I woke up in a field. I had no idea what was going on. Yeah, I am pretty sure a lot of stories start this way. Waking up in a field of some sort, some strange planet or something, no idea what was going on. I was missing a few memories, but most of my life was intact, and with just a hint of logic I could figure out what was going on.
There were a few young men who were stirring around me. They were waking up in a field too. Like me, they were dressed in a variety of local outfits. In my case, I was wearing a pair of heavy coveralls that were a bit filthy, heavy boots, and a pair of steel manacles around both of my wrists.
The field we were waking up in was not some random section of plains, a farm, or even a yard. No, it was an atmospheric containment field. We were in one of the dipper’s huge cargo containers. I had filled them plenty of times and recognized the marks on the metal walls. In the middle, there was a small generator keeping the containment field active, slowly chugging away at its fuel supply.
From the looks of it, it was about halfway empty. With twelve guys on board, we were about three-quarters of the way up the dipper, if they had put in a fresh fuel rod, and we should make it to the top with plenty of time to spare. If we were still close to the beginning of our trip, we’d make it to the top as a dozen asphyxiated and vacuum-frozen corpses.
“Scrot.” I heard behind me. A sentiment which I could only wholly agree with. I honestly thought I had escaped. I had been far enough out in the country, away from the ports, that I had believed that there was no chance they’d tracked me. I should have known better since the Fleet had the advantage of sensor systems that the commonwealth of Korse could only dream of.
I struggled to my feet, groaning a little at the pins and needles sensation of a broad-area stunner in my limbs. I had to know how high we were, and I couldn’t guess lying on my back. Someone behind me was struggling as well, and I glanced back to see a charlotte boy, clearly recognizable by his shock of white hair, sharply pointed ears, and Charlotte-specific citywear, struggling up as well.
The gravity was… light. That was good, less than half of what I was used to. That meant that, more than likely, we were near the end of our trip. Some people assumed that conscription was worse than death, but I didn’t agree with them. As long as you were still breathing, there was always hope, which was why I had chosen to run instead of taking the easy way out.
One of the twelve hadn’t made it. I could smell the sole remaining motionless figure. Dead for maybe 6 hours. Some people, especially citybreds like the slender corpse, did not handle a stunner well. He was probably still alive when they loaded him, but without a medtech to restart his heart on the trip, the combination of the stunner and the gantry gees probably stopped his heart the moment our container was snatched by the dipper. The problem is, city-bred don’t do well outside of the one gee generators at the heart of each city, with their pride at being ‘unmodified’, and the four gee snatch, which was probably closer to ten gees Earth standard for the poor boy, was more than his shocked system could handle.
I looked around. There were three charlottes, two city boys that survived, three morans, and three of us wilders, who didn’t have clan markers. Both of the wilders looked like orcs, from the first generation of adapted settlers, and neither of them had the faint green tinge that my skin had, third-generation adaptations before gene mods had been outlawed in favor of full system implants.
I was surprised. Usually, even the fleet was careful to keep the various sub-breeds of Korse apart. Especially the wilders. The short morans were capable of getting along with just about anyone, but the wilder orcs and charlottes were still technically at war. Although, in this case, whatever stupid scrot they were fighting over was probably irrelevant to us prisoners.
“Yo, goblin.” one of the orcs wagged his chin at me, grimacing a little to show his overdeveloped upper and lower canines like he thought that would scare me. “You got a way out of this?”
I shrugged a little, “Notice the scrotting place is empty? Unless you want me to take a piece out of the wall or disassemble the generator unit, We are in here till they let us out.” I smiled a little at him. “Any other bright ideas, orc?” The names were intentionally insulting. My breed of wilder was third gen but with vastly lighter and denser muscle and bone for dealing with our world’s 2.5 gees.
The first gens had been designed by a corporation for scut labor, helping with the terraforming and basic infrastructure. Second gens, like the morans, were designed for wresting the world’s mineral wealth from beneath its surface. Third gens like my people had been more specialized, with longer lifespans, but when we were very young we looked tiny and scrawny in comparison to the first gens of a similar age, with a greenish tinge to our skin and almost comically oversized ears.
Of course, once our world’s tech had been basically screwed over by the core worlds, both orcs and my clan had been considered worthless and went unsponsored. Thus, wild ones, or wilders. And for my subspecies, I was incredibly short, much shorter than even the four-foot-tall morans, mostly because I was not even close to done growing yet.
In any civilized world, people like my clan would be desperately sought after… or killed out of hand for being gene mods. Out here, though, we were barely hanging on, a world ripe for harvesting occasionally by the fleet for more powerful bodies to throw into the war against the Chaos Lords.
Every few decades, the Fleet would show up and claim half a generation. All youngsters between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Most of us scattered, although the orcs occasionally volunteered. When there were not enough volunteers, the fleet had some way of knowing who was in the right age range and where they were. Just my luck, I had just turned eighteen when the broadcast calling for volunteers went out.
This was fairly recent… The fleet had risen to interstellar power about six hundred years ago, during my grandmother’s childhood. The thing is, the orcs could afford to lose an entire generation every few years and be fine, their lifespan and breeding cycles were fairly short, and the system mods could greatly increase their lifespan if they survived getting thrown into the meat grinder… but my people, well, we didn’t breed very quickly.
The charlottes were brilliant but relatively passive. The morans were affable and happy to work under any conditions, and were no real threats… But us? We were strong, smart, and intentionally self-motivated. If our tech hadn’t been dropped into the stone age after the collapse of Old Terra, we would be a real threat to the unmodded baselines.
We knew damned well that the fleet dropped a pulse generator into the system to cause instability that bathed our world in harmless electromagnetic waves every thirty to fifty years. Any electronics we tried to create either had to be insanely shielded or had a limited life span. We could still work, but more than once we had tried to create a way to get off-world and out from under the fleet’s thumb.
But, you know, we were at the bottom of a hellish gravity well. Without the dippers, or space elevators, nothing could move off-world unless it was using advanced gravitics… like the United Planets Fleet had. And the occasional EMP made sure we could never develop it by locking us permanently at tech level four. That means steam engines without electric telegrams.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
I felt a clunk as the container was retrieved off of the gigantic carbon cable leading up to the station, and gravity was suddenly all over the place as we were swung through a Zero-Gee stretch to be placed on the teardrop counterweight station at the top of the cable. The atmosphere grew thin for a moment, causing all of our ears to pop, as the generator couldn’t keep up with the changes and started to chug to a stop. With a thought, I cut over the short circuit and reignited the chemical monofilament and the pressure started to equalize as the generator hiccuped and started to run again, and fortunately no one seemed to notice.
Yeah, the Fleet had technology we could only dream about, but that didn’t mean they wasted it on a bunch of conscripts. Especially conscripts that they could never, ever allow to grow in strength. Everyone knew that no matter how often you went onto the chopping block, if you ever hit the steel stage you were DONE, either through mandatory retirement or...other methods.
It was plain that whatever they had set up for us, it apparently hadn’t affected my affinity. One of the reasons I had run was because only a few were born with my affinity each generation, and my grandmother had insisted I do my best to hide from the draft. I would do my best to hide it, since I didn’t want to do the fleet any favors unless my life were at stake.
And realistically, I had known there was a good chance I would get caught. Now that I was here, I had a mission, like it or not. My affinity was one of the reasons our gene mod even existed. And it was one of the reasons that gene modding had been outlawed.
The bay doors were finally cranked off, each of the dogs getting unscrewed slowly as, I suspect, someone with a hand tool on the other side broke the seal. We were all staying away from the corpse, which one of the orcs had pushed towards the exit.
I wanted to say that the broken seal let in a breath of fresh air, but it was the same canned, recycled air that the atmospheric containment field had almost managed to regularly replace. I think they had intentionally intended for the twelve of us to be logy from the air, but because one of us was dead it smelled bad but there was enough oxygen to keep us all alert.
A man was standing in front of the door in some sort of light brown uniform, with a sidearm clearly visible on his hip. He looked like an unmodified human, and the moment he saw that we were standing instead of trying to peel ourselves off the deck or unconscious, he pulled the firearm and held it at his shoulder, ready, while letting out a piercing whistle.
None of us, not even the orcs, were dumb enough to rush an armed man on a busy loading dock. Our foresight paid off a few moments later when two men in green-edged white space armor took their places beside him, their heavy carbines pointed directly at us instead of thoughtfully at the ready like… the Sergeant, I believed. A symbol of a bird of some kind over three arcs was like… some kind of petty officer, I thought, without any rockers or stars over top of it. I honestly had no idea. Below was a name tag that said “Holmsberg”
“Greetings recruits! And welcome to the Unified Planets fleet! Your brave sacrifice at volunteering to join the service to protect your world from the Chaos Lords has been noted and respected!” The guy seemed to be able to speak every sentence with an exclamation point.
“I see that one of the recruits has already given his life to protect humanity! His name will go down in the Fleet Annals as a graduate and honorable recruit. The same is true of anyone who makes the ultimate sacrifice during training, and I can guarantee another one of you will!”
He pointed beside the container and said “Now, gentlemen, you need to line up in height order tallest to shortest. From there we will join all of the rest of the honorable volunteers on your ship where you will be personally attending the finest training that the Unified Planets has ever been able to devise to prepare its volunteers for a life of honor and glory on your mission to save the Universe!”
Didn’t this dipscrub notice the fact that we were all trussed up like turkeys? Volunteers?
“Scrotter hogscrot.” one of the orcs said. “I ain’t no volunteer. Where’s the cell for deserters?”
Petty Officer Holmsberg smiled brilliantly and waved his hand towards one of the large windows to space that surrounded the teardrop. Finally pointing at it. “Right there, recruit. Next to the conscientious objectors, violent protesters, and individuals who choose to wax eloquent on the downfalls of our enlightened volunteer recruitment efforts. Consider this your first, and last, warning.”
“You gentlemen chose to avoid the call to glory when it was made to your planet, ignoring the social contract that you were bound to by living under the peace and tranquility of the Unified Planets. Yet you chose to finally heed that call. Unfortunately, because you are known to be somewhat pusillanimous, The option to fail basic training and move into a less demanding form of service is now closed to you.”
The bright smile on his face was finally revealed as a thin sort of sneering contempt. I had no problems with the idea of fighting Chaos Lords. Heck, that was why our planet had been established, we simply didn’t choose to do so under the ‘leadership’ of totalitarians like the UP fleet. To be honest, it was probably a good thing he was using words that the orcs would not understand, because they had a very particular response towards those who called them cowards… a response they might not have survived, but which Holmsberg would be unlikely to survive as well.
I checked the two rifles that were pointed in our direction. Both were electrically triggered heavy-round multifires, fully automatic. I didn’t think they had enough charge to easily kill an orc, especially not both of them. The orcs may have just met each other a little over an hour ago, but orcs stuck together… That was how they managed to be such incredible pains in the scrot to the charlottes for so long.
“Petty Officer Holmsberg?” I asked somewhat quietly. I would be playing the reasonable one for the moment. It wasn’t that I didn’t think our crew could handle these three, they probably could, and if a general melee started we and the other conscripts could probably kill every fleet member in the teardrop. And then, the fleet would drop the teardrop, and our world would become utterly dependent on the fleet’s nullgrav for EVERYTHING off-world until we could someday hope to get another one lifted in the face of frequent EMP bombardments.
“Yes, and who are you?” he asked me.
“Potential Recruit Reynard, sir. If you would be so kind, The orcs are rather disturbed right now, so despite your obvious censorship of our actions, unless you wish to turn Teardrop station into an example, it might be best to avoid antagonizing them further. Many of us have reasons for avoiding conscription, from familial obligations to simply not having been in a position to hear the call, considering how frequently our world is smashed by EMPs.”
He nodded, “Then I expect you to keep them quiet and under control, Recruit Reynard. We need to move quickly to the transport.”
“Did he call me a pussy?” one of the orcs said.
I shook my head and shushed him, adding quietly, “No, he didn’t understand that you are not interested in homosexual relations. I cleared it up with him, so he shouldn’t invite you again.”
Did I lie to an orc? You bet your ass I did. That was the only way to handle them. Hopefully, by the time he figured out what ‘Pusillanimous’ meant, the danger would have passed. They had quick tempers about certain things, but I’d like to assume that at least someone at our destination would know how to handle them. I didn’t want a bloodbath that I was right in the middle of.
While I wouldn’t say I had consigned myself to the course that was outlined by fleet, I was well aware that currently, anything I could do would probably get me and most of the station killed. Could I survive the basic training? I was from Korse, so there would be no difficulties. As long as they didn’t try to bring in a reader I should be able to bide my time until an opportunity to escape or move out of the conscript battalions presented itself.
Look, I get it. Every species was expected to fight against the Chaos Lords, and humans, and their various subspecies were vastly better than most. But everyone knew the real reason the fleet was recruiting… because when you own the soldiers, you own the rewards they earned. The Unified Planets had to maintain its technological and economic edge to ‘unite the planets’ under their rule, and conscription was their preferred method.
It was not the first time in the last few thousand years, and it would be far from the last. The real trick was to simply survive as each new dictatorship arose, outlive it, and then wait for it to fall from its own internal corruption.