Steel World by B. V. Larson Read Free Book Online

but it was gone in an instant.
    To my surprise, a man stood there in a vac suit. He had a helmet with a red crest on his sleeve, marking him as a centurion. He looked at me and lifted his hand. His thumb stuck up from his fist.
    I was losing it, and I didn’t quite understand what was happening anymore. I couldn’t think.
    I passed out at last, and my final thought was one of confusion. I was baffled as to why the centurion had just stood there watching us through that portal, doing nothing to help us.
     
    * * *
     
    Some of the men didn’t wake up. A few had expired. But a couple of hours later, as the survivors recovered in the ship’s medical unit, we saw the dead return to our group. They’d been revived.
    I could only imagine what a revival looked like. Had their bodies twitched and spasmed unnaturally as life returned to them?
    We were ordered to gather in a large ready-room with big wall-screens on every side—even the ceiling and the floor had screens. We stared at them, fascinated despite ourselves. Each depicted a different view of the ship we were on or space itself.
    The ship was huge, bigger than any ship that had ever crossed Earth’s oceans. It was long and sleek in design. There weren’t many gunports, as the vessel was primarily designed to deliver troops between star systems, not to fight other ships.
    Under the ship was the blue-white marble of Earth, a vast expanse of natural beauty. Sitting in the skies over our homeworld like this made me feel lonely and triumphant at the same time.
    Most of the men were just annoyed. They’d died and been revived, and they were sour about it.
    The centurion who had greeted me with flinty eyes at the exit of the lifter arrived and stood in our midst. None of the recruits smiled when they saw him, and neither did he.
    “Good morning recruits,” he said. “I’m Centurion Graves, your commanding officer. Welcome aboard the dreadnaught Corvus .”
    No one said anything. I suspected there were some hard feelings among the troops.
    “You almost wiped,” he said. “Only a few made it to an exit at all, and only McGill here managed to get one open.”
    A few eyes drifted to linger on me. I didn’t look back. I stared at the centurion instead.
    “Normally,” he continued, “if this had been a real emergency, McGill’s action would have been worth a promotion. But since it was only a training exercise, he’ll gain a commending mark on his record instead.”
    I thought I deserved more, but I wasn’t going to complain now. I’d learned something, however: this legion wasn’t for the faint of heart. Whatever our missions were, we played for keeps. I’d read a bit about training exercises, and I’d never even heard of an outfit killing their recruits wholesale on the first day as part of a routine.
    Graves stood easily in the middle of the recruits, as if he didn’t know many of us already wanted to kill him. Or maybe he just didn’t care.
    “Now that you’ve been properly introduced to Legion Varus,” he continued, “I want you to find your assigned bunk and take a break. If you died, you’ll find it takes a few hours to feel right again. A veteran can go straight back into combat after a revive, but most recruits can’t. I’m giving you all twelve hours leave until we do any more training. Meet me in the exercise rooms after that at 0500.”
    On the way out, the centurion came by and clapped me on the shoulder. “Good work,” he said, without smiling. “I’ve never seen a man manage to open that door single-handedly. You’re supposed to get there and do it with a partner who provides a fulcrum. You happened to be tall and determined enough to do it alone.”
    I nodded, but I didn’t smile at him. He was a prick, I knew that now. He’d made us all suffer in what I thought was a needlessly cruel way. I understood we’d all learned a lesson, and I understood the power of training, but tricking people like that…I wasn’t happy.
    The