While I wouldn’t say I had consigned myself to the course that was outlined by the 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; the physical aspects would be a joke in this low gravity. As long as they didn’t try to bring in a deep psychic reader, I should be able to bide my time, play the part of the clever but harmless tech-rat, until an opportunity to escape presented itself.
Look, I get it. Every species was expected to fight against the Chaos Lords, and certain humans, and their various subspecies, were vastly better at it than most. But everyone with two brain cells to rub together 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 of resource acquisition. Free labor, free soldiers, and all the loot they could pillage from the chaos zones.
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. I just had to make sure I wasn’t one of the bricks in its foundation.
We were finally marched in the incredibly low gravity over to several other lines of shackled ‘recruits’, a sad and ragged parade of the unwilling. We boarded the brick-like transport docked to the teardrop. It was as utilitarian as its name suggested.
They separated the two low-gee city dwellers from the rest of us, probably to some medical bay to be pumped full of adaptogens. There were about two hundred of us, total, and I had no idea how many had died in transit. The brick, or company troop transport, was barely better than the dipper’s cargo container had been. There were benches and straps, but the entire thing was propelled by a simple electronic brain, a generator with another atmospheric containment field, and a hydrogen fusion engine that probably predated my grandmother.
Of the two hundred men aboard, the vast majority were orcs, their low, grumbling conversations filling the cramped space. There were a dozen elves, looking profoundly out of place and uncomfortable, about forty dwarves who were already making the best of it by swapping stories, and then… well… me. A solitary, green-tinged sapling in a forest of grim oaks. The idea that I’d been the only one of my kind that had been close enough to the surface for them to catch was not too unusual, since, technically, I was still a child. A child they were shipping off to war.
One of the reasons we fought so hard against the draft was because their age range, eighteen to thirty, while more than mature among the orcs, reasonable for the dwarves, and only a bit on the young side for elves, was considered barely young adult among my sort… Hell, I was technically still in puberty, which started at seventeen for my people. I was still a good ten years away from my age of majority. That didn’t mean I was a child, but it DID mean that I was expected to get away by my family… and when I had activated my swarm, sending a cloud of micro-drones to scramble their sensors, I thought I had.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The Irony was a bitter pill. If the fleet had asked for volunteers from among the fifty to two-hundred-year-olds from my people, they probably would have gotten swamped by volunteers. The chance to see the universe, to get our hands on real technology, and to find new mates? We’d have jumped at it. But the fleets didn’t understand some of the more unusual modified humans. To them, one hundred years old was far past the age of a soldier’s usefulness, and they didn’t understand that at one hundred years, we were finally coming into our own as warriors and technicians, and would probably be at the top of our game until we were almost three hundred and fifty years old. They wanted pliable young bodies, not seasoned minds.
The orcs were modified to handle my world’s heavy gravity, but as first gens, it still hit them hard… they usually had heart and age problems starting at about sixty. At thirteen years old, most orcs were ready to start working in earnest and raising their own families. The elves and dwarves were built to adapt better and had a more reasonable lifespan of two to three hundred years in this gravity, which was unusually short by elven standards but strictly normal for a dwarf. But my mod had been built to SETTLE any non-poisonous world, to make it our own, and live comfortably there for centuries. It was the final, crushing irony and agony that made us the rarest species on the very worlds we had been designed to fill.
I wiggled a little uncomfortably in the hard seat. The gravity was alright, the hydrogen fusion engines now accelerating us at an uncomfortable three gees, which felt almost normal after the teardrop’s lightness. The trip was a study in monotony and discomfort. It only took us three hours, with ten minutes of even more uncomfortable zero gee as the entire brick turned to accelerate to a stop at the nexus. There was no conversation, just the shared misery of captivity.
It was extremely low-tech. No guards on us, as no guards were really needed. The genius of the system was its utter simplicity. If we altered the ship in any way, we’d probably kill ourselves. There was limited fuel and no way of getting more, and if we tried to change the ship’s course, we had no instruments or ways of figuring out where to go. It was basically a rocket-powered baseball, thrown from one catcher to another. Modern ships generally were far more advanced, and I suspected that ‘the brick’ was used solely for its cheapness and its perfect, idiot-proof security. It was basically a big hollow rectangle with simple transit runes, of composite metal, and any weapon would instantly turn it into scrap, and us along with it.
The best part? We were still in restraints. No food, a single reeking oubliette in the middle for the two stories of benches to relieve themselves, and a pre-set drive core that I could probably sing to sleep and reprogram in my sleep, but to what end? Where could I send us? Nowhere, that’s where. I didn’t even dare unlock my own restraints, since, if we arrived at our destination in comfort, the fleet might decide to shoot first and ask questions of the bodies. Compliance was the only strategy for now.
Was I depressed? Absolutely, but not enough to end myself. The stubborn core of me, the part that was my grandmother’s offspring, refused to break. I WILL get out of this and get home somehow, eventually, I promised myself. It might just take some time and attending whatever silly training the fleet thought we would need.
And I wouldn’t cry. Crying was for babies. I had convinced the petty officer I was mature and kept the orc from escalating an insult into a massacre. I could keep acting like an adult until I could finally get home and see my family again. I stifled a sob that threatened to escape, turning it into a cough that was lost in the rumble of the engines. I was a survivor. And this was just another problem to be solved.
