Basic

I followed the signs to "Basic Training". It was another one of the circus designer's pipedreams, domed rooms of material all over the shop with a few antennas and satellite dishes adorning it. The "front door" had a large wire mesh covering it with a slit in the middle you had to fit through. At first I figured this was to keep it protected and secure, if there's rifles and stuff in there, but... we're in a war to save the earth. I think who has guns and ammo is irrelevant as long as they're human and running in the direction of the Bane.

I walked in and saw a small row of seats in front of a projector screen, all of them with a bum on except the one at the furthest back right corner. I sat down and tried to introduce myself to the woman next to me, she can't have been more than 20 on a good day. How on earth was she genetically suitable to be an elite soldier of this "AFS"? It was all so wrong. I heard the crunching metal of the mesh door being forced behind me and saw the most stereotypical soldier type entering. An easy 6 foot, with biceps like plant pots and wearing the same form of uniform as us, except he had a golden wings-and-logo symbol on his arm which I took to mean he was in charge of... something. The way he yelled when he spoke meant it was probably us.

"I am Gunnery Sergeant Gibbs, formerly of the glorious US Marine Corps, now, your very own personal trainer in basic combat." Great... every war needs it's gung-ho shouting and yelling marine sergeant. He went on about the way in which we were to be trained to be elite soldiers, or as he put it "rank amateurs pretending to know something about fighting", within a week. The projector screen booted up when he told it to do so. Fancy, I thought, but not that fancy, I had a friend with voice activation on his plasma TV back home. It showed a map of a small area, it was all desert and had one long column in between two sand dunes, with a few walls of sandbags dotted along it. A red marker at the top of the column announced it was the 'Bane insertion point', and a blue marker at the bottom denoted itself as the 'AFS dropzone'. Gibbs said we would be thrown into the thick of it from the off, fighting projections of what they called the Bane 'soldiers' just to see what our past life on Earth had given us in the way of combat experience. For me... i'd seen my share of war movies, played around on rifle ranges a bit as a cadet when I was younger, but never anything remotely military. Give me my mixer and some mortar though and i'll wall us in, that'd stop the Bane. Probably.

The Gunnery Sergeant showed us into a room seperated by a curtain next to the main seating area. It had 12 lockers, one for each of us, and each had a surname on it. I wandered over to the one that read 'Pvt. Oriagi' in big black letters and noticed the combination lock on the door. Gibbs had wandered off, presumably we were meant to know what our codes were... I looked around and no, everyone else was about as flustered as me. Then I heard a very quiet yelp of excitement, and saw the young girl I had sat next to with her locker open. "It's your birthday!" she shouted out, and we all started fiddling with the locks. One by one the very heavy doors to the full-size lockers swung open, amidst a few sharp intakes of breath from the men and an occasional whimper from the girls.

In two robust looking brackets on one side of the locker was a large red-and-black contraption. The magazine poking out and trigger gave me the hint it fired bullets and made a lot of noise. On the other side were hooks with very large pads and panels hanging off of them, that looked like they would fit snug over the human body, armour I figured. And on the shelf above was two stacks of metal boxes. Ammo magazines, one stack for the pistol, and one for the rifle, was the best guess. The Sergeant walked back into the room wearing a similar suit of this body armour, and carrying a large rifle like ours, except with an extra scope here and torch there, like it was customised to his own needs. He pointed at the timer above the only other exit to the room, a small LCD panel showing a countdown from just over 6 minutes. It was labeled 'Time until Insertion'. I immediately took this to mean if we weren't wearing the armour in 6 minutes we'd be getting shot at a lot more.

I pulled out the pads and started sliding on the torso piece, hopefully the right way round. Then the leg panels, and a few pads for over the forearms. As with the jumpsuit this was a very good fit, I was beginning to think they had taken our sizes back home somehow. I took two of the pistol magazines and put them into the pouch in my belt I found earlier, and did the same with five of the rifle magazines. Damn that thing was getting heavy. Finally I put another of the pistol magazines into the gun itself, with a resounding click and no bang, which I took to mean I did it right. I grabbed the rifle and looked it over carefully in my hands, it wasn't nearly as heavy as it looked. There were a few buttons on the top, labelled for, I would imagine, simpletons like us 12 that had never used a gun before. "Ultra Violet Range Marker", "Semi-Automatic (1rnd)", "Burst-fire (3rnd)", and "Release Clip". I pressed each to toggle between the modes, noticing the cool purple dot that showed up momentarily where I was pointing it when I pressed the marker button, and the way the "clip" dropped out when I hit the button and the red light above it went out when I reloaded it. In the war movies i'd seen, rifles always had a handle on the side that the hero pulled ...heroically... before opening fire, but this had nothing like that. Not even a safety switch. I think Gibbs must have realised I was thinking this as I looked the gun over searchingly, and said "It ain't got one, son. It's a clever rifle. It knows if you're pointing at a comrade or a little green guy using techno-whiz inside it. Weird ain't it, a gun with a brain." Too bloody right it's weird. What on Earth am I doing with it?