“Hey, Nolan! Where do you think you’re going?” Corporal Tebba Girana shouted as Lon started away from the dismissed honors formation.
“Back to the barracks, Corporal. I didn’t have time to get all of my gear squared away.”
“Forget it for now. That’ll wait. The mess hall is this way.” Tebba pointed. Girana was a little below average height for Dirigent (five feet, eleven inches for men) but built stockily. Solidly muscled, he was a veteran of more than fifteen years in the Corps. He pushed himself harder than he pushed any of his men, and he kept himself as fit as he had been when he finished recruit training when he was eighteen years old. There was no room in the DMC for flabby soldiers—not even officers, let alone noncoms. If a man could no longer pass muster, he was gone. Even the regimental commanders had to meet physical training standards each year.
“I don’t mind missing a meal, Corporal,” Lon said. “I’m really not all that hungry.”
“Well, I mind. The lieutenant says I gotta get you up to speed in a hurry. We might get a contract almost anytime. And missing meals when you don’t have to is a bad habit to get into. There’ll be times enough in the field when rations are short. Body’s gotta have fuel to work right.”
Nolan had been under military discipline too long, on Earth and Dirigent, to argue any longer. He nodded and walked with Girana toward the mess hall. Automatically, Lon fell in step with the corporal. After more than three years at The Springs, the military academy of the North American Union, and two months of recruit training on Dirigent, Lon could scarcely walk anywhere with anyone without subconsciously walking in step.
More than three years, almost four, Lon thought. It was still hard to accept the sudden and unexpected change in his life. He had been less than eight months from graduation at The Springs, and his commission in the NAU Army. Ranked third in his class at the beginning of his senior year and with a spotless disciplinary record, he had looked forward to rapid promotion and a good career. And then the bottom had fallen out.
“It’s a good life here, most of the time,” Girana said, and Lon realized that he had missed whatever the corporal had said before that. “An honorable life for a man.”
“I never wanted to be anything but a soldier,” Lon said, hoping that it would sound as if he had been following what Girana had been saying. I never wanted to be anything but a soldier. That was the problem. That was why the bottom had felt as if it had been yanked out from under him at The Springs.
“I don’t imagine you’d have faced the sort of operations we do,” Girana said. “Earth is so damned crowded. I doubt that the total population of all the worlds I’ve been on add up to a third of the people who live on Earth. Of course, I’ve only been on a small fraction of the worlds that people live on.”
“Does anyone even know how many planets have been settled?” Lon asked. “Back home—back on Earth, I mean—there’d be a different number anywhere you looked.”
Girana grinned. “I’d guess that Corps Intelligence has a pretty good count on the number of worlds. That’s their pidgin, after all. You never know where you might find a contract. There must be more than a thousand settled worlds. Maybe half as many space habitats. Now, those are hairy for a foot soldier.”
“I can imagine,” Lon said. It was something he had never considered. He started to think about the possibilities, but Girana kept talking.
“Like fighting with your hands tied behind your back. You can’t use half your weapons because you might breach hull integrity. Zero gravity—or, at best, partial gravity from spin—I don’t think any of the deepers bother with anything near full gravity. Sure not on the few habitats I’ve been to.”
“I think Over-Galapagos keeps its outer levels at seventy percent, but I know what you mean,” Lon said. “I guess if they wanted full gravity, they’d have stayed on the dirt, like us.”
“Yeah, something like that,” Girana agreed. “They’re a weird lot, the deepers, the few I’ve come across.”
“I spent eleven days at Over-Galapagos on the way here. That was the first permanent deeper structure over Earth, out at geo-stationary. Something like twenty-five thousand people live there permanently, and there are always a few hundred temporaries—or so I was told. I had to wait to change transport coming here. Eat, sleep, and exercise so your bones don’t soften up, and all the other stuff. Most of the folks don’t live out where they’d have seventy percent gravity. There’s not much time for anything else. I don’t know how they get anything done.”
“They don’t, not much,” Girana said with the unquestioning confidence of a man who knew almost nothing about it. “The deepers are a dead end. Freaks. Another fifty years, most of those habs will be deserted. It’s just not natural for people to live out in space like that.”
Maybe, but I doubt it, Lon thought. He would not openly disagree with the corporal, not within thirty minutes after joining his squad. There were millions of people living in space habitats. Some of the habs had been in constant use for nearly five centuries. It was hard to write their inhabitants off as freaks on a dead end.
The first and second battalions of Seventh Regiment shared a mess hall, but each company had its own dining room. They were on two floors, ranged around the central core that allowed Food Services access to each of them. Girana led Lon up to the second floor and through a door marked A-2-7.
“We eat good in garrison,” Girana said as they moved toward the cafeteria-style serving line. “Civilian cooks, good chow, and plenty of it. It makes up for the lean times.”
“You talk like nobody ever eats on a campaign,” Lon said.
“Contract, not campaign,” Tebba corrected absently. “Naw, it’s not that so much. Just, well, sometimes it’s hard to get your fill in the field. Battle rations may provide all the stuff that a body needs, but it don’t always fill you up right. And there’s times when even the BR packets don’t get around on time.”
The serving trays were large, and Girana took liberal portions of just about everything as he moved along the line—and the available choices were quite broad. Nolan took less, but more than he had expected. The aromas were enticing enough to waken his appetite. I guess I’m hungrier than I thought, he decided with a thin smile. The drinks carousel had everything but alcoholic beverages.
Nearly half of the men in the company had reached the dining hall ahead of Girana and Nolan. There was already considerable noise—people talking as they settled in at their places and started to eat. But the noise never became overwhelming. Acoustical ceiling panels kept the sound level bearable. The dining halls at The Springs had never been so relaxed. There, it was all sit at attention on the edge of your seat. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to by a superior, and then keep your response down to the fewest syllables possible—”Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” were preferred. Eat by the numbers. Finish and get out. The mess hall of the training battalion on Dirigent had been less formal, but the training had been so long and arduous that few of the recruits had retained energy for talk when they came in from the field at the end of each day. There had been times when just staying awake through the meal had been an almost insurmountable challenge.
I like this place, Lon told himself before he got to the table or took his first bite of supper. The colors were warm, the atmosphere friendly. Between the serving line and the table, Girana stopped a half dozen times to return greetings or to say something to someone at one of the other tables. Lon found himself more relaxed than he had been in ages. It felt good.
The men of second squad had reached their table more or less together. Including Girana, there were eleven regular members of the squad. They were one man short of full manning. Until Lon received his commission, he would make up the difference. Girana seated the cadet next to him at one end of the long table and introduced the new man to the rest of the squad. Lon concentrated on the names and the faces that went with them. Remembering names had never come easily for him. These were men he would go into combat with, at least once. And, unless things went terribly wrong, Lon might command these same men someday. He had to know them.
Janno Belzer had curly black hair and eyes, and an olive complexion. He was tall and thin. Dean Ericks was blond, with light brown eyes and the sort of pallor common to people who never got out in the sun. He seemed to be almost exactly Lon’s size and build. Phip Steesen was shorter, with a receding hairline; the hair, what was left, was an indeterminate brown. Gen Radnor was big and beefy, dark hair, bushy eyebrows, and sunken dark eyes. He seemed to be the most reticent of the men in the squad. Lance Corporal Dav Grott was the assistant squad leader. He looked older than his thirty-two years, as if he had lived a particularly hard life. Frank Raiz was the youngest member of the squad—excluding Lon—at twenty-three. He kept his scalp shaved. It gave him a fierce look. Raphael Macken was the kind of man who could escape notice in a group of three. Tod Schpelt was distinguished by an accent different from the rest, despite the fact that his family had been on Dirigent for three generations—still newcomers. Harvey Fehr concentrated on his eating. Lon did not hear him speak at all during that meal. Bait Hoper was a distant cousin of Lieutenant Carl Hoper, platoon leader for the company’s first and second platoons.
The first real question, after all of the greetings and exchanges of names, was, “Where are you from?” Lon’s accent did place him as an off-worlder.
“Earth,” Lon said, without really thinking about it. He was cutting into his roast. The sudden silence that greeted his announcement made him look up. He scanned the faces that were staring at him—everyone but Girana and Fehr.
“Did I say something wrong?” Lon asked.
A couple of heads shook. A couple of mumbled negatives were voiced. “You caught us off guard,” Janno Belzer said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who came right from Earth.”
“You pulled a fast one on us, Tebba,” Dean Ericks accused, pointing his fork at the corporal. “You shoulda warned us.”
Girana grinned. “What, and spoil the fun? And you can bet you’ve met guys from Earth before. There must be sixty or seventy in the Corps, maybe more. There’s always some.”
“Hey, a couple of million people a year go outsystem from Earth. They’ve got to be around somewhere,” Lon said.
“Maybe they lie about where they’re from,” Phip Steesen suggested. That drew a laugh from most of his squad-mates.
“Could be,” Lon said, falling into the bantering spirit more easily than he would have guessed possible. “They probably don’t want to hurt any colonials’ feelings.”
“I hear they’s so many folks on Earth now that they gotta sleep in shifts, that there ain’t enough room for them all to lay down at once,” Dean said.
“Naw, the problem is they spend so much time in the sack that they make more people than they know what to do with,” Phip said before Lon could respond.
Supper went on at length. Now and then someone would get up to go back through the serving line. Someone else would make a run to the drinks carousel with a tray to bring back refills for anyone who wanted them. Lon continued to do more listening than talking, but he did answer questions when they came his way. Janno, Dean, and Phip did most of the talking for the veterans in the squad. Lon’s longest contribution came when one of them asked why he had come to Dirigent.
“Now, that’s the kind of question you don’t have to answer, Nolan,” Girana said, scowling down the table at the person who had asked it. “Every man’s past is his own.”
“I don’t mind.” Lon shrugged. “It’s probably better that I do talk about it. I haven’t had much chance. Sometimes I’m not sure that I really … comprehend everything about it.” After that, he had the full attention of everyone at the table. Even Fehr looked up from his eating.
“Since I was little, I never wanted to be anything other than a soldier,” Lon said. “Now, it was never just a kid thing with toy soldiers and playing war. Even when I was only, oh, six or seven, that’s what I wanted to be. The older I got, the more set I was. I wanted to be a soldier. When I was in my junior year of high school, I took the preliminaries for competitive appointment to The Springs—the North American Military Academy—passed, and went on to the second round of testing.” He paused long enough to take a last bite of his dessert and to wash it down with a long sip of coffee.
“I won the appointment, went to The Springs, and did fairly well. By the start of my final year, I was … near enough the top to look forward to a good career in the NAU Army.” There was no point in bragging that he had been ranked third. “Then the commandant called me into his office.” Lon paused for a long time then, but no one said anything. He was remembering that morning when his carefully planned future had been taken away from him. In his mind, he relived the interview with the commandant, hardly aware that he was describing the events to his new squad-mates at the same time.
“Cadet Nolan reporting as ordered, sir.” Lon had been nervous about the summons to the commandant’s office, but he could not think of anything he might have done that would call for disciplinary action, even though he did not know of anyone who had ever been called in for anything else. In the few minutes he had been given to prepare himself, Lon had thought back over everything he had done recently, and he could conceive of no reason why he might be called to account.
Commandant Banks returned Nolan’s salute. “Sit down,” he said, gesturing to a chair near the corner of his desk. That invitation was more of a shock to Lon than the summons had been. He sat on the edge of the seat, at attention, the way he had always been forced to sit as a plebe. The commandant swiveled his own chair until he was facing Lon.
“Relax. You’re not on the carpet,” Banks said, correctly gauging Lon’s worries. “Far from it. You have one of the most nearly spotless records I’ve seen in my years at The Springs. In a way, that makes what I have to say even more difficult.”
“Sir?”
“I have received a directive from the Secretary of Defense,” Banks said. “The curriculum for the spring semester will be drastically changed for this year’s first classmen, concentrating on riot control and criminal justice topics. And the top one hundred and fifty members of your graduating class will be transferred to the Department of Justice for commissioning in the NAU Federal Police. No exceptions will be permitted.”
Lon did not realize that he had fallen silent, lost in his memories, until Phip asked, “So what’d you do, resign?”
Slowly, Lon shook his head as he looked around the table at his new comrades. “I couldn’t. I didn’t have acceptable grounds. And, in the time I had left, I couldn’t lower my grade average enough to get below the top one hundred and fifty unless I simply stopped doing my class-work and intentionally failed tests, and that would have opened me up to disciplinary action for willful misconduct. When the commandant hit me with the news about being sent to be a federal cop … well, I really can’t describe all of the things that went through my head, all at once, mixed together in a crazy jumble. The only way out that I could see was to do something really desperate—and incredibly stupid. But the commandant was a couple of steps ahead of me.”
“He sprung you?” Janno asked.
“In a way,” Lon said, nodding. “He took a big risk.”
“Look at me, Nolan.” Lon had blinked and looked up. He had not even noticed that he had let his gaze, his head, drop. The news was simply too devastating to be true.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve got a good notion how this hits you. It sticks in my craw as well. We’re soldiers, though, you and I, and soldiers take orders, even when they don’t like them.” A grim smile fixed itself on the commandant’s face. “My job here has been to turn out soldiers, not combat-ready police.” He glanced toward the office door, then leaned closer to Lon.
“What I have to say to you isn’t to go any farther. You’re not to repeat it outside of this room. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Lon felt puzzlement return, but all he could do was sit and wait for the commandant to continue.
“As I said, I’ve got a damn good idea how this hits you. I’ve been stewing over this directive since I received it four days ago and found that there is no give to it. Now, there is absolutely no way that I can get you a commission in the NAU Army, or in any other army … on this planet.” When Banks paused, Nolan raised his head a little more.
“You do want to be a soldier, rather than a cop, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve never wanted to be anything else.”
“That’s what I thought. Now, I’m going to give you a name and a complink code. Memorize them. Don’t write them down. Things may get rough for you here for a while, Nolan, but stick it out. Then, when the time comes—and you’ll know when that is—give that code a call and take it from there.”
Lon blinked again, several times, and looked around at his new squadmates. “The complink number was for a DMC recruiter who was operating, illegally, on Earth.”
“Yeah, but what happened?” Phip asked.
Lon grinned, but there was pain behind it. “Thirty-two of the top one hundred and fifty members of my class were dismissed from the academy for ‘conduct unbecoming.’ The commandant rigged a shakedown inspection and we were all caught with contraband. He gave us all the maximum penalty permitted—expulsion from the academy with prejudice—and then he resigned his own commission the same day. And here I am.”
“Here you are,” Corporal Girana said. “And it’s time to get back to the barracks, Nolan. We’ve got to draw your equipment and start checking you out on everything. You go right into training with the platoon, first thing tomorrow morning, so we’ve got to get you ready tonight.”