“What the hell are we supposed to do with him? Scrawny doesn’t even cover it.” The petty officer scowled at me when I finally reached the front of the line leading to the desk. There was a typical laser measuring station, and the entire place looked more like a machine depot than an issuing station.
The air here was...not exactly canned. Every once in a while, you could smell a hint of something green, which, with the energy trace I ran when I came on board, meant we were actually on a planet, or more likely in a self-contained bunker under the surface. I was thinking perhaps a repurposed prison, in which case the surface was probably airless or poisonous and it had a seriously bio-diverse hydroponics section since the air didn’t taste entirely recycled.
So far we had been run around in heavy-duty passageways that were uniformly painted gray-green and reeked both of the chemicals used to clean them and the underlying metal. Despite my misgivings, well, they had experience with Korse ‘recruits’ and so our physical was nothing more than a few cursory questions about our current health and a basic fitness and strength test. We were genemods, which meant few if any allergies or recessives. In my case, nothing but chocolate.
After a quick meal of some kind of noodles with a meat-flavored sauce laced with protein cubes, we were here to get our first uniforms issued. That meant a few heavy-duty threaded and sealed sets of gray coveralls, pressure gloves, custom-fitted boots, and a set of pre-designed helmets with emergency oxygen fittings.
To be fair, I understood why they moved the charlottes and city dwellers out. I was nowhere near as strong as the orcs, but gremlins were still Korse natives.
“He’s as strong as most baselines, physical affinity. Kit him out like a goblin. He says he has tech, but he was sold by bounty hunters as a dodger. He’s stuck with the penal battalion unless the brass notices.” Petty Officer Kratz glared at me, “You WILL be pushing that physical affinity until you can keep up. With tech, you might be able to weasel transport or mechanized. Just don’t run your mouth. Maybe we can send you over to the goblins.”
I nodded, keeping my secrets to myself might be physically challenging, but intellectually I already knew how important it was. Orcs were natural bullies, and I knew I was going to have to hurt at least one of them and then offer an incentive to leave me alone for however many weeks of training we would have.
They broke us up into thirty-man companies, and I learned something important about marching. Until they trained us to march, marching meant ‘running’.
We ran from the mess hall to the barracks, and then, the next morning, we ran to physical training. The barracks had been a bit challenging, I had to stay up for an hour after everyone else was snoring to use the showers, and fast talk the fire watch, but gremlins were lucky that way. Four hours of good sleep was all I needed, so the six hours most of the rest got was more than I needed. I was already up and ready by the time a set of higher-ranked orcs were banging on trash cans and tossing the big men out of their racks to wake up on the floor.
Honestly, even the constant running was a low energy expenditure for me. We were bred for a heavy world, and with my size and light weight, I mostly just got scowled at. I wasn’t as fast as some of them, with my shorter legs, but during our ‘morning run’ I managed to stay ahead of the corporals that were pacing the party, while some of the faster bruisers at first ran out of energy and were flattened during the four-hour ‘warmup’.
Yes, everyone here was a heavyworlder, but most of these guys were not used to running for long stretches yet. If they’d been old enough to get trained as true warriors for their clans, they’d have learned, but I was able to keep the pace easily enough.
***
At the end of week three, after we’d been worked hard, a corporal came to see me.
“Fall OUT recruit Reynard!” a burly young human yelled at me while we were practicing ‘rifle carries’ using heavy Iron rods weighing about sixty pounds. I nodded, lowering my ‘rifle’ to my side, and trotted over to the orc. Dropping them, even though they were nothing more than a chunk of iron, got you reamed and drilled and even beaten if it happened a second time. Honestly, it was way too big for me, and the weight was a struggle for me even more than the Orcs, but I intended to stay the course. Very bad things could potentially happen to me if any of them detected weakness.
I’d already had to ‘accidentally’ break the leg of one of my new unit compadres who decided that bigger men deserved more food… my food, to be exact. But as I mentioned, I was in the middle of a growth spurt, and I was always hungry. I could put away as much food as any of the big orcs and possibly a bit more since I had to train a lot harder than them to keep up.
There were some things I was unable to keep up with as the orcs trained, but military discipline was not one of them.
“Give me that,” he said, reaching for the chunk of metal, which I sidled backward to prevent. “Never release your weapon.” had been beaten into us, until it was time to hand it back to the quartermaster.
He growled at me, “What the Scrot, recruit? You are being transferred. That’s not your weapon, it’s a chunk of Iron.”
I sighed, “Unified planets Military Code one-two-one. You do not release your weapon unless informed to do so by your commanding officer, sent to reissue, or being apprehended by a duly authorized military police force.”
He grumbled and told me to stand where I was while he trotted over to Kratz. After a few moments, Kratz glared at him, walked over to me, and held out his hands. “Release your weapon, recruit.”
I nodded, lifted the rod, and placed it into his hands. After a moment, he said, “You are being set back to opening week, recruit, and will be joining company zero-one-six, as part of the 128th supply Battalion. There are no failure marks on your record, it is an administrative transition for morale reasons.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Okay. Great. So what they were saying was that I was not physically up to snuff with the orcs. Not an unexpected conclusion, since the kind of fighting they were training emphasized both strength and weight. Frankly, I was far too small to be a decent ship marine, I couldn’t even hold a shield or Gladius high enough to reinforce a shield block, and even though I was a nasty enough fighter to deal with bullies in the barracks, it wasn’t the kind of front-line tanking that the 132nd penal Battalion was known for.
“Follow this corporal, He will be turning you over to your new company commander,” Kratz said almost sympathetically.
I trotted along behind the corporal, who seemed to be actively striding as far as his much longer legs could move to keep me following him like a puppy. It was rude, by military standards, since I could easily keep a ‘military pace’, but he outranked me, I had to simply follow him.
After about half an hour's walk, we reached the station transit lines. We waited a few minutes for one of the trolleys to roll up, and he hopped into the front and pointed at the back seat. “Get in.”
I slid into the back. We’d been carrying our iron rods everywhere for at least three days, and it was weird to not be lugging the oversized chunk of iron, but I sat carefully on the seat. “May I ask a question?”
He shook his head, “No, you are unfit for your unit and are getting transferred to one-two-eight. I only talk to real Marines, so shut the fuck up.” So much for not having a black mark on my record. I was also pretty sure that he was full of scrot since he wasn’t muscled anywhere near the mass of an orc, or even one of the heavyworld baselines. Real Marines my butt, I bet he was in a medical A-school or something and was doing his duty weekends running errands with the recruits. He had that “I am smarter than you stupid grunts’ look that A-school recruits always had, especially when they were barely bright enough to pass their classes.
He stopped the trolley by our barracks and had me pick up my kit, glaring at me when I took a few more minutes than he probably thought were appropriate to pack my bag from my locker ‘appropriately’. Making your bed, stowing your kit, and re-packing it to military specifications was something that had been drilled very hard, and I didn’t want to start a new command with lots of extra exercises for failing a kit inspection.
I was wondering if I could break him in half as he typed in our destination. The base trolley was a set of easy-to-transfer open-topped cars with basic stupid SI for getting from one company command to the other, since they were often separated by hundreds of miles. The Unified Planets Fleet had several BIG basic training camps, situated all over their systems, because they trained, and needed, a lot of military personnel.
It took us almost an hour of silence before the little levitating floatcar finally pulled up to a large hangar with the number ‘128’ and a picture of a stylized globe dropship next to it. He hopped out and growled at me to follow him. I finally decided that yes, I could have taken him, since his twitching and muscular motions convinced me that he was a one-gee baseline. He probably doubled my weight, but that just meant his center of gravity would be absurdly easy to disrupt.
We walked into the building, which used automated doors. Wasn’t 128th supply a mech unit? They were considered one of the most ‘front line’ of the tech battalions,
“Wait here.” The corporal said and then turned around and just… walked out of the building. I was in another input area and was just...standing by the intake and issue desks looking and feeling stupid while a bunch of recruits or conscripts were filed in and put in line.
There were a lot of Morans, a ton of actual goblins, and even a few hard-bitten-looking duergar that were trying to stay as far away from the Morans as possible, while the two groups glared at each other. Morans and Duergar were old adversaries, the latter were also heavyworlders designed on similar lines, but Duergars were built to go without sun for their entire lives in more water-rich or poisonous heavy atmospheres. They were pale grey with bleached-out white hair and beards, while the Morans from my world were used to not being sealed in against poisonous atmospheres, and were as often ruddy or deeply tanned as they were pale from underground work.
Something had happened about two thousand years ago on a shared planet that had set the two neohuman breeds at each other’s throats, and with nearly a three-hundred-year lifespan, they tended to have long memories, especially for grudges. I didn’t know the exact situation, but it had something to do with a Romeo and Juliet situation gone bad.
The goblins were, well, goblins. At this age, I looked a lot like they did, slightly taller, not as squat, and without their broad limbs and mouthfuls of carnivorous teeth. They had been bred to settle hostile worlds and bring them up to galactic standard tech, with a special ability to overcome almost any adverse environmental conditions within a generation, and they were known for having BIG generations. They had a longer lifespan than orcs, but like my species, they were created to use their size as an advantage in almost any gravity that they could survive.
Unlike me, they could survive nearly any toxin yet discovered by man. They were prized for ship work since they could handle battle damage safely that would kill other breeds, and their naturally creative bent lent itself to unorthodox solutions to repairs.
A ship might come back from a battle in the weirdest possible shape with goblins on board, but if they were alive, it WOULD come back. Last year there was an interesting story about a badly damaged ship using a repurposed gravity simulator as a transit engine. Goblin jury-rigging was responsible, it had taken two years to get back to civilization, and its crew was almost desperate enough for supplies to turn cannibal, but they HAD made it back.
They usually had a technical affinity, just like me, but often had weird traits like ‘enhanced Jury rigging’ and ‘scrounging’. If I was lucky, I might pick up one of those as well. Then again, with forces, in an emergency, I would have a different way to get ships out of trouble.
After about two hours, one of the human civilians, a blonde girl, looked at me curiously. “Is there a reason you are standing there, recruit?”
I nodded, “Yes, I was transferred from the 132nd Penal to the 128th Supply. The corporal told me to stand here and then left.”
She nodded and started typing on her tablet. “Yes, it says here that you were transferred, and were supposed to get your UI scanned, an hour ago. You are late, recruit, why didn’t the corporal send you to get scanned?”
I shrugged, “I have no idea, Ma’am. He told me to wait here and left. I have no idea what his motivations were.”
She grimaced and tapped a few buttons and another corporal, this one a goblin, finally came up and looked me over. “You are late.”
I nodded, “Yes, Corporal. I was standing here as ordered for the last two hours.”
He sighed, “Mancy, go ahead and get his UI scanned. I can’t block the blot, but hopefully, his performance review won’t get trashed for it. Also, find out who dropped him off, and send a trace to Chief Wiggin about it. Whoever dropped him off also dropped the ball, and the Chief’s probably already pissed about a transfer being late.”