“Good,” Steve said. “Have there been any major problems?”
“Had a few thousand protestors at the fence for a week or two,” Romford said, “and caught a number trying to sneak into the base. They stopped doing that after we put them to hard labour for a few days before releasing them. Oh, and we’re being sued by their families.”
Steve snorted. The agreement between Heinlein Colony and the United States agreed that the training camp wasn’t — legally — part of the United States, just like an embassy. Anyone who crossed the fence was entering a territory where the laws were different — and, if they crossed the fence in any case, they were breaking and entering. There were no legal grounds to sue Steve and his people for arresting intruders, or for giving them a small punishment before they were released.
“Not much of a problem,” he said. “And the men themselves?”
“We weeded out most of the idiots and glory-seekers within the first week,” Romford assured him. “Most of our discipline problems were handled at the same time. Right now, I have faith in both the selected officers and NCOs. If there’s one advantage of giving our allies more soldiers than they asked for, it’s that we can rotate officers and NCOs back to Earth to give lessons to newer recruits.”
Steve smiled. “And are there newer recruits?”
“A surprising number,” Romford said. He shrugged, expressively. “It could be the lust for adventure or the extremely generous benefits, but we have more volunteers than we have space to train. So far, we’re giving priority to men and women with genuine military experience from the Western countries, although we have quite a number of qualified candidates from Russia too. The Chinese, on the other hand, seem quite reluctant to allow any of their personnel to sign up with us.
“Given time, I suspect we will have thousands of potential recruits from poorer parts of the world too,” he added. “But that will cause other problems.”
Steve nodded. Americans and other Westerners were generally well-educated — and they could all speak English. Working with soldiers from other parts of the world had convinced him that the foreigners had their own way of doing things, not all of them remotely compatible with the American Way of War. But there would be no need to humour or tolerate the locals, not now. Those who failed to make it through the training program would have no opportunity to embarrass the human race in front of the Galactics.
“Just make sure you exclude the ones who can’t make it,” Steve said. “What about expanding the camp?”
“I think we will have to lease somewhere else,” Romford said. “Right now, the American Government is cooperating, but that might change. We are, after all, training mercenaries here.”
Steve rolled his eyes. The American Government had been training mercenaries, rebel armies and foreign soldiers for years, although not all of the students had gone home brimming with love for America. There was little point in the political objections, he knew, save for a desire to look good in front of the voters. But politicians rarely changed their spots when confronted with reality.
“Start looking for somewhere else, then,” he said. “It will be years before Mars or Venus is ready to serve as a training camp.”
“I’ve been making enquires,” Romford said. “Panama is a possibility — quite a few of my team have great memories from Panama — but we’d have to pay out a shitload in bribes. I don’t see anywhere in Europe accepting us, at least not without a fairly hefty quid pro quo — maybe additional fusion reactors. Right now, if we are restricting ourselves to democracies, we may be restricted to Australia. They’re quite interested in hosting one of our camps.”
Steve gave him an odd look, so Romford explained.
“They’re nervous about troubles spreading over from Indonesia,” Romford explained. “If we want to put a camp there, they will be quite happy with it in exchange for assistance if they need it. There will be a few basic rules, but no real difference from what we have here.”
“I’ll speak to Komura,” Steve said. “He can open discussions.”
He shrugged. “Have we had any problems that might give them pause?”
“A couple of bar fights,” Romford said. “One of our guys was called a baby-killer, so he hauled off and punched the bastard… and everything went down from there. Another guy was set upon by a group of thugs and defended himself admirably. Other than that, no major problems. I have made it clear that American law runs outside the fence and if anyone gets into trouble with the law we won’t get off our asses to do anything about it if they’re guilty.”
“Good thinking,” Steve said. “We don’t want another rape case.”
His father, he recalled, had ranted about a rape case in Okinawa, where an American serviceman had raped a local girl. The bastard should have been strung up by his testicles, Steve’s father had thundered, or handled over to the locals as soon as his guilt had been established. No matter the outcome, it had discouraged the locals from wanting to keep the American military presence.
And if one of my men do something like that, Steve thought, coldly. He’d damn well pray that the local government gets to him before me.
“Quite,” Romford agreed. “Not that that will be a problem, Steve. There are four new brothels in town.”
Steve snorted. “Why am I not surprised?”
“The men have their new immune boosters,” Romford said. “They can fuck an AIDS-infested whore from Tijuana and they won’t be in any danger of actually catching anything. Or pregnancy, for that matter. We’ve given just about everyone — particularly the women — contraceptive implants, just to make sure there’s no risk of pregnancy. But we may want to set up a brothel on Ying or another alien world.”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “What do the aliens think of it?”
“I went through their contracts,” Romford said. “I don’t believe they would have any objections, as long as it didn’t interfere with military matters. We have quite a lot of freedom to determine how best to handle our affairs.”
Steve nodded. If two different human cultures could have different requirements, how much harder would it be for two alien races to live by the same rules? There were races where one sex was unintelligent, races that had more than two sexes, races that laid eggs and didn’t have sex as humans understood it, races that had sex anywhere and everywhere they could… and that was only one tiny aspect of the whole. What would happen when there were different religious requirements? Or food and drink? At least food professors could produce something edible to humanity, even if it didn’t always taste nice. But that was just a matter of programming.
“Make sure you don’t compromise our combat effectiveness,” he said. “Other than that, make whatever arrangements you like.”
He accepted an invitation to walk through the combat simulator and marvel at just how perfect a simulator it actually was. A combination of holographic images, force fields and gravity wave generators allowed the system to reproduce almost any combat environment, from urban-style warfare to operations in outer space. And the simulator computers tracked the whole system so perfectly that there was no need for proper umpires.
“We actually programmed the teleporter to yank anyone out if they’re recorded as dead,” Romford explained. “In high-intensity operations, anything tough enough to burn through a suit will very definitely kill the person inside. Low-intensity operations are probably not going to be part of our work, but we train for them anyway. One major problem is that we have little room to deploy medics. And even if we did…”