"Hey. Do you want to go on a quest with us to kill some goblins?"
"…weak and brainless as human children. We don't need potions when it's just goblins!"
CLANG.
The sword knocked from Harry's hand. The face of dumb horror in the torchlight, before the goblins were on him with knives and axes. No reason to keep a man alive, only the women…
"Fwoosh! I'm a genius!" Ilsa the wizard crowed, hurling a flamestrike. Before the goblins knocked off her glasses and stabbed her in the stomach.
"Hiyaa! Hiyaa!"
She kicked out in fury, she killed, killed. Then the giant hobgoblin came from nowhere, caught her foot. Swung her head against the stone wall, and there was no more she could do. She was beaten, her clothes were gone, she was Yip Lei's daughter, Fighter, but four goblins were holding her down. All them would do what they wanted with Yip Lei's daughter, as she watched them break Ilsa's staff and stab at her eyes. She was helpless. Defeated. No. No. No…
-0-
"NUUUU! MMPH! NUUUU!
"She's broken her restraints! Hold her–UGH!"
"Morphesome response way over the limit! Crashing out now!"
"Help! We need some help here!"
Corpswoman Shuang 'Fighter' Lei, HISMC, almost choked on her own vomit before a techie ripped off the gag. Then she almost tried to bite her own tongue off, before she came back on her hands and knees. The rough steel floor, 200 miles above the planet; her own filthy hair and shaking muscles. The Sense-Sim couch behind her that she couldn't even look upon, as she tried to retch up everything.
"NO! No…Harry…run. Run. RUN!"
"Focus, Lei. Focus, damn you!" The Colonel's voice, harsh on the intercom, "You are on board Empire of Humanity Training Orbital IHTO Coriolanus! You are an Imperial Space Marine! Are you going to break like this when you finally see combat? For frag's sake, act like a marine and take it!"
The light hurt her eyes, burnt shadows on her face. No monsters. The room was safe. Outside, elsewhere, in her mind, she would never be safe again, never free.
The techies were speaking gently now, but she wouldn't stay down. Trying to touch her, but she batted the arm away and charged for the door. With her father's training, with a space marine's fibre-aug muscles, orthoskin, Kevlar-sheathed bone…she could have let the steel door know she was there, at least. But in the end, she only struck the door once. Howled once, then straightened up and waved away the sedative with a death-glare.
Multi-million credit killing machines were not permitted to go crazy or get upset, if they had a hope of passing Armour training. 'Psychologically unstable' was a failure that could not be fought. Failing a simulation was a glaring black mark already. As was damaging Marine Corps property–Shuang felt shame upon shame to finally notice the techie whose plastic-coated jawbone she'd kicked through, fighting off nightmares of violation. Unless, of course, this was still the nightmare.
-0-
Twenty months earlier
The Empire of Humanity Space Marines Corps trained its recruits longer and harder than any other fighting force in the galaxy. Fresh out of high school, Shuang could have joined Planetary Defence, the flightless 'Chickens', or even the Space Navy ('Scrubs' was their only printable nickname). But for the ancient honour of her family–for the atrocities screaming from a hundred planets every week, across the starnet–she had decided to be the strongest warrior she could be.
Basic had been a whole lot of shame, before the glory of being called 'good enough'. The distance runs and swims, at any hour of day or night, the inexhaustible PT and even the marksmanship…Shuang had taken and tackled them. Her father's martial arts, and the illegal gene-mods her grandmother had died in jail for getting, built power and concentration rather than pure stamina or endurance–Shuang learnt the difference after a week in a frozen tent. But she was strong, and hours of meditation had made her the master of her soul. She knew she was no quitter. She loved her family, she loved to fight, and the Lei school of martial artists did not give up.
But the shame came in, and the doubt, when she made a mess of reassembling her plasma blaster–the sergeant yelled, and her comrades laughed. She'd always been hopeless with machines, but none of her friends had ever laughed at her in school. Then she deliberately made her bed the wrong way, because some rules were just stupid, and everyone in the barracks had extra PT that week except her. She'd always, easily, been a strong-hearted big sister to her friends–the weariest recruit wouldn't even accept a glance from her, after that. She'd always been a great martial artist, but the instructors bawled that she had to forget that rubbish and learn real fighting. And punched her to the ground whenever she tried to prove them wrong. She'd thought she was strong, she'd known she was no quitter–but when she passed out before the end of a run, that counted for nothing. They called her useless slag, and for one terrible night she believed it.
Then there was the Milling. You had to punch another recruit in the head for two minutes, with gloves, while they punched you. No dodging, no guarding, no moving from the spot; the idea was to make sure you shot back at the Tauian stormtroopers instead of ducking. Shuang's father had been teaching her to duck and dodge since she'd been six and hitting her when she didn't. She only saw one way she could possibly get through.
Thirty seconds in, Shuang's opponent went down under a right straight. With no step-in possible, the punch came solely from above her hips. Even the recruit's close friends heartily cheered. If you can't take some knocks, don't join the Marines.
"It has to be two minutes," Rapped an instructor with a stopwatch, "Corporal Yates, step up, please."
Shuang somehow lasted another minute, but something about the cheers helped her not to duck. She woke up on the canvas with a terrible headache and a smile.
Basic stripped you down. Let you know just how strong you had to be. Basic took your dignity and your name, but the marines gave it back.
The sergeant who promised to beat her half to death if she ever gave up. The redhead with glasses who coached her in Rules of the Corps. The slight ollycod girl who Shuang taught to punch, urged through every mile of run, and simply sat with when she despaired. The two unknown comrades who'd carried her to the end of the course where she'd fallen. Even the broke-nosed guy who'd talked her ear off about spreading the Emperor's light to the furthest star. Marines who didn't help marines didn't get the help they needed from anyone; Shuang knew this. With a grin, a ready arm, and the undying faith that she would never give up, she had led them to the truth. They were a band of brothers and sisters; she was Fighter, the name her comrades had given, and she had earned. Their strength had always been in them and their strength would always be in the Corps.
That was the theory, at least.
-0-
No one helped Recruit Blake. The marines would've loathed such a mollycoddler almost as much as the pariah himself. The instructors naturally baulked at ordering anyone to assist him or lightening his burden by an atom; they had tried punishment, collective punishment, using him as a team-building object of team-hate, and were now finally waiting for him to wash out. Skinny, bullied at school and beaten at home, Blake wasn't actually terrible at anything, but always behind the pack on every run. He didn't push himself, let alone for the sake of others. Arrogant as only the weak can be, he started fights over insults Shuang would have borne with a smile, and never asked for help, or thanked an incidental helper. Most unforgivably, he complained.
On a distance run in the last week of Basic, where the instructor had stated that anyone who missed the time would immediately wash out, Blake was at the very back of the pounding, huffing recruits. Red faced, falling further behind than the back, stumbling over bluegrass and snaffar burrows as his feet dragged. The recruits noted that weeks of misery would soon end with his departure, and focused on the run. A few shouted insults about Blake's mother. This spurred him on darkly, but the hecklers soon laid off, and Blake fell even further back.
Then Fighter dropped back from the middle of the pack. The leading sergeant bawled at her once, then let her go. At Blake's side, she could smell the anguish in his sweat, as his eyes bulged in their sockets.
"Need to run faster, if we're going to make that time." No response, "You can do it. Don't give up. I'll kick you back to the start line if you give up, idiot!" Another runner suggested what Shuang could offer Blake to make him run; Shuang smiled evenly over hoarse laughter.
"Everyone knows...I'm going down," Blake gasped, "I'd have to be stupid not to know it…weak."
"Don't you hate being weak? Didn't you join up to get strong? Just be strong right now, and you'll be a marine! In five minutes, it'll be too late! Show all those idiots up there that you can be a space marine, Blake!"
"Yeah!" Fawkes, the recruit of the broken nose, was dropping back as well, "How are we going to finally drive the Raptors off the Veridian moons together, if you give up now?"
She went on as she ran; Blake only jogged in silence. It was seven minutes before he realised that no one was visible ahead except for Fighter, by his side. If she kept on at his pace, she would inescapably miss the time. He found himself breaking into a run, agonised and gasping, even if it was already too late.
Fighter smiled. Her father would probably smack her about a bit, but going through Basic again from the start didn't seem too bad right now.
Somehow, they made the time. Fighter's friends were all in the mess hall, but Blake did confess his love for her when he'd finished puking, and deliriously try to kiss her without wiping his mouth. Afterwards, the PT sergeant–a black woman with an ugly white scar across her nose–asked Fighter if she'd had any thoughts of becoming an instructor.
"Ma'am, yes, ma'am!"
"Really? You'd like to play schoolmarm to every wash-out like Blake, until our beloved Corps is filled with limp dicks? You'll make a good groundpounder, Lei, but never NEVER, try to lead, train, advise, or even pick up the soap in the shower, until you have learnt to LET FRAG-WITS WIPE THEIR OWN ASSES!"
"Ma'am! Recruit Blake would have washed out if I hadn't–"
"THAT'S THE POOOOINNNT, YOU IDDIIIOOOT! WEED OUT THE NON-HACKERS!" Her red tongue beat out the words on Shuang's right eye, "BLAKE IS NOT, AND NEVER WILL BE, A MARINE!"
"Ma'am, he finished the run, Ma'am! Isn't all this meant to turn weaklings into marines?"
"If it was like a steroid shot, we wouldn't have any drop outs. We make the strong into weaklings, and then marines. Failures will never be anything but. Well done for sticking up for your friend. Run 50 laps of the training field before you see what's left in the mess hall."
-0-
"…and then we got pushed out of a plane over the north Nova Canadian mountains with only a parachute and a combat knife. I was frozen and starving, but still heading west after the plane, when I stupidly bedded down in a cave that a bear was using already. I thought, after all that, I'm going to die a horrible, pointless death…unless I slice his throat out, before its claws carve through my back as far as my lungs."
Shuang's old friends, back in the sterile sprawl of Megaplex Alpha, would usually burst out laughing at this point. Until she dragged out the huge stinking pelt and assured them that yes, she had been very scared she would die. But life wasn't a computer game–facing an unkillable foe at the end of your strength, you simply had to do or die. It was the first thing marines learnt–though her instructors, when she staggered back into the training camp like a fur-clad barbarian, had been uniformly speechless (When her father had heard, he'd declared that now he could die in peace).
With light-rifle mock battles, wilderness survival and the formation marching that had had nothing to with the battlefield since about a millennium pre-Imperium, Basic Training had been very like a time warp to a grim and bloody past. The General who spoke at their graduation claimed that the training of a warrior hadn't essentially changed from the time of the Spartan Helots, except that the Empire did train an elite volunteer force, to defend its thousand worlds from the rebel and alien, rather than conscripting slave soldier hordes, to die in a distant jungle or charge machine guns through drowning mud. Shuang certainly felt glad to have escaped a birth in some primitive age.
Then the Chaplain stood up in his robes and armour, to give the reading of the Code. A marine protects the innocent. A marine speaks only the truth. A marine never attacks an unarmed foe. Marines fight for each other.
"A true warrior-servant of the Emperor," The Chaplain went on to declare, "Is a law unto themselves. Power and Imperium come from the barrel of a gun, and from the human will! If you Corpsmen must obliterate a city, on some distant rebel planet, then for humanity's sake, you must! But the Emperor's truest servants will bear this Code in their heart, and their honour and mercy will be a beacon–the Emperor's light, to the galaxy's darkest frontier!"
Shuang knew what kind of marine she wanted to be, as well as the strongest. From the tears in his eyes as they sang a final hymn to the God-Emperor, Gladius Rex, she guessed that Corpsman Harry Fawkes felt the same way she did. They had both sort of hit it off as friends throughout Basic, talking about Harry's dreams and his family farm on Old Earth. But she'd decided to celebrate her graduation with Corpsman Oswald Blake.
Something about the idea that Blake was born to failure–that no degree of effort could help him, that it was an incurable idiocy in her for trying–really rubbed her the wrong way. The Corps said that Blake was both a marine and no marine. That a good marine accepted what was, from the first minute of Basic, and did not complain or fight it. But she couldn't accept this, so she had to fight. Through her evening on the town with Blake, she told him he was a marine a hundred times; there was almost nothing she didn't say to urge his self-belief and diligence. She did have to keep telling him that her eyes were placed higher than her chest, and eventually smack his face, but Harry had that problem as well, and that might also do him some good.
As for herself, she was approached by a small Colonel with antique cybereyes during her leave, and given the option of Armour training as her specialisation. It would mean officer rank when and if she did finish, and strength beyond her dreams; everything else was classified information. Her father was against it; he seemed to think she'd lose her humanity with enough metal on her or inside her. But when her old PT instructor actually called up Shuang to apologise for rubbishing her potential, it seemed like a sign; a change in destiny. And she had learned with the claw scars on her back that facing a savage universe would take every bit of strength she could gain by any means. She signed up for Armour training and bid farewell to her comrades, with hopes of meeting them again on a distant battlefield.
On leave half-way through Armour training, she heard about Blake. He had been sent with an infantry platoon to clear a Volucris infestation on the factory moon of Char. Six legs, six feet long, a cockroach that made a tiger look like a housecat.
Ilsa Tresckow and Harry Fawkes told Shuang that Blake had been on point at the rear. After about thirty minutes shooting combat, and about four hours of edging through the city-sized smelting plants, a swarm of Bugs had dropped from an upper walkway. Blake had seen their heat-signs through the shadows–his helmet recorder confirmed that–but he hadn't fired a shot or made a sound.
"Must have frozen up." Harry said, "Can't blame him too much, since that's what I did when the Bugs tore us up from behind. My first fight and I didn't get a shot off either, before–" The hand on his knee shook. He tapped his new metal leg. "First fight, after all that. Thank the Emperor we got out alive. I just wish they could replace my nerves with steel, but we're all getting psych-counselling. We'll be back to burn those fragging Bugs out, soon."
Ilsa's cold green eyes said to Shuang what she already knew–
"This is my fragging fault. If I hadn't pulled Blake through that run, he'd be alive, and Reeder, Ollendorf and Brown, and your leg…frag, frag, frag! HARRY!"
Nothing like a marine, she had clung to his legs and wept. He had gone into battle, he had almost died; she had killed a bear with a knife, but she could not let go of him. Ilsa quickly shut the door before anyone saw the dishonourable, unsoldierly outburst.
"…Lei…Shuang. You couldn't have known. You'd have carried me out of that fragging factory, if you'd been there, just like the others did. We are the Space Marines, and none of us ever give up. I know Blake would've done better, if he'd survived, because that's what I'm going to do. You…need to get up and walk away from this. You're going to be Armour."
It had been Harry's dream to be Armour. A bionic leg, Oswald Blake and Shuang Lei, had killed it. Shuang stood up, unsmiling and walked away to she knew not where.
A/N: Shuang/Susan's adventures as a Space Marine are derived from a playthrough of 'Mobile Armoured Marine: Mission to Far Hope' from Hosted Games, written by Steve Cave. The hapless Blake, Fighter's victory over the equally hapless bear, the Volucri ambush and the Space Marine Code of the Empire of Humanity are all derived from this story. The practise of milling is part of British Parachute Regiment training, for men and women, and MAMMFH mentions simulated horrors being used to toughen up the Space Marines without specifying their content. Thanks to Steve Cave for, once again, writing a better story than Goblin Slayer.