I've always wondered why shuttles were so quiet.
I mean, you've got a warp engine chugging away behind you with enough antimatter to blow away a cruiser, and then you've got the chirping consoles which some genius of an engineer installed back at base, and then you've got the gun on top that's good for roasting ducks but not much else. All of which, you'd think, would make so much noise that walking into one of the unholy things would be like telling the Klinks to stick you in one of their agonizers.
Insulation probably counts for more than I think.
Not that I'm complaining. I've never been much good at dealing with noise, not even with omnipresent mechanical noise. At Lancer, Bill managed to reprogram a service robot to act like his personal masseuse, until I nailed the thing with a blast from my gun right when life was about to get interesting. Then again, you know Bill. "The perfect man for every woman and the perfect woman for every man." Amazing, the types who join the marines.
The intercom makes that little warbling sound again. Must be the tenth time. Guys down there probably getting desperate. Don't you get the point? I ask very calmly. I don't care about you. I don't care about your buddies. In fact, all of you bastards could go jump off the nearest cliff and I wouldn't give a rat's ass.
But you're one of my buddies too, and you know that.
I'm Queen Victoria. Didn't you know that?
What happened to it's all about the guys next to you? That's war. You gotta stay with your friends, man--
Bullshit.
Deep down, I swear to myself that if the guy tries to call me again I'll drive this shuttle straight down his windpipe and blow it up somewhere between the stomach and the intestine.
I never liked shuttles, so I suppose it was karma that I ended up driving one this beautiful December morning. Some error in the bureaucratic system, probably, passed off as my real assignment because no one wanted to get off their lazy asses and fix it down at Ops.
After my first ride on a shuttle, I threw up. It was a Federation Type-E shuttlecraft, known as the Eppie to the guys. Handled worse than a dreadnought, or so I was told. And just my luck, I got one of those daredevil pilots who wanted to strut her stuff--so she did some crazy-ass flips over the Golden Gate, some more crazy-ass flips over the Sierra Nevadas, and some more crazy-ass flips in zero-g before she finally landed. Terra firma at last.
First, I discharged all of the orange juice she'd sadistically offered me before the flight. Second, I brushed myself off with the last remaining shreds of dignity I had left. Third, I looked her in the eye, grinned, and made a rather obscene gesture with my hands.
If it wasn't for the fact that I had landed at Lancer Base, Starfleet Marine Corps, I would have done more. Much more.
The intercom chirps again. So the guy still wants to talk. I turn to the computer and plot in the coordinates. If I've calculated correctly-- and I know I have--the first people to go will be my buddies in the command center.
You're serious, aren't you? he asks desperately. You're really fucking serious.
It's too funny. Trying hard not to laugh, I let him have it. Of course I'm fucking serious. Don't you know me well enough? I thought I was your best friend, you know?
I'm not friends with traitors.
That's a harsh word.
He must have realized that he'd screwed up, but I really didn't give him much of a chance. I clicked off the safety on my precious rifle and proceeded to turn the comm into a mass of molten metal. There was really no point in listening to Jimmy rant.
Jimmy's the kind of guy you love to hate. He's got that killer smile, which many a young girl's fallen for, those chiseled abs which signaled that he spent most of his waking life exercising--one way or another--and short, cropped blond hair. Son of a rich father and his mother's the most powerful woman on the Council. On the fast-track to promotion ever since he was born. In other words, the perfect Starfleet marine.
And I had the good fortune to meet him a few hours after I arrived at Lancer.
If you had put me and Jimmy next to each other, you'd start swearing that we were probably fraternal twins without the twins or the fraternal. I'm lanky and relatively short, and I really didn't give a damn about girls. My dad was a lieutenant on the Nautilus, one of the new destroyers, and my mom was so disinterested in politics that the principal of my grade school had to personally come over to our house to convince her to join the parent/teacher association. While Jimmy was born with a golden foot in his mouth, I had to actually do work to get into the Corps. As a result, there was a whole "poor-ass commoner against rich-ass aristocrat" thing going around Lancer, a supposedly classless base.
I say "classless" because of our CO Sergeant Balantino who had a temper so vicious that he once broke a phaser with his bare hands. Snapped the thing in half without even grunting. The guy's five-foot one. Like every sergeant in the Corps, Balantino thought of us recruits as nothing better than that raw targ the Klinks use as a delicacy, and looked like he ripped people's guts out for the hell of it.
Jimmy's the kind of guy people love to hate, and Balantino hated Jimmy, but he really couldn't do much to him. Fuckin' connections, Balantino used to snarl. If it wasn't for your fuckin' connections I'd be beating the shee-it out of you right now.
I don't think Jimmy really cared. His mama would have raised so much hell that Balantino would have been sent to the froggie front. Nobody in their right mind wanted to be fighting the froggies, of course, since we'd been hearing horror stories about how they zombify everyone they capture. Hell, I don't think people who weren't in their right mind would want to be fighting the froggies either. Otherwise, Jimmy would have gone. What a loss.
My mom had never wanted me to join the Corps, for she was definitely in her right mind and she really didn't want her only son to get zombified by the froggies. Then dad died and some fucker at the pension department said that we weren't eligible for the pension and then began to speechify about all of the bureaucratic shit that had to take place before we could be eligible for the pension. Apparently, death in the line of duty wasn't enough. Since mom couldn't get a job without leaving her present one, which was taking care of me, I joined the Corps. She made a lot of ruckus the day I left, but the last time I heard from her she was a successful accountant for Stern and Stanley. So successful, in fact, that the fellow at the pension department was so ashamed he volunteered to go to the froggie front and was zombified in a day. Last I heard of him, he was lifting bricks at the slave colony on Zolov.
Dad would have been proud of both of us.
My dad was a twelfth-century guy who had the terrible misfortune of being born in the twenty-third. He met my mom when she tripped down a flight of stairs and landed on his back. Dad was carrying a large broadsword he'd just bought at an auction for a few thousand credits. The thing just exploded like one of those clay pigeons we shot at during Basic. I've still got the pieces somewhere. Dad never could find someone good enough to put the sword back together.
All the other kids were read bedtime stories about the Tortoise and the Hare or other folktales like that. For me, Dad yanked out his personally translated copy of [I]Le Morte d'Arthur[/I] and, with me on his knee, began to expound upon the greatness of the medieval ages. Now, here we've got Mordred, he would tell me. Mordred's a fucking bastard. He's the illegitimate son of King Arthur and Morgan le Fay, the evil sorceress, and his primary ambition is to get onto the throne and Arthur's wife along with it. And that's not all. While Mordred was plotting all of that bad shit, Sir Launcelot--you remember Sir Launcelot, right?--yeah, the guy who has a romantic issue with Arthur's Wife--Sir Launcelot leads a revolt against the king...
And on and on like that until Mom ran into the room screaming her head off for me to go to bed. Filling his head with crazy notions, she would always say. More of this and he's going to be running off to join the military and get himself killed.
I loved those bedtime stories. Not as much as for their content--I was too young to appreciate the innuendos at the time--but because Dad seemed to sincerely believe in them. King Arthur found an England with wars and shit, Dad would say after each story, and left it with more wars and shit. But while he was alive, he had a vision of a united country where might was used for right. He made a difference, and we remember him because of it. And one of these days, I'm going to make a difference too. You remember that, son. You remember that.
Dad did make a difference, all right. Two months after he completed officer training and got himself assigned to a new destroyer, his cocky CO decided to go beat the shit out of a froggie heavy. Apparently, Dad's CO didn't know that froggie COs were also cocky and liked to beat the shit out of Feddie destroyers. Now, I haven't seen them for myself, but all the Navy I've talked to say that plasma torps are some crapass things to get on your tail.
Dad's ship got four.
To make a long story short, the destroyer was about to be blown out of space until, no thanks to the Federation--which didn't want to trigger another fucking "diplomatic incident"--the rescue ship arrived. The rescue ship was commanded by another cocky CO who apparently had no compunctions about disobeying orders to save lives. All guns blazing, the rescue ship promptly smashed itself to pieces on a very large asteroid.
When the fight was over, the Navy boys had to send a medical frig to clean up the pieces. And, true to form, the sawbones had just enough body bags so that every corpse but one could be treated to an honorable burial. Partly because he was wedged between a warp engine and the bridge and partly because the spacetroopers didn't want to risk their precious paint job getting close to big floating rocks, the medical frig fired a twenty- one gun salute (well, actually, a one-gun salute twenty-one times) for each of the heroes in the body bags, vaporizing what was left of Dad's body in the process.
I suppose that I had to recover sometime in my life. I locked myself in Dad's study the day after I learned of his death not from a Starfleet telegram but from the news media, took down his books from their shelves, and flipped through them like we used to do when I was five. Mom picked the lock, caught me removing Dad's broken broadsword from its bag, threw a fit, and kicked me out of the room. She never did handle things as well as I did.
I didn't learn anything about Dad's death in the line of duty until I arrived at Lancer and Balantino gave me a long talk about my family lineage, concluding with an exhortation to do my absolute fucking best in his beloved Corps or be ripped to pieces by his Dobermans. Like I had a choice.
People'll go around and give you all this bullshit about how bad Basic is. The drill instructors, they say, are probably demons from the deepest depths of Hell. The water seems to lower its temperature just for you, it's never anything below a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the guns they give you are specially made to misfire. If I were you, I wouldn't believe that shit at all. Things aren't like these guys tell you.
Things are worse.
Now, you got to believe me here when I say that I've never been cut out for all of that hefty stuff you see in those holovids. "Be the best you can be," the slogan is, and then you see the sweaty Andorian jumping off a wall with a few hundred tons of weapons on his back. For the record, that's all computer generated. No marine would ever try a stunt like that, and no film crew would ever get that near a sweaty Andorian.
No, Balantino took one look at me and he assigned me to the snipers.
For most people, it's a dream job. Good ol' Jimmy--you remember Jimmy, right?--Jimmy pulled some strings and got himself assigned to the snipers too. Supposedly brought prestige and honor to the family. But to be a good sniper, you have to be good at two other things. One. You need to know how to shoot. And two. You need to know how to shoot straight.
Everybody can shoot. You can give a monkey a pump-action shotgun and he'll mow down the entire Federation Council before you can say banana. Even Jimmy could shoot, and that's saying something. The trouble with sniping is that you need to shoot straight.
Don't give me that crap about high-tech gadgetry. None of that works when you're on a planet and your sensors are all fouled up with interference. It's all about the eyes and the control. Before you go into the Corps, you're an ordinary human being. The Corps beats you down. The Corps smacks you so hard that you'll fly all the way to Shanghai and back. The Corps makes sure that only the toughest survive. And then the Corps turns you into a killing machine. The most lethal weapon ever invented, Balantino would always say, are you guys. But you'll find out that my Dobermans are fuckin' lethal too. So get your ass moving before you find out just how lethal they are.
Jimmy never liked any of that and said so to the Sarge's face. Balantino looked like he was about to break the guy's neck, but instead began spouting another long monologue about Jimmy's fuckin' connections, threatening him with God and Satan and Everything In Between. God and Satan were Balantino's two Dobermans, and Everything In Between were their three pups.
But even if you've got fuckin' connections, you've still got to pass the final exams before you're considered a full-fledged marine, and if you're in the sniper corps, you got to shoot straight. There was a bet going around the guys that the only way Jimmy could shoot straight was if there was a girl around him, and in that case he would never miss, and I won a few hundred off of Bill that way. Never did realize that most men think if other men as their competitors for playmates, not as their playmates.
It was different for me. Jimmy couldn't shoot straight at anything but girls; I could shoot straight at anything except girls. Around the second week we were at Lancer I met up with a guy with a souped-up Three and I asked him where he got the gun fixed up like that. Next day, I gathered up all my winnings from Bill and went to the quartermaster's where the guy gave me a tripod, grip, and sniper sight, and threw in a free IR- muter because I flashed some cash. Balantino didn't make any rule against using souped-up guns, so while everyone else was trying to hit the targets popping up one by one, I blasted each of them with a clean headshot with my Three with time to spare. Everything In Between reacted rather strangely to the ultrasound from my silenced gun--they would go mad every time I fired it next to them. Maybe they didn't like it, maybe they did. I don't know if trying to bite your leg off is a sign of affection in Dobermans.
Balantino didn't seem to think so, but that was probably because the only love he'd ever felt in his entire life was from his dogs. Sarge loved his dogs so much that he'd cover them with his umbrella and lead them to the car while the rain was pouring buckets of water onto his starched uniform. Drill sergeants have to have a human side, I suppose. Even Balantino, who spent twenty years of his life in the Corps. That's what the Corps teaches you. They drive everything that's human out of your body and replace it with a crazy-ass disregard for life. You can either do that or drop out. And if you dropped out, you could go Navy and fight froggies all day long until they zombified you and sent you to Zolov. Naturally, nobody in their right mind would ever go to fight froggies, so nobody ever dropped out.
I'm not saying that people didn't die during Basic. Federation's desperate to hide it, but the sad fact is that some folks just weren't cut out for the job. Modern medicine and all that other doctor shit only works if you get to the guy in time, and sometimes the medics just couldn't get to the guy in time. What was so fucking stupid about the whole thing was that their deaths were simply pointless.
I never had any objection to killing people if it was for a just cause. I mean, even Galahad had to kill some time in his life, and he's the guy who got the Holy Grail. But killing to have fun--that's just disgusting. But that's what war's all about. Preserve your way of life. Make sure that the bad bogeymen don't get you first. Because you know that when they get you, your family's next, and then all that you love and care for in this galaxy.
Back in the 20th century, before the Federation rolled around, there was a shitload of pointless killing. They called it World War One, when old countries like England fought with other old countries like Germany. For no other reason than the death of one measly man called Ferdinand. Millions of boys, sent out by their politicos for the cause of freedom, died in that war, all of them doing their best to kill before being killed. Is human life really that worthless?
A few days before Christmas on the Western Front boys on both sides realized something really deep, which all of the guys in charge never realized. These guys realized that, no matter which country you were from or which army you were fighting for, you were still one of their really distant relatives. Weren't we all descended from the same monkeys, after all? And these guys began to think.
It started when the English guys began to sing German Christmas carols. And the Germans began to sing English carols. Then the English guys sang more German carols. And then the Germans sang more English carols. And pretty soon, all of these boys left their weapons in their trenches and walked out to say Hello or whatever you say in German, laughing, crying, whatever. They played soccer, drank together, sang together, and brought down the whole fucking house. For those few precious days, guns were forgotten as the spirit of humanity cut through the horrors of that war. More carols, more soccer, more schnitzel und bier.
And then these guys went back to their weapons and started blowing the shit out of each other again.
Fucking pointless, war is.
Abso-fucking-lutely pointless.
The Federation tried to change that. The guys in charge said, we want peace, you want peace, let's all be happy and give it a chance. No more wars. No more nuclear holocaust. Just give peace a chance.
Much good that did. Three hundred years later we're still fighting wars, this time with aliens halfway across the galaxy, and we're killing them like mad. And they're killing us like mad too. And what the [I]fuck[/I] is the point of that? All those guys dying out there, on both sides, and we don't get anything but a stalemate.
See, war's become much more mechanized now. There was actually honor back in the old days, chivalry, codes of conduct which said that you had to be nice to your enemy and your enemy had to be nice to you. Like the Green Knight, who spared Sir Gawaine instead of chopping him up into tiny bits. And now, all you do is point, press a button, and a computer does it all for you. We've got fighters that can rip things apart from kilometers away, and the pilots don't see who they're killing. All they see is another machine coming right towards them, blasting away, and they try to kill that machine before it kills them. You can't look the other guy in the eye and see just how frightened he really is. You just have to kill.
I remember when Balantino first took us hunting. Somehow, he managed to train his Dobermans to be hunting dogs, and there happened to be a forest next to Lancer. Balantino saddled us up in a few speeders and sent us on our way. They had deer in that forest, and all of them simply weren't afraid of us. How were they supposed to know that the strange things moving around were going to kill them? Everyone was whooping and shouting excitedly as they blasted holes through deer after deer. The most powerful guns the Federation can offer against mere Nature. Pretty soon the forest was full of dead carcasses.
Balantino wanted me to shoot something, so I did. I picked the weakest one I could see. The doe was obviously suffering, for there was this bigass bulge and it took every ounce of strength she had to stand up. I raised my Three and pumped a single shot into its head.
Those eyes.
You should have been there to see those eyes. Liquid brown flecked with black, large and wide, and looking curiously at me before I burned a small black hole into its skull.
Good shot, said the Sarge proudly. That one was pregnant. I'd better put you on assignment soon or there'll be no more deer left to shoot.
I saluted stiffly, excused myself, and threw up on the nearest tree.
Isn't that just what war is? Killing deer? Guys you can't see and who don't get a chance to see you before they die? For some vague jingoistic notion of devotion to country?
I would have resigned right then but there was no way in hell that I would go fight froggies. So I stayed, and I let myself be taught the arts of dealing death. Head shots work best, Balantino would say, putting a clean hole through a target. You hit these froggies in the head and they'll go down like a fucking bag of bricks. For these dolphin-like ones, you bust their senses with a flashbang and then toss an electromag into their tank. Fry them like charbroiled crawfish on Mardi Gras. And so on and so forth. I didn't see how anybody could stomach watching Balantino blow the brains out of deer like that and still want to stay in. Least of all the girls in the camp, like Andrea.
I'm sure she didn't join the Corps on purpose. If you'd seen her, you'd have sworn that she wasn't much older than sixteen. Short blond hair, five-foot four or something like that. The Three every sniper carried around looked out of place when she carried it. Hell, Balantino cursed in disgust when Andrea arrived at Lancer. We got ourselves a fuckin' fashion model.
It was true that she wasn't that bad to look at. All the guys were forced to get buzz cuts, and when you were wearing gear it wasn't really all that bad. But then you'd walk into the mess hall, you'd see four or five full heads of hair with a large hairless crowd gathering around each of them and you'd know that things weren't going so good for the dames.
Since the Corps already allowed all Federation races to join, there really was no point in not allowing women to serve. I got to question the mental well-being of some of those higher-ups, though, because putting the four or five girls who were drafted in the same camp as a few hundred testosterone-laden guys whose idea of a good time was to beer up and bash some heads didn't seem like the recipe for success.
That was true from the start. Annie would get asked out every other minute by another guy at Lancer, and she'd smile modestly and say maybe. That's the way to keep interest, I remember thinking as Kevin returned to the bunks looking more dejected than ever. Keep their hopes alive and eventually dash them into more pieces than Balantino's deer. Brilliant. I looked at Annie and couldn't help thinking that here was a true damsel in distress, for almost half the Lancers were after her.
Don't mistake me here. It's not love, but rather an emotion somewhere along the lines of pity. I'm not so egotistical as to think that all women think I'm a Launcelot--I'm definitely not the best-looking guy at base (although I'm not so self-deprecating as to say that I was the worst). There was simply no fucking way a sylph like that one would ever want to have anything to do with me. But there were plenty of men who wanted to have lots to do with her, and I later found out that she was simply too well brought up to give a flat-out no.
But she could shoot, and that was what Balantino looked for. In my opinion, if one of them Sixty-Niners--yeah, the artillery--went off next to her the shockwave would have shattered her body. She was too frail to be a good marine. Balantino didn't give a shit. Balantino did give her a gun and told her to blast a few targets, and she did acceptably well. Better than Jimmy. I won another hundred dollars off of Bill for that too, because Bill didn't seem to think that women could shoot half as well as men.
What was so tragic about Annie was not all the harassment, however. It was that she was young and idealistic. I want to make a difference, she once said to me. Just like what Dad had said before he got himself killed. And that was the same way she was. Idealistic is not a good thing. When you're idealistic, you dream, and when you dream too much, you find out that what you're dreaming for simply can't come true.
There's only one conversation with her that I can remember clearly, the one which convinced me that she had better drop out of the Corps or else was a few nights after I blasted Bill's robot to pieces. Somehow our nightly game of poker had turned into a Q and A session where each of us asked each other just why he'd been fucking stupid enough to join the Corps.
I heard the usual excuses. My mom wanted me to join so I did, or I got drafted in such-and-such a year, or I wanted adventure so I signed up. Everyone got a chuckle when Bill said he joined because he wanted the company. Just a bunch of bored soldiers having their fun.
Annie was different. You can tell when someone's really believing in whatever they're telling you. All of a sudden she got this earnest look on her face, leaning forward and propping her hands against the table. It's my duty to the Federation, she said. To earn everything which it gives me. To protect our society from any and all invaders. And so on and so forth. You know the mantra.
I was listening to her and trying hard not to shut her up by stunning her with my Three. All the while thinking where have I heard this shit before?
When she was done there was absolute silence. Then, suddenly, Jimmy began to laugh.
Jimmy's laugh is the kind of laugh that hurts. Starts with him, then it spreads to that guy down the line and to the next guy and the next and the next until the whole fucking room is laughing uproariously. Annie takes one look at us and runs out of the room. Her little idealistic bubble had just been burst and I swear that even Sarge Balantino noticed something.
Listen, he told her as gently as he could the next day during one of our breaks. Heard what you were talkin' about last night. And what happened. Now you gotta hear me when I tell you this, otherwise you'll get booted out faster than anything. None of that shit about the Federation matters anymore. Got that?
Annie looked absolutely stunned.
Balantino shrugged. Fine. Don't believe me. But I've been in combat against more guys than you can possibly fuck in a lifetime so you hear me good. When you're shootin' and blastin' your way through guys with nobody but a fellow marine next to you your mind goes blank. You don't think about the Federation. You don't think about your family. You think about the guy next to you. The guy next to you's the guy that counts. If he doesn't shoot good, you're dead. If he doesn't protect your ass, you're dead. And he knows that if you don't do what he's doing for you, he's dead too. So fuck the Federation. It doesn't matter anymore. Got that?
She nodded mutely. It's all about the guy next to you, I could see her mouthing to herself as she kept on shooting. Her Three whined as another target exploded. Said it again. Another target exploded. And again. Another target exploded. And on. And on. And on. That day she got the highest kill ratio that I ever saw.
Annie was shattered, I could tell. She'd just figured out that the ideal world she'd been envisioning could never possibly be the one which the rest of us lived in. Just realized that the world didn't work the way she thought it did. But she was more resilient than I had thought. All about the guy next to you became her modus operandi. Kill ratios skyrocketed. Pretty soon she passed even me.
There was a fanatical drive in the girl that had just been awakened. To prove herself to everyone, including herself, that she was right in thinking that she could change the world just like that. By virtue of ideals alone. First it was loyalty to country. Then it became loyalty to companion. She dedicated herself to that. Maybe too much. For it was like an obsession, this burning need to show the world that she could single-handedly take it on and win.
Then Jimmy, good old Jimmy, drank too much beer one night and tried to rape her.
That was the final straw. In less than two months every single pillar her life had been built on suddenly disappeared, ripped to pieces by cold reality. Country didn't matter any more. Balantino had made sure of that. Companions didn't matter any more either. Jimmy had made sure of that. There was nothing left for Annie to live for.
The next day we were scheduled to do a survival run. They'd take us up in a shuttle, pop the doors, and push us out. A few thousand feet above the sky we were supposed to pull the cord and open the parachute. Then we were supposed to steer the piece of shit and land it. Then we were supposed to do some POW training. If we got caught by guys dressed in Klink uniforms we'd been taken to a "simulated" camp and be stuck into a low-power agonizer. If we didn't get caught and if we made it to the hut in the middle of a clearing they'd give us congratulations and a chocolate chip cookie.
There were only three of us in the shuttle. Annie, Bill, and me. Bill did his jump and got captured by the Klinks seconds after because he knew a guy on the OPFOR and wanted to socialize. Then it was Annie's turn.
Your para's untied, I told her as she stood up. Sit down and I'll check the gear for you.
She looked up at me. Those eyes.
Those eyes were the eyes of a young girl whose world had collapsed around her. Panicked. Sorrowful. And yet full of determination. Just like the deer in the forest. I let go of her parachute. Annie jumped out of the shuttle, her eyes still locked on mine.
For the first time in my life, I felt helpless. Absolutely goddamned useless. I kept on watching as her petite body tumbled upside-down and backwards and side to side as it gradually became smaller and smaller until I couldn't see anything at all.
Balantino later told me she fell five thousand six hundred and ninety feet before she died.
Survival training was canceled. So was everything else. Sarge walked around with this strange hollow expression not even returning salutes and the rest of the guys were strangely quiet as we filed back into the barracks. Death hit home to the Lancers when Annie jumped out of the shuttle. All of us were traumatized.
I still can't believe the irony.
From day one Balantino had relentlessly drilled into us that we were Marines. Marines are elite, he said. Your drunken bastards on the street can be the infantry. But it takes a special kind of guy to join the Corps. A kind of guy that doesn't fear dying in the line of duty. We've got the highest KIAs in all of the services for a reason. If you don't understand that, you can get the fuck out and let the real men do the work for you. Then Balantino congratulated every one of us on making the cut and expressed his sincere hope that we'd die before the age of 30.
You see, no life matters more than your own in the crazy calculus of war. I've shot people before because they pulled funny shit. And I know for a fact that I'm going to shoot people again if any of them try to pull more funny shit. No hesitation. None. I'm just going to pull the trigger and watch another guy hit the dirt.
Cold-blooded, you say. Damn right it is. But you try standing in the middle of a street with a crazy mob rushing towards you and there's really nothing you care about more than your own hide and to hell with everyone else. Blame Darwin, not the men on the ground.
There are veterans in the Corps with at least seven hundred guys killed. There are the rookies who get two hundred, maybe three if they're lucky. And then there are the dead, the ones who didn't kill enough. That's what the Corps teaches you. Self-preservation through maximum destruction. Survival of the fittest complete with night-vision goggles and phaser rifles.
I suppose every guy has to go through a sort of mental reprogramming at one time or another to justify that killing other guys is the right thing. Demonizing the enemy; making up moral issues; whatever worked for them. But above all was the preservation of life--their own life. All of us went through the same process, until all of us could kill without flinching. I suppose that's what keeps us all alive.
All of us except Andrea, who single-handedly defied all of the conditioning that had been drilled into our heads. And died because this pathetically imperfect world wasn't good enough for her dreams. Wasn't good enough for all of us who believed that there was some higher purpose to live for.
In other words, abso-fucking-lutely pointless.
The funeral was held at the base two days later. A priest said a few prayers, her body--pardon me, what was left of her body--laid in the mess hall for a few days, and then the coffin was tossed six feet under with a cute little cross on top. Her parents didn't come. Apparently they thought people who committed suicide were possessed by the devil and deserved to be condemned to burn in the fiery pits of Hell for all eternity. The letter of condolence that Balantino forced himself to write was returned without being opened.
There would be no punishment, of course. Jimmy's "fuckin' connections" served him well. Dear old dad simply threatened to withdraw funding from some program close to the President's heart if his son didn't get off lightly. Dear old mom simply threatened to raise hell with lawyers. Against all of this what chance did Sergeant Balantino have? So Jimmy got Annie and got off also.
What did she do to deserve all of this?
What did she do?
None of us can answer that question, although many of us certainly tried. Flaw in the gene pool, Jimmy said. Not every bitch goes insane after a night on the town. Told you she wasn't cut out to be a marine, Kevin announced. Can any woman do it like this, Bill hollered out one night when he was being deflowered. Like all marines, we were good at making excuses.
And so life went on. We trooped out onto the shooting fields the very next day after Andrea's funeral, jacked the safety off the Threes, and went back to work. The only reminder that somebody had died at the base were the black ribbons tied to our guns, and even those came off, one after the next.
I don't know why I kept mine on. There was really no reason, and I couldn't think up an excuse. But when the executioner's ax falls and you're standing there and you can't do anything and you have to watch as something innocent is shattered by the wrecking ball of reality, then I suppose that you can't disassociate yourself that easy.
Two months after the funeral, a bunch of bighead brass dropped by with the usual caravan of reporters to check up on the conditions at the base. Balantino broke some more guns with his hands but couldn't do anything. Otherwise he'd be sent to fight the froggies. Nobody really liked the brass.
It's kind of hard to believe that the brass were once marines too. I mean, look at that potbelly, look at those flabby muscles, look at that empty head. Nobody in that condition could have gotten into the Corps. Apparently, no such guidelines applied to the people in charge of the Corps. Each of them wear titles a foot taller than themselves and so many medals and decorations on their chests that I wonder why they don't need a large iron block tied to their back to counterbalance the weight. In essence, brass are the typical bureaucrats who happen to hold all of our fates in their hands.
The day before they were scheduled to arrive Balantino called me aside. Look, he said to me, eyeing the ribbon tied to my Three. You're going to have to take that thing off when the brass come. You can stick it back on once they leave, but that's only after they leave. We've got the right authorities notified and that's all I want to tell. Got that?
I didn't say anything, just fingered the rifle.
Look, he continued. Nothing against you or Andrea. Nothing at all. But try to see things from my point of view, all right?
Fingered the rifle some more.
You fuckin' deaf? Balantino was starting to get steamed. Take that ridiculous piece of shit off your gun and make sure it stays off while the brass are around.
Didn't do anything.
That's an order.
His eyes burned holes into me as I slowly undid the knot. The black ribbon fluttered to the ground and I slid it into my coat pocket. Then Balantino grinned, clapped me on the back, and revealed that he had put my name up for Lieutenant and a future officership. It was then that I understood I was being offered a bribe. Accept the petty rules of the Corps and zoom up the ladder to promotion or watch as my career withered away in front of me. For what?
Of course it was easy for everyone else to lose the ribbons. What was it to them? Like everything in life, Andrea's suicide was just one thing in this constantly changing world, and pretty soon she lay forgotten by the wayside as more important things like making the officer cut rolled around. Everyone mourned for a day or two, but of course it was all for show. Nobody meant whatever they said at the funeral. Nobody really gave a damn.
What did Dad say to me the day before he went off to his ship? I want to make a difference? He died for that. Galahad had taken his lot when he found the Holy Grail and had transcended all the boundaries that God placed upon humans right then and there. So did Arthur, when he stabbed Mordred during the final battle even if it was prophesized that he would be killed. And if all of those guys could do it, why couldn't I?
Darwin was correct when he said that self-preservation is key. The natural instinct of everybody is to make sure that they stay alive. Some inhuman force struggling against conscience, against all the law and order that we try to impose upon the world. A force that would always win unless we showed ourselves to be worthy of sentience.
I'd already failed once. For Andrea, nothing was worse than death. She was young, she was beautiful, she had an entire lifetime ahead of her. Everything in the world was there to make her happy. All she needed to do was to reach out for it. And I couldn't stop her.
Somehow, I didn't think I could live if I didn't do what I had to do. I really didn't have much of a choice.
When the brass arrived I was there to greet them with that black ribbon tied to my rifle.
That was the turning point, I suppose. The brass naturally inquired why I had it on and what family tragedy allowed me to disobey normal protocol and disfigure my weapons, and I explained everything tersely. Their leader nodded and told me that I could forget about stars.
Fuck you, I said.
So after they left Balantino dragged me to his office, screamed his worst, and then fixed my files so that I would drive him around in a shuttle. There goes your promotion, he snarled. Keep that goddamn ribbon on your goddamn rifle and give that goddamn rifle back to me.
I took my Three out of its holster and hit the safety. Killing was nothing to me now. He'd made sure of that. He'd transformed all of us into natural-born engines of destruction. After all, wasn't that what I was trained to do? Wasn't that my job?
It was remarkably clean. There was a nine-millimeter hole right through his heart. Amazing what technology can do. I locked the door to his office and asked the nearest cadet to show me to the nearest shuttle.
So the spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil all by itself. That's what's so convenient about tragedy--the simplest little thing will set it all off. A nonchalant look at a girl, for example, or a careless word, or even a tiny ribbon. Then the tragedy is on. The rest is automatic, and then you don't need to lift a finger. Every kind of death, chaos, and destruction is unleashed by that one simple thing. And then a horrible stillness. The kind of stillness that falls inside of you after the guillotine chops off a head; the kind of stillness that falls inside of you when a roaring crowd calls out for blood; the kind of stillness that falls inside of you when two lovers bare their hearts and bodies to each other, face to face in a darkened room; a hologram without sound; a mouth open but no voice; yourself, alone, in the middle of the silent desert.
Nothing is in doubt--that makes things easy. You see, you know what's going to happen to you. The guy you just killed knew what would happen to him. It all depends on the part you play. Nobody is at fault but the clockwork gears that move tragedy forward. You're trapped. The sky has fallen on you. Chicken Little was right. And there's nothing for you to do but accept it and stay still.
The intercom crackles again. Apparently there's another one which I'd forgotten about.
Jimmy's voice. Just as I remembered it. Just as it was days ago, months ago, years ago, ages ago. Pleading with me to change my mind. To change my course. To think of all the friendship we shared back when we were training together. To think of everything that we'd did and everything that we'd do. From marine to marine.
I said nothing.
To be or not to be, said Hamlet as he returned to Denmark and his death. That is the question. And that indeed is the question, for him, for Dad, for Andrea even. For me. Was there anything for me to do but accept it? To suffer in stillness?
I gunned the engine and sent the shuttle into a steep dive aimed straight at the barracks of Lancer Base.
It is all over. If it wasn't for me everything would be at peace. But it's too late for that now. All are caught up in the web without knowing why. Everyone's dead. Stiff, useless, rotting. And those who survive will begin to forget the dead, like they forgot Annie and they forgot my Dad.
I have played my part.
=/\= NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH =/\=
OMAHA, NEBRASKA—At 6:04 AM this morning an ensign crashed a shuttle into Lancer Starfleet Marine Corps Base for unknown reasons. The center of the blast was the barracks, but damage could be seen a full five miles in each direction. Due to security reasons, the Marine Corps has refused to identify the ensign, only saying that he was a new recruit with a history of insubordination. Also, in something which seems to be linked to the disaster, Sergeant Richard Balantino was found dead in his office with injuries consistent with the phaser found near the wreckage of the shuttle. Authorities are investigating the incident but have repeatedly refused to return calls for more information.
"It's terrible," says Lieutenant Jim Wycliff, the marine who took the initiative and led his men out of the barracks and to a place of relative safety right before the crash. "I had no idea that anybody was crazy enough to do something like this. Absolutely no idea."
Wycliff kept the ensign talking while he evacuated the rest of the marines, buying enough time so that only one was killed and five lightly wounded. The President of the Federation Council has hailed him as a hero and has recommended that he be awarded the Medal of Valor.
Apart from the phaser, the only other item shown to journalists was something which had inexplicably survived the inferno--a small black ribbon which was reportedly tied around the ensign's wrist.
=/\= NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH =/\=
I mean, you've got a warp engine chugging away behind you with enough antimatter to blow away a cruiser, and then you've got the chirping consoles which some genius of an engineer installed back at base, and then you've got the gun on top that's good for roasting ducks but not much else. All of which, you'd think, would make so much noise that walking into one of the unholy things would be like telling the Klinks to stick you in one of their agonizers.
Insulation probably counts for more than I think.
Not that I'm complaining. I've never been much good at dealing with noise, not even with omnipresent mechanical noise. At Lancer, Bill managed to reprogram a service robot to act like his personal masseuse, until I nailed the thing with a blast from my gun right when life was about to get interesting. Then again, you know Bill. "The perfect man for every woman and the perfect woman for every man." Amazing, the types who join the marines.
The intercom makes that little warbling sound again. Must be the tenth time. Guys down there probably getting desperate. Don't you get the point? I ask very calmly. I don't care about you. I don't care about your buddies. In fact, all of you bastards could go jump off the nearest cliff and I wouldn't give a rat's ass.
But you're one of my buddies too, and you know that.
I'm Queen Victoria. Didn't you know that?
What happened to it's all about the guys next to you? That's war. You gotta stay with your friends, man--
Bullshit.
Deep down, I swear to myself that if the guy tries to call me again I'll drive this shuttle straight down his windpipe and blow it up somewhere between the stomach and the intestine.
I never liked shuttles, so I suppose it was karma that I ended up driving one this beautiful December morning. Some error in the bureaucratic system, probably, passed off as my real assignment because no one wanted to get off their lazy asses and fix it down at Ops.
After my first ride on a shuttle, I threw up. It was a Federation Type-E shuttlecraft, known as the Eppie to the guys. Handled worse than a dreadnought, or so I was told. And just my luck, I got one of those daredevil pilots who wanted to strut her stuff--so she did some crazy-ass flips over the Golden Gate, some more crazy-ass flips over the Sierra Nevadas, and some more crazy-ass flips in zero-g before she finally landed. Terra firma at last.
First, I discharged all of the orange juice she'd sadistically offered me before the flight. Second, I brushed myself off with the last remaining shreds of dignity I had left. Third, I looked her in the eye, grinned, and made a rather obscene gesture with my hands.
If it wasn't for the fact that I had landed at Lancer Base, Starfleet Marine Corps, I would have done more. Much more.
The intercom chirps again. So the guy still wants to talk. I turn to the computer and plot in the coordinates. If I've calculated correctly-- and I know I have--the first people to go will be my buddies in the command center.
You're serious, aren't you? he asks desperately. You're really fucking serious.
It's too funny. Trying hard not to laugh, I let him have it. Of course I'm fucking serious. Don't you know me well enough? I thought I was your best friend, you know?
I'm not friends with traitors.
That's a harsh word.
He must have realized that he'd screwed up, but I really didn't give him much of a chance. I clicked off the safety on my precious rifle and proceeded to turn the comm into a mass of molten metal. There was really no point in listening to Jimmy rant.
Jimmy's the kind of guy you love to hate. He's got that killer smile, which many a young girl's fallen for, those chiseled abs which signaled that he spent most of his waking life exercising--one way or another--and short, cropped blond hair. Son of a rich father and his mother's the most powerful woman on the Council. On the fast-track to promotion ever since he was born. In other words, the perfect Starfleet marine.
And I had the good fortune to meet him a few hours after I arrived at Lancer.
If you had put me and Jimmy next to each other, you'd start swearing that we were probably fraternal twins without the twins or the fraternal. I'm lanky and relatively short, and I really didn't give a damn about girls. My dad was a lieutenant on the Nautilus, one of the new destroyers, and my mom was so disinterested in politics that the principal of my grade school had to personally come over to our house to convince her to join the parent/teacher association. While Jimmy was born with a golden foot in his mouth, I had to actually do work to get into the Corps. As a result, there was a whole "poor-ass commoner against rich-ass aristocrat" thing going around Lancer, a supposedly classless base.
I say "classless" because of our CO Sergeant Balantino who had a temper so vicious that he once broke a phaser with his bare hands. Snapped the thing in half without even grunting. The guy's five-foot one. Like every sergeant in the Corps, Balantino thought of us recruits as nothing better than that raw targ the Klinks use as a delicacy, and looked like he ripped people's guts out for the hell of it.
Jimmy's the kind of guy people love to hate, and Balantino hated Jimmy, but he really couldn't do much to him. Fuckin' connections, Balantino used to snarl. If it wasn't for your fuckin' connections I'd be beating the shee-it out of you right now.
I don't think Jimmy really cared. His mama would have raised so much hell that Balantino would have been sent to the froggie front. Nobody in their right mind wanted to be fighting the froggies, of course, since we'd been hearing horror stories about how they zombify everyone they capture. Hell, I don't think people who weren't in their right mind would want to be fighting the froggies either. Otherwise, Jimmy would have gone. What a loss.
My mom had never wanted me to join the Corps, for she was definitely in her right mind and she really didn't want her only son to get zombified by the froggies. Then dad died and some fucker at the pension department said that we weren't eligible for the pension and then began to speechify about all of the bureaucratic shit that had to take place before we could be eligible for the pension. Apparently, death in the line of duty wasn't enough. Since mom couldn't get a job without leaving her present one, which was taking care of me, I joined the Corps. She made a lot of ruckus the day I left, but the last time I heard from her she was a successful accountant for Stern and Stanley. So successful, in fact, that the fellow at the pension department was so ashamed he volunteered to go to the froggie front and was zombified in a day. Last I heard of him, he was lifting bricks at the slave colony on Zolov.
Dad would have been proud of both of us.
My dad was a twelfth-century guy who had the terrible misfortune of being born in the twenty-third. He met my mom when she tripped down a flight of stairs and landed on his back. Dad was carrying a large broadsword he'd just bought at an auction for a few thousand credits. The thing just exploded like one of those clay pigeons we shot at during Basic. I've still got the pieces somewhere. Dad never could find someone good enough to put the sword back together.
All the other kids were read bedtime stories about the Tortoise and the Hare or other folktales like that. For me, Dad yanked out his personally translated copy of [I]Le Morte d'Arthur[/I] and, with me on his knee, began to expound upon the greatness of the medieval ages. Now, here we've got Mordred, he would tell me. Mordred's a fucking bastard. He's the illegitimate son of King Arthur and Morgan le Fay, the evil sorceress, and his primary ambition is to get onto the throne and Arthur's wife along with it. And that's not all. While Mordred was plotting all of that bad shit, Sir Launcelot--you remember Sir Launcelot, right?--yeah, the guy who has a romantic issue with Arthur's Wife--Sir Launcelot leads a revolt against the king...
And on and on like that until Mom ran into the room screaming her head off for me to go to bed. Filling his head with crazy notions, she would always say. More of this and he's going to be running off to join the military and get himself killed.
I loved those bedtime stories. Not as much as for their content--I was too young to appreciate the innuendos at the time--but because Dad seemed to sincerely believe in them. King Arthur found an England with wars and shit, Dad would say after each story, and left it with more wars and shit. But while he was alive, he had a vision of a united country where might was used for right. He made a difference, and we remember him because of it. And one of these days, I'm going to make a difference too. You remember that, son. You remember that.
Dad did make a difference, all right. Two months after he completed officer training and got himself assigned to a new destroyer, his cocky CO decided to go beat the shit out of a froggie heavy. Apparently, Dad's CO didn't know that froggie COs were also cocky and liked to beat the shit out of Feddie destroyers. Now, I haven't seen them for myself, but all the Navy I've talked to say that plasma torps are some crapass things to get on your tail.
Dad's ship got four.
To make a long story short, the destroyer was about to be blown out of space until, no thanks to the Federation--which didn't want to trigger another fucking "diplomatic incident"--the rescue ship arrived. The rescue ship was commanded by another cocky CO who apparently had no compunctions about disobeying orders to save lives. All guns blazing, the rescue ship promptly smashed itself to pieces on a very large asteroid.
When the fight was over, the Navy boys had to send a medical frig to clean up the pieces. And, true to form, the sawbones had just enough body bags so that every corpse but one could be treated to an honorable burial. Partly because he was wedged between a warp engine and the bridge and partly because the spacetroopers didn't want to risk their precious paint job getting close to big floating rocks, the medical frig fired a twenty- one gun salute (well, actually, a one-gun salute twenty-one times) for each of the heroes in the body bags, vaporizing what was left of Dad's body in the process.
I suppose that I had to recover sometime in my life. I locked myself in Dad's study the day after I learned of his death not from a Starfleet telegram but from the news media, took down his books from their shelves, and flipped through them like we used to do when I was five. Mom picked the lock, caught me removing Dad's broken broadsword from its bag, threw a fit, and kicked me out of the room. She never did handle things as well as I did.
I didn't learn anything about Dad's death in the line of duty until I arrived at Lancer and Balantino gave me a long talk about my family lineage, concluding with an exhortation to do my absolute fucking best in his beloved Corps or be ripped to pieces by his Dobermans. Like I had a choice.
People'll go around and give you all this bullshit about how bad Basic is. The drill instructors, they say, are probably demons from the deepest depths of Hell. The water seems to lower its temperature just for you, it's never anything below a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the guns they give you are specially made to misfire. If I were you, I wouldn't believe that shit at all. Things aren't like these guys tell you.
Things are worse.
Now, you got to believe me here when I say that I've never been cut out for all of that hefty stuff you see in those holovids. "Be the best you can be," the slogan is, and then you see the sweaty Andorian jumping off a wall with a few hundred tons of weapons on his back. For the record, that's all computer generated. No marine would ever try a stunt like that, and no film crew would ever get that near a sweaty Andorian.
No, Balantino took one look at me and he assigned me to the snipers.
For most people, it's a dream job. Good ol' Jimmy--you remember Jimmy, right?--Jimmy pulled some strings and got himself assigned to the snipers too. Supposedly brought prestige and honor to the family. But to be a good sniper, you have to be good at two other things. One. You need to know how to shoot. And two. You need to know how to shoot straight.
Everybody can shoot. You can give a monkey a pump-action shotgun and he'll mow down the entire Federation Council before you can say banana. Even Jimmy could shoot, and that's saying something. The trouble with sniping is that you need to shoot straight.
Don't give me that crap about high-tech gadgetry. None of that works when you're on a planet and your sensors are all fouled up with interference. It's all about the eyes and the control. Before you go into the Corps, you're an ordinary human being. The Corps beats you down. The Corps smacks you so hard that you'll fly all the way to Shanghai and back. The Corps makes sure that only the toughest survive. And then the Corps turns you into a killing machine. The most lethal weapon ever invented, Balantino would always say, are you guys. But you'll find out that my Dobermans are fuckin' lethal too. So get your ass moving before you find out just how lethal they are.
Jimmy never liked any of that and said so to the Sarge's face. Balantino looked like he was about to break the guy's neck, but instead began spouting another long monologue about Jimmy's fuckin' connections, threatening him with God and Satan and Everything In Between. God and Satan were Balantino's two Dobermans, and Everything In Between were their three pups.
But even if you've got fuckin' connections, you've still got to pass the final exams before you're considered a full-fledged marine, and if you're in the sniper corps, you got to shoot straight. There was a bet going around the guys that the only way Jimmy could shoot straight was if there was a girl around him, and in that case he would never miss, and I won a few hundred off of Bill that way. Never did realize that most men think if other men as their competitors for playmates, not as their playmates.
It was different for me. Jimmy couldn't shoot straight at anything but girls; I could shoot straight at anything except girls. Around the second week we were at Lancer I met up with a guy with a souped-up Three and I asked him where he got the gun fixed up like that. Next day, I gathered up all my winnings from Bill and went to the quartermaster's where the guy gave me a tripod, grip, and sniper sight, and threw in a free IR- muter because I flashed some cash. Balantino didn't make any rule against using souped-up guns, so while everyone else was trying to hit the targets popping up one by one, I blasted each of them with a clean headshot with my Three with time to spare. Everything In Between reacted rather strangely to the ultrasound from my silenced gun--they would go mad every time I fired it next to them. Maybe they didn't like it, maybe they did. I don't know if trying to bite your leg off is a sign of affection in Dobermans.
Balantino didn't seem to think so, but that was probably because the only love he'd ever felt in his entire life was from his dogs. Sarge loved his dogs so much that he'd cover them with his umbrella and lead them to the car while the rain was pouring buckets of water onto his starched uniform. Drill sergeants have to have a human side, I suppose. Even Balantino, who spent twenty years of his life in the Corps. That's what the Corps teaches you. They drive everything that's human out of your body and replace it with a crazy-ass disregard for life. You can either do that or drop out. And if you dropped out, you could go Navy and fight froggies all day long until they zombified you and sent you to Zolov. Naturally, nobody in their right mind would ever go to fight froggies, so nobody ever dropped out.
I'm not saying that people didn't die during Basic. Federation's desperate to hide it, but the sad fact is that some folks just weren't cut out for the job. Modern medicine and all that other doctor shit only works if you get to the guy in time, and sometimes the medics just couldn't get to the guy in time. What was so fucking stupid about the whole thing was that their deaths were simply pointless.
I never had any objection to killing people if it was for a just cause. I mean, even Galahad had to kill some time in his life, and he's the guy who got the Holy Grail. But killing to have fun--that's just disgusting. But that's what war's all about. Preserve your way of life. Make sure that the bad bogeymen don't get you first. Because you know that when they get you, your family's next, and then all that you love and care for in this galaxy.
Back in the 20th century, before the Federation rolled around, there was a shitload of pointless killing. They called it World War One, when old countries like England fought with other old countries like Germany. For no other reason than the death of one measly man called Ferdinand. Millions of boys, sent out by their politicos for the cause of freedom, died in that war, all of them doing their best to kill before being killed. Is human life really that worthless?
A few days before Christmas on the Western Front boys on both sides realized something really deep, which all of the guys in charge never realized. These guys realized that, no matter which country you were from or which army you were fighting for, you were still one of their really distant relatives. Weren't we all descended from the same monkeys, after all? And these guys began to think.
It started when the English guys began to sing German Christmas carols. And the Germans began to sing English carols. Then the English guys sang more German carols. And then the Germans sang more English carols. And pretty soon, all of these boys left their weapons in their trenches and walked out to say Hello or whatever you say in German, laughing, crying, whatever. They played soccer, drank together, sang together, and brought down the whole fucking house. For those few precious days, guns were forgotten as the spirit of humanity cut through the horrors of that war. More carols, more soccer, more schnitzel und bier.
And then these guys went back to their weapons and started blowing the shit out of each other again.
Fucking pointless, war is.
Abso-fucking-lutely pointless.
The Federation tried to change that. The guys in charge said, we want peace, you want peace, let's all be happy and give it a chance. No more wars. No more nuclear holocaust. Just give peace a chance.
Much good that did. Three hundred years later we're still fighting wars, this time with aliens halfway across the galaxy, and we're killing them like mad. And they're killing us like mad too. And what the [I]fuck[/I] is the point of that? All those guys dying out there, on both sides, and we don't get anything but a stalemate.
See, war's become much more mechanized now. There was actually honor back in the old days, chivalry, codes of conduct which said that you had to be nice to your enemy and your enemy had to be nice to you. Like the Green Knight, who spared Sir Gawaine instead of chopping him up into tiny bits. And now, all you do is point, press a button, and a computer does it all for you. We've got fighters that can rip things apart from kilometers away, and the pilots don't see who they're killing. All they see is another machine coming right towards them, blasting away, and they try to kill that machine before it kills them. You can't look the other guy in the eye and see just how frightened he really is. You just have to kill.
I remember when Balantino first took us hunting. Somehow, he managed to train his Dobermans to be hunting dogs, and there happened to be a forest next to Lancer. Balantino saddled us up in a few speeders and sent us on our way. They had deer in that forest, and all of them simply weren't afraid of us. How were they supposed to know that the strange things moving around were going to kill them? Everyone was whooping and shouting excitedly as they blasted holes through deer after deer. The most powerful guns the Federation can offer against mere Nature. Pretty soon the forest was full of dead carcasses.
Balantino wanted me to shoot something, so I did. I picked the weakest one I could see. The doe was obviously suffering, for there was this bigass bulge and it took every ounce of strength she had to stand up. I raised my Three and pumped a single shot into its head.
Those eyes.
You should have been there to see those eyes. Liquid brown flecked with black, large and wide, and looking curiously at me before I burned a small black hole into its skull.
Good shot, said the Sarge proudly. That one was pregnant. I'd better put you on assignment soon or there'll be no more deer left to shoot.
I saluted stiffly, excused myself, and threw up on the nearest tree.
Isn't that just what war is? Killing deer? Guys you can't see and who don't get a chance to see you before they die? For some vague jingoistic notion of devotion to country?
I would have resigned right then but there was no way in hell that I would go fight froggies. So I stayed, and I let myself be taught the arts of dealing death. Head shots work best, Balantino would say, putting a clean hole through a target. You hit these froggies in the head and they'll go down like a fucking bag of bricks. For these dolphin-like ones, you bust their senses with a flashbang and then toss an electromag into their tank. Fry them like charbroiled crawfish on Mardi Gras. And so on and so forth. I didn't see how anybody could stomach watching Balantino blow the brains out of deer like that and still want to stay in. Least of all the girls in the camp, like Andrea.
I'm sure she didn't join the Corps on purpose. If you'd seen her, you'd have sworn that she wasn't much older than sixteen. Short blond hair, five-foot four or something like that. The Three every sniper carried around looked out of place when she carried it. Hell, Balantino cursed in disgust when Andrea arrived at Lancer. We got ourselves a fuckin' fashion model.
It was true that she wasn't that bad to look at. All the guys were forced to get buzz cuts, and when you were wearing gear it wasn't really all that bad. But then you'd walk into the mess hall, you'd see four or five full heads of hair with a large hairless crowd gathering around each of them and you'd know that things weren't going so good for the dames.
Since the Corps already allowed all Federation races to join, there really was no point in not allowing women to serve. I got to question the mental well-being of some of those higher-ups, though, because putting the four or five girls who were drafted in the same camp as a few hundred testosterone-laden guys whose idea of a good time was to beer up and bash some heads didn't seem like the recipe for success.
That was true from the start. Annie would get asked out every other minute by another guy at Lancer, and she'd smile modestly and say maybe. That's the way to keep interest, I remember thinking as Kevin returned to the bunks looking more dejected than ever. Keep their hopes alive and eventually dash them into more pieces than Balantino's deer. Brilliant. I looked at Annie and couldn't help thinking that here was a true damsel in distress, for almost half the Lancers were after her.
Don't mistake me here. It's not love, but rather an emotion somewhere along the lines of pity. I'm not so egotistical as to think that all women think I'm a Launcelot--I'm definitely not the best-looking guy at base (although I'm not so self-deprecating as to say that I was the worst). There was simply no fucking way a sylph like that one would ever want to have anything to do with me. But there were plenty of men who wanted to have lots to do with her, and I later found out that she was simply too well brought up to give a flat-out no.
But she could shoot, and that was what Balantino looked for. In my opinion, if one of them Sixty-Niners--yeah, the artillery--went off next to her the shockwave would have shattered her body. She was too frail to be a good marine. Balantino didn't give a shit. Balantino did give her a gun and told her to blast a few targets, and she did acceptably well. Better than Jimmy. I won another hundred dollars off of Bill for that too, because Bill didn't seem to think that women could shoot half as well as men.
What was so tragic about Annie was not all the harassment, however. It was that she was young and idealistic. I want to make a difference, she once said to me. Just like what Dad had said before he got himself killed. And that was the same way she was. Idealistic is not a good thing. When you're idealistic, you dream, and when you dream too much, you find out that what you're dreaming for simply can't come true.
There's only one conversation with her that I can remember clearly, the one which convinced me that she had better drop out of the Corps or else was a few nights after I blasted Bill's robot to pieces. Somehow our nightly game of poker had turned into a Q and A session where each of us asked each other just why he'd been fucking stupid enough to join the Corps.
I heard the usual excuses. My mom wanted me to join so I did, or I got drafted in such-and-such a year, or I wanted adventure so I signed up. Everyone got a chuckle when Bill said he joined because he wanted the company. Just a bunch of bored soldiers having their fun.
Annie was different. You can tell when someone's really believing in whatever they're telling you. All of a sudden she got this earnest look on her face, leaning forward and propping her hands against the table. It's my duty to the Federation, she said. To earn everything which it gives me. To protect our society from any and all invaders. And so on and so forth. You know the mantra.
I was listening to her and trying hard not to shut her up by stunning her with my Three. All the while thinking where have I heard this shit before?
When she was done there was absolute silence. Then, suddenly, Jimmy began to laugh.
Jimmy's laugh is the kind of laugh that hurts. Starts with him, then it spreads to that guy down the line and to the next guy and the next and the next until the whole fucking room is laughing uproariously. Annie takes one look at us and runs out of the room. Her little idealistic bubble had just been burst and I swear that even Sarge Balantino noticed something.
Listen, he told her as gently as he could the next day during one of our breaks. Heard what you were talkin' about last night. And what happened. Now you gotta hear me when I tell you this, otherwise you'll get booted out faster than anything. None of that shit about the Federation matters anymore. Got that?
Annie looked absolutely stunned.
Balantino shrugged. Fine. Don't believe me. But I've been in combat against more guys than you can possibly fuck in a lifetime so you hear me good. When you're shootin' and blastin' your way through guys with nobody but a fellow marine next to you your mind goes blank. You don't think about the Federation. You don't think about your family. You think about the guy next to you. The guy next to you's the guy that counts. If he doesn't shoot good, you're dead. If he doesn't protect your ass, you're dead. And he knows that if you don't do what he's doing for you, he's dead too. So fuck the Federation. It doesn't matter anymore. Got that?
She nodded mutely. It's all about the guy next to you, I could see her mouthing to herself as she kept on shooting. Her Three whined as another target exploded. Said it again. Another target exploded. And again. Another target exploded. And on. And on. And on. That day she got the highest kill ratio that I ever saw.
Annie was shattered, I could tell. She'd just figured out that the ideal world she'd been envisioning could never possibly be the one which the rest of us lived in. Just realized that the world didn't work the way she thought it did. But she was more resilient than I had thought. All about the guy next to you became her modus operandi. Kill ratios skyrocketed. Pretty soon she passed even me.
There was a fanatical drive in the girl that had just been awakened. To prove herself to everyone, including herself, that she was right in thinking that she could change the world just like that. By virtue of ideals alone. First it was loyalty to country. Then it became loyalty to companion. She dedicated herself to that. Maybe too much. For it was like an obsession, this burning need to show the world that she could single-handedly take it on and win.
Then Jimmy, good old Jimmy, drank too much beer one night and tried to rape her.
That was the final straw. In less than two months every single pillar her life had been built on suddenly disappeared, ripped to pieces by cold reality. Country didn't matter any more. Balantino had made sure of that. Companions didn't matter any more either. Jimmy had made sure of that. There was nothing left for Annie to live for.
The next day we were scheduled to do a survival run. They'd take us up in a shuttle, pop the doors, and push us out. A few thousand feet above the sky we were supposed to pull the cord and open the parachute. Then we were supposed to steer the piece of shit and land it. Then we were supposed to do some POW training. If we got caught by guys dressed in Klink uniforms we'd been taken to a "simulated" camp and be stuck into a low-power agonizer. If we didn't get caught and if we made it to the hut in the middle of a clearing they'd give us congratulations and a chocolate chip cookie.
There were only three of us in the shuttle. Annie, Bill, and me. Bill did his jump and got captured by the Klinks seconds after because he knew a guy on the OPFOR and wanted to socialize. Then it was Annie's turn.
Your para's untied, I told her as she stood up. Sit down and I'll check the gear for you.
She looked up at me. Those eyes.
Those eyes were the eyes of a young girl whose world had collapsed around her. Panicked. Sorrowful. And yet full of determination. Just like the deer in the forest. I let go of her parachute. Annie jumped out of the shuttle, her eyes still locked on mine.
For the first time in my life, I felt helpless. Absolutely goddamned useless. I kept on watching as her petite body tumbled upside-down and backwards and side to side as it gradually became smaller and smaller until I couldn't see anything at all.
Balantino later told me she fell five thousand six hundred and ninety feet before she died.
Survival training was canceled. So was everything else. Sarge walked around with this strange hollow expression not even returning salutes and the rest of the guys were strangely quiet as we filed back into the barracks. Death hit home to the Lancers when Annie jumped out of the shuttle. All of us were traumatized.
I still can't believe the irony.
From day one Balantino had relentlessly drilled into us that we were Marines. Marines are elite, he said. Your drunken bastards on the street can be the infantry. But it takes a special kind of guy to join the Corps. A kind of guy that doesn't fear dying in the line of duty. We've got the highest KIAs in all of the services for a reason. If you don't understand that, you can get the fuck out and let the real men do the work for you. Then Balantino congratulated every one of us on making the cut and expressed his sincere hope that we'd die before the age of 30.
You see, no life matters more than your own in the crazy calculus of war. I've shot people before because they pulled funny shit. And I know for a fact that I'm going to shoot people again if any of them try to pull more funny shit. No hesitation. None. I'm just going to pull the trigger and watch another guy hit the dirt.
Cold-blooded, you say. Damn right it is. But you try standing in the middle of a street with a crazy mob rushing towards you and there's really nothing you care about more than your own hide and to hell with everyone else. Blame Darwin, not the men on the ground.
There are veterans in the Corps with at least seven hundred guys killed. There are the rookies who get two hundred, maybe three if they're lucky. And then there are the dead, the ones who didn't kill enough. That's what the Corps teaches you. Self-preservation through maximum destruction. Survival of the fittest complete with night-vision goggles and phaser rifles.
I suppose every guy has to go through a sort of mental reprogramming at one time or another to justify that killing other guys is the right thing. Demonizing the enemy; making up moral issues; whatever worked for them. But above all was the preservation of life--their own life. All of us went through the same process, until all of us could kill without flinching. I suppose that's what keeps us all alive.
All of us except Andrea, who single-handedly defied all of the conditioning that had been drilled into our heads. And died because this pathetically imperfect world wasn't good enough for her dreams. Wasn't good enough for all of us who believed that there was some higher purpose to live for.
In other words, abso-fucking-lutely pointless.
The funeral was held at the base two days later. A priest said a few prayers, her body--pardon me, what was left of her body--laid in the mess hall for a few days, and then the coffin was tossed six feet under with a cute little cross on top. Her parents didn't come. Apparently they thought people who committed suicide were possessed by the devil and deserved to be condemned to burn in the fiery pits of Hell for all eternity. The letter of condolence that Balantino forced himself to write was returned without being opened.
There would be no punishment, of course. Jimmy's "fuckin' connections" served him well. Dear old dad simply threatened to withdraw funding from some program close to the President's heart if his son didn't get off lightly. Dear old mom simply threatened to raise hell with lawyers. Against all of this what chance did Sergeant Balantino have? So Jimmy got Annie and got off also.
What did she do to deserve all of this?
What did she do?
None of us can answer that question, although many of us certainly tried. Flaw in the gene pool, Jimmy said. Not every bitch goes insane after a night on the town. Told you she wasn't cut out to be a marine, Kevin announced. Can any woman do it like this, Bill hollered out one night when he was being deflowered. Like all marines, we were good at making excuses.
And so life went on. We trooped out onto the shooting fields the very next day after Andrea's funeral, jacked the safety off the Threes, and went back to work. The only reminder that somebody had died at the base were the black ribbons tied to our guns, and even those came off, one after the next.
I don't know why I kept mine on. There was really no reason, and I couldn't think up an excuse. But when the executioner's ax falls and you're standing there and you can't do anything and you have to watch as something innocent is shattered by the wrecking ball of reality, then I suppose that you can't disassociate yourself that easy.
Two months after the funeral, a bunch of bighead brass dropped by with the usual caravan of reporters to check up on the conditions at the base. Balantino broke some more guns with his hands but couldn't do anything. Otherwise he'd be sent to fight the froggies. Nobody really liked the brass.
It's kind of hard to believe that the brass were once marines too. I mean, look at that potbelly, look at those flabby muscles, look at that empty head. Nobody in that condition could have gotten into the Corps. Apparently, no such guidelines applied to the people in charge of the Corps. Each of them wear titles a foot taller than themselves and so many medals and decorations on their chests that I wonder why they don't need a large iron block tied to their back to counterbalance the weight. In essence, brass are the typical bureaucrats who happen to hold all of our fates in their hands.
The day before they were scheduled to arrive Balantino called me aside. Look, he said to me, eyeing the ribbon tied to my Three. You're going to have to take that thing off when the brass come. You can stick it back on once they leave, but that's only after they leave. We've got the right authorities notified and that's all I want to tell. Got that?
I didn't say anything, just fingered the rifle.
Look, he continued. Nothing against you or Andrea. Nothing at all. But try to see things from my point of view, all right?
Fingered the rifle some more.
You fuckin' deaf? Balantino was starting to get steamed. Take that ridiculous piece of shit off your gun and make sure it stays off while the brass are around.
Didn't do anything.
That's an order.
His eyes burned holes into me as I slowly undid the knot. The black ribbon fluttered to the ground and I slid it into my coat pocket. Then Balantino grinned, clapped me on the back, and revealed that he had put my name up for Lieutenant and a future officership. It was then that I understood I was being offered a bribe. Accept the petty rules of the Corps and zoom up the ladder to promotion or watch as my career withered away in front of me. For what?
Of course it was easy for everyone else to lose the ribbons. What was it to them? Like everything in life, Andrea's suicide was just one thing in this constantly changing world, and pretty soon she lay forgotten by the wayside as more important things like making the officer cut rolled around. Everyone mourned for a day or two, but of course it was all for show. Nobody meant whatever they said at the funeral. Nobody really gave a damn.
What did Dad say to me the day before he went off to his ship? I want to make a difference? He died for that. Galahad had taken his lot when he found the Holy Grail and had transcended all the boundaries that God placed upon humans right then and there. So did Arthur, when he stabbed Mordred during the final battle even if it was prophesized that he would be killed. And if all of those guys could do it, why couldn't I?
Darwin was correct when he said that self-preservation is key. The natural instinct of everybody is to make sure that they stay alive. Some inhuman force struggling against conscience, against all the law and order that we try to impose upon the world. A force that would always win unless we showed ourselves to be worthy of sentience.
I'd already failed once. For Andrea, nothing was worse than death. She was young, she was beautiful, she had an entire lifetime ahead of her. Everything in the world was there to make her happy. All she needed to do was to reach out for it. And I couldn't stop her.
Somehow, I didn't think I could live if I didn't do what I had to do. I really didn't have much of a choice.
When the brass arrived I was there to greet them with that black ribbon tied to my rifle.
That was the turning point, I suppose. The brass naturally inquired why I had it on and what family tragedy allowed me to disobey normal protocol and disfigure my weapons, and I explained everything tersely. Their leader nodded and told me that I could forget about stars.
Fuck you, I said.
So after they left Balantino dragged me to his office, screamed his worst, and then fixed my files so that I would drive him around in a shuttle. There goes your promotion, he snarled. Keep that goddamn ribbon on your goddamn rifle and give that goddamn rifle back to me.
I took my Three out of its holster and hit the safety. Killing was nothing to me now. He'd made sure of that. He'd transformed all of us into natural-born engines of destruction. After all, wasn't that what I was trained to do? Wasn't that my job?
It was remarkably clean. There was a nine-millimeter hole right through his heart. Amazing what technology can do. I locked the door to his office and asked the nearest cadet to show me to the nearest shuttle.
So the spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil all by itself. That's what's so convenient about tragedy--the simplest little thing will set it all off. A nonchalant look at a girl, for example, or a careless word, or even a tiny ribbon. Then the tragedy is on. The rest is automatic, and then you don't need to lift a finger. Every kind of death, chaos, and destruction is unleashed by that one simple thing. And then a horrible stillness. The kind of stillness that falls inside of you after the guillotine chops off a head; the kind of stillness that falls inside of you when a roaring crowd calls out for blood; the kind of stillness that falls inside of you when two lovers bare their hearts and bodies to each other, face to face in a darkened room; a hologram without sound; a mouth open but no voice; yourself, alone, in the middle of the silent desert.
Nothing is in doubt--that makes things easy. You see, you know what's going to happen to you. The guy you just killed knew what would happen to him. It all depends on the part you play. Nobody is at fault but the clockwork gears that move tragedy forward. You're trapped. The sky has fallen on you. Chicken Little was right. And there's nothing for you to do but accept it and stay still.
The intercom crackles again. Apparently there's another one which I'd forgotten about.
Jimmy's voice. Just as I remembered it. Just as it was days ago, months ago, years ago, ages ago. Pleading with me to change my mind. To change my course. To think of all the friendship we shared back when we were training together. To think of everything that we'd did and everything that we'd do. From marine to marine.
I said nothing.
To be or not to be, said Hamlet as he returned to Denmark and his death. That is the question. And that indeed is the question, for him, for Dad, for Andrea even. For me. Was there anything for me to do but accept it? To suffer in stillness?
I gunned the engine and sent the shuttle into a steep dive aimed straight at the barracks of Lancer Base.
It is all over. If it wasn't for me everything would be at peace. But it's too late for that now. All are caught up in the web without knowing why. Everyone's dead. Stiff, useless, rotting. And those who survive will begin to forget the dead, like they forgot Annie and they forgot my Dad.
I have played my part.
=/\= NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH =/\=
OMAHA, NEBRASKA—At 6:04 AM this morning an ensign crashed a shuttle into Lancer Starfleet Marine Corps Base for unknown reasons. The center of the blast was the barracks, but damage could be seen a full five miles in each direction. Due to security reasons, the Marine Corps has refused to identify the ensign, only saying that he was a new recruit with a history of insubordination. Also, in something which seems to be linked to the disaster, Sergeant Richard Balantino was found dead in his office with injuries consistent with the phaser found near the wreckage of the shuttle. Authorities are investigating the incident but have repeatedly refused to return calls for more information.
"It's terrible," says Lieutenant Jim Wycliff, the marine who took the initiative and led his men out of the barracks and to a place of relative safety right before the crash. "I had no idea that anybody was crazy enough to do something like this. Absolutely no idea."
Wycliff kept the ensign talking while he evacuated the rest of the marines, buying enough time so that only one was killed and five lightly wounded. The President of the Federation Council has hailed him as a hero and has recommended that he be awarded the Medal of Valor.
Apart from the phaser, the only other item shown to journalists was something which had inexplicably survived the inferno--a small black ribbon which was reportedly tied around the ensign's wrist.
=/\= NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH NEWS FLASH =/\=