Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) (4 page)

Moving quickly, he dipped his body downwards in a desperate dive, promptly slamming the top of his helmet against the bottom. Slapping his hands about frantically, Toni found that the tunnel goosenecked, and he followed it up and out of the water.

It was dark on the other side. Feeling another hard yank on his leg, Toni threw himself forwards and fell headfirst into the second gooseneck beyond. He quickly cornered the obstacle and clawed his way out the other side and into unexpected light.

The old sergeant pulled him out of the tube’s opposite end and dropped him dripping onto the tent floor. As Toni gaped in confusion at his surroundings, a medic subjected him to a cursory health check.

“Thirty seconds!” The sergeant stated gruffly as he glanced at a stopwatch, just as Toni realized that he was inside a closed tent.

He was puzzled as to how he could have completed the course in only thirty seconds, but the thought was interrupted by a resounding horn that almost shook the tent down. All three clapped their hands to their ears.

“Fuck hell! Jorren, twenty seconds!”

Toni blinked stupidly as the orderly put a knee to the ground and looked into his eyes.

“Son, do you wish to continue?” He asked.

Toni couldn’t work his mouth, so he nodded instead.

“Ten seconds! Jorren, get the rope off the boy!”

The orderly released the rope that had been hooked to Toni’s trouser leg and gave it three hard yanks. After a pause the rope slipped back down the tube.

“How long has it been?” Toni gasped, his mind numb as he struggled to stand.

“Three ... two ... one ... go!” The sergeant shouted, giving him a smack in the back hard enough to send him flying out the tent.

“You’re five minutes in, boy!” the orderly shouted as Toni departed.

A much younger sergeant stood before him. Grabbing a hold of the newcomer’s arm, he lifted a finger before Toni’s nose.

“I’m gonna say this only once, so listen good! You’ve done the fear obstacles. Nice job. From here on out it’s all resistance. Keep up your pace but don’t kill yourself. You stop running only when they tell you to stop. Understood?”

“Yeah ...” Toni breathed.

The sergeant then pointed beyond Toni towards the triple palisade beyond.

The Click’s second part was a cinch for Toni. Growing up on a farm with a lot of trees and fences about had its privileges. If he hadn’t already been dead tired from the first part, he might even have enjoyed it. There were palisades, rope swings, trenches, successively taller Chinese gateways, over-unders, a whole assortment of obstacles, variations on obstacles, and combinations of obstacles to overcome. The rain had even let up a bit, although every surface was still wet and treacherous. The resistance course accompanied a waterline that snaked around a low hill. Beyond the waterline he found some spectators, all clad in varying shades of green, grey, and mud-brown uniforms, some shouting words of encouragement while others spewed verbal abuse at his passage. Shortly afterwards a much recovered Toni was making his way around the hill’s opposite end, when he saw before him what was almost certainly the final obstacle.

A rippling black wall twenty paces wide and thirty tall stood with an obscene slit at its center, accessible only by a scaffold foot-ramp that began shortly beyond the end of the second-to-last obstacle. A horde of spectators was visible on both sides of the wall, and all were silent for the moment. All fear Toni might have had was smothered by his relief at the sight of the finish-line.

Overcoming a confusing array of lowlying wires, he hit the ramp at a steady jog and held the pace as he ascended. Someone off to his left began to shout on a loudspeaker.

“JUMP! JUMP! JUMP!”

The spectators took up the cry. As Toni peered up at the wall itself, he noticed that it was apparently made of the same flexible polymer he had dealt with minutes ago. He made out three words in a semi-circle above the slit.

ONE GIANT LEAP

His last task was apparently a simple one.

Closing in on the gate as the shouting reached a crescendo, Toni held his breath, crossed his forearms over his chest and leapt with legs locked together through the slit.

For the briefest of moments, he caught sight of something impossibly large moving impossibly fast and, from the corner of his eye, a blur moving towards him like a freight train.

I die now
, his mind ejaculated.

The freight train struck Toni, hammering him so hard that the heavens burst before his eyes. The deafening smack resounded in his ears as he was launched sideways, doing a gradual half-turn as he glided through the air. He had briefly relieved himself while in the watery tunnel, believing there would be no more appropriate location than there to do so. What little hadn’t come out before did now. One brief, terrified squirt.

Toni’s landing was, contrary to all else that had happened to him, unbelievably soft. Landing up-side-down, his hands instinctively clawed at the ascending net of nanowire that had broken his fall, the net giving way several meters beneath and beyond him. He lay there for a moment, barely registering the raucous cheers from his audience, until a heart-stopping roar tore into his ears, banishing all emotions except terror from his mind.

Toni turned onto his back and laid his eyes upon the armored Suit. It stood before him, grey as granite, segmented in body and headless, holding a gigantic shock-yellow padded sledgehammer in a double-handed grip. Moving with unexpected fluidity, it swung the sledgehammer in an uppercut against the bottom of the nano-net he was lying on. The ripple propagated upwards, flipping Toni right-side-up and forcing him to twist around once more to keep his eyeballs on the colossus.

“CLIMB! CLIMB! CLIMB!” The man with the loudspeaker began to cry, and it was also soon taken up by the spectators.

Moving with silence and agility, the Suit dropped the sledgehammer into the churned mud below and gripped the bottom end of the nano-net. The titan then shook the net in a parody of spreading a bed sheet and the wave rippled upwards, forcing the recruit to hold on for fear of sliding down into the mud.

Toni took the hint and began to scramble up the net, ascending quickly despite the Suit’s occasional shaking and bullying. His shoulders and thighs began to burn fiercely with the effort, but gradually the voices below became fainter and fainter. The net’s width varied widely but was never less than twenty paces across, and it kept a roughly thirty degree angle due to having been fixed to nearby trees with nanowire cables. Finally breathless, his heart beating a heavy staccato rhythm inside his chest, Toni began to hear encouraging shouts from above, and he paused momentarily to rest and scrutinize the source of the noise.

Above him, set between four massive redwoods, was an army encampment. Viewed from below, it appeared to be an enormous hovering square of about forty paces across and canopied with an olive-green awning, and there was a line of desks to either side of a narrow entryway.

At the entryway, an assortment of uniformed men and women applauded and shouted words of support down to him. Encouraged but uncertain, he began to ascend once more, the more suspicious facet of his personality fearing that they would fall upon him with clubs at his arrival. In the last couple of meters the net’s angle suddenly steepened, but then a multitude of hands grabbed him by his anti-trauma padding and hoisted him onto the plastic flagstones. Toni felt relieved at having already puked out the contents of his stomach, but still he dry heaved a few times as someone annoyingly patted his back.

“Would you believe it?! The first recruit made it through! We must have done something wrong!” A matronly woman announced loudly to the crowd’s laughter.

“Corporal, take the rook out back and see if you can put him back together.” A deep voice spoke, and he was gingerly lifted into the arms of a burly soldier with red stripes so old they had faded to pink. Toni stared belatedly at his muddied thighs as he was easily carried by the soldier, and then he was set down against a line of crates acting as improvised railing for the camp’s perimeter.

“Who would have thought, a Corpie carrying a rook around like he was a baby ...” the corporal drawled in his deep voice. He didn’t sound altogether as offended as the words implied.

“Thank you ...”

“Don’t mention it. I’m Baylen.” The corporal thumbed at the nametag on his broad chest where, sure enough, his name was neatly printed along with his blood-type. They shook hands briefly, Toni’s fingers receiving a surprising gentle squeeze from his beefy shaker.

The recruit quietly observed his surroundings. Most of the camp’s population was still at the Click’s finishing line, and a solitary soldier manned a laptop at a desk to their left. To say it was windy up there would have been a gross understatement.

“This place is something else ...”

“Yeah, welcome to Valhalla Command, that heavenly place all true warriors ascend to after getting plastered by a Suit. Or something like that. You just sit there for a few mikes and take small sips from this bottle here, and I’ll return once your breath is back to get you stretching. Man, you stink, by the way ...” he added, chuckling as he stomped back towards the crowd.

Toni sat on the tiles alone for some time, keeping his eyes closed as his body slowly recovered, only his ears remaining attentive to their surroundings. Valhalla camp’s awning was set at its lowest point to the rear, and a continuous cascade of rainwater drained off behind him and downwards to the forest floor. After a while he noticed that he was wrapped in a thick grey blanket, and wondered when that had happened. Its enveloping hug spared him from the chilly wind’s worst bite, but still he continued to tremble.

Baylen returned with dry clothing and duly initiated him into a stretching routine. As he followed the corporal’s instructions, Toni heard the armored Suit moving far below, occasionally sounding the war-horn and that skin-crawling roar that, according to Baylen, had once been recorded from a mountain lion and since become a permanent addition to the Hammerhead’s playlist.

“So that’s a Hammerhead?”

“Yes and no.” Baylen answered as he helped him stretch his calves, “Hammerhead is what Joe Public knows it as, and it’s also the nick we have for the walker. It’s a Model 2 Tactical Armored Suit, and we call it the Hammerhead ‘cause the operational ones got a head that looks like those sharks. You know the ones, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Don’t sir me, respect me, you hear? We call the Hammer down below Headless. I guess that’s about the extent of our imagination. But its chassis and systems have seen better days, and though its OS is up-to-date, its hardware is not.”

“What’s an OS?”

The corporal chuckled. “You’ll find out if you make it into Suit School, rook. Haven’t passed your medical or the interview yet so don’t get too cocky over today. All it takes is a bad non-remediable gene, or maybe a bad interview, or maybe a screw-up on base, and you’ll be working Logistics and Support by the end of the day. So forget about the questions for now and keep up your stretching, alright?”

“These are the weirdest socks I’ve ever seen ...” Toni remarked as he inspected the footgear the corporal had brought with him.

Baylen laughed. “Those are moccasins, rook! Did you grow up on a farm, or something?”

Toni didn’t answer, but his ears began to glow cherry-red.

Before long he understood the corporal’s concern for him getting cocky about today. By the time Toni, newly clad in a polar-neck jersey, thick cotton trousers and the sock-like pair of moccasins, had joined the crowd by the finish line, the horn had blown six times. Despite that fact, he was still the only recruit to have reached the end of the Click, although only moments ago he had seen a female recruit execute the Leap into the Unknown. She had jumped face first only to be bushwhacked by Headless, the padded sledgehammer’s slap against her flailing body carrying all the way up to Valhalla, where it met with the delight of its inhabitants.

“Outstanding, Headless. The brass up here are pegging you as their new cleanup hitter.” The soldier beside Toni hollered into his radio, and he was answered from down below with the familiar feline roar. Toni wondered what the other recruits were thinking as they heard that sound, suddenly relieved at having been the first to go.

A voice squawked something out of the soldier’s hand-held radio that only he seemed to understand.

“Captain, Headless is saying the recruit fell off the net and can’t get back on!”

“Give her the two-mike penalty and stop her time.”

“Fifteen minutes, twenty and seven seconds, sir!”

“log it, Hank. What’s her name?”

“Sueli Cassel, code-name Blusher.” Someone answered as she perused a clipboard.

There were a few chuckles to that.

“That’s why I like Mason at Station One. He can pick up a candidate’s traits in a heartbeat!” The Captain remarked.

He was a heavyset man in his forties, who sported a wide black goatee in contrast to his shaved skull. Taking a seat on one of the few wooden stools, he supported an elbow against the desk beside him and eyed Toni.

“And he’s got enough asshole charm to get rid of the feebles before they get on my nerves.”

The captain had a pleasant enough voice, but Toni felt his hackles raise. There was an odd expression on the man’s face as he read what was written on the recruit’s forehead.

“Sir? Ribbon’s calling from station two. Says his nightscope’s running out of juice.”

“That’s ‘cause our sergeant’s keeping the scope up even when no one’s there. Tell him to use the ears the Gods graced him with and only punch it when he hears someone coming.”

The morning began to stretch out as the rain came and went, horns and roars and occasional raucous laughter filling the forest. The camp, suspended among the high trees by nets and cables, swayed in the occasional breeze.

Most of the sergeants and officers present on Valhalla didn’t appear to need to be there, and were regarding the Click as a kind of social event, complete with an improvised buffet table Toni didn’t dare approach despite his growling stomach. The few soldiers actually at work were the captain, a female sergeant named Miriam Reeves, Corporal Baylen and the two soldiers manning the electronic equipment. The radio-man, an agitated youth not much older than Toni, would receive news from his various sources on the ground and relay them to the officer. The news focused as much to the spirit with which the recruits were attacking the course as to their actual performance, and he found himself wondering what they had said about him.

It was eleven o’clock when Toni finally found himself again in the company of a fellow recruit.

Her leap into the unknown was original. The recruit launched herself headfirst through the passageway at a steep descent, prompting the Hammerhead’s first miss of the day as she splattered into the churned mud below. Apparently unhurt, she jumped fitfully away from the Suit and, spotting the nano-net above her, pounced upwards like a cat and gained a hold of its end. In that moment a second figure jumped through the wall, colliding against the armored Suit’s spaulder and somehow managing to grip onto its exposed artificial muscles. As the first to arrive finally clawed her way up the net, the second spotted her and launched himself onto it, colliding with and almost sending the female recruit back down into the mud. The spectators’ cheers were drowned out by the armored Suit’s frustrated roars as both recruits embarked on their scrambling climb to Valhalla.

The first to arrive was the female recruit, covered in mud but sporting an insane grin on her face as she scrambled onto the tiles. The male recruit, however, was the proud owner of a newly acquired gash spanning much of his forehead, exposing the pale bone beneath. His crash-helmet was missing.

Valhalla Camp’s medical evacuation procedure proved to be terrifying in its essence. Once his laceration had been briefly disinfected and bandaged, the recruit was fitted with a parachute and cursorily flung over the side. The chute deployed by cable, and within seconds the casualty had touched down on the forest floor. Shortly afterwards, a second Hammerhead showed up, unceremoniously picked up the recruit, wrapped him in parachute silk and stomped away with the boy held in its arms like an infant.

Toni began to wonder how they were going to leave Valhalla. When he asked the radio-operator about it, however, the soldier laughed.

“We’re going down the way you came up, chum, unless you brought a chute for yourself!”

Toni accompanied Baylen as he directed the remaining recruit to the camp’s rear. Pulling the awning’s fringe back from the nano-net it was suspended on, the corporal improvised a rainwater shower for her to wash off the mud.

With chestnut hair but the oddest almond-shaped aquamarine eyes, the recruit seemed unable to remove the grin from her face, and indeed he was unsurprised to find “HAPPYFACE” written on her forehead. The corporal treated her like a princess, keeping her company as he sent Toni to fetch dry clothing from a crate at the camp’s opposite end. By the time he returned it was clear why Baylen had done so.

The corporal was no longer alone with the recruit, having been intruded upon by a very irritated Second Sergeant Reeves, who had apparently taken it upon her shoulders to protect Happyface’s innocence. Baylen was stiffly ordered to vacate the premises along with a bewildered Toni.