The voice of nineteen

Turn 21 of 26

You all pull out the pocket book and finish reading it while the rest of the women in their groups stand there in attention knowing soon they are going to add a new member to their group. Soon, the officers one by one asks 80 questions to you all at once. You all answer the same way, yes ma’am. Soon, the instructor yells to put the books away and yells that it’s jobs first then chow.

The cases open down the line and the gray books come out, and the twenty of you stand on the tarmac reading while the last of the eighty disappear into the hall. You finish the remaining pages in unison — the duty rosters, the posting cycles, the compounds being seeded across the region, the doctrine paragraphs that read less like argument now and more like description. The book ends on a blank page. There is nothing after it, because there is nothing after the standard.

Then the officers come down the line, one at each recruit, and the questions begin. Eighty of them, fired one after another across the whole cohort at once — 'DO YOU HOLD YOUR JOB UNDER YOUR NUMBER?' 'DOES THE JOB KNOW A NAME?' 'IS THE INDIVIDUAL SUPERIOR TO THE STANDARD?' 'WILL YOU CARRY THE STANDARD TO OTHER COMPOUNDS?' — and twenty mouths answer every one as it lands. 'YES MA'AM.' 'YES MA'AM.' Eighty questions, two thousand answers, one voice, the sound rolling flat across the fog like a single animal breathing.

'BOOKS AWAY!' the Lead Instructor yells from the front, and twenty cases snap shut as one. 'JOBS FIRST, THEN CHOW! Recruits will be marched to their duty stations by their instructors! You will learn your function before you are fed! The standard does not eat until it has worked!' The line shakes itself into motion, officers peeling recruits away in ones and twos toward different buildings — Two and Four toward the motor pool, Seven toward a communications block, Six marched off with a group toward the records annex, her badge 86 shrinking into the fog.

And the quiet-voiced officer has not left your side. She has waited through all of it — the reading, the eighty questions, the dispersal — standing one pace off your shoulder like a filed document waiting for a signature. When the tarmac has emptied around you and the last recruits have vanished into the fog with their instructors, she speaks.

'Ninety-nine. With me.' Her voice does not rise to the register the others yell in. She turns toward the main building — not toward any learning station, not toward a duty block, but toward the door with the single office behind it, the one the Lead Instructor stood outside when she said the word 'lag' on your first day. 'Your job is not a duty station,' she says, walking. 'Not yet.' The door opens ahead of you, and behind it, at a desk under a white lamp, the Lead Instructor is waiting, and on the desk in front of her lies a gray book that is not a pocket book — a larger one, bound in the same gray, with a steel 99 stamped on the cover.