“Oh. Van Klomp,” said SmallMac, satisfied. He returned the favor with Fitz’s kit bag. “One of the best of them. Good-o. Looking at your clothes and hair, I thought you might be one of their pretty boys.”
Fitz had no doubt who “them” were. And he wasn’t surprised that his new acquaintance knew who Van Klomp was. It was a small colony for a loud voice.
“And you?”
SmallMac smiled wryly. “Oh, I played with horses. Kept me out of the army. But they decided I wasn’t young enough anymore. Besides being a bit slow.”
“Move, you lot! On the double.”
Carrying their kit bags, they ran again to get their heads shaved. Then to have slowshields implanted. To get infrared lenses implanted. Then, still carrying the kit bags, straight to drill.
Fitz had gone into this strong and fit. He’d heard about boot camp—although he was sure that OCS candidates did not have nineteen-year-old Vat sadists as instructors. He’d vaguely thought that the suffering associated with boot camp would be for other people. Less fit people. His aching body was beginning to realize that the purpose of exercise here was twofold. As a secondary thing, it was to get you into condition. Principally, it was to break you. No kind of fitness is enough for that. He was as exhausted as SmallMac by the end of it.
He’d also come to realize he’d been wrong about the wiry little man. SmallMac, while lacking in upper body musculature, had incredibly strong legs and fantastic balance. He’d been a horse-breaker for a large riding academy—quietly excused military duty because of his employer’s connections. Unfortunately he’d had a falling-out with his boss. So here he was, carrying a pole, at a jog.
“Are they trying to kill us?” panted the horse-breaker.
“No. Well, not quite. One step short of it.”
“But why?” asked SmallMac. “I thought they wanted soldiers. They’ll end up with wrecks.”
“My sensei explained it to me,” said Fitz. “Most humans aren’t natural killers. You can make them into soldiers, though. Humans will fight bravely, using the skills you train into them. You can either bring them up from the cradle to do this, in which case you have samurai. Or you can make soldiers in six weeks. They won’t be anything like as good as samurai, but it is quicker. But to do that they have to get you into a state of physical and mental exhaustion, in which old habits are forgotten. The soldier doesn’t think anymore. He just has to obey. Obey unconditionally.”
“Hmm. A bit like breaking horses. Well, not my way. But one of the ways. I see the advantages,” panted SmallMac, “to the army anyway, of getting conscripts young and fresh out of Vat-school. They’re pretty blank anyway, and used to obeying orders. It’s a lot harder for them—and us—dealing with old fossils.”
“Yep. We’re foolish enough to question things and to think for ourselves.”
“Speak for yourself, Fitz. I’m too tired to.”
“That’s the whole idea. Come on. We’ve got to run again.”
* * *
“This is your bangstick.” The instructor held up the short-bladed assegai. “This is your new wife. You will sleep with it. You will run with it. You will eat with it in one hand. You will clean it. You will love it. You will treasure it. God help you if I find you without it, because He is the only one who may be able to.”
Fitz looked at the issue weapon. Three feet long with a foot-long blade and a cutout into which a shotgun cartridge was inserted. Personal shields, which stopped anything moving faster than 22.8 mph, made projectile weapons useless. So: You had a short little spear, a trench knife—which, as a connoisseur of knives, he was almost ashamed to touch—and a funny little ice-pick thing. Technological advances seemed to have sent weaponry back to the iron age.
The next three days were a blur of the worst that life had ever offered Fitz. Aside from the lack of sleep and the sheer physical grind, he’d never even cleaned his own boots before. Or made a bed.
He learned. But not fast enough.
The corporal picked up the corner of the bed with its display of laboriously polished, ironed, starched and folded items and tipped it onto the floor. Fitz, standing at attention by the foot of the bed, couldn’t see what was happening. He could hear it, though.