First to Fight (4 page)

“Hey!” Butch exclaimed suddenly. “Why the Marines? I thought you were settled on the army?”

Dean shrugged and his face reddened. “I don’t know, Butch, I just changed my mind.” He didn’t want to explain what had happened—he didn’t know if he could explain it.

Butch reflected for a moment. Dean had been working for him for five years, all through college. The young man would have quit to join the army much earlier, but when he’d finished high school, his mother wouldn’t sign the papers to waive college. “Ah, well, Joe, you’ll make a good Marine!” Butch stuck his hand out. He remembered the time a drunken deckhand on a Canadian hydrofoil had threatened to throw some passengers overboard. When he began roughing one of them up, Dean, only sixteen at the time, had stepped up and knocked the man unconscious with one blow. “Ah, shit, kid, I’ll miss you! You’ll make a damn fine Marine. Good luck to you!” They shook hands.

For the first time since he’d decided to enlist, Joe Dean felt a twinge of sadness. He never thought he’d regret leaving New Rochester, a dreary place on the shores of Lake Ontario, about twenty miles west of the site that had been Rochester, in the state of New York, before the Second American Civil War. The old city had been completely destroyed in the war and then rebuilt farther west about eighty years afterward. But he’d liked Butch Buczkowski, a rough and profane but honest and fair man.

Saying good-bye to his mother was much harder. But she had known this was coming for years and had prepared herself for it. He had not been prepared, though, and the next morning as he trudged away from the dingy complex where they lived, his throat was so constricted he could hardly breathe. His mother had refused to go with him because she knew he’d need the long walk to recover from their parting. She hugged him long and hard and silently right at the last. He had almost made it to the government building in the downtown section before the tears in his eyes had dried enough so he could see clearly.

CHAPTER

TWO

“Recruits!” Corporal Bulldog Bildong barked. “Stand at—ease!”

The slim officer who had just administered the Oath of Enlistment to the fifty-five men standing before him looked them over before saying anything further. The officer, a captain, Dean thought, looked to be about thirty-five years old. He was wearing a bloodred tunic with an epaulette on each shoulder and a high stock collar bearing the rampant-eagle device; his trousers were a bright gold. On each shoulder board was his insignia of rank, one gold orb. The captain had told them his name was Samson Malimaliumu. He began speaking in a clipped, rapid-fire voice:

“At ten hours you will depart here for the New Rochester spaceport, where you will board a shuttle bound for the starship CNSS
Private Thomas Purdom,
which is in docking orbit three hundred kilometers above Earth, for transit to the training world Arsenault. Arsenault is nearly two hundred light-years from Earth. The trip, mostly in hyperspace, will take approximately thirty Earth days. The
Purdom
has a complement of one thousand naval personnel. You will be traveling with approximately three thousand other recruits, most of them army and navy enlistees, all of them from Earth. The other recruits will be rendezvousing at the depot from other ports around the globe. Once all the other Marine recruits are aboard, you’ll be formed into your training company en route to Arsenault. You’ll train in that company until you graduate—if you live that long. Arsenault is a very tough world and the drill instructors are even tougher. Upon graduation from Boot Camp, you will be assigned to the Fleet. Other training companies are being formed on the other worlds where we recruit and they will arrive at Arsenault at different times during your training cycle, but you won’t have much contact with them, or with any Marines other than your drill instructors, until completion of your recruit training. In peacetime, Earth ships out recruits every six months. Your training will commence the moment you board the
Purdom.
You will be issued all necessary items of clothing and equipment while aboard her. By the time you reach our training base on Arsenault you will be familiar with the organization, history, and traditions of the Marine Corps; the rank structure of the Corps; the Confederation’s system of military justice; the basic school of the Marine, including military courtesy, the manual of arms, close-order drill, how to wear the uniform, basic squad formations and the duties of the combat infantryman; you will learn basic weapons assembly and disassembly.

“Any questions? No? Corporal!”

Corporal Bildong came to attention facing the captain. “Sir!” he barked.

“You have command, Corporal.”

“Aye aye, sir.” He turned back to the recruits. “Detachment, atten-HUT!” Behind him Captain Malimaliumu marched out of the room.

At Bildong’s command, the recruits tried with considerable lack of success, and many imaginative variations, to assume the military position of attention.

The corporal rolled his eyes and snorted. “Well, my little dukbirds, at least you got a job for the next eight years!” A few of the recruits laughed at the remark and Bildong silenced them with a ferocious frown. “Okay, stand at ease,” he commanded resignedly. “You’ll learn all the military stuff when you get aboard the
Purdom.
Right now, here are meal chits for all of you. There’s a cafeteria in the basement of this building. Go on down there, eat breakfast, and wait there for further instructions—that means don’t leave the cafeteria, not for any reason. That gives you an hour to eat and get acquainted. Take your personal stuff with you.”

“How soon do we get our guns and go and fight?” someone asked abruptly.

Bildong quickly fixed him with a steely look. “You want to fight?” he snarled, then continued in a calm but firm voice, “Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance. You’ll get more chances to fight than anybody could want.” He walked over to the recruit, a short, skinny, uncommonly black man. “And I guarantee you,” he continued, staring into his eyes from inches away, “the first time you get into a fight, you’ll wish to whatever god you pray to that you’d never heard of the Confederation Marine Corps. When Marines fight, people die. And some of those people are Marines. Maybe you. If you go into combat with the attitude you seem to have right now, you’ll probably die in your first firefight.” He stepped back and swiveled his head to look at everyone. “Any of you think you’re tough guys? You think you know how to fight? Well, what you know is fun and games. This is no game, people. This is about life and death. A lot of death.”

A long silence descended upon the recruits, fifty-five pairs of young eyes glued to the figure of the corporal. A chill had run through the room. These young people had enlisted in the Corps for the usual reasons people had been joining the military since at least the time of the Romans: to test themselves, to get away from home, to travel, to have fun in foreign parts—both geographical and anatomical. Now, dimly, they were beginning to realize that the Confederation Corps of Marines might have its own serious plans for them that had nothing to do with travel and fun, especially not fun.

“Anybody else have a dumb question?” Bildong asked when the silence had stretched long enough to be uncomfortable.

“Uh, Corporal, when will we get the full briefing Sergeant Riley-Kwami mentioned yesterday?” Joe Dean asked innocently.

“Sergeant
Riley-Kwami?” Bildong asked. “I don’t know any
Sergeant
Riley-Kwami.” Then an expression of surprised realization slowly came over his face. “Or do you mean,” he began slowly, “
Master
Sergeant Riley-Kwami ?”

“Uh, yes, uh, aye aye,” Dean stammered, uncertain what he’d done wrong.

Bildong shuddered, then looked away and waved a hand at him. “Never mind with the ‘aye aye,’ you’ll learn how to use the word properly later on.” He looked back at Dean. “You did mean Master Sergeant Riley-Kwami?”

Not trusting his voice, Dean nodded.

“A sergeant has one more stripe than I do,” Bildong explained with exaggerated patience. “
A master sergeant
has a good many more than that. We’re not the army—we make the distinction.” He paused to see if his point had gotten across, then continued, “Now, I believe you asked a dumb question?” He waited, and when Dean didn’t answer, said, “Repeat your question.”

“Uh, what about the full briefing Ma-master Sergeant Riley-Kwami said we were going to get before boarding ship?”

Bildong regarded him with wide-eyed amazement for a moment. “Sweet Jesus Muhammad, you a comedian or sumptin’?” Then he shook his head. “Recruit, you just got all the ‘briefing’ you’re gonna get until you step aboard the troopship. Then they’ll ‘brief’ you until it oozes outta your ears. Now go on down and get some slop. Might as well start getting used to Marine Corps food. Take the first ladder—that’s what you probably call a stairway—on the left after you exit this room. When you’re done, stay in the cafeteria. An NCO will join you there later to escort you to the port.”

The cafeteria indeed served something that resembled “slop,” and within seconds, with the fifty-five recruits crowding in, it was overfull and noisy. Fortunately, Dean was one of the first recruits in line, so he was able to find an empty table in a comer where he set his loaded tray. He took a taste of the glutinous material dished up as hot cereal and marveled at what they’d managed to do with plastic these days.

“Sit with you?” someone said. It was the skinny black kid who’d asked when would they get to fight. “My name’s Frederick Douglass McNeal. But everybody calls me Fred.”

“Joe Dean,” he replied, and shook McNeal’s outstretched hand. He was struck by McNeal’s dark complexion. It seemed as out of place in this room full of shades of brown as did his own fair face. He remembered his recruiter saying, “We don’t see many pure anybodies anymore.” In a way, his almost-pure Irish ancestry and McNeal’s evident almost-pure African gave them something in common.

“Guess we’re both on Corporal Bildong’s shortlist with our dumb questions, huh?” McNeal asked. Before Dean could respond, he said, “Look over there!” Dean glanced in the direction McNeal nodded and saw nothing but other recruits. “Look, look.” McNeal pointed with his fork. “That girl.” He indicated one of the cafeteria’s counterwomen. Dean hadn’t taken much notice of the cafeteria workers. This one looked pretty plain to him.

“What about her?”

McNeal leaned his head closer and whispered, “Does she shuck?”

“Huh? What?”

“You know.” McNeal arched his shoulders and made an open gesture with his hands. Seeing Dean still didn’t catch his meaning, he pounded one fist gently into a palm.

“Oh,” Dean said. Redness instantly crept up to his hairline from under his collar. The survivor’s benefit from his father’s pension wasn’t very much and he’d had to work most of the way through high school and college to supplement it, and didn’t have much time or energy left over for an active social life. So he was particularly inexperienced with women, and in fact had never done anything more daring with a girl than hold her hand. The only woman with any meaning in his life up to then had been his mother, whom he loved, and he saw all other women in the same light.

Seeing Dean’s embarrassment, McNeal apologized quickly. “I’ve got a big mouth.”

“That’s okay,” Dean said. He was relieved that McNeal wasn’t going to rib him about his inexperience. “Where you from, Fred?” he asked, changing the subject.

“Churchville,” Fred answered quickly, then launched into his favorite topic: “They named me after a saint,” he began, and enthusiastically told Dean all about himself. Dean reciprocated. By the time they were finished with what they could eat of their breakfast, the two had become friends. They were an incongruous pair, Fred McNeal, short and wiry and very black, and Joe Dean, tall and fair with reddish-brown hair and a face full of freckles.

After a while Dean leaned over and asked McNeal, “Say, have you ever, you know, did it, uh, with a girl, Fred?”

“Hell no.” McNeal laughed, covering his own embarrassment at the directness of the question. “Who needs a woman when you got these,” and he held up the fingers of his right hand.

Breakfast over—the recruits were still too raw to think of the meal as “morning chow”—they cleared their trays and sat at their tables, waiting for the escort NCO to show up. And wait they did, sitting and standing around the way enlisted men of all armies at all times in all places have always waited.

“Why’d they make us come in at eight?” McNeal asked after more than an hour of sitting at the cleared breakfast table.

Dean shook his head. “I don’t know. My dad was in the army, and he always complained about ‘Hurry up and wait.’ I guess this is what he was talking about.”

“Didn’t that officer say we were going to the ship at ten?” another recruit, who overheard him, asked.

“I think so.”

“So it’s half past now.”

Dean shrugged. His father had been a career army man, and he didn’t really know any more about the Marines than his companions, probably less since he’d made the decision to join the Marines only the day before.

Clearly annoyed that the recruits were lingering so long after breakfast, but unable to do anything about it, the civilian cafeteria workers tried as best they could to prepare for the noon meal.

At 10:45 a voice cracked over the hubbub. “Attention on deck!” About half of the new recruits continued their conversations.

The man who had called for attention was a sharp-looking corporal who’d entered the cafeteria quietly and unnoticed. When he saw he didn’t have the room’s full attention, he sighed and jumped onto a chair and from there onto an empty tabletop. “SILENCE!” he bellowed in a voice that carried more than two hundred years of parade-ground authority. Startled, the recruits turned their attention to him. The civilian workers had all heard this routine before and, since it wasn’t directed at them, ignored it.

“That’s better,” the corporal said in a voice still powerful and penetrating but several decibels lower. He was of average height and build, with a dark complexion. His main distinguishing feature was a fierce, sweeping, black mustache. But with all eyes in the room fastened upon him, he seemed somehow larger than his actual physical size. Dean recognized the voice he’d used. His father had often projected his own that way and he called it his “command voice.” He also realized that this corporal was a man used to commanding and being obeyed.

“I am Corporal Singh, and you are in my charge. From this moment until you finish your training on Arsenault—those of you who survive it—I will be with you, day and night.”

“Oooh, one powerful, take-charge bozek, that corporal!” McNeal whispered into Dean’s ear.

Somehow Singh heard. “Who said that?” he shouted. Again the recruits jumped at the sound of the corporal’s parade-ground voice. The cafeteria workers continued about their business. “Now you people listen up,” Singh shouted. “Two things I do not want to hear from any of you while I’m talking: your chow hole and your asshole!” The “hole” of “asshole” echoed in the comers of the room and out in the hallway, and people passing along the corridor on the floor above wondered idly who was doing all the shouting about holes. The silence that now descended upon the recruits was profound.

“Now listen up! You people may think you’re about to embark on some kind of camping trip or big adventure. Well, I’m here to set you straight. My Marine Corps has been around for 225 years and we proudly trace our lineage all the way back to the United States Marine Corps, and through them to the Royal Marines of the United Kingdom—two of the fiercest bands of warriors ever to grace humanity. My job is to see that none of you screws up my Corps, and by all the prophets, I will see to it! We are warriors! That’s our sole reason for existence. We fight and we kill. Believe me, that is no kind of camping trip or big adventure. For more than two centuries we have fought in campaigns and wars everywhere there has been fighting.” As he spoke he paced back and forth on the tabletop. The recruits slowly edged closer to each other for protection from this suddenly very fearsome man. “Not once in our history have we been bested on the battlefield. Some of the fiercest fighters in Human Space have surrendered by the thousands without a shot being fired rather than risk being defeated by an eleven-man squad of Confederation Marines.