"Piers Anthony - Bio of a Space Tyrant 02 - Mercenary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

"But I'm underage," I said, though I wanted no part of deportation to Callisto, where at best I would face indefinite prison. If the Halfcal bureaucracy was as inefficient as that of Jupiter, they probably would not be able to identify me, and that could save my life; but still there was no future for me there. Yet I had tried to join the Navy before and learned that seventeen was their minimum enlistment age. I lacked six months.

"We have two affidavits attesting to your age as seventeen," he said tiredly, as if accustomed to the prevarications of migrant scum. "You are eligible for induction."

"Two?" I was amazed by this detail. "Who?"

He checked the papers on his desk impatiently. "Rivers, half-brother of the deceased, who testifies that the deceased informed him you were of age, and that the deceased was in a position to know."

Rivers! Now I remembered that he had said he owed me one. It seemed this was his way of paying. Joe might have told him I had tried to enlist in the Navy; Joe would not have lied about my age. All the migrants knew I faced trouble on Callisto, for I had told my story in full detail several times.

"He also testified that you had no part in the incitement to riot, though the deceased was a friend of yours. That you had been ill. A blood test confirmed mild contamination in your system, evidently from defective food. Rivers will be put on trial for riot, but we seem to have no reason to doubt his statements concerning you." He leafed through more pages. "The other statement is by your uncle Worry, confirming your age."

Worry! So he had been true to the brotherhood of the song!

"Nothing I can say would convince you that I am underage for induction?" I asked.

"We have the affidavits," he repeated firmly.

I sighed. Please don't throw me in that briar patch! I had tried to tell the truth, and they wouldn't listen. "Then you had better draft me."

And that was the manner of my enlistment as a common soldier in the Jupiter Navy, at age sixteen and a half. My career as an alien mercenary had begun.



Chapter 2 BASIC TRAINING



It would be tedious to describe in detail the whole of basic training, surely already familiar to the twenty-seventh-century citizen. The initial stage was a jumble of hurry-up-and-waits, of stripping and being reclothed completely, of taking batteries of tests for intelligence and aptitudes and skills, after a night with four hours sleep in a recalcitrant hammock. Hammocks are handy in space, because they adapt automatically to changes of thrust, but sleeping in them is an art that is not mastered instantly. I managed to make up the loss by sleeping through parts of several tests, by punching computer terminal buttons randomly in rapid order so as to finish early. I was a survivor. I was assigned to a barracks ship similar in certain respects to the migrant-labor ships I had been in before. That housing made it easy to ferry our company to any part of the base or nearby space for the various training exercises; in fact, sometimes we were moved while we slept. We never knew what new hazard we would emerge to, and perhaps that was best.

I was part of the 666th Training Battalion, nicknamed "Hell's Rejects," for reasons relating to occidental mythology or numerology and the supposed savagery of the exercises. It had three companies, A, B, and C-I was in A for Awful-each of which had three platoons, each of which had three sections. The Jupiter Navy was trilaterally organized. One platoon in Awful was female. There were thirty trainees and five supervisory personnel in each platoonship, and additional cadre in each company, so Awful had a total manpower of one hundred fifty. But I was in regular contact only with the people of my own platoon; the other two platoons were of largely peripheral awareness, and the other companies might as well not have existed. My whole attention, like that of my fellow recruits, was occupied just getting through training.

We marched, we did grueling calisthenics, we attended dull lectures, we ate, we slept, we polished boots and brass. And of course we did KP-Kitchen Police, a euphemism for scrubbing floors and pots in the mess hall, sometimes with the same brushes. Theoretically the past five or six centuries were enough time for the military machines of our species to find ways to automate the kitchen facilities, but it had never happened. Similarly, permashine leather and brass were on the civilian market but were not available to us. We theorized that these were simply ways to keep us busy and miserable-and in subsequent years I have never found a better explanation. Likewise, inspections, a colossal expenditure of nervous energy without reward, and the necessity of maintaining entire display units of equipment that were used only for inspections. Some feculent personality once knotted my display towel over my hammock-cord while I slept, in the signal for early waking for special duty; not only was it not my turn for duty, it ruined my display. Some joke! I would have put his head out into the vacuum of space, had I known who it was.

We got haircuts every week, or else. For the first occasion, my full platoon was marched in step to the barbershop to be shorn, like it or not. We had been issued partial pay toward our first month's pay of eighty-six dollars-twenty per week-so we had the necessary cash. The Navy always made sure we had the cash for its requirements, and woe betide the recruit who spent it otherwise. Two dollars for a scalping; no hair on my head was left longer than half an inch. Later we would be allowed to grow some hair back; here in Basic the bald look was in.

The Navy was equally efficient about sex. Prescribed normal heterosexual relations were mandatory, and the Navy was the agency that defined "normal." There was, it was aptly said, the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way. "You will indulge once a week," the platoon sergeant brayed, only he happened to employ a more explicit Saxon vernacular term in lieu of "indulge." Whereupon, for the first occasion, we were marched to the brothel ship for the maiden performance. The sanitary facilities were termed the Head; this department was, of course, the Tail. Each of us had to pay the two-dollar fee at the entrance, just as we had for the haircuts. Or, as the sergeant put it, else.

Talking was not permitted in the ranks, but I heard muttered exclamations of amazement, delight, and shock. Awful Company was largely Hispanic, made up of refugees like myself, ranging up to twenty-five years of age; many did not yet speak English, so had not comprehended the nature of this assignment until they saw the red Tail light by the door. I do not think Hispanics are any more sensitive about sex than are those of other origins, but we were ill prepared for the suddenness and dispatch of this particular requirement. We should have known; the haircutting had been as forceful and insensitive, and the physical examinations had nearly provoked riot when the medics started checking prostates. I do not know how the average recruit of Saxon stock feels about this, but to us the prostate check seemed very much like buggery. We also had suffered painful inoculations against obscure diseases to which we never expected to be exposed. Why hadn't they used the painless mists instead of the huge blunt needles? To humiliate and cow us, of course; that was common knowledge. So we should have been prepared for something akin to rape as the Navy introduction to sex; the Navy prided itself on making any natural occupation a horror. Yet, in our naivete, we were dismayed.

One man broke ranks and fled. The Saxon sergeant turned and aimed his stunner almost casually, but caught the man in the back, a perfect shot, and the fugitive fell facedown to the floor. No one went to pick him up; he was left there unconscious as an object lesson for us all. We knew he wasn't seriously hurt-the stunner only stuns- but still, this had a sobering effect. No one else broke ranks. Numbly we waited as the lines moved forward.

In one sense it was an eternity before my turn came; in another it was an instant. The act of sex was not foreign to my experience, but I had no interest in this manner of indulging it. A uniformed matron, a female sergeant, met me just inside the door and guided me to Room Number Eighteen. Eighteen-my older sister, Faith, had been eighteen when she was brutally raped. "You have fifteen minutes, soldier," she said, and more or less shoved me through the entrance. Fifteen-my age when I watched my sister raped. I heard the door click behind me, and knew I was locked in. Both physically and symbolically.

A young woman in a pink negligee sat on a bunk. She was attractive enough in face and form for a Saxon, but her bored expression and my knowledge of her profession put me further off. I really had no sexual desire for her. Some people assume that any young man will eagerly indulge in any sex that offers; this is fantasy. For most of us, there has to be some emotional commitment, some indication that the woman is not merely willing but interested, that some sort of continuing relationship is possible. Our drives are strong but with many counterindications, so that the net effect is often doubt rather than passion.

"Well, get your clothes off, soldier," she snapped. The way she pronounced "soldier" reminded me that a soldier was the lowest form of life in the Jupiter Navy, and a recruit somewhat beneath that.

"I-do not feel inclined," I said, aware that I was blushing about as well as my swarthy skin permitted.