Welcome to the Marines (Corporate Marines Book 2) (16 page)

I feel the engines change pitch as we get close to ground.

I am starting to hear the pinging of laser fire hitting the hull. So far only light stuff, and they can’t hold it on target long enough to make a difference. Seconds to go.

BAM
! We are down. The sides drop and we disconnect and go. Everyone is a blue dot on the Heads Up Display (HUD) in my armours helmet. Targets are highlighted in red. Everyone in the area is stunned or whatever passes for stunned for their race. They are smaller than us, but I remember that females are bigger than the males and have almost mind control over those that they mate with. I stop the useless junk thoughts and focus on the target. There are shots everywhere now. I see two security officers picking themselves up off the ground. My rifle drifts over them and I take the shot. They are not wearing armour and the first one literally explodes from the kinetic energy of a fifteen-millimetre round hitting him in the torso. The second one is a head shot. As far as I can tell, they have purple-coloured blood, and a lot of it.

Another security team comes out of a guard box by the building entrance and Ten and I take them one round each, working from the outside to the inside of their line. Their armour is only good for light personal weapons. They are dead splatters.

I stop short of the door and provide over watch for Ten while she places the demo charge on the door. She moves to the side and we blow it.

The door flies off and I move ahead, with Ten taking the rear covering. We are running through the facility. As we advance, Ten drops scanners every few feet so we will have a better range on the sensors and have small charges in them for after we are done.

Sensors are working full out and there are multiple enemy in the hall ahead. I fire on the run, single rounds, and through the sensor hash enemy signals are fading fast, sometimes two at once as the rounds travel through the first target and take out another behind them. I fire my last round and take a knee, reloading smoothly while Ten continues past me. I can hear her firing and I am following, covering anything she passes.

She stops firing and we are at the door. Again she slaps a charge on the door and steps out of the way while I cover.

When she blows the door I am first through and shoot the three beings in the room. Ten moves forward and, pulling out a cutter, starts working on the vault door.

Twenty seconds and she is through. I am covering the entry and doing a full sensor scan through the scanners. There is no movement but there are lots of enemy in the area, mostly in offices. They are starting to group together.

Ten pulls the door away and checks the cases. There are three cases that look like our target and not the one that the intel told us about. Ten mag-locks one to her chest and carries one in her off hand. I grab the last one in my off hand and we are moving.

The other targeted bunker building is mined and the charges will detonate when they are tampered with, or all the charges will go off together with the rest of the gifts we left when the button is hit on our way out.

I take the lead and move, with Ten following.

The HUD shows that the section is in position and we are starting to collapse down toward the ship. Everyone is still on time. In fact, we are ahead of schedule.

As we exit the building, the sensors start acting up as the enemy begins jamming us.

Outside of the door there is smoke billowing up and the general chaos of battle. The others are firing more than I’d expected as they are engaging anything that is near.

I cover by the door while Ten starts moving ahead for the drop ship. I move out behind her about four metres and my mark-one eyeballs are strained to cover all the angles. The smoke clears and I see a little figure running toward Ten. I track and slow. It’s a child running scared and it is heading for a trooper. Time slows down and I flash back to the enemy robot killing the kids. I see them screaming as they are burned in half by the laser.

I squeeze the trigger and the enemy child’s body explodes. There is a much larger explosion that actually picks up Ten and throws her to the side.

My plants identify that the child was carrying a mining charge.

Ten staggers to her feet and carries on to the troopship. I can see her armour is damaged. I see two more children moving toward Ten, one with a laser side arm, and the other with a metal bar. I take them both down with single shots.

We are ahead of the rest of the section and Ten is now injured, according to her icon. I slap the case against my chest and mag-lock it.

Ten lets me know that she is at the ship and covering an arc.

I pivot and slowly walk backwards, watching for enemy forces. If it moves, I engage it.

This race is either insanely brave, very territorial, or there is some sort of hive mind engaged. From the little intel I am getting from sensors and what I can see, it looks like the enemy is running toward us rather than away.

A group is coming straight at us on my covered arc and I space out three grenades blasting them apart. Two get up and keep coming. They both have severe injuries but are still moving.

Another trooper goes down and gets back up again, with moderate armour damage.

We are collapsing inward to the ship and I am one of the last to board.

I empty my rifle and grenade magazines at the approaching enemy and then board.

The sides of the ship close and I immediately mag-lock myself to the wall. The engines come on and we are shooting for the sky.

Total mission time was twelve minutes.

We get back to the ship, which immediately moves out of orbit.

In the bay I remove my armour and then help Ten out of hers. The damage is minor. While I am helping her get the jammed leg piece off she leans forward and murmurs, “I guess I owe you for taking out those kids and saving me.” She throws me a wink and licks her lips slowly.

The sim ends.

I struggle to my feet feeling like I have been beaten heavily.

The instructors are sitting drinking something hot and talking. They all stand and then Armour looks at us. “Congratulations, you have passed this phase’s training. You are now considered Marines, almost. You still need to do more armour and section-level training, but this was the big test.”

I look around and notice that two of the couches no longer have people with them. I wonder what happened to them.

The main instructor continues. “The only way to win the mission is to engage all of the enemy forces. All but two of you did so.” She pauses and then continues. “Young or old, tall or small, male or female, any enemy can kill you and those enemies likely do not have the same issues or morality that you would.”

She continues again. “Congratulations. You have passed and are now Marines.”

I am a qualified trooper now. I almost couldn’t squeeze the trigger.

The few of us that are left head for dinner. Armour stands there in the door watching each one of us pass by her.

H
e looks at Seven. Timothy, her other half, isn’t here today. He is working on a new algorithm mod that, with some updates, is supposed to increase the sensitivity of the evaluation even more.

Hopefully that works.

She just sits there looking at him. She doesn’t look smug or happy. It is the same mask that she always wears. He almost feels that she is gloating.

He has that feeling from the file sitting open in front of him.

The numbers in there are staring out at him. All those glaring zeroes.

This isn’t about ego. “So the initial tests show him as being well attuned to the armour during synchronization.”

She raises an eyebrow but says nothing.

“Those are
just
initial tests, and while I will agree that he is a good fit, these results are not conclusive. Not yet. After what you did to him and everything else he has been through, he may never fully stabilize.”

He stops and stares at her.

She is smiling.

She leans forward and touches the end of her finger to the line of test scores. “I was right.”

She stands up and walks out, closing the door behind herself.

He sits there and curses. He looks at the numbers again and sighs. She was right.

He carefully pushes the file back together and closes it. He places it into his briefcase and stands up, smiling as he closes it.

The new candidate is performing perfectly.

He turns the light off and closes the door, heading down to his office.

W
e have all been given the night off again but no one feels like celebrating or having “fun” tonight. I’m sure if everyone’s mission had been the same, but everyone has a look to their face.

I don’t know what to call it when I look at them. Shocked? Or maybe horrified?

Everyone looks the same. Their eyes are sunk back into their heads. They have black rings around their eyes. Maybe half of us are shivering, and on the way back to our accommodations, everyone, including me, is starting at every noise.

The lights seem brighter and every noise is much louder than usual. I stop in the big foyer and look at the shiny elevator doors. That is when I see my face. I thought I was doing well but in reality, I look like them. Panicked and terrified.

It hits me then what we look like: haunted. I used to be into history and reading up on what had happened in the past. For some reason, horrible wars were really cool to me. Our faces looked like those survivors from concentration and prisoner-of-war camps from the twentieth century. There had been more recent conflicts, and the footage of survivors that had been through horrible torture or other abuses looked like us.

I don’t get it. We shouldn’t look so bad after a few minutes or hours in sim.

Heck, when we went out and lived in the big wide world during “survival training,” we came back after two weeks looking better than we do now. I had not felt this bad then, and after about six hours back we were all looking pretty good.

It was so hard to think, though, that I stopped trying. I put one foot in front of the other and, like everyone else, made it back to my room.

As we head down that last corridor, I have the horrible feeling that we are being watched. I just know that we are going to be thrown into the next level of training. It would follow that, after doing a sim like that, they would have actual combat robots come out and chase us through the complex.

They never aimed to kill us during this training, but I could see them amping up the robots’ laser systems so that we were burned. The fastest way to make sure someone learns is to hurt them. If they weren’t smart enough to learn then, they shouldn’t be in this system and I could see that it only made sense to kill them off to ensure only getting the best.

Why keep failures alive? Even with the contracts in place and the fact that we would be working as high-level somethings in the company, I had no idea what they would do with us at this point. Office manager? Riiiight. We know all this information on tactics and how everything works. We are the highest level of security risk, even if they had spent something like thirty million credits, or whatever they used as money, to get us to this level.

The best thing they can do is to kill off anyone that doesn’t work out now.

I can feel the others thinking along those lines too.

Then it hits me. They need so many of us to survive out of each training group. If some of the others die off, then that means more openings for the rest of us. Even if we are failures, their system is probably like everyone else’s. If they have eight positions, then they have to fill those.

So if my fellow candidates had a bad accident… or if I just slit their throats while they were sleeping… I know that they would overlook a few murders.

I’m standing outside my room door and shaking and sweating so bad. I don’t remember walking the last few paces and then I realize that no one is in the hall. But someone is watching me. I look over and see Mouth, or Kellye or whatever. She is watching me carefully.

I wonder if she is thinking about where would be best to put the knife blade in. She could easily take something from the cafeteria. I gulp and try not to throw up.

She looks really good and doesn’t look as bad off as the rest of us.

She calls out to me quietly, “Are you okay? You’ve been standing there for a few minutes. I just came out of my funk and realized that we were both standing in the hall.”

I nod jerkily and stammer out, “Yup, right as rain. I didn’t really see all those kids get killed. There wasn’t blood all over and everything is good. I’ll see you later, okay?” and I duck into my room and close the door. I put a chair up against it as the only way to really secure it.

I know there are some other candidates who are likely freaking out like I am. I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to come and kill me.

I stop and sit down, shaking.

The last thing I had seen in the hall was Kellye’s face and she looked shocked.

I had blabbed out whatever and I shouldn’t have.

I need to get a grip. But every time I close my eyes I see blood everywhere.

I see the bodies and blood.

I want to cry and scream at the same time.

This is wrong.

Then I am sobbing. In the back of my head I can hear a voice saying, “Stop it! This isn’t you! You didn’t kill them!”

But I had. Bodies torn and lying there all because I hadn’t been there to try and stop them.

I stagger to my feet and walk to the mirror and look at myself. I am horrified. I look even worse. Every one of my features stands out from my face and looks bruised and battered.

What have they done to me? Are the nannites out of control? Have the instructors decided they don’t want me in the program anymore and fed me some slow-acting poison? Or something worse?

I grab the garbage can just in time as I throw up.

I look up and see some puke around my mouth and I know I am dead. I just don’t know what to do.

Then there is a loud
BING!
And through the speaker system comes a cold robotic woman’s voice. “All candidates will report to the main auditorium now.”

In my mind her voice is an executioner’s and she is calling us for a slow death. I consider ignoring the voice and hiding in the room. Then I realize that they would get me no problem. I start thinking about how to escape and evade my way out of the complex to the surface, work my way to some portion of the gate, and then slip over and out. But that won’t work. The gates are heavily manned. I could hop the fence and then work my way through the mines and whatever else was out there. If I run fast and hard, maybe I can get away and find someone to tell them what has been done.

Her cold voice continues on. “I will say this again. You will report to the auditorium at once for briefing. You will head there now and be sitting waiting for debrief in three minutes or you can consider yourself a fail. A failure at this point means that you will be shipped off-world to work in radiation mines or on other equally dangerous work for the next decade. Ensure that you are properly turned out. You now have two minutes fifty seconds.”

The voice clicks off.

I grab a washcloth and run it over my face and rinse my mouth out. I am still dressed good enough for a muster inspection, barely.

I leap to the door and open it. Everyone else is just gathering in the hallway and look bad. There are a few people that are looking worse than me, but not many.

I still feel like running away but it wouldn’t make any difference. We have trackers in our blood so they would let me get as far as they wanted to and could tease me by letting me make progress or just stop me by the elevators up.

As the last door opens and we are all in the hall I see one of the guys look around furtively like an animal. His mouth is set in a hard line and he is breathing through his teeth. He looks like he would attack anyone who comes in reach.

He suddenly takes off at a sprint, heading deeper into the complex. I figure that he is going to the air handlers. If he can make it in and get through the inside safeties, then he can work his way up an airshaft and getting out will be easier.

A part of me takes off after him to escape as well. But it is a small part.

I had already considered the airshaft but it wouldn’t work. It would take too long to override whatever is securing it and then you would have to wedge yourself in and climb all the way to the surface slowly. Even in top shape, if you made it to the top, you would climb out exhausted and they would know exactly where you were. You were done then.

I look around. Others had been considering running with him. I can see it in their faces. We turn and start walking the other way toward the auditorium when I can hear a faint snap-crack sound and what would have been an almost scream.

I think it came from about three hallways over. I guess they knew that someone would run and had us boxed in. Every escape scenario leaves my mind and I start walking.

If they wanted me or anyone else gone, then we were just gone. They hold all the cards, like they always have. Part of me hates myself because I had given them the leverage over myself. Most of the rest were volunteers, so could grump about it, but they could have left earlier and still have good, high-ranking jobs. I am trapped into going all the way through because of my actions.

I try not to blink as I keep seeing blood and I can feel the cold body in my arms.

I have to tune it out.

We all march into the auditorium and move to the front row and sit.

I have the feeling that we are all feeling like we are going to be executed. Again, I can’t figure out why this would happen or why we would feel this way. We are a huge expense to the company by this point.

This auditorium had held three hundred of us on Day 1 and then we had dwindled in numbers. Now there are less than twenty of us. I shiver, wondering if they had lied to us all the way through. Every failure taken out and executed.

I shake my head.

The lights are on and then Armour comes out. The scary, quiet one that moves like an animal that I know has killed people or aliens or whatever.

She walks out to the centre of the stage and then sits down. Just like that, dropping from a standing position to cross-legged in front of us. She is fast.

Her one-piece coverall fits well and I find myself having inappropriate thoughts while I try to ignore her icy blue eyes.

I give that up and then try to look her in the eye.

Her face is cold, as always, and her eyes are moving back and forth over us, looking for something.

She settles on me for a second and I feel like she is looking through me. She knows everything and I have been foolish to think that I could run from these people.

I am shaking and can’t stop the tremors that are wracking my body.

She stops looking back and forth and puts her head in her hands for a second and then sighs. She straightens up after a second and looks at us.

She is smiling a little and almost looks understanding.

She clears her throat. “During your time in the last combat sim, the time was compressed down. To properly judge your reactions, your nannites and body mods were manipulated in a specific way that can be done, but it is not good to do this for very long. In fact, there are nasty side effects. I have done the same artificial swings in combat for up to thirty seconds. It increases awareness and reflexes in such a way that you are like a god. As I said, there are side effects, though. We do not use it for long and we are monitored for the side effects as it is addictive.”

She stops and looks around at us. “You have all heard about sim addiction, correct?”

We nod; it is an increasing problem and the government agencies say that one day sim addition will surpass drug use. The worst-case situations are those who never come out of the sim as their brain leaves them in an artificial world. They are unable to differentiate between real and fake, and it is difficult to get people out of that.

I shiver.

They had put us into something like sim addiction on purpose?

It’s like the instructor is reading my mind. “The purpose is NOT to get you sim-addicted. The purpose is to boost your system to as close to reality as possible for that sim. Your mind is telling you everything you experienced is REAL. You will be able to do that with your systems later after you learn more. What would sex be like in a sim? Or whatever your secret fantasy is. It could be more overpowering than the real world.”

She stops and her face goes blank. Then she continues. It is like she has turned off the understanding side of herself and her voice is a bit harsher. “The Corporation needs to know how you would react in the sim as a final test, part one. Within a few hours of coming out of the sim, though, your mind is suffering the effects of the combat which it feels is still going on in an advanced and accelerated format. But it also knows that you are dead or maybe horribly wounded. This is part two of the final phase test. You were suffering from post-traumatic stress. How you responded to that was monitored at every step you took down the hall. There is a large team tracking your thought patterns. Past traumatic events will surface in your memories and become real. The amount of stress that you were put under in the last hour that you sat in your rooms was tremendous, and normal people are never asked to deal with that. Yet you were just forced to deal with it.”

Again she is pausing and looking at us. “Your side effects include paranoia, psychotic breaks and assorted others, depending on who you are. If you had tried to hurt yourself, you would have been sedated and stopped. After all, at this point you are the property of the Corporation.”

She takes several deep breaths and relaxes, even though her upright posture never eases a millimeter. “When I gave you the orders to show up here with the timings, that was the final catalyst of the testing. You would either come or you would not. Now you are all completed this phase of training. You are still not fully in until you pass the armour training that will be occurring over the next stage. Even when you complete that training and are fitted for armour and shipped off to a section that needs replacements, are used to stand up a new armour section, or are just kept here in Sol System for special security for a future project, even then you are not
fully
in until you are part of a unit and you are evaluated by your commander.”

Her mask comes off and she smiles. “While you have been sitting here listening to my explanations, which are all correct, you have been gassed and had your systems eased down. How do you feel?”