He came to the Sally as a Punishment Brigade convict, having worked his way through the abbreviated Pacific Command military justice system like a grain of sand passing through a worm's tract. Like the metaphoric worm, Pacific Command didn't have much in the way of brains or heart, just nerve ganglia that received Valentine as a deserter (he rode back from Mount Omega in an empty supply truck - heavily caged for transporting valuables east and malefactors west - chained hand and foot and under the watchful eye of a sentry in the cab cage) and processed him by a hearing where he admitted leaving his post without orders with the intent never to return. He gave a fine speech damning Pacific Command from the Bears following orders all the way up to Adler's Resource Denial methodology, but none in the hearing seemed particularly impressed. They convicted him and sentenced him to ten years in the Punishment Brigade. When he asked
his lawyer how many men survived that long a term, he got a quiet shake of the head.
They put him to work with some other convicts in a chain gang black-topping roads and felling trees. When they had 120 convicts together - the additions took roughly six weeks - they gave everyone a hose bath and piled them into a pair of seatless school buses for the trip to Pacific Command Military-Criminal Salvage Training - Sally.
* * *
"Okay, you cocksuckers, listen and listen hard!" the top sergeant yelled, standing at the head of the stairs with his back to the church doors. Like Valentine, he had a generous helping of Native blood and wore a mattress-ticking shirt and green camping shorts. Only the jaunty police hat had a military crest, the eagle head of Pacific Command.
Valentine and the others waited in groups of twenty, each under a police corporal. Ever since being handcuffed at Mount Omega, he'd given up on hope. He felt like a wrung-out rag, but still had enough intellectual curiosity to wonder what kind of bin he'd be tossed into.
"I'm Sergeant Kugel. You're going to hate me, this place, and every waking minute you spend here. The only way to shorten your stay is to follow orders. You stay here until I decide you're fit to leave, on the bus to the front or in a body bag. Your choice.
"We've got no officers, no la-di-da judge advocates. Just you cocksuckers and your PB training staff and some sentries with scoped thirty-aughts, who'll shoot you down from the wire just for the challenge of a tight grouping".
He took off his pistol belt and hung it on the church door behind him. "I'm going to save everyone a lot of time and mental stress. Any of you cocksuckers feel like taking a shot at me, I'll give you the chance right now. No hard feelings. Anyone swings at me after this big fat kiss of a welcome, I shoot the cocksucker dead and feed his balls to my Doberman. So now's your chance".
He stepped down to the bottom of the church steps and disappeared
from Valentine's view, thanks to the rank in front of him. Valentine could see a bit of hat and that was all.
"Well? Well? I haven't had PT today... I could use a good sweat. All right".
Sergeant Kugel trotted back up the stairs and put his gun belt back on.
"You're all standing here because you're useless. You were useless the day the bitch that whelped you squeezed you out, and you're useless now, according to God and Court, which decided you're not even worth the brass a firing squad would expend. We'd float you downriver like shit, except we don't want to give the Reapers the satisfaction. So I'm going to make sure that though you may have been born useless and lived useless, you'll be able to die in a useful manner and following orders for once.
"One last thing. I don't want to hear any talk about how anyone is innocent. That's between you and God above. I don't give a damn, and I hate you all, whether your souls are white as a virgin's sheets or black as the witch king's pits. I'm here to send you out ready to keep the Reapers busy until a Bear team can take them down. There's no sick call, no off duty, and a bullet's the only punishment. We start in five minutes. I'm not going to ask if you all understand. Like the man said, frankly, my dear cocksuckers, I don't give a damn".
* * *
Valentine spent forty-nine endless days in the confines of the training school. After two weeks of almost solid physical activity - his only break was the two days he spent in the kitchens under the equally bloody-minded sergeant who ran the laundry and larder - the men began to break down and miss orders, stupefied with exhaustion.
He kept waiting for the pistols to come out, for an execution to set an example to the rest, but they lost only one man, a rapist whom the others called "Short Eyes". Valentine woke one morning and found his bunk empty. His name wasn't called in the morning roll, and nobody asked questions over breakfast. He'd slept at the opposite end of the
bunk-littered school gymnasium, and Valentine fought hard to keep from being too much awakened by the inevitable noises of 120 men all sleeping in one room.
He made a few friends. Diaz, who had been caught raiding a Pacific Command depot - according to him, in order to feed his mother and sisters; according to Kugel, he'd been caught with copper wiring and electrical tools. Diaz never seemed to tire, and was always the first to offer a hand to help someone to his feet one more time. Then there was Smooth John Hollows, "Joho", who'd been caught peddling drugs but who had such an easygoing, friendly manner and a sharp sense of humor Valentine couldn't help but like him, or at least look forward to the next quiet quip out of his mouth, and then there was Tuber, a meaty, disproportionate Bear washout who'd lost his temper once too often and killed a man in a brawl.
After the eighteenth day, much of it spent on the broken-up old bleachers on the athletic field, which had been disassembled and turned into an obstacle course, the only way they could make it through their exercises was by teamwork. Pairs and trios of men helped one another up the shimmy poles and over the walls. Valentine divided the twenty-man team into groups of four and shoved them into places as they negotiated the course, then stayed with the slowest team. They'd get a rest break after ten circuits; the faster they got through the circuits, the longer the rest break. "His" platoon finished first.
When the mass could hardly walk without staggering, the sergeants made them crawl through everyone's least favorite stretch of the exercise yard: the mud pit and track circuit. The mud clung until it seemed that every man was carrying an extra thirty pounds for the trot around the edges of the wallow and back to the starting point for another crawl. After Valentine lost count of the circuits, he could rise only with the aid of Diaz and Joho.
"Wish they'd get some quimmies in this mud with us", Joho grunted. "I'd do some fast jackrabbit uh-uh-uh when lil' Keggo isn't looking".
Valentine remembered the shape and bob of Malia's mud-covered
breasts, felt his heart break anew. That night drying mud flaked off his hair and into his dinner.
Then, remarkably, the tyrants gave them a day off. They distributed early apples and pamphlets with the history of the Punishment Brigade, its simplified rank structure, and the various sorts of specialty fields.
The Punishment Brigade mostly did high-risk duties: disarming unexploded ordnance, clearing minefields and booby traps, and doing forward signal duty or decoy work (the Kurians had some sort of special missile called a "screamer" they lobbed into the mountains now and then that homed in on radio transmissions), sapping missions, and "river watch".
The last was one of the most dangerous jobs in Pacific Command: guarding the rivers leading up into the mountains. The Kurians employed the fish-frog creatures Valentine had first encountered in Chicago, to guard water-girthed Seattle, and sometimes small teams of the creatures foraged inland. The river-watch teams inspected nets and kept an eye on white water, looking for a glimpse of the pale green bellies and shining goggle eyes of the Big Mouths. At night there was little you could do but keep away from the banks and listen for the slee-kee, slee-kee sound of their on-land breathing.
The next weeks were a mix of classroom, lab, and exercise. Everyone paid attention during class, asked questions; anything at all was better than pounding across the athletic field for the ten thousandth time. They were tested daily on their progress.
"Right answers, and I can even read it", Kugel said, handing Valentine back his test on Eleven Ways to Kill an AV and Crew. "Where'd you get the thing about hand grenades and electrical tape in the fuel?"