Welcome to the Marines (Corporate Marines Book 2) (21 page)

All I know is that by the end of the training day, we are all exhausted from the concentration and activity.

When we are back in the fitting room and stripping out of our armour, I realize I stink. But I put the armour back on its stand and run the diagnostic on it and then wipe it down. That takes almost an hour and then we all stagger back to the cafeteria, where we devour huge quantities of food. Off to the rooms and then showers, followed by sleep. I am out by nine and don’t wake up for a few minutes through the alarm going off.

The next day is the same, and the day after that and so on. We become better shots and go from using a firing line to one person moving and shooting at a time in that tunnel.

After we have the use of the rifles down to the point where we will not embarrass Armour, we move on to side arms. We are better than when we first started using our rifles, but we are not good.

After a few days of thousands of rounds down-range, we are almost good.

Then we move on to the first support weapons.

Our medium laser cannons and rocket launchers are using underpowered shots and non-explosive warheads. Our suits are reconfigured so the sensors show them as full power.

They are not hard to use. It’s when the specialized training begins that it hurts.

Our suits can be programmed so that they act to disorient us and shift our centre of balance. We operate singly and in teams using the weapons.

One scenario has us on a volcanic planet with fluctuating gravity and earthquakes. One person is the base and mag-locks the weapon to their back while they are on all fours. The other person sights and fires the weapon at a distant target almost three kilometres away. We have to hit a target the size of a dinner plate at that range while we are bucking all over.

None of us does it the first or second day. But by the eighth day of this weird training, we are scoring seven out of ten hits.

Every day is mostly the same. The only real difference is that it gets more difficult while we are getting used to it. We are always exhausted and worn out, but we can do amazing things now.

Then we leave the base.

We armour up and go to the elevator like we did every day. This time it heads up and we come out in a large indoor vehicle park. There are two huge trucks that remind me of garbage trucks. We board them and then hook up to internal umbilical’s so that we won’t use up our batteries.

The trucks roar off and then Armour, who is sitting at the front on a smaller seat than the big benches that the six of us are stuck on, speaks up. “You are good enough to go out in public. So we are going to hit a live-fire range and do some warm-ups, and then move on to the grenade launchers. Don’t mess up as the eyes of the world are upon us.”

We sit there for twenty minutes while we drive out. Then we finally stop and unload.

We are in an area that looks like it belongs on the moon. In the distance are some hills and a small building off to the side where the vehicles roll to when we unload.

As we are unboxing our rifles and side arms, the crews that had driven us out here leave the cabs of the trucks and move into the small building.

I look at it and activate my sensors, staying in passive mode. That small building is quite a large underground bunker loaded with electronics. All the sensors and gadgets inside are aimed at the range where we are going to start from.

We move to the firing line and then I see movement down-range from us.

My comms line clicks open and Armour starts talking in what I’m used to thinking of as lecture mode. Just don’t drift off mentally or she’ll kick your ass.

“The standard attached grenade launcher fires a shell that is just a bit larger than an old-style twelve-gauge shotgun shell. Effective range is out to almost two hundred and fifty metres. Multiple different types of ordnance have been created by the Corporation. You will use explosive shrapnel, penetrator rounds, high explosive rounds, and the close-quarter buzz round. You see ahead of you three different targets that will show you what these rounds can do. Step to the line. Load one of each round in the order I described them to you and wait to fire.”

The line clicks off and I move up and load. When the chime sounds, I bring my rifle up. Ahead of me there is movement and then I can see hundreds of pigs running around in an enclosed open-topped pen.

The chime sounds again and then a targeting carat appears above the pen. I fire my round and everyone else fires theirs at the same time. It is a long, drawn-out popping explosion at a distance of less than a hundred metres. Right after the explosion sound is the screaming of the pigs, which suddenly cuts off except for a single shrieking sound that goes on.

Another chime sounds and a target farther off pops up. They all look the same: a large piece of armour standing upright. The chime sounds again and we all fire. I can see my round hit and blow right through the armour plate, leaving the edges glowing for a second.

The third set of chimes starts and what looks like a large square blob of Jell-o rises up. At the second chime, I fire my round into it, where it explodes, tearing the Jell-o square apart.

My comms line clicks on and a voice says, “Advance.” We start moving forward in line. The first chime sounds and then suddenly targets pop up in front of us while the second chime sounds. I aim at the centre of three figures and fire instinctively by now.

We all keep advancing.

Armour halts us at the last target, which had popped up so close to us. There were three humanoid shapes and they were wearing medium-weight personal body armour like the military and police assault teams use. They are completely shredded and literally in pieces.

We begin advancing again and come up to the pen. There is blood and gore everywhere. I can hear Mouth gasp and then curse over the comms line.

Armour speaks up. “This is what the weapons you are learning on do. They maim, shred, destroy and kill your targets. When the light goes green and you advance, you cannot think about these effects. You have to cause those effects and destroy the enemy. Never forget that, or you get yourself and your section mates dead.”

I can hear Mouth and it sounds like she is trying not to throw up. I wonder why she didn’t pop her helmet open and get it out of her system. I’m concerned, and then a data stream opens to the side and I can see her chemistry calming down.

The implants had brought her down from the worst of it and provided her balance.

We advance to the last two targets and see what the weapons can do. Then we move back and the targets reset and we start doing run-downs while firing. That means running in a firing line while firing at targets that pop up in your arc.

We are running at twelve kilometres an hour and fire from the hip usually. We have to cover a five-hundred-metre distance while doing that. Then we walk back and answer questions that Armour puts to us.

It’s a long day.

We head back and board the trucks again, heading back for base.

We come back the next day and the day after that. We move as individuals and then fire teams of two.

Our last three days we move as a full oversized section of twelve, covering a distance of two kilometres against pop-up targets and drones that zoom around and suddenly activate.

It’s intense.

Every night I expect to have nightmares like I used to, but I never have one. During the few conversations we have in the cafeteria, it comes up that no one has been dreaming.

The next day when we report, we are moved down the hall as a group and enter a large secured room. Inside are row upon row of weapons in racks. The weapons we use daily for practice are left where they are and we are brought over to another lab technician that smiles and pulls out a huge stack of paperwork.

We are getting issued our new weapons.

We each sign for a brand new rifle, laser and projectile pistol, and several chest rigs to carry ammunition.

These are ours forever, until they are destroyed in action or until we die.

We are issued no ammunition, but the weapons are racked next to our armour now.

That was our day. We take the rest of our day stripping and verifying every part of the weapon in the lab. Out of armour and in. We had done this in sim training before, but this brings it home. By the end of the day I can strip, assemble and field test my weapon with my external sensors off, so selectively blind. So can everyone else.

That night we prepare to deploy off Earth.

T
he next morning we are up and off to training. After we finish the running and weight training, we eat a light meal and then armour up. We grab our weapons and then are off in the large garbage trucks for a long drive. We unload at a launch pad and board a shuttle into the cargo area. There are positions for twenty armour suits to lock down and attach to umbilicals so we have lots of space.

Weapons are stored next to us and then we are pushed back as the shuttle taxies and roars down the runway. We are all there, including Armour. As the thrust pushes us back and bounces us around in the cargo area, I would have swear that Armour is asleep.

If space shuttle transport is this loud, I am amazed that anyone ever uses it. So during the trip up, I review the schematics of the standard shuttles. We are uninsulated from anything, where the normal passenger areas are insulated and have additional buffers to ease the rough conditions of take-off and landing in an atmosphere.

Being fully sealed in a suit, the shift from multiple Gs of pressure during the initial escape turns to that sense of weightlessness when we are all the way out of Earth’s gravity and just coasting along. We never experience that, though, as the armour is mag-locked into the individual cradles and the suit compensates for the extra gravities.

We feel it, but it is more like a roller coaster ride for us.

When the shuttle docks with a station at the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon, we cross-load to an in-system ship owned by the Corporation. From there we head toward the moon.

Actual traveling in space is boring. When we are not on a shuttle as cargo, we are in small cubicles and we continue suit training through sims.

The one big addition is that as soon as we enter the spaceships, we start learning ship duties. This is standard for anyone who goes to space, no matter what their specialty. A spaceship is an enclosed community. Every member has a purpose and a job. When there is a problem, every crewmember and passenger is expected to help and be an asset.

We have limited medical knowledge but a full implant set. In a pinch we could assist in surgery or act as damage control.

With a full implant set, we have all the knowledge at hand and can be guided through doing almost any activity. We are book-smart with no real-world experience.

We deploy to the moon for three days. We stay suited up and work in full armour in a weak gravity and learn how to deal with it. Old entertainment movies show astronauts taking huge bounding leaps on the moon, almost like they were skipping along the surface, really.

They had kicked us out on the dark side in the centre of a huge training area that is a no-fly zone. They dropped us in two assault landers, as there are so many of us.

If we put too much power into a movement, we end up flying high in the sky and then we’d end up dead—targeted by a dozen robotic drones that had been brought along with us as assistants in training.

We were only given an hour to acclimatize to the new environment. We live for three days on the surface of the moon. We run, load magazines with individual rounds, carry out live-fire section attacks and ranges. We have to change out our batteries regularly and then set up survival domes, which we can pressurize and then crap in.

The plumbing hook-ups on armoured suits work, but they aren’t meant for fecal matter. Of course, Mouth asks what would happen if someone had explosive diarrhea. Armour just looks at her and says, “Then you shit yourself and carry on. The body suit and inside the armour has enough flexibility that the feces will work its way down your legs so you won’t be facing fecal impaction if you hold it for days on end. Everyone ends up doing it at some point, so get over it now. Just so you know, the food that you are fed keeps you regular. The ‘food’ you can pull through the suit’s sippy straw will keep you going once a day, and it will be loose. In the event you are stuck for extended periods, your suit will recognize that and automatically increase how often you go and it will be mostly fluid.”

I’m not sure then if she is serious or not. A long time later, I’d find out the truth and that would keep me alive even though I never really talked about it.

After three days of doing everything we can and learning how to keep our bodies, armour and equipment under control on the Moon, we move out again.

Again we deploy, this time to Mars.

We come in hot and fast in assault landers again, and move out, securing the training areas. The gravity on Mars is less than half of Earth, but more than the Moon, so we have little difficulty adapting to it.

We are located on the opposite side of the planet from all the initial terraforming projects.

For terraforming to be successful, the project is slowly spreading across the planet. No large explosives are allowed anymore and in just a few short years the expectation is that the Corporation will willingly not use the planet or do anything to disturb the delicate process they are managing. All training will move to the next one or two in line.

But for now, we set up automated defence turrets and assault them. We operate here and on the moon Phobos for another five days. Then we are off again.

Now it becomes tricky. We are given our first full mission brief. We are going in, weapons hot, to take out an enemy installation in our system. It is sitting just off the normal travel lanes and is a big space station just sitting there in cloak.

We are given mission objectives that are split between the two sections, and given a basic layout. We are using rifles and side arms but no grenades. We need to capture this facility mostly intact.

Both landers take off from the cargo ship we had been staged out of and we start off slowly, just like two small shuttles moving along the busy space lanes.

At an optimal point designated by the AI, we shoot off at a hard angle, aiming off to the side of the station at full burn. We are not going to head directly for the station, as anyone with a heavy or medium weapon could take shots at us as we travel inbound. On the flip side, any weapon targeting us would wait for us to get close, so the risk level as long as we did not travel in a straight line, was a bit lower.

We come in hot and fast will full retro burn just before we hit the station. We are suddenly stationary and then disengage our magnetic locks and blow our umbilicals free. As our airlock bursts open and we swarm out of the lander to start the assault, we hear from the other lander.

Enemy crew had been outside and had hit their lander several times with heavy lasers on the way in, and they had taken damage.

Our engineer asset slaps the small charge on the wall of the station and we bring up our armoured shields as he blows it. Atmosphere vents out and then stops after seconds. The first two in the section pull themselves through the opening with one hand while covering their arcs with their rifles.

We all flow in and move through the small section. It is compartmentalized for just this situation and there is no one in this section.

By now they are all in space suits, or more likely armoured space suits, and we wouldn’t trick them or surprise them and make it easier by blowing the doors open as we went through.

We blow every door anyway. In the next section are two in light armoured ship suits, which go down fast through headshots. Off of this section are two doors and we split up into two groups of three. Armour is with the other section and they are encountering more resistance so far as they are near the crew quarters.

We are in the core area where the crew is working, and they had been better able to prepare for our assault. There are just fewer of them.

My group hit the next door and blows it in. We can’t see through any of the doors as they are solid and our sensors can’t tell what is on the far side. Our point man rolls in and is blown back as heavy slugs start hitting him in the chest. The gravity is off so I mag-lock one foot to the ceiling and lean in, firing for the centre of the corridor to distract whatever is there. It is a heavy armour from the Kah-Choo Empire. My round takes it centre of mass and does nothing except provide a minor distraction. By the time it adjusts its weapon up toward me, I have put three rounds into the centre of the ‘head’ on it. Our third throws himself through on the floor and blows out one, then the other weapon arm.

Before it can lumber toward us and use any of the close-quarter attachments that it may have, we have both emptied a magazine into it and it slowly sways and stops moving. The pilot is dead but the feet are mag-locked to the floor. It has powered down and is still shorting as we advance. Our original point man is dead and we have to move.

All told, we have covered over half of the satellite and we still haven’t found the power core or lab.

We move past the dead armour and there is a door ahead of us to the right. I attach myself to the ceiling again while the last man slaps on his breaching charge.

The explosion is loud and crisp and atmosphere vents out past us again. As soon as the gap appears in the airlock door, I drop down and start methodically putting rounds into the crewmen beyond. There are five of them in a room three times the size of anything else we have come across so far, and two of them are trying to control their medium weapon in the gusting wind.

They should have vented the atmosphere before.

I have two headshots but the other three aliens end up being centre of mass and bloody frozen messes almost immediately. The atmosphere finishes venting out and the bodies are floating around.

With five down, I wonder if there were more when two pop up from behind a control console and start firing their weapons.

I can’t move and am a perfect silhouette in the door. I take a glancing shot to the helmet and a hit to the chest from their laser pistols. It doesn’t puncture my armour, but I could feel the overload and lose some of my sensors. Thankfully I can still see.

After firing their three shots each, they drop. Only the fact that they were shaken up from the assault meant that I hadn’t been hit more. I carefully aim just off-centre on the console and open fire with slow-paced shots until the console is a wreck and then a body jerks out from behind the cover. Before I can empty my last few shots into the other side, the alien leaps up. I am still in the same spot so he is already on target.

The rounds hit him in the head and decapitates him, leaving another body and a bloody mess that quickly freezes and floats around like a disgusting ice carving.

He had forgotten the other Marine on the floor.

I reload and then release the mag-lock, taking the rear position. We move in and secure the room. The room is clear and we have both objectives here.

Our comms lines click. “All units, this is Seven. Objective is taken. Sensor scans indicate that all enemy units are dead. Ending simulation now.”

The large room around us dissolves from modern blown-apart instrument panels to a dark room with some lights. The size is the same, but the entire station loses its modern appearance and looks like what it really is: a large number of basic habitat modules that are welded together into the semblance of a space station dumped off the normal lanes with a small minder station next to it. As we move back toward the lander, we meet up with the “dead” Marines and pass the scrapped robot models that had tried to fight us off.

Before we load, we clear our weapons and put the mags away. We load back onto the assault lander and settle into the individual docking spots for our suits after we rack our weapons.

I haven’t even finished mag-locking myself in when I feel the shakes hit.

The lander disengages from the target and slowly backs away.

Now that the mission is over, we have full access to the sensor data. There are two small shuttles coming over. They will remove and replace the damaged doors and fix the holes we have shot the modules full of. They will police up the garbage we left behind and set up new robotic combat drones for future use.

Armour had told us that there are several sites set up in-system that are always ready for a quick invasion by up to two sections of Marines.

Robots aren’t as effective as real flesh-and-blood combatants, but we have only gone up against them once. If we did this a dozen times, we would have zero casualties every time and work through twice as fast.

Small comfort to me or the other Marines that had ended up dead. My armour should have shorted out with the two hits, but the AI running the sim had felt that it held, given its newness.

We had fired live rounds, but the enemy robots had only used extremely low-power lasers just a bit more powerful than what a kid would use in laser tag. The projectile weapons had used plastic bullets. The AI running the sim had added the reality components, making it as real as we could want it.

At least newbies like us who have not seen this a thousand times.

After a short trip, we are back at the in-system cargo ship and transfer over again.

We strip the armour down and check it over for faults or any potential problems. Armour is there watching, as always.

You never duck the work if Armour is there. She sees everything.

I have to change out a small sensor node and once I do that, I’m done. I check the ablative outer component near where the underpowered lasers had hit. Not even a blemish.

We finish checking and cleaning up and are directed to the tiny mess hall.

Our debrief is short and harsh, led by Armour, of course.

We are all sitting at the two tables facing the one side, where Armour is sitting in one of the few chairs facing us. This is a longer, narrow room. Spaceships don’t really have a lot of space, as anytime they build one where there is space, someone comes along and uses it to store supplies or gear.

Armour just sits there watching us, and the longer she says nothing, the more nervous I feel everyone getting.

I can bench two hundred and fifty pounds, run ten kilometres in forty minutes, and in or out of armour I can kill.

But I’m terrified of how bad this is going to go.