I tried to wipe the sand out of my mouth and rolled over on my back. That was a mistake. The sun nearly blinded me. The pain in my side wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t seem to get much air and what I got was hot and dry.
A face blotted out the sun for a moment; a weathered, wrinkled face improved by puckered scars. It loomed over me, drew closer. The face was about ten centimeters from my nose and its breath settled on me like a poisonous fog.
“Shize, Springer,” he shouted. “Can’t you do no better than that? You lying there like an old lady. Get our butt off the sand and move those legs. Now! Move ‘em.”
I wanted to say that I’d had enough, that I was finished, that I felt like I was dying. It wouldn’t have helped. That voice wouldn’t stop until I moved. I hated the voice and the knuckle-dragging cretin that belonged to it; we all did. Bruno Santino, our drill instructor, who tried to push everyone to the breaking point, then beyond. I think he rode me harder than the others. Probably because I was the only one larger than he was.
The only way I could get him to shut up was to move. I pulled myself to my knees. It hurt, everywhere.
“That’s it, Springer. We’ll make a soldier out of you yet.” He turned abruptly to harass another student. I never wanted to be a soldier. I was just a university student. He seemed to forget that.
Somehow, I managed to get to my feet. In the distance I could see the glinting black solar panels on the barrack roofs. The buildings were mostly underground, only the tops poked above the sand and scrub brush. Some of the students had already reached the barracks. They hadn’t had as far to go as I did. Some brilliant mind had scaled the maneuvers this morning so that the largest had the longest trek. I could make a case for it being the other way around/
I put one foot out. It held. I tried another and slowly lurched across the desert.
Of course nobody had promised us that Hell would be easy. It had been the most unpleasant world in the Confederación, until Springworld was colonized. Now I figure it’s a toss-up, though Hell might have an edge. Sometimes when I’m all tired and beat, I almost feel like I was back at home harvesting the volmer.
Hell has only one important industry; training people for violence by tempering them to violence. Just about everything that moves on this rotten planet can kill you, including the Hellers. Maybe especially the Hellers. Planets that are serious about war send their future military leaders here to learn their trade. They either learn it or they die. That’s the hard course.
There’s another course for important people like princes. Under controlled conditions they learn how to kill without being killed. If they fail they don’t die, they just flunk out. They might lose face, and maybe a limb or two, but they live. Come out pretty tough, too. This is called the easy course.
Naturally, there’s a third course for people like us — students and visitors who just want to get a taste of what goes on during the training process on Hell. This is called the soft course. They rolled us out of bed at 0300 this morning, and we’ve been going full tilt for sixteen hours. Somebody named Bruno keeps yelling in my face that he wants to make me a soldier. I’d yank his arm off if I had any strength left. Soft course!
When I finally got to the barracks, I headed straight for my bunk. It felt like it was made out of bricks and was at least a meter too short. For the first time, I didn’t complain. I stretched out on top of the sheets and was asleep before my head hit the pillow. I could have slept ten years; it felt like ten minutes.
“Wake up, Carl,” said a familiar voice., far away. “Only a half hour till chow.” I opened one eye. My mouth felt like a carrion bird had been nesting in it. The sand between my teeth made interesting sounds.
Gradually the person on the adjoining bunk came into focus. Short, black-haired with a drooping mustache. Pancho.
“Gonna skip chow,” I moaned. “Sleep. That’s what I need. Lots of sleep.”
“You need food, amigo,” said Pancho, reaching over and shaking my arm. “Your body needs fuel.”
What my body needed was a picket sign: On Strike. Every muscle was howling in protest of the last week of punishment.
“Let me think about it,” I said, closing my open eye.
A harsh voice cut through the barracks, “Ah, the baby from Springworld, the giant baby, he needs his beauty sleep.”
Damn Bruno. Even knowing we were supposed to hate him didn’t help any. Somehow I managed to sit up, get both eyes open this time.
“I was just going to shower up and get something to eat,” I said. There was no rule against sleeping during meals, but it was considered a sign of slacking off and slackers got pretty rough treatment. I didn’t need any more of that.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, my eyes came about even with Bruno’s. He was pretty tall for a Heller, but I still had an easy three-quarters of a meter on him as well as being some eighty kilos heavier. All other things being equal, though, I wouldn’t want to tangle with him in earnest. Hellers were built tough. I swallowed all the things I really wanted to say about the species of his parents. Instead, I turned to Pancho.
“About that shower, amigo. You ready?”
Pancho grabbed two towels, tossed me one. “Let’s go,” he said.
The showers had two settings: cold and colder. The recycled water had a foul, musty smell. Were their recyclers inefficient or was it that way on purpose? They did a lot of obnoxious things on Hell to “build character.”
The mess hall was noisy and crowded in spite of the fact that we were late. Balancing my tray, I looked over the room and saw a couple of empty seats. I plowed my way toward them and Pancho followed along in my wake. We sat down at a table with B’oosa, Alegria and Miko Riley, who had joined the tour on Earth. I didn’t like him much.
“Did you boys enjoy our little invigorating hike this morning?” B’oosa asked as I set down my tray.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Up at 0300 hours and I pulled late watch last night. Calisthenics till sun-up. Doubletime over the sand for thirty kilometers. Seemed like a death march to me.”
B’oosa laughed, an easy laugh, smooth as glass. “The desert reminds me of home,” he said. “It was good to get out and stretch my legs. Even a ship as large as Starschool feels cramped after a while.”
“I thought I was in pretty good shape until they started running us around,” I said. “If this is their soft course, I’d hate to see their hard one.”
“It’s pretty mean, from what I hear,” said Pancho between gulps of unidentifiable pasty food.
“They build tough soldiers on this planet,” said Alegria. “It’s their only export item.”
I nodded. Hellers were known all over the galaxy as first-class scrappers. The only people nearly as rough as Hellers were those who had gone through their training course. The hard one.
“We’ve got a long evening ahead of us,” said Miko. “Full-dress exercises.”
Oh, no. I hadn’t checked the duty board after I’d gotten back. What else had I missed? I hated working out with a field pack. But I couldn’t let them see it. Not Miko, anyway.
“Easier than daytime running,” I said, though I didn’t feel very confident about it.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” said B’oosa, rising. “See you there.” He placed his tray on a conveyor belt that led out of the hall. I imagined there was a monster at the other end, gobbling up any leftover food. It would have to have a titanium alloy stomach.
I looked glumly at my own tray. Three piles of amorphous gray slop filled it from rim to rim. It was supposed to be nutritious. Guaranteed to keep a body full of energy. It tasted even worse than it looked.
Pancho was shoveling it away. I wondered what they normally ate on Selva that could have possibly prepared him for this, but I didn’t want to think about it too much.
“At least it’ll be cooler in the evening,” said Alegria.
Pancho nodded. “But those field packs are heavy,” he said.
“Feel like t
hey weigh a thousand kilos,” said Miko. “Like carrying a bear around on your back.”
“It’s only 37.5 kilos,” I said, and then wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
“Not much for you,” said Miko. “The rest of us have to get along with normal bodies.”
We could have been kidding, but we weren’t. Miko and I were not the best of friends. He saw me as a rival, and I saw him as an interloper.
Alegria had gotten on Starschool at Selva, the stop before mine. We got to be pretty close friends and, in spite of her being so short, I guess it was always in the back of my mind that someday we might be more than friends. Well, Miko got on at Earth, and Alegria liked him instantly — she liked everything about that damned antique of a planet.
I guess I was a little obvious in my dislike for him, and that got Alegria to taking sides. Then the impudent little dwarf challenged me in the gym. He started it; I couldn’t back down. I just did what I had to do. It only took a dab of plastiflesh to patch him up. Alegria was mad. Pancho, too. Me, too — only Miko didn’t seem to mind. He’d done what he wanted to do.
Alegria stood up from the table, picking up her plate. “I’m finished,” she said, walking away. Miko followed her, even though he still had food on his plate.
“What’d I do?” I asked Pancho.
He just shook his head and we finished eating in silence.
We were late to afternoon briefing session and had to stand at the rear, at attention. A Heller officer stood at the front and surveyed us with a look of weary contempt.
“Hell is no place for soft people,” he began. “You students are softer than most. We don’t have much time with you to change that, but we’re going to try. You’re on this tour to learn and we’re here to teach. To teach you a few things about life and how to keep it. It won’t be easy. What you’ve done so far has been child’s play compared to what will follow. Our objective here is simple: we want to push each and every one of you up to your own individual breaking point. Then we’re going to push you a little harder. You’ll hate us for it. Maybe later, at some important time in your life, you’ll thank us for it. Pay attention. In the next two weeks you just might learn something.”
He looked around the room, relaxed a little, leaned against the top of the desk.
“I suppose you students don’t like it out here in the desert. You should. It may not be comfortable, but it’s safe. Not many dangerous animals in the desert. Oh, there are a few, but not too many. The really mean ones are large and we can see them coming.”
They’d warned us about some of those creatures, but we hadn’t seen any. Just hearing about the sandlizards was enough, though. Hoped I’d never meet one.
“We put tour groups and people like you in these desert compounds. That way we don’t lose too many. Most regular recruits spend their first few days in Panoply. You’ll be jumping there tonight, in full field dress. It’s a little more dangerous than here, but I think you’ll be able to handle it. We jump at 1800 hours. I’ll now turn your over to Sergeant Santino, who will dismiss you. That’s all.”
He turned and left the hall abruptly. Bruno came forward.
“All right, children, I guess your butts have had enough exercise for now, so let’s get the rest of you in shape. Gonna be a long night. As you leave here I want you to do twenty laps around the complex. The last ten people to finish will do twenty more. Move!”
At least I was standing in back. I got a head start.
II
Vertigo. The desert suddenly dropped out from beneath my feet. I gripped the webbing tightly and closed my eyes. B’oosa laughed. It was 1800 hours, to the second.
They had loaded us into three of those huge floaters for the jump. I had a good view, too good. My two and a half meters wouldn’t fit into one of the regular seats, so they put me up front where there was some room for my legs to dangle. B’oosa say beside me, Bruno was next to him. It was a long way down. The barracks looked like a scattering of small black mirrors. Soon they were gone.
We slipped over a mountain range and headed out over the water. Panoply was an island quite a distance from the shore. That was one of the things that made it “safe”. The other was that periodically a team of Hellers swept from one end of the island to the other. It was supposed to be just about as safe as any non-desert place in Hell could be. The thought didn’t cheer me.
The trip took a little longer than it should have. We had to skirt around the southern edge of Panoply because there was a war going on. An interplanetary war.
I guess I should explain.
The Confederación forbids actual interplanetary wars. By that I mean that we don’t have any ships fighting it out in space or bombing planets. It was tried once, by a planet called October. October doesn’t exist anymore; the Confederación moved in and sterilized the planet, wiped it clean. That pretty much stopped anybody from trying it again. Of course, I could never see much use for it, anyway. There’s just not much cash flow between planets, not enough to start a war over.
Occasionally there’s a big gripe between two planets and they fight it out on Purgatory. Purgatory is a fair-sized continent that the Hellers lease out to factions who don’t want to dirty their own planets up. Each side puts up a bond and they slug it out according to the rules. The rules are simple: nothing stronger than class three, low-yield nukes. Everything else goes. Part of the bond goes to clean up the mess on Purgatory when it’s over, but the Hellers pocket most of it.
The Confederación doesn’t care what people do on their own planets, so there are always lots of candidates for Hell’s unique training program.
No Springers, of course. On Springworld we have our hands full just fighting the planet. Who has time for anything else? Besides, we don’t try to impose one rigid system on anybody. If something isn’t working, we just try something else until we find one that does. It seems like a waste of energy and resources trying to “prove” that one system is right and another is wrong. It either works or it doesn’t. Seems simple to me.
(There have never been any wars on Hell between Hellers. They may know something the others don’t.)
We dropped down close to the water and skimmed along about a meter above the whitecaps until the shore of Panoply rushed up. The island was surrounded by a narrow, sandy beach cut off immediately by a wall of impenetrable jungle. Turning into a small cove, we came down on a landing pad near a cluster of buildings set up in a clearing.
We got off the floaters and split into our training units — TU’s, they call them. Love their abbreviations. There were five in ours, the maximum number: B’oosa, Pancho, Alegria, Miko, and me. All across the field people gathered in small clusters. A Heller came up to our group. We sat on the grass. My ears still rang from the wind that had torn at us in the open floater.
“Name’s Vito Fargnoli,” said the Heller. “Most people call me Skeeter, so you might as well.” As he talked he drew a knife from his belt, flipped it from hand to hand. “I don’t know what you’ve been told about this place, but it ain’t no holiday here. Safer than most places ‘round here, but that ain’t saying much. You’re going to take a tamed version of the survival test we run all raw recruits through. You’ll have it easier than them, but not too much. We swept the island a couple of weeks ago, but it’s a big island. Could have missed a sucker or two.”
Suckers were round animals about the size of the palm of my hand. They liked to drop out of trees. Their bodies were soft, but their skeletons were a lot of sharp spines. When they hit, their spines stuck and the animal created an instant mouth where the spine had pierced its victim. Enough of them got you at once and they could bleed you dry. They tended to come in bunches, too.
“Isn’t it the big ones we have to watch out for?” asked Miko.
The Heller spit on the grass. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Biggest thing on this island is a beast we call the masher. Six meters tall and all teeth. Three rows of teeth and if you get close enough to count ‘em they’
ll be the last thing you ever see. You’ll never have to get that close. They got no natural enemies here; they just clump around and make a lot of noise. You can hear them a couple klicks away. Just head the other way. A vibroclub’ll bring one down in a second. Stunner’s better, though, don’t need to get as close.”
“Mostly you should watch out for the small things, the night bats, the land eels. If you stay on the path, you shouldn’t have much trouble.”
“Path?” I asked. “What path?”
“Students,” he said. “What do you know? Nothing. It’s all very simple. We take you to a place and drop you. You follow the paths back to here. The paths are kept clean, cleaner even than the rest of the island. If you stay on them you should have no trouble. You watch your step, you follow the path, you come back here. I would think even a student would understand that.”
He pulled a small box, about ten centimeters square, out of his field pack and set it in front of him. “This is a transmitter,” he said. “What it does is transmit a call for help and give us your location. All you have to do is press this little button on the side. The red light shows you’re transmitting, the green light shows we receive you and are on our way to pick you up. One of you carries this. Don’t lose it.”
B’oosa reached out, picked it up.
“I suppose you’ve worked out in field packs before,” said the Heller. We all nodded. It was an understatement. We’d drilled with the things on our backs every day. I almost felt naked on Hell without one.
“You have the standard week’s ration of dehydrated food, but I don’t expect you’ll use much of it. Shouldn’t be out more than a day. We’ll issue your group two vibroclubs and a stunner. Please try not to injure each other with them.”
I tried to hide a smile. I knew my way around a vibroclubs pretty well, as did B’oosa and Pancho. I didn’t see any trouble there. If worst came to worst, B’oosa could make a staff from a branch. There’s nothing he can’t stop with a staff. I bet he could even handle a masher.