Chapter 141. A New Base, New Rules

Our escort, a local corporal who also doubled as a combat training instructor, turned out to be twenty-seven. Almost six years younger than me. Considering that even the base commander had barely crossed the thirty-year mark, an unpleasant sense of foreboding stirred inside me again. I was seriously starting to worry that I would once again be the only adult in a kindergarten packed with armed teenagers. Then again, if I looked at the equation from the other side, maturity gave me a natural, built-in advantage. To inexperienced minds, age was synonymous with experience. And experience in the Corps was worth a great deal.

Corporal Lee, whose steady pace we matched on the way to the barracks, struck me as a perfectly reasonable guy. At least, he was the first person on this base who had not looked at us like garbage. My [Analysis] gave me a clean, stable read on him: the physical condition of a solid athlete, no bad habits, no hidden medical issues. A pleasant and reassuring contrast to Lieutenant Dillon, with his sallow yellow face and alcoholic tremor.

I kept catching Lee glancing at me from the corner of his eye. His expression betrayed open, purely professional curiosity. Full-time career soldiers were practically nonexistent in the Corps. The overwhelming majority of the Awakened were teenagers yanked out of ordinary schools, rushed through basic training, and thrown into the meat grinder of the Portals. At best, some of the boys managed to get through a couple of years at West Point before their superpowers kicked in. Compared to them, I looked like an anomaly. A black sheep in a perfectly pressed officer's uniform. And that asset needed to be monetized immediately.

Army manuals on adapting to closed groups all hammered home the same point: conducting an information audit before entering the barracks reduced the risk of friction by eighty percent. The old hands always tried to probe a newcomer for weaknesses and force him to play by their rules. I had not had time to gather any information beforehand, but right now, fate was giving me a second chance.

We passed an empty obstacle course. I stopped abruptly beside a long shelter used to store athletic equipment, where a thick blanket of shade covered the ground.

"Corporal, you've been staring at my medal rack for the last three hundred yards," I said calmly, turning toward Lee. "You've got questions. Let's take a quick five-minute break, and you can ask them."

"Sir..." Lee hesitated, but military curiosity won out over regulation. He nodded toward my chest. "That's a Bronze Star, right? With the V for valor? You... you served in the Middle East before joining the Corps? Marine Corps?"

God, I wanted to just nod. A simple yes would have instantly elevated my authority to absolute levels. The Pentagon had poured billions of dollars into the cult of conventional war veterans, and even senior officers treated them with deference. But the medal had a downside: Ted was standing right there. The kid was practically straining to hear every word and knew perfectly well that before my Awakening, my primary weapons had been a calculator and annual balance sheets in a quiet office. Lying in front of a witness was a strategically vulnerable position.

"The award was approved through the Corps after I joined," I replied evenly, without a hint of unnecessary pride. "For identifying and resolving a crisis situation in a training Portal."

"No way!" Lee immediately reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboros, clearly settling in for an epic story. "So how'd you pull that off, sir? As far as I know, instructors practically hold recruits by the hand through the surveyed zone in the first Portal. Did things get seriously out of hand in there?"

"Out of hand?! You don't know the half of it!" Ted practically wedged himself between us, waving his arms so wildly he nearly knocked the corporal's cap off. His eyes burned with wild, fanatical excitement. "I was there! I saw the whole damn thing with my own eyes! There were a hundred times more of those green-faced bastards crawling out than there were of us! You understand?! They had us pinned against the rocks, hammering us from every direction with heavy-caliber fire, and our shield was already cracking apart and ready to pop like a soap bubble! Everybody was panicking, the instructors had lost their heads, and then Tom... Tom just takes command! Like some damn grandmaster, you know?! He figured out the whole strategy in three seconds, made everyone hold formation, and covered our asses! Then he actually went out there alone against the whole damn swarm and started mowing them down left and right like the Terminator!"

Ted's speech was chaotic, packed with wild exaggerations and cheap Hollywood theatrics, but I did not say a word. I simply watched Corporal Lee. He listened to the kid practically holding his breath, reminding me of small-town housewives glued to their radios during an evening soap opera.

"You know Colonel Stewart from Intelligence?" Ted lowered his voice conspiratorially to a whisper and leaned forward.

"The department head?" Lee whispered back, equally stunned. "Of course I know him. What about him?"

"After the mission, he personally hobbled over to Tom. Shook his hand like this, real firm, and announced it right there on the parade ground: 'Ross, if it weren't for that brain of yours, I'd have had to order two dozen body bags. You're one hell of a hero, son.'"

The corporal's face went slack. He slowly shifted his gaze to me, and his eyes filled with the kind of deep, rock-solid respect that money could not buy.

I mentally logged the result. I did not fully understand Ted's motives. Why was he working so hard to build up my personal legend when there was no obvious benefit to him? Most likely, it was a simple adolescent impulse: the kid just liked being the center of attention and basking in the reflected glory of someone else's achievement. Whatever the reason, his big mouth had just done me a tremendous favor. My local authority among the base's NCOs had been established before we even crossed the threshold of the barracks.

"Serving alongside you is an honor, sir!" Lee snapped his chin up and delivered such a textbook salute that you would have thought he was standing before a lieutenant general from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"At ease, Corporal." I gave the brim of my cap a brief, crisp touch. The iron was hot enough. Time to strike while it was still malleable. "Enough about me. Tell me how this base operates. I want the regulations, the chain of responsibility, and any unofficial rules I should know about."

"Well... we don't really go in for all that military pomp around here. We don't goose-step across the parade ground or salute every officer we see." Lee coughed awkwardly. As he tried to light another cigarette, he fumbled the pack onto the asphalt and snatched it back up a little faster than necessary. "We're pretty simple around here, sir. Nobody invites us to parades in Washington, and we don't exactly sit around drinking tea with the brass at the Pentagon. Standard schedule is two Portal deployments in thirty days for every soldier. Not everyone comes back from each one. Statistics are a stubborn bitch, sir. Assault troops don't tend to live very long, so we don't waste time filling our heads with that headquarters bullshit."

"So... I can keep my bandana?!" Ted practically jumped in place, his eyes lighting up with fanatical excitement. "Yes! I knew this was the coolest place on Earth!"

Lee silently lit his cigarette, exhaled a thin stream of smoke, then casually pulled the orange fabric straight over Ted's nose, completely blocking his view.

"Hey! What the hell?! Why are you attacking me?!" The kid recoiled indignantly, frantically readjusting his bandana and clenching his fists.

"Kid, do you see me wearing a Panama hat? Or maybe bright beach shorts?" Lee slapped a hand against the heavy fabric of his field uniform. "This is still the United States Army, kid, and there are basic rules here. I'll run you through morning drills until you're coughing blood, but I don't give a damn what angle your pillow sits at or whether your top button is fastened. See the difference?"

"Not really, but it sounds pretty damn awesome!" Ted broke into his trademark ear-to-ear grin again.

I understood the point immediately. And I did not like what I was hearing. Strip a military unit of its mental framework of discipline and leave nothing but physical wear and tear, and you no longer have a regular army. You have a gang of undisciplined mercenaries. Codes, regulations, and drill procedures existed for a reason. They kept the human mind anchored to civilization when blood started flowing all around it. Give people one exception, loosen the screws, and the whole system would start unraveling into an uncontrollable mob.

"The daily schedule is the same every day," Corporal Lee continued, flicking ash onto the scorched grass. "Reveille, breakfast, group PT. Then you get some personal time. After that, S-Armor heavy exoskeleton training. Lunch. Then hand-to-hand combat or tactical vehicle training. More personal time, specialized training for your individual superpowers, dinner, an hour of free time, and lights out. Then you do it all over again the next day."

"Time management is almost identical to the training camp," I said aloud, comparing the schedules in my head. "The only difference is that theoretical lectures have been replaced with vehicle operation. Explain that part. What kind of vehicles are we talking about?"

"Depends on the Portal's environment, sir. In some zones, we can get motorcycles through, Stryker armored personnel carriers, sometimes even tanks if the engineers hustle. That's what we train on." Lee took a deep drag. "Of course, the odds of an assault trooper actually having to drive a Stryker or go hand-to-hand with a xenomorph are about the same as hitting the Powerball jackpot. But protocol says we have to know how to do everything."

I nodded slowly, keeping my expression neutral. The local training program was a completely inefficient use of my time. Ordinary people needed thousands of grueling hours of repetition to turn a skill into muscle memory, followed by daily practice to keep it sharp. My current physiology operated by entirely different rules. My modified brain absorbed any practical database in nanoseconds, locking the corresponding skills in at peak, absolute form. Sitting for hours in a stuffy simulator pretending to drive an armored vehicle was a waste of resources. My resources.

"Yeah, there's one more thing." Lee narrowed his eyes at Ted, who was looking considerably happier now. "Unlike the training camp, we don't have hired support staff here. Cooking, minor repairs, and cleaning are all handled by the personnel. The quartermaster assigns daily duty rotations for each job."

"What?!" Ted practically jumped. His face twisted into an expression of genuine, childlike horror. "You mean I have to... scrub toilets with a toothbrush?! What if I refuse?! I came here to fight, not run around with a rag!"

"I'd recommend you erase the word 'refuse' from your vocabulary for good, kid." Lee cut him off coldly, without a trace of his earlier friendliness. "We deal with anyone who sabotages duty assignments real quick. Physically and mentally."

Ted's mouth snapped shut, but the pout in his cheeks made it obvious that a sullen adolescent rebellion was already boiling inside him.

"All right, don't get so worked up. It's not that bad." Lee patted the teenager on the shoulder, softening his tone. "Anyone assigned to kitchen or cleaning duty is completely exempt from the grueling drills and simulator training that day. Think of it as a legal day off."

The consolation was questionable at best. Replacing intensive training with free, low-skilled labor for the benefit of a collective I had no particular fondness for hardly seemed like a good deal. Apparently, this base was capable of finding new ways to disappoint me indefinitely.

"And one last rule. This one is ironclad." Lee looked Ted straight in the eye. "Leaving the base perimeter without written, verified authorization from the quartermaster is strictly forbidden. If we catch you outside the perimeter, you're going before a tribunal."

The forecast had been confirmed. Things had gotten even worse.

"What the hell?!" Ted shouted again, throwing his hands up. "Are we in Alcatraz or something?! This is a freaking prison!"

"This is the front line of the United States' defense, son." Lee calmly exhaled a thick cloud of bluish smoke directly into the kid's face. "Get used to it. School's over. Mom and the teachers are behind the fence. We're required to remain combat-ready every second of every day. The call to deploy into a Portal can come at any moment."

Ted finally wilted, his shoulders sagging. The news was much easier for me to take. My hidden asset, my contracts with other, more influential Corps departments, gave me a free pass. The Ministry had opened these gates for me, bypassing whatever local regulations Lieutenant Dillon cared to impose. I could leave this hellhole whenever actual analytical work required it.

Now, looking at the rusting structures around the base, I could see for myself how right the other Awakened had been when they spoke of P-SWAT with a shudder. This really was the bottom of the departmental hierarchy. The Corps' sewer.

Lee took one last drag, then ground his cigarette butt into the asphalt with the heel of his heavy combat boot.

"All right, recruits. Let's head inside. Time to introduce you to your new family."

I braced myself for the worst. My instincts told me that today's quota of unpleasant surprises was nowhere near exhausted.