[Hello, 60 readers! We’re up to 51 pre-orders, and we only have a few more days for that number to climb in this contest. We’ve done really well in this Inkshares/Nerdist thing so far, and it would be great to do even better before the contest ends on the 15th. If you like what you’re reading, remember to link, share, and get your friends to give it a shot, too!
As always, this is an early draft, but it’s time for our next fiction preview/character introduction! We’re interrupting our preview of "The Protectors" to show you their opposition; a soldier in the PML. Sort of. --RRZ]
The People’s Military League didn’t care one whit about actually holding onto Yaren Tertiary, a sun-baked world on a decaying orbing on the way into the gas giant, Yaren Prime, they just didn’t want those DemFed bastards to hold onto it, either. Between them, they’d bombed almost everything worthwhile about YT into the dirt—on the dark side, the cold side, the side that could sustain human life except for all the bombing—but neither side was willing to give it up, now. Amidst the urban rubble, they fought over the worthless hunk of rock like it was still teeming with life, like the colonists hadn’t given up on it after just a few centuries, like it mattered at all. They fought, but in a half-hearted, uncaring, way; the contest was all that mattered, not the prize.
And when the contest was all that mattered, the 227th Shock Troopers (Penal) got sent in.
“Threepeat,” the order began, as weary as it was wearying, on a radio a generation too old for standard issue, cutting through the thing atmosphere of Yaren Tertiary, coming in a voice muffled by an old rebreather (still in better shape than the secondhand ones that left most of the 227th coughing and panting).
“Take twenty men and flank left. Advance, establish a base of fire to draw enemy attention, and await support.”
Austin Baird, called Threepeat, had been enlisted for seventeen months, and had gained a Private First Class’s stripes--theoretically, that is, none of the troopers in the 227th were allowed to wear rank patches--then a Lance Corporal’s, then a Corporal’s, and now a Sergeant’s, by way of attrition alone. The spotty, half-missing, command structure of the punishment detail meant it was normally a Captain giving the order, but over time they’d changed from “Coble, take Threepeat and twenty men,” to “Marshall, take Threepeat and twenty men,” to “Randall, take Threepeat and twenty men,” to, finally, “Threepeat, take twenty men…”
But it was always him. And he knew why, as much as everyone else did. The 227th were, like all Penal units, the scum of the People’s Military League Army, disposable troops in a disposable command structure, united only by their contempt for the PML and the PML’s contempt for them; thieves, rapists, murderers, shirkers, and cowards. Never quite deserters, of course, those were simply executed by the nearest morale officer.
The men and women of a Penal battalion, malcontents one and all, received inconsistent rations, ungenerous quartermaster attention, unfair orders, and suspended pay. They lost their rank upon entry. The one perk was a lack of a morale officer; after the casualty rate of attached morale officers was nearly four times that of standard units, even the stubborn PML High Command had stopped assigning them to these disciplinary commands. The 227th was among the longest-lived of such units, but the same didn’t hold true to the individual soldiers assigned to it. Thieves received a three-month tour. Rapists a six. Those showing a reluctance to fight, also six. If they managed to live, they returned to their old units—or some other one on-planet if their former comrades had moved on, there was no need to waste interstellar travel on such scum—and worked their way back up the ranks.
Threepeat, though, seemed to be here indefinitely. It was, effectively, a death sentence without a date specified. His seventeen month tour was the longest anyone remembered—records were spotty, because a penal battalion didn’t exactly have a regular unit historian so much as lean on disciplinary notices from officers scattered throughout the PML as a whole—and was essentially unheard of. There were others who had been assigned to penal units multiple times for, perhaps, as long, but none had ever been in one without reprieve.
Baird was here because he had failed a test.
The People’s Education/Aptitude Test, widely called the PEAT, was an essential tool in the state assessing the abilities of every citizen, the culmination of a PML citizen’s academic career, and was used to best assign them to fill the needs of the League. Austin Baird had excelled in similar, preliminary, exams as a boy. His general scores had been impressive, his comprehension scores from primary school had placed him in top brackets and juggled him to high classes. He’d matched his academic performance with athleticism, celebrating the physicality of the People’s Military League by overperforming in competitions with rival schools, and—once—even scoring repeatedly in an exhibition match with a visiting academy team from the capital.
Then his father had died, and everything had changed. Eugene Baird had been life-long PML loyalist, a true believer, a hard-working man with scarred hands like hams and a bald head that shone brighter than his smile, a builder of homes and workplaces, a crafter of whatever the League had needed. He worked and bled for the PML. For decades the Baird family lived in their drafty state-assigned housing—Austin’s mother got too cold, then got too sick—while he left to insulate and reinforce the homes of others, to breath in the dust of his labors, to kill himself from the inside out. Three days before his only son took the PEAT, three years after his wife’s pneumonia killed her, Eugene Baird was reduced to little but a bloodstained pillow and a sleep from which he never awoke.
On the day the state buried his father, Austin Baird got every question wrong on the People’s Education/Aptitude Test. Every one. His teachers had nervously exchanged glances, spoken with school administrators, and offered him an almost-unprecedented second chance.
He did it again. Proudly. Defiantly. Answering each question differently than the last time—to show them he could—but meticulously never selecting the right answer.
Morale officers visited his home. They knew their work. They didn’t leave any marks, didn’t leave any bruises. Austin took the test a third time, and once again scored a perfect zero.
His enlistment paperwork was filled in without him, signed by a morale officer, stamped by a morale officer, and in the same moment, on the same desk, marked by a morale officer for transfer to the 227th Shock Troopers (Penal). He was taken in the night, given most of a uniform to hide the marks and bruises they had left this time, and put immediately to work. His superiors in the 227th had special orders for him.
And then it had begun; “Coble, take Threepeat and twenty men…”
But he had lived.
So now he took the twenty men. Twenty other malingerers, thieves, looters, rapists, killers, and cowards, led into battle—always from the front—by the Sergeant they all looked down on and called Threepeat. They were in ugly gear cobbled together from battlefield trophies, looting stores and homes they came across, and half-hearted gear assignments from central command. They wore green and grey and black and brown, most without a patch in sight, and they fought with weapons just as mis-matched. They had a banner back on the dropship that had expelled them at the start of their time on Yaren Tertiary; someone had vandalized the (Penal) into (Penile) with stolen paint or or stolen cloth or stolen thread and stolen needles, so they had disembarked without it. Again.
Threepeat took twenty of them—not all men, actually, a half-dozen of his nearby hand-picked troopers were women—and flanked left. He was young and strong and fast and fit. He had hatred in his heart, and was able to take it out on the enemies of the PML, for all that he’d rather take it out on the PML itself. This week he had a stolen shotgun, DFMC-issue, picked up from a corpse right next to a DFMC ammunition carrier that held 150 rounds for it.
He was sure he’d make it back, like he always did. Cut, battered, bruised, panting behind this damned rebreather, later to be patched up with stolen cloth and stolen needles and stolen thread, and perhaps with a dozen or so of his unlucky twenty with him.
But he’d make it back. He always had. Whether Baird liked it or not, he served, he worked, he bled, like his father had, and he would until it killed him.
