Fabienne Gschwind - The Fallen Heroine

I had a sore muscle from yesterday, but felt incredibly strong today. I had never felt such a zest for life as I did today.

The boss manually operated the controls and unleashed one repro dummy after another on me. Again and again, Tartelette made loud announcements, "Good balance." “Footwork; we need to improve." "Good reflexes." "Shoulder mobility; we need to improve significantly....", "The kid is talented."

At one point I was just lying on the ground panting heavily and had been knocked down what felt like fifty times.

"Killed 23 times in an hour," Tartelette was already correcting the number downward as well.

"Not bad." She reached out and pulled me up as if I were a feather. She looked at me with her icy stare. She patted my belly. "Bit less fat and bit more muscle. You'll turn into something. And then we just have to make sure that all the female fans don't interfere with your work. "

She laughed and then became serious: "Our second-to-last apprentice died on his second assignment, after five days! The last apprentice girl after four months. I really hope you can last longer! So in the field, you'll stay close to me..."

The next day I had on-call duty, where I was off but was supposed to be on call. It was a beautiful early summer day. I sat down on the beach "Plage des Minimes" very close to where I lived. Mainly I lay on my stomach and read books or kept my diary and completed it.

On the whole, everything had been a lot of fun much better than what I had expected. I liked the idea of becoming a professional reprokiller and saving hundreds of people's lives. My colleagues were great and I also really liked Tartelette's gruff manner.

I took my old-fashioned paper book on French history - history is my hobby - and started to read.

I loved reading and my favorite subject, I can only emphasize, was French history.

I had an eight-volume volume on the subject of the “Evolution of french Monarchy." After Charles Martell, Louis XIV and Napoleon came the part that excited me the most: the resurgence of the monarchy during the First Trireligious War. When the world was overrun with assassinations and no one knew who to trust anymore. Corrupt politicians? Self-appointed dictators? Gen-Manipulated policemen and soldiers who, instead of protecting the population, shot unrestrainedly into the crowd? And then there were the nobles. With their coat of arms and mottoes that pointed to the permanence of the nobility and showed that they had survived everything and would still be there.

"Permanence for Europe: monarchy proven for thousands of years", was the motto. A first popular uprising in Hungary led to the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy flourishing again.

Democracy had thus only lasted barely two hundred years. Nobles and royalty took over throughout Europe and other continents. The nobles formed the governments, took over the judiciary and occupied all politically important offices.

The next day nothing else was going on, Emily and Gabin were working out in our gym or reading theory sessions. I had been given the shooting room at Tartelette's request. I practiced as much as I could. My survival depended on it, as it slowly dawned on me, and that created incredible motivation.

Tartelette had put us through a rigorous program, as I now saw. The program included strength training, mobility training, relaxation exercises, shooting exercises, machete training and theory blocks. In between, long-distance ocean swimming, running, hand-to-hand combat, climbing, first aid, zoology, survival training, and all that military procedure.

"Hop, don't be lazy, Gabin 100 pushups, Emily 50, me 120! Ship's boy, you're on break!", Tartelette also commanded and everyone gathered on the floor in our gym groaning. But nothing came of my break. Thibault rumbled into the basement and grabbed me by the collar. He was wearing his headset and data goggles so he could answer emergency calls immediately.

He rushed me through all the military drill. To make matters worse, he pulled out a thick book of ranks from between the storage shelves and gave it to me to memorize. A little pissed off by this order, I returned to the others. They were standing in the small control room to the shooting cellar and evaluating the protocols.

The logs also showed that Tartelette had done several thousand hours of simulated combat, not just repro battles, but everything the software could give. She seemed to train two to four additional hours almost every night. When she slept was a mystery to me. "It may be that I'm genetically predestined ... I've always been more athletic and stronger than others. But everything else is practice, practice and practice," she told me. “During a mission you are only as good as you are in your worst training”.

In the evening we went straight on and for me shooting training was on the agenda again. I began to wonder what had happened to all the free time we had been promised during the two weeks of basic training.

After all, they had said that we would only have a four-day week. And after heavy deployments, at least three extra holidays. Maybe that was the case with regular units, but certainly not with Tamara's unit.

Tartelette also came down to the basement again after she had done her office work and gave me a telling off. For the twentieth time she stressed that I should finally take up marathon running. "Your endurance and agility are grotty. So now get out of here, I want to practice."

That must have been around ten o'clock at night. At home, my refrigerator was yawningly empty and I had gotten something to eat from a brasserie.

"Muscles need rest to grow, it's called supercompensation," Tartelette explained to me. Emily had prepared breakfast and set out extra protein drinks for me. "So you can build muscle mass and get as big and strong as Gabin," she smiled as Gabin took off his uniform jacket and posed like a bodybuilder. Tartelette joined him and performed some ninja pressure technique on Gabin, who fell to the ground like a potatoe bag. I watched in fascination - I really had to learn that trick.

Breakfast sort of turned into brunch while Tartelette watched helmet video with us and gave us tips on what we could improve.

Someone knocked on the door. Our ReS doctor, Doctor Selger, entered. "Ah, the vampire. Well roll up your sleeves, folks." The doctor was used to these jokes, as he came by every two weeks to draw blood and do other tests that were on his long list.

Since we came in contact with repro so frequently, it was important to check us regularly for blood count changes. In addition, we were closely supervised by fitness trainers and physical therapists. After all, we had to be fit to fight again in the shortest possible time after injuries, so we received the best possible medical care. Gabin, with his broken ribs, was ready for action again after only six hours in the regeneration tank.

Tartelette rolled up her sleeve and extended her forearm to the doctor. Afterwards, Emily went to the shooting range and Gabin wedged himself behind some theory sessions, while Doctor Selger suddenly turned to Tartelette. "Commander, have you committed this boy yet? Because of paragraph 24(4)?"

I had opened the large ReS manual on my computer and looked up in amazement.

Tartelette was looking at me with a strange expression on her face. "Boy, wait in the old coffee room. Gabin, where do you keep your wonder magazines?"

Somewhat confused, I stood up and walked to the unused chamber where packaging, boxes, cleaning robots, and old combat armors piled up. What on earth was the boss planning to do with me? Suddenly, she stood behind me and pushed me roughly onto a crate while she pulled the door shut behind her. "So, you must have had biology in school?"