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When I was fourteen, I would have given anything for a chance to kill my dad, take revenge for all the beatings and humiliations. Now he’s in front of me, weak enough that I wouldn’t even need the gun tucked into my waistband, and I have no hate left for him.
I look back at him, the man who contributed half of my genetic code. I tell myself that this is going to be the last time I see him—that I should say something that will make me feel like I have closure. Instead, I just turn around and walk away.
Right then, I know that she’s never been within ten miles of a welfare tenement. Walk away, and go back to that place?
Now they hardly talk about benefits at all. Everybody knows you’ll get fed and that there’s a real bank account and a certificate of service if you make it through your enlistment term. Now they try to discourage as many people as possible from signing up by describing all the drawbacks of service.
There’s no ceremony, no oath of service, no pomp or ritual. You sign a form, and you’re a soldier. It’s a bit of a letdown, but at least they’re consistent in that respect.
I suppose I should be curious about the kind of stuff they’re injecting into my system, but I find that I don’t care. It’s not like they’d let me refuse the shots anyway.
“You want to keep up,” he says. The way he words the statement makes clear that it’s not a suggestion.
When I wake up tomorrow morning, I have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s liberating, but it’s also scary as hell.
“Hell, yeah,” he replies. “I didn’t join to get my head blown off. It’s navy or nothing. Push comes to shove, I’ve had three months of real food, right?”
“My name is Staff Sergeant Burke. These are Sergeants Riley and Harris. Our job is to send most of you back home and figure out what the rest of you are good for.”
It’s a strange feeling to be walking in lockstep with a bunch of people dressed exactly alike. I feel like a cog in a machine, but that’s one part of the military I don’t mind. 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.
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.
As much as I hate working out and getting bossed around, having to take a shuttle back to that place would be much worse. I’d end up just like Mom and Dad—not really living, just existing.
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.
The helmet has more computing power built into it than all the computers in my old high school classroom put together.
The squads square up against each other in training, and we win or lose matches, just like in high school. There’s even the customary locker-room bragging in the showers after the training rounds, with gloating winners and sulking losers. Nobody dies, or gets hurt, except for a few bruises here and there. The battle armor gives off a bit of a zap when you’re “hit” by enemy fire, but it’s not really painful, just unpleasant, like brushing your hand against a stripped low-voltage wire.
“Looks like you’ve found something you don’t suck at, Grayson,” Sergeant Burke remarks when he reviews the kill list with the platoon. “Just don’t think you’re a natural killing machine now. This shit ain’t real combat, you know.”
She’s unlike any of the girls I knew back home. Halley hardly ever talks about her own home, but I just know that she’s never been within fifty miles of a PRC. Everything about her shouts “middle-class suburbs”—her straight and well-maintained teeth, the way she pays attention to her appearance even in the baggy uniforms we wear, the way she holds her cutlery in the mess hall.
It occurs to me that our disparate talents mean we’ll probably get posted to different services if we make it through Basic Training, and the idea of parting with Halley suddenly makes me depressed.
Later that evening, Halley and I retreat to one of the empty bunks by the back wall of the platoon bay. We have to endure some good-natured ribbing from the rest of the platoon as we fashion a sight barrier out of the scratchy issue blankets by hanging them from the frame of the top bunk.
There are some catcalls and comments from our platoon mates, but we’re too busy with each other to pay attention, and after a while they go back to their business and leave us to ours.
She’ll probably shack up with some steel-jawed officer, or a succession of them, and I’ll have my own flings. By the time our discharge date comes around, we’ll most likely only be a faint and pleasant memory to each other.
Then we swear our oath of service. There’s something almost mystical about a few thousand voices chanting the same words in unison.
Any TA company I’ve ever served with could mop the floor with any marine company. You know why TA gets all the shit jobs? Because nobody else could handle ’em, that’s why.
We kiss one last time, this time more like brother and sister. I watch as she walks to her gate, duffel bag over her shoulder.
I’m still disappointed about not going into space, and I have no idea whether I’ll feel the same way about the TA in two years. For better or for worse, however, this place will be my home until my service time is up, so I decide that I might as well make the best of it.
“A smart-ass. As if we didn’t have enough of those already. I think you’ll fit in just fine.”
Maybe it’s the knowledge that this weapon actually fires live rounds, fléchettes that can pierce armor and flesh instead of harmless beams that merely trigger a computer protocol, but somehow I have a lot more respect for this weapon.
My salvo hits the trailing soldier in the midsection, and he drops instantly. I can see little puffs of material where my fléchettes tear through his outdated body armor. I’ve been in fights in the PRC before, even hurt people badly a few times, but this is the first time I know for sure I’ve killed a fellow human being.
The road in front of the embassy turns into the Seventh Circle of Hell as thousands of fléchettes from computer-controlled rifles sweep it clear of any living presence.
This is not a fight—it’s a rout. The enemy soldiers are so far out of their league that it feels like we’re a bunch of professional boxers beating up a schoolyard full of asthmatic grade-school kids.
“You’re supposed to save those thermobaric grenades for special occasions,” Baker says to me over the team channel. “Those are expensive.” “Save ’em for what? I’m a few weeks out of Basic,” I reply. “Snipers shooting at me is a pretty special occasion right now.” It’s only when my whole squad erupts into laughter that I realize I toggled my response into the squad channel.
The indigenous revolutionaries have apparently lost the nerve for another brawl after the mauling they received in front of the embassy gates, because we don’t see another living soul out on the street for the remainder of our brief stay.
“War’s a waste, you know. We just broke a shitload of property down there. Never mind the poor slobs we killed. Just keep in mind that they started the shit. I would have been just as happy to stay home tonight and have a beer at the noncommissioned officers’ club.”
I guess I should be dwelling on that fact, and wonder how much those enemy soldiers were like me—trying to survive their service time to collect their money in the end—but I don’t. They came to kill us, and we killed them instead, and I don’t feel any remorse about that.
It feels a bit like high school, only with guns and uniforms, and instead of learning trigonometry or North American history, we learn better ways to kill people and blow up their stuff.
Hansen is the prettiest girl in the company, and virtually all the guys—and some of the girls—have a crush on her. She’s also deadly efficient at hand-to-hand combat training, which is why her admirers content themselves with looking rather than touching.
Like every family, we have our internal quarrels, but when some outsider picks a fight with one of us, we close ranks.
When he says “jump,” the entire battalion is usually in midair before asking for an altitude parameter.
“We’ll be doing some supplemental close-combat training in the gym. That was a disgraceful performance. You should have been able to mop up that herd of space apes before the MP even got to the mess hall.”
A year ago, I would have been part of that mob, using the chaos as a convenient excuse to break stuff and steal things, but now I’m on the other side of the line, and I feel no guilt as I sight in on the advancing crowd.
I watch in morbid fascination as the armor-piercing fléchette rounds pass through the unlucky rioter and into the man behind him.
What it doesn’t monitor is how scared I am, how many times my armor has been struck, how much I feel like puking, and how badly I want to be back at the base right about now.
I have stopped thinking of them as people. They’re just silhouettes in my gun sight now, one squeeze of the trigger each. Our squad is huddled together in a cluster, everybody covering a sector in front, just like in training.
If I had seen her on the street back in my PRC, killing her would have been the last thing on my mind. Even in death, she looks more vital, more substantial than most of the people I know back home. Even though she tried to kill me, I’d take those rifle rounds back now if I could.
“We’re supposed to protect and defend the citizens of the NAC, Private. Blowing the hell out of a civilian high-rise isn’t exactly the kind of thing that makes us look like we’re doing a good job at that.”
Not everyone in there was a rioter, but I killed them. By accident, sure, but they’re still dead, and I’m the one who pressed the launch button.
I recall all the news I’ve ever seen in the PRC, back when I lived with Mom. If they downplay all the bad stuff like this to keep the pot from boiling over, we must be in much worse shape than I thought.
There are no recent veterans in our PRC—people who leave for Basic never come back. I always figured it was because they didn’t want to come back, not because they couldn’t.
I don’t want to answer, because I don’t want to sound like I’m not loyal to my unit, but I find it hard to be dishonest with Sergeant Fallon. So I tell her the truth.
