Gramm actually shuddered, hugely. Again Pirius wondered who this woman was, what hold she had.

Pila, Gramm’s elegant advisor, watched this wordlessly, her lips upturned with disdainful humor. Throughout the whole of the meeting, as far as Pirius could remember, she hadn’t said a single word.

When the meeting broke up, Nilis came to the ensigns, his eyes shining. “Thank you, thank you. I knew my hunch was right, to bring you here — you have made all the difference! Project Prime Radiant — that’s what we’ll call it — Project Prime Radiant was born today. And the way you spoke back to the Minister — I will be dining out on that for years to come!”

Torec glared at Pirius, who said dolefully, “Yes, sir.”

“And now we have work to do, a great deal of work. The Minister has given us seven weeks to report — not long, not even reasonable, but it will have to do. Are you with me, Ensigns?”

Pirius studied this flawed old man, a man who had dragged him from his training, from his life, had hauled him across the Galaxy and then paraded him to further his own ends — and yet, flawed though he might be, Nilis was working for victory. Pirius could see no higher duty. “Yes, sir.”

Nilis turned to Torec. “And you won’t worry about being turned out of your job, when we win the Galaxy?”

Torec smiled. “No, sir. There are always more galaxies.” Her tone was bright, her smile vivid.

But Pirius saw Nilis pale at her words.

On Quin Base you lived inside the Rock.

Chapter 10

Once, this Rock had been nothing but a lumpy conglomerate of friable ice and dirt. Now it had been hollowed out and strengthened by an internal skeleton of pillars of fused and hardened stone.

The Rock’s inner architecture was layered. You spent most of your off-duty time in big, sprawling chambers just under the surface. Here you ate, slept, fornicated, and, perhaps, died. Beneath the habitable quarters was another layer of chambers, not all pressurized, with air and water purifiers, and the nano-food bays which processed rivers of grunt sewage. Right at the heart of the Rock were more essential systems yet: weapons shops and stores, a dry dock area for small craft.

But Pirius Blue and his crew spent most of their time on the surface. As Service Corps recruits, their job would be to support infantry in combat conditions. And so their training began with basic infantry work.

Which turned out to be very basic indeed.

Under Captain Marta’s watchful glare, in squads of a hundred or more, skinsuited cadets were put through hours of parade drill. Then there was the physical work: they bent, jumped, lifted, wrestled, endured endless route marches.

And they ran and ran and ran, endless laps of the trampled crater rim that seemed to be Marta’s favored form of torture.

Cohl, gasping, complained to Pirius. “You’d train a rat like this.”

Pirius forced a laugh. “If they could teach a rat to hold a spade you wouldn’t need infantry grunts at all—”

“No talking!”

And off they ran again, glued to the asteroid dirt by their inertial belts.

It seemed as if every cadet on this Rock was younger than the Navy crew, save only This Burden Must Pass; every one of them was fitter, including Burden. It was galling that the Claw crew came last or near last in every exercise they were put through, and had more work inflicted on them as “punishment.” The younger ones with their hard little bodies actually seemed to relish the sheer physical joy of it.

And it went on for hours. After a few days, sleep became the most important element in Pirius’s life, to be snatched whenever there was an opportunity, in the brief hours they were left alone before reveille, or out on the surface between punishing routines. He even learned to catnap standing up.

It was very different from Navy training. Much of the training for flight crew was specialized, highly intellectual, with physical training focusing on fast reactions, fine control, endurance — it was a unifying of mind and body, so that both could work effectively and efficiently under the intense conditions of combat. The very geometry of Arches Base, with its n-body architecture of plummeting asteroids, was designed to stimulate, to train you from birth to be free of vertigo, to judge shifting distances and motions on an interplanetary scale.

But Army grunts didn’t have to fly FTL warships. Here there was nothing more stimulating than dirt. Navy jokers always said that all grunts had to know how to do was dig and die, and now that Pirius was cast down among them, he was starting to suspect it was true.

Nothing could help poor Enduring Hope, though. No amount of effort seemed to shift a gram of fat from his body, and he always trailed in last.

As Captain Marta inflicted her punishments on him, she always kept the rest of the training group, hundreds of them sometimes, waiting at attention in their sweat-filled skinsuits. As Hope slogged through his lonely circuits, their resentment was tangible.

For Pirius, things slowly got more bearable.

After a couple of weeks, he could feel some of the fat falling off his body, and his muscles didn’t ache quite as much as they had after his first outings. His body was still young and was responding to the exercise, and he was not deprived of food, which he ate ravenously. He would never admit he enjoyed it. But he knew he was growing healthier, and he took some pleasure from the glow of his muscles.

He learned to use the correct Army rankings: colonel, not commander; sergeant, not petty officer. That at least lubricated the friction with the officers, none of whom had any time for Navy “flyboys.” It turned out that most officers here belonged to the elite regiment known as the Coalition Guard, who even looked down on the rest of the Army.

The culture of these infantry troops was very different from the Navy’s, but slowly he began to perceive their fundamental pride. This war fought with starships had a surprisingly primitive base. There was ground to be held everywhere, on planets full of people and docks and weapons factories, on Rocks thrown into the battle zone. If the ground was lost, the battle was lost. And if you were infantry you held the ground; if you were infantry you were mankind’s fighting force, and everybody else was just support.

Even the horror of their surroundings in the barracks began to wear off.

At first they felt as if they had been thrown into a pit of strange, subhuman animals. They were surrounded by smooth-skinned, lusty kids; it seemed to Pirius that whichever way you looked somebody had his dick out. “It’s like being in a Coalescence,” Cohl whispered, horrified, her eyes wide.

It certainly wasn’t like Arches. There, the instructors — combat veterans, even if they were invalided out — were role models for the cadets, and discipline was comparatively light. Most adults here were keepers, not teachers. It was all very dismaying.

But gradually, in their way, these strange swarming kids seemed to accept the Claw crew. Jabbering in their own strange, rapid dialect, the cadets would show them the way to the refectories and showers and de-lousing blocks. Others showed them simple tips on how to make your life easier: for instance, if you saved some grease from your food and rubbed it into the inside of the joints of your skinsuit, the chafing was eased a lot. Once when Pirius stumbled during one of Marta’s endless route marches, a couple of them came over and helped him up.

In the barracks one night, another offered to share her Virtual with him. It was a drama, a crude soap opera full of strong plotlines and tear-jerking emotions, one of a whole series pumped out endlessly by storytelling machines, all different yet all the same. Pirius watched a little to be polite, then slipped away when his host fell asleep.