"I find myself unable to stress enough how unacceptable your behavior was," Lieutenant Templeton said solemnly.

"I briefly considered making a reference to the military virtues, but I think I'll give them a rest for now. I will say is this, however. There are three things a soldier must learn before he can become a functional member of his unit. Firstly, the soldier must learn how to do. To do the things that are expected of a soldier. Fight, eat, shower, make his bed, wipe his ass, and so on. Secondly, the soldier must learn how to learn. To learn how to discipline his mind so as to accept newfound knowledge more easily and understand how to exploit it. All this means nothing, however, if one hasn't first learned how to be! How to exist in this institution, to respect its traditions, its constituents and its laws! You have both failed in this third lesson, and that is why you will be punished.

"Recruits Toni Miura and Ian Templeton, You are both found guilty of behavior unbecoming, and are hereby sentenced to go into orbit for a period of no less than three days from the end of this hour. If either of you return to ground before the end of that period, these events will become known to Captain Damien, who may then decide on what is in the best interests of this subunit," the lieutenant finished in a monotone.

Despite Mason's best efforts, Lieutenant Templeton had adamantly decided that no one would be taking the Walk on their first day of training. Ray had been whisked off to Medical Bay and, after a cursory examination from the orderly, redirected via ambulance to Leiben CHC. Oddly enough, he suffered no consequences besides what had already befallen him in the casern.

By MEWAC tradition, to go into orbit simply meant that, for the period of allotted time, in no way could any part of the convicted recruit's body touch the ground. The only way that such a feat could be accomplished was if the condemned was carried around all day by his fellow platoon members. Drill instruction, physical training, weapons training, civil and military moral studies, signals, topography, vigilance and counter-vigilance, camouflage, eating, drinking, defecating, showering, sleeping, every single daily task, including dressing and undressing himself, would be executed as he was held aloft by his mates. The lieutenant had chosen not to go into detail as to how that should be accomplished; they were apparently expected to figure it out for themselves. But he had solemnly informed his subordinates that, it being a most important tradition, the local base inhabitants would be unusually informative in the event of any cheating taking place. Moreover, surprise inspections would be used as a means to ensure compliance with the sentence.

Mason beamed delightedly, having apparently discovered hog heaven.

As anticipated, the punishment turned out to be just as agonizing for the platoon members as it was for Toni.

The days that followed proved surreal. The entire canteen would burst into delighted applause every time he and Ian were carried in, as if celebrating virgins being offered up for pagan sacrifice.

Figures moved silently in a darkened casern as six platoon members relieved another group holding a snoring Toni aloft, said recruit diligently faking his slumber. He slept almost not at all in those nights, discomforted as he was with the notion of resting while his mates were in effort. Ian did not share his concern, although every time he fell asleep, one of the recruits holding him up would give him a stiff shake. Empathy for their senior had died on that Monday, a state of affairs that Ian made no effort to correct.

The showering arrangements proved particularly harassing for Toni. In their first attempt, his complement had attempted to simply hold him up as he showered, the effort proving impossible due to the shower heads being set too low. The solution they finally decided upon proved feasible but profoundly embarrassing. A loudly complaining Gordie held a naked Toni under the shower as if they were newly-weds, an amused Hirum armed and ready with soap and shampoo.

Nothing, however, came close to the complications surrounding use of the latrine. Toni made every effort to avoid the scenario, eating as sparingly as possible in an attempt to last the three days in orbit without evacuating. The pressure, however, soon began to accumulate, and before long his platoon members were groaning at the impending prospect. Mason took pains to personally inspect the procedure, striving to ensure that Toni's buttocks at no moment touched the toilet seat, his mates going so far as to dismantle the toilet stall nearest the bathroom entrance to make room for three.

No words were immediately available to describe Toni's shame. The remaining MEWAC personnel, however, had no difficulty in describing the episode to the uninformed over beers at the local bar.

Toni somehow managed to keep up with the training. More importantly, he came to understand that if at any time his fellow recruits had gotten tired of the punishment, they needed only have dropped Toni to the ground before Mason's feet. The consequences would only have been his and Ian's to suffer. Yet such a thing never happened.

Toni's feet touched down amid much fanfare a full seventy two hours after entering orbit, and training suddenly became that much easier for the remainder of the week.

By the beginning of the second week, however, the pace of activity had begun to accelerate. Each recruit was distributed a veritable pharmacopeia of compulsory medication, beginning with Ultarine, a selective androgen receptor modulator. The SARM was, as was briefly explained to the platoon, a drug especially designed to duplicate the androgenic effects of anabolic steroids, sans their annoying side-effects. But Ultarine had its own side-effects, centering on loss of body moisture through sweating and urination, and the occasional diarrhea. Accordingly, every recruit was required to carry a canteen on his belt from that moment onwards and required to guzzle three liters of water a day outside of meals.

Metaracetam and Ampakinatam were also on the menu, the first intended to improve memory retention and the second to enhance attention span and alertness. Toni came to suspect that it was the second pill that was responsible for the almost fluorescent yellow urine he began to pass.

Aside the intense physical fitness program, Toni was soon dealing with long hours at a desk or in U-formation out in the open, soaking in as much military lore as his instructors could dish out. He had always been prone to becoming lost in his own thoughts, but the medication had performed a miracle of sorts; he hung on his instructors' every word, committing all to memory with obsessive interest. The list of aptitudes they were expected to accumulate had seemed menacingly vast on his first day, but gradually he began to gain confidence in his ability to meet expectations.

The clear downside to the nootropics was their side-effects. Toni's level of alertness was so high that he usually found himself mentally exhausted at the end of their day, which wasn't a problem at all until they began to be pulled from their beds for supplementary training. Recruits often went into standby mode in those hours, their minds having closed up shop for lack of stock, only their most basic goods still on display.

Some cracked in those days and others crashed, but Toni did neither; instead he operated in a dream-like state, and sometimes he was surprised to discover in their conversations the next day that there had been supplementary training in the night. Sometimes he would remember those times as if they were dreams, and sometimes not at all.

He told no one about the lost time, of course.

He also kept quiet about the obsessive and repetitive behavior he had begun to exhibit in his spare time, although not for fear of embarrassment. He had noticed other recruits pacing about erratically, biting at their fingernails until they bled, and engaging in all manner of repetitive tics. One was spending far too much of his free time alone in the remotest of the latrine stalls.

By their fourth week of training Toni could no longer call himself scrawny. He was putting his all into the physical exercises and the dope's magic was doing its work. He had gained a full six kilo-mass in that time, and the first thing he bought with his initial paycheck was an anti-scarring salve.

In their fifth week of training, the same day recruit Debusey suffered a mental breakdown, earning him a one-way ticket out of the SIC, Toni spoke with several of his mates about the Orbit Order, still curious as to why they had put up with it.

"Wasn't that hard, honestly," Gordie replied, ignoring the outraged retorts of his somewhat weaker mates.

It was Hirum, however, possessed of a characteristic directness that Toni had begun to appreciate, who gave him a straight answer.

"Listen, Toni. What you guys did was stupid. But I honestly didn't know any of you well enough to just give you over to the Screamer like that. And to tell you the truth, we all got to know you better after the order ..."

"Yep, a little too well, maybe –" Ray added with a sly grin.

"Listen," Hirum insisted. "What I'm saying is that if anyone was going to take a dive at the sarge's feet, it would have been Ian. Not you. We even talked about that for a while, but nobody stepped up 'cause then you would have taken the Walk as well."

"I didn't know you guys were still so put out with him," Toni observed quietly. He hadn't missed the collection of scowls at Hirum's statement.

"Let's just say he got a little too comfortable at being carried around like that. You, at least, were just as pissed off as we were," he replied somberly.

Corporal Baylen showed up that week to assume the mantle of assistant-instructor, taking upon his shoulders the added task of training his charges in hand-to-hand combat. The platoon was introduced to the base's Combat Training Square, where they took to assembling every second day, weekend or not, for HHC training. Baylen loved the Art, as he liked to call it.

"I doubt you Suit-pukes will have any need for this training, your thirty millimeter cannon should be keeping you clear of that, but this training should help you become more agile on your feet, and you can certainly use that. Two weeks from now the LT will begin to participate in these classes, and so we'll be adding some fall-rise and lateral-impact training to your repertoire before then. Trust me when I say you'll need that when you face him. I think by then we'll have begun your absorption tests as well."

Nobody had asked what absorption tests were; they all knew better than that. Two weeks later, they found out.

The absorption tests were simple in their design; a recruit was told to remain stock-still in the middle of the CT square, where he would be subjected to a series of shoves, kicks and (if the Screamer was around) blows to the body in ever increasing intensity, said recruit being expected to absorb the punishment in place without flinching, swaying or (most especially) falling down. Staying on one's feet proved to be impossible, though, unless that person's name was Gordie. His body had sucked in the Ultarine like a sponge, and he was slowly becoming as solid as a rhinoceros.

The ultimate goal of the exercise, as they were eventually informed, was for a future Suit driver to become accustomed to performing in combat while under enemy fire. Toni gradually began to imagine every slap as the direct impact of an anti-materiel grenade, every kick or shove the nearby detonation of an artillery shell. Mason's were direct artillery hits. By the end of the second week of absorption tests, rationality and lucidity were tested both during and immediately following every pounding.

It proved to be somewhat difficult to strip down and reassemble a Lacrau after a few blows to the skull.

After a while, the tests began to gain entertainment value; the male recruits found special interest in contemplating the violent femmes as they were put through their paces. In those tests it also became clear why Hannah had made it thus far.

The exercise began with the intimidating encirclement of the subject by the three members of the Drill Team, Baylen adding to the pressure by fixing the female recruit with a dead-eye stare. And it was the stare itself, apparently, which tended to get her going. Standing with her feet widely spaced apart, her arms stretched out beside her, she would bite down on her lips to suppress a giggle, an effort made even harder by the face-pulling recruits sitting at the sidelines. Toni noticed that simply smiling at her in those moments was enough to get her going. The bully team then spiraled inwards and she would find herself being shoved every which-way, holding her knees slightly bent so she might react faster to any push, pull or kick. The only time he ever saw her smile falter was when she received a particularly vicious blow to the head. Mason at his best, of course. Other than that, her morale had proven unshakeable.

Watching the other femmes taking punishment had its own entertainment value. Sueli kept her face tightly expressionless as she was buffeted left and right, but when struck just right she would briefly show the endearingly outraged expression he kept watch for. Rakaia, in true Terminator style, would put up a mean face. She was, however, the femme who fell most frequently, being of slighter build than the others, and each time she would rise with a furious expression, as if wishing death and destruction to the world for not being of more substantial size. Toni often wondered whether she was counting the days until her chance at driving a real Suit. He certainly was.

Baylen's arrival had been accompanied by a torrent of speculation as to what had kept him off-base for so long. Some said he had gotten into trouble with civilian authorities over a bar-fight, an idea most promptly discarded since no obituaries had recently been reported by the media. Other speculated that he had finally managed to bed Captain Damien's teenage daughter, trying to make the connection between one's arrival and the other's sudden bout of irritability. Still others whispered that the corporal was currently the prime suspect in a rape investigation, although no one had volunteered the victim's identity. Toni kept silent whenever he heard the whisperings and tried not to say anything stupid. He already knew why Baylen had been delayed, but had been asked by his instructor to keep it quiet.

Toni didn't quite know why Baylen had confided in him, but was beginning to suspect that he came across as trustworthy.

The conversation had taken place after-hours, as Toni coated the casern's exterior walls as punishment for an infraction he could no longer remember. Mason had decided that Toni shouldn't end basic training before putting a fresh coat of whitewash on the Company building. Baylen sometimes loitered about while he worked, ostensibly to supervise the job, keeping up a low drone of conversation as Toni smeared the walls, the corporal's deep drawl pleasant company after the Screamer's daily abuse. Sometimes the recruit would get a heads-up from his corporal, and those warnings had more than once proven useful in keeping clear of Mason's radar.

And then, out of nowhere, he found his instructor dropping the name of Miriam Reeves.

"The sarge from Valhalla?" Toni asked, trying to remember her face. It had been quite pretty in a very freckly sort of way.

"Yep," Baylen confirmed. "That's why she had her eye on me when I took Happyface to the back, to keep me outta trouble, see?"

Toni nodded silently and returned to his work, his defined forearms lime-smeared up to his elbows.

"There's nothing wrong with a corp and a sarge getting together, you know. But it's gotta be off-base, and there was a rumor going round we were getting intimate in the sergeants' mess quarters. And then Captain Damien heard about it ..." Baylen didn't quite spit the name out, but the resentment was there nonetheless.

Toni simply nodded and made a noise of encouragement as he worked.

"So I was called to his office one day, and he told me there was an enquiry into the matter. I told him he needn't worry, that I and the sarge were respecting the institution. But some people are queer, you know? My saying that confirmed that we were together, and he didn't like that at all. Told me I would never train another platoon. So I put in a few off-days, compliments of the FIC commander, you know him, big fella. Only came back for the enquiry proceedings, and that was ugly. Gotta be the most unpleasant business I've ever gotten mixed up with. I tell you, Toni, this army is asleep at the helm. We're worried about who's sleeping with who when we should be worried about our mission. You might not have noticed it yet, but eventually you will. We're going through the motions of training, we talk about operations and tactics and strategy and all that, but ultimately we're asleep, sleep-walking through our jobs since there's no boogeyman to fight out there. About the last time this army was awake was with the PBI, and that was about twenty years ago ..."

"The PBI?" Toni suddenly felt more than passing curiosity at the conversation.

"Phantom Battle Incident. There was a time just before I joined when some of the research hubs were thinking of separating into independent states, you know."

"Never heard about it," Toni said, trying to remember his history lessons in Leiben High and drawing a blank in his effort.

"Of course you didn't. That isn't taught at school, and there was only some talk about it in the media and Civilian Network, but at the height of the crisis there was a training incident involving a few tanks, friendly-fire during a live-fire exercise. Someone botched things up and, by the time it got leaked to the media, it was supposed to be a full-blown battle. I was fourteen years old at the time, and seeing everyone scared shitless like that gave me more of a hard-on for the service than anything else could have. Some Cavalrymen and Arties died on that day, twenty-four, I think. Anyway, that must be the last time there was a real honest-to-god Red-Alert on any military base. Since then it's been slow slumber."

Toni was surprised by the tone; he had never heard Baylen speak so bitterly before.

"I thought you loved the army, Corp."

"No, Toni, I hate the army. I hate today's army, the one that exists. What I do love is the army the MEWAC could have been if there wasn't so much bullshit flying around. Never forget this, kid. Even in times of peace the Enemy still exists. But this enemy is on our side. Every soldier napping on sentinel duty, every asshole sergeant with a chip on his shoulder, every officer making mountains out of molehills, is the enemy.