Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 5

My battle armor is scuffed and beaten to hell, but I love it anyway. I love the rifle in my hands, too, more than a sane individual should love a mere object. Together, the rifle and the armor turn me into something different, something more advanced than the sum of myself and the technology in which I am wrapped.

We’re in our seventh week of training, and squad-level combat training is the first thing I’ve done in the military that I wouldn’t mind doing every day. We have spent the last few weeks getting to know our rifles and our gear, and learning the basics of infantry combat: moving as squads and fire teams, assault, defense, the basic steps in the dance that is modern integrated ground warfare.

The first time we practiced squad movements with the help of the integrated tactical network, I felt like I’ve been myopic all my life without knowing it, and somebody finally slipped a set of prescription glasses in front of my eyes. The helmet has more computing power built into it than all the computers in my old high school classroom put together. On the inside of the eye shield, there’s a sort of monocle over the left eye, and that’s the truly magical part of the suit. It’s the holographic projector linked to the suit’s tactical computer. The computer analyzes everything I see, overlays my field of vision with tactical symbols over every friend or foe in the vicinity, and then transmits the data to the rest of the squad. Whatever I see, the rest of my squad can see as their computers integrate the feed coming in from mine. If one of us spots a new threat, their tactical computer automatically sends the new data to the other squad computers through the encrypted wireless network, and the entire squad is aware of the threat within a few milliseconds. We’ve only been taught the use of the system two weeks ago, but I am already so used to the information feed that I feel blind and dumb when I am out of the battle armor.

The rifle is linked to the computer as well. It doesn’t aim or sight itself, but it does everything else automatically. Whenever I aim the rifle at a target, the computer selects the right burst length and cadence for the threat. My rifle doesn’t spit out any actual flechettes, but there’s a hydraulic feedback system built into the butt end that simulates the recoil of live firing. To make the illusion complete, there’s a sound module that gives off a report.

Advancing with a squad and engaging other squads on the mock battlefields of the training facility is a strangely intoxicating experience. We’re training for war, and I know that the enemy out in the real world is going to shoot high-density flechettes and explosives at me instead of harmless beams, but so far, it all feels like a very exciting sort of sporting competition. The squads square up against each other in training, and we win or lose matches, just like in high school. There’s even the customary locker room bragging in the showers after the training rounds, with gloating winners and sulking losers. Nobody dies, or gets hurt, except for a few bruises here and there. The battle armor gives off a bit of a zap when you’re “hit” by enemy fire, but it’s not really painful, just unpleasant, like brushing your hand against a stripped low-voltage wire.

We’re just past the halfway point of Basic, and there are twenty-seven of us left. We have lost thirteen recruits in six and a half weeks. In the first week, it was just the linebacker who decided to quit in the middle of our first run, but since then, the pace of washouts has accelerated. Nine have left voluntarily, and the other four were ejected by our drill instructors for failure to follow orders, or failure to meet standards. Our mess table has lost one member—Cunningham, the girl with the tattoos and the buzzcut. She made it to the third week, and then decided that she’d had enough of Sergeant Riley singling her out for extra sessions on the quarterdeck. One evening in Week Three, she just tossed her PDP onto her bunk, and walked out of the platoon bay. We went off to a class on chemical warfare, and when we returned to get ready for dinner, her bunk was stripped, and her locker emptied out. They never empty a recruit’s locker when the platoon is present, but they never wait around, either.

We’re in the Urban Warfare Training Facility, a mock-up of a generic East Asian city block. It’s situated in the brushy desert on the outskirts of the base, and getting there is a training exercise in itself. We’re on Day Three of our Urban Warfare exercise, and every day, we’ve been ready and in full battle gear by 0530 in the morning. Every day, we’ve marched the twenty miles through the desert to the UWTF, encumbered with battle armor, rifles, fully stuffed backpacks, and three-gallon hydration bladders. The march to the UWTF takes two and a half hours at Sergeant Fallon’s pace, which is a march that’s somewhere between a fast walk and a slow trot.

Our platoon is down to three squads of nine now. Every time we lose recruits, they shuffle the squads around to keep each squad at roughly the same headcount, and now we’re too few to fill out a full platoon of four squads. On this exercise, I am the leader of my fire team of four recruits, and my squad leader is Ricci. We’re one of the two attacking squads, and the defending squad is positioned in defensive spots up ahead in the “city”. The squad leader of the defending squad is Halley, my bunk mate.

Ricci makes a lousy squad leader. Twice now, our squad has been chewed up by the defending squad, and twice, the instructors have reset the exercise and ordered us to do it again. Ricci does not deviate from his plan, which involves leapfrogging from doorway to doorway on the main road. Ricci doesn’t want to play infantry, and it shows. He’s aggressive where he should be cautious, and timid where he should charge ahead. We’ve wasted two hours on the setup and execution of his attack plan, only to get shot to bits by Halley’s squad repeatedly, and I have no idea why the instructors aren’t letting someone else drive the bus for a change.

“You need to get your team across the road faster,” Ricci says as we come through the same alleyway for the third time, our squad taking up covering positions at the intersection with the main road. The illusion is almost perfect—there’s trash everywhere, the walls are adorned with foreign graffiti and flecked with all kinds of bodily fluids, and there’s warbly Chinese pop music coming from shops along the road. I’ve never been to the Far East, but the fake city looks just like the places I’ve seen in the news and war movies. The only thing missing is the population.

“It doesn’t matter how fast we move,” I tell Ricci. There’s a modestly tall building overlooking the intersection at the end of the road, a hundred yards ahead, and the defending squad has at least a fireteam in place up there. “You’re having us charge a defended position, and they know we’re coming. You can’t outrun a freaking flechette.”

“Well, General Know-It-All, do you have a better idea?”

I bring up the tactical display on my monocle and study the overhead map of the block.

“Let’s split the squad, and go up those two side alleys, one team per side. When we’re at the intersection, we pop smoke and then rush over from two sides. We can’t go around the building because they’ll shoot us in the ass from above if we do.”

“Popping smoke, you might as well yell, ‘Here we come’,” Ricci says.

“We don’t make our own cover, we get shot to shit again. Your call, boss.” I put just a little bit of acid into the last word, and Ricci flips me the bird.

“Two teams, then,” he says. “I’ll take mine up to the right, and you go left. You go ahead and pop smoke if you want. I’ll use the diversion while you guys get fucked up.”

“We’ll see. At least we won’t all get killed together in the middle of the intersection like the last two times.”

Being on the attack is a crappy task. The defenders know you’re coming, and you have to put yourself out into the open to come to where they are. You do, however, have the initiative.

We dash from house to house, using the cover of store awnings and doorways to mask our approach to the intersection. On my tactical display, I can see the other team making their way up the alley to our right.

We reach the intersection without any contact. I scan the top floor of the building across the intersection for movement, but the defending squad has it together. I know they have at least a fireteam in that building—it’s a natural chokepoint, and we can’t go around it without exposing ourselves—but they are playing a good game of hide-and-seek.

I toggle the squad channel.

“Fire team Bravo, in position. Ready when you are.”

“Go on three,” Ricci says, and I pull a smoke grenade from the harness on the front of my battle armor.

“Wait for smoke,” I say, but Ricci is already counting down.

“One…two…”

I let out a curse, pop the safety cap of the smoke grenade, and hurl it into the intersection.

“…three!”

On my tactical display, I can see that Ricci’s entire fire team has left cover. Then I hear the rasping of their rifles as they fire automatic bursts from the hip while running.

“Dumb fuck,” I say, and give my team the signal to rush. The smoke grenade goes off with a muffled “pop”, and there’s an instant cloud of thick, chemical smoke over our side of the intersection.

“Go, go, go!”

We rush into the smoke, towards the building. It’s only about fifty yards away, but that’s an incredibly long distance when you know there are people with rifles and grenade launchers trying to keep you from reaching the finish line.

The training rifles emit no muzzle flashes, but I can hear the staccato of automatic fire coming from the building, on both sides of our advance. It looks like Halley has most of her squad in that building in anticipation of our dumb leader’s third attempt at an offense. The tactical computers score individual kills, and so far, our squad has chalked up a big, fat zero.

Over to our right, where Ricci’s team is rushing across the intersection, I can hear cursing as the first recruits are hit by the virtual projectiles from the guns of Halley’s squad. I rush through the cloud of artificial fog, listening to the chatter of at least two rifles from the part of the building in front of me, and my stomach turns in anticipation of that little electric jolt that signals a hit. When a recruit gets nailed by a virtual round, the tactical computer will assess the location of the hit, and disable things based on the severity of the simulated injury. If you take a lethal hit, the computer turns off your comlink and tactical interface, so you won’t be able to communicate or share data with the rest of your squad. It also turns off your rifle, so you can’t cheat and fire back while you’re dead.

Luckily, the defenders facing my fire team are merely firing blindly into the smoke, hoping to score hits by accident. My team makes it through the smoke and across the intersection.

When we’re all lined up on the side wall of the building, I check my tactical display for Ricci’s half of the squad. Their symbols are blinking red, meaning there’s no status information coming from their transmitters. I toggle the squad channel again, but I already know it’s pointless.

“Squad leader, Bravo. You guys across?”

There’s no response on the squad channel—they’ve all been mowed down by Halley’s defending teams, and their computers have turned off their network links.

“Well, looks like we’re on our own on this one,” I tell my team members.

“Beats the hell out of being dead again,” one of them says, and the others nod in agreement.

“Game’s not over yet,” I say.

There’s a doorway on the side of the building. I signal my team to take up positions on either side. Halley has her shit together, so I don’t want to just rush the team into the building. I take a grenade out of the harness on the front of my battle armor, and pop the safety cap off with my thumb.

“Ready?” I ask, and get three nods in response.

I activate the timer of the grenade by slapping the fuse button against the hard shell of my breastplate.

“Frag out!”

I toss the grenade into the doorway, aiming for the wall beyond the doorframe for a deflection shot into the hallway beyond. The grenade bounces against the concrete, and skitters onto the floor out of sight.

“Fuck!” I hear, and there’s the sound of quick movement in the hallway, as someone hastily scampers out of the way of the little black sphere with the pebbled outer skin.

Then the sound module in the grenade goes off with a muffled bang. The exercise grenade emits a bloom of simulated projectiles, beams reaching out in every direction, deflecting off hard surfaces and behaving much like their lethal counterparts.

“Go!”

We dash into the hallway in two pairs, by the book. There’s nobody in the hallway beyond, but there is another doorway to our right, ten feet ahead. I see movement beyond, and rush up to the door, rifle at the ready. One of Halley’s troops is scrambling to his feet just beyond the doorway, and I raise the rifle and shoot two bursts into his back just as he tries to bring his rifle around. There’s another enemy in the room, still by the window, and he has his rifle trained on me. I know that he has beaten me to the punch, and I cringe in anticipation of the jolt that signals a hit, but when he pulls the trigger, his rifle remains silent. The recruit who paired up with me for the entry steps into the doorway, aims his rifle, and we both fire a burst into the second defender.

“Clear,” I say into the helmet mike, and the other two members of my team come into the room, rifles at the ready.

“What the fuck?” the second one of Halley’s troops asks, looking at his rifle in consternation.

“Musta taken a hit from that grenade,” I say.

“That’s bullshit. I was already through the door when that thing went off in the hallway.”

“Computer says you’re dead, so you’re dead,” my team mate says. “No point arguing.”

“Stop the chatter,” I say. “There’s more rooms on this floor. Let’s get busy.”

Action beats reaction most of the time. We clear the floor in pairs, going room by room, sanitizing the rooms with grenades before going in and shooting everything wearing battle armor. We lose one of our teammates, who ends up getting tagged by a “wounded” enemy who tries playing possum, but at the end of the exercise, we have Halley’s squad smoked out, with an attacking squad at only half strength. The rooms don’t have any barriers to block the simulated shrapnel from the grenades we toss in, and Halley’s squad can’t find a counter against us quickly enough as we take them down pair by pair.

“Well done,” Sergeant Burke says over the platoon channel when we have cleared the last room. “Gather your junk and form up in front of the building. Platoon, execute.”

“What have we learned this morning?” Sergeant Burke asks us when we are gathered in front of the building for our exercise critique.

We’ve learned that Recruit Ricci sucks at infantry tactics, I think, but Sergeant Burke answers his own question before I can voice that thought.

“A strong position is your friend when you’re in the defense, but it can also be turned against you,” Sergeant Burke says. “The defending squad got a little too cocky on that third run. They were trapped in their own fighting positions because they didn’t secure the back door, and because they didn’t leave themselves a way out. The attacking squad kept the initiative and used the isolation between the defenders to take them down with local fire superiority. That means, Recruit Halley, that you had more guys in the defense, but that it didn’t matter because they were split up and dispersed too much. They were isolated and neutralized by the attackers in smaller chunks, which is exactly the way it’s supposed to work when you do it right. The fight was four against ten in favor of your squad, but Recruit Grayson’s team fought the whole thing with four against two in his favor. We call that a defeat in detail. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sir,” Halley says.

“Well done,” Sergeant Burke says in our direction, and my team stands up a little more straight. “If Recruit Ricci had managed to grow a brain and not get his team mopped up for the third time, it would have been no contest at all. Looks like some of you aren’t completely retarded, after all.”

Ricci looks at Sergeant Burke with an impassive face, but I know there’ll be some trash talk at the dinner table tonight.

“Halley, you play attackers now. Form up your squad and move out to the staging point,” Sergeant Burke orders. “Ricci, have your squad pick defensive positions. Let’s see how you do on the defense.”

We spend the day killing each other bloodlessly.

Being on the defense is easier and more difficult at the same time. We can prepare our fighting positions, make use of cover and concealment, but we also have to wait for the other team to begin the attack on their terms. We get wiped out once, and beat the opposing team back twice, getting our revenge for our earlier defeats at the hands of Halley’s squad. At the end of the day, the score is even. One of Halley’s fire team leaders takes first place on the individual kill board, with fourteen kills to his name. To my surprise, I come in second, despite our lack of kills in the first two rounds of the day. I scored killing shots on twelve of Halley’s troops.

“Looks like you’ve found something you don’t suck at, Grayson,” Sergeant Burke remarks when he reviews the kill list with the platoon. “Just don’t think you’re a natural killing machine now. This shit ain’t real combat, you know.”

“You like that stuff too much,” Halley says back in the platoon bay head as we shower off the sweat of the day. “You were having a good time out there.”

“Maybe,” I shrug, as I try not to be too obvious about studying her shapely backside as she turns to rinse the cleaning agent out of her hair.

“You don’t watch out, they’ll mark you for the Territorial Army,” Ricci says from across the head.

“Is that why you sucked so much today?” Halley asks, and a few of the other recruits laugh.

“What do you think?” Ricci replies with a grin. “You think I want to give them a reason to mark me down as ‘Good With A Rifle’? That way lies a TA billet.”

“Well, you sucked at Land Navigation last week, too,” I say. “And I think you were near the bottom of the list in Combat Control. You waiting for the Office Management instruction to show your true skills, or what?”

“Funny,” Ricci says, and hurls a container of liquid soap in my direction. I swat it back at him, and it clatters to the floor between the two rows of showers. Ricci gives me a sour look as he walks over to the middle of the head to retrieve it. Halley lets out a mocking wolf whistle when he bends over to pick up his soap. He holds his middle finger up without looking back at her.

“What a turd,” Halley says under her breath.

I don’t do so well in the next phase of the training.

Our Air & Space week, as Sergeant Burke calls it, begins with a day of instruction on aeronautics, cockpit systems, and the basic principles of atmosphere and space flight. I can understand the theory well enough, and I manage to receive good marks on the electronic exam at the end of the classroom part of the training, but somehow my brain can’t translate that knowledge into practical ability very well. After the classroom instruction, we move on to simulator training, which takes place in a big room the size of our platoon bay. Every member of the platoon has their own sound-proofed simulator capsule. From the outside, it looks like a squashed egg with cables sticking out of its back, but when you sit in it, the inside of the shell turns into a giant display, and the seat and avionics in the capsule are exact replicas of those found in a standard Wasp-class attack drop ship. You take your seat, strap on your helmet, plug into the TacCom console, and the computer that runs the simulation does it best to make you believe you’re flying the real thing. The whole thing sits on hydraulic actuators, which can spin the capsule through three hundred sixty degrees of movement. When I do my first practice drop from orbit into atmosphere, the imagery of the planet below combines with the movements of the capsule to give me a disconcerting sensation of vertigo.

The theory is simple enough. The stick on the right side of the cockpit moves the control surfaces on the wings and tail of the ship. The throttle on the left side controls engine thrust, and the hat switch on its side fires the maneuvering thrusters for extra-atmospheric flight. Pull on the stick, the nose comes up—push on the stick, the nose goes down. Tilt it left or right, the ship tilts in the same direction. The rudder pedals under my feet control the yaw. Each control axis moves the ship around a different physical axis, and all the pilot has to do is coordinate his input on stick and throttle to move the ship where he wants it to go.

“A good drop ship pilot can thread a needle with a Wasp. A great drop ship pilot can do it with a fully loaded ship while under fire, with one engine and half a wing shot off,” Sergeant Burke says when he introduces us to the simulators.

Apparently, I’m not a great drop ship pilot. I’m not even a good one. After Day Two, I’d settle for being mediocre, but so far, I only manage to be abysmally bad. Somehow, my spatial sense gets all messed up by the unfamiliar sense of weightlessness, and my brain refuses to synchronize my control input on all three axis properly. The exercises consist of following a flight path to a drop zone, and the helmet-mounted tactical display helpfully shows the right vectors and navigation cues directly in my field of vision as I release from the simulated attack carrier and tumble towards the atmosphere of the planet below.

Without the automatic landing feature, I can barely get my ship pointed the right way. The throttle accelerates the craft, but it keeps moving according to the laws of physics, which means that tilting the nose merely moves it away from the axis of travel, rather than changing direction. Before too long, I end up flying sideways or backwards, and I can’t figure out how to coordinate my controls to make the nose point forward again. Flying a drop ship requires constant adjustments in all dimensions, like trying to run while keeping a ball bearing centered on a dinner plate you balance on your fingertips. It’s a skill that’s beyond my mental abilities, and by the end of Day Three, I have burned up in the atmosphere on every one of my drops.

“Recruit Grayson has destroyed a total of nine hundred million Commonwealth dollars so far,” Sergeant Burke says at the end of our third day, when he gives us his customary end-of-exercise critique. I feel my cheeks flush as some of the recruits laugh at his remark.

“Don’t feel bad, Grayson,” he tells me when he notices my embarrassment. “The rest of the platoon didn’t fare much better. We don’t expect anyone to actually land the ship, you know. We’re just trying to figure out which of you even have the talent to begin proper flight training.”

I don’t have to wonder about that, at least.

“How did you do?” I ask Halley when we sit on my bunk after the evening shower. We get a little time to sit and check our PDPs before the lights are turned off, and Halley and I usually stick our heads together to vent to each other.

“I landed the ship twice,” she says in a low voice, and flashes a proud grin.

“No shit? Did Burke say anything?”

“He said I seem to have a hand for it.”

“Looks that way,” I say. “All I’ve done all day was to turn my drop ship into a comet.”

“I’m just glad I’m good at something.”

It occurs to me that our disparate talents mean we’ll probably get posted to different services if we make it through Basic Training, and the idea of parting with Halley suddenly makes me depressed. I know it’s irrational—there are so many different Marine regiments and Navy fleet units that we would almost certainly not be serving together even if we ended up in the same service branch—but I can’t turn off the feeling. For a moment, I consider aligning my results with hers, slacking off on the infantry training to not get ahead of Halley in that respect, but there’s no way I could match her skill in the simulator, and I’m not even considering asking her to throw her results for my sake. Besides, the military being what it is, there’s little method in the assignments anyway, and we may yet end up serving in proximity to each other.

Halley recalls her first successful simulated landing, and I listen to the story and watch the little dimples she gets on her cheeks when she smiles.