The next two weeks was an introduction to special cruiser service training and Camp Heishi, when they were not excising.
They were shown the obstacle courses, the gym, medical, and training rooms. From what she could find out there were a dozen different training sections on the island each separated by eight kilometers so each grouping was isolated and training would not interfere with other training groups.
Still in her section there were at least a hundred people trying to pass SCS training split into twenty five men and woman groupings each being led by three instructors.
After the two weeks of indoctrination begin the first part of SCS training.
Faith had thought the physical conditioning they had been doing had been hard but that was nothing as the weeks progressed.
Daily eight kilometer runs were the started at o five hundred, then breakfast, followed by a one point six kilometer swim in the ocean, and then the real fun begin.
Faith lifted her section of the long and heavy wooden pole.
Weighting something over 200 kilograms they had to run with it, left it over their heads, switch it back and forth between shoulders, and drop and pick it back up continuously.
After hours of lifting the pole, they were allowed to relax by laying down in the surf and swigging their legs up and down, paddling in place as the cold waves hit them over and over, submerging them until the water receded and they could take a breath and prepare for the next wave.
Then there was the mud pushups, mud situps, and mud crawling. If Faith had not been receiving daily injections of enhancement drugs along with all the other trainees she knew she would not have survived training.
The daily runs became longer, the swimming farther, and the pushups and situps now had do been done with weights on their backs.
The only thing keeping her going was the cocktail of medication injected daily. The medication also suppressed emotions and made Faith hyper focused. It reminded her of when she was working on a project or when she was studying and then needed to pee really really badly and found ten hours had flown by.
There was also a downside, they needed to eat tubes of nutritional paste. With the medication and demanding training regime the paste was a concentration of proteins, electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, and other supporting elements that helped with cell growth and regeneration. It also contained synthetic neurotropic chemicals that helped support neuron growth and neuron plasticity which in turn helped with learning and memory retention.
Sarah had said that a normal person would, at best, be able to eat one once a week but it was more like two otherwise medical complications could arise, Faith and her fellow trainees were eating them every day, at every meal, morning, noon, and night.
Faith was growing taller with more and more muscles packed onto her frame. The men were developing even more muscles under the constant, never ending, physical training. The only upside of being female was that her flexibility was not hindered by the overdevelopment of her muscular structure.
After six weeks the number of trainees dropped in her barracks alone was eleven, form twenty five, including her, to fourteen and in other training groups it was higher.
Faith finished her two hundred pushups and flipped over and started doing two hundred situps. Then they did lunges, and jumping jacks. This followed by a four point eight kilometer swim, swimming to a buoy a two point four kilometers out in the cold rough sea and then turning around and swimming to the shore.
Faith heard sputtering, choking, and someone thrashing in the water. Looking around Faith tried to see as another wave swept over her. Looking around as it passed and before another wave hit, she saw a fellow recruit just as she went under.
Swimming hard Faith reached the spot the trainee disappeared at but had to wait as the next wave rushed over her to take a deep breath and dive.
The water was murky and deep. Shrugging off her thirty kilo weight harness Faith swim hard towards the bottom. Her lungs were burning as she reached the bottom and looked around franticly for any sign of the woman.
Luckily the recruit unforms had built in heath monitoring sensors and had activated a flashing bacon on the shoulders and ankles. Ignoring her need for air Faith swim towards the dim flashing lights and reached the down woman.
Flipping her on her back Faith used what little air she had to preform breathing resuscitation. It was all she could be not to panic and thrash as her burning lungs and body were deprived of oxygen and white dots begin appearing in her vision.
Somehow she powered through it, focused on reviving her fellow solider.
As the woman came awake and started thrashing Faith had to slap her in the face hard and then pointed up. The woman seemed to get settle and get the message and started swimming towards the surface. It was fortunate that the other woman had also taken off her weight harness.
Together, with each dragging the other up through the water, they reached the surface just a Faith’s sight dimmed and the last thing she remembered were hands dragging her into a boat.
Coming awake Faith found herself in the small medical building of the training group and had a mask over her face suppling her with pure concentrated oxygen.
“Well boot it looks like you’re going to live!” A voice said cheerfully.
Looking over to where the voice came from, she saw a medical officer at a desk beside the entry door. He did not look up at Faith, just continued to read something on a datapad, Faith assumed it was her medical readout.
“Well, no use just lying there get up boot!”
Sighing Faith removed the oxygen mask and got up with a groan levered herself up and out of the bed.
As she opened the door to leave the man spoke again. “Good job saving boot Cowen.”
Faith just gave a nod of acknowledgment and left.
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Returning to her barracks Faith returned to the grueling daily grind of special cruiser service. It was only a few days later that hell week started. The SCS hell week made the troop hell week seem like a kid’s birthday party in comparison.
They exercised twenty two hours a day for a week straight, swam sixteen kilometers every day and ran over eight hundred kilometers in the week of hell. They did not sleep and trainee dropped continuously with them passing out or having mental breakdowns.
Five killed themselves in the sleep deprivation hallucinations.
Faith wanted desperately for the week to end and her vision shrink until she could only see less then a meter in front of her and her body responded automatically to commands without her even registering what she was doing.
As the week ended Faith and the five trainees still in her training group collapsed into the sand and were unconscious even before the boot instructors finished saying they could rest.
The end of hell week saw most of their separate training groups reduced drastically and the remining trainees in their section combined into one group of thirteen, including Faith, out of the hundred that started training.
Other training sections had lower results and two sections even had none finishing the first phase of training. One though had an impressive twenty two trainees pass.
Faith found this out as a score sheet was posted in the barracks of her combined group. No names or designations were included just numbers. 8-1-221 was the number beside the group who passed with the most members. Faith did not even know what her original training group number was or what her new training group number was.
Training continued without pause the next day and they entered the vacuum and space training phase of training.
Unbeknownst to the trainees the SBS training island had an extensive underground training complex with complete ships, form small patrol cutters barely eight meters in length, though they were powerful enough to stop a pirate vessel with dual light pulse cannons on torrents topside and keel and had two missile tubes that could fire micro missiles, up to a complete mockup of a dreadnought.
The Empire of Thronos only had three of the massive warships with one permanently assigned to the capital system of Thorn and one permanently assigned to Sedisca. The last one roamed the boarders projecting power and intimation to the Empires many enemies.
They practiced zero gravity maneuvers, zero g hand to hand combat, zero g rescues, and zero g breaching. They were also extensively trained in oxygen deprivation with their air supply being cut off and their hands and feet bound.
They had to maneuver in zero g to a designated point where they received a short spurt of vital oxygen before it was cut off again and they needed to reach another designated point before they blacked out.
Faith had extensive training in zero g maneuvers, she did it for fun on the station cutting off the gravity field in an empty bay and flying around. Now the fun exercises were vital as she had to launch herself towards a wall and timed when to flip herself over to land feet first and then push off to her real target without losing momentum, all while her feet and hands were tied up.
More then one trainee could not handle the constant hypoxia and zero g and were dismissed.
Exercises was also enhanced for not just a thirty kilo weight and Sedisca 1.33 gravity field was enough for the sadistic trainers, they increased the gravity up to two gravities, increasing her weight and her weight harness by one and a half times.
Faith was glade they kept the Agraria station at the standard one grav and not the Agraria planet’s point nine four grav field. It may seem a small difference but the gravity you were birthed and grow up in had a massive cascading effect when going to worlds with stronger gravity fields. Some of the worlds outside the Empire had gravity so low that the planet’s population could not physically step onto Sedisca without major health risks.
This was why the Empire stopped the colonizing of three worlds inside their borders. Granted two were only marginally habitable and the last one was a small tidally locked moon of a super gas giant but still any habitable planet was usually colonized but the Empire put a memorandum on colonizing any world that had less than ninety percent standard gravity.
They were also trained in full sensory deprivation to simulate floating out in deep space.
Some of SCS’s missions involved launching themselves dozens of AUs outside a planet’s detection range and coasting for hours, sometimes days, in the void of space until the entered the atmosphere of the enemy’s planet masked as a simple falling asteroid.
Again some could not handle complete sensory deprivation and washed out.
The training was grueling and intense, more so then even the first phase of training because they would be operating the majority of their time in space and on ships. They may be deployed for months on a planet but for most their time it would be on ships traveling between worlds of the Empire or to the worlds of the Empire’s enemies.
The grinding training continued relentlessly and before Faith realized it phase two of training was complete.
The third phase was a combined terrestrial and space warfare that included navigating around the planet and space, small unit tactics for either environment, demolitions, a wide verity of weapons training, and more hand to hand combat training.
They also had classroom instructions and learned a truly staggering ways to conduct warfare form basic infiltration to undercover work as unseen assassins.
They could find their way with just the direction of the sun and stars and had to memorize dozens of star formations seen from various points on every world in the Empire. They drilled on small unit tactics and using just hand signals to communicate, a must to remain undetected form enemy scanners. They trained on ways to use and to make explosive compounds that could take down entire buildings with just a kilo of explosive material.
Faith excelled at this, making highly explosive compounds with just some cleaning supplies and soap that made even the instructors nervous when she blew up a designated building with such force pieces were blasted for kilometers.
She even took down a ten story building with less then a kilo of carefully placed homemade compounds, placing them on strategic structure supports that kept the whole building up. Only trained and experienced engineers could hope to accomplish what she could and she was forbidden to make any more explosives after the third building she took down too enthusiastically.
They were also trained on combat field medical support, both on how to treat injuries and how to inflect them with maximum precision. They trained with truly barbaric methods, learning how to preform minor surgery with just a combat knife. Modern medication could heal just about anything given time, except death, so they were trained to do whatever was needed to keep a fellow soldier alive.
Cutting into a vat grown corpse made Faith and several others throw up through it was almost no different than cutting into vat grown meat. Somehow having a full body with facial features and skin made it a thousand times worse than just a lump of meat pulled out a vat.
Training was grueling for now beside exercising they had to use their brains to learn, comprehend, and remember a wide verity of topics. They studied the tactics and weapons used by their nearest four largest enemies, the Commonwealth of Polaris, Abyssinia, Catalonia, and Ceylon.
The last three’s hatred of the Empire was mostly due to the Empire’s control of the FTL network which would give their citizens access to information their government would not want them to have, like other worlds had freedom and they were brainwashed and enslaved by their own corrupt government.
The first one actually had a legitimate claim against the Empire for the Empire had tried to incorporate the Commonwealth into the Empire at the Empire’s founding. It was also located only five light years outside the Empire’s borders, the closest enemy out of the four, which increased the Commonwealth’s distrust and fear of the Empire.
They had weapons form each of the star nations militaries and learned to use them as effectively as their primary LM-75c, a variant on the standard LM-75’s the rest of the military branches used.
Phase three ended with them getting dropped into a massive forest on one of Sedisca’s continents with just a canteen and a survival knife and told to be at the assigned coordinates in a week.
They had to hunt and forage on the run to make the distance in time and navigating the correct course was vital for any delay would make them miss their deadline.
Faith’s group of four fellow trainees pushed hard and barely slept or ate the following week of force march through the woods. Even with that they arrived at their assigned coordinates with only an hour and six minutes to spare.
Faith had successfully completed special cruiser service training, one of the few out of thousands who started.