Picking Up the Pieces

Chapter Four

“There are a lot of them,” Peter observed, as we watched the queue. We’d barely opened the recruiting office and hundreds of volunteers had arrived. There were so many that I was starting to suspect someone had prepared it in advance. “We’re not going to be able to train all of them at once, boss.”

I nodded. We’d set up three offices in New Copenhagen and if all of them were as busy as the main office, we’d have thousands of recruits. The clerks were working overtime to register them all, fingerprint them and give them a date for presenting themselves at the bus terminal. We could have asked them to make their own way to the spaceport, and the training grounds we’d prepared near it, but I figured that it would be easier to bus them in. Besides, it would cut down on the number of scenes outside the spaceport.

“There’s hundreds of them,” Suki said, astonished. I’d brought her along as native guide… and also because I didn’t want to leave her alone at the spaceport, not yet. “How many are you going to take?”

“As many as we can,” I said. “We’ll start with a couple of hundred, more or less, and move on from there. The ones we select to start training today will be the first class, but once we get up to speed we’ll be training thousands of them at a time. The UN used to train far more at any one time, but they had hundreds of training facilities. We have one.”

We walked over to one of the clerks and listened as she collected information from the recruit in front of her. He was a young man in his late teens, his face marked with the traces of acne, and he looked nervous as he recited his address, education details and resistance credentials. We’d hung a large sign threatening dire punishment to anyone who lied to his or her recruiting officer, but it was amazing how many people had joined the resistance when the UN pulled out. The prospective recruit looked uneasy when she finally took his fingerprints — the planet had nothing like a full database of its citizens — and I guessed that he had a criminal record of some kind. I didn’t care, as long as it wasn’t rape or murder. The military machine would grind mild criminal tendencies out of him.

“Report to the bus terminal in a week,” she said, finally. The recruit nodded, stood up and turned to leave. “If you don’t show then, don’t bother showing at all.”

Suki gave me an enquiring look. “Everyone has second thoughts when they join the army,” I explained, softly. “We try to give them a chance to rethink their decision, if we have time. If they don’t show up when they’re called, we won’t bother to worry about it; we’ll just note that they won’t be accepted again, should they try to apply at a later date. After they get to the training base and take the oath, things get a hell of a lot more serious.”

We walked back outside and into the middle of what seemed like a riot. A crowd of young men and women, mainly women, were protesting our presence, shouting slogans that had been old when the human race had been young. Some were personally insulting, while others were merely amusing, or silly. MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR was a popular one, even though it was perfectly possible to do both. Others attacked the President, or the Council, or even the Mountain Men, blaming them for the unwelcome presence of foreign mercenaries. I rolled my eyes, relaxing slightly as I realised that the police had the entire scene under their watchful eye, but I felt a prickling in the back of my neck as we walked over to the groundcar. Someone out there didn’t like us.

“They’re Communists,” Suki said, when I asked her. “They’re mainly students from the university who think that they’re going to be drafted into a planetary army or some such nonsense. That’s not going to happen, is it?”

“I doubt it,” I said, although it was possible that the Government might start a draft later. I don’t like using conscripts myself and few professional militaries disagree with me, although some worlds do make military training mandatory. I’d prefer to have the Drill Sergeants kicking the shit out of someone who volunteered to be there. “In any case, what happens after we’re finished and leave is none of our business, is it?”

We watched the protesters for a few more minutes, but nothing much happened. They were a surprisingly well-ordered group of protesters; I’d been in protest marches that turned to riots on command, attacking people the UN had Officially Classified as Evil. I decided that they’d probably been carefully primed; they weren’t even hassling the recruits. That happened on Earth and several other worlds, but not here.

“Interesting,” Peter agreed, when I pointed it out to him. “This is a smaller place than Earth. It could be that they know their fellow youths…”

“Could be,” I agreed. I checked my watch and smiled. “We’ve just got time for lunch and then we’ll have to be back at the spaceport for the induction.”

“Of course,” Suki agreed. “I know just where to take you, too.”

I’d been curious what kind of local food Svergie produced and it was a pleasant surprise. Some of the lunch was cold meat, barely touched with herbs or spices, while other dishes were hot and spicy, a legacy of the Indonesian girls. There didn’t seem to be any prohibition against pork and I ate several small spicy sausages without demur. The combination was interesting, I decided finally, after a dish of spicy chicken and noodles. There were definitely some benefits to the UN’s policy of mixing the races.

We felt stuffed afterwards so I allowed Suki to go on ahead while Peter and I jogged in to the spaceport. I enjoyed the run more than I should, but it was a relief to be somewhere that there was no danger of a hidden sniper, or a sandstorm that would literally strip the flesh from your bones. I felt surprisingly better after we passed through the gates — this time, there was a local policeman to add to the guards from A Company, eyeing their weapons warily — and double-timed it over to the training ground. The first bunch of recruits were already spilling out of the buses, looking lost and alone. That was good. We’d give them a new family here; fathers in the drill instructors, brothers and sisters in their fellow soldiers.

“It brings back memories,” I muttered to Peter, remembering my first day on the drill field. The boys and girls facing the drill sergeants were luckier than I’d been, although they probably wouldn’t see it that way. They were going to be taught by people who knew what they were doing. My trainers couldn’t have found their butts with both hands. “I wonder if they’ll break and run…”

The sergeants were imposing order by the simple expedient of shouting orders at volume and pushing recruits into some semblance of a straight line. It would probably have made some of them cry if the recruits did it like that later, but for the moment it was barely acceptable. I studied them with interest and was pleased to see that most of them didn’t look too scared. There’s no point in pointlessly torturing recruits, even though most of them are dumber than rocks. They need to learn that the torments have a point.

“ATTENTION,” Russell bellowed. His roar could probably be heard for miles. “I am Master Sergeant Russell Kelsey, your training supervisor. You will address me as ‘Sergeant.’ You will not call me ‘sir!’ I actually work for a living.”

He glared at the recruits, measuring them. “You are the sorriest bunch of recruits I have yet seen on this planet,” he said. It was perfectly true, although it was also true that they were the best bunch of receipts he had seen. “You are in this course for one purpose; you are here to become soldiers, the first real soldiers your planet has yet seen. In twelve weeks, we will break you down and build you up again into soldiers. Don’t bother crying to your mommy or whining about your pappy; they’re not here and they can’t help you. You volunteered for this.”

His eyes swept across their ranks. “You are under military discipline now,” he thundered. “You can be punished under the Code of Military Justice” — we’d borrowed Heinlein’s code with a few additions and modifications — “and if necessary sentenced to death by field court-martial. There is no point in whining about lawyers and due process. You’re in the army now. In order that you know what you should not do, we will list the offences against military order every day. You will learn them off by heart. You will not commit them. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” they shouted, a ragged chorus of words.

“What did I tell you about calling me sir?” Russell demanded. “All of you; drop and give me twenty push-ups, now!”

I watched as they struggled through them and finally stumbled back into line. None of them looked cocky now and a few looked downright scared. That was good too; hopefully, they wouldn’t try to push Russell too far. I didn’t want to have to condemn any of them for striking a superior officer. That carried the death sentence under martial law.

“Now,” Russell said, once they’d finished. “Offences against military order, listed as follows; Insubordination, use of drugs, tobacco and alcohol, possession and/or consumption of food outside designated eating periods, possession of any contraband, failure to perform duties as assigned to you by lawful authority, being absent without leave and, last, but not least, fraternisation. To repeat; any of those offences will get you a punishment that may range from heavy exercise to being summarily discharged from the army. You will have those offences read to you every day, along with the definition of each offence. You will have no excuse for committing any of them!”

He paused long enough to size them up. “Many of you will have brought drugs, or alcohol, or even food onto this base,” he said, coldly. “When you are taken to be assigned your uniform and regulation-issue underclothes, get rid of them. This is your one warning. You may think that the police wouldn’t charge you with a crime if you are in possession of illegal drugs, but this is the army. If I catch any of you possessing or using drugs on this base, that person will wish that he had never been born!”

“Each class of recruits needs to be shocked out of their complacency,” I muttered to Suki, who had been watching the proceedings with a faintly stunned look on her face. “They also need to know exactly what they cannot do under any circumstances. Back on Earth, the recruits often had to be searched and drugs and shit still got into the bases. Here, we get a little more control.”

Russell was still thundering at his cowed audience. “Insubordination; wilfully disobeying, insulting, or striking a senior officer. Absent without leave; leaving the base or your unit without permission, or failing to report back to your unit at the end of a leave period without permission. Fraternisation; sexual relationships with any of your fellow recruits, or senior officers, or anyone within your military unit. The remainder should require no explaining. If they do, you’re in the wrong line of work.”

His gaze swept across them again. “That building there holds the medical personnel and the outfitters,” he said. “Form a line and march into the building, two by two!”

I pulled Suki away as, behind us, the recruits started to realise that they were going to get a haircut. They’d all have their hair trimmed right back to their bones when the barbers were finished with them, leaving them all looking like proper military cadets rather than louts we’d pulled off the streets. The medical staff would check each and every one of them afterwards and confirm that they were fit for duty. If they weren’t… well, if they were lucky, they wouldn’t have had their haircut by then.

“You’re not going to have them killed, are you?” Suki asked. “Not for…”

“It depends,” I said, vaguely. “Military discipline has to be maintained in the harshest of conditions. Just you wait until they get to the spit test.” She lifted an eyebrow. “The recruits will line up and spit into each others’ faces. The ones who learn not to flinch will pass.”

“I didn’t want to know that,” Suki said. “Why are you so down on… fraternisation?”

“The UN used to allow couples to form among military personnel,” I explained, more openly. “When those units were attacked, they ended up breaking up as the lovers tried to protect each other at the expense of the rest of the unit. They also had problems with jealousy and sexual rivalries that tore unit cohesion apart. There are some planets that bar women from combat altogether, but I’ve always preferred to have a strict law that forbids fraternisation within the ranks.

“I’m sure that those boys and girls will have lovers on the outside and I can’t stop that,” I added. “I wouldn’t even if I could. I can stop them from having sex within the unit and I won’t hesitate to bust someone out of the force for doing it.” I smiled at the vague pun. “It doesn’t matter who, or why. I drew the line and if anyone crosses it, they’re out.”

We reached a massive building, guarded by a pair of soldiers from B Company, who checked our IDs before allowing us to enter. The UN Supply Deport was large enough to take several starships — or so I thought — and utterly packed with supplies. I couldn’t understand how it had remained untouched until I remembered the Fleet garrison, who had kept it in trust for the planetary government. The circumstances of the pull-back hadn’t allowed for the return of all the supplies.

Muna emerged from one of the stacks and waved at us. Her dark face was lit with a sly smile. “You won’t believe how much stuff they abandoned here,” she said, cheerfully. I hadn’t seen her in such a good mood for years, but I suppose that being drenched in enough supplies to make her job easier would please even Muna. “We could operate several divisions on this and never notice the loss.”

I stepped further into the building and wondered if she might be right. There were spare parts for every vehicle in the UN’s inventory and enough weapons to outfit several fighting units. I passed a stack of machine guns and paused to examine a set of assault rifles, before studying a pile of gold coins and various stacks of currency. I couldn’t imagine why the UN General in command of the base had thought he’d need currency from a dozen different worlds. Perhaps it was the bribes he’d accepted — I never met a UN General who wasn’t corrupt — or maybe he’d planned to retire one day. It didn’t matter anyway. We would put the money to good use.

“There are several billion rounds of ammunition here and in the other bunkers,” Muna informed me, seriously. I could believe it. The UN sent out thousands upon thousands of boxes of ammunition, but there was so much paperwork involved with using it — every round had to be accounted for — that training sergeants tended to avoid using ammunition. Heinlein had taught us how foolish that was, but it had come too late. Earth’s civil war was still raging away back on the mother planet. “If the other supply bases have this much…”

I followed her logic. “The Mountain Men have enough to fight and win a civil war,” I concluded. It wasn’t a reassuring thought. The UN’s records of what had actually been in those supply bases were incomplete. They could have much more, or much less. “Have you established a distribution network yet?”

Muna nodded. “I can have it sent anywhere, sir,” she said. “Where do you want it?”

“Make as much as the trainers need available to them,” I ordered, shortly. We were not going to repeat the UN’s error and train our people on simulations only. They’d all have a chance to fire weapons before war broke out. “Get the Company Commanders to go through the listings and see what they want before we come to any other decisions. If we can equip a tank regiment… well, why not?”

“I could give you two reasons,” Muna said. “Would tanks actually do us any good?”

“Maybe,” I said. If we ended up fighting a war, Landshark and Goliath tanks might be very useful. “And the other reason?”

“This planet is very short on fuel,” Muna said. “A petroleum-based industry exists, but it’s very limited. Unless we find a source of crude oil, we’re going to be permanently hamstrung if we become dependent on the vehicles.”

“Oh joy,” I said. It was honestly something I hadn’t thought about, but the UN had a long history of limiting the use of oil-drilling equipment on the Colonies, in the name of protecting the environment. Other worlds used hydrogen-powered vehicles and never felt the lack. “Get in touch with the local oil concerns and see if you can find us enough, all right? The last thing we need is to be permanently short of fuel.”