One month. More accurately, thirty-five days. That was the time we had left to train twelve recruits on basic weapons handling and operation and get them into proper shape. Then we had one week to train them on the mission itself. It was, in all honesty, insanity, but we couldn’t afford to take six months to a year to train them, so we were rushing. That wasn’t my preferred course of action, but time was rarely on our side.

  Fortunately, we’d given out a few rifles during the Battle of Tooth and Claw, so we at least had a few people who were familiar with them. We’d counted and they’d seen some heavy use during the battle, the ones that we’d recovered intact, at least.

  We recovered the weapons from their users and invited them to try and qualify for basic training. Lacking the deep databases and digital networks of any Terran installation we had to make do with whatever secondhand accounts we could get our hands on as we built our own databases. I knew we couldn’t process the sheer amount of recruits we’d get and our facilities physically couldn’t hold more than a platoon so until we had the many months needed to build everything we needed and staff the place, we’d be cutting corners. It irritated me, but there wasn’t any other choice until things settled down in the region, and a world-ending horde of bugs wouldn’t allow for that unless we got rid of them.

  Despite the challenges involved in getting the twenty-one recruits where they needed to be and relaying our requirements to them, things were going well, apart from some minor glitches and issues. Some of it was the newly constructed base and others were recruit-related. I’d already decided to have Larsen be the one dealing with the day-to-day running of the base. Despite the fact she wasn’t an officer she was adept at managing people and training them seemed to be one of her strong points.

  I knew she had a corporate background, so that was likely one of the reasons behind her competency. It was a good thing too, because the rest of us weren’t trainers, Drill Instructors, or very experienced at dealing with Marines straight out boot, let alone recruits.

  Larsen was overseeing the recruits as they practiced basic shooting at a range we’d set up. It was a deep sunken pit extending in four directions with a large tower set up in the centre. It was a basic setup, but serviceable enough. The depth was about twenty metres, so there was very little risk of collateral damage from a stray round. We had a number of fabricated buildings set up, but we were missing a lot of things like a proper obstacle course, shoothouse and a secure zone to

  The forest here was dark and dense, and the shade left the air slightly chilly in the early post-dawn. We were all in armour—except for the recruits—but we had our helmets off as we instructed a group of forty recruits in the classroom inside the tower.

  "This is a FOB, forward operating base, and a training facility.” I said pointedly. “We're so far forward we can't even see the ass end of the seventy anymore. It's not Fort Chester, damn it. We're not having a bunch of shops or a massage parlour!"

  "Damn. But what about roast duck?"

  "Chen." I said slowly, "Do you see any roast duck out here? We’re well past the ten thousand light-year mark and I’m pretty sure duck isn’t delivered past seventy-five."

  "I don't know, Edward… could be they have something very similar here.”

  "Oh just shut up and help me with this thing, would you?" I tried to scowl, but I couldn’t help but crack a smile and laugh.

  We didn’t even have basic plumbing set up yet since the boreholes were still being connected up to the system. We had a lot of resources, courtesy of Marden, but our actual ability to use them was weaker than I’d like. Though, to be honest, what I’d like was if we had a full fabrication stack spanning a square kilometre. For now though, four fabrication units would have to do, with another reserved for building more fabricators.

  I was removing the access panel on a sentry turret overlooking the main gate. A minor software glitch required fixing in the turrets ringing the base and with the operating system being immutable, I needed direct access to make permanent changes. Though the fasteners for the panels were little more than nanites acting as glue, the access panel itself was a solid block of armour and the work would go faster with help. That was how I found myself chatting with Chen as we worked.

  “You think there’s good hunting out here?”

  “In the forest?” I asked.

  “Sure. Has to be something here we can eat, right?”

  “If you’re thinking of going out and shooting ducks or whatever, don’t. Your rifle would just blow a hole in them.”

  “Well, yeah but my sidearm—“

  “I’ll ask if we can ship some August-style roast duck down, the next time I talk to Marden, happy?”

  He just nodded, grinning with delight. I couldn’t really blame him. The food on a ship underway wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t the freshest thing either, and actual meat that wasn’t grown in a vat was reserved for the higher-ups, meaning officers.

  I’d already set up a series of buried repeater nodes and a physical communications line back to Wolfport. From there the wireless link carried it directly to the King’s office, or Lilith’s depending on the needs of the moment. The comms line wasn’t quite there yet, since the nanites had to tunnel a considerable distance, but it would probably be done in a few more days.

  “These damned turrets should’ve included some kind of wireless connection when they were built. I mean, we’re the only ones on the planet, why even bother with security?”

  “Don’t let Carver hear you talk like that. Last time I asked him why we needed biometric scanners on all the doors he went on this whole rant about how someone ‘stole’ his car keys once..”

  “Did they?” Chen asked, as he slotted his panel back into place. The turrets came in sets of two to cover more angles simultaneously, so we were well within speaking distance of each other.

  “Did they what?”

  “Steal his keys.”

  “Oh, no, they just wanted to return them to him.”

  Chen shook his head.”Figures. How many is that now?” He asked, hefting another large panel down to the ground.

  “Four more, then we’re done.”

  “Great. I’m starving.”

  “You’re always starving. The recruits have started staring, you know.”

  “I need to keep myself in top physical condition so I don’t let you down. It’s not my fault I need three times as much food as the rest of you.” He crossed his arms and looked at me. I would’ve said indignantly, if I didn’t know better.

  “Actually, it kind of is.” I argued.

  A total of twenty-two turrets had been installed so far, with one at the forest's edge to provide advanced warning of anyone approaching. Counting the two we’d just finished, we have four more to go. That meant just as many trips to plug in a data cable and replace the exterior back panel.

  We were dedicating most of our production to logistics and manufacturing, rather than defenses or actual usable gear and it would pay dividends at some point in the future. Right now though, I wished that we had a couple drone to do the work for us, because I had a lot of other work that needed to be done that didn’t include dicking around with sentry turret software.

  "Larsen, how are the kids?" I asked, keying my radio.

  "Kids? You mean the recruits? Some of them are so dumb I don't even feel the need to shoot them, they'd do it for me if I let them. I’m keeping the auth chips locked down very carefully."

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  "Surely they're not that bad." Chen ventured hesitantly.

  My friend dropped into a falsetto voice and gave us a fair impression of the average recruit. "Oh, Lady Larsen, what kind of artifact is that? Does it shoot thunder?” She sighed. “Here. I’ll send you something.

  A file flashed up on my implants, seeming to float in my field of vision, half-transparent. I accepted the file and watched it play. Larsen, acting very much the school teacher stood at the range and demonstrated the operation of a rifle with the assistance of a large screen.

  I saw Larsen stiffen and dive down out of the way as some hapless recruit flagged her with a rifle. The rest of the recruits then went on to ask what she was doing, with varying degrees of confusion. I finally lost it when about six of them admitted they couldn’t even read the slideshow she was using.

  I laughed. "Weapons practice still has another eight minutes to go, right?"

  "Yeah, why? I did the theory first today." She said, jolting me back to reality.

  "Good. I want to introduce them to some basic CQB concepts."

  "We have one month, Edward. One. Not four or five or six." Her exasperation was audible.

  "We’ll get one decent squad of regulars out of them by then. Surely, they're not all hopeless cases. Who's at the top of your list?"

  Begrudgingly, she answered. "Recruit Delian, he scored poorly in the written exams, but that's not surprising, pretty much all of them did. They’re not able to read our language, which sucks. I’m having the computer dictate most of it.”

  “Recruit Delian, tell me about him.”

  “He's already fallen into something of a leadership role for the recruits and the three klick run to the river didn't even faze him. He’s not a trained soldier, but he’d make a decent irregular, I think."

  “Alright, send me a report, we’ll be back soon. I’m going to grab the two turrets at the edge of the forest and then I’ll see how the recruits are faring, I want to talk with them. I’ll send Chen back to you now.”

  A pause. “You want to make a speech?” Larsen asked.

  “No, I want to talk with them.” I corrected. “We’re only taking one squad, so I want them to be the best. If anyone has any issues with their training, we need to solve them before we take them into the field.”

  I told Chen to head back and help Carver. I knew it would only annoy the smarter man and I found it amusing to think what he would say to Chen’s cravings for roast duck.

  It took me about six minutes to finish up my work with the last of the turrets and another three to make my way back to the perimeter of our base. The turrets tracked me as I walked up to the gate and it slid open at my command. The way the turrets tracked me was unnerving, more than normal, I mean.

  Maybe it was the fact we were on an entirely foreign world, or the fact that Carver had personally coded their operating system. That last fact should’ve reassured me, in theory, but the lack of rigorous military testing involved did nothing of the sort.

  I made my way over to the base of the tower by the shooting range, watching as the recruits shot at simulated targets. They all had Smart Glasses, in lieu of fully-fledged helmets. They’d have virtual targets projected downrange, moving as close to the real thing as we could get. Not just other men with rifles, but all manner of melee weapons and even a few Vitaru, though all of it left some authenticity to be desired. We had precious little data to feed into the training algorithm, so their movements weren’t always smooth. Still, most wouldn’t even notice.

  Chen had beaten me back by a few minutes and was instructing a few recruits personally, correcting their form while Larsen talked with some others and got to know them. I could actually see their files being written in real-time. This close together our implants and armour could form a Beowulf Cluster with their processors, so every digital task went quicker than usual.

  While that wasn’t very relevant for something as simple as having personnel files write themselves based on real conversation, it was very relevant for crunching the numbers on Carver’s latest project.

  I’d spoken to him before we arrived at the base and the conversation had been brief, but productive.

  "You know the old adage about military spec being a sign of rugged quality, and military issue being anything but?" I’d asked.

  "I’ve heard it before.” He acknowledged.

  "We get to decide both. Draw up some plans. I want new primaries and armour designs waiting for me by tomorrow."

  "You're serious." Carver stated.

  "As crystal." I answered, a feral glint in my eye.

  Looking back, he’d actually gone and done a better job than I’d asked for, producing multiple proposals, blueprints and potential drawbacks and strengths for the different weapon systems. The armour was proving tricky, but he had a number of ideas for weapons waiting for me. I pulled up the database, tapping into the base’s systems with a thought.

  Hand-held lasers, sonic weaponry, a plasma gun. A lot of it was too new and experimental or too situational, but of the few real contenders, one weapon stood out.

  An electromagnetic projectile launcher. The thought gave me chills, not just imagining the recruits trying to use one, but the sheer destructive power of the weapons. We’d only recently made the huge leaps necessary in compact power storage needed to make something like it feasible, so the Martian Marines had mostly stuck with a traditional approach. It hadn’t hurt that it was a much cheaper approach, too.

  Me, though, I didn’t care for cost, but for effectiveness.

  “Carver, the railgun. Is it ready?”

  “Is it ready?” He mockingly asked me. “Oh, sure, I built, tested and conducted field trials for it all in a few days. I’ve even been pumping out units by the dozens. Of course it’s not ready!” He snapped.

  “I was just asking a question. When—“

  “When I’m done with the thousand other things I have to do, it’ll be ready, and not before!”

  He sounded miserable, and also overworked, but I didn’t really expect anything else. We were all working near-constantly to pull together

  “But will it be ready before the mission?” I pressed.

  He let out an aggrieved sigh. “I don’t know. The technology was abandoned in the early 2020’s, no one’s ever made a serious attempt at doing this since. It’s all mostly uncharted territory. We can’t even fire them without armour right now, the recoil would be too much.”

  “Well, do your best. I want an advantage because I doubt those hounds are all that we’ll be facing. It’d be a nice multi-role weapon, you know?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t you have teaching to do?” Carver was crankier than usual, but he often got like that when he was busy, or under pressure. With both being the case, I was surprised he wasn’t biting my head off, though he probably didn’t consider it worth his time.

  “Message received and understood.” I laughed softly.

  Standing off at a distance outside the pit, Larsen and Chen didn’t pay me much attention, though I knew I would show up on the tacnet. Carver was tucked away in a building somewhere with a fabricator, probably, so it wasn’t any real surprise that the most attention I received was from the recruits practicing. I’d gained some notoriety over recent days as the leader of the ‘’Saviours of Ebonwreath’.

  The name wasn’t what bothered me, nor even the legend it was a foundation for, but the fact I was seen as a hero. A very old friend of mine had once told me that heroes happen when people fuck up, and while the attack on the city wasn’t my fault, I still felt guilty over it, nevermind that our presence there had been a net positive.

  I checked the system clock on my armour. Two minutes to the end of weapons practice.

  I cupped my hands, more for a visual indicator than because it helped and engaged the public address system on my armour.

  “Attention recruits! Remove the magazine from your rifles, clear the chamber and confirm they’re on safe. Then, gather round. Your training is about to progress.”

  In a manner of moments, they did as instructed. A brief ping of the RFID chips in each weapon confirmed they were as safe as could be, and I locked the auth chips down so they wouldn’t fire without an implant unlocking them, not out of any real fear that I’d need it, but just because it was good practice.

  I approached the top of the stairs we’d cut into the ground. Nothing fancy, but it was a kind of easy to mass-produce geopolymer that had taken over from concrete some sixty years earlier.

  The recruits joked with each other quietly, whispering about what would come next. I smiled and watched as they went up the stairs with a spring in their step. None of them, to a man were unenthusiastic about being given the chance to be the tip of the spear. This was a day that they would remember for the rest of their lives, I suspected.

  With the twenty-odd recruits gathered in a loose pack at the top of the stairs, I resisted the urge to frown. We’d begun teaching them how to move as a unit and respond as one, otherwise known as ‘drill’. It looked like the concept was still fresh though. I couldn’t really blame them seeing as how it had been only a few days and none of us were real Drill Instructors.

  “Well? Form up!” I barked.

  They quickly assembled themselves into a familiar shape—two ranks of ten—arraying themselves in front of me.

  I continued, after they settled, and I saw Larsen ambling towards me with Chen at a lax pace. I got the feeling churning out professional soldiers might not be the way to go and that we’d be better off establishing an actual mercenary company, but that was an idea to discuss later.

  We weren’t an actual military belonging to a sovereign nation, and we couldn’t become a sovereign nation without a hell of a lot of time, help and land.

  “While I know you’ve heard us say it a lot already, your training will be brief, and it will be basic, but it will also be effective. To that end, instead of PT after weapons practice, I’ll be directing you on the basics of Close-Quarters Combat, sometimes also called Close-Quarters Battle. We’ve got an abundance of empty buildings, and the fundamentals are important to get right.”

  They stood and milled about, their whispers quiet and unnoticed—or so they thought.

  “Quiet in the ranks!” Larsen barked, as she hopped up the stairs in a single bound, courtesy of her armour.

  They instantly settled.

  “You there.” I pointed to Recruit Delian. “Find twenty sticks, and follow me.”

  “Sir?” He floundered.

  “Do you understand the order?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Then do it, Recruit!”

  If he couldn’t improvise and find a way to get twenty sticks to me without hand-holding, well, I didn’t care how good he was at the range, I didn’t want him.

  With that, I wandered off to the shoothouse. It was unfortunately, empty between it’s four walls. I soon came to a stop inside the bare room. We hadn’t bothered putting anything in there without even three squads’ worth of recruits yet and the variable layout features weren’t a simple matter to fabricate, making use of large amounts of nanites and other advanced technologies.

  “We are going to have a little mock exercise. Who wants to volunteer?”