“You are not an I! None of you maggots rates an I! The only first person on this deck is me! The only time you maggots say the word ‘I’ is when you declare that you understand and will obey an order, and you will do so by saying ‘aye aye’! Do you understand me?”
“Sir! Aye aye, sir!”
“Every time you wish to refer to yourselves, you will do so in the third person! You will say ‘this recruit’ and you will not say the word ‘I’! When you refer to yourselves, you will do so as ‘recruit,’ followed by your last name. Do I make myself clear?”
“Sir, aye aye, sir!”
“Jesus, Quan Yin, and Buddha, are you that stupid, maggot? You say ‘aye aye’ when you understand and will obey an order! If I ask a question requiring of you a simple yes or no answer, you will reply with the appropriate yes or no! Do you understand?”
“Uh…Sir, yes, sir!”
“What was that? I heard some static in your reply!”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Now, what is it you had to say to me?”
John had to grope for what it was Sewicki had originally asked him. Exhaustion and disorientation were beginning to take their toll, and his mind was fuzzy.
“Sir! This recruit had a naming last week. I…uh…this recruit took his mother’s name. Sir.”
“You’re a little old for that, aren’t you, son?”
Save for the members of a handful of conservative religious groups, women rarely took the names of the men they married anymore, which meant that a person’s last name was now a matter of conscious choice. Throughout most of western culture, for at least the past fifty years, boys took their father’s last name, girls their mother’s, until about the age of fourteen, when the child formally chose which name he or she would carry into adulthood. John originally had his naming ceremony on his fourteenth birthday at his father’s church in Guaymas.
There was nothing in the rules, though, that said he couldn’t have a second naming and change his last name from Esteban to Garroway. He’d gone to a notary in San Diego with his mother as soon as they’d left Sonora, paid the twenty-newdollar fee, and thumbed the e-file records to make it official. He would never be John Esteban again.
“Sir—” he began, wondering how to explain.
“I think you’re a goddamn Aztie secessionist, maggot, trying to hide your Latino name.”
The sheer unfairness of the charge surged up in his throat and mind like an unfolding blossom. “Sir—”
“I think you’re trying to be something you’re not. I think you’re an Aztie trying to infiltrate my Corps—”
“That’s not true!”
“Hit the deck, maggot!” Sewicki exploded. “Fifty push-ups!”
“Sir! Aye aye, sir!”
Face burning, John dropped to hands and toes and began chugging off the repetitions. As Sewicki pounced on another victim farther down the line, the other sergeant loomed over him, counting him down. His Marine career, he decided, was off to a very rocky start. It wasn’t that he thought the Garroway name would buy him any favors, exactly, but he sure hadn’t figured on it buying him any trouble.
He’d only reached fifteen, arms trembling, when Sergeant Heller swatted him on the back of his head and barked, “On your feet, recruit!” Sewicki was leading the rest of the group off to a building behind the paved area at a dead run, and he had to scramble to catch up, jogging through the humid night.
By now he was beginning to wonder if he would ever catch up.
The building was a featureless gray cinder-block structure, unadorned and almost unfurnished, save for a desk with a nano labeler operated by a bored-looking civilian. As the recruits filed in, the civilian touched each on the back of the left hand with the wand. Within seconds the numeral 1099 began gleaming from each recruit’s hand in self-luminous neon-orange light.
“That,” Sewicki told them, “is the number of your recruit training company, Company 1099. It is your address. It is who you are and where you are in the training schedule. You will be required to memorize it!”
Next, they filed past a large, plastic bin beneath the hawk-sharp gaze of Heller and Sewicki, dropping into it everything the two sergeants considered to be “contraband.” Most of what they collected were handheld electronics and microcircuit jewelry, hummers, sensory stims, and the like.
A few of the more expensive units were sealed in plastic with the recruit’s name, to be returned to him after he left boot camp. Most, though, went into the bin, along with a growing pile of gum, candy, pornoholo cards, prophylactic pills, analgesics, wakers, sleepers, memmers, magazine sheets, and disposable personal comms. One recruit, a bulky, heavy-set guy who claimed to be from Texas, surrendered a bowie knife he had strapped to his leg, claiming with a broad, easy drawl that he was an experienced knife fighter and that he’d heard Marines could choose their own personal blades.