Kildar

Chapter Twenty-Five

“You are tense,” Anastasia said as she worked on his back. She was straddled across his butt, pressing hard into the push-up muscles. All she had on was a lightweight blue silk nightgown that had ridden up to her hips. Mike didn’t even have that much on.

Mike had taken an easy day on Sunday, not even working out after the stresses of Saturday, mostly spending the time talking with Nielson about changing the training schedule and Vanner about archaeology. The Marine MI guy turned out to have a mass of unrelated information he’d picked up in a dozen odd places and the two of them had examined the architecture in the foyer again, comparing it to data on the web. The worn carvings on the pillars, as well as the essentially cruciform layout of the floor, argued for Byzantine design. There were differences, but some of them could be related to climatic conditions. He still couldn’t find anything definite indicating when the building had been constructed.

He’d also taken the opportunity to poke around in the lower cellars. On the west side, towards the mountain, they were in pretty bad repair, with the plaster flaked off and seepage water puddled on the floor. He wasn’t sure how much damage there was, structurally, but the caravanserai had lasted for hundreds of years, if not thousands, so he was inclined to dismiss it. He made a mental note, though, to have Prael or Meller check on it.

Near the stairs there was an old well with a metal cover plate, probably put there by the Soviets. He managed to drag it aside just enough to get a ear to it and heard rushing water not far below. There was apparently an underground stream or river that passed under the serai. In the event of a total FUBAR like a siege, they were good for water. He made another mental note to get a hand pump for the well.

On the east side the cellars were in pretty good condition. The damp had gotten to them as well, and the plaster was flaked, but not as badly. There was a very old wooden door to the last room and he had a fairly hard time forcing it open. But he decided that he’d found his bondage dungeon. The room was the longest in the cellars, the ceiling domed up to about ten feet in the center with four domes down the length. On the walls there were small discolorations about a meter off the ground that when he examined them seemed to be the remnants of something metal. Probably shackles from the look and very very old.

The cellars were remarkably free of litter, but they were very dusty and in places in the corners there were small piles of decayed stuff. Most of it was essentially soil, it had been down here so long, but he found bits of wood in some of the piles. A forensic archaeologist might have made something of it, but he wasn’t planning on calling one in. He’d left word to have the Keldara get a detail down to the east side to get it cleaned out and left it at that.

What he hadn’t found was any indication of the original builders. He’d hoped to find some graffiti or a foundation marking or something. But all he’d found was just dirt and crumbling plaster.

“I found out something about the Keldara,” Mike said, shrugging. “It makes me interested in the serai. And I’m worried about the training. They need to get good, and they need to get good fast.”

“You worry too much,” Anastasia said. “Turn over.”

Mike rolled over and she mounted him, tightening down when he was in her, and began moving up and down.

“There,” she said, huskily. “You can stop thinking now.”

Mike pushed the nightgown up and over her head, pulling it down to pin her arms with a quick twist of the fabric, and rolling over so he was on her.

“I also found a good dungeon,” Mike said, stopping for a moment in her.

“You’re still thinking?” Anastasia gasped. “And you stopped.”

“I can’t let you think you’re in charge,” Mike said, chuckling. “If I let you think you’re in charge before long you’ll be running the place and then it’ll be nothing but work, work, work all day long.”

“If you don’t start working soon…” Anastasia said, trying to lean up to bite his shoulder.

Mike ducked back with a laugh and grinned at her.

“If I don’t start working soon, what?” he asked, teasingly.

“I can get… my arms…” the girl replied, struggling to get an arm loose.

“Ah, ah,” Mike said, dropping his weight on her and clamping a hand over her mouth. “Don’t think so!” He still didn’t start moving, though, just stayed in her, grinning faintly and looking her in the eye.

Anastasia glared over the clamped hand, then closed her eyes and bore down, trying to push him out.

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Mike said, firmly, pressing back. The harem manager had some of the strongest muscles he’d ever encountered and it wasn’t exactly easy, but he was already in place. Pushing him out wasn’t in the cards.

Finally, Anastasia went limp, looking pleadingly at him over the hand and muttering into it.

“That’s better,” Mike said, starting to stroke. “Time to prove who’s boss.”

Normally he either worked on her with tongue and finger to bring her to climax or simply took his own and figured he’d owe her. Tonight he did neither, instead pounding at her like a steam press, hard, fast and constant. He slid his left hand up behind her, grabbing her left wrist and pinning it up behind her back, then began pounding, keeping his hand clamped over her mouth.

Anastasia fought back, wrapping her legs around his hips and trying to pull him out while wrestling to get a bite on his hand. But he had her fully pinned — she wasn’t going anywhere — and he had a thumb under her chin, holding her mouth firmly shut, her head pressed back into the pillow. After a few moments the girl lay back, half exhausted from the struggle, letting out a low moan and closing her eyes.

Mike took this as a signal to redouble his efforts, keeping the speed constant but pounding in harder. As the girl started to pant he removed his hand from her mouth and grabbed her hair, turning her head to the side brutally and sliding his tongue up her exposed throat, then biting down on it like a vampire.

At that Anastasia climaxed, letting out a shriek of pleasure and clamping her legs powerfully around his waist. Mike didn’t slow up, though, he just kept pounding.

“You’re not done, yet?” Anastasia moaned as the last of her shudders passed.

“Not even close,” Mike replied, not even out of breath. “I figure I can keep this up for about, oh, six hours.”

“Oh, God,” Anastasia whimpered, lying limp.

Mike just chuckled, evilly, and kept going.

“You’re looking chipper this morning,” Adams said as Mike walked into the kitchen, whistling. “You didn’t wear yourself out last night, did you?”

“Only for crunches,” Mike said, getting a cup of coffee. It was just a bit after four o’clock in the morning, o-dark-thirty in military parlance, on the first day of training. First call was five but the trainers were going to be at the barracks at four-thirty to wake up the trainees, most of whom had partied well into the previous night.

“Think I should go down and join the rest for first call?” Mike asked.

“Nah, let them have the fun,” Adams said, chuckling.

Vil let out a groan as the lights in the bay went on and grabbed his head at a bellowed: “FIRST CALL!”

“It’s before dawn,” Edvin muttered from the bunk above him.

“ON YOUR FEET YOU KELDARA WANKERS!” Sergeant McKenzie bellowed. “PT UNIFORM! FALL OUT IN FIVE MINUTES!”

“Crap,” Vil muttered, rolling to his feet and clutching his head again. “Which one’s the PT uniform?”

“The gray one,” Dutov said, stumbling out of his bed and opening his footlocker. “And we’re to wear the new shoes, the ‘running’ shoes.”

“They want us to run?” Edvin asked.

“Apparently,” Vil said, looking around for the sergeant and belatedly realizing he was supposed to be in charge. He shook his head for a moment against the hangover and then stood up. “ON YOUR FEET! GET IN PT UNIFORM! NOW!”

“Oh, what a bunch of sorry looking sons of bitches.” Adams chuckled, walking down the blocks of recruits who were stumbling through their first class in calisthenics. Jumping jacks did not require a high degree of physical coordination, but from some of the green faces most of the Keldara didn’t have a high degree of physical coordination this morning.

“Teach them they can push through a hangover, anyway,” Mike said, trying not to smile. “I’ll probably cut back on the run this morning, though.”

“About time for that,” Adams said, considering the series the Keldara were supposed to go through this morning.

“Call it when you’re ready,” Mike said.

Adams looked over at Sergeant Heard, who had the nearest set of Keldara. They were deliberately going to let some of the female trainers work with the militia so they could see that women could “hang.” The female Keldara were going to be their heavy weapons support, not to mention positional defense. They were going to have to learn that they could depend upon females for support in combat. Showing them the examples of the trainers would work to that end.

Heard nodded over at Adams and turned back to her group.

“… Two-three-twenty-nine,” she called. “One-two-three and HALT! Attention in the ranks!” she shouted as one of the Keldara bent over, gasping. “You think that was hard! You don’t know what hard means, boys!” The last word was said with such a note of bitter contempt even Mike flinched.

As the other five teams halted their jumping jacks, Adams took a center position on the formation.

“Company, ten-shut!” he called. “Platoon guides. Post!”

The trainers waved the team leaders over to take their places in front of the team formations and trotted to the rear. The team leaders had hastily snatched their guidons from their holders. Each was a field of blue with the name of the team on it. When they were in position, Adams spun in place.

“Kildar! The company is formed.”

Mike walked over and saluted Adams who, in turn, trotted to the rear of the formation.

“Good morning, boyos,” Mike called to the Keldara. “I think some of us drank a bit too much last night. The traditional method for dealing with that in the military is to sweat the liquor out. Which we’re now going to accomplish. A soldier has to learn to deal with discomfort. Fatigue, pain, cold, lack of food and sleep. That is what we’re going to teach you to do, to keep going even when you think you can’t. Because when you’re in mission mode, there’s no excuse. You either do the job or you die and your squad mates die with you. So when you think you can’t go any farther, you’d better find it inside or you’re not going to be any damned good to anyone except as pig-slops. Company! Left-FACE! Quick-time, march… double time… MARCH!”

“What’s wrong, Oleg?” Mike asked, sympathetically, trotting over to the team leader, who was looking pretty shaky.

The run was light from the point of view of the U.S. military: only going on three miles and no more than a seven- or eight-minute mile. Of course, the Keldara weren’t trained runners. They did, however, have the basic soldierly trait of being able to handle pain and fatigue. What he wasn’t sure was that they had the right “drive on” mentality that had to accompany those.

“Not… used… to… running… Kildar,” the team leader gasped.

“You can fall out, you know,” Mike purred suggestively. A few, not many, of the Keldara had done so. Most of them puking by the side of the road and then trying to catch up. “Of course, I’ll have to find someone else that can actually lead your team…”

“I will stay, Kildar,” Oleg said, firmly.

“But you don’t even know how far we’re going,” Mike pointed out. “I can keep going, faster than this, for kilometers and kilometers. You Keldara watch me, you’ve seen it. We could be running all day.”

“I’ll… run all… day… Kildar,” Oleg said, weaving a bit.

“Okay,” Mike said. “We’ll just run all day. Nothing important on the training schedule, anyway.” He trotted back to the side of the formation, which was turning off the road and down the slope to the Keldara compound, then sped up and headed to the front where Adams was leading the formation.

“I’ve got it,” Mike said. The formation area for the militia was down on the flats near the houses and Mike turned the Keldara towards it. He headed into the formation area, where most of the Keldara expected the, to them brutal, run would end, then continued through it to one of the graveled roads that led to the training areas.

He didn’t look back as he passed through the formation area but he heard Adams grunt.

“How many’d we lose?” Mike asked as they crossed the nearest bridge.

“ ’Bout a third,” Adams growled.

“Go back and round ’em up,” Mike said, chuckling. “And there’d better not be any team leaders.”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Adams said, peeling away.

Mike led the group about fifty meters past the bridge, enough room to turn around, then trotted in a curve onto the verge and back. The trainers chivvied the group into the turn and headed back to the barracks.

Mike passed the barracks again, though, heading back towards the road and turning around again. The Keldara were fixated on the run ending and expected it to end at the barracks. He wanted them to get their hopes up and then lose them as the expected stopping point didn’t occur.

Finally he brought them to a “quick-time” march up on the road and walked them back to the barracks for a cool-down. When they were back in formation in front of the barracks, he brought them to at-ease and faced them.

“You’re used to looking forward to the end of work,” Mike said, looking over the formation of blowing Keldara. “For the beer at the end of the day of picking rocks. For the sun to fall on the harvesting or the last stand of wheat cut and the party to follow. But a soldier cannot be looking for the end of work, for the end of pain. Your mind starts to focus on that and it will betray you. As you return from a mission, anticipating a beer and rest, you could be ambushed. You might be sent on to another mission, and another and another. You cannot focus on rest, on peace, until you are at peace. You have to exist in a state of mind without a goal of the end of pain. You must learn to accept the pain, to revel in it, to make a brother of pain. To be a soldier is pain! It is suffering and loss and sacrifice. You must learn to pray for chaos and pain! This is one of the many things you’re going to have to learn if you want to be soldiers. And if you turn out to be lousy soldiers, which it looks like this morning, then I’ll just get some people that know how to do the damned job, to revel in the pain, and you can till the damned fields if that’s all you’re good for! Sergeant Major! Post!”

“They’re looking pretty good,” Mike said, walking past one of the barracks as a footlocker sailed out the window. He spoke quietly, his face stern and contemptuous of the nervous troopers standing at attention outside the barracks.

“Gotta agree,” Adams said, raising his voice slightly to overcome McKenzie’s trained bellow as an armful of uniforms followed the footlocker. “The trainers say they’re having to look God damned hard to find defects. Much better than standard recruit material. These guys are neat, thoughtful, strong and they’ve got stamina from hell. It’s scary.”

“I think I should have gotten some Gurkha trainers,” Mike mused. “They’re used to top-notch entry material.”

“Well, we’re not being as choosy as they are,” Adams pointed out. “There are a few that aren’t quite up to standard. One of ’em’s Gurun. You know, the guy who got the bean or whatever. Killjoy says it’s not that he’s not trying, it’s that the rest don’t want to have a damned thing to do with him.”

“In some societies, the guy who’s in his position gets referred to as dead,” Mike replied. “We might have to pull him out. It’d be hell on him, though.”

“Does that mean we lose one guy per year?” Adams asked, frowning. “That’s going to play hell with manning. We don’t have all that many guys as it is.”

“Think of it as a casualty,” Mike said. “We also need to be looking for replacements for the team leaders. We are going to be engaging in combat at some point and the guy with the shortest life expectancy is the team leader. So make damned sure we have the right guys in the assistant team leader slots.”

“Will do,” Adams said, frowning. “What are you going to do if they won’t accept Gurun?”

“Find another job for him,” Mike said, musingly. “I don’t know him from Adam. If he can’t fit in, though, send him to me and I’ll look him over.”

Mike spent most of the day watching the “training.” It really was training, but what it seemed to be was purest abuse. The trainees weren’t being taught to shoot or blow things up or even kill people, although many of them probably wanted to kill the trainers. They were being taught a series of skills, all of which could be lumped under the heading “soldierly conduct.” The idea was to break their normal methods of doing things, of thinking, of living, and teach them new ones.

The way this was being done was the “abuse.” The troops were made to fall into the square in front of the barracks while the instructors went through and inspected their gear. They’d been given a class in how it was to be prepared, how it was to be laid out, how it was to be cleaned. Most of it was brand new, but “military” clean was different from “civilian” clean. If there was lint or a bit of thread in the crease of an ammunition pouch, it wasn’t “clean.” The point here was attention to detail, absolutely zero defect. There were many tasks that soldiers performed where the slightest mistake would lead to death. Learning to do things perfectly was the point. If they could learn to make their beds perfectly, to clean their gear perfectly, to lay out their gear perfectly, then when they had to lay in a charge of explosives perfectly or clear a mine perfectly they might actually survive.

Furthermore, the conditions were designed to be stressful. It might actually work to have gunfire and explosions going off, randomly, while they were going through this stage of training and Mike had considered it. Hell, he could do the training any way he wanted. But the instructors screaming at them and having them do the same tasks over and over again, never willing to accept even true perfection, was stressful enough. And they’d be doing it well into the night. By the end of the week the recruits would be so mind numb, they’d be doing the tasks in a haze of unreality. And they’d eventually be doing them perfectly in that state of mind. Which was the point.

“You’ve got some training of your own to do,” Adams pointed out, grinning.

“And I’ll start tonight,” Mike replied. “I’ve been considering how to do it. Right that is. Gor… isn’t the right way in my opinion.”

“It’s got its attractions, though,” Adams said with another grin. The Gor books were still classics of bondage fantasy, emphasis on fantasy.

“I’m going to go check on the dam,” Mike said. “Not much to see here for a while. Call me if there are any problems.”

“Will do, boss,” Adams said. “You go… check on the dam.”

Mike headed for the Expedition, rolling his eyes as he went.

“Got the pour done,” Meller said, gesturing at the weir. The concrete structure was about six feet high and thirty feet long, a rectangular box with rectangular openings in the bottom and a broad, triangular, concrete platform in front of it. “It will take about a week to set enough to start dumping on it, but we’re starting with the edges now.”

He spoke over the sound of a truck as it climbed up the grade to the dump point. The broad platform above the dam had been partially dug and partially blasted out and was now wide enough that the truck could make half a three-point turn so its load would dump over the side. As Mike watched, it backed into position and dropped a load of loam over the side. As soon as the dirt was dumped, it dropped the cargo bay and began turning to go back down the hill.

As the truck drove away, the older Keldara men who were working on the project began spreading the dirt out. Some of that was done with a small bulldozer but mostly it was spade work. As soon as the dirt was spread out evenly, three of the Keldara started pressing it down with hand compactors.

“As long as the rain holds off we can keep this up,” Meller continued.

“Know anything about microbreweries?” Mike asked, distantly.

“Not a thing,” Meller said, frowning. “Except I like their beer. The Keldara beer is better, though. Why?”

“I want to build one,” Mike said. “I had Genadi plant most of the new fields in barley. I’m not sure if that will give us enough to run a decent microbrewery, but it will be a start.”

“I can build the building,” Meller said, definitely. “But I have no idea how it should be laid out and I don’t know anything about how they work except that they have big copper vats.”

“Same here,” Mike said, sighing. “I guess I’ll just have to do some research.”

“Delegate,” Meller said. “Vanner’s underutilized at the moment. If you get him to find a design, I’ll put it together. I suppose the Keldara women can figure out how to increase their output.”

“I’d better go talk to Mother Lenka about that,” Mike said. “You got enough people?”

“For now,” Meller said, shrugging. “This is more or less makework until the concrete sets.”

“Okay, see you later,” Mike replied.