Poor Man's Fight (20 page)

“That’s not for you to worry about,
recruit.” She spoke without anger or derision. Either she didn’t want to get sidetracked or the Archangel Navy’s medical capabilities were some great big secret. “You did better than I expected yesterday.”

“I did?”

“I’m not here to blow sunshine up your ass,” Janeka frowned. “This isn’t praise. Now I know you haven’t been giving it your all. I don’t tolerate sandbaggers.”

“I’m not a sandbagger, sergeant,” Tanner protested quietly.

“Then what the fuck have you been doing all this time?” Her voice was controlled. Clearly, the gunny had a very broad range of tones, volumes and expressions with which to communicate her endless disapproval.

Tanner hesitated.
For the first time, Janeka didn’t admonish him for failing to answer promptly. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, sergeant.”

“You plan on hugg
ing the enemy into submission?”

“No, sergeant, I just...they’re not the enemy,” Tanner shrugged with his uninjured shoulder. “The enemy isn’t in the company. You’re not the enemy, either.”

“Not until yesterday?”

“Not until you were beating me up, no,” Tanner admitted.

The sergeant stepped closer. She called up a display on her wrist computer, projected it, then turned it around for Tanner. “I thought you might need to see this.”

It was a flat projection, showing only one camera angle of Janeka and Tanner facing off. He saw himself block her snap kick, then take the cartilage-crunching blow to his nose, then more shots as he was left reeling. He saw himself surge back with the first punch he ever landed on Janeka, knocking her away. The screen froze.

“What did you do there?” Janeka asked.

“Right cross,” he said.

“A
perfect
right cross, Malone,” Janeka corrected. “Perfect form, especially right in the middle of a fight when nothing’s perfect or rehearsed. Excellent extension, good follow-through. Were you even thinking about that?”

“I just wanted to hit you,” Tanner half-shrugged again. It was an odd thing to say, but once more, Tanner remembered that Janeka didn’t care for pleasantries or tactful eloquence. She demanded
straight talk.

“Your training took over,” she said. “You were stressed. Maybe frightened, maybe not, but you knew you had to act, and so you acted as you were trained.

“That’s the point to all this, Malone. You need to learn to
fight
. With your hands, with your equipment, whatever.
Things will go wrong
out there
. You will be scared and tired and hurt and things will go wrong, and you need to be ready to fight in spite of all that. We aren’t putting you through all this hand-to-hand combat because we expect you to get into fistfights. It’s not about throwing punches and kicks. It’s about facing pain and adversity and fear without giving up. You did that. You could’ve done it better.

“If you’d been trained to handle real stress by your school or your parents, you wouldn’t have crashed the Test, and you wouldn’t be here now, would you?” she asked.

Tanner looked up at her, searching for a dig or an insult but couldn’t read her poker face. “Chief Everett told you about that?”

“We share the same brain,” Janeka said. “Didn’t you know?”

The recruit grunted. It was, in fact, something that the company generally suspected. The only topic of debate was whether their brains were unified by some cybernetic relay or if they had a telepathic link.

“You’d never been in a fight before yesterday, have you, Malone?”

“No, sergeant.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve usually been able to think my way out of trouble, sergeant.”

“That’s good, but you need to move beyond that now
. You’re in a uniform. It’s a dangerous world out there. You can think or talk your way out of a fight when you’re dealing with someone else who also has functioning brain, but there are an awful lot of people out there who don’t. Or they’re following the orders of people who don’t. That uniform means that if there’s gotta be a fight, you want it to come to you and not to someone else. You ready for that, recruit?”

“Yes, sergeant,” Tanner nodded quietly.

“I don’t think you are,” Janeka said. He found himself staring into her eyes again. “I think you’ve got the guts, but you’ve got to start taking all this more seriously. You’ve got to start doing all this for real.”

“I am, sergeant.”

“You’re not.” She let it hang there for a moment before she said, “My first fleet duty was on the
Resolute
. We picked up a distress call from a freighter getting attacked by pirates halfway out to hell and gone from Augustine. All we found were bodies floating in the void. We found one guy alive, an engineer who’d been lucky enough to have his vac suit on and was able to slip away, and he had his holocom recording the whole time.

“His ship had some guns and they tried to resist, but in the end the captain decided he couldn’t fend ‘em off and so he surrendered. They spaced the whole crew.
Thirteen passengers, too. Civilians. We picked up thirty-seven bodies, and not all of ‘em died from being spaced, and not all of ‘em died quick. Thirty-seven bodies and one bloody teddy bear.”

She
stared at him to make sure it sank in. “Malone, you get in a fight, you gotta do it for real and give it everything you’ve got, and I don’t care if it’s dirty and I don’t care if it’s ugly. There’s no such thing as a fair fight. You fight for real and you fight to win and the hell with anything else, because
you do not know what’s gonna happen if you lose
.”

She fell silent. “Aye, aye, sergeant,” Tanner said.

Janeka nodded, then called something else up on the display. He saw the two of them tangle, followed by their synchronized headbutt. “What were you trying to do there?” she asked.

“I thought...
I thought you were keeping your distance from me,” Tanner said, “and that maybe getting in close would put you at a disadvantage. Maybe you weren’t as good at it.”

“How’d that work out for you?”

“Not so good.”

“No. I am trained at grappling and fighting close,” Janeka explained, “and I’m stronger than you. That wouldn’t have worked out for you at all.
It’s only dumb luck that it didn’t turn out worse than this. But you were thinking, Malone. For one little moment in all of that, you were thinking.

“Untrained, inexperienced people are all rage and panic when they fight. You get someone trained up, they can think while they fight. That’s where we’ve got to take you, Malone. You and everyone else in the company, and they can’t get there if you give them the bullshit half-assed matches you’ve been putting on so far. You got me?”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“I hope so,” Janeka said. “You’ve got a lot of heart, but you don’t have a lot of mean in you. You better find a way to build some up real quick, or you don’t belong in a uniform fighting for anybody.”

Tanner swallowed. “Yes, sergeant.”

Janeka nodded. She pulled the silver rod that was his yeoman’s computer from one pocket and handed it to him. “Catch up on your files. Do something useful with your time while you get fixed,” she said. The sergeant turned to leave, then turned back. “One more thing.” She pointed to her bruised eye. “Do you know what this is, recruit?”

“It’s a black eye, sergeant,” Tanner answered. He had a sudden, somewhat disappointing realization. “That’s not something I gave you, is it, sergeant?”

“No. This came from Recruit Wong about two minutes after you were carried out of my squad bay. She requested a match right then and there.” Janeka stared, almost daring Tanner to laugh, but he did not.

“Did she win, sergeant?”

“No. She did a whole lot better than you did and her ass isn’t in the infirmary like yours is, but that isn’t my point. Recruit,
if I find out about anything going on between you and Wong at all—you lay a finger on her outside of a sparring match, you so much as draw a smiley face on something that she’s meant to see—I will personally beat both of you beyond the ability of modern medicine to correct, do you understand me?”

Tanner’s eyes were wide. “Yes, sergeant.”

“Do whatever you want come graduation, but until then there will be no fraternization in my company.”

His initial appraisal of her had been correct all along. Janeka was insane. “Yes, sergeant.”

“I’ll send the doctor back in,” Janeka said with a masterful scowl before she left. “Can’t be healthy for your face to be that red.”

***

“Malone,” Everett called out from his office, “you all caught up on performance scores for this week?”

“Yes, Chief,” Tanner replied. He sat at a small table just outside the company command office with several screens displayed in the air around him. Most of his work could be done in the squad bay, but some matters had to be kept confidential. He glanced at the screen showing the individual performance scores of each member of the company just as
Everett logged in and shifted its organization from an alphabetical sort to a top-down sort by scores.

Alicia Wong was at the top of the list, but that was no surprise. He turned away
without reading the others. Tanner busied himself with double-checking payroll routing instructions against individual recruit requests. Everyone’s entire first pay deposit had gone toward covering personal uniform and supply costs; only now would anyone get money they could call their own. Tanner didn’t want to screw anything up.

“Malone,”
Everett called again. Nothing followed.

Closing his eyes as he accepted the inevitable, Tanner killed the screens, stood and came to attention in the doorway to the office.

The chief sat at his desk behind a pair of data screens. “Go get Kalodner, Michaels, Waikowski and Palmotti. Have ‘em form up in front of my office and knock when they’re set.”

“Aye, aye, chief,” Tanner said with all the energy he could muster—which wasn’t much. He knew what was coming. He did a left-face, stepped out of the doorway again and headed into the squad bay.

Oscar Company’s weekly field day of the squad bay looked nearly complete as he walked in. Tanner was occasionally pulled out to handle clerical chores as the company yeoman. At the moment, though, he wished he could just scrub or mop with everyone else. Tasks like this one left him feeling far apart from the rest of the company.

He found Gunnery Sergeant Janeka standing over a pair of recruits as they performed push-ups for whatever screw-up she must have discovered. “Sergeant Janeka,” Tanner said, coming to attention beside her. “By your leave, I have instructions to direct four from the company to the command office.”

“Go ahead, yeoman,” Janeka said without looking at him.

Tanner turned away to find the squad bay unsettlingly quiet. He swallowed hard before he called out, “Kalodner, Michaels, Waikowski, Palmotti. Fall in outside the command office.”

Heads turned. Palmotti was the only woman among those called; she and the others headed for the door. Several of their fellow recruits offered quick handshakes or pats on the back as they passed.

“Oscar Company!” Janeka called out. “Secure from cleaning detail. Configure the squad bay for unarmed combat training.”

Tanner took a deep breath as he marched out of the squad bay, not wanting to look at anyone as he passed. He told himself that this was all out of his hands, yet he felt responsible anyway simply for having been the messenger.

Outside
Everett’s office, Tanner waited for the four recruits to silently form up. Kalodner had to be reminded about where he was supposed to stand. It was, ultimately, the sort of thing that got him called out in the first place.

Tanner slapped the side of the doorway to the command office. “Recruits assembled as ordered, chief.”

“Carry on, yeoman,” Everett said as he rose from his seat. Tanner winced as he turned away. Had he been dismissed, he could’ve returned to the squad bay. Instead, he had to sit through this. He returned to his small chair just outside the office, pulling up his data screens once more.

Somehow the familiar click of
Everett’s heels had lost none of its intimidation value since the first time the company heard the sound. Everett emerged from his office to stand in front of the recruits.

“I have reviewed the current performance scores for the company,”
Everett explained calmly. “As you may have suspected, the four of you have not met with the minimum standards to move on with your training. I am therefore reverting you to a junior company further back in the training schedule. Your files have been forwarded to the commander of Papa Company. His company yeoman is on the way here to direct you to Squad Bay Papa.

“
This is not personal. Recruit Palmotti, Recruit Michaels, I have informed your new company commander of your effort. It is clear to Sergeant Janeka and I that you have not slacked off in your training.

“The four of you will collect your gear and return here immediately. Dismissed.”