Authors: Bruce Bethke
case that’s fifteen millimeters
longer
—it was perhaps the first of the
modern high-powered military rifles!” Johnson unzipped his belt pouch
and whipped out one truly
enormous
rifle cartridge. The jarheads all
oo’ed and ah’ed.
Johnson dropped the round into the magazine. “Rifles and carbines
based on the Mosin-Nagant design were manufactured by the Imperial
Russian Arsenals at Tula and Sestroretsk,” he dropped another round
into the magazine, “the French Manufactory at Chatellerault,” he
dropped in a third round, “the Swiss Industrie Gesellschaft at
Neuhausen-am-Rheinfalls,” he dropped in a fourth round, “the Austrian
Osterreichische Waffenfrabrik at Steyr,” he slapped the magazine
trapdoor shut, “and by the American firms of Remington and New
England Westinghouse.” Flipping the rifle over, he hefted it, as if
considering something. “As late as 1960, variants were still being
manufactured by Finn SAKO and the ChiComm People’s Armory.”
Johnson cranked the bolt open again. I saw a shiny brass cartridge
pop up into the action. “Beginning with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904
and the Russo-Persian War of 1911, the Mosin-Nagant rifle saw action
in most of the major conflicts of the Twentieth Century! From the frozen
plains of Russia to the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia, it has been
proven time and again to be a reliable, accurate, and deadly weapon! For
these reasons, you will continue to find Mosin-Nagants in service in the
Third World to this day!” He slapped the action shut. The cartridge
seated with an ominous
thunk
.
Raising the rifle to his shoulder and pointing it down the airstrip,
Johnson squinted through the sights. Then he returned it to port arms.
“The Mosin-Nagant has two design flaws,” he said. “The first—a
relatively limited magazine capacity—did not prove relevant until the
Vietnam War, and the advent of the American M-14 and M-16
automatic rifles.
“The second is more serious. Unlike comparable German and
American designs, the Mosin-Nagant has
no
cross-bolt safety!” Johnson
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held the rifle out at arm’s length and pointed to a large knobby thing on
the end of the bolt. “While the exposed firing pin does mean that the
weapon remains combat-serviceable as long as the barrel and bolt are
intact—if all else fails, you can always fire it by hitting it with a stick—
“It also means that any sudden jar or impact,” Johnson’s voice
choked off. The rifle slipped out of his fingers; he fumbled, bobbled,
almost caught it. The butt of the rifle hit the ground—
“
BLAM!
”
By the time the sound stopped echoing back from the woods, I
figured I was safe getting my face out of the dirt. Payne’s boots were
right there, two feet off my nose.
“Very good, Harris,” he said. “You too, Spinelli. Howe. Chang.” He
stepped back, looked around, took a deep breath and warmed up for
some bellowing. “The rest of you: What the hell’s
wrong
with you?
Didn’t you hear
gunfire
?
“Let’s do this again. Drop!” The rest of the class flopped down hard
on the grass.
“Better. Now give me twenty.”
#
My Tuesday afternoon History class let out early. I ducked around
the Admin Building to avoid running into Rogers and started down the
back path through the woods to the library. Mr. Lewellyn had given me
a doozy of a problem that Monday, and I didn’t feel like waiting ‘til my
scheduled Wednesday study time to see if my answer checked out.
Plowing through the ferns in the gulley, I darted up the slope and
bounced into the Library.
“Mister Lewellyn!” The door was open; the lights were out. The
library was dark, empty. Odd. “Mister Lewellyn?” Cautious —I didn’t
want anyone to think I was sneaking someplace I didn’t belong—I
slipped through the stacks. The door to Lewellyn’s office was ajar. I
pushed on it, a little; old hinges turned with a slow groan.
He was lying, sprawled on the floor, next to a tipped-over stepstool
and a scatter of books. His face was the color of cold, dead, ashes.
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One instinct told me to get out of there before anyone saw me;
another said to get in there and
do
something. I listened to the second
one. His skin was cold and clammy; his heart was beating slow, s-l-o-w,
but it was still beating. His breathing was shallow, almost imperceptible.
I ran for help.
He never regained consciousness. They MedEvacced him to
Calgary; I never heard what happened to him after that. A week later the
new librarian—a tall, beak-nosed sourball named Fellows—showed up,
and Lewellyn’s Apple got crated up and sent to the storeroom.
“So you’re that Harris kid,” is how the new librarian introduced
himself when I showed up. “I’ve heard about you.” Then he informed
me that the library was a
privilege
reserved for
responsible
cadets, and
that I would need a signed note from an instructor before I would be
allowed to study in the library.
The day I realized Lewellyn was never coming back was the last
time I ever cried.
#
I wrapped up my first Grade One year with a lot of nice round
numbers: zeroes in everything. Absolute complete flunkout. The plan
didn’t work, though. Dad just slapped down another tuition check and
the Academy reenrolled me.
My surprise was total. All my life, I’d been taking competitive
exams to get into better schools. It’d never occurred to me there might
be such thing as a school you
couldn’t
flunk out of. One night I woke up
at 3 a.m. from a nightmare about being forty years old and still a Grade
One cadet, and that’s when I decided I’d better make minimum effort at
passing some classes.
The summer I turned 15 was the worst summer of my life. I couldn’t
mix with my class; after all, they all were Grade Twos, and I wasn’t
even a Grade One. I couldn’t mix with the summer boys; after all, I’d
been through that game already. Payne’s summer boys did galley
warfare that year, and I spent most of my time in the mess hall, cleaning
up after their foodfights.
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Until the first week of August, when it occurred to me one day they
were just about ready for the final trick. I insinuated my way next to a
couple of them, tried to tell them about the battle of Aegespotami.
But who listens to a cyberpunk?
#
My second Grade One year was even worse than the first one, and
for one major reason:
Douglas Kemuel Luger
. He’d gone home at the
end of that first summer, and I’d bid good riddance to him then. Trouble
was, I flunked out at the Academy, but good ol’ Deke Boy flunked out
of the real world. On the first day of the fall semester I fell in for
inspection and found Deke standing next to me, smug and cold as ever,
and it only took me a little contact to flag he’d picked up something new
while he was back home: a mean streak a mile wide.
I decided, since I couldn’t get anybody to
like
me, I was going to flip
my toggles.
Sunday night, after I finished polishing Roid Roger’s boots, I went
to bed as Mikey Harris. Monday morning I woke up as Max Asshole,
Def Cyberpunk.
During the winter of my Grade Two year, I took basic electricity and
learned about Ohm’s Law: resistance plus energy equals
heat
.
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Chapter 13
One minute I was sleeping; next minute I was waking up all fury and
derangement with a hand clamped over my mouth and an evil whisper in
my ear. Then I recognized the Survival Instructor’s voice. “Get your
boots. Go outside. Maintain silence.”
Hey, at age sixteen Harris, Michael A., former CyberPunk—
me
, to
tag a constant—might be contending for Oldest Grade Two in camp, but
this kid’s no vidiot! Soon’s I IDed that swine I knew
precisely
what
kinda loaf had pinched on me and opted for Least Painful Response
Mode: Instant Compliance.
After three rotten years at the Von Schlager Military Academy, I
was finally starting to get the hang of LPRM.
This time it meant barefooting out of the barracks and into the cool
and dewey late-May dawn—the pines were still; the owls had called it a
night and the meadowlarks weren’t ramped up yet —sitting down in the
butt-freezing damp grass, and velcroing my boots while the S.I. dragged
four more blear-eye Grade Twos from their bunks. In a coupla minutes I
was sharing the grass with skinny Murphy, in t-shirt, sweat pants, and
sullen attitude; hulking Buchovsky, in waffle weave, cut-offs, and cowlike
calmness; snake-dangerous Kao Vang, in heavy black pajamas and
Who-me-did-I-get-tipped-off? smile—
And
gruppenfuhrer
Luger, in boxer shorts. Oh fritzing great, just the
guy I wanted. Luger, at near 17 the reigning Oldest Grade Two in camp
and my self-appointed mortal enemy. Luger, telepathing,
“If I wasn’t
too tough to shiver I’d
kill
for that thinsulate jumpsuit, Harris.”
Luger:
Murphy and Kao Vang grouped with him and hostilated at me. I could
see already this was gonna be certified zero fun.
One by one we got our boots on and sneaked behind the trees to get
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the moss steamy. Then the S.I. popped past and gave us the silent signal
to follow. Obediently, we fell in behind.
#
Don’t ever quote me, but a three-klick run at dawn is
real
good for
flushing the sludge out of your headworks. I was feeling alertness, total,
by the time we got to the airstrip, so just before we ducked into the
briefing shack I caught a shadow glimpse of the ground crew rolling out
a helo and confirmed what I’d pretty much inferenced. This wasn’t
standard character-building harassment; we were doing The Colonel’s
Game, elimination round.
The briefing shed was lit, bright, and heavy with the smell of fresh
coffee and doughnuts. A seriously pinholed tactical map covered most of
the short wall opposite the door, and five small piles of name-tagged
gear lay on the floor. I spotted mine, but before I could check it out the
S.I. barked, “Attention!” and we snapped to. He walked past us, stern
and inspecting, hooked himself a cup of coffee, sipped, grimmaced,
added sugar ...
“This,” the S.I. said at last, “in case you stupid sods haven’t figured
it out yet, is your Combat Survival Final Exam. In the next week we’re
going to find out what kind of stuff you’re
really
made of.
“Whether you have the right,” he sipped his coffee and eyed the
doughnuts, covetous, “to call yourselves
men
, or if you’re better off