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We emerged into the middle of a multistory building, kind of an atrium without glass. The light was artificial. Around us, snowflake-like, six wings of barracks in six levels. “This is Operant Training Barracks Two, your new home! Each bay holds one section in three squad rooms! The squads I am now assigning you to will be your place here until you are otherwise notified! The assignments have been made at company level and are not subject to appeal! Your squad leader has been apprised of your joining their squad and has your records! Your first assignment will be to stow your gear, change your wet disgusting clothes and report to your squad Leader! Move”
My datalink informed me I was being assigned to Third Squad, Third Section, Fourth Platoon, First Troop. What that meant was I was in Bay Six on what Americans like myself would describe as the fifth floor. When I informed Asto of that, he said he was in Second Squad, First Section of the same Platoon, in Bay Four of the same floor. Well, it could have been worse. We’d known they wouldn’t put us in the same squad, no matter what. At least he was only two bays over, when he might not have been in the same building or even at the same base. I saw a couple other recruits teleport up to their new assignments, and nobody called them on it, so I followed suit. I walked into Bay Six, found Third Squad’s room, noted that one bunk of the sixteen bunk beds was empty, along with the corresponding footlocker. No sleep fields here. I used perception to check my bunkmate’s use of her locker, peeled my wet field uniform off along with the underclothes, dressed in another outfit, identical to the first. My civilian clothes went under the stack of neatly folded clean uniforms on the right of my locker, then I went into the squad bathroom to wring out my soaked used set before depositing it on the left side of my locker. Perhaps eight people would be comfortable in that bathroom. Too bad it had to serve thirty-three. The squad room as a whole looked like it had all the privacy one could reasonably expect in building full of operants. Unless the double doors into the section bay were open, nobody could see in. Of course, being operants, everyone else around me had a sense of perception, too, and even if that had not been the case, there was absolutely no privacy from other members of your squad. I’d had a few years to get used to the fact that the Empire didn’t segregate by sexes, or I might have been really taken aback. The only ripple from Asto at the notion was mild amusement at the fact I still wasn’t completely acculturated on that point. It also looked like eating was permitted in barracks – there was a large, neatly stacked pile of Life bars, next to a similar, even larger pile of water cubes.
That accomplished, my datalink told me my squad was doing something called obstacle course three. Well, I’d seen army movies back home, so I thought I might have some idea of what that entailed, and silently damned Instructor Jereya for telling me to change out of one soaked uniform in order to promptly soak another. I escalatored myself down to the main floor by jumping over the railing and slowing my fall with matris. It seemed the fastest way down. The portal refused my request, so I took off out the front door of the barracks at a run, headed for where my datalink told me my squad and its Leader were. I teleported twice when I could see far enough to make it worth my while. Even so, it took a good five minutes – about eight and a half Earth – to get to where I was going, by which time I was soaked again.
While I ran, I reviewed the military protocol that had now been downloaded into my datalink. Guardians were expected to make good use of their faster, augmented brain, where a natural state human would require more time to absorb it. I might get away with not having it completely down for the first day, but I’d be held responsible for the most important parts immediately. Which was probably why they were making me run in the rain.
Even before I got to the squad Leader, the first thing I noticed about my fellow trainees was their emaciated, hollow look, like they were on the ragged edge of repshanti.Was this what I had to look forward to? Available evidence said it was.And yes, it was outdoors in the rain and the mud just like you might have surmised, and the temperature was barely above freezing. “Sir, Trainee Grace Juarez reporting as ordered!” The Imperial procedure and salute were essentially identical to Earth, palm out like the British, for similar reasons. Convergent evolution of ideas.
He was wearing the same uniform as Instructor Jereya, with one difference. His insignia of rank had red above the horizontal white bar in his insignia, green below. “Leader Dakar, trainee,” he returned my salute, “Grab a set of weights and get started!” In a locker were sets of five weights, two for wrists, two for ankles, one for your torso that strapped on via a belt and shoulder straps. I quickly put on the wrist weights – five prime of mass each, or a shade under four kilos – followed by the ankle weights, which were twice as heavy, and the back weight, which was a full thirty prime, over twenty kilos. Altogether, it was just under forty-seven Earth kilos of weight, or about one hundred three pounds. Over the last couple years, I’d increased my height to five foot six (168 centimeters, or two ififths, thirtyfour isixths by Imperial measure) and my weight to 185 pounds (eighty-four kilos, or one square, forty-seven prime by Imperial measure) although thanks to high density tissue it looked more like 150 pounds. Over a hundred extra pounds was quite an addition. I could do it – I’d been augmenting my muscles since I went operant – but it wasn’t trivial.
“Tighten those shoulder straps, trainee!” Dakar told me, “Course rule: no matrisassists! Follow Nushto!” indicating a man slightly taller than myself but who had probably the gauntest appearance I had ever seen, wearing some sort of tabs that made him stand out from the other trainees. I took note of the prohibition, complied with both instructions, and fell in behind the emaciated man. Matris was the ability it might be easiest to think of as telekinesis, although it could produce many other effects as well.
I’m Nushto, trainee team leader,one of them told me, First thing you need to know, he sent to me, is that this phase of training is all about keeping us at the ragged edge of our strength, endurance, and agility. This particular course is testing if we’ve augmented our muscles well enough. Follow me and do the same things I do. If you slip, you are allowed to save yourself but then you have to go back to the start.
The course was an ithird in length, or about two and a third kilometers, if you followed the track on the ground. It wasn’t a horizontal course. It started out as a jungle gym, climbing and swinging, then a couple of standing jumps of about four meters – in the rain and carrying a forty-seven Earth kilograms in extra weight, mind you – at an altitude of over twenty meters. Four obstacle walls, each about thirty-five meters high, and you had to climb both up and down with Leaders telling you to “Go faster, you waste of an opportunity! People behind you might make soldiers if you don’t hold them up!” Then a water tunnel where you swam/climbed uphill against a current, then a pair of things that looked like fifty meter paddlewheels you had to clamber up first like a monkey, switch to jumping on the outer edges of the planks – their edges were about five centimeters wide – to get over the top, and then clamber down the planks on the far side. Did I mention the planks were moving against your direction of travel and there was slick gooey mud at the bottom which stuck to everything? Then a comparatively short low crawl through thick mud that was the easiest part of the course, although I wished it could have been before the water tunnel, then back to more jungle gyms, more walls, several rope obstacles and a few pole obstacles, and finally something that reminded me conceptually of a three dimensional version of the training apparatus in Kung Fu Panda. It wouldn’t kill you, but if you timed it wrong or zagged when you should have zigged, you took one hell of a blow and your lap didn’t count. Your datalink was constantly updated with your time and where you should be if you wanted to pass the phase, judging from the time you’d last passed the starting beacon.
After about three hours (a little over five Earth hours), the temperature dropped and the rain turned to snow and the water on the ground and obstacles started turning to ice. For whatever reason, the Leaders decided we’d had enough of the obstacle course about then and formed us all up into squads and set us off on a cross country run through the snow. Double interval, ten slightly longer paces per second, each squad in its own direction. Lord forbid we travelled a previously broken trail through the accumulating snow. At intervals of three ithirds (about seven kilometers Earth distance), the column leaders would drop back to the end to rotate who had the job of head plow. No, we didn’t take the weights off. But people took out bars of Life and started gnawing on them, and someone passed me one. You couldn’t really eat them like you can your average fruit and cereal bar. They had a tough, chewy texture and taste, kind of like rubberized granola except that what you thought was fiber, was instead a stringy artificial product that bound fat and protein and carbs all together. Life was dry as hell, but it was higher in calories than pure fat. You had to gnaw it off the bar, usually in conjunction with drinking water. Three to five ounces of Life would feed a normal person with normal activities for a day.
In case you hadn’t figured it out, you can’t put normal “natural state” humans though that kind of workout. Even if they didn’t fall and severely injure themselves, and even if they did manage to perform all of the physical feats required, they’d get hypothermia and die in short order. If you did it on a more amenable day when the hypothermia didn’t happen, they’d hit a fatigue barrier in no time. Even if they could do it once, they couldn’t keep doing it over and over, lap after lap and mile after mile, never mind whatever else they’d been doing. I’d heard a rumor a couple times that Guardian’s military physical training was the same as natural state humans, which would have been trivial for us. I found out firsthand that first day how false that rumor was. I was cold, wet and miserable the whole time, but everyone else kept their mouths shut so I did, too.
Copyright 2014 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.
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