The Stars Came Back (63 page)

Field Day

FADE IN

EXT - DAY - Training field on New Texas

Aerial view of a vast grassy plain in full, bright sun. A hectic Day One in an extremely large boot camp. There are thousands of young men in companies of a hundred or so running various speed, agility, and strength tests. Each company has a handful of guys in uniform, and they are racing individuals and teams against one another in a high-speed, highly competitive, multifaceted selection process. The guys in uniform are mostly broad shouldered, thick necked, mature men with short hair and severe expressions. The recruits range from 18 to 30 years old, and while mostly fairly fit looking, they are not all of a type. All ethnic backgrounds, builds, hair styles, and styles of dress are represented. Recruit have big alphanumerics on them, two letters and two numbers, separate companies having a different pair of letters. The uniforms running each test company have head-mounted cameras watching the action and carry simple tablets or e-readers that they occasionally consult. The recruits are being harshly tested and compared, sorted, ranked, and measured. The recruits are all sweating heavily, and numerous water barrels scattered around are being used.

They are running wind sprints, endurance test, simple obstacle courses, shoving matches with shields in a ring, shield wall spear practice, shield exercises, and every other devious and exhausting drill the men of the 13
th
Mountain Shields can put them through.

CUT TO

EXT - DAY -
Tajemnica
ramp near the edge of the training field

Lag, Harbin, and Helton watch the expanse of
recruits. A company runs by the ramp in a very uneven formation. One of the guys falls out of line a moment, pukes, wipes his chin on the back of his sleeve, and doggedly gets back into the race.

Helton: All I can say is
holy shit
.

Lag:
Why surprised? It’s your plan.

Helton:
Our plan. But a plan is one thing, seeing it in action is… big.

Harbin: Don’t be modest. It’s
your
plan. We just filled in details.

Lag: And
Taj
helped no small amount on execution.

Helton: Joint effort, for sure. But picking up the 13th
, making it here and having a sorting-out process for nearly ten thousand men in less than a week is unreal.

Lag: Being here before and having a reputation helped.
Contacting every possible volunteer on the planet with a custom direct message, after a basic prescreening by medical and academic records helped immeasurably. They all show up, each with parts of the testing equipment. Poof, it happens. You’re right, though. With
Taj
helping run the screening data collection and an experienced infantry company to manage it on the ground, it’s got to be a record.

Helton: Didn’t think we’d get this many this fast.

Harbin: They had a suicide bomber recently. Lost more than twenty people, including a pair of pregnant ladies. It’s fresh on their minds. Records screen turned down three times this many applicants.

Lag: Don’t think they mind selling a few thousand sides of beef at a good price to support their men, either. Free training, excitement, revenge, be a part of history.
Long list of reasons to be here.

Helton: So two days of this?

Harbin: Genetic and paper tests only tell you so much. Push a guy hard for a while in a highly competitive environment and the real person shows up.

Helton: But two days with no food, just hydrating and competition?

Lag: This battle will be an endurance test. We’ll be outnumbered ten to one at
best
. Possibly forty to one. Endurance and mental toughness when you can’t take a break will be more important than a little extra strength. They have to be fast
enough
, strong
enough
, smart
enough
. But for this fight there is no substitute for endurance. Keep going or die.

They watch the action going on all across the field. Another company runs by
, every man carrying a five kilo weight in each hand and a small backpack. It’s not a very tidy formation. A big, powerfully built guy is struggling, stumbles, hops a few steps, drops his weights, then gingerly puts his foot down as the rest of the company goes by. He staggers and limps a few steps, wincing. They watch, shaking their heads in silent disappointment as his expression tells them he knows he just twisted his ankle and he’s not going.

Lag: Time will tell if that was a
n unlucky break, or a lucky one.

Allonia walks up next to them and watches the guys competing for a moment.

Allonia: Managed to get another twenty-two massage and physical therapists, and five more chiropractors.

Helton: You sure we’ll need that many? Already some on board.

Harbin looks sideways at him with a slightly annoyed expression.

Harbin: Pushing hard for three months will beat up a lot of bodies, even young ones like these. Figure five perc
ent a day get some minor injury: back, shoulders, elbows, ankles, ribs, necks, pulls, strains, minor tears, all the rest. That’s over a hundred a day, with maybe a week to fix, so once we’re rolling they’ll be treating five hundred little things a day. Massage and PT helps tremendously with recovery, so we can push harder, go the extra distance. A good team of those folks will make everything else go much more smoothly. We’ll lose fewer. We can hit the ground in peak condition at full strength. They aren’t a luxury under these conditions. If we could train all these guys, then select the best twenty-five hundred at the end, that’s one thing. But we have to pick, then train and retain them all to make this work.

Helton: Right, as always… I think the self-styled Mahdi is in for a bit of a surprise in a couple of weeks.

FADE TO BLACK

Training

FADE IN

INT - DAY -
Tajemnica
middeck passageway, near a stairwell

Helton, looking tired, walks heavily down the stairs and clumps down the passageway headed for the galley. He pauses and looks through a window into the cargo bay where two formations with about
a hundred men are doing drills wearing armor and carrying shields. The formations face one another as shield walls layered four ranks deep, and they are practicing pushing forward against the other, while the other side falls back together on command. Shove, counter shove, advance, fall back, bugle call, change direction, do it again. Heard through the open windows are the crashing of metal and flesh, a grunting of men struggling to breathe and keep going, corrections and encouragement from the experienced soldiers. Another short bugle call and they both fall back a few steps to rest in place. Kwon steps up next to him to watch.

Kwon: Damn grav cycling is hard on these old bones.

Helton: Not easy on my younger bones either. But the air cycling bugs me more.

Kwon: You working out with them at all?

Helton: (Nodding) But those guys make me feel old fast.

Kwon: Not surpris
ing. They’ve been hard at it over a month.

Helton: Harbin laid out the plan with
Taj
. Very scientific, playing with physiology in very precise ways, increasing gravity, then pulling back a bit, then increasing further, cycling oh-two levels and air density based on activity levels to build red-blood cell counts, alternating cardio and strength training, upper and lower body, core muscles, calisthenics and drills like this. Builds a body fast.

Kwon: Feels like shit.

Helton grunts in agreement.

Helton: With your food and a
last minute carb-loading, by the time we hit Dustbowl these guys will feel like they’re flying even when wearing armor in that low gravity. Be able to last a
long
time.

Kwon: I heard the main training the Mahdi’s followers do is praying, fasting, and self-flagellation.

Helton: Pick your leaders, live with the direction they choose.

Kwon: Or die with it.

DISSOLVE TO

INT - DAY - A smallish former lounge

A group of twenty recruits stand in two lines. They wear high-tech helmets that cover their eyes with a visor. They c
arry shields with some extra doodads clipped on around the edges, and short practice spears. Projected on the walls is a CGI enemy horde, some in armor, some with weapons, some not, some male, some female. The view is as though it were from the line of recruits. The recruits stand in close formation, and as they flick their spears out the hit location is shown on the screen as they take out one target after another. A very high tech battle simulation. Suddenly the scene freezes, and a trainer calls out.

Squad Leader: Rayes! What’s the best target?

Rayes, a guy in the second rank, speaks up and points with his spear.

Rayes: That guy, right in front.

Squad Leader: He’s almost completely covered, only an eye-slot shot. What about that guy taking a swing off to your right?

Rayes: Oh, yeah.
Totally open. Missed him.

Squad Leader: That’s what I thought. Can’t go missing the easy kills like that. Rack up the easy
ones, save yourself for the hard ones. You only get
one
mistake when it’s real. All right, then, ready?

The troops shift slightly back into ready positions, and the action on the walls picks up again. Three guys lance the target the squad leader made note of. It pauses again.

Squad Leader: Why all three of you? Better three than none, but he’s got great exposure only to Rayes. Tompson, that lady to your left is a better shot, and Matsui, the guy in front of Rayes is easier than crossing over to poach Rayes’ target. Be a team, guys. It’s the final score that counts, not individual totals. Again. Eyes open.

The simulation backs up
and starts again, this time the three make better target choices, spear and recover quickly, then carry on.

DISSOLVE TO

INT - NIGHT - Dimly lit cargo bay of
Tajemnica

About two hundred recruits, soldiers,
and some of the crew are practicing slow, steady stretching exercises. Most of them are clad in little more than shorts. It looks like a combination of tai chi, yoga, and martial arts. The motions are smooth, solid, as much to calm as stretch, relax, and practice unarmed blocks and attacks. Not a hard workout, but something to do at the end of the day
after
a hard workout. The man leading the exercises looks like one of the older 13th Mountain Shield soldiers: wiry, muscular, scarred, obviously tough. Allonia, Bipasha, Quiritis and Quinn look a little out of place amid the masses of male muscle, but no one seems to care as they focus on the moves and follow the teacher.

Expectations

DISSOLVE TO

INT - DAY -
Borealis
main dining room

The large and once elegantly appointed room is now a training hall, with formations of
armored men doing maneuver drills, blunted training spears stabbing in and out like so many scorpion stingers. The men are in close formation, armored shins and feet visible below the overlapping shields, helmet eye slits barely detectable above. No skin is visible. The helms are smoothly rounded with narrow vision slots and many small breathing holes. They are wheeling to the left under the watchful eyes of Lag and Harbin, who stand to the side in similar armor. There is a short bugle call, and the formation runs forward five paces in lockstep, then stop. Another short bugle call and they fall back slowly, one careful step at a time. More bugle notes and they stop retreating, shove their shields forward hard, step forward and shove again, step, shove, step, shove. Harbin picks up the bugle from his hip, blows a quick call, then another. Every man in the entire formation turns in place, runs back ten paces, abruptly stops, turns, and braces with the in-front-again row dropping their shields all the way to the ground, and the next rank putting their shields up to overlap them and make a solid wall that conceals everyone behind. From behind the wall, running around the ends, come the back five ranks on each side to stretch the wall longer while the two-high wall stands solid and braced, only spears visible above it like a wicked, flickering picket fence.

Lag and Harbin look on and nod. Harbin blows another short bugle call of five notes, and the line freezes, and then he blows another, different one. Drifting up from the ranks comes an expression of confusion.

Confused Recruit: -the hell?!

Centurion: (
Bellowing from the back) HOLD THE LINE!

Harbin blows another call, and the line visibly relaxes a bit.

Lag: Shields down, take five!

All the shields lower, men stand and stretch or otherwise
quietly relax and breathe. A few of them pull out water bottles from carriers in fanny packs and take a drink, putting them away easily and without fuss or looking while Lag talks. The armor shows patches of fine chain mail, but no skin except where helms are removed. They are very well protected and can move freely and easily.