I will be posting a poll later today on if this story or the WarCraft story should be continued for Early Access. Title still pending and suggestions are always welcome!
Chapter 2
“Wake up, trainee!”
Memory flooded back, and my first thought was wondering if my parents were still alive. April and William Fischer had been above average in their rearing of me. When I had regained consciousness and my memories, I had been in a state of shock. As I came out of it, I had resented the idea of physical affection, but in time I rationalized that I shouldn’t be avoidant of it as a child. That would only serve to alienate people who by biological imperative were in my corner. In time, I realized there was something comforting in skin-to-skin contact with someone who genuinely cared for you. I felt loved.
And of course Being X won’t allow me to have anything nice.
If my parents had been killed in the attack on my home, I would not rest until I in turn murdered everyone responsible. For now, I needed information. I rolled out of bed and took stock of my surroundings.
There were three men in camouflage uniform above me, and they weren’t alone. There were dozens of them, and I saw one use some sort of electric baton on another young child. There were over seventy children and roughly half that number of military figures rousing us. No one else had three looming over them specifically. One shouted nearby.
“I said up, boot! You know which way up is?”
I had almost instinctively moved to attention, but stopped at the last moment. Standing there and processing things made me realize that I had been forcibly recruited into the military. The government of mankind was the Unified Earth Government. They were an inept bunch and like all centralized governments with far-flung colonies, they were destined to fail. Ultimately, humans had a drive for self-determination. Every empire in two lifetimes had fallen, and I was convinced that would be the case no matter how many different realities Being X sent me to.
This was my third life and I still inwardly cringed at the way I died in the second life. Albion Mages were no joke, but the specific circumstances… it was my own fault really, and I hope Visha and the others made it out. I was separated beyond space and time from them, so I would likely never learn of it. I hadn’t expected a third chance, but I honestly should have. Being X clearly wasn’t omnipotent; he was a charlatan in the guise of a supreme being. He was a liar. Fraud. Charlatan. Still, I had expected him to make himself known, but so far he hadn’t.
Clearly he prefers to be a voyeur this go around and just pulls the strings behind the curtain to make me a child soldier. AGAIN.
The military arm of the UEG was the United Nations Space Command, or as most people called it, the UNSC. I assumed that was who had us, though it was probably some sort of clandestine black ops division. Generally speaking, you didn’t kidnap children for your armed services.
“I am Chief Petty Officer Mendez,” one of the men shouted. “The rest of these men are your instructors. You will do exactly as we tell you at all times.”
That was a NAVCOM rank, a fairly high NCO rank. I desperately wanted to ask about my parents, but it wasn’t the time. And the people over us in this facility might not even know.
Mendez pointed to the far end of the cinderblock barracks.
“Showers are aft. You will all wash and then return here to dress.”
After returning from the wash we were instructed to clothe ourselves in the gray sweats by our bunk. They and the boots fit me perfectly and I saw stenciled on the chest, Tanya-118. That was another clue that I knew Being X had a hand in this bullshit. Why would my parents name me Tanya out of all names? Why did I have the same approximate body? Albeit, much better nourished and even taller than other girls my age.
The trainers were making liberal use of their shock batons, but as I moved with alacrity and hadn’t hesitated, I had not been zapped yet.
“Outside, trainees,” Mendez announced. “Triple time… march!”
Shit, I’m on another planet.
They must have put me in cryosleep after they abducted me. In this life, mankind had a form of FTL travel that allowed spacecraft to transition into slipstream space. I had been fascinated to read on the subject when I had gained awareness and was grateful that the dummy AI programs didn’t have child locks for the copious amount of scientific knowledge that mankind had.
It was a dimensional subdomain that was entwined with the physical universe. Ordinary matter cannot exist in that dimension, but slipspace drives create a temporary quantum field that prevents direct exposure to the eleven-dimensional space-time of slipspace. The mathematics involved were far beyond anything in my first or second life for a human mind to calculate. Even my own mind, with all its experience in the high-octane computation orb driven combat, could not ever hope to achieve it. I processed information at what I believed was the peak of human capability. It wasn’t a superhuman talent, but some part of my ‘soul’ resonated with the speed of magical combat of my second life and I just thought faster than the baseline average. With humanity having billions of people in the species, I suspected there were probably a few thousand who might also operate like I did.
A pity I don’t actually have any magic in this life.
Despite that impressive ability to do things like find square roots of eight-digit complex numbers within a heartbeat, nothing biological could possibly process the necessary astrogation involved. For the average colony ship it required around four quadrillion calculations of the quantum field per second. Even with all that, time to travel between the stars could take weeks or months depending on the distance. Which itself was rather confusing since slipspace didn’t behave under the same laws of directionality. It was a fascinating and beautifully complex field of research that I was sure humanity had only scratched the surface of.
It was time for grueling physical training. A hundred jumping jacks to start with. When one trainee refused, he had been doubled over with a nasty blow to the stomach. I approved of harsh training methods, they worked, but this was also a six-year-old child. This seemed borderline absurd to abduct people my age to do this.
Then one hundred sit-ups. Followed by deep squats, knee bends, and leg lifts. Some kids puked. I did my best to conserve my energy, but the burn of muscles and exhaustion were quickly setting in. A brief break was called for, and we drank some slightly salty-tasting water, probably filled with electrolytes. They had taken a lot of trouble to kidnap us and send us to this world; I doubted they wanted to risk anyone dying.
“A good start, trainees,” Mendez told them. “Now we run. On your feet!”
A truly ridiculously long run led us to a building with the words NAVAL OFFICERS ACADEMY chiseled above the arch of the entrance. At the top of the steps was the image of a woman, it was an AI that identified itself as Déjà.
Artificial intelligences had been created by humanity sometime in the mid-21st century. Most AI systems were categorized as either ‘dumb’ or ‘smart’ AI. A dumb AI was one that was just a sophisticated computer program. Far more powerful than the most advanced supercomputer of my first life they may be, they had confined architecture and were designed narrowly. Smart AIs on the other hand were military-grade entities that uncomfortably blurred the line on what it meant to be alive. They supposedly had the ability to learn and ‘feel’ like humans did, but due to that neural flexibility, they also went mad after seven years.
“Please come in. Class is about to start.”
We got some crackers and milk and I carefully and methodically ate them at a rate that would not cause me to puke. I was exhausted as the AI created a holographic countryside. I instantly recognized that this was a simulation of the Battle of Thermopylae.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Did she really just call them the best soldiers that ever lived?
They probably had been damn good, but Sparta’s dominance was brief. They lost to Athens at Sphacteria and honestly I felt their reputation was a bit overwrought. The city-state itself was not a great place to live and in general I would have been more sympathetic to the argument if the AI had said warriors, instead of soldiers. Soldiers did more than just fight well, and there were better examples in history. And naturally I would place my own 203rd Aerial Mage Battalion as far more professional soldiers than any ancient army.
I might be biased. But I’m a military history nerd and then became a military officer. I was never a historian who had to pretend to be objective.
I kept my mouth shut. It was a lesson for a bunch of six-year-olds. After it was over we ran another two damned miles to the ‘playground.’ It was a forest of twenty-meter tall wooden poles with rope cargo nets and bridges spanning between them. It was an obstacle course with a few interesting elements such as pulleys tied to baskets. We were divided into teams of three and Mendez explained the game.
The goal was to have every member of our team ring the bell and then get back to the ground and cross the finish line. All but one team would be able to get an admittedly mouth-watering-sounding dinner, and the team that placed last would go to bed hungry.
“Make ready,” Mendez said.
“Question,” I called out, “Are we allowed to impair other teams?”
The question caused the Chief Petty Officer to do a slight double-take. He grinned. “Not this time, but that sounds like a great idea to run up the flagpole.”
I looked at my teammates. Musa-096 and Linda-058. Before the race began, I quickly spoke to them.
“There on the right there’s a way to use that pulley to help someone across. When we finished the run here, which one of you was slower?”
“It was me,” Musa said with a scowl.
“Great, then get to that platform there while Linda and I get to the other end. We’ll bring you across and then we can ring the bell. This test is contingent on helping our slowest.”
“What if you are the slowest?” Linda asked.
“I’m not.”
I proved it and we were off. I wasn’t the fastest, but I had already mapped out the route to take and got there before Linda did. Once Linda arrived, my plan worked and we ended up ringing the bell slightly ahead of the middle of the pack. It was good enough for me, as we finished as a team in third. I recognized who rang the bell first, he was actually from the same world as I was. While we waited for everyone to finish, I asked some basic questions to the two kids and learned they were from different worlds.
John was his name and he had always been a standout in the only few months of formal schooling I had. Bigger than the other kids, he was something of a genetic freak. Absurdly fast, strong, and coordinated, he had run circles around the other children in playground games. However, he had failed to listen to the instructions Mendez provided and had not realized he was part of a team and not some averaged out individual performance.
I wonder if they borrowed it from the Naruto bell test. Damn… did they even have the same anime in the 20th century as I was used to? I never bothered to check, too fascinated by reading about the military conflicts of the last four hundred years and all the scientific discoveries.
After dinner I was escorted by Mendez and two other trainers. Two walked behind me, and I wondered how the other abductions had gone. I suspected most children didn’t have the presence of mind to try to fight back effectively, even if it had been futile.
I arrived at the office of a woman I had recognized from the educational facility. She had been watching me and it took a bit of willpower to keep a scowl off my face.
“Tanya Fischer, my name is Doctor Halsey. All the other trainees were told of what their purpose here was, but you were kept under until you awoke this morning. There was some concern you would cause a scene and encourage behavior we didn’t want displayed this early.”
I waited, eyeing her and realizing that only the Chief Petty Officer was still in the room. He was a solid man, and I was still a six-year-old child. There was a pen on the desk I could use to stab his eye, but my odds of success were almost certainly in the single digits, percentile wise. He moved like the soldier he was, and I had no plan and a critical lack of information. Violent murder could wait until I knew more.
“You are a remarkable candidate, while physically not everything we were looking for, mentally you are far and away the most gifted person. And I think you know that. Even now you are evaluating me and displaying an unheard-of restraint for a child. At the same time, when ONI operatives attempted to abduct you, you actually managed to injure an agent and sound the alarm.”
She gave me a tentative smile. “I’ll get to my point. As per Naval Code 45812, you are hereby conscripted into UNSC Special Project, codenamed SPARTAN-II. You have been called to serve. You will be trained and become the best we can make of you. You will be the protectors of Earth and all her colonies.”
“Conscription, which means no choice in the matter. However, you went to extraordinary expense to bring myself and the other recruits. You want our cooperation, but what is in it for me? What will I actually be doing in service to the UNSC?”
She gave me a wistful smile. “Don’t you want to keep people like your parents safe?”
I leaned forward. “So they are alive?” I wasn’t able to keep the desperation out of my voice.
“Yes, they are alive. They are in mourning for they think you are dead, but they are alive.”
I closed my eyes and felt them sting. I opened them and locked them onto Dr. Halsey.
“How do I keep them that way?”
She looked taken aback for a moment, something that surprised me. I wondered about her role. The woman didn’t move like a soldier, so I suspected she was a specialist of some sort for this undertaking. I made a mental note and waited for her response.
“Nothing will happen to them. We took pains to make your capture not raise suspicion. You complicated things, but nothing we can’t resolve. Your fellow trainees will be your new family and I meant what I said. You will be the protectors of humanity. Eventually, when the training is completed, you will be the most powerful soldiers imaginable and a living symbol of the strength of UNSC. This will ensure we do not have an all-out war in the future that will cost billions of lives in strife.”
“We are going to be the bogey man. A force unstoppable that their mere presence will keep the outlying colonies in line.”
She again looked a bit troubled, but pushed forward.
“In a way, yes. But it will be more than that, though I can’t give you more details. Your training is projected to take a decade.”
I assessed her. “Are you the one in charge? The program head?”
“Yes, obviously I report to people above, but this is my project.”
I nodded. “You are a disgusting individual and I personally loathe you. But I am not irrational. If you provide proof of life of my parents at least once a year that satisfies me, I will not sabotage this program or attempt to kill you.”
Mendez made a strangled coughing sound behind me.
Halsey once again looked disturbed. “You… it is best that you forget your parents. Thoughts of them and home will only make this harder.”
“Take the deal or look over your shoulder. If you are training the best soldiers the galaxy has seen, then at some point we’ll be given weaponry. I’m not afraid to die, Doctor Halsey,” I lied with a straight face. I didn’t like dying, especially if it meant I couldn’t keep Mom and… April and William safe.
“I think we should be able to arrange that, Tanya. You’ll just have to promise me you won’t be difficult and that you’ll work hard to fit in.”
Agreement made, I was escorted back to my bunk by the two guards outside Halsey’s office.
***
“What the hell is wrong with her?” Mendez asked the doctor.
I wish I knew.
They had done a full psychological profile along with all the genetic and physiological screenings. Tanya Fischer’s intelligence was off the charts, but there hadn’t been any sociopathic tendencies. Surveillance teams had reported normal interactions with her parents, with her school teachers, and other children. Six-year-old children did not threaten to murder people without emotion.
No, there was emotion there. She was furious at me and it’s clear she loves her parents.
“I’m not sure. All of the children are standouts, but we missed something with her. I’m almost tempted to wash her out, but she has the potential to be the very best. She picked up the game and worked seamlessly with two other children. I think we can control her as long as we hold our side of the bargain.”
Mendez shrugged. “Your call, doc. It won’t be the first time I’ve trained a natural-born killer, but normally they’re a lot older.”
Halsey shivered. Tanya Fischer was an enigma and one she wasn’t sure she wanted to solve. The next few months would tell her if Tanya could work within the system they devised.
“Treat her like all the others, just make sure you stay on your guard.”
“Goes without saying, kid or not. Never assume anyone isn’t a threat.”
It was a terrible way to live in her estimation. But then, it was a terrible thing that they were doing all together. The program had to work or humanity would destroy itself through endless civil war. Tanya couldn’t be allowed to endanger the program, but maybe, just maybe, she would be what could drive it to the success it needed.