Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (8 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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“I am Staff Sergeant Linley. I will be your Regimen Trainer while you are here at Camp Nallibong as members of Class 7157. That means I will be in charge of turning you soft, wet, civilian noodles into
real
Marines. You will enter the changing room here,” she stated crisply, flicking the thin baton in her hand at the doorway next to her, “scrub yourself from head to toe in a maximum ten-minute shower, and change into the clothes of your SF-MC uniform.
“Today, you will wear all-brown undergarments, socks, boots, pants, T-shirt, broad-brimmed hat, and sunglasses. Do not don the mottled clothes of your camouflage uniform at this time. You will apply your name-patches to each shirt and jacket before repacking them in your kitbags; the flag patch of the Terran United Planets will go on your right shoulder, the patch for Camp Nallibong Class 7157 will go on your left shoulder, your name patch will go over your right chest pocket, and the TUPSF-Marines patch will go over your left chest pocket. If your shirt has no chest pocket, you will see the fuzz of the adhesion patches in the designated region anyway.
“If you have any questions, refer to the Dress Charts on the walls of the changing room. Refer also to the lists of local dangers of flora and fauna; pay particular attention to the posters on avoiding pools and streams while outside, and the dangers of ‘salties,’ saltwater crocodiles, which can and will be found in fresh water even up here on the plateau. Further instructions will be given over the next three days on all the dangers to watch for locally, and the dangers you may encounter elsewhere in the known galaxy.
“You will be expected to be ready to go twenty minutes after the last of the recruits in your training class has entered this room, and you may be quizzed at that time on the information on those charts. Be prepared and be packed. You’re in the Marines now, Recruits. We do not slack on the job!”
Two more recruits approached. Sergeant Linley held up her palm, stopping them. She kept her gaze on Ia and the other three who had already been there for most of her spiel.
“When you have changed, you will pack up all your nonallotted personal belongings in the transport boxes provided, located to the left as you enter the changing room, and label them with the address of their return destination. If you have any questions regarding what you are permitted to keep, you will refer to the charts posted on the walls regarding allotted goods. Anything nonregulation which is found left in your possession at the end of this day or which was incorrectly labeled for shipping will be sent to the recyclers, so make sure you send it where you want it to go in the next few minutes. Once you have showered and dressed, all regulation and allotted items will be packed in your kitbag. You four will now move inside.
“
You
two will stay. I am Staff Sergeant Linley. I will be your Regimen Trainer while you are here at Camp Nallibong . . .”
CHAPTER 3
 
The first few days of any boot camp are always the toughest—not physically, since that actually happens a bit later—but emotionally and mentally. The recruits have to readjust their thinking, from “civilian” to “military.” From “whatever” and “whenever” to “obedience” and “discipline.” From “me” to “us.”
Some would-be wit once suggested that shaving off everyone’s hair isn’t so much a matter of efficiency and uniformity as it is a way to give the new recruits a common traumatic experience over which to bind them together as a family. I can’t say if it worked or not. I was too busy trying to get things right the first time around, so I wouldn’t have to waste my time on trivial repeats.
~Ia
 
 
Ia nudged Kumanei and Forenze, getting them moving. At least they didn’t seem to be required to respond to the Regimen Trainer’s orders. Yet. Following behind Ia and the other woman, the dark-skinned male whistled softly as they entered the changing room. “V’
dayamn
. She’s as cold as a comet!”
“Watch your language,” Forenze warned him, tugging her suitcase around the end of a gear-crowded bench. “I’m half V’Dan on my mother’s side. Don’t be taking the Empire’s name in vain around me.”
“Then what the junk are you doin’ in the Terran military?” one of the other men in the room asked. From his damp hair and half-clad state, he had already taken his appointed shower. The room smelled of soap, steam, and freshly manufactured plexi, the ubiquitous, recyclable material that had long ago replaced less environmentally friendly substances. Bunching up a sock, the recruit slipped it onto his foot. “Me? I say, if you’re in the
Terran
military, you shouldn’t give a V’
damn
about the V’Dan.”
“You tell ’em, Akhma!” someone else called out. “We’re in the Ma-
reens
now,
sojers
! Hoo-rah,
eyah
!”
“You’re
locosh’ta
, meioa,” Kumanei retorted, giving the speaker a dubious look as she dumped her things on the empty end of one of the occupied benches. “You’ve seen too many episodes of
Space Patrol
.”
“Not to mention ‘
eyah
’ is a
V’Dan
word,” Forenze pointed out tartly. She found an empty bench and dumped her things on one end of it, leaving room for Ia and the man who had followed them to the changing room. “And it’s ‘
eyah
, Hoo-rah,’ in that order. It comes from when the Terrans and the V’Dan hooked up and fought together during the Salik War two centuries ago. Try to get it right.”
The recruit who had joined them gave the women in the changing room a wary, wide-eyed look. “Are we really supposed to . . . change . . . in front of women?”
“Don’t worry, Lackland,” Forenze reassured him. “We won’t bite.”
“’Scuse me? Speak for yourself.
I
certainly bite,” Kumanei shot back, before eyeing the men with a smirk. Laughter echoed off the plexcrete walls. “. . . But not during Basic, so you can relax, meioa-o. At least until we graduate.”
Half of her attention on the others, Ia unpacked her kitbag to lay out the required change of plain brown clothes and boots, and fished out the necessary toiletries. She repacked everything else swiftly, neatly, and started removing her civilian clothes. Changing in front of mixed company had never bothered her; Ia had always shared a bedroom with her two brothers, back home. With the military’s strict views against unwanted copulation, she had no worries that anything would happen.
Someone let out a low whistle right after she pulled her lightweight, long-sleeved blouse over her head. It turned out to be Spyder. “. . . Sweet Jovian rings! Lookit th’ muscles on ’er! Ey! Ia! Whatchoo do onna colonyworld all day, practice ferra bodybuildin’ show?”
Ia looked down at her arms, which looked like they always had. She glanced up at Forenze, whose own arms were somewhat muscled, but not like her own. Craning her neck, she looked back at the green-haired colonist and shrugged.
“I’m a heavyworlder. Where I come from, everyone grows up looking like this.” She paused, considered her words, then added lightly, honestly, “Well . . . most of them are shorter than me. But they’re all just as muscular, if not more so.”
“How much shorter?” one of the other recruits asked. Mendez, that was his name. Ia knew him from the timestreams.
She held up her hand at bra-level. “Most of ’em are about this tall, on average. Very few ever reach as tall as my shoulder.”
Mendez held up his own hand at about the same level, eyed it, then lifted it to the top of her head, eyeing her dubiously. “. . .
That
much difference? If everyone on your homeworld is so short, heavyworlder or not, how come
you’re
so tall?”
She shrugged, turning away so she could have room to shuck off her flats and remove her pants. “Good genetics, I guess.”
“Whoa, looka’ that! Choo an Afaso?” Spyder asked, pointing at her other arm. “F’real?”
Ia glanced down at the tattoos on her right deltoid. They were so new, they still stung a little if she flexed her arm the wrong way, but not so much that she noticed it. “Yeah, they’re real.”
The spiral galaxy was the symbol of the Unigalactan movement; the sword piercing it, point-down, was the symbol of the Afaso Order. Below and to the left of the sword edge were two humanoid figures. One represented the mark of the Junior Master, the other the mark of the Full Master. To the right were spaces left for Senior Mastery and Elder Mastery, and above that would go the tattooed representation of High Mastery, the highest rank anyone could attain outside of the Grandmastery of the whole Order. She might one day attain Senior Mastery rank—and thus be eligible to teach all the martial arts that she knew—but she would never attain High Mastery. Not in this life.
She could, but she wouldn’t. Ia didn’t have Time for it. The best she could do was learn just enough to keep herself and those around her alive. Nor did she have the time to fuss with Order politics.
Her tattoos were plain black line art, lacking the full color found in the tattoos of someone who was a fully Vowed Afaso monk. That kept her out of the hierarchy of the Order, which would give her the freedom to give orders to the Afaso in the future, without having to take them, too. Grandmaster Ssarra would help see to that. He had helped her improve herself to the point where she had earned the second rank of Afaso Mastery, and he would help her to preserve and pass out her instructions for the future.
Without him and his successors, her plan wouldn’t work.
“So, what kind of genetics?” Mendez persisted, sitting down so he could unlace his own footwear. “I’m Hispanic, from a longstanding military family, but you . . . You got white hair, but you also got light brown eyebrows. And I never saw an albino with brown
eyes
, never mind brown hair elsewhere. You also look kinda Asian, but not really.”
“Sanctuary’s a new colonyworld,” Ia hedged, stripping off her underwear. “They’re not sure if I’d been affected by something local while I was in utero, or if my hair is just some sort of random genetic quirk. All I can say is, I was born this way. White hair, brown lashes, light brown eyes, and I tan fairly easily.”
“Yeah, but what’s your genealogy?” Mendez pressed. “Your ethnic background? You got any V’Dan in you, or just Terran, or a mix?”
“My biomother’s part Irish, part Greek, and she said my father looked Asian, possibly Japanese.” Ia shrugged. She pulled the tie off the end of her braid and started loosening the plait in preparation for washing it. “Beyond that, she couldn’t say.”
Lackland, still looking a bit timid about removing his clothes around women, stared carefully at her face. “Your mother . . .
didn’t
know what your father was? Weren’t they married?”
“No, but my mothers were. My father was just some guy they met in a park one day while having a picnic to celebrate their second wedding anniversary.” Selecting the cleaning gel from among her new toiletries, Ia headed for the shower stalls.
“That’s . . . very different from how I was raised,” Lackland stated. “Where I come from, parents are married to each other. And they don’t involve outsiders in . . . in that sort of thing.”
Halfway to the showers, Ia turned back and leaned over the low wall separating the dry half of the room from the damp half. “My parents were first generation first-worlders on a backwater colony so far from Terran space, it might as well have been inside the Grey Zone. They had neither the time, nor the money, nor the
resources
to get to a fertility clinic. If they wanted kids—and they did—that meant doing it the old-fashioned way. Since it was fully informed and fully consensual, agreed upon all the way around,
I
don’t see what the problem is.”
Spyder clapped his pale hand on Lackland’s sun-browned shoulder. “Welcome t’ th’ real universe, yakko. Takes all sorts, dunnit? Whachoo need t’ do now is t’ grow up ’n open yer mind. More’n one road int’ Rome an’ all that, right?”
Turning away, Ia left Lackland to process his fellow recruit’s heavily accented words. Grabbing a washcloth from one of the stacks on her way, she picked an empty stall, flipped on the water, and started scrubbing herself from head to toe. She was already accustomed to taking short, efficient showers, thanks to the joys of having only one bathroom for five people back home.
It didn’t take her long to get clean and rinsed, nor all that long to scrub herself dry with one of the age-roughened towels waiting in neat stacks at the border between stalls and benches. Just as she returned to her waiting gear, a familiar, crisp voice called out over the noise of forty-five people trying to organize themselves, their new gear, and their efforts to be clean and dressed in a timely manner.
“Alright! Listen up, Recruits!” Sgt. Linley called out, startling most of the men and women in the locker room. She lifted something over her head; from the small, silvery size, it might have been an archaic stopwatch. “ZeeZee, here, is the last member of Class 7157 to be processed and receive their dispensary goods. Let’s
move
it, people! You have exactly
twenty
minutes for everyone to hit the showers, dress in plain Browns, pack up your civvies for mailing, ready your kitbags for travel, and be lined up out in the hall, toeing the blue lines in five rows of nine each!”

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