"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," he said, his voice reasonable, "perhaps you could tell me what the minimum safety standard is for reservoir depletion. What is the absolute lowest that you are allowed to run your tank to before doctrine commands that you cease all activity and let it refill?"
The gulp from Stillwell was clearly audible over the frequency. "Uh..." he stammered.
"How low, Stillwell? How low?"
"Five percent, Lieutenant," he finally was able to blurt out.
"Five percent," Wilton said reflectively. "That's correct. I thought that I'd mentioned that number fifty or sixty fucking times during my lectures. I thought that that was what was common knowledge among every MPG member, among every fucking outside civilian worker who wears the fucking biosuit! So, Stillwell, with that in mind, perhaps you could explain to me why you let your reservoir go all the way down to two and a half percent before you stopped?"
"Uh... well... I didn't really... I mean, I thought that I could... you know..."
"Didn't want to fag out before Wong huh?" he asked. "You just couldn't stand to think that Wong would be able to go further up that hill than you could, right?"
"No Lieutenant," he said sternly. "I just thought I could bring it back you know. That if I conserved..."
"Don't you fucking lie to me," Wilton nearly screamed. "You brought yourself far below safety standards, put your stupid-ass life at risk out here, just so you wouldn't have to admit that Wong is in better shape than you."
He didn't wait for a reply. Instead, he glared at the rest of the troops. "And he's not the only one, is he? I counted thirty-seven of you who were well below four percent on your readings. Thirty-fucking-seven of you! And there were another five of you who were below five percent. And holy Jesus, all of you just happened to decide that enough was enough about twenty seconds after Wong finally had to give it up. You stupid idiots! Do you think we pulled that five percent figure out of our asses? Did it occur to you that you were putting your lives at risk? What would have happened if your bodies didn't recover from the exertion quickly enough to stop the discharge of your suits? You would've died of suffocation out here and there wouldn't have been a goddamn thing we could have done about it!"
The men who had been involved in this all hung their heads in shame at this lecture.
Wilton continued to glare and then shook his head in disgust. "If anyone in this platoon ever lets his or her tank drop below five percent again for any reason whatsoever, you will be dismissed from this training and returned to your regular assignments. I will not tolerate stupidity! Is that understood?"
It was understood loud and clear. Lisa, uncomfortable with all of the chaos that her presence had caused, looked around and saw that looks of hatred were being directed at her from all quarters. Waves of resentment were radiating off of her colleagues almost visibly. What had she done to deserve this? Just because she had signed up for the position that she thought she was best suited for, they all hated her.
"Let's get back to our feet," Wilton told them. "We have a long jog to the gunnery range. I want everyone to shoot off a thousand rounds today before we break for lunch."
One by one they got to their feet and formed up. Soon they were trotting off across the red landscape once again. They kept to a pace that was slow enough that no one discharged their oxygen tanks and thirty minutes later they arrived at the outside gunnery range, a one square kilometer area, ringed with small hills, upon which a variety of holographic targets could be activated and shot at.
For the next three hours they practiced various maneuvers and shooting drills. Lisa, who had qualified as expert with her M-24 ever since joining the MPG, quite easily showed up most of the men in marksmanship. Indeed a few of them were forced to grudgingly accord the smallest amount of respect towards her in this as she placed clean head or body shots on target after target, without benefit of her combat computer, from ranges up to half a kilometer away.
One person who did not give her respect was Stillwell, who was still quite stung from being publicly humiliated by Wilton because of her. His own shooting was near expert and well within the top ten in the class, but it was still short of her own. He took every opportunity to make snide remarks towards her, saying things like, "So she can hit a target with a gun. She still hasn't been in a combat unit before". Or he would remark to another student, "Do you really want a woman backing you up in a firefight? What if there's some icky blood around? She might get sick". Lisa, for her part simply ignored him and went about what she had been told to do. Wilton too, though he could hear every transmission that was made, chose not to say anything to either of them. Lisa wasn't sure what to make of his silence. Was he waiting for her to handle things on her own? Was he perhaps hoping that Lisa would quit of her own accord? She just didn't know. Wilton was a difficult man to read.