“There are a lot of them,” Peter observed, as we watched the queue. We’d barely opened the recruiting office and hundreds of volunteers had arrived. There were so many that I was starting to suspect someone had prepared it in advance. “We’re not going to be able to train all of them at once, boss.”
I nodded. We’d set up three offices in New Copenhagen and if all of them were as busy as the main office, we’d have thousands of recruits. The clerks were working overtime to register them all, fingerprint them and give them a date for presenting themselves at the bus terminal. We could have asked them to make their own way to the spaceport, and the training grounds we’d prepared near it, but I figured that it would be easier to bus them in. Besides, it would cut down on the number of scenes outside the spaceport.
“There’s hundreds of them,” Suki said, astonished. I’d brought her along as native guide… and also because I didn’t want to leave her alone at the spaceport, not yet. “How many are you going to take?”
“As many as we can,” I said. “We’ll start with a couple of hundred, more or less, and move on from there. The ones we select to start training today will be the first class, but once we get up to speed we’ll be training thousands of them at a time. The UN used to train far more at any one time, but they had hundreds of training facilities. We have one.”
We walked over to one of the clerks and listened as she collected information from the recruit in front of her. He was a young man in his late teens, his face marked with the traces of acne, and he looked nervous as he recited his address, education details and resistance credentials. We’d hung a large sign threatening dire punishment to anyone who lied to his or her recruiting officer, but it was amazing how many people had joined the resistance when the UN pulled out. The prospective recruit looked uneasy when she finally took his fingerprints — the planet had nothing like a full database of its citizens — and I guessed that he had a criminal record of some kind. I didn’t care, as long as it wasn’t rape or murder. The military machine would grind mild criminal tendencies out of him.
“Report to the bus terminal in a week,” she said, finally. The recruit nodded, stood up and turned to leave. “If you don’t show then, don’t bother showing at all.”
Suki gave me an enquiring look. “Everyone has second thoughts when they join the army,” I explained, softly. “We try to give them a chance to rethink their decision, if we have time. If they don’t show up when they’re called, we won’t bother to worry about it; we’ll just note that they won’t be accepted again, should they try to apply at a later date. After they get to the training base and take the oath, things get a hell of a lot more serious.”
We walked back outside and into the middle of what seemed like a riot. A crowd of young men and women, mainly women, were protesting our presence, shouting slogans that had been old when the human race had been young. Some were personally insulting, while others were merely amusing, or silly. MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR was a popular one, even though it was perfectly possible to do both. Others attacked the President, or the Council, or even the Mountain Men, blaming them for the unwelcome presence of foreign mercenaries. I rolled my eyes, relaxing slightly as I realised that the police had the entire scene under their watchful eye, but I felt a prickling in the back of my neck as we walked over to the groundcar. Someone out there didn’t like us.
“They’re Communists,” Suki said, when I asked her. “They’re mainly students from the university who think that they’re going to be drafted into a planetary army or some such nonsense. That’s not going to happen, is it?”
“I doubt it,” I said, although it was possible that the Government might start a draft later. I don’t like using conscripts myself and few professional militaries disagree with me, although some worlds do make military training mandatory. I’d prefer to have the Drill Sergeants kicking the shit out of someone who volunteered to be there. “In any case, what happens after we’re finished and leave is none of our business, is it?”
We watched the protesters for a few more minutes, but nothing much happened. They were a surprisingly well-ordered group of protesters; I’d been in protest marches that turned to riots on command, attacking people the UN had Officially Classified as Evil. I decided that they’d probably been carefully primed; they weren’t even hassling the recruits. That happened on Earth and several other worlds, but not here.
“Interesting,” Peter agreed, when I pointed it out to him. “This is a smaller place than Earth. It could be that they know their fellow youths…”
“Could be,” I agreed. I checked my watch and smiled. “We’ve just got time for lunch and then we’ll have to be back at the spaceport for the induction.”
“Of course,” Suki agreed. “I know just where to take you, too.”
I’d been curious what kind of local food Svergie produced and it was a pleasant surprise. Some of the lunch was cold meat, barely touched with herbs or spices, while other dishes were hot and spicy, a legacy of the Indonesian girls. There didn’t seem to be any prohibition against pork and I ate several small spicy sausages without demur. The combination was interesting, I decided finally, after a dish of spicy chicken and noodles. There were definitely some benefits to the UN’s policy of mixing the races.
We felt stuffed afterwards so I allowed Suki to go on ahead while Peter and I jogged in to the spaceport. I enjoyed the run more than I should, but it was a relief to be somewhere that there was no danger of a hidden sniper, or a sandstorm that would literally strip the flesh from your bones. I felt surprisingly better after we passed through the gates — this time, there was a local policeman to add to the guards from A Company, eyeing their weapons warily — and double-timed it over to the training ground. The first bunch of recruits were already spilling out of the buses, looking lost and alone. That was good. We’d give them a new family here; fathers in the drill instructors, brothers and sisters in their fellow soldiers.
“It brings back memories,” I muttered to Peter, remembering my first day on the drill field. The boys and girls facing the drill sergeants were luckier than I’d been, although they probably wouldn’t see it that way. They were going to be taught by people who knew what they were doing. My trainers couldn’t have found their butts with both hands. “I wonder if they’ll break and run…”
The sergeants were imposing order by the simple expedient of shouting orders at volume and pushing recruits into some semblance of a straight line. It would probably have made some of them cry if the recruits did it like that later, but for the moment it was barely acceptable. I studied them with interest and was pleased to see that most of them didn’t look too scared. There’s no point in pointlessly torturing recruits, even though most of them are dumber than rocks. They need to learn that the torments have a point.
“ATTENTION,” Russell bellowed. His roar could probably be heard for miles. “I am Master Sergeant Russell Kelsey, your training supervisor. You will address me as ‘Sergeant.’ You will not call me ‘sir!’ I actually work for a living.”
He glared at the recruits, measuring them. “You are the sorriest bunch of recruits I have yet seen on this planet,” he said. It was perfectly true, although it was also true that they were the best bunch of receipts he had seen. “You are in this course for one purpose; you are here to become soldiers, the first real soldiers your planet has yet seen. In twelve weeks, we will break you down and build you up again into soldiers. Don’t bother crying to your mommy or whining about your pappy; they’re not here and they can’t help you. You volunteered for this.”