"Christ, Perry! Don't you assume that being dressed is part of being at attention?"
"I would not presume to assume, Master Sergeant!"
"'Presume to assume'? Are you being a smartass, Perry?"
"No, Master Sergeant!"
"Well, presume to get your platoon out to the parade ground, Perry. You have forty-five seconds. Move!"
"A squad!" I bellowed and ran at the same time, hoping to God my squad was following directly behind me. As I went through the door, I heard Angela hollering at B squad to follow her; I had chosen her well. We made it to the parade grounds, my squad forming in a line directly behind me. Angela formed her line directly to my right, with Terry and the rest forming subsequently. The last man of F squad formed up at the forty-four-second mark. Amazing. Around the parade grounds, other recruit platoons were also forming up, also in the same state of undress as the 63rd. I felt briefly relieved.
Ruiz strolled up momentarily, trailed by his two assistants. "Perry! What is the time!"
I accessed my BrainPal. "Oh one hundred local time, Master Sergeant!"
"Outstanding, Perry. You can tell time. What time was lights out?"
"Twenty-one hundred, Master Sergeant!"
"Correct again! Now some of you may be wondering why we're getting you up and running on two hours of sleep. Are we cruel? Sadistic? Trying to break you down? Yes we are. But these are not the reasons we have awakened you. The reason is simply this—you don't need any more sleep. Thanks to these pretty new bodies of yours, you get all the sleep you need in two hours! You've been sleeping eight hours a night because that's what you're used to. No longer, ladies and gentlemen. All that sleep is wasting my time. Two hours is all you need, so from now on, two hours is all you will get.
"Now, then. Who can tell me why I had you run those twenty klicks in an hour yesterday?"
One recruit raised his hand. "Yes, Thompson?" Ruiz said. Either he had memorized the names of every platoon recruit, or he had his BrainPal on, providing him the information. I wouldn't hazard a guess as to which it was.
"Master Sergeant, you had us run because you hate each of us on an individual basis!"
"Excellent response, Thompson. However, you are only partially correct. I had you run twenty klicks in an hour because you can. Even the slowest of you finished the run two minutes under the cutoff time. That means that without training, without even a hint of real effort, every single one of you bastards can keep pace with Olympic gold medalists back on Earth.
"And do you know why that is? Do you? It's because none of you is human anymore. You're better. You just don't know it yet. Shit, you spent a week bouncing off the walls of a spaceship like little wind-up toys and you probably still don't understand what you're made of. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that is going to change. The first week of your training is all about making you believe. And you will believe. You're not going to have a choice."
And then we ran 25 kilometers in our underwear.
Twenty-five-klick runs. Seven-second hundred-meter sprints. Six-foot vertical jumps. Leaping across ten-meter holes in the ground. Lifting two hundred kilos of free weights. Hundreds upon hundreds of sit-ups, chin-ups, push-ups. As Ruiz said, the hard part was not doing these things—the hard part was believing they could be done. Recruits were falling and failing at every step of the way for what's best described as a lack of nerve. Ruiz and his assistants would fall on these recruits and scare them into performing (and then have me do push-ups because I or my squad leaders clearly hadn't scared them enough).
Every recruit—every recruit—had his or her moment of doubt. Mine came on the fourth day, when the 63rd Platoon arrayed itself around the base swimming pool, each recruit holding a twenty-five-kilo sack of sand in his or her arms.
"What is the weak point of the human body?" Ruiz asked as he circled around our platoon. "It's not the heart, or the brain, or the feet, or anywhere you think it is. I'll tell you what it is. It's the blood, and that's bad news because your blood is everywhere in your body. It carries oxygen, but it also carries disease. When you're wounded, blood clots, but often not fast enough to keep you from dying of blood loss. Although when it comes down to it, what everyone really dies of is oxygen deprivation—from blood being unavailable because it's spewed out on the fucking ground where it doesn't do you a goddamned bit of good.
"The Colonial Defense Forces, in their divine wisdom, have given human blood the boot. It's been replaced by SmartBlood. SmartBlood is made up of billions of nano-sized 'bots that do everything that blood did but better. It's not organic, so it's not vulnerable to biological threats. It speaks to your BrainPal to clot in milliseconds—you could lose a fucking leg and you wouldn't bleed out. Most importantly to you right now, each 'cell' of Smart-Blood has four times the oxygen-carrying capacity of your natural red blood cells."
Ruiz stopped walking. "This is important to each of you right now because you're all about to jump into the pool with your sacks of sand. You will sink to the bottom. And you will stay there for no less than six minutes. Six minutes is enough to kill your average human, but each of you can stay down for that long and not lose a single brain cell. To give you incentive to stay down, the first of you that comes up gets latrine duty for a week. And if that recruit comes up before the six minutes are up, well, let's just say that each of you is going to develop a close-up and personal relationship with a shit hole somewhere on this base. Got it? Then in you go!"
We dove, and as promised, sank straight down to the bottom, three meters down. I began to freak out almost immediately. When I was a child, I fell into a covered pool, tore through the cover and spent several disoriented and terrified minutes trying to break through to the surface. It wasn't long enough for me to actually begin to drown; it was just long enough for me to develop a lifelong aversion to having my head completely enveloped by water. After about thirty seconds, I began to feel like I needed a big, fresh gulp of air. There was no way I was going to last a minute, much less six.
I felt a tug. I turned a little wildly, and saw that Alan, who had dived in next to me, had reached over. Through the murk, I could see him tap his head and then point to mine. At that second, Asshole notified me that Alan was asking for a link. I subvocalized acceptance. I heard an emotionless simulacrum of Alan's voice in my head.
Something wrong — Alan asked.
Phobia — I subvocalized.
Don't panic — Alan responded. Forget you're underwater—
Not fucking likely — I replied.
Then fake it — Alan responded. Check on your squads to see if anyone else is having trouble and help them—
The eerie calm of Alan's simulated voice helped. I opened a channel to my squad leaders to check on them and ordered them to do the same with their squads. Each of them had one or two recruits on the edge of panic and worked to talk them down. Next to me, I could see Alan make an accounting of our own squad.
Three minutes, then four. In Martin's group, one of the recruits began to thrash, jerking his body back and forth as the bag of sand in his hand acted as an anchor. Martin dropped his own bag and swam over to his recruit, grabbing him roughly by the shoulders, and then bringing his recruit's attention to his face. I tapped into Martin's BrainPal and heard him say — Focus on me on my eyes — to his recruit. It seemed to help; the recruit stopped his thrashing and began to relax.
Five minutes, and it was clear that extended oxygen supply or not, everyone was beginning to feel the pinch. People began shifting from one foot to the other, or hopping in place, or waving their bags. Over in a corner, I could see one recruit slamming her head into her sandbag. Part of me laughed; part of me thought about doing it myself.