Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (11 page)

“Good luck, recruits. May God protect you, and may you serve humanity with distinction, and with pride.”

And then Lieutenant Colonel Higgee saluted us. I didn’t know what to do. Neither did anyone else.

“You have your orders,” Lieutenant Colonel Higgee said. “You are dismissed.”

The seven of us stood together, crowding around the seats in which we just sat.

“They certainly don’t leave much time for good-byes,” Jesse said.

“Check your computers,” Harry said. “Maybe some of us are going to the same bases.”

We checked. Harry and Susan were reporting to Alpha Base; Jesse to Beta. Maggie and Thomas were Gamma; Alan and I were Delta.

“They’re breaking up the Old Farts,” Thomas said.

“Don’t get all misty,” Susan said. “You knew it was coming.”

“I’ll get misty if I want,” Thomas said. “I don’t know anyone else. I’ll even miss you, you old bag.”

“We’re forgetting something,” Harry said. “We may not be together, but we can still keep in touch. We have our BrainPals. All we have to do is create a mailbox for each other. The ‘Old Farts’ clubhouse.”

“That works here,” Jesse said. “But I don’t know about when we’re in active duty. We could be on the other side of the galaxy from each other.”

“The ships still communicate with each other through Phoenix,” Alan said. “Each ship has skip drones that go to Phoenix to pick up orders and to communicate ship status. They carry mail, too. It might take a while for our news to reach each other, but it’ll still reach us.”

“Like sending messages in bottles,” Maggie said. “Bottles with superior firepower.”

“Let’s do it,” Harry said. “Let’s be our own little family. Let’s look out for each other, no matter where we are.”

“Now you’re getting misty, too,” Susan said.

“I’m not worried about missing
you,
Susan,” Harry said. “I’m taking you with me. It’s the rest of these guys I’ll miss.”

“A pact, then,” I said. “To stay the Old Farts, through thick and thin. Look out, universe.” I held out my hand. One by one, each of the Old Farts put their hand on mine.

“Christ,” Susan said as she put her hand on the pile. “Now
I’m
misty.”

“It’ll pass,” Alan said. Susan hit him lightly with her other hand.

We stayed that way as long as we could.

On a far plain on Beta Pyxis III, Beta Pyxis, the local sun, was just beginning its eastward journey up the sky; the composition of the atmosphere gave the sky an aqua tint, greener than Earth’s but still nominally blue. On the rolling plain, grasses waved purple and orange in the morning breeze; birdlike animals with two sets of wings could be seen playing the sky, testing out the currents and eddies with wild, chaotic swoops and dives. This was our first morning on a new world, the first I or any of my former shipmates had ever set upon. It was beautiful. If there hadn’t been a large, angry master sergeant on it, bellowing in my ear, it would have been just about perfect.

Alas, there was.

“Christ on a Popsicle stick,” Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz declared after he had glared at the sixty of us in his recruit platoon, standing (we hoped) more or less at attention on the tarmac of Delta Base’s shuttleport. “We have clearly just lost the battle for the goddamn universe. I look at you people and the words ‘tremendously fucked’ leap right out of my goddamned skull. If you’re the best that the Earth has got to offer, it’s time we bend over and get a tentacle right up the ass.”

This got an involuntary chuckle from several recruits. Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz could have come from central casting. He was exactly what you expected from a drill instructor—large, angry and colorfully abusive right from the get-go. No doubt in the next few seconds, he would get into one of the amused recruit’s faces, hurl obscenities and demand one hundred push-ups. This is what you get from watching seventy-five years’ worth of war dramas.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz said, back at us. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, you dumb shits. I know you’re enjoying my performance at the moment. How delightful! I’m just like all those drill instructors you’ve seen in the movies! Aren’t I just the fucking quaint one!”

The amused chuckles had come to a stop. That last bit was not in the script.

“You don’t
understand,
” Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz said. “You’re under the impression that I’m talking like this because this is just something drill instructors are
supposed
to do. You’re under the impression that after a few weeks of training, my gruff but fair façade will begin to slip and I will show some inkling of being impressed with the lot of you, and that at the end of your training, you’ll have earned my grudging respect. You’re under the impression I’ll think fondly of you while you’re off making the universe safe for humanity, secure in the knowledge I’ve made you better fighting men and women. Your
impression,
ladies and gentlemen, is completely and irrevocably fucked.”

Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz stepped forward and paced down the line. “Your impression is fucked, because unlike you, I have actually been out in the universe. I have seen what we’re up against. I have seen men and women that I knew personally turned into hot fucking chunks of meat that could still manage to scream. On my first tour of duty, my commanding officer was turned into a goddamn alien lunch buffet. I watched as the fuckers grabbed him, pinned him to the ground, sliced out his internal organs, passed them out and gobbled them down—and slid back under the ground before any of us could do a goddamned thing.”

A stifled giggle from somewhere behind me. Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz stopped and cocked his head. “Oh. One of you thinks I’m
kidding
. One of you dumb motherfuckers always does. That’s why I keep
this
around. Activate now,” he said, and suddenly in front of each of us a video screen appeared; it took me a disorienting second before I realized Ruiz had somehow managed to activate my BrainPal remotely, switching on a video feed. The feed appeared to be taken from a small helmet camera. We saw several soldiers hunkered down in a foxhole, discussing plans for the next day’s travel. Then one of the soldiers stopped talking for a second and slammed a palm down onto the dirt. He glanced up fearfully and yelled “incoming” a split second before the ground erupted beneath him.

What happened next happened so quickly that not even the instinctive, panicked turn of the camera’s owner was fast enough to miss it all. It was not pleasant. In the real world, someone was vomiting, ironically matching the action of the camera’s owner. Blessedly, the video feed switched off right after that.

“I’m not so funny now, am I?” Master Sergeant Antonio Ruiz said, mockingly. “I’m not that happy fucking stereotypical drill instructor anymore, am I? You’re not in a military comedy anymore, are you? Welcome to the fucking universe! The universe is a fucked-up place, my friends. And I’m not talking to you like this because I’m putting on some amusing little drill instructor routine. That man who was sliced and diced was among the best fighting men I have ever had the privilege of knowing. None of you are his equal. And yet you see what happened to
him
. Think what will happen to
you
. I’m talking to you like this because I sincerely believe, from the bottom of my heart, that if you’re the best humanity can do, we are magnificently and totally fucked. Do you believe me?”

Some of our number managed to mumble a “Yes, sir” or something close to it. The rest of us were still replaying the evisceration in our heads, without the benefit of the BrainPal.

“Sir? Sir?!? I am a fucking master sergeant, you shitheads. I work for a living! You will answer with ‘Yes, Master Sergeant’ when you need to answer in the affirmative, and ‘No, Master Sergeant’ when you answer in the negative. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Master Sergeant!” we replied.

“You can do better than that! Say it again!”

“Yes, Master Sergeant!” we screamed. Some of us were clearly on the verge of tears by the sound of that last bellow.

“For the next twelve weeks, my job is to attempt to train you to be soldiers, and by God, I am going to do it, and I’m going to do it despite the fact that I can already tell that none of you motherfuckers is up to the challenge. I want each of you to think about what I’m saying here. This isn’t the old-time Earth military, where drill sergeants had to tone up the fat, bulk up the weak, or educate the stupid—each of you comes with a lifetime of experience and a new body that is in peak physical condition. You would think that would make my job easier. It. Does. Not.

“Each of you has seventy-five years of bad habits and personal feelings of entitlement that I have to purge in three goddamn months. And each of you thinks your new body is some kind of shiny new toy. Yeah, I know what you’ve been doing for the last week. You’ve been fucking like rabid monkeys. Guess what? Playtime is
over
. For the next twelve weeks, you’ll be lucky if you have time to jerk off in the shower. Your shiny new toy is going to be put to work, my pretties. Because I have to make you into soldiers. And
that
is going to be a full-time job.”

Ruiz resumed his pacing in front of the recruits. “I want to make one thing clear. I do not like, nor will I ever like, any one of you. Why? Because I know that despite the fine work of myself and my staff, you will inevitably make all of us look bad. It
pains
me. It keeps me awake at night knowing that no matter how much I teach you, you will inevitably fail those who fight with you. The best I can do is make sure that when you go, you don’t take your whole fucking platoon down with you. That’s right—if you only get
yourself
killed, I count that as a success!

“Now, you may think that this is some sort of generalized hatred that I will carry for the lot of you. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Each of you will fail, but you will fail in your own unique way, and therefore I will dislike each of you on an individual basis. Why, even now, each of you has qualities that irritate the living fuck out of me. Do you believe me?”

“Yes, Master Sergeant!”

“Bullshit! Some of you are still thinking that I’m just going to hate the other guy.” Ruiz shot out an arm and pointed out toward the plain and the rising sun. “Use your pretty new eyes to focus on that transmission tower out there; you can just barely see it. It is ten klicks away, ladies and gentlemen. I’m going to find something about each of you that will piss me off, and when I do, you will
sprint
to that fucking tower. If you are not back in an hour, this entire platoon will run it again tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Master Sergeant!” I could see people trying to do the math in their heads; he was telling us to run five-minute miles all the way there and all the way back. I strongly suspected we’d be running it again tomorrow.

“Which of you was in the military back on Earth? Step up, now,” Ruiz asked. Seven recruits stepped forward.

“God
damn
it,” Ruiz said. “There is nothing I hate more in the entire fucking universe than a veteran recruit. We have to spend extra time and effort on you bastards, making you unlearn every single fucking thing you learned back home. All you sons of bitches had to do was fight humans! And even that you did badly! Oh, yes, we
saw
that whole Subcontinental War of yours. Shit. Six fucking years to beat an enemy that barely had firearms, and you had to cheat to win. Nukes are for pussies.
Pussies
. If the CDF fought like the U.S. forces fought, you know where humanity would be today? On an asteroid, scraping algae off the fucking tunnel
walls
. And which ones of you assholes are Marines?”

Two recruits stepped forward. “You fuckers are the
worst,
” Ruiz said, getting right in their faces. “You smug bastards have killed more CDF soldiers than any alien species—doing things that Marine fucking way instead of the way they’re
supposed
to be done. You probably had ‘Semper Fi’ tattoos somewhere on your old body, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“Yes, Master Sergeant!” they both replied.

“You are so fucking lucky they were left behind, because I
swear
I would have held you down and sliced them off myself. Oh, and you don’t think I wouldn’t? Well, unlike your precious fucking Marines, or any other military branch down there, up here the drill instructor
is
God. I could turn your fucking intestines into a sausage pie and all that would happen to me is they’d tell me to get one of the other recruits to mop up the mess.” Ruiz stepped back to glare at all the veteran recruits. “This is the
real
military, ladies and gentlemen. You’re not in the army, navy, air force, or Marines now. You’re one of us. And every time you forget it, I’m going to be there to step on your fucking head. Now start running!”

They ran.

“Who’s homosexual?” Ruiz said. Four recruits stepped forward, including Alan, who was standing next to me. I saw his eyebrows arch as he stepped up.

“Some of the finest soldiers in history were homosexual,” Ruiz said. “Alexander the Great. Richard the Lionhearted. The Spartans had a special platoon of soldiers who were gay lovers, on the idea that a man would fight harder to protect his lover than he would for just another soldier. Some of the best fighters I ever knew personally were as queer as a three-dollar bill. Damn fine soldiers, all of them.

“But I will tell you the one thing that pisses me off about you all: You pick the wrong fucking moments to get confessional.
Three separate times
I’ve been fighting alongside a gay man when things have gone sour, and each fucking time he chooses
that
moment to tell me how he’s always loved me. God
damn,
that’s inappropriate. Some alien is trying to suck out my fucking brains, and my squadmate wants to talk about our relationship! As if I wasn’t already
busy
. Do your squadmates a fucking favor. You got the hots, deal with it on leave, not when some creature is trying to rip out your goddamn heart. Now run!” Off they went.

“Who’s a minority?” Ten recruits stepped forward. “Bullshit. Look around you, you assholes. Up here, everyone is green. There are no minorities. You want to be in a fucking minority? Fine. There are twenty billion humans in the universe. There are four
trillion
members of other sentient species, and they
all
want to turn you into a midday snack. And those are only the ones we know about! The first one of you who bitches about being a minority up here will get my green Latino foot squarely up your whiny ass. Move!” They heaved out toward the plain.

On it went. Ruiz had specific complaints against Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists, government workers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, blue-collar joes, pet owners, gun owners, practitioners of martial arts, wrestling fans and, weirdly (both for the fact it bothered him and the fact that there was someone in the platoon who fit the category), clog dancers. In groups, pairs, and singly, recruits were peeled off and forced to run.

Eventually, I became aware that Ruiz was looking directly at me. I remained at attention.

“I will be goddamned,” Ruiz said. “One of you shitheads is left!”

“Yes, Master Sergeant!” I yelled as loudly as I could.

“I find it somewhat difficult to believe that you do not fit into any of the categories I have railed against!” Ruiz said. “I suspect that you are attempting to avoid a pleasant morning jog!”

“No, Master Sergeant!” I bellowed.

“I simply refuse to acknowledge that there is not something about you I despise,” Ruiz said. “Where are you from?”

“Ohio, Master Sergeant!”

Ruiz grimaced. Nothing there. Ohio’s utter inoffensiveness had finally worked to my advantage. “What did you do for a living, recruit?”

“I was self-employed, Master Sergeant!”

“As what?”

“I was a writer, Master Sergeant!”

Ruiz’s feral grin was back; obviously he had it in for those who worked with words. “Tell me you wrote fiction, recruit,” he said. “I have a bone to pick with novelists.”

“No, Master Sergeant!”

“Christ, man! What did you write?”

“I wrote advertising copy, Master Sergeant!”

“Advertising! What sort of dumbass things did you advertise?”