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On the way home I stop at the food station to pick up my weekly meals. They come in sealed, disposable trays, twenty-one to a box. Every welfare recipient gets a box per week, fourteen thousand calories of Basic Nutritional Allowance.
They say it’s deliberately designed to taste merely tolerable because it discourages excessive consumption, but I think that no scientific process can make BNA rations a culinary delight.
At the end of my term, the account will be activated, with the accrued balance of sixty-two paychecks available for withdrawal. If I die before the term of enlistment is up, all the money in my account flows back to the government, as reimbursement for the cost of my training and equipment.
We call this a ‘dial-a-pain’ weapon. With just a change of grenades, you will be able to knock down a rioter or a reinforced one-story concrete building.
“We’re going to play a game called ‘Follow the Leader.’ Sergeant Riley over there is the leader.”
Your job is to stick with her. Sergeant Harris will bring up the rear. It is in your best interest to stay in front of Sergeant Harris and behind Sergeant Riley at all times.”
After two hours of loud and repetitive instruction, I find that drill works best when you switch off your brain entirely and just act like a voice-controlled robot. The rest of the platoon seems to have come to the same conclusion. We still suck, but much less than in the beginning.
When you do exactly as you’re told, and you’re neither the best nor the worst at any task, you can disappear in the crowd and have a small measure of solitude.
I want to make it through the training session without getting yelled at or drawing extra push-ups. Then I can work on the next session, and maybe I’ll make it through the whole day like that.
Eleven weeks and five days to go, I tell myself. Eighty-two days of running, getting yelled at, and doing punishment workouts on the quarterdeck.
Together, the rifle and the armor turn me into something different, something more advanced than the sum of myself and the technology in which I am wrapped.
We’re just past the halfway point of Basic, and there are twenty-seven of us left. We have lost thirteen recruits in six and a half weeks.
They never empty a recruit’s locker when the platoon is present, but they never wait long, either.
Now get out of here, and forget about what you were ‘looking forward to.’ This is the military, and nobody gives a shit about what we want. We take what we’re served, and we ask for seconds, and that’s the way it goes.”
“Marksman’s a good score for cooks and filing clerks, but the Expert badge looks better on an infantry Class A,” she says. “Not that it matters in the end, mind you.
really counts is how well you can shoot when your targets are shooting back.”
One of the troopers from Second Squad, Harrison, got knocked on his ass by the first round from the sniper, but his armor stopped the .50-caliber round. That kind of round is powerful enough to go through the visors of our helmets, and if the sniper had aimed about eight inches higher, Harrison would have been dead instantly. As things stand, he only has a bruise on his sternum, and the sniper is now finely dispersed organic matter.
Tonight I have ended the lives of four people, added a final period to their life stories with a pull of the trigger.
Your battalion or regiment is your clan, your company is your extended family, your platoon is your immediate family, and your squad is your household. Like every family, we have our internal quarrels, but when some outsider picks a fight with one of us, we close ranks.
“We’ll leave the LT with Third Squad,” she says to me. “Grab his ammo. We’re going to go for a little walk.”
I remove Lieutenant Weaving’s magazines from their pouches and fill up the empty pouch on my harness before stuffing the rest of the ammunition into the side pockets of my leg armor. “Nobody’s ever been in a firefight and complained about having too many bullets with them,” Sergeant Fallon says to me.
We’re a rifle squad in a combat battalion, with state-of-the-art equipment, and we got reduced to a limping pack of walking wounded—and two dead—in just a few moments of battle, fighting against our own people, in the middle of one of our own cities.
“What’s for dinner?” “For you, Liquid Nutritional Package Seventeen. Your choices are vanilla or applesauce flavor. I have to warn you, though. The flavor designations do not accurately reflect the taste experience.”
“There’s no perfect place, you know. You always end up trading one kind of shit for another. Me, I’ll stick with the shit I know.”
My old squad mates were the first people my age who seemed to like me—not for the stuff I could get them, or the things I could do for them, like the kids my own age back home. In the PRC, everyone looks out for themselves. On the street in Detroit with my squad, we looked out for each other.
Its astronomical notation is Capella Ac. The marine designation is “dirt speck at the ass end of the known galaxy.”
“Now would you stop talking about ejecting out of this thing? I’m not too keen on adding a parachute ride to my list of new experiences today.” “Oh, those are kind of fun,” Halley says. “In a white-knuckled terror sort of way.”
I watch my first extrasolar sunset for a while, and it occurs to me that I can’t remember ever having sat down just to watch a sunset back on Earth.
“I have had my fucking fill of near-death experiences today,” she says. “I hope this counts as a defeat,” I say to Halley, “because if this is a victory, I’d really hate to see what it looks like when we get our asses kicked.”
“Well, I was looking forward to a good shower,” Halley says dryly when she sees the ChemWar team in full protective gear waving us toward the decontamination tent. “Just not in the middle of the damn flight deck, with half the carrier watching.”
