Stratton and Paterson’s medals to their folks last week.

Wear them--you’ve earned them. The squad sends their greetings.

Best,

Briana Fallon, SFC, TA

I look at her signature twice before I notice the new rank after her name--SFC, Sergeant First Class. It looks like she received a merit promotion after Detroit.

I take the medals out of their velvet-lined cases and weigh them in my hand. The Bronze Star has a red and blue ribbon with a small, bronze-colored letter V on it, to signify an award for valor. The Purple Heart is the military award for receiving wounds in combat. It’s my reward token for a pierced lung, and three boring weeks in a military medical center.

The two medals have smaller ribbons in their cases, for wearing on the jacket or shirt of a dress uniform. I take the ribbons out of their spots, and walk over to my locker. I pin the ribbons onto the jacket of my Class A uniform, right above the top edge of the left breast pocket. The Combat Drop Badge, a little silver drop ship in frontal profile flanked by a set of curved wings, goes on top of the ribbons. When all the decorations are in place, I smooth out the front of my Class A jacket with my hand, and look at the arrangement for a few minutes, the two ribbons from Basic and Navy Indoc joined by the one for the Purple Heart, and topped with the Bronze Star ribbon and the CDB wings. The ribbons are just thin brass strips covered with a bit of colored fabric, and the badge is merely a piece of chrome-plated alloy. They hold no honor or achievement by themselves.

It feels good to have tangible, official proof that we did our jobs well on the ground in Detroit, but I would trade a whole warehouse full of ribbons and badges for an opportunity to go to the chow hall with Stratton one last time and shoot the bull for an hour over sandwiches and coffee.

Halley completes her Combat Flight School training three days before I take my final Neural Networks exam. She sends me a message the morning after her graduation to let me know that she passed, and that she’s now wearing a brand new pair of pilot wings.

>91% score on the final flight exam
, she writes.
I am the fucking Mistress of the Wasp.

>Congratulations,
I reply.
When are you getting into the fleet?

>Tomorrow. We got our assignments last night. I’ll be on the Versailles.

I check my PDP for information on the NACS Versailles, and it looks like she’s a fleet frigate from an older class. She was commissioned almost thirty years ago, which means that she’s just a few years away from the scrapyard.

>I didn’t even know they had Marines on those little frigates.

>Just one platoon. One drop ship, and one in reserve. I’ll be one of four pilots on that tub.

>Well, good for you. Any leave before you ship out?

>I had five days, but they cancelled my leave for some reason. They’re letting me take it after the next deployment instead. Hey--maybe you’ll get some leave by then, too!

>That would be nice,
I reply, even though I have no idea what I would do with a week or two off.

>We could go to some military resort somewhere, and do nothing but eat and screw for a week or two, what do you think?

Halley’s reply makes it look as if she had read my mind, and I chuckle at the screen.

>That sounds tolerable,
I send back.
Pencil me in.

Our final exam is a grueling eight-hour marathon session of computer tests and practical problems. We have to use our admin decks to serve requests from fictitious ship officers, and fix a series of ever more complex simulated Network problems. The final test is the solving of a total environmental control failure in fifteen minutes, before the crew suffocates. Most of us figure out the source of the problem--sabotage by virus--but a few of the trainees don’t find the solution in time and fail the exam, to be recycled into the next training flight.

At the end of the day, there’s the obligatory graduation ceremony, and I’m glad to see that it doesn’t involve parading in front of a flag officer in dress uniform. Instead,
our section commander pins Neural Network Admin badges on our shirts, shakes our hands, and orders us down into the chow hall for a graduation party.

We all gather in the building’s galley, mingle with instructors, and drink crappy alcohol-free beer. Everybody is anxious to learn their assignment, and our instructors don’t keep us in suspense for long. One of the petty officers brings in a large plastic tub, and as we crowd around it, we can see a bunch of little white cylinders at the bottom.