Kennedy Hudner: Alarm of War

P.D. 948

The Recruit

In Victorian Space, on the Planet Christchurch

The recruiting sergeant wasn’t sure what to make of her.

At twenty-seven, she was older than his usual recruits. Usually he had nervous eighteen year olds, fresh out of high school, clueless and looking for something they really weren’t sure of. Adventure. Excitement. Something other than the home they had grown up in. Sometimes they were miners in their early twenties, thick necked and dirt stained, looking to get off Christchurch and not having enough education to do anything else but join the Fleet. Other times the recruits were bored and restless, or in trouble.

Plus, she had some education. Gods of Our Mothers, she not only went through college, she actually had a master’s degree. Sgt. Martinez shook his head. A master’s degree. He had barely made it through high school. Why on earth would anyone with a master’s degree want to join the Fleet?

She sat still, looking at him. She was attractive, but hardly glamorous. Small, almost petite, with coffee skin, very dark eyes and black hair, all pretty much average for a woman born on Christchurch. But she held his gaze without looking away, showed no anxiety or discomfort. He almost had the impression that she was interviewing him, not the other way around.

He just wasn’t sure what to make of her.

Sergeant Martinez glanced at her application folder once more. “Says here you got a college degree,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes.” Nothing more, just “Yes.”

“What was your degree, Miss Tuttle?”

“History.”

“And what have you been doing for a living?”

Her mouth twitched then, a mere hint of a smile. “I’m a sales clerk in a furniture store. Or was, anyway.”

Martinez raised his eyebrows in question.

Tuttle shrugged. “Christchurch is not exactly at the heart of Victoria’s economic juggernaut, Sergeant. The furniture store closed and I was laid off.”

Martinez felt himself grow irritated. “So you can’t find a job and decided you might as well join the Fleet, is that it?”

She shook her head, her black hair swirling around her neck. “No, I had already decided I wanted to join, but my mother was still alive. She needed me to take care of her.”

“Fleet doesn’t have a lot of use for history majors, Miss Tuttle.”

Her black eyes fixed on him for several beats. “I would have thought I would be an attractive candidate, Sergeant.”

“You’re pretty small to be a soldier,” he said.

“I want to join the Fleet, Sergeant, not the Marines.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Anyway, I bet they said the same thing about you.”

Sgt. Martinez, all five feet one inch of him, blinked twice, then laughed out loud. “Yes, Miss Tuttle, they certainly did.” He laughed again. “They certainly did.”

She smiled for the first time. Her black eyes grew luminous with their shared mirth. Sgt. Martinez felt the force of her smile, felt a little tingle. Then she leaned forward, earnest and intense. “I want to join, Sergeant. I’m educated, single, no family ties. I’m smart and…” Unexpectedly, she faltered.

“And?” he queried.

She took a breath. “And…I want to serve something bigger than myself.”

Well, well. Just when you think they can’t surprise you anymore… Martinez drummed the table with his fingers. Then he stood and reached out a hand. She took it and he shook her hand. “Welcome to the Fleet, Miss Tuttle. I hope you are as happy with it as I think it will be with you.”

It wasn’t until later that he noticed her field of studies for the master’s degree: the History of Conflict. He thought for a few minutes, then took a pen and carefully put a check mark in the top right corner of her application. It was a sergeant-to-sergeant thing. Her applications papers became part of her personnel file and would go with her to the two-year training program on Aberdeen. The check mark meant, “Watch this one, she could be good.”

He didn’t use it often.

P.D. 948

The Recruit

At Victorian Fleet Training Facility on Aberdeen

For Emily, the first two months of basic training was like watching a laboratory experiment in behavior modification, but from the rat’s point of view.

The space flight from Christchurch to Aberdeen had been uneventful. When they arrived, she and hundreds of other recruits had been kept waiting for hours until the buses came to take them to Camp Gettysburg, the sprawling military base that was the training center for some twenty thousand recruits each year.

The buses reached the camp in the middle of the night, causing one of the recruits- a teenager, really — to groan, “God, I’m looking forward to some sleep!” Emily had suppressed a smile. She had read enough books on military training to know that none of them would be allowed to sleep for some time yet. Sure enough, they were herded off the buses, run across a large parade field, and then pushed into a sloppy semblance of order by screaming drill sergeants. As tired as she was, Emily wanted to laugh. It was all so obvious. A quick glance at her fellow recruits, however, revealed the Fleet’s time-tested formula for basic training was working. To a person they looked scared, flustered and unsettled. Ready, in other words, to be broken down and then rebuilt to fit the needs of the Fleet.

The first weeks passed in a haze of fatigue and pain. Emily was assigned to Training Company Baker, run by Drill Sergeant Kaelin and ten Drill Instructors. She slept in a barracks with forty-nine other women, but all of the training was co-ed. The three weeks were occupied with nothing but physical strengthening and verbal intimidation from the Drill Instructors. No recruit could do anything right, and the Drill Instructors made sure they knew it. Every day each of them had one or more DIs screaming spittle in their face. Each night some of the women recruits cried themselves to sleep. One of the men lost his temper and when a Drill Instructor pushed him, he pushed back. A mistake. An instant later he was on the ground, his eye already swelling shut from the blow that put him there, and then he was yanked to his feet and dragged away. They didn’t see him again.

The verbal abuse and intimidation did not bother Emily. She knew what they were doing. She would play the game. She would run and sweat and scream ‘Sir, yes Sir!’ and do whatever they wanted her to do. She had a goal: she was going to be a Fleet Historian. If she had to get through basic training to accomplish that goal, she would, and she was not going to let some screaming DI rattle her.

But in the third week, Sergeant Kaelin found her out.

It was her own fault. Drill Instructor Johnson was giving hell to another recruit. The recruit — Jeffers — had gotten so nervous that he had hyperventilated and, quite suddenly, crumbled to the ground, out cold. DI Johnson had stepped back, a look of astonishment on his face. The astonishment was soon replaced by irritation.

“Get up, damn you!” he roared at the unconscious form on the ground. “I’m not finished with you yet!”

That was too much for Emily. Laughter spluttered from her lips before she could stop herself, then she realized that Sgt. Kaelin was staring right at her. Still fighting the giggles, she thought, What the hell… and winked at him. Kaelin continued to stare at her without any change of expression, then abruptly turned and walked away.

Later that afternoon, dragging in from a five mile run — her years in the library had not prepared her for this — Sgt. Kaelin was standing in front of the administration building, hands on his hips.