Forging Steel

Sat in the back of the transport shuttle, Sal was barely eleven years old when he was deployed on his first op with a gun in hand and staring young eyes unsure this was the life for him.

Nevertheless, military life is all he had known as since the age of six he’d been a part of Project Honour. Picked, like all participants, because he was an orphan. His parents having abandoned him to a home, which he doesn’t really remember, prior to Doctor Samuel Vargas-Hines adopting him under cover of night alongside so many others just like him.

Why they had needed to leave under cover of night Sal cannot remember, but sat in the back of the transport part of him wished that he could. Much like he wished the rifle in his hands was not so oversized. Clearly it was meant for larger appendages, he thinks, and if it were to fit his current size it would need to be a third smaller.

Alongside Sal is the reminder of his squad; Jenn, Kal, Ami and Dex. He barely knows them, at least from a combat perspective. But Doctor Vargas-Hines had insisted, via Control, that the squads be regularly mixed up and rebalanced to better prepare the children for active combat.

Sal could not say that he agreed and thought it mad, when he learned, that their first deployment to a configuration wholly new to them, rather than one that is tried, true, tested.  To him, it feels like Doctor Vargas-Hines wants them to perform sub optimally. If that is the case then why deploy them at all?

The boy with scruffy black hair which will require a trim, at the very least, in the next few days does not know. As ever it could be that data gathering is the aim. But as far as they have all been told, this is a real op. Not a training scenario, and that means lives could be lost. The scruffy haired Sal doesn’t like the idea of that. Especially, as a few have already dropped out of the program. He didn’t know most of them well, only face and name. That alone had been enough, and had left him with a pit of sadness, which had been picked up on a psych evaluation. Something they have, like it or not, regularly.

The transport comes to an abrupt halt, Sal along with the others in the back with him, of which there are ten; jostle back and forth in the wake of the sudden stop. Yet none of them says a word. Glances, looks, are exchanged but nothing else. Sal himself wonders if they have reached their destination. In his mind it can be the only reason for why they are no longer in motion, transit.

Suddenly, the boy feels a lump in his throat, sweat on his palms. He tightens his grip on the rifle. It is a burst variant. In fact, as far as he is aware they all have burst variants for this op.

To be frank, Sal loathes burst rifles. In his eyes they have far too much recoil; to the point that he struggles to keep the weapon on target, any target. Mercifully, he is not alone in his difficulties with the weapon type as he is yet to see any of the other children show they are capable of managing the recoil either. That gives him a semblance of relief, albeit a small one.

Out of the blue there is banging on the side of the transports outer shell. One of the other children slams a balled fist into a release button instinctively. A red light fills the interior where the pre-adolescents are sat. It strobes but there is no noise.

Even as the rear lowers to allow a flood of fresh air from the world beyond the thick armoured hide of the transport there is only silence. Sal doesn’t like it, but with the tail down to create a ramp he and the others soon disembark.

Out in the unfettered air the only description appropriate for it is that it is biting, cold.

They are not in Jacinta anymore, he does not think, and yet he can see almost nothing in the darkness that surrounds. It is a wall, one he must resist the urge to swipe at to check if it is real. Chiefly he resists because he is fully aware that it is real. How could it be anything else?

Still, stood here, wherever here is, this darkness can only be described as oppressive compared to that he’s experienced during training drills in and around Jacinta.

“You know you’re mission, take this, affix and move out.” Is the short demand that is made while long cylinders are dropped into the hand of each waiting child grasping a burst rifle.

With cylinder in hand Sal does not move. Rather, he looks down at what has been dropped into his palm. It is unquestionably metal, smooth. He turns it in his one hand and understands what it is, a suppressor. Instinctively he raises his head with a quizzical expression carved across his face. Alas, he finds whoever had issued the orders are gone, along with the transports. When he turns to look around him shortly after he is relieved to find he is not alone. Kal, Jenn, Ami and Dex are stood alongside him as is the other five child squad. They too wear the same expressions on their faces as Sal.

Taking a deep breath the scruffy haired boy concludes they are alone from here on out; with their handlers, mentors, whatever you want to call them, having withdrawn. Training kicks in a hair after such a realisation. It’s why Sal does as ordered and affixes the suppressor to the end of the rifle’s barrel.

Only once previously has he fired the weapon with a suppressor attached. It didn’t go well, for any of the children, but for him worst of all. You see, regrettably the addition of a suppressor to this weapon in particular increases the recoil significantly. And during that one training exercise Sal fired it only to have the weapon jump back and into his face. Blood had streamed from his nose forcing a visit to the onsite medical unit. They patched him up, treated him much more like a child than anyone else ever had, got reprimanded for it and sent him on his way. Shortly thereafter the medical team were rotated out for a different crew. Apparently, Sal had not been the only participant in Honour who had been treated in this manner and against the express demands of Doctor Vargas-Hines.

The replacement crew for the med unit had been far more distant, cold individuals who refused to treat any of the children as anything other than goods. Sal had, on the occasion’s medical visits had been a necessity, despised it.

“We need to move out. We have an op and need to complete it.”

“Affirmative,” Had been the response from the four other members of this new newly assembled squad.

What happened to and with the other squad, Sal could not say. He didn’t see them again. They seemed almost leaderless while his own felt, even on this first run, like a well oiled machine. Whether that was true, he cannot say. It was simply how it felt, in his opinion, looking back at that time, those moments.

If he were to receive data only on the operation there is a chance he would not draw such a favourable conclusion. Mercifully, there is no way for him to do that. Human memory is flawed, tailored to better be stored. Such things might be for the best.

When they reached their goal it was clear they had not been the first to arrive. It suggested to all five of them that they were part of a secondary wave. Sal then and now isn’t sure how he feels about that. It was not a detail provided ahead of time or ever confirmed and yet how else could bodies be scattered lifeless around the compound bathed in darkness. Sure, it could be something else happened there, except that possibility was blown out of the water in minutes when the squad sighted bodies of a few of the participants from Honour.

Seeing them lying their motionless had left all five with deep feelings of loss, remorse, pain in their guts. These emotions, following the op’s completion, resulted in them being put on twenty four hour watch for a fortnight. In addition they undertook daily psych evaluations and then a final test which all but Dex passed. Sal never did see or hear from him again after that. It had been sad, another blow, but not nearly as impactful as the loss of Tom, who didn’t live to see another day.

Apparently, he’d been in the initial wave, unofficially speaking for it was never acknowledged that there were waves. Nevertheless, Tom had been in the heat of battle, managed to dispatch six foes that had been guarding a checkpoint which had claimed the life of several of Honour’s participants, before a trip grenade ended his life.

Sal never saw the aftermath but two of Tom’s squad rotated out after that, allegedly due to what had transpired. It was tragic but Sal, having hidden his grief, continued to push as hard as he could, so he could be the best he was able to be.

Truth-be-told he doesn’t remember the details of the op. They are foggy, inconsistent. He thinks it might’ve had something to do with a terrorist faction and a plot involving a particle annihilation warhead. Though, he cannot say for sure.

It was eight months after the completion of the op that the enhancement procedure had commenced. First came the drug cocktails, then the agonising skeletal reformations to better provide ideal body growth. That in turn led to bone strengthening, then muscle simulation, enhancement, ocular improvements and finally the muscle thread accelerators which not only increased speed and agility but also massively reduced the possibility of muscular tears and weaknesses.

It took years to complete the process. During it, and the rehabilitation which followed, more participants dropped out with the previously mentioned side effects as well as a raft of others. Yet, Doctor Samuel Vargas-Hines had not been deterred by the failings of the few for he had the many. And these many proved in the intervening period between the successful completion of their rehabilitation and today that they are everything he could ever have dreamed of.

Where previously they had been little more than subjects, lab rats if you will, in an experiment of his own design and for purposes, in his mind, all his own; they were now his children. But that extended only to those who had remained in the project, his project. The others, the dropouts, they were not his children. They were nothing and no one to him. He even made sure to forget they ever existed; a cruel fate for it was he and General Armitage who orchestrated the deaths of the participants’ parents. It wasn’t easy, from a logistical standpoint, to document an entire family lost, following a tragic ‘accident,’ but they achieved it with what the head of Project Honour would call; spectacular brilliance.