Lisa glared at him, a task that was a little difficult to accomplish through the helmet and combat goggles but which she somehow managed anyway. 'Do it again, fuckface and you'll be picking pieces of your faceplate out of your nose,' she told him, her voice level and softly threatening, the same voice she used when addressing troublesome vermin out on the streets while on patrol.
'Wong, Stillwell,' said Wilton, 'enough of that shit. Keep the frequency clear for tactical communication.'
Stillwell glared back at her for a second and then started up the path to the top of the hill. After a moment, she followed him.
The going was rough as she picked her way between rocks and up the incline. Before she even climbed twenty meters up she realized that there was no way in hell that she could possibly make it without stopping to let her oxygen extractor catch up with the demand she was putting on the reservoir. Each step under the load she was carrying, with her center of gravity shifted about half a meter behind her and the need to twist and turn between the rocky obstacles, was making her heart pound in her chest, her legs scream out under the strain, and her breath tear in and out of her lungs. The discharge warning indicator reappeared in her visor, blinking on and off rapidly. The percentage meter that showed how much oxygen she had remaining dropped from forty percent down to thirty- seven percent in the blink of an eye.
She tried to slow her pace a little bit but it did no good. Each step upward was a concerted effort and an exercise in coordination. The bar graph and the numerical display continued to drop. It fell to thirty percent by the time she was thirty-five meters up the hill and down to twenty percent by the time she made it fifty meters up. She wasn't going to make it up there. She was going to have to stop when she reached five percent in order to keep from suffocating. She would have to stop and the rest of the platoon would all shake their heads at her and tell each other that the woman couldn't hack it out here. And maybe she couldn't. If she couldn't climb a simple hill, maybe she didn't belong in the special forces in the first place.
Nevertheless she pushed on, climbing higher and higher while her oxygen level fell lower and lower. When it reached eighteen percent is when others around began to stop their ascent. One of the larger men - Lavenger was his name - was the first of them. He simply stood next to one of the larger rocks and held in place, his body still, his limbs held limply to his side.
'Lavenger!' barked Wilton's voice over the headset. 'What the hell are you doing, boy? You were told to climb that hill! Why the hell are you just standing there?'
'My oxygen level is down to five percent, Lieutenant,' he said, his voice shameful and scared. 'I'm discharging and I'll run out if I keep moving!'
'Are you saying that you're stuck up on the hill, Lavenger?' he asked, sounding quite incredulous.
'Yes, Lieutenant,' he replied, more shame in his voice now. 'I have to wait until my tank gets more air in it.'
'Bullshit,' Wilton said. 'You're a dead man now. The enemy spotted you and killed your out-of-shape ass. Hold in place until you get twenty percent built up and then get back down here.'
'Yes, Lieutenant,' he said, sounding like he was about to start crying.
The rest of them continued to climb, their pace slowed down considerably now. Lisa was about ten meters behind Stillwell, about a third of the way towards the front of the pack. She wondered for the first time what their reservoir readings were. She knew that she was going to have to sit down as Lavenger did in about another three minutes or so.
Corporal Benning was the next to go. He was near the front of the line but had dropped back considerably in the last few minutes. Now he simply stood in place, bent over and unmoving, his profile partially hidden from Wilton's view by a boulder, as if he didn't think their lieutenant would notice that.
No such luck. 'Benning?' Wilton asked reasonably. 'Are you out of oxygen now too?'
'Yes sir,' Benning admitted. 'I'm at five percent with my discharge warning still showing. Sorry, sir. I couldn't make it.'
'You're a dead man as well. Hold in place until twenty and then get your ass back down here.'
Two other men went a minute later. Two more quickly followed. A group of four then dropped out one after the other. Wilton had contemptuous words for all of them.
Lisa's level slipped down to ten percent and then to nine. The warning light began to flash even faster in her vision. She continued trying to take slow, deep breaths, to conserve her air as much as possible, to reduce her pace upward even further, but no matter what she did the discharge stayed on and the percentage continued to drop. Two more people were forced to drop out before she reached five percent and the critical oxygen level indicator began to flash. She took one last deep breath and then brought her forward motion to a halt.
'Wong? Don't tell me that
'Yes, Lieutenant,' she told him resignedly. 'I'm down to five percent.'
'And you told me that you were in shape for this training, Wong. You lied to me, didn't you?' He didn't wait for an answer to his question. 'Well, you've no doubt heard what the drill is, right? Hold in place until you reach twenty percent again.'
'Yes, Lieutenant,' she told him, feeling herself flush, feeling like a failure.
As soon as she stopped her motion, forty-three of the others - Stillwell among them - stopped within five seconds of each other, so many that Wilton was not able to scold each and every one of them. It occurred to Lisa that they had all been running with a critical warning light blinking but that none of them had wanted to stop before she did. Now they could all say that they'd outlasted the female in the group. Wilton noticed this as well.
'All right,' he said to the group at large, 'you idiots have proved that you could climb longer than Wong. Hold in place until you get back to twenty and then come down.'
That left only four men left in the running for the top. One by one they too were forced to come to a halt. None of them had made it even to the halfway point on the hill.
It took the better part of fifteen minutes for Lisa's reservoir to fill back up to twenty percent. Once it did she started back down, her steps gingerly and easy. Her discharge warning light did not come back on. Soon everyone else was able to come down as well. Wilton gathered them around him in a circle, himself standing in the middle.
'You people thought you were in shape, did you?' he asked, spinning slowly around so that he could look each one of them in the eye. 'You thought you could just come into special forces and that we'd teach you how to shoot better and do all those sneaky little things that we do and everything would just be static, right?' He shook his head sadly. 'Wrong. As you can see by my little demonstration here, not even the fittest of you are even close to being special forces standard. Not even close! Any SF member would be able to run ten kilometers out here with full packs without causing a discharge warning on their suits at all. And any of them would be able to climb that hill immediately after that run and be on top in less than ten minutes and still have better than ninety percent levels in their tanks. That is the standard that we are going to achieve here and that is the fitness level that you are going to have to maintain to be a part of this particular team. It has to be that way because, as you were able to see up there on that hill, once your oxygen reservoir gets down to critical levels, you are effectively stuck where you're at. You cannot move, you cannot fight, you cannot do anything. You are, in effect, as useless as a cock on a cow. We're going to run your asses off twice every day and we're going to come out to this hill three times a week until every last one of you can climb it with oxygen left to spare. Whoever doesn't think they can handle that amount of exercise, drop your biosuit and your weapon off in supply when we get back and go back to whatever assignment you were in before you came here.'
He paced around in the circle for a moment, shifting his weapon from one shoulder to the other. He then went back to his slow turn, his looks in the eyes. 'Now that was my normal speech for this part of the training,' he told them. 'Every class that I bring through gets run out here and told to climb that hill and every time they fag out one by one. Never have I had a new SF recruit make it to the top on the first day. Never!' He took a few deep breaths, as if considering what he was going to say next. 'This time however, something a little bit different happened. This time we had Wong among us, a woman in a place where no woman has ever tread before. And what I saw in response to her presence here today was very disturbing to me indeed.
'I was watching your oxygen levels on my combat computer,' he told the class. 'I had a graph that drew from the feeds in your suits, a little tool that the commander of a platoon has to help keep track of his troops.' He stepped forward a few steps, his gaze falling directly upon Stillwell, who seemed to shrink back from it. 'Stillwell,'
