Mercenary (7 page)

But Smith surprised me. He brought me to his barracks room, which was in strict military order, its hammock folded away and its furnishings sparse. There were two chairs and a table, and he bade me sit down. “Hubris, I've been watching you,” he said. “You're inexperienced but hardened to work, and you're three times as smart as your tests show. Why'n hell'd you pull a stunt like this?”

“I can't tell you, Sergeant,” I said, hating this.

“You broke 'n entered, and that's a black mark on your platoon and on me,” he said. "It's my business to see that this sort of thing doesn't happen. You aren't a criminal-type, Hubris. You had to have reason.

You were after something, and I mean to know what it was."

I sat silent. I couldn't tell him about my quest for Spirit; this was not a thing the Navy would understand.

It would be better to take my punishment straight. I deserved it for my foolishness.

“Tell me why, and give me your word there will be no repetition, and I will give you minimum standard punishment,” he said.

I shook my head no, fearing what was coming.

He said no more on that subject. “The barracks needs cleaning,” he said. “You will scrub it down, beginning at floor level, during your free time, commencing today. Here is your scrub brush.” He handed me an archaic toothbrush.

That afternoon, and the afternoon following, I labored to clean the immense inner hull with that tiny brush. My platoon-mates saw me but did not comment; it was forbidden to talk with a person undergoing punishment. The labor was mind-deadening, but I had spent a year on the migrant circuit, so I was toughened to this sort of thing. I simply tuned my mind to other things, freeing it from the mundane blank, and proceeded, as it were, on automatic.

On the third day Sergeant Smith approached while I worked. “This isn't necessary, Hubris,” he said.

“You have completed minimum punishment and have served as an example. What have you to say?”

“This is supposed to be a training battalion,” I said gruffly. “I did wrong and I am being punished; that's fair. But you are making me do something useless when you should be making me do something that forwards my competence as a Jupiter fighting man, even though I'm really a mercenary.”

“Just what are you trying to say, Hubris? You may speak freely.” That meant I would not suffer additional punishment for anything I might utter; this code, too, is honored. I could call him a fecal-consuming pederast whose hash marks were forged, and get away with it.

I elected for a less personal critique. “This is chicken shit,” I said, using the age-sanctified vernacular for pointless harassment.

“You want a rationale to justify it?” he asked disdainfully.

He had the temerity to argue the case. “Yes, if I have to indulge in it.” I should have known better than to challenge a military professional. The officer at the Tail had tackled my doubt head-on, and so did Sergeant Smith.

“The foundation of the military service, any military service,” he said carefully, “is discipline. Men and women must be trained to do exactly what is required of them, in precisely the way required, and at the moment it is required. The military organization is ideally a finely crafted machine, and the individual parts of that machine can not be permitted free will, or the machine will malfunction. We want the soldiers of the Navy to be able to fight; but first they must obey, lest we become no more than a random horde of scrappers. Civilians come to the service with a number of ungainly and counterproductive attitudes; we must cure them of these, just as we must build up their bodies and their skills. Naturally, civilians resist these changes, just as they resist the first haircut and the first session in the Tail. They have other ideas—and because we must rid them of these ideas, we put them through a program some call chicken shit. It may be unpleasant, but it is necessary if they are ever to become true military personnel, able to function selflessly as part of an effective fighting force. It is, ultimately, not hardware or firepower or numbers that determines the true mettle of any military organization; it is discipline. What you are undergoing now is not useful work by your definition; it is the essence of discipline.”

I paused in my scrubbing, impressed. Sergeant Smith had given me a genuine answer, instead of the bawling out I had expected. I realized that I had not properly appreciated the qualities of the man—and that was embarrassing, because I, of all people, had no excuse for such misjudgment. I had turned off my mind too soon!

Yet I resisted the logic. “In what way does scrubbing a clean hull with a toothbrush contribute to discipline that rigorous useful training would not?”

“Rigorous training is proud work,” he said. “You have too much pride, Hubris. Your very name smacks of it; I daresay it runs in your family. In civilian life it can be an honorable quality, but here it amounts to arrogance. You assume that your personal standards are superior, even when you are in plain violation of reasonable regulations. We must expunge that arrogance, or you will never be a true soldier. And that would be unfortunate, because you have the makings of a fine one. So I have given you a task that deprives you of pride, because it has no meaning. Chicken shit is very good for abolishing hubris, the arrogance of pride.”

He was making some sense. I realized, now that I understood him better, that I could trust Sergeant Smith. He was not the blind disciplinarian I had taken him for. He was a sighted disciplinarian. It was a significant distinction.

“Will you keep a secret?” I asked.

“No. I serve the Jupiter Navy, nothing else.”

Did my quest for Spirit really have to be secret? It seemed to me now that Smith would understand, and perhaps it was best that I tell him. I could have told him before, and spared myself all this, had it not been for that very hubris he charged me with. Surely my surname was no coincidence; some distant ancestor had been so proud of his arrogance he had adopted its name for his own. This was, it seemed, a lesson I had needed. “Will you give me a fair hearing, even if it takes some time?”

“Yes.” No fudging here.

“Then I will tell you what you want to know, and I will promise not to break any more military regulations.”

“Come with me.” He turned and walked away.

I set down my toothbrush and followed him to his room. There I told him about the manner I had separated from my sister, Spirit, and how I had received news of her survival.

“Then it was not pride so much, but need,” Sergeant Smith said. “You have to try to save your sister from the pirates.”

“Yes.”

“You should have gone through channels. The Navy is not indifferent to the welfare of the families of soldiers. You should have come to me at the outset.”

“I guess I should have. I didn't realize—”

“Lot you have to learn about the Navy, Hubris. That's why you're a recruit. It's my job to teach you, but you have to give me half a chance.”

He was right. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I—”

“Apology accepted.” He looked at his watch. “Chow time.” He touched his intercom. “Corporal, bring me dinner for two from the mess.”

“Check, Sergeant,” the intercom replied.

Startled, I looked at him, the question in my face.

“I have obtained some of your private history, Hubris,” he said. “Now I'll give you some of mine. We'll eat here; what we have to discuss is nobody's business but ours.”

I nodded, still uncertain what he had in mind.

And while we ate, Sergeant Smith told me his military background. It was amazing. He had been a master sergeant in a regiment, in charge of the specialized training the troops needed for a hazardous mission. The plan had been to make a covert raid to a planetoid in the Asteroid Belt where certain Jupiter officials were being held hostage. Smith had urged against the attempt, believing that the risk of precipitating the murder of the hostages was too great. He believed that negotiation was called for. The captain in charge had overruled him unceremoniously and ordered the preparations to be made. Smith had then gotten the job of training the men in the necessary maneuvers. He had tackled it honestly but pointed out that he needed at least two months to get the men in proper shape so that there would be no foul-ups. The captain, eager to get the job done, cut the time to one month. Again Smith warned against using this inadequately prepared force; again he was overruled.

The mission was launched—and it failed. The hostages were killed, a number of the raiding personnel were lost, and Jupiter's interplanetary relations suffered, exactly as Smith had warned.

There was an investigation. Smith was found guilty of gross negligence, reduced four grades in rank, from master sergeant E7 to private first class E3, and reassigned to the lowest form of supervisory labor: the training of recruits. That had been four years ago; he now had won back two of his lost stripes and might eventually recover the rest if he kept his nose clean.

“But it was the captain who should have paid!” I exclaimed.

“Officers don't pay,” Smith said. “Appearances must be preserved. They needed a scapegoat, and I was the one.”

“But you were right and he was wrong!”

“Right way, wrong way, Navy way,” he reminded me.

I shook my head, confused. “You accepted wrongful punishment to support the military way?”

“You accepted it to protect your sister.”

“Yes, I suppose. But—”

“When you are ready to do the same for the Jupiter Navy, you will be a true military man.”

“I'll never be that sort of man!” I declared.

He smiled, somewhat grimly. “Hubris, when you finish Basic, I want you to put in for retesting, and then for Officer's Training School. I believe you would make a better officer than the captain I served.”

“You are going to all this trouble, just to get me to try to be an officer?” I asked incredulously. “ Why? ”

"I owe it to the Navy to do my job the best way I know how and to produce the best fighting men I can.

You have real potential. I want to straighten you out and set you on the right course. Hubris, you have a real future in the Navy—once you make up your mind to pursue it."

“A future in the Navy? I'm a mercenary, and I'm not even of age!”

"I know that. But irregularities in the induction are excused if the rest is in order. As a resident alien you are eligible for any position in the Navy, which is more than can be said for your civilian opportunities.

You have a clean record, Hubris; keep it that way."

“A clean record? But I—”

“There was no court-martial. You accepted unit punishment. No officer was involved. It is off the record. Remember that: In the Navy, souls can be bought and sold for a clean record.”

Probably true. “You expect me to be the sort of careerist you are? A scapegoat?”

“I think you can do better, Hubris. Get your house in order, become an officer, and I will be proud to call you 'sir.' ”

“I can't do it,” I protested. “My first priority is to rescue my sister.”

“I will help you do that.”

Again I was amazed. “How? You can't break the regulations either.”

“I don't have to break regs. I just have to enforce them.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“The transsex feelies are unauthorized,” he explained. “It is Navy policy to tolerate them as long as they don't cause mischief. It is the prerogative of the Platoon or Company Commander to determine what constitutes mischief; in practice it's left to the noncoms. If I raise an objection, I'll get to the source quickly enough. They'll figure I'm bucking for a bribe; they'll be glad to settle for information.”

I smiled. “Sergeant, if you do that for me, I'll be the best soldier I can be. And the day I get my sister back, I'll put in for Officer's School.”

“Deal,” he said. “But it'll take awhile to trace the supply route, because these people are cagey, understandably. They've been stepped on before. And I don't dare check with the officer who pays for the chips out of general funds; he's twice as cagey as the pirates are.”

“I understand.” We shook hands, and that was that. It was a great relief to me, in several senses.

Nothing more was said in the following days. But the next week, when the assignments for trainee squad leaders were posted, I was the one for my squad. I had no real authority; all it meant was that I got an armband, marched at the head of my column of ten men, and had to relay minor directives and items of information. I also had to select the men for police call (routine cleanup of refuse) and such other stray chores as were assigned. But it was my first taste of leadership in the Navy, and a signal that I was expected to set an example of good soldiering. I intended to do so.

A few days later, Sergeant Smith called me in for a squad leader conference, told me one of my men had reported for sick call twice when due for special duty formation, and to get him in line pronto. Then:

“EMPTY HAND chips are distributed by the pirate fence, Chip Off the Old Block, who handles the more extreme entertainments. They're into drugs, too, and they've got a security system the Navy can hardly match. That's a dead end; we'd have to shut them down before they'd talk, and by the time that scene was done, they'd have destroyed all their records and skipped the base. Only if they get into murder, or if they seduce a general's daughter, will the Navy move firmly against them.”

“All I want is information,” I said.

“I know. That's why I call this a dead end. We've got to go another route, and it will take time. You don't want the pirates to get any whiff of what you're really after; your sis would pay the penalty. The Navy runs surveillance on the pirate ships in the Juclip; I'm sure there's a record of every one that connects to the Old Block fence. But no enlisted man has access to that list. You need an officer. The right officer.”

“What officer?”

“Hubris, I can't tell you. I know him, but I can't violate his trust. I'll have to ask him to contact you. If he refuses—”

“I understand,” I said. “You can't tell an officer what to do.”

“This one's special. Give it a couple of weeks; I think he'll agree. When you meet him, you'll understand.”