Chapter 9B

And while Jeff Waters was learning to get along with his new playmates and his best friend Matt Mendez was getting first degree burns on his neck from the stomach acid in his vomit, Lisa Wong was enduring a tribulation of her own.

She, along with fifty-nine other members of the special forces training class, were eight kilometers outside the safety of the base, in the wastelands, all of them dressed in full biosuits, their M-24s slung over their shoulders, and all of them lugging large equipment packs that weighed twenty kilos in the reduced gravity. They had been in the training class for two days now and this was their first physical training run. Since the primary job of the special forces teams was to operate outside, far from the protection of the pressurized environment, that was where they were doing it. Since all of the recruits had been regular soldiers before the training all of them were already in better than average physical shape. The eight kilometer run over the sandy hills and rough terrain of the Martian surface had been tiring of course and had been quite a bit more than most of them were really used to, but no one had been forced to drop out of formation. Their oxygen levels however, were all getting low. The physical exertion they were under was causing them to use more out of their reservoirs than the extractors could replace. Even the most physically fit of them had been in a constant state of discharge since kilometer number two.

Lisa's suit was currently at 38 percent in the reservoir, about enough for another thirty minutes of running at the rate she was consuming it. Her legs were sore and her face beneath her helmet was sweaty but otherwise she felt good. She was glad that they were starting them off slowly in the physical training department. The reputation of the special forces school was somewhat notorious for being grueling in this particular category. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, the horror stories about running the recruits into the ground were just rumors.

The run ended a few minutes later at the base of a large hill that rose up from the red soil. It stood about six hundred meters above the ground and the mapping program in their combat computers listed it as a defensive emplacement for infantry troops. Its slopes were about forty-five to fifty degrees. A winding, twisting trail that snaked between boulders and outcroppings of rock could be seen leading to the top.

"Okay folks," said Lieutenant Wilton, the primary instructor of this particular training platoon, his booming voice coming through their tactical radio earpieces, "in front of you you will note a large piece of rock and soil known as a hill. Specifically, it is Hill 607, which is part of the inner defensive perimeter for Eden. On top of this hill is a large trench in which there are ammunition storage containers and mounts for heavy machine guns. You will also note that the hill is quite steep and that it is accessed via a foot trail. Your task now is to climb this hill and enter this trench. You will climb quickly, as if enemy forces are moving in on you at this very moment. Stillwell," he barked, calling out the name of one of the trainees, "let's go back to basic infantry training here for a moment. When climbing a hill to position yourself, do you want to do it quickly?"

"Yes, Lieutenant," Stillwell answered immediately, his voice somewhat breathless.

"Correct," he said. "Wong, tell me why that is."

Lisa took a deep breath of the manufactured air in her helmet. "Because you're vulnerable to enemy fire while ascending," she answered. "Your movement and cover are limited and the enemy can see you and engage you from a long way off." Out of the corner of her eye she saw several of her teammates casting contemptuous looks at her, obviously unimpressed by her military knowledge. There was little she could do or say to impress them. She was the only woman among them, indeed the only woman in special forces planetwide and they had already made it quite clear that they did not think she belonged there.

"Very good," Wilton said tonelessly. "And that is why you will all proceed up that hill immediately and as quickly as possible. You will not stop along the way to rest. The first person to make it to the top will earn himself or herself a twenty-four hour pass and a one hundred dollar intoxicant credit at the club. So lets get going. Up, up, up! Right now! Everyone! Move it out!"

Lisa moved with the others towards the base of the hill, her suited legs and heavy boots treading carefully over the rocky, sandy terrain, utilizing the shuffle step which was how one walked in the reduced gravity. Several of the others pushed in ahead of her. One of them, Stillwell as a matter of fact, deliberately nudged her shoulder with his, almost throwing her off balance.

"Sorry, ma'am," he said contemptuously as she struggled to remain on her feet. "I wouldn't want you to fall down on your little behind now."

Lisa glared at him, a task that was a little difficult to accomplish through the helmet and combat goggles but which she somehow managed anyway. "Do it again, fuckface and you'll be picking pieces of your faceplate out of your nose," she told him, her voice level and softly threatening, the same voice she used when addressing troublesome vermin out on the streets while on patrol.

"Wong, Stillwell," said Wilton, "enough of that shit. Keep the frequency clear for tactical communication."

Stillwell glared back at her for a second and then started up the path to the top of the hill. After a moment, she followed him.

The going was rough as she picked her way between rocks and up the incline. Before she even climbed twenty meters up she realized that there was no way in hell that she could possibly make it without stopping to let her oxygen extractor catch up with the demand she was putting on the reservoir. Each step under the load she was carrying, with her center of gravity shifted about half a meter behind her and the need to twist and turn between the rocky obstacles, was making her heart pound in her chest, her legs scream out under the strain, and her breath tear in and out of her lungs. The discharge warning indicator reappeared in her visor, blinking on and off rapidly. The percentage meter that showed how much oxygen she had remaining dropped from forty percent down to thirty-seven percent in the blink of an eye.

She tried to slow her pace a little bit but it did no good. Each step upward was a concerted effort and an exercise in coordination. The bar graph and the numerical display continued to drop. It fell to thirty percent by the time she was thirty-five meters up the hill and down to twenty percent by the time she made it fifty meters up. She wasn't going to make it up there. She was going to have to stop when she reached five percent in order to keep from suffocating. She would have to stop and the rest of the platoon would all shake their heads at her and tell each other that the woman couldn't hack it out here. And maybe she couldn't. If she couldn't climb a simple hill, maybe she didn't belong in the special forces in the first place.

Nevertheless she pushed on, climbing higher and higher while her oxygen level fell lower and lower. When it reached eighteen percent is when others around began to stop their ascent. One of the larger men - Lavenger was his name - was the first of them. He simply stood next to one of the larger rocks and held in place, his body still, his limbs held limply to his side.

"Lavenger!" barked Wilton's voice over the headset. "What the hell are you doing, boy? You were told to climb that hill! Why the hell are you just standing there?"

"My oxygen level is down to five percent, Lieutenant," he said, his voice shameful and scared. "I'm discharging and I'll run out if I keep moving!"

"Are you saying that you're stuck up on the hill, Lavenger?" he asked, sounding quite incredulous.

"Yes, Lieutenant," he replied, more shame in his voice now. "I have to wait until my tank gets more air in it."

"Bullshit," Wilton said. "You're a dead man now. The enemy spotted you and killed your out-of-shape ass. Hold in place until you get twenty percent built up and then get back down here."

"Yes, Lieutenant," he said, sounding like he was about to start crying.

The rest of them continued to climb, their pace slowed down considerably now. Lisa was about ten meters behind Stillwell, about a third of the way towards the front of the pack. She wondered for the first time what their reservoir readings were. She knew that she was going to have to sit down as Lavenger did in about another three minutes or so.

Corporal Benning was the next to go. He was near the front of the line but had dropped back considerably in the last few minutes. Now he simply stood in place, bent over and unmoving, his profile partially hidden from Wilton's view by a boulder, as if he didn't think their lieutenant would notice that.

No such luck. "Benning?" Wilton asked reasonably. "Are you out of oxygen now too?"

"Yes sir," Benning admitted. "I'm at five percent with my discharge warning still showing. Sorry, sir. I couldn't make it."

"You're a dead man as well. Hold in place until twenty and then get your ass back down here."

Two other men went a minute later. Two more quickly followed. A group of four then dropped out one after the other. Wilton had contemptuous words for all of them.

Lisa's level slipped down to ten percent and then to nine. The warning light began to flash even faster in her vision. She continued trying to take slow, deep breaths, to conserve her air as much as possible, to reduce her pace upward even further, but no matter what she did the discharge stayed on and the percentage continued to drop. Two more people were forced to drop out before she reached five percent and the critical oxygen level indicator began to flash. She took one last deep breath and then brought her forward motion to a halt.

"Wong? Don't tell me that you're running out of oxygen as well?" came Wilton's voice in her ear. "You who challenged the admission standards based on your police experience?"

"Yes, Lieutenant," she told him resignedly. "I'm down to five percent."

"And you told me that you were in shape for this training, Wong. You lied to me, didn't you?" He didn't wait for an answer to his question. "Well, you've no doubt heard what the drill is, right? Hold in place until you reach twenty percent again."

"Yes, Lieutenant," she told him, feeling herself flush, feeling like a failure.

As soon as she stopped her motion, forty-three of the others - Stillwell among them - stopped within five seconds of each other, so many that Wilton was not able to scold each and every one of them. It occurred to Lisa that they had all been running with a critical warning light blinking but that none of them had wanted to stop before she did. Now they could all say that they'd outlasted the female in the group. Wilton noticed this as well.

"All right," he said to the group at large, "you idiots have proved that you could climb longer than Wong. Hold in place until you get back to twenty and then come down."

That left only four men left in the running for the top. One by one they too were forced to come to a halt. None of them had made it even to the halfway point on the hill.

It took the better part of fifteen minutes for Lisa's reservoir to fill back up to twenty percent. Once it did she started back down, her steps gingerly and easy. Her discharge warning light did not come back on. Soon everyone else was able to come down as well. Wilton gathered them around him in a circle, himself standing in the middle.

"You people thought you were in shape, did you?" he asked, spinning slowly around so that he could look each one of them in the eye. "You thought you could just come into special forces and that we'd teach you how to shoot better and do all those sneaky little things that we do and everything would just be static, right?" He shook his head sadly. "Wrong. As you can see by my little demonstration here, not even the fittest of you are even close to being special forces standard. Not even close! Any SF member would be able to run ten kilometers out here with full packs without causing a discharge warning on their suits at all. And any of them would be able to climb that hill immediately after that run and be on top in less than ten minutes and still have better than ninety percent levels in their tanks. That is the standard that we are going to achieve here and that is the fitness level that you are going to have to maintain to be a part of this particular team. It has to be that way because, as you were able to see up there on that hill, once your oxygen reservoir gets down to critical levels, you are effectively stuck where you're at. You cannot move, you cannot fight, you cannot do anything. You are, in effect, as useless as a cock on a cow. We're going to run your asses off twice every day and we're going to come out to this hill three times a week until every last one of you can climb it with oxygen left to spare. Whoever doesn't think they can handle that amount of exercise, drop your biosuit and your weapon off in supply when we get back and go back to whatever assignment you were in before you came here."

He paced around in the circle for a moment, shifting his weapon from one shoulder to the other. He then went back to his slow turn, his looks in the eyes. "Now that was my normal speech for this part of the training," he told them. "Every class that I bring through gets run out here and told to climb that hill and every time they fag out one by one. Never have I had a new SF recruit make it to the top on the first day. Never!" He took a few deep breaths, as if considering what he was going to say next. "This time however, something a little bit different happened. This time we had Wong among us, a woman in a place where no woman has ever tread before. And what I saw in response to her presence here today was very disturbing to me indeed.

"I was watching your oxygen levels on my combat computer," he told the class. "I had a graph that drew from the feeds in your suits, a little tool that the commander of a platoon has to help keep track of his troops." He stepped forward a few steps, his gaze falling directly upon Stillwell, who seemed to shrink back from it. "Stillwell," he said, his voice reasonable, "perhaps you could tell me what the minimum safety standard is for reservoir depletion. What is the absolute lowest that you are allowed to run your tank to before doctrine commands that you cease all activity and let it refill?"

The gulp from Stillwell was clearly audible over the frequency. "Uh..." he stammered.

"How low, Stillwell? How low?"

"Five percent, Lieutenant," he finally was able to blurt out.

"Five percent," Wilton said reflectively. "That's correct. I thought that I'd mentioned that number fifty or sixty fucking times during my lectures. I thought that that was what was common knowledge among every MPG member, among every fucking outside civilian worker who wears the fucking biosuit! So, Stillwell, with that in mind, perhaps you could explain to me why you let your reservoir go all the way down to two and a half percent before you stopped?"

"Uh... well... I didn't really... I mean, I thought that I could... you know..."

"Didn't want to fag out before Wong huh?" he asked. "You just couldn't stand to think that Wong would be able to go further up that hill than you could, right?"

"No Lieutenant," he said sternly. "I just thought I could bring it back you know. That if I conserved..."

"Don't you fucking lie to me," Wilton nearly screamed. "You brought yourself far below safety standards, put your stupid-ass life at risk out here, just so you wouldn't have to admit that Wong is in better shape than you."

He didn't wait for a reply. Instead, he glared at the rest of the troops. "And he's not the only one, is he? I counted thirty-seven of you who were well below four percent on your readings. Thirty-fucking-seven of you! And there were another five of you who were below five percent. And holy Jesus, all of you just happened to decide that enough was enough about twenty seconds after Wong finally had to give it up. You stupid idiots! Do you think we pulled that five percent figure out of our asses? Did it occur to you that you were putting your lives at risk? What would have happened if your bodies didn't recover from the exertion quickly enough to stop the discharge of your suits? You would've died of suffocation out here and there wouldn't have been a goddamn thing we could have done about it!"

The men who had been involved in this all hung their heads in shame at this lecture.

Wilton continued to glare and then shook his head in disgust. "If anyone in this platoon ever lets his or her tank drop below five percent again for any reason whatsoever, you will be dismissed from this training and returned to your regular assignments. I will not tolerate stupidity! Is that understood?"

It was understood loud and clear. Lisa, uncomfortable with all of the chaos that her presence had caused, looked around and saw that looks of hatred were being directed at her from all quarters. Waves of resentment were radiating off of her colleagues almost visibly. What had she done to deserve this? Just because she had signed up for the position that she thought she was best suited for, they all hated her.

"Let's get back to our feet," Wilton told them. "We have a long jog to the gunnery range. I want everyone to shoot off a thousand rounds today before we break for lunch."

One by one they got to their feet and formed up. Soon they were trotting off across the red landscape once again. They kept to a pace that was slow enough that no one discharged their oxygen tanks and thirty minutes later they arrived at the outside gunnery range, a one square kilometer area, ringed with small hills, upon which a variety of holographic targets could be activated and shot at.

For the next three hours they practiced various maneuvers and shooting drills. Lisa, who had qualified as expert with her M-24 ever since joining the MPG, quite easily showed up most of the men in marksmanship. Indeed a few of them were forced to grudgingly accord the smallest amount of respect towards her in this as she placed clean head or body shots on target after target, without benefit of her combat computer, from ranges up to half a kilometer away.

One person who did not give her respect was Stillwell, who was still quite stung from being publicly humiliated by Wilton because of her. His own shooting was near expert and well within the top ten in the class, but it was still short of her own. He took every opportunity to make snide remarks towards her, saying things like, "So she can hit a target with a gun. She still hasn't been in a combat unit before". Or he would remark to another student, "Do you really want a woman backing you up in a firefight? What if there's some icky blood around? She might get sick". Lisa, for her part simply ignored him and went about what she had been told to do. Wilton too, though he could hear every transmission that was made, chose not to say anything to either of them. Lisa wasn't sure what to make of his silence. Was he waiting for her to handle things on her own? Was he perhaps hoping that Lisa would quit of her own accord? She just didn't know. Wilton was a difficult man to read.

At last the shooting session wrapped up and they spent the better part of an hour picking up the expended shell casings that littered the range. Wilton then made them run back to the base at triple time, once again discharging their tanks.

By the time they made their way through the airlocks and back into normal gravity and pressurization, all of them were exhausted. Wilton told them to hit the locker rooms and get their biosuits off and back into their normal clothes so they could spend another three hours in the classroom learning the finer points of movement and tactics.

Lisa followed the men into the locker room that had been set aside for the use of the special forces teams. Wilton and the other instructors had given her access to a small storage room adjacent to the locker room for the purpose of changing her clothing in privacy but she had adamantly refused it, not wanting to have any difference between herself and the other SF troops in training. So far she had only put her biosuit on over her shorts and T-shirt. Now however she would have to strip completely naked and shower in front of them.

The locker room was quite large, large enough for an entire company to dress and shower in at once. A long plastic bench sat before each row of metal lockers. She found the locker that Wilton had reluctantly assigned to her and opened it by placing her fingerprint on the locking mechanism. She released the seal on her helmet and pulled it off, setting it on the bench before her. Her short hair was damp with her perspiration. She took a few deep breaths of the stale air, glad to be breathing anything other than the manufactured variety, and then began undoing the clasps that held her biosuit body in place. She slid it off so that she was standing only in her sweaty shorts and T-shirt. She looked around and saw that the men within view were moving slowly at removing their own equipment. Some were casting glances at her, others were trying their best to ignore her, all seemed very uncomfortable with her presence.

She thought of saying something to them and then decided not to. To hell with it. The sooner they got used to her being among them, the better. She reached down and pulled her shirt over her head, dropping in into a laundry bag in her locker. Her ample breasts were now covered with nothing more than a nylon work-out brassiere. She pulled this off as well, baring them for anyone to see. She could plainly hear the gasp of surprise from those around her. It was apparent that they hadn't thought she'd really go through with this. She continued to ignore them and dropped her shorts and underwear as well, leaving her completely nude. She stuffed the rest of the clothes into her locker and then picked up a clean towel and a bottle of liquid soap. Strolling almost casually she headed for the lockers, passing between groups of men.

"Better hurry up," she said flippantly, speaking to no one in specific. "We only have twenty minutes until we're due in the class. Wouldn't want to be late."

No one moved, no one replied.

She stopped and looked at them, amused to see that many of them - these tough, macho guys who fancied themselves the best of the best - were actually blushing. "Oh come on, you assholes," she said, just a hint of challenge in her voice. "Are you afraid of a naked woman? Surely a few of you have seen tits and ass before. Are you afraid to shower with me?"

She walked off towards the community shower area. Here were a series of showering stations situated above tile floors with drains in the center. Each station held a fixture that featured six nozzles in a circular pattern. She hung up her towel and then stepped up to the first one.