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  "Wipe that smug expression off your faces," Handlebar roared. He and the other instructor stalked into our room.

  Alejandro and I exchanged a worried glance then followed nervously inside.

  "What the shit?" Handlebar tore up my perfectly made bed, throwing the entire mattress on the floor. Fauxhawk did the same to Alejandro's bed. Instructor Piker came rushing inside and dumped a pail of wet sand all over our beds and possessions. The other two tramped through the sand and left a gritty trail across our painstakingly polished deck. Handlebar went to the lockers and toppled them. He tipped out the drawers in both our dressers.

  "I've never, never, in my whole life, seen a messier, dirtier, room than this!" Handlebar said. "Fail!" The two instructors stormed outside.

  Alejandro and I just sat there, mouths wide, staring at the mess that was our room. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. I was just stunned. We'd spent the whole weekend cleaning that room, putting every into it. We'd given it our all. I was heartbroken. I looked at Alejandro. He was blinking fast, and his lower lip was quivering.

  I gave him a brave smile, and looked away. Nothing I hated worse than seeing a grown man cry. I was about ready to lose it myself. This was an injustice, I knew that. I struggled within myself, trying to understand the point of it all. Why tell us to ready our room for inspection, only to ransack it and tell us we fail?

  I went to the hallway and noticed, to my relief, that the students in the room just across from us were receiving the same mistreatment. Beds were thrown out of racks, desks overturned, drawers emptied onto the deck, a pail of sand dumped in the center of the room.

  The instructors moved methodically from room to room, enacting the same fervent theatrics, so that when it was done the entire barracks had become a mess of sand and overturned beds and tossed sheets, some of which spilled right out the doors. The names of the instructors were whispered down to us.

  Handlebar was Instructor Peterson, and Fauxhawk was Instructor Brown.

  Another instructor I hadn't met before appeared at the entrance to the barracks. He had a thick black beard and yellow eyes. A wolf of a man. He loomed there, seeming taller and meaner than any of the others. Definitely wasn't happy.

  Someone whispered his name. "Chief Adams."

  "What in the hell?" Chief Adams said, finally blowing his top. "You call this sty a barracks? Turn yourselves into Gingerbread Men, now! Double-time!"

  We sprinted outside into the pre-dawn twilight, and waded into the freezing ocean, wearing our freshly polished boots, our perfectly ironed white shirts, our sparkly clean swim trunks. I sat down, and doused my head beneath the waves, gasping at the cold, and then hurried back on shore. I rolled in the sand with more than a little regret. When I was sufficiently covered in grit, I stumbled to my feet, my perfect clothes ruined.

  Headlamps turned on nearby, and I shielded my eyes. The silhouette of an instructor walked into the light. He moved between us, inspecting. When he came near, I saw that it was Instructor Piker. He had a terrible scowl on his face as he stroked his spade-like goatee.

  "What are you trying to pull Mr. Eaglehide?" He'd stopped beside Tahoe. "You're not properly sandpapered. Your whole right cheek is bare!" He spun around. "All of you do it again!"

  And so we did. This time, when we rolled on the beach, we scooped up the sand in our hands and dumped it on our faces, using the light of the headlamps to make sure we all looked like walking sand castles. My eyes were burning because there was so much grit in them. I even felt sand in my gums, between my teeth, scratching away.

  "What the hell are you maggots doing standing around?" Instructor Piker shouted. "To the grinder you sorry excuses for trainees!"

  We rushed to the black asphalt at the center of the compound. The lights were off, so the instructors couldn't see our faces in the twilight, and we couldn't see theirs. But I recognized the voices.

  "Take your places, now!" Chief Adams said.

  There was enough light to see the outlines painted on the concrete, which indicated where each student should stand. I took the first free place I found and waited while others rushed to find a spot.

  When we were finally assembled, Chief Adams said, "I've never seen such a disgraceful display in all my life. That little stunt your class pulled this morning in the barracks cannot be forgiven. Sand everywhere. Beds thrown about. There's only one way to pay for what you've done. You're all going to die. Drop and push 'em!"

  What followed was the worst PT beating I'd ever experienced in my life.

  Over the next three hours we alternated from pushups to lying kicks to bar dips to pullups. This while being constantly sworn at and accused of being gay. My knuckles became rubbed raw from sitting on my fists for the flutter and scissor kicks. The blood and sweat caused me to slip sometimes on the pullup bar and get a further chewing out from the instructors. Around me, a few students were whimpering. Some were crying. These big, strong men who never cried for anything, weeping like babies.

  The flint stone at the far end of the grinder flashed at least once every ten minutes as people quit. Three loud taps. Sometimes it happened several times in a row, as if people were just waiting for someone else to quit first before throwing in the towel themselves.

  By the third hour of this beating, with no relief in sight, guys started to urinate and defecate themselves. Some vomited. It started to smell like a mix between a sewer and a pigsty. Instructors moved through the fray with a high-pressure water hose, spraying down whoever they felt like. One instructor sprayed the guy beside me, then doused my face and Alejandro's for good measure. It felt just short of getting slammed in the cheek with an icicle.

  All I could think was that this was just day one. And it was going to get a whole lot worse.

  I had to force those thoughts away, because I knew such thinking was self-defeating, I knew if I tried to look beyond this moment I'd get disheartened and just want to quit. And I wasn't going to do that.

  I wasn't going to let myself.

  I focused on breakfast. I was going to make it to breakfast.

  Three hours, thirty-three minutes after we'd begun, the call finally came.

  "Breakfast, children!" Chief Adams said. "You have an hour. Go!"

  We jogged the mile to the mess hall, and by the time we got there most of us were too exhausted to even eat. I managed to get down a slice of buttered toast before the announcement came that our time was up.

  "I thought we had an hour!" someone whined.

  "Since when have you ever had an hour for breakfast? Ridiculous, you fecal maggot. Out!"

  As we were running back to the grinder I vomited up the toast.

  "Rade, you okay?" Alejandro said beside me, panting loudly.

  And then it suddenly hit me.

  I understood why they were doing this to us.

  I started laughing.

  "Rade," Alejandro said. "What is it hombre? You aren't going loco on me are you?"

  "They want us to quit," I told him. "It's textbook shock and awe. Don't you see? They just want to scare us off. They want us to think it'll be like this every day. But it can't be. Of course it can't. No one would survive. No one would graduate."

  Alejandro didn't say anything. I don't know if he believed me. But I was right. I knew I was. I had to be.

  Three more guys tapped out the instant we reached the grinder.

  "Well children," Chief Adams said. "It's time to start your next evolution. Get your asses over the sand berm and line up along the high water mark!"

  We did as we were told.

  "Turn around," Chief Adams said through the megaphone on the beach. We did, so that we faced away from the water. All the Instructors were assembled on the berm above us, drinking energy drinks. They had big smiles on their faces. I saw dipping tobacco lining the gums of more than a few of those mouths.

  "Shoulder to shoulder," Chief Adams said.

  "Wooyah!" We pressed ourselves tightly together.

  Four Weavers roll
ed up over the berm. The sight of those medical robots felt somehow ominous.

  "Your performance this morning was ridiculous," the Chief said. "Not one of you, not a one, deserves to ever call himself a MOTH. You're done for. We're going to get rid of your dumb asses once and for all. Call it a mass extermination." He lowered the megaphone to take a puff on his cigar. His yellow eyes gleamed with a sudden malicious glee. "Turn about!"

  "Turn about!" we answered, swiveling to stare out across the gray ocean.

  "Lock arms!" Chief said.

  "Lock arms!" I interlocked my arms with Alejandro and the man on my right.

  "For-ward mar-ch!"

  "Forward march!"

  We waded into the surf. I winced when a wave splashed my crotch. You'd think the bay water would be warm down here in California, but it felt like it was fed by the arctic (I learned later that it was—damn ocean currents).

  I kept expecting the Chief to order a halt, but he didn't. Deeper and deeper we marched into the ocean, the freezing bay water coming first to our knees, then our waists.

  "Halt."

  "Halt!"

  Finally.

  "Sit down."

  "Sit down!"

  Sit down?

  We obeyed, and the freezing ocean enveloped us to the armpits. I gasped loudly. I wasn't the only one. I inhaled three or four times, trying to catch my breath through the shock of the cold. Alejandro and Tahoe shivered madly on either side of me.

  After about a minute and a half:

  "This is loco," Alejandro said with his teeth chattering. "I'm not built for this crap."

  "Careful brother," Tahoe said. "Don't think beyond the moment. Therein lies the path to failure. Open yourself to the spirit world."

  "The spirit world?" Alejandro said. "You mean the world of the dead? You're telling me I should just accept this and die?"

  "No," Tahoe said. "Open yourself to the spirit world. Ignore all pain. Ignore all suffering. Transcend it."

  "I thought you didn't believe in that crap?" Alejandro said.

  Tahoe gripped me tight. "In times like this, I'll believe anything."

  I tightened my grip on both their arms, trying to pull him and Tahoe closer to me.

  "This is called sea immersion, children," Chief Adams said on the megaphone. "Enjoying it so far?"

  "Wooyah," someone responded, weakly.

  Around me, the sound of eighty chattering teeth brought an odd image to mind. I thought of a kid, running along a slatted fence with a stick. The chattering I heard was the sound of his stick as it hit each slat. A wolf chased that kid.

  I was zoning out. That was bad. I had to stay in the moment. Had to stay aware.

  "Everywhere we go-o!" I said, to an imaginary cadence.

  No one answered.

  "Everywhere we go-o!" I tried again.

  Alejandro answered it. "Everywhere we go-o!"

  "People wanna know-o."

  Three or four others picked it up in addition to Alejandro. "People wanna know-o."

  "Who we are-r."

  "Who we are-r!" More people.

  "So we tell them."

  "So we tell them!" the whole class.

  "You're going to get beaten real good if you keep that up!" Chief Adams said through the megaphone.

  I didn't care. "We are the Navy!"

  No one else seemed to care either. "We are the Navy!"

  "The motherfucking Navy!"

  "The motherfucking Navy..."

  * * *

  "It's time for your next evolution," Chief Adams said. "ATLAS PT."

  Turned out I had been right about the shock and awe. Tuesday morning we had PT for only forty-five minutes, compared to the three and a half hours of the day before, and after breakfast we had classroom sessions until 1000. The instructors had been trying to scare us off, and they'd achieved their goal admirably: Thirty guys had quit yesterday. We were down to sixty-eight.

  We'd just come from lunch and had mustered at the top of the sand berm. Looking down, I saw several flatbed pickups backing up onto the beach with man-sized robots in the truck beds. The robots were humanoid in shape, with metallic arms and legs and yellow visors lowered over their dented heads. Red chest scars indicated where the power packs had been yanked.

  "Some of you native citizens, or fans of old movies, might recognize these," the Chief said. "Old-style ATLAS 1s, relatively ancient precursors to the ATLAS 5s in use today."

  I did a double take on the robots in the truck beds again. Yes, I could see the resemblance now. They were miniature versions of the ATLAS 5 mechs I'd seen on the Net.

  "These models are obsolete to the extreme of course. Little more than fancy powered exoskeletons. Basically forerunners to the modern jumpsuits. But they make good practice for spec-ops trainees. Don't get all excited on me. You're not actually going to pilot these, or wear a jumpsuit. Not until you've proven that you have at least half a brain. Besides, any parts of value have long since been salvaged. Hell, there's not even a CPU, let alone a battery pack. So what are you geniuses going to do with them?" He grinned widely. "Why, you're going to carry them. ATLAS mechs have one of the highest availability ratios in the fleet, second only to starships. Unfortunately, they do break down on occasion, due to mechanical failure or battery discharge or, heaven forbid, being shot down in combat. So we do have to portage them from time to time. Look heavy, don't they? Well, they're not that bad, not these ones at least. See, the ATLAS combat mechs are made of some of the most lightweight metallics available, so these ATLAS 1 will set you back only around ninety kilos, or two hundred pounds for you metrically-challenged. If these were ATLAS 5s on the other hand, well, then you'd be in trouble. Just be happy you're not qualified to touch an ATLAS 5, because when you have to carry a mech that weighs three tonnes for twenty miles without a jumpsuit, let's just say you gain an appreciation for these early models."

  We divvied up into crews, and after turning ourselves into "Gingerbread Men" we hurried over to the trucks. I jumped into the bed of the nearest truck, and wrapped one arm firmly around the left knee of the ATLAS 1. Alejandro took the right knee. Haywire took the head, Tahoe took the right shoulder, another guy took the left shoulder, and two others jammed under each hip. Our crew lifted.

  The thing was a bitch to carry. The seven of us banged it up pretty good while jumping down from the truck bed.

  "You just dented a piece of equipment worth half a billion digicoins, dumbasses!" Instructor Piker said. "Your whole crew, sea immersion. Now!"

  A bunch of other crews soon joined us, which didn't really make me feel any better.

  When the seven of us were called back from the freezing ocean, we tried again. Eventually we realized that it was all about teamwork. You had to work together if you wanted to move that ATLAS without dropping it. Alejandro started calling out a cadence, and we marched in tempo, taking even steps.

  Piker made us dress the suits like "gingerbread men" soon thereafter, which was a very gentle process that involved lowering the ATLAS into the ocean, struggling back to the high tide mark and chucking a ton of sand over the metal. Once that was done, the crews did various PT evolutions while holding up the sandy ATLAS 1s, including squats, lunges, jumping jacks, situps and overhead tosses.

  "So, how do you like ATLAS PT?" Instructor Piker said. He had a big sarcastic grin on his face. "Beats sitting at home with your feet up on the couch, munching a bag of chips and watching the latest gay porn on your aReal don't it?"

  "Wooyah!"

  As usual, teamwork was essential here. We motivated each other as best we could, but someone inevitably would tire and make a mistake, causing the ATLAS to drop to the sand. The crews were being beat up left and right by the instructors because of that. Some individuals were singled out and forced to become Gingerbread Men while the crews struggled on with one man less. Others just washed out—in fact, one guy on my crew quit while we were doing pushups with the ATLAS balanced on our backs. Not fun.

  "You all look like stud
s," Instructor Piker said while we were struggling through the pushups, one man short. "Especially you, Mr. Galaal. Do you have any tips on getting pussy?"

  I was used to this sort of abuse by now and it didn't bother me. "That's a negative, sir!"

  "Come on, a stud like you, and you have no tips on getting pussy? Oh. I get it. You're gay. The only tips you can give me are for getting a piece of ass."

  "Wooyah, sir!"

  He focused on Alejandro next. "Mr. Mondego! You are flagging. You're the weakest person in this class. Are you going to make me punish your classmates because you can't keep up? Are you?"

  "Wooyah Instructor!" Alejandro said.

  He wasn't flagging. He was keeping up. He was one of the hardest workers here. But like I said, I was used to comments like that by now.

  Except, for some reason it got to me today.

  "Leave him alone," I said.

  I don't know why I said it. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  Instructor Piker spun toward me like a shark sensing blood. "Why, hello again Mr. Galaal."

  He smashed a handful of sand into my face while I did my pushups. Then another handful. And another. I'd scrunched up my face, but my nostrils were full of sand, and my whole nose was throbbing—he'd hit pretty hard. My cheeks were burning where the grit had dug in. I kept my eyes shut tight, and worked through the pain.

  "You really are gay, aren't you Mr. Galaal?" Piker said.

  "Negative, Instructor!" I managed, breath heaving.

  "Are you and Mr. Mondego playing with each other's buttholes at night?"

  "Negative, Instructor!"

  "You're lucky I don't send your whole crew to sea immersion for being gay. In fact, that's an excellent idea. The six of you go cool down in the ocean for a while. For being gay."

  And so it went.

  The days began to blur together. Morning PT, sea immersion, soft sand runs, swimming and deep dive practice, bay swims, more PT, Gingerbread Men, O-Course, inflatable boat races, ATLAS PT, pipeline crawls (where we had to crawl in these super-tight, super-claustrophobic pipes that had been laid at the bottom of the bay). There were random room inspections, which was really just an excuse for the instructors to ransack our barracks. We were expected to find time at the end of the exhausting day to clean up our rooms again. One time there were two inspections in the same day, before anyone had time to clean up after the previous one. The instructors gave us an epic beating for that, involving repeated sea immersion and O-Course runs. I tell you there's nothing worse than climbing the cargo net in the O-Course when you can barely move or feel your cold-numbed fingers.