Poor Man's Fight (10 page)

“I am Chief Boatswain’s Mate
Everett,” the navy man said with a loud, perfectly calm voice. “You are Oscar Company, and I am now your company commander. This,” he said, nodding only slightly to his left, “is Gunnery Sergeant Janeka. She is the assistant company commander. There is no difference in our authority or purpose as far as you are concerned.

“Today many of you will be assigned positions of responsibility within the company. Gunnery Sergeant Janeka and I will assign these positions based on our estimation of your abilities. We will remove you from these positions should you fail in your duties.
”

His gaze swept the room. “That’s the pep talk
.”

No one spoke. No one had permission.

“Ordinarily,” Everett began anew, “we’d head to your squad bay right now. There has been a delay in getting it ready for habitation. However, the Navy’s time is not to be wasted lightly. Company!  Burpees, by the ten count!  Begin!”

Tanner and roughly half the company got right to it: a squat with hands on the ground, then kicking their legs straight back into a push-up position, then two push-ups, then back into the squat, and finally jumping straight up into the air, all of it counted out just fast enough to make it stressful. Others simply blinked. “Right here?” one recruit asked.

The recruit paled as Janeka approached him, her eyes promising death. “Th-the tables are too close!” he protested lamely. All that stood between the two of them was the table and his gear upon it. Janeka promptly swept the gear to the floor, where much of it clobbered the next recruit over.

The sergeant pointed at the table. “Stand on it, Gomez,” Janeka snarled, reading his nametag. “Now.” Gulping, the recruit did as he was told. “This table is two met
ers across,” she said. “You aren’t quite two meters tall. It should be perfect for you.”

“But I--“

“Are you saying you aren’t ready to deal with tables?” she roared. “Are they too complicated for you? You have an order, recruit! Get to it!” The recruit started cranking out hesitant burpees, doing his best not to fall off the table. “Recruit, you will keep pace with the rest of the company. This table is perfectly adequate for your task. If you fall off, I will know that tables are too complicated for you and you will eat your meals standing up until I tell you otherwise!”

Cowed, the recruit picked up his pace before she finished yelling at him. So did everyone else. The tables were indeed too close for such exercise to be done safely. One recruit after another slammed his head against the table in front of him or hit the table behind him with the small of his back. Others, kicking their feet backward under the table behind them, managed to strike a fellow recruit in the shoulder or the skull.

Everett and Janeka allowed no pause or adjustment. They moved from table to table, barking insults all the while. Virtually every individual they addressed had his or her gear knocked from the tables. “You’re gonna have to move tighter than that on a ship!” Everett demanded. “Quit strikin’ your shipmate! He didn’t do anything to you! Don’t move, I didn’t tell you to move out of your spot! I didn’t tell you to stop, either!”

As
Tanner dropped into a squat, the foot of the woman in front came down on his right hand. He yelped and kicked his legs back, only to thrust his foot into the face of the guy behind him. Janeka stood over Tanner and saw it all, watching with open disgust.

“
Didn’t any of your parents qualify for pre-natal defect treatments?” Everett demanded of a smaller female recruit. “Christ, every one of you has a brain deficiency that should’ve been corrected before birth!”

A resounding crash interrupted his rant. Recruits yelped and grunted.
Janeka looked back at the mess. “No tables anymore, Gomez!” she yelled. “I see you sitting at a table at chow, I will cripple you for life!”

Tanner kept performing as ordered. The one thing he knew for sure was that he didn’t want any extra attention from either of these two. He thought morbidly that it would be interesting to measure their voices for kinetic energy and compare it to, say, getting pelted by rocks. Everyone knew that recruit training for any military service, be it a system militia or corporate forces, involved a lot of physical exercise
, verbal abuse and stress. Yet knowing that from second hand sources and experiencing it were very different things.

It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, though, before Tanner realized that neither trainer was yelling anymore. He didn’t see either one out of the corners of his eyes. He kept going, though, as did most everyone else. The stomps, grunts and heavy breath of the recruits filled the room.

Whimpers and wheezes from other recruits struggling to keep up reminded Tanner of his own weariness and fading endurance. Tanner resolved not to add to such noises. Clearly, passing out would be preferable to getting caught making a half-assed effort. He saw absolutely no chance that Everett or Janeka would call the company to a halt because someone showed pain, discomfort or fatigue.

He squatted, kicked out, did his push-ups, tucked in his knees and jumped up.
He did it again, and again, and again. He didn’t even count out. He just kept going and hoped he could at least keep up with the company average, whatever that was.

Then he spotted one recruit, off to his left and toward the front of the room, who wasn’t keeping up at all. The young man had a dark complexion and close-cropped hair, with the upper edges of a tattoo across his back reaching just up over the collar of his
vac suit. He waited in a half-squat, looking around the room suspiciously.

“They’re gone,” he said almost too quietly for Tanner to hear.

“So?” huffed the guy next to him. “Keep going, fool.”

“No, come on,” scowled the first. “It’s a game. They’re fucking with us. Just wait and watch. Only suckers keep this up.”

“Gonna catch you and take it out on everyone,” someone else grunted.

The slacker tossed a quick sneer over his shoulder to his new critic. “You guys are idiots,” he said. “This is all just a mind game.”

Tanner wanted to yell something out, but that was only more likely to draw attention. He couldn’t stop glancing at the slacking recruit as he continued doing burpees. He saw a couple of others also stop.

“Shit,” the slacker shrugged. “Hey,
Matuskey! Keep lookout on the hallway!”

“What?” huffed a short, stocky man close to the door, behind Tanner.

“Shut up!” Tanner warned.

“Man, fuck you,” the slacker scowled, waving Tanner off. “
Matuskey, keep watch! You don’t have to keep jumping!”

“
Matuskey, don’t listen to him!” Tanner hissed. He caught the slacker’s eye as he jumped up and then squatted down again. The slacker glared at him intently, but Tanner went back to paying attention to what he was doing.

“
Matuskey!” the slacker whispered. “Come on!”

Matuskey
thought about it, caught the eye of a couple of other recruits—all of them still doing the exercise—and shook his head before dropping into another push-up.

The slacker growled in frustration. Then his eyes suddenly went wide and he got back to business with the rest of the company, but it was far too late. Gunnery Sergeant Janeka was already halfway across the squad bay, having appeared from out of nowhere. “Stand up! You stand up, slick! What is your name
?”

His nametag clearly read “Eickenberry,” but Janeka ignored it.
“Eicken—um,” the slacker stammered.

“Ein-what?  Einstein? Are you Albert Einstein? You must be, if you’re smarter than everyone else! Are you done here, Einstein? Did you get done before everyone else? You must have, ‘cause everyone else is still moving and yet you’re done! You must have known that I was coming in to call everyone to a halt before I even thought of it! That’s some genius thinking you’ve done there!”

“Einstein” said nothing, remaining at attention and failing miserably at staring straight ahead.

“Everyone here i
s still working, Einstein,” she shouted. “But not you. You’re all set, right? Are you all done? Ready to go hit the showers?”

“Yes, Sergeant Janeka!” Einstein replied.

“That’s good. You just stand right there until everyone else is done.”  She walked to the back of the squad bay. “Not you guys! You retards aren’t done yet! Einstein’s the only one finished!”

The company carried on. There was no unity of movement, but at least the accidents diminished. Janeka fell silent and eventually headed for the door.

“Pff,” Einstein snorted quietly. “Suckers.”

On her way out,
Janeka slapped the emergency response panel next to the doorway. Jets of blue, freezing cold foam erupted from slots imbedded in the ceiling and floor.

Laughter erupted from several of the recruits who thought that this was some final punch line to the whole big joke of the introduction of their company commanders. Most, though, realized they hadn’t been told to stop. They pressed on despite the drastic change in their environment. Slips and falls abounded, yet it was only a minute or two—seemingly endless though those minutes were—before the
laughter died and everyone was back to business.

Everyone
except Einstein, who found the whole thing hilarious. As the foam jets exhausted their payloads, his giggles became easier for everyone to hear. “C’mon, hurry up and get done, guys,” he quipped, “I wanna go dry off.”

Burpees continued. So did the glares.

“Attention in the squad bay!” roared Everett’s voice from the doorway. Everyone, even Einstein, popped to attention. “Do we all understand now that we will obey orders?”

“Yes, Chief
Everett!” the company shouted back.

“Stow your gear in your backpacks and get down below and out on the deck outside,” he said. “You are responsible for all your gear. Leave nothing behind. You have ninety seconds to form up.”

Chaos followed. Many recruits had seen their belongings tossed aside by their new oppressors; others knew it had happened, but had no idea where their gear had landed. To make things worse, everything was now wet.

Tanner luckily found his gear close by. He snatched up toiletries, towels and underwear, frantically shoving it all in the backpack. Small stuff on the bottom, he thought quickly, since it wouldn’t take up much room and he could just shove the bigger uniform items in after it.

Then he realized how much water his dress uniform had taken on. It simply wouldn’t fit in with his vac suits, socks, underwear and towels. He glanced around, looking hurriedly for someone with a good idea he could copy, but found that either nobody else had the same problem or they had already resolved it. “How do we—?” he asked the recruit to his left, who promptly ran his fingers over the static seals of his bag and rushed away. Tanner turned to his right, wanting to ask the same thing, but found himself alone.

He tried again. His bag simply wouldn’t seal. There was too much stuff and no time to wring it out. “Fuck it,” he fumed. Tanner yanked the towels free, unzipped his
vac suit and stuffed the freezing cold cloths inside.

Tanner was among the last out. Someone roughly shoved past him along the way, sending him stumbling to the floor under the weight of his backpack just before he got to the stairs.

“Dammit,” Tanner grunted. He got to his hands and knees, wincing from the pain in his left elbow, and then quickly found himself scooped up off the floor by a pair of recruits. Their nametags, Tanner noted, read “Ravenell” and “Gomez.”

“Thanks,” Tanner huffed.

“In this together,” shrugged the tall, dark-skinned recruit on his left. Gomez was already headed down the stairs; Ravenell stayed long enough to give Tanner a tug in the right direction. “Just keep moving. You okay?”

Tanner wanted to make some quip about the relativity of a concept like “okay” in a place like this, but he was far too out of breath to be funny.

***

If the antique liquid fire suppression system in Squad Bay Zero was an unpleasant surprise to Oscar Company, their arrival at their new living facility was much worse.

The company failed to muster in time for Everett’s deadline. Ten more agonizing minutes of soaking wet burpees on rough pavement followed before they were instructed to form up again. The company found it difficult to form up into columns despite having learned to do so on its first day. They found it even more difficult to manage the punitive calisthenics that resulted from their failures. Along the way several over-stuffed backpacks exploded and had to be cleaned up while other recruits performed push-ups and ran in place so as to not waste the Navy’s time. Everett demanded further torturous calisthenics under the premise of educating the company of the differences between left, right, forward, back, up and down.

Squad Bay Oscar turned out to be an ancient underground emergency shelter well apart from the main buildings of the base itself. A grassy, overgrown hill with plenty of trees covered most of the structure. The exposed walls were all titanium-alloy and reinforced concrete, with large, heavy doors
built to withstand heavy weapons.

“The government of Archangel has seen fit to expand our militia’s numbers, starting with increased recruiting incentives and reservist training immediately,” Chief
Everett announced to the assembled company outside their new home. “I’m sure more than a few of you probably missed out on what will be some good deals for those who will soon follow you. Tragic, I know. On the other hand, you will benefit from sharply increased recruit training standards and curriculum. For one thing, you’ll all be pleased to know that we’ll all be together for twice as long as the ordinary basic training sequence.”