PHASE III
"The stuff you learn in Boot Camp and the stuff you learn in the Marine Corps, it becomes part of your personality. And you don't even realize it."
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Staff Sergeant Richard
Hull |
Of all the Phases of Boot Camp, perhaps the most grueling is the third and final phase. Thirty-four days that contain two weeks in the field, Communications, Pyrotechnics, Navigation, Gas Chamber, Infiltration Course, Patrolling, Rappelling, and Close Combat Training including, Pugil Stick Training and Hand-to-Hand. There are inspections and drills and motivational and conditioning runs. As rough as the Boots thought they were having it, the DIs were having a worse time of things. Every special course involved building it from the ground up and then tearing it down to make room for the next course. Splitting up the teaching was covered. Between the five of them, all the bases except the hand-to-hand were touched.
If the civilian is uninformed over the handling of weapons, the handling of the body in combat is even less understood. One need only to observe a street fight to grasp this concept quickly. Often the combatants swing and miss, roll around on the ground and grunt vigorously, giving a great show but doing little damage. Self defense and offense are a learned skill, which requires training and practice. If done properly, it can help negate size and strength differences. Thanks to Griffen, professionals in the field would teach this key element.
As near as Christopher could calculate, they were holding the line, only about a day and a half off the routine schedule. As he saw it, he had time to spend from the time frame Griffen had dictated, so he set the Boots to building and drilling while he and his Instructors began mapping out the remaining days.
Certain practical applications were posing problems. For example, how to keep Boots in the field for two weeks when you're floating around on a ship in a void. Rojas analyzed the situation and equated five days on the outer hull with two weeks in the field. The suggestion raised several eyebrows, but Rojas convinced them his experience would enable him to pull it off. The Infiltration course was another stumper. It duplicated the sounds and sights of battle and dumped a Boot right in the middle of it to demonstrate the skills he—or she—had learned. After knocking a few ideas back and forth, Maysfield raised his hands in disgust and volunteered to do it.
Little by little, a plan was hammered together that was feasible.
* * *
"Fuck you, Bob." Maysfield never took his eyes off the most recent issue of Leatherneck he had been able to get his hands on. "We finally got something that weakly resembles the real Corps, a full rifle battalion—and you wanna pull the best two machine gunners we got and move them back to Scullery work. I say fuck you, Sergeant Christopher! Hell, your daddy and your daddy's daddy and his daddy's daddy would be ashamed of you. And all their wives to boot!" The harshness of the interjection sent an alert out to the group as a whole that this wasn’t another card game. The attention to his family tree stabbed at Christopher like a knife through the spine. It was as if Maysfield was calling him "un-Marine" or "anti-Marine"—or, worse, "politician."
"Master Sergeant, Colonel Griffen has ordered us to—”
"To segregate the four women from the platoons, not banish them to kitchen duty!" Maysfield's eyes rose over the top of the magazine. The look in his eyes startled the gathering. He was pissed and in total disagreement with the group. "Ga'dannit, Bobby. No fraternization between genders in training except as authorized through the office of the Commandant for purposes of training! I was sittin' at the computer when Griff dictated it ten years ago!" Abner's voice was elevating in pitch and there were overtones of anger. There was a natural tenseness to the man's face that was not natural to the man. "Before you knew they were women, they swam, ran, ate, PT'd, trained with us... AND KEPT UP WITH US! AND NOW! NOW, YOU WANT TO TELL THEM 'OH, WE'RE SORRY! YOU QUAL'D AS MACHINE GUNNERS IN A RIFLE BATTALION, BUT THE GREEN WEENIE FEELS THAT IT’S MORE IN YOUR DAMN INTEREST TO GO CLERICAL, SWAB DECKS, DRIVE TRUCKS, OR SERVE CHOW. NOW AIN'T... THAT... JUST... GRAND!" Maysfield drove the magazine hard onto the tabletop. He rose suddenly, knocking his chair over, and turned abruptly to head for the door.
"Abner! You're assigning M.O.S. now? WILL YOU STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT? MASTER SERGEANT! WHAT IS YOU MAJOR MAL-FUCKIN’-FUNCTION?! Christopher slammed his palms down and rose quickly, knocking his chair over too. The Junior NCOs froze in their seats, aware that something big was about to go down. Maysfield spun complete around without breaking stride and stood almost nose-to-nose with his under-ranking superior.
"MY MALFUNCTION? BECAUSE OF A GLITCH IN A SIT-REP, WE'RE GOING TO TAKE FOUR MARINES WITH A LOT OF HEART AND LEAVE THE BIG DUMB BASTARDS ON THE BEACH! YOU KNOW WHAT KIND OF MESSAGE THAT'S GONNA SEND OUT? THEY BUSTED THEIR ASSES TO GET THE JOB DONE... AND NOW, BECAUSE OF A HALF-ASSED REGULATION MEANT TO DRAW ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE FACT THAT WE WERE BECOMMING BAGGAGE HANDLERS AND TELEPHONE OPERATORS, YOUR GONNA DROP TROU, SHOW FANNY, AND RUN FROM THE GREATEST OPPORTUNITY THE CORPS HAS HAD SINCE GRIFFEN TOOK UP WITH THESE GUY’S FATHERS!!"
"AND WHAT OPPORTUNITY IS THAT?"
"TO BE MAKERS OF MARINES! LOOK AT WHAT GRIFFEN GAVE YOU TO WORK WITH! YOU SEE TIRE PLUGS AND SOLDERING IRONS? HELL NO! YOU GOT SHOTGUNS THAT MIGHT HAVE SEEN BELLEAU WOODS! A BUNCH OF LEFT OVER ARMY SURPLUS RADIOS WITH ENOUGH FREEZER BURN TO HAVE BEEN WITH PULLER’S MARINES AT THE CHOISEN RESERVOIR! M16s SO SHOT OUT YOU KNOW THEY SAW THE SOUTH PACIFIC—GUAM, BOUGAINVILLE... IWO! BROWNING AUTOMATICS FROM 'NAM, UNIFORMS FROM DESSERT STORM, TIN GEAR FROM EVERY MISERABLE TWO-BIT SKIRMISH THE CORPS SAW FOR OVER A CENTURY. WE'RE STILL FLOATIN' 'CAUSE GRIFFEN LIVED UP TO HIS WORDS, AND THAT'S HOW YOU MEASURE THE VALUE OF A BEING ON OUR WORLD OR ANY OTHER! THE WORD HE GAVE ME WAS, 'MAKE MARINES!' AND THE WORD I GAVE HIM WAS 'YES!' AND BY GOD, THAT'S WHAT I'M GONNA DO! AND I DON’T GIVE A GOOD GA’DAMN WHAT KIND OF REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS THEY’RE CARRYIN’ AROUND!"
For a moment the two hung silently in the air over the table. Christopher's lips began to pucker and he pushed off the table. He put his hands in his pockets and studied his shoes for a moment. Then he looked up.
"Pick three of your boots and give 'em over to Stone. They're yours, Abner. You just make sure they steer clear of trouble. And don't give Stone any bottom-enders! Deal?"
"Done!"
* * *
One by one, they drifted past the light of the M Bay hatch. 3033 platoon was free-floating alongside the phEY-QUAD, feeling their way through the chilling darkness on the guide ropes swirling like worms on hooks from the port locks. Puffs of vapor glistened in the darkness, becoming anemic fireflies as they passed the light intruding on the master darkness that stretched out edge of infinity. There were few amongst the Boots that had not floated freely against the hull performing some mundane chore of the space-faring breed. But this was different—and it scared them.
As ancient Terran seamen had clung to the hulls of masted sailing vessels moving at the speeds of their day, scraping and repairing, so too did their void-born descendents. But always at the end of a few relative moments, a hand would grasp them and they would be brought back into the safety of their vehicle. But here, now, they were setting up hostiles on an outer hull to remain for five full passings of the sun around an unknown planet. Just as they had begun to believe their Instructors might posses a modicum of sanity, they go and do this!
There had been moments of individual and collective fear over the proceeding weeks, but mostly a fear of things unknown. The conquering of the water, and the free jumps off a thirty-foot tower into it, had been tremendous accomplishments for them. But that was the taming of a beast unknown. This was beast they knew too well. It was smothering and freezing and boiling and emptiness of immeasurable depth. What possible purpose could this serve, now or ever?
They had rejoiced when word began to spread of an outer hull excursion. It was an escape from the daily routines and liberation from cumbersome alien clothing and heavy personal equipment. They had not counted on a five-day visitation with impending doom.
They had gotten their first inkling that something was amiss when Drill Instructors Stone, Rojas, and Sabott had disappeared for three days, leaving all four platoons to the less-than-tender mercies of Maysfield and their former coworker-turned-commandant Christopher. For three endless days they PT’d, ran, and prepared unusually large amounts of gear for outer hull duty. A silent panic had siezed all 185 of them when ship's doctors began to perform physical after physical on them in preparation for their duty. The truth be known, when permission to leave ship was requested of coHLI, he had responded with absolutely not! But he had caved into the persistent Marines and given his permission.
When Stone returned, a high-intensity course on survival in a hostile environment was given. Tension mounted. They knew the theories, but the practical application of it was unheard of. The idea of living inside a 200-pound atmosphere suit for five days wasn't only not rational—it was not possible!
But Rojas knew it was possible. He had done it. It wasn't fun, that was for sure, but it was possible. For three days, he had taken Stone (with no experience) and Sabott (with next to none) and showed them how it was done.
The greatest fear and danger to the novice or professional was the constant night that surrounded you. Darkness amplifies fears. It plays with your mind and slowly seeps into your soul as you begin to realize that the inky blackness is the sole constituency of the great, infinite void. The first day had not been bad for Stone and Sabott. They were engrossed in learning how to functionally move with the massive environmental suit, how to task it to work for them and how to perform tasks with it. The most difficult thing to learn was how to extract your arms and legs from their tubes and press the suit inwardly outward to a ball configuration so that one might be 'tied down' and sleep. There was no great skill with the passing of bodily functions, but its contrariness to the normal procedures always proved mentally draining. And it took more than a little practice to expel the wastes from the suit through the dispatch chute into the honey pots. But once they were past the personal basics and began on the man-to-man training techniques, the awesome and brutal all-encompassing darkness became a relentless foe to the man tethered to the hull. Several years later, Rojas would be inducted in a popular book of galactic records as having heard more than 18,000 bottles of beer on the wall being counted in a three-day weightless state—not that he had wanted to attempt such a dubious distinction. But he knew it either was that or lose Stone or Sabott to the frozen darkness. There just were no other choices. If mental discipline broke down in a free float, the idle mind began to seek some light sources, forgetting to tie on. And it came upon you quickly, with the ferocity of a Great White.
Artificial illumination could be channeled for work areas, but it stayed where it was pointed as if it were a fireman's hose splashing a trickle on a conflagration of intense magnitude. Depending on where you were stationed, you might see a halo ring on the outer edge of the vessel from the nearest sun or light source on the opposite side of the ship. This was the danger of free-float rapture—forgetting where you were, what you were doing, the need to attach as you waited for you body to recalculate its situation in a void.
As you floated freely in a dormant period, allowing your blood gases to be recalculated by the support process pressing into your nervous system, you can begin to stare off into infinity, into the incalculable black. As the massive craft slid through time and space, the gravity of the outer hull would change. Within a few feet and less then a second, you could find your mass no longer attracted to the mass of the vessel. So, silently and unaware, you could drift away into the space where time and distance and light no longer mattered. And as you slipped through the cracks of the continuum, merrily conversing with the voices of angels that beckoned you forth, you became a ripple in the distance to the fellow spacemen who may have noticed you missing and come after you, vanishing to a point in the flow of time which sits a thousand centuries before the existence of your species. It is a painless, unaware death—but lonely.
Or you might just drift over the edge of the vessel into the unhindered path of the heat from a nearby sun, and awaken to an environment hundreds of degrees hotter than the suit can handle.
Either way, it was less than thrilling to 3033 to be the spearhead of the exercise.
Along the thin, erect, but lifeless cords they crawled, each team of four or five carefully dragging a flooding illuminator. Although they had been inoculated to expand or contract the various blood gases surging through their bodies to increase endurance, each task of more than a few short hours, DI time, demanded a dormant period of nearly ten minutes. The first order of business was to stake out the dimensions that would soon become an encampment. Using a compensated compass, offering a said north to delineate a four-cornered square as a basis for a grid, they accomplished this. The point man traveled in his assigned direction until he literally ran out of rope, and then affixed the magnetized base of the floodlight to the hull. The team would tie to the light and go dormant as the second team moved out, dragging limited radar that interacted with the floods and alerted DIs to any boot that might be developing rapture or, in a dormant state, might break from a tie and begin to drift away.
As you floated, held to known life by the thinnest of threads, you might see the hostile squads dragging the great sleds that bore the steel slabs to be raised for the 'art/envi'—the artificial environment. Large enough to house two suited squads for a scheduled breather of an hour every second day, it was a place for the body to decompress. Of the four structures to be raised, one would be a field med. It would be treatment for the other great terror of prolonged exposure to darkness in a self-contained solitary artificial environment—claustrophobia.
To each point of the compass, a platoon flag was planted as an assembling point. It took nearly eleven hours to bring all the squads and their gear together as a set encampment, complete with squad bays and fire watches. And it did not go without incident. A tie-down on a mess gurney had snapped, trapping 3033's recruit Lightbulb between it and a refuse trough on the ship's surface. Cries of "33 down! 33 down!" echoed through the comm devices. As the gurney's momentum carried it further from the ship's hull, the cable-like tie-down drew its captive tighter and tighter against the hull. Only the quick reaction of Lewis and Sabott prevented disaster.
3031, abreast of the gurney, saw it go down first. Sabott and Recruit Lewis both pivoted and snapped free of their lifelines. As if of one mind, they released the reserve air supplies at the base of their helmets and shot across the void like comets, neither mindful of the other. Sabott collided with the flat surface of the gurney—and, for a brief moment, neither Sabott nor the gurney could determine who was the action and who was the equal and opposite reaction. But a moment was all Lewis required. Despite multiple cries of "Call off!" from Sabott, Lewis slipped under the motionless gurney and slid beneath the remaining rigidly affixed tie-down. The force of his momentum created enough lift and stress to cause the last tie to snap. The sudden release decided the debate between Sabott and the gurney over Newton's Laws. The sudden freedom, at the angle Lewis' thrust had created, caused it to fly off its course. Sabott barely managed to slide underneath and push himself downward toward the hull before the gurney glided away from the gravity of the ship. He landed flatly and stayed there motionless as the gurney floated off into oblivion.
Both Stone and Rojas had begun almost instantly to head toward the incident, and watched it all happen from closing distances. As the mess gurney drifted into the time stream and Sabott impacted with the hull and lay motionless, the calls to Sabott began to ring out. By the time they reached him, he had shifted into a sitting position.
"Look at that sucker move!" he laughed. "Eight hundred pounds of century-old biscuits, stale cigarettes, and Uncle Sam's own instant almost-coffee headin' off to who knows where and who knows when. Jesus! I hope we ain't responsible if some dumbass on the other side of the galaxy finds that stuff and tries to eat it."
"Sabott," said Stone, patting him on the helmet, "go dormant!"
* * *
Rojas had known better than to ask Abner Willie to step outside, but Christopher had declined, citing paperwork as the reason. Truth was, the idea of leaving Maysfield, in his present serious-DI mode, alone on a ship of unsuspecting Malacans didn't really appeal to him.
But there was much to be done. At coHLI's insistence, they obtained work crews and began to construct the needed courses for the remainder of the phase. And while all work was done with typical Malacan efficiency, eye ridges were raised over some of the objects being constructed. What could these strange Earthers want with a forty-five-foot tower that went nowhere? Or a gas chamber?
To the average Malacan crewman who knew nothing of the actual goings on, nothing seemed to be too strange for these Marines to try. For almost two months now, they had gotten used to all manner of explosions, screams, yells, and who knew what else at all hours of day and night. The requests for a certain insect had almost caused a mutiny when word got out to the crew. But it blew over when, through Marine intervention, a cure had been discovered for the effects of a dead black hole—it meant better opportunities for shore leave in places they had only heard about.
While the Marines themselves were too unacquainted with Malacan physiology to notice any changes of major import to their recruits, the civilian population (including a certain ship's captain) could not help but notice the physical and mental changes in the recruits from their investment of time and energy—and it was paying dividends. A fleeting glimpse of the Boots as they ran down a corridor or jumped to a DI's call told the story, even if it was a few chapters short. Even though they could not tell what it was, an end was in sight; a purpose for all the yelling and screaming was in sight.
No request was too strange not to be considered. There was a point to all of this, but no civilian on the ship—except, perhaps, coHLI—knew what it was.
* * *
"YOU DUMBASS HAIRLESS JAR-HEADED MOTHERFUGGER, YA' DID IT AGAIN, GA'DAMMIT!" Roach was livid. His arms flailed and rotated in all directions as he tried to right himself, while the capsized occio twisted and spun and cometed past him, leaving a trail of refuse as a tail. All his gyrating managed to do was twist his lifeline around him as he floated away from the hull. When he ran out of line, he hung there, twisting and screaming and looking more like a balloon at a Thanksgiving Day parade than a potential Marine. Swirling around him, churning like a swarm of angry bees—very large, angry bees—was the entire refuse collection of 3033. Included in the swarm were two very large honey pots, originally destined for the biological waste tank, which were moving toward his helmet.
"YA BIG DICK! GET ME DOWN BEFORE STONE SEES US!" His calls became more and more frantic as anger turned into helpless frustration.
Arnold, on the other hand, was having the time of his life. "Eat shit, you liddle butthead!" he screamed through the darkness, throwing more garbage at the clotheslined Roach.
* * *
Rojas knew his trade. There had been method to his madness in putting the platoons on the hull of phEY-QUAD. Of the 185 recruits, about 130 of them had seen duty outside the vessel through either cargo handling or hull maintenance. It was a relative snap to go through the basics—eat, sleep, move. The two weeks beginning the third phase were, according to the book, for BWT—Basic Warrior Training—not skipping around the outer edge of infinity like it was a picnic. But as Rojas—and, later, Sabott and Stone too—saw it, the Basic Warrior was in want of a new definition. An anchor, a globe, and an eagle were no longer sufficient. It was a smaller world, but a grander universe than any human mind could imagine. At least that was what they saw when they peered into the darkness.
Combat in the new battleground had consisted of installing or modifying weaponry and employing the Flight Wing’s standard air combat techniques. Stone had been engaged in one of these skirmishes. A couple of blasts and a sudden turn were enough to put an intruder to flight. To him, it had seemed nothing more than a big dog showing his teeth to a burglar. From what he had heard from friends in 5800, Ground Security, ground combat wasn't much different.
But what would happen when the enemy didn't run? Stone had felt that it was inevitable. Could a squad circumvent an attack by taking an incoming craft, or affect a ground assault, with the inky blackness of space as a starting point? Could a being overcome the short duration of mobility in the space and time flow? Could combat formations for ground warfare be utilized in space? These were things that had best be learned before they were needed.
Maysfield had started Rojas thinking. Perhaps they had a unique opportunity here, a place to begin. They knew the basic survival skills for the most part, and the few who didn't had the mandatory courses needed for space travel. By the end of the second day on the hull, all advanced techniques had been concluded and theories went into practice.
One by one, each platoon found itself spread squad by squad across the outer hull and advancing as if they had been afield at the Island. While no weapons had been issued, calls of sit-report or ammo count echoed back and forth from squad leaders and squads as they advanced on trash chutes posing as gun mounts, or approached communications towers and antennas with the cautions of oncoming enemies. At fifteen minute intervals the point squad would attach with magnetic anchors and begin a modified dormant phase as they were passed over by an upcoming squad to retrieve the point with a spurt of reserve air. Foot by foot, ground would be secured. One by one, item by item, they learned all the skills that the Terran Marine on the ground learned: navigation, communications, even rudimentary astro-pyrotechnics got covered. Dragging equipment in, wounded out, overcoming the fear of the dark that so terrifies us all, they began to act as a unit, a multi-celled organism with each cell relying on its twin. And somewhere between the dark and the backbreaking exertion, an idea became an art form.
It was the humblest of beginnings, but it would change how the game was played forever.
* * *
"What the hell are those dumb bastards doing out there?” Abner peered into the inky void through the viewer as the last echoes of the blast curved along the walls of the engineering deck. Through the small electronic periscope, he saw teams of five crawling along small life cables toward the upper hatch leading into the onboard decompression hatches.
"Rojas told them that if they couldn't find a way into the ship, they'd spend another five days out there in the dark. Dahhmmm!" drawled Christopher to no one in particular. "Look at that little prick go! Now that's what I call highly motivated!"
Roach, operating as a point man, had wedged a small canister of compressed air under the edge of the hatch. The sudden release of highly compressed O2 into the vacuum had created an explosion that, while not strong enough to blow the outer seal and shield off, had most certainly had loosened it. He then removed a blade from one of the occios used to haul supplies and was using it as a lever to pry the lid off. As his team reached him, one by one, they grasped the bar. Only with a great deal of effort was the lid opened. A week had been more than enough. They were ready to return.
