Once Finger Roberts saw that he had all of our attention, he told us "Pick up your kit and follow me."
We all hurried to keep up with him as he set off at a rapid pace across the parade ground. I assumed that we would be shown to a barracks of some sort and then, hopefully, to a mess-hall so that we could get something to eat, and I was hopeful as we walked towards the buildings on the other side of the parade-ground that completed the horseshoe arrangement. I was puzzled when I realised that we were approaching the end of the buildings and we hadn’t entered one, and even more so when we left the parade-ground and started following a pathway that wound between some trees and into the bush.
We continued along the pathway for a long time, I would guess that we walked at least five klicks before Finger Roberts finally turned off the pathway at an intersection and headed through some bushes before finally stopping and saying "This is home for the next while. Find a bunk and meet me out here in ten minutes."
We were standing in a clearing in the bush about thirty meters wide and on the opposite side of the clearing from us there was a long low building. It had a roof made of some natural material that looked like woven leaves and was raised from the ground on what looked essentially like small stilts. When I got into the building I realised that the walls were very unsubstantial screens that would let the breeze blow right through them. They looked like the pictures I had seen of houses in tropical areas that were built to be cool in the intense heat. The barracks was divided into two with a simple partition. On the right side there were six frame beds, three on each side of the room. One already had kit on it, so I guessed it was taken. I dumped my kit in a pile on the bed opposite and Desrae did the same on the bed next to me. The others all chose beds and within a few minutes we were outside again standing in a line in front of Finger Roberts.
"Right," said Finger Roberts, "That wasn’t too bad. As you can see the facilities are fairly primitive here. I have no idea what you were used to where you come from, but this world is very primitive and you will have to adapt to it very quickly. The climate is essentially sub-tropical to tropical everywhere you will go. Buildings, sanitation and everything else is primitive as you can see from our accommodations here. Your food will be delivered here every morning, but you will have to set up a rotation to do the cooking. The six of us will be living and working together here for this stage of your training. Any questions?"
I looked around at the others in our Finger and when no-one asked any questions, I decided to risk it.
"Finger-Leader, when can we get further information about what we will actually be doing?"
"You will learn most of this stuff as we proceed, but for now here is the situation. This world has a fairly stable social structure and it’s own population. It is fairly close to what you would consider to be feudal or medieval. Does that give you any clues?"
"Yes Finger-Leader. Will we interact with the population or is it just battles all the time?"
"You will go through your first phase of training with me, then to graduate you will go out and perform on a mission. You can think of it as doing quests. You will have an objective given to you and you have to figure out the situation on your own. Part of what you will learn here will be the details of the situation on the world, so that you are not too lost when you get there, but that will be integrated with the military aspects of what you will learn. There are civilians out there and you will interact with them to the extent that it is required for your mission. Any other questions?"
This last was accompanied with a scowl that deterred even me from asking any more questions.
"Ok. Let’s get started." Finger Roberts walked over to the house and went into the left-hand partition. We all trooped in after him. I could see that it was decked out as a mini-classroom, with what looked like a blackboard and six chairs.
"Grab a seat and listen up."
Once we were seated, Finger Roberts began our first lecture.
"The first lessons you have already learnt. These were best shown by example and will be the basis for much of the rest of what you learn about and on War World. A lot of it you will not even have realised yet, but the basics are this:
- Your bodies and minds are vastly improved in potential, but you need to develop them by use.
- There is technology on War World, but it is not available for your use, and your experience on the planet is constrained by this fact.
"If you have been paying attention, you would have noticed that we have emphasised that it is not only your bodies that are important, but your minds too. The structure of the units that we use is different to what you are used to and there is a reason for this; it is not simply change for change’s sake. The most important aspect of this for you at the moment is why we have a ‘Finger’ with five members and what it means to be a Finger-Leader. As it happens, Finger-Leader is the lowest level of leadership position because the ability to control and communicate with others at this level is restricted to five people.
"We are going to start with physical preparation, but simultaneously we will work on mental preparation. One of the very first things that you need to learn is mental communication. All combat communication has to be facilitated by someone who has reached a certain level of competency, and this is one of the pre-requisites for achieving rank."
"Finger-Leader, can anyone learn how to do this?" asked one of the others.
"Anyone can receive," Finger Roberts replied, "most of you will learn how to reply, and some will learn how to initiate communications. A leader’s develops the ability to send to more than one at a time, and to maintain more than one communications link. This is important as we have to maintain a network of communications. Each Finger-Leader must be able to speak to his Finger members on one ‘net’ as well as to his Hand-Leader on another. Within the Hand, the same restrictions and rules apply as within the Finger. The same is true at each level up the chain of command. The higher levels can reach down through the various nets to any level, although that is only done in unusual cases, we like to maintain the chain of command."
"How will we learn this?" I asked. I was a little concerned about this as I had no experience of it. I was pretty sure that I could learn to handle anything physical that was thrown at me, but I was used to technological solutions to problems and this was far outside of my previous experience. The actual structure of the ‘network’ made complete sense to me though, as it seemed to duplicate to a large extent the radio networks that I was accustomed to. "Oh, and how do you know who you are talking to? Do you use call-signs?" I added as I thought of the radio network.
"I will give you some exercises to do which you need to start practicing. This is not something that you do only in a classroom environment, but that you need to mull over and practice constantly all day long." Finger Roberts replied.
"In fact, that leads me to the general approach that we take here," he continued, "this is not a basic training course in the same sense as you might have experienced before. What we are going to do is to start with a number of basic building blocks and drill you on them. Once you have achieved a certain level of competency, then we will move on to training with other Fingers and even competing with them in mock battles and exercises, although you will find that we believe in the philosophy of ‘The more sweat in training, the less blood on the battlefield’ although I suspect you will be surprised at how much blood you will actually shed during training."
"[What I want for now though is for you to take some time to settle in and get to know each other. I will give you some exercises to practice and I want to see progress in the morning.]"
I was shocked. I could see Finger Roberts was enjoying himself: he had a huge smile on his face. The last sentence had appeared in my mind without him speaking out loud at all.
"[Yes. That’s correct. You guessed it. This is what I have been talking about.]" he said in our minds again. "[Does that answer your question about call signs]" he asked me.
"Absolutely." I replied. There was no doubt who had spoken in my mind. I didn’t know how, but it seemed as if there was a ‘taste’ that identified Finger Roberts uniquely.
He then proceeded to tell us what the mental exercises were that would help to prepare us for mental communication and dismissed us to settle in. I certainly had a lot to think about.
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