Once I read the description and researched assault drone Coxswain, I began to sweat. Someone higher up must have been truly desperate to grab an involuntary recruit for the position, but considering my known abilities, I could sort of understand why they would take the risk.

Technically, you would command a ship… a small shuttle-boat actually, stuffed to the gills with assault drones. It was designed to hit surfaces hard and fast, unload, and get away like a bat out of hell.

Drones were disposable, and NCOs were...less expendable. Slightly less expendable. The drop-ships that drone coxswains flew were big two-piece disposable tin cans filled with drones, and the boat itself was a lot more of an unarmed and hardened fast tug the size of a heavy fighter attached to the ‘can’ with Grav-locks. If you need to, after you dropped the ‘can’, you could come and pick it back up after the fight was over, or if an actual infantry unit found it they could use it to call for a pick-up.

And then there was controlling the drones. The ‘can’ had a portable node for controlling the drones remotely, but big rifts, hell-worlds, and drifter hulks were very good at tearing unaccompanied drone control away from a node if the drone controller were not fairly talented… and infantry would get justifiably upset if they called for drone backup that arrived and started to shoot them to pieces or instantly was absorbed by a rift as fuel.

Sometimes you recovered some drones, sometimes you didn’t… and on a hell-world drop, coxswains didn’t always come back. Chances are likely, someone put my shielding, tech sorcery, and adept tech affinity together and came up with better-than-average odds for completing missions and hopefully living through them.

I could understand why it was either the luckiest break possible… independent commands for conscripts were almost unbelievable, and could lead to a fast promotion track to officer candidate school… Or the unluckiest, considering that that fast advancement came with incredible risks to match it for all but the tightest controller pilots.

Or they knew what Gremlins were, but the chances of that were so unlikely that it was not even worth considering.

The conscript UI they had fitted me with was supposedly unhackable, which might have been true if I had been strictly tech or sorcery, but with my merged affinity, it was laughably dumb. Apparently, they trusted it enough to not even provide an escort to the J-school. Or maybe something about my performance instilled a level of trust that I wouldn’t run because I hadn’t.

It’s possible to remove one, if you had a fully stocked cybershop on at least a tier 6 tech world, and didn’t mind the fact that it would immediately broadband an APB on the hacker and the wearer. Goblins would do it, but they were the core of the black market… and I wasn’t a goblin. My homeworld was forcibly barely tier 4, so I was a safe bet.

Except, I wasn’t. I had removed mine in the first week in boot camp and had hacked its transponder within ten minutes of it getting installed, using nothing but my brain, my gifts, and a hint of techno-sorcery, just to see if I could. I put it back on and hacked it three more times just to make sure, it felt… primitive. Tech six was a broad category, after all, including everything from cellphone networks to ionic spaceflight.

Full genemods had been outlawed for a very long time for three reasons. The first was purely moral… people were creating custom-designed perfect slaves that would bond with their masters and become insanely, unspeakably loyal no matter how much they were abused, which was breaking down what little ethical framework existed between worlds. The second was psychological, in that genetically ‘perfect’ beings were destroying morale pretty much everywhere. The third one was the technomancers… a weird set of custom-designed affinities created a set of nearly-omnipotent beings that, once they became powerful enough, bid fair to destroy or own all of humanity’s territories… They destroyed the old, pre-UP empire before they were finally taken down.

Two out of three wasn’t good. I wasn’t perfect, far from it. I looked like a big-eyed, skinny goblin. I didn’t want to go into the first, and the third… well… Technology and spiritualism were already a dangerous combination when you considered the kind of monsters you could create with it. Adding forces, an enhanced high-level affinity, to any other set of affinities, left you with creatures that, according to the UPF and other human governments, soon left behind the understood bounds of crime and punishment, it drove them insane with power and convinced that they were the only hope for humanity’s future.

Not to say I was superbly powerful, but I wasn't... Forces gave you baseline control over quantum bonds, but at my level? An orc with a grudge could probably beat me to death pretty easily. Right now, forces just gave my natural abilities a nudge. Higher-ranked people, bronze and iron, could potentially have affinities in the hundreds... forces would get me killed because of its potential, not because I had any real power right now.

Yep, that was the line that most governments took. My homeworld generally considered that sort of reasoning highly suspect, which was probably one of the reasons that they got bombed back into the Stone Age by EMPs every generation. Even we, however, were aware of why forces-enhanced affinities needed some sort of external control on their behavior. If your bond was an ethical, moral, and generally decent person, life could be very, very good… but if they were a monster, a sociopath, or even extremely selfish, that control could be a chain around your neck from which the only escape was self-immolation.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Under the circumstances, however, the UPF had me pegged perfectly. No, I wouldn’t run… where would I run to? There was no way to get home… there was a moratorium on imports to Korse, and with its gravity, any ship short of an overpowered raider or fleet lighter would see the thrust-defeating gravity well as a one-way trip.

I couldn’t buy that kind of hardware to get home, and unless I wanted to get involved in some seriously shady ventures, something I was hugely opposed to, there would be no way to gain my own ship to get home without being vulnerable to bonding. At the very least, the fleet was harsh on certain conduct, which meant my chances of getting force-bonded before I was powerful enough to protect myself were far lower than in the United Planets civilian sector at large.

I sighed and went through the node station according to my orders. The UPF had almost total control over all major space-borne nodes in the human sectors. Of course, there were planetary nodes, but almost all of them were in close proximity to a rift nexus, which meant unless you were on a raid, taking a planetary node was a good way to wind up quickly, and messily, dead.

There were a few exceptions, of course, core planets often had a transport node that was protected, but chaos spawn were fanatically attracted to nodes… every core planet node was protected by layers and layers of defenses and security procedures to stop and destroy the chaos spawn that would assault such a tasty target.

I thought it was because of all the creation essence that nodes produced. Chaos spawn tried to soak up creation essence like a sponge and destroy it when they couldn’t. Planetary nodes were so powerful that a simple tin-level like me would probably die of essence overload in moments despite my special abilities. Forces could reduce the effect to some extent, but in the end, I was mortal, which probably wouldn’t change anytime soon.

I could feel the essence coming off the node as I approached. It was shielded, but it was tolerable simply because nodes don’t get the same kind of enormous life energy manipulation in space, even at the center of the space cities that tend to form around them, to offer dangerous loads of essence. In moments, I had tapped into my destination station to the portal terminus, moved through the mil-spec steel portal, and then simply ‘was’ at the minor node at Hachimoto station, where my J-school was.

Rare people with very high sorcery ratings or weird gifts like mine could feel the essence gathering at a node just as they stepped through or received resource rewards, but it honestly was odd enough that paying too much attention to the millions of strands of spiraling, twisting essence as it was woven into reality was enough to make you throw up. You didn’t teleport, you were...shifted, through the node network from one location to another. I only paid enough attention to make sure it was still the same me that exited the other side, but it still almost cost me my breakfast.

“Heh. Node sickness… do you need a bag?” The attendant at the other end asked. She had either a decent dye job or a minor gene mod, with short, bright blue hair, and based on her slightly oversized eyes, I was betting a gene mod.

When cosmetic gene modding had come out, a huge portion of people had chosen to alter themselves to look like some ancient cultural custom back on old Earth… something called weeaboo, which involved nonstandard primary or fluorescent hair colors, oversized eyes, tiny mouths, and permanently slender figures. I didn’t find it appealing, especially in males, but considering my genemods, who was I to be critical?

Full genemods might have been banned, but recessive screening and cosmetic gene therapy were still hugely popular for baselines that could afford it. I bet this girl’s grandparents had been very wealthy, or she was able to afford a decent cosmetic therapy package through some other means.

“No…” I said, gulping back the urge, and sighed, “I need to find a transit stand, I am assigned to the assault shuttle J-school.”

She nodded and called a transit for me. Fancy cosmetic gene-mod or not, this station was all fleet. In a few minutes, I arrived at the primary lock for the assault school, where some artist had converted an entire wall into a well-crafted holomural of an assault landing… dozens of bulky, ancient drop-ships landed in hail of beam-fire and explosions while power-armored human figures stomped down boarding ramps and collected in organized ranks, other parts showing them in melee and firefights with lizardlike chaos spawn.

Sure, there were a million things wrong with the picture. Assault shuttles never landed that close to each other, armored troopers specifically avoided formations or any large group that could be easily wiped by a single fire breath or acid splash, and the LIVING troops usually used high-speed drop capsules… Drones might pop out of a grounded drop carrier, but the transport unit and all-too-vulnerable pilot would be way the hell away, and the armored troops would be flanked by drones and the occasional engineer unit to control them, usually accompanied by a short moran or goblin tech, and those were not shown at all.

And where would Chaos Spawn get lasers and airbursts? They NEVER opposed landings, except to try and eat the invaders as quickly as possible. You can’t absorb the essence of a living creature if you blow it up in the sky, after all. Half the point of a Chaos Lord taking a world was to try and entice the defenders to try and take it back. They didn’t care about real estate, and would eventually happily consume an entire world if they weren’t opposed, all they cared about was destruction, especially the destruction of living creatures, which released so much more essence than plants or inorganics as they converted them back into raw chaos.

It was certainly an exciting picture, right out of a war holodrama, but I hoped no assault pilots that came to this J-School expected it to be anything like that. I wasn’t even a veteran, and I could tell propaganda when I saw it.

Could a void beast eat a world? If it was undefended, they could eat it in mere weeks. But every world that they captured had a chance of being recovered… a hell world was valuable bait, as the forces of the Chaos Lords and the defenders vied for the resources and essence that would be released by the conflict over a captured planet.

The defenders usually won, too, which was ironic since their losses regaining ground usually just made Chaos Lords that much stronger. A single sapient, living creature released more essence on death than an entire dead planetoid, which is why wholesale destruction never really happened until after a system was irretrievably lost. Void beasts were a terror weapon, not a viable strategy, and there was a lot of conjecture that they existed to be defeated, reaping the rewards for their lords of the hundreds or thousands who died ending their threat.

I entered the lock warily, ready for whatever weird crap they considered necessary to teach me. I wouldn’t gain any advancement until I guided some combat drops, but I still hoped that whatever they had to teach was worth learning, with such a glowing example of fiction for their decoration.