Gramm grunted. “The power of the mob. Which the Commissary no doubt intended to stir up when he marched his two pet soldiers through the streets of the Conurbation.”
Pirius glanced at Nilis. Could it be true that Nilis had been so manipulative as to use them to further his own ends in such a way? There was much of the doings of Earth he had yet to understand.
But he had listened to this meeting unfold with increasing irritation. He felt bold enough to speak again. “Minister, Commissary — I’m sorry — I don’t understand all this talk of control and caution and stepwise funding. Isn’t winning the war what this is all about? Why don’t we just do this?”
Gramm raised his eyebrows. “Bravely spoken,” he said with quiet menace. “But no matter what gossip you’ve heard in your barracks at the Front, we don’t have infinite resources, Ensign. We can’t do everything.”
“But it’s not just that,” said Luru Parz. “Ensign, my dear child, how sweetly naive you are — but I suppose you have to be or you wouldn’t be prepared to fight in the first place. Is winning the war really what we want to achieve? What would Minister Gramm do all day if there were no more need for a Minister of Economic Warfare? I’m not sure our system of government could withstand the shock of victory.”
Gramm glared at Luru Parz, but didn’t challenge her.
Recklessly Pirius said to Gramm, “I don’t care about any of that. We have to try to win the war. It’s our duty, sir.”
Gramm looked at him, surprised, then threw his head back and laughed out loud, spraying bits of food into the air. “You dare lecture a Minister on duty? Lethe, this pet of yours has spirit, Commissary!”
“But he’s right,” Nilis said, shaking his shaven head gravely.
Luru pressed again, “So he is. You have to support this, Minister.”
Gramm growled, “And I will be flayed in Conclave for it. I would have thought you would be the most conservative of all of us, Luru Parz.”
She smiled. “I am conservative — very conservative. I just work on timescales you can’t imagine.”
Gramm actually shuddered, hugely. Again Pirius wondered who this woman was, what hold she had.
Pila, Gramm’s elegant advisor, watched this wordlessly, her lips upturned with disdainful humor. Throughout the whole of the meeting, as far as Pirius could remember, she hadn’t said a single word.
When the meeting broke up, Nilis came to the ensigns, his eyes shining. “Thank you, thank you. I knew my hunch was right, to bring you here — you have made all the difference! Project Prime Radiant — that’s what we’ll call it — Project Prime Radiant was born today. And the way you spoke back to the Minister — I will be dining out on that for years to come!”
Torec glared at Pirius, who said dolefully, “Yes, sir.”
“And now we have work to do, a great deal of work. The Minister has given us seven weeks to report — not long, not even reasonable, but it will have to do. Are you with me, Ensigns?”
Pirius studied this flawed old man, a man who had dragged him from his training, from his life, had hauled him across the Galaxy and then paraded him to further his own ends — and yet, flawed though he might be, Nilis was working for victory. Pirius could see no higher duty. “Yes, sir.”
Nilis turned to Torec. “And you won’t worry about being turned out of your job, when we win the Galaxy?”
Torec smiled. “No, sir. There are always more galaxies.” Her tone was bright, her smile vivid.
But Pirius saw Nilis pale at her words.
On Quin Base you lived inside the Rock.
Chapter 10
Once, this Rock had been nothing but a lumpy conglomerate of friable ice and dirt. Now it had been hollowed out and strengthened by an internal skeleton of pillars of fused and hardened stone.
The Rock’s inner architecture was layered. You spent most of your off-duty time in big, sprawling chambers just under the surface. Here you ate, slept, fornicated, and, perhaps, died. Beneath the habitable quarters was another layer of chambers, not all pressurized, with air and water purifiers, and the nano-food bays which processed rivers of grunt sewage. Right at the heart of the Rock were more essential systems yet: weapons shops and stores, a dry dock area for small craft.
But Pirius Blue and his crew spent most of their time on the surface. As Service Corps recruits, their job would be to support infantry in combat conditions. And so their training began with basic infantry work.
Which turned out to be very basic indeed.
Under Captain Marta’s watchful glare, in squads of a hundred or more, skinsuited cadets were put through hours of parade drill. Then there was the physical work: they bent, jumped, lifted, wrestled, endured endless route marches.
And they ran and ran and ran, endless laps of the trampled crater rim that seemed to be Marta’s favored form of torture.
Cohl, gasping, complained to Pirius. “You’d train a rat like this.”
Pirius forced a laugh. “If they could teach a rat to hold a spade you wouldn’t need infantry grunts at all—”
“No talking!”
And off they ran again, glued to the asteroid dirt by their inertial belts.
It seemed as if every cadet on this Rock was younger than the Navy crew, save only This Burden Must Pass; every one of them was fitter, including Burden. It was galling that the Claw crew came last or near last in every exercise they were put through, and had more work inflicted on them as “punishment.” The younger ones with their hard little bodies actually seemed to relish the sheer physical joy of it.
And it went on for hours. After a few days, sleep became the most important element in Pirius’s life, to be snatched whenever there was an opportunity, in the brief hours they were left alone before reveille, or out on the surface between punishing routines. He even learned to catnap standing up.
It was very different from Navy training. Much of the training for flight crew was specialized, highly intellectual, with physical training focusing on fast reactions, fine control, endurance — it was a unifying of mind and body, so that both could work effectively and efficiently under the intense conditions of combat. The very geometry of Arches Base, with its n-body architecture of plummeting asteroids, was designed to stimulate, to train you from birth to be free of vertigo, to judge shifting distances and motions on an interplanetary scale.
But Army grunts didn’t have to fly FTL warships. Here there was nothing more stimulating than dirt. Navy jokers always said that all grunts had to know how to do was dig and die, and now that Pirius was cast down among them, he was starting to suspect it was true.
Nothing could help poor Enduring Hope, though. No amount of effort seemed to shift a gram of fat from his body, and he always trailed in last.
As Captain Marta inflicted her punishments on him, she always kept the rest of the training group, hundreds of them sometimes, waiting at attention in their sweat-filled skinsuits. As Hope slogged through his lonely circuits, their resentment was tangible.
For Pirius, things slowly got more bearable.
After a couple of weeks, he could feel some of the fat falling off his body, and his muscles didn’t ache quite as much as they had after his first outings. His body was still young and was responding to the exercise, and he was not deprived of food, which he ate ravenously. He would never admit he enjoyed it. But he knew he was growing healthier, and he took some pleasure from the glow of his muscles.
He learned to use the correct Army rankings: colonel, not commander; sergeant, not petty officer. That at least lubricated the friction with the officers, none of whom had any time for Navy “flyboys.” It turned out that most officers here belonged to the elite regiment known as the Coalition Guard, who even looked down on the rest of the Army.