“March of Cambreadth,” “Gates of Valhalla,” “Warriors of the World,” “Route Marching,” “Men of Harlech,” and his absolute favorite “The Sound of Freedom.” He’d even throw in old favorites that nobody used anymore like “The Marseilles,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “John Brown’s Body,” and, naturally, the Marine Hymn. Berg had finally tracked them all down and it was an eclectic list, ranging from Kipling poems to heavy metal songs. There was a consistent theme, though, probably best summed up by the chorus they were currently singing:
Face it, Top was just an old-fashioned romantic in the truest sense. “Romance” stories used to mean what were now called “adventure tales.” The original stories that Don Quixote lampooned were “romances”: Arthurian Tales, Roland and Oliver and all the rest of the late medieval stories of battle and sacrifice.
By that definition, Top was a romantic.
Top had segued to “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He was the only guy Berg had ever met who knew all six verses. The first sergeant had the memory of an elephant. It was scary.
Before joining Bravo Company, Berg had never even heard the sixth verse, but Top ground it out, in his horrible voice, just as the company reached the barracks.
“Companeee… Halt!” Top bellowed. “Right… Face. Fall into the barracks for shit, shower and shave. You have forty minutes. And every last Marine had better swab at least his filthy armpits and crotch and put on a fresh uniform! There’ll be enough Joe Funk after a week on deployment without starting with it. Platoon sergeants, my office. Fall out!”
Was that the answer, Berg wondered as he pounded up the steps to the barracks. Was it simple unthinking faith in something greater? Was it just that Top truly believed that God was unstoppably marching on?
Somehow that didn’t give him the warm fuzzies he’d hoped. God seemed a long way away when you were between the stars.
There was no ceremony for their departure, this time. The company marched back to the ship, this time led by Gunnery Sergeant Juda who sang “normal” cadences to keep them in step, then filed into the ship to find their bunks.
Berg had grabbed a top bunk when they were loading, based on seniority. While on land a bottom bunk was preferable, at sea or in space, top was the place to be. Among other things, it was the place to avoid the worst of spew if people got seasick.
But when he forced his way through the throng in the berthing compartment, there was someone else occupying the top bunk.
“Excuse, me,” Berg said to the short, black-haired sergeant. “I sort of grabbed that one earlier.”
“An I got seniority,” the man said in a thick vaguely Hispanic accent. He looked more like an Indonesian and Berg didn’t even have to read his nametag to guess who he was.
“Got it, Sergeant,” Berg said, checking the personal effects compartment on the second bunk down. Sure enough, his stuff was in there, neatly put away. He wasn’t sure if he should be offended that the sergeant had moved his stuff. You weren’t supposed to go into other people’s drawers, but on the other hand Berg hadn’t had to move it. But Himes’… or maybe Smith’s stuff had been in here…
“Hey, what’s Himes’ stuff doing in my drawer?” Probably Smith said, looking in his effects compartment.
“Everybody’s shifting down one tier,” Berg said, climbing the ladder and rolling into his bunk. “You’ve got bottom.”
The compartment had a companionway barely one Marine wide down the center and four tiers of bunks on either side. The bunks weren’t just steel racks, though. Each was a self-contained survival compartment that could be sealed off from the outside via a memory plastic door. Called a “Personal Environmental Unit,” the acronym had more than one meaning in Berg’s opinion. Given water rationing on the ship and the frequent strenuous activity the Marines engaged in, the bunks could get pretty rank by the end of a deployment. On the up side, they had interior water and air supplies, communications, gaming and entertainment systems. Frequently on the last trip the Marines had been sealed in when the ship encountered “disturbances” ranging from gravitational waves to complete depressurization.
This time, thankfully, they had spacesuits. The last mission the only thing the Marines had been issued that could be used in death pressure were their Wyverns, which were impossible to move around the ship. So the only choice they had was to sit out depressurization in their bunks. The suits they’d been issued were similar to the skinsuits the crew were issued, the big difference being that they were digi-cam colored, had been “hardened” in likely wear spots — elbows and knees primarily with “crawl pads” — and the material they were constructed of was woven with carbon-nannite armor fabric, making them resistant to fragmentation. They also had a layer of automatic sealant in the event of small punctures. But if they got into a battle in vacuum, one solid hit anywhere on the body was pretty much a death sentence.
The obvious place to store the suits had been in the bunks, so a compartment along the inboard bulkhead of the bunks had been added, narrowing the already less-than-generous width of the bunks considerably. Getting into the one-piece suits in the bunk was going to be an interesting exercise in gymnastics. The environmental packs for the suits, about the size of a pair of double SCUBA tanks, had to be racked at the foot of the bunks on the outside, crowding the already narrow passageway to the point of insanity. The worst part, though, was that the compartment for the helmet, which was on the inboard again down by the foot of the bunk, took up a sizeable bit of cubage. Berg figured he was going to be stubbing his toes on it on a regular basis.
He got situated in the bunk and started arranging the interior. The one thing he made sure of was getting everything locked down. The captain… had some idiosyncrasies about how he headed for space.