Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (25 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

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“Ma gla gieza vu-oul lo ma’a alkul, olnie Eltu ma’a tieh . . . Ma gla gieza vu-oul lo ma’a alkul, olnie Eltu ma’a tieh.”
With each repetition, she strengthened her voice, pushing back the sepia-drenched bodies with white mental light and pure, ululating sound.
“Ma gla gieza vu-oul lo ma’a alkul, olnie Eltu ma’a tieh! Ma gla gieza vu-oul lo ma’a alkul, olnie Eltu ma’a tieh!”
“What the hell are you singing, Recruit?”
She jolted back to reality. It
hurt
to wake up fully. Eyes blurring, throat sore from not having sung in months, Ia found herself staring down at Sergeant Tae, who stood just a few inches away.
“What do you mean by singing ‘. . . though hell itself should bar my way,’ huh? You think
this
is hell?” he demanded. “
Do
you?”
She hadn’t known he knew enough V’Dan to interpret her words on the spot. “Sergeant, no, Sergeant!”
“You’re supposed to be
resting
, Recruit, not standing half-naked in the hot sun, singing some silly little mantra! I wanna see you drinking a full liter right now!” he ordered, snapping his baton in the direction of her gear, then followed her when she obediently moved.
She avoided Arstoll’s stunned look, crossing over to where her shirt, weight suit, and backpack lay in a tidy pile on the ground, stripped off and set aside for the duration of their half hour of allotted rest. Picking up her canteen, she drank from it, then dug out a handkerchief and wetted it. Pushing up her sunglasses, she lifted it to her face. A hand blocked her wrist before it reached her cheeks.
The hand belonged to Sgt. Tae. “Are those
tears
on your face, Recruit?”
Tae gave Ia room to her scrub her face clean of dust, sweat, and other things. He stayed at her side as she moved into the shade, his dark brown eyes fixed on her lighter ones. “I don’t get you, Recruit Ia. We throw enough
shova
at you to choke a Battle Platform’s lifesupport filters, and you take it without flinching. But a silly little
song
makes you cry?”
“What
I
want to know,” Linley offered as she reached his side, “is why she’s here in the Corps with a voice like
that
. I haven’t heard anything that good since my last trip to Sydney. Why are you
really
here, Recruit?”
Acutely aware that the DoI observer, Sergeant Chong, was also listening for her answer, that the hovercameras were recording her every word, Ia wiped down her neck and onto her chest, scrubbing at her skin around the straps of her sweat-streaked athletics bra. “I am here, Sergeants, because I am far more useful here than I would be anywhere else. I
like
being useful. Now, if you have any problems comprehending that . . . I apologize for any tactlessness, given how tired I am, but I respectfully suggest you recheck the reasons behind your own military careers.
If
you cannot comprehend that. Sergeants.”
Taking her canteen to the water pipe stationed by the latrine building for this designated rest-area, she drank its remaining contents to make sure she stayed hydrated, then filled it to the brim and drank again. The water tasted bitter, but only because it was flavored with her own disappointment.
I will
never
have the career I wanted as a child.
All
of my dreams drowned and died in the god-damned timestreams three years ago.
With sparse, tight movements, she refilled the canteen, then marched back to her gear and shrugged back into her shirt. As tired as she was, she had to be ready to move when they ordered her back into action. Her head ached from lack of sleep, her body winced at the thought of strapping on the weight suit, and her eyes burned from her brief bout of useless tears.
All I have left are the nightmares, and the slim chance I can help save the universe.
A glance at her trainers showed them conferring among themselves in a huddle. She sensed instinctively that the time to move along was almost here.
Sorry, Sergeants. Compared to the destruction of every world, every race, every
thing
in our galaxy, this Hell Week of yours is
nothing
. A mosquito-sting to a gaping gut-wound.
This
is not hell. This is the only road
out
of hell.
I
will not
stop.
 
“Come on, you slagging slackard! Can’t you do
one measly
push-up
right
?”
“You
can
quit any time you want, you know.”
“Next up is the zip line, Recruit Ia. You think those trembling limbs of yours can hold on to the clip as you slide down? Or are you going to land in the bushes, or the water if you’re lucky? Or maybe in the gaping jaws of a saltie—would you like that? Snap-snap?”
“I can’t hear you counting to ten, Recruit! Start over from
one
!”
“Just put your hands on your heads and surrender; you’ve already gone farther than the rest of your classmates . . .”
“She’s right; you don’t have to go any farther if you don’t want to . . .”
“She’ll quit. She’s weak.”
“Back straight, Recruit!”
“. . . Time!”
“Enough.
Enough!
” Sgt. Tae barked, cutting through the sudden silence. “Recruit Ia, on your feet! Fall in!”
Shaking with weariness, Ia pushed herself slowly upright. Her weight suit felt as if it weighed four times as much as it should; just balancing herself was difficult. Blinking, she focused on the shorter man waiting patiently in front of her.
Seven days of too much exercise on too little sleep had dulled her wits. She fought to focus on why he had stopped everything. The pattern should have been another . . . twenty or so minutes of regimen training, and then . . . the zip line back down from the upland zone to the salt-flats, a long metal cable strung from the topmost cliff to the depths of a ravine not too unlike the one she had jumped into weeks ago, in her pursuit of Kaimong.
“About Face, Recruit! March yourself to the ground bus!” Tae ordered her.
“The General was right,” she heard one of the other sergeants whisper. “If we had a
hundred
like her . . .”
Slowly, wearily, the corners of her mouth curved up. Even her facial muscled protested at having to move, but Ia couldn’t resist the urge to smile.
That’s what “time” meant . . . It’s the end of the seven days. I won.
I won.
Smug satisfaction gave her a tiny bit of energy. Enough to lift an arm high enough to tug off her front-brimmed cap, allowing the heat of the sun to fall on her white-fuzzed head, restoring her sapped energies just a little bit more. A tiny trickle, barely enough to allow her a deeper breath, but a trickle was enough. For now.
“Stow your kitbag and get on the bus, Recruit,” Tae ordered her.
Grateful to be rid of the pack’s weight, she shrugged out of it, and tucked it under the bus. Above the storage space, at the edge of her tired vision, she could see the faces of her fellow recruits pressed to the plexi windows. She smiled even more. While the timestreams were still closed to her—assuming she had the energy to reach for them—she didn’t have to be psychic to know she had impressed them. Turning to head for the door, she found herself blocked by Tae’s baton.
“
Why
are you
smiling
, Recruit?”
Tired but pleased, Ia smirked. It wasn’t much of one, since she didn’t have a lot of strength left, but she let herself smirk. “I won.”
Two seconds later, she finally registered his suddenly fierce scowl. Losing her smile, Ia edged around him, heading for the front door of the bus. The blood draining from her face combined badly with her exhaustion, leaving her dizzy.
Oh,
shakk
. Maybe . . . I shouldn’t have said that?
“Where do you think you’re going, Recruit?”
Confused, she turned back to face him, gesturing over her shoulder. “Onto the bus, Sergeant. As ordered.”
“Well, guess what? I changed my mind. Follow me!” he barked.
Bemused, Ia followed. He didn’t lead her far, just to the front of the ground bus. Unclipping the tow line from the winch frame, Tae played out about two meters, locked it in place, and re-clipped the end to the frame again. Lifting the loop of cable in his hand, he faced her.
“Congratulations, Recruit Ia. For
that
little piece of sass, you will tow this bus all the way back to the barracks!”
Eyah.
I
shouldn’t
have said that.
Too tired to grimace, Ia looked at the cable in his hands, then reached for the patch pocket on her trousers that contained her rappelling gloves. Even in her exhaustion-numbed state, she knew the cord-twisted metal would tear her skin apart if she tried to haul on it bare-handed.
“Did you not hear me, Recruit?” Tae growled. “I said
tow
this bus
back
to the barracks. That’s an order!”
Tugging on the gloves, almost dropping one in her fumble-fingered weariness, she tightened the cinching straps around her wrists. Took the cable from him. Trudged forward two steps, turned, and pulled. The bus didn’t budge. Drawing in a deep breath—fighting against the urge to just sit down and sleep—Ia dug in her boot heels, leaned, and
tugged
.
Her feet skidded out from under her, landing her on the dust-strewn plexcrete of the road with a surprised
oof
. Blinking, Ia stared dumbly at the cable, then at the bus. A brown-brimmed hat and a brown-tanned face interposed itself between her and the tan-hued ground vehicle.
“Are you
disobeying
a direct order? That
is
Fatality Number Five, you realize!”
Disobeying . . . oh, God . . .
For a moment, the grey blankness fogging her mind opened up wide, showing her the timestreams. Not those immersed in the present or the near future, but into the cracked and barren rocks more than three hundred years from now.
Oh, God . . .
“Do you
hear
me, Recruit? You will tow this bus all the way back to those barracks, or I will
personally
march you straight through a tribunal, plant my boot on your asteroid, and
kick
you
out
of the Space Force!”
No . . . No . . . Oh, God—
no
!
Horror gave her the strength her body lacked. Lurching to her feet, Ia grabbed the cable and spun, jerking as hard on it as she could. Again, her feet skidded out from under her, slamming her belly-first on the road. Gritting her teeth against the pain, Ia shoved back up and hauled again, and again. And again, and again, the bus did not move.
“Enough! That’s enough Sergeant. Stop it!”
“Get back on the bus, Recruit Arstoll—get back on the bus, all of you!”
“No, Sergeant!” The voice belonged to Forenze. “You don’t treat a recruit this way. You
do not
treat her this way!”
“
You
want to be court-martialed for disobeying a direct order, too? There will
not
be a mutiny in this recruitment class!”
Ia slipped and fell, again unable to budge the ground vehicle. Dazed, she rolled onto her hip and stared blankly at the parked vehicle, listening with less than half an ear to her fellow recruits arguing with their chief Drill Instructor next to the parked bus.
Parked . . . bus . . .
Parked . . .
Grunting in self-disgust, she shoved herself upright and staggered toward the front of the bus. Half careening off the corner, she hooked her hand enough to redirect herself into the steps, literally and figuratively. Ignoring the
whack
of the tiles on her web-work leggings as they hit the steps, the new bruises they gave to the older ones already mottling her shins, Ia crawled up to the driver’s seat.
Parked . . .
The vehicle was powered by a modern hydrogenerator, using cheap, clean water for its fuel. But it was also a ground-based vehicle, if designed for off-road travel. A hover bus might have flown from landing pad to landing pad a lot easier, but that much thruster tech was expensive, and hovering took a lot more energy than rolling along the ground. The terrain was also a problem; in this part of the continent, there wasn’t always an easy path down through the jungle canopy, even to an established clearing. Better for troop transports to be capable of following the same ground-pounding path the recruits used, which meant using a cheap, ground-supported form of transportation.

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