Poor Man's Fight by Elliott Kay

to file inside.
    The entrance involved three sets of thick, armored doors. Inside, recruits found nothing on but single-mattress bunk beds, old-fashioned standing plastic storage units, and an unpleasant, musty stench. There were absolutely no windows. Toward the rear, they saw signs of staircases and lifts, but many of the lights were out. The shelter seemed like it hadn’t been cleaned in years… which became Oscar Company’s first mission.
    Sergeant Janeka doled out tasks as if she read them from an invisible checklist. Mops, brooms, rags, buckets and soap waited in the entrance passageways, apparently left by some unseen welcoming committee before the company arrived. Young men and women used to automated room sweepers, sonic cleansing wands and computerized dust filtration systems took up the old-fashioned tools with trepidation and distaste.
    “Ahmed, Gonzalez, Huang, Ravenell,” Janeka called out, “you get the vents. Get up there and start cleaning. Take off the grills and reach inside. Don’t let me catch you just wiping off the faceplates. Start with the ventilation terminals and access ports on this floor tonight. You’ll get a chance to crawl all the way into the atmospheric recycling tanks down below before the week is out. If you’re claustrophobic, congratulations. You’re about to get over it.
    “Espinoza, Perelli, Whittier, Gomez and other Gomez,” Janeka said with a roll of her eyes, “you’re on inventory duty. Sweep through this entire floor and mark down literally every piece of equipment, every tool, every rag, everything that is not mounted or bolted down into a bulkhead, the overhead or the deck. That means walls, ceiling or floor for those of you who never bothered to read your orientation manuals. You record everything and you will bring your manifests to me. You will also collect everything that might be garbage of some sort into a central point. There hasn’t been an internal inventory on this facility in a long time, so we will double-check every previous record and we will do so immediately.
    “Ramos, Matuskey, Malone, and Einstein,” she continued, “you chatterboxes get to clean the head.”
    Silence followed. It wasn’t the first time the trainers at Fort Stalwart used some odd word for something completely mundane. They had heard this one before, but nobody remembered it. Tanner bit his lip, wanting to translate in the painfully awkward silence, but he worried he’d be speaking out of turn again. Finally, Ramos spoke up. “Sergeant Janeka!” he called out, “What is the ‘head?’”
    Janeka just snorted. “It’s what you kiddies used to call the potty. From now on, you call it the head. You get to scrub out the toilets and the showers. There should be hand tools and chemicals in the cleaning closet inside. Don’t put any of it in your mouths.”
    Chemicals? Tanner thought with surprise. Who the hell even makes chemical cleaning agents anymore?
    Matuskey blanched. “Uh, Sergeant Janeka?” he asked. “Are there protective gloves?”
    “There’s nothing in that head that can’t be cured,” Janeka asserted. “You already got your basic inoculations. There’ll be more comprehensive immunizations later if you don’t wash out of basic training, but those cost money. We don’t want to invest too much in you ‘til you’ve earned it. Now stop sandbagging! Fall out!”
    The four recruits all stepped out of line and headed for the back of the squad bay. What they found shocked them. The shelter had been designed to accommodate two hundred people for an extended period, with sanitary facilities to match. Not one of the recruits had ever seen such a foul mess. Even in the most impoverished, multi-family dwellings of Archangel, bathrooms were built with the ability to self-disinfect and eliminate foul odors in mere seconds.
    After countless dissections and other less-pleasant tasks in his advanced biology classes, Tanner could endure rather nasty smells. Even so, the