Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(32)
Reeves gazed across the cohort, most of whom were still struggling to regain their breath.
“To ingrain resource management into us,” Beck gasped. “So we don’t waste our supplies in the field.”
The Proctor’s eyes locked on her for a few seconds. The dislike on his face grew no better, but at least it didn’t get any worse. “That’s the end goal, Park, yes. More practical is that we don’t want you guzzling down your whole supply just to vomit it back up. Here, that will earn you extra conditioning. Out there it will earn you a slow death under the sun, if you’re lucky. Learn this lesson well, children: concepts always come second. You focus too much on phrases like ‘resource management’ and not enough on what that actually means in the real world, and I’ll break my foot off in your ass. Here, we put practicality first. You have fifteen minutes to eat and take advantage of the facilities. Use them well.”
Beck rushed to the bathroom, pulling a meal bar from her jacket pocket as she ran. Indoc was not what she expected. Not what anyone she had ever met expected, so far as she knew. People chatted about it from time to time, idly wondering about the mysterious Deathwatch and its training methods as they also sometimes mused over the many strange ways of the old world. People liked to imagine what they couldn’t immediately know, and Beck quickly realized how wrong every bit of speculation had been.
The first half of the day was spent undergoing a battery of tests and measurements, as well as having a small monitor chip inserted just under the skin at the base of her skull. Beck was scanned down to the tiniest measure, the computer left with no mysteries about her body. Her visual acuity, hearing, reflex responses, and dozens of other metrics were put through rapid paces and logged.
The chip, called a Brain Interface Monitor, or BIM by the tech who implanted it, would slowly record and model her neurological activity. This was explained as a necessary step to allow for maximum integration with her armor.
All of that was important. Beck knew this on an intellectual level, just as she knew that tomorrow would bring another half day of testing, this time of her mental abilities and education. This aspect of indoc was spelled out in excruciating detail by Eshton, the utter bastard, even if he and Bowers remained tight-lipped on every other element she would have to endure.
What no part of her expected was the insane level of physicality that would be demanded up front. Beck was not in bad shape, but at heart she was a mechanic and computer wonk. This sort of exertion was beyond anything she had ever imagined, much less experienced.
And it was nowhere close to over. Reeves was explicit on that front.
She stopped by the outdoor mess—just a long stone bench in front of a taller bench loaded with supplies—and plugged her canteen into the refill station before falling back into line. The track ran the entire length of the circular wall surrounding Rex Acuet, the tiny training ground for Deathwatch recruits.
Reeves waited for the recruits to stop shuffling and fall quiet. Beck became uncomfortably aware of the hot wind blowing, though the quality was notably different from back home in Brighton. The dust here was of the mundane variety, the result of parched land rather than a weapon. The whisper of air rushing between the buildings had a hollow sound, a reminder that no one lived in this place. Acuet came to life only when a cohort needed training—and culling—with only necessary maintenance in between.
“For the next few days, you will spend your first waking hours undergoing the testing we need to know you inside and out,” Reeves reminded them. “Some of you may think this is because the Deathwatch has to know if you’re useful. That is not the case.”
Beck heard murmurs of surprise around her. She felt the same curiosity; most of them had likely been given the same statistics about acceptance levels for recruits. She had assumed much of the testing centered on paring down those who could from those who could not based on standards for physical and mental abilities.
Reeves took in their confusion with practiced patience. A slight change in his body language was all it took to silence them again.
When Reeves spoke, his voice was eerily different. The rough tone was gone, replaced with a calm smoothness that reminded Beck of the old vids she had seen about predatory animals. “This is the first thing we have to teach you: your biases have to be broken. By show of hands—and honesty is always expected here—how many of you made the assumption at some point today that I was a cruel man? That I enjoyed pushing you so hard physically?”
Beck, along with nearly everyone else in the cohort, raised her hand. Reeves nodded as if expecting the result.
“Think about that,” he said. “You knew perfectly well you were coming here to be put through a crucible. You knew it would be hard. All I had to do in order to shift the frustration and physical pain you felt onto a ready target was sneer at you. You projected onto me as a way to vent those feelings. As a member of the Deathwatch, no matter what division you end up in, this is not a trap you can allow yourself to fall in. Who wants to tell me why?”
A tall recruit with deep brown skin but who didn’t look old enough to shave spoke up, mild shame in his voice. “Because we’ll probably be in positions where we have to make objective judgments under similar conditions. The kind where we have to decide if people live or die.”
“No probably to it,” Reeves said, “but you’re close enough to the mark. The Watch doesn’t reject based on how smart you are, how well you can hear, what kind of training you had before joining. We can compensate for physical flaws, and the right attitude means almost anyone can learn to follow protocols and make good decisions. Over the next eight weeks I will push you harder than you ever thought possible, physically, but that’s only to bring you to your peak. The first defenders back during the Collapse had to work with what they had. None of them had the luxury of training this way before taking a post.”