Free Mercenary by Piers Anthony

would be better to take my punishment straight. I deserved it for my foolishness.
    “Tell me why, and give me your word there will be no repetition, and I will give you minimum standard punishment,” he said.
    I shook my head no, fearing what was coming.
    He said no more on that subject. “The barracks needs cleaning,” he said. “You will scrub it down, beginning at floor level, during your free time, commencing today. Here is your scrub brush.” He handed me an archaic toothbrush.
    That afternoon, and the afternoon following, I labored to clean the immense inner hull with that tiny brush. My platoon-mates saw me but did not comment; it was forbidden to talk with a person undergoing punishment. The labor was mind-deadening, but I had spent a year on the migrant circuit, so I was toughened to this sort of thing. I simply tuned my mind to other things, freeing it from the mundane blank, and proceeded, as it were, on automatic.
    On the third day Sergeant Smith approached while I worked. “This isn't necessary, Hubris,” he said.
    “You have completed minimum punishment and have served as an example. What have you to say?”
    “This is supposed to be a training battalion,” I said gruffly. “I did wrong and I am being punished; that's fair. But you are making me do something useless when you should be making me do something that forwards my competence as a Jupiter fighting man, even though I'm really a mercenary.”
    “Just what are you trying to say, Hubris? You may speak freely.” That meant I would not suffer additional punishment for anything I might utter; this code, too, is honored. I could call him a fecal-consuming pederast whose hash marks were forged, and get away with it.
    I elected for a less personal critique. “This is chicken shit,” I said, using the age-sanctified vernacular for pointless harassment.
    “You want a rationale to justify it?” he asked disdainfully.
    He had the temerity to argue the case. “Yes, if I have to indulge in it.” I should have known better than to challenge a military professional. The officer at the Tail had tackled my doubt head-on, and so did Sergeant Smith.
    “The foundation of the military service, any military service,” he said carefully, “is discipline. Men and women must be trained to do exactly what is required of them, in precisely the way required, and at the moment it is required. The military organization is ideally a finely crafted machine, and the individual parts of that machine can not be permitted free will, or the machine will malfunction. We want the soldiers of the Navy to be able to fight; but first they must obey, lest we become no more than a random horde of scrappers. Civilians come to the service with a number of ungainly and counterproductive attitudes; we must cure them of these, just as we must build up their bodies and their skills. Naturally, civilians resist these changes, just as they resist the first haircut and the first session in the Tail. They have other ideas—and because we must rid them of these ideas, we put them through a program some call chicken shit. It may be unpleasant, but it is necessary if they are ever to become true military personnel, able to function selflessly as part of an effective fighting force. It is, ultimately, not hardware or firepower or numbers that determines the true mettle of any military organization; it is discipline. What you are undergoing now is not useful work by your definition; it is the essence of discipline.”
    I paused in my scrubbing, impressed. Sergeant Smith had given me a genuine answer, instead of the bawling out I had expected. I realized that I had not properly appreciated the qualities of the man—and that was embarrassing, because I, of all people, had no excuse for such misjudgment. I had turned off my mind too soon!
    Yet I resisted the logic. “In what way does scrubbing a clean hull with a toothbrush contribute to discipline that rigorous useful training would