Chapter 1

Burning My Bridges (TY9-month 104)

I walked out of the testing center and transported directly to the Militia headquarters at Drovers Run without even looking at my card. I left as soon as I got my card, before the Civil Service officer could say anything. I’d done my reading and even if by some oddball quirk of fate my CAP turned out to be 6.5 or better, they couldn’t make people volunteer. Our colony on Tara was ten years old now, founded just five years after humans’ first contact with the Sa’arm. Most human colonies in the Confederacy dated everything based on the so-called Swarm Calendar in Earth standard days and years. Not Tara. We dated everything based on the Tara Year from the first landing. It took me about a week to get used to it when we arrived and then I never thought about it again.

The governor of Tara had decreed that on his or her birthday (according to the Tara year) any concubine could volunteer for the colony Militia and would eventually earn citizenship. I didn’t need a sponsor to approve my joining and I was certainly never going to return to my stepfather’s farm to let him enslave me for another lifetime. He called himself my stepfather. More like my owner, if you ask me. Even as a dependent, he’d worked my fingers to the bone. I’d had enough of the farm life in the four years and three months we’d been on Tara.

That was part of why I didn’t care if I qualified for sponsorship. I hated the Confederacy and didn’t want anything to do with the aliens or their military. I hated my mother’s sponsor, his other concubine and the other eight brats on the farm. Except my sisters. I’ll get to them later. I even hated my mother for having ripped us away from my father and our lives on Earth to become the slaves of Amos Radcliffe. That was four years ago.

Leaving Earth (TY5-month 60, Earth Year 9)

It was supposed to be a great day. I was ten years old and we were going to the county fair. Rides, junk food, and even an exhibition by my Taekwondo class. Mom promised my sisters and me that we could have all the junk food and rides we wanted after my exhibition. Anne was two years older than me and Bae was three years younger. I’m Niall, by the way.

Dad couldn’t join us. They didn’t give factory workers the day off to go to the fair. The next weekend, though, he’d promised to take me to the national chess competition in Baton Rouge. It would be a long drive, but I was crazy excited about it. I was the regional chess champion for my age group and qualified to play at nationals. Dad and I played every night and we were pretty evenly matched now. Dad was wicked smart. He worked in a factory because it was good money and regular hours.

“Why would I want to work in an office for a salary and never know how many hours I’d have to put in. I like being home with my family at night,” he’d once said. I liked having him home, too. We did all kinds of things together. He’d even helped me get my yellow belt in Taekwondo. I was ready to test for my green belt soon.

All those dreams went up in smoke when a gray interdiction field went up around the county fair. Anne took Bae and me to the dependents’ barn while Mom joined the cattle hoping to be selected as some stranger’s sex slave. Amos chose her as his ‘exotic’ and took his own daughter as his other concubine. We were transported to a waiting ship along with most of the livestock at the fair. This was a special pickup that was supposed to get a diverse collection of domestic animals. They were put in a hibernation state and transported to the ships by shuttle. We were all shipped off to Tara, an agricultural planet devoted to maintaining Earth’s agricultural ecosystem. Amos Radcliffe became a private in the Confederacy Corps of Engineers. [See Buying Wholesale by Thinking Horndog for an example of a County Fair pickup.] [See also A Day at the Fair by Baron Rod.]

I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my father. I tried to run away, but some jolly green giant hauled me back in line and my mother wouldn’t let go of my arm until we were on the ship. I didn’t get my green belt. I didn’t play in the national chess championships. I was just more livestock shipped off to Tara.

I hated Amos and he was none too fond of me. He just wanted the help on his new farm. The first thing he did was put Mom and Christine, his daughter, in the med tubes. Mom was a delicate Asian. She came out nearly as strong and bulky as a Marine—a human workhorse. Christine had been short and fat. She loved being made into a big powerful girl. Amos even asked if he could have me modified but was told not until I was fourteen. A good thing, too. I’d have used the power and strength to kill him. And of course, he was just as big and strong as he’d made the women. All three of the adults were able to handle the work of two unaugmented men each on the farm. I knew if I went back to be his concubine, he’d do the same thing to me. Mom and Christine each had a baby the first year on Tara. Anne turned fourteen and Amos took her as a concubine, too. He did the same routine with body mods and she pumped out her first baby the next year. Mom and Christine dropped another each and Anne was pregnant with her second. She had a hollow look in her eyes like she knew the rest of her life was going to be nothing but pumping out babies and hard work on the farm.

I hated the Confederacy and everything it stood for. But I wasn’t stupid. I used the sleep trainer in my little free time to continue advancing through my levels of Taekwondo. Of course, there was no master here to judge my forms. No one to test me. I wouldn’t accept belts from the AI. I played chess with it, though. AIs aren’t as smart as people think they are. If they were, they wouldn’t need humans to fight their damn war. But they learn, just like I learned. When it came to chess, our household AI and I were pretty evenly matched.

I called the AI Cricket, after that little conscience critter in the movie Pinocchio. He was the only thing I was going to miss when I left the farm.

Recruitment (TY9-month 104)

So, now I was fourteen. I’d taken my CAP test and left to join the Militia. I knew Mom and Anne and Bae would be disappointed when I didn’t show up for my celebratory dinner that night. But I’d never go back there.

Governor O’Hara—How do you like that? Scarlett O’Hara was the governor of the planet Tara—had adopted the concept of a planetary Militia early on. It was two years old on Tara. The idea was pioneered on Demeter, a planet that was a huge military installation. [See Colonisation by Duke of Ramus.] Tara didn’t have much of a military presence. One of our townships was reserved for rest and recuperation of Marines and Navy who needed a break from the front lines. There were fewer than 10,000 of them on the planet and they kept strictly to their own township. Of course, the sponsors on Tara all held military ranks in the Confederacy Corps of Engineers, Agricultural Division, but they knew next to nothing about military matters except showing up for a weekend each month for ‘training.’

Any concubine could volunteer for the Militia on their birthday or anniversary of their arrival on Tara. The opportunity came every year. The term of service was supposed to be thirty years active and thirty years reserve—and they were not easy years. If not training or engaged in actual battle—which was only a remote possibility for our little backwater world—the Militia was the public works department of the colony. I’d seen Militia members going through an expansion of Amos’s farm picking up rocks from the field. They also made sure open ranges were patrolled and free of predators. They might get involved in ship maintenance if they showed a particular aptitude for that.

Members of the Militia were given all the same rights as a sponsor with a 6.5 CAP—including a pod to live in and the right to take two concubines. The only limit was that they couldn’t leave the planet. At the end of their sixty years of satisfactory performance, we’d supposedly be granted full Confederacy citizenship.

I had no illusions about it being a cushy way out of farm life, but I doubted it would be any worse than being owned by the asshole Amos. I knew of a couple of people in Twelve Oaks who had joined the Militia and quit to become slave concubines again because the work in the Militia was too hard. But in sixty years I could be a free Confederacy Citizen. Then I’d set about righting some wrongs. Starting with Amos.

“Name?”

“Niall Cho.”

“AI, why don’t we have a record of a Niall Cho?”

“The concubine before you is named Niall Radcliffe.”

“That is my mother’s sponsor’s name, not mine. I’m Niall Cho.”

“AI, register the change of name to Niall Cho.”

“Affirmative.”

I looked around the recruiting office. The officer guy behind the desk was looking over my records. It was a plain building that looked a lot like the testing center—a reception area and a hall with doors on the left and right, and one door at the end. There was one recruiting poster on the wall advertising “Join the Militia, today! Be a citizen tomorrow!” The Militia guy looked kind of silly in a plain dark brown coverall, holding a rifle that looked like a toy.

“All right, Niall Cho. You want to join the Militia. You know your CAP score...”

“Please, sir. I’m not interested in my CAP score. I’m only interested in joining the Militia—unless you won’t have me.”

“Okay. You know, it’s not easy. We throw away one out of ten recruits. You’re giving up sixty years. It could be the rest of your life,” the sergeant said.

“If I was a slave concubine, it would be the rest of my life. What choice do I have? At least there’s a stop loss in the Militia,” I said.

“And you think you’ve got what it takes to endure the time and the hardships to become a citizen? No one’s ever done it before.” He was clever. Of course no one had ever done it before.

“The program is only two years old,” I said. “It’s hard to survive sixty years in a program that’s only two years old.”

“You’ll feel like it was sixty years by the time you’ve done two years,” he said. “Any special skills?”

“I’m a chess master and would be the equivalent of a Taekwondo black belt if there was a qualified master on the planet who could test me.”

“Really? You know if the Sa’arm invade this planet, you should hope they don’t get close enough for hand-to-hand combat. Weapons experience?”

“Only bo staff. I can handle an axe. I know how to use a knife.” We needed those skills on the farm.

“Okay. We’re going to give you a test to determine where to put you in our training. I can almost guarantee you it will be at the bottom,” the sergeant said.

“I just took my CAP test,” I said.

“That determines if you’re a sponsor or a drone. Think of this as your college placement test. Did you go to school?”

“On Earth. Other than that, I took all my schooling by sleep trainer. Our farm was pretty remote from Twelve Oaks,” I said. Maybe if I’d gone to a real school, I would have had better socialization and wouldn’t have let my hatred steep for so long. Now I had a single-minded purpose. I would start by killing Amos Radcliffe, my mother’s sponsor.

“One of those,” the recruitment officer sighed. “Go to the second room on the right down this hall. Strip and lie in the testing chair. Like you did for your CAP test. When you’re finished, the AI will provide you with a uniform and a communications implant. Leave by the back door and you’ll be on our base. You’ll be assigned to a barracks and class. Follow instructions from there.”

“I thought Militia became citizens of the planet and were issued a pod,” I said. He laughed at me.

“Not on day one, they don’t. When you finish training, you’ll be eligible for a pod, if you want one. No concubines until you’re past probation.”

“How long is training?”

“Until you’re done. This is a young program, recruit. We’ve had two years and have turned nearly 200 recruits into Militia comrades. But there are a lot of hiccups. Part of your duty is to find and report them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s no sir in the Militia. This isn’t the fucking Marines.”

The idea of the barracks didn’t sound bad to me. Rooming with other people? I might find some friends here. It couldn’t be all that bad.

When I stepped off the testing bed, I saw a new uniform neatly folded in the replicator. It was just a neatly pressed coverall, dark reddish brown, and plain. I pulled it on and, of course, it fit perfectly. So did the lightweight boots. I couldn’t really tell anything from the uniform. There was no rank insignia on it. All it had was my surname on the left pocket flap. “Cho.” Brief and to the point.

“What’s my rank?” I wondered aloud.

“You are a recruit trainee. No other rank has been assigned,” the AI said. «You do not need to speak aloud for me to hear you. Just subvocalize your questions and I’ll respond.»

«Wow! I wonder if I’ll ever get used to this. Is this like mental telepathy?»

«No. It is a standard communications chip that was implanted during your test. It will get easier as you practice. Exit through the door at the end of the hall and you will find Capo Humphreys with a class of trainees. Join her.» That was a little abrupt. Fortunately, the test was also an instructional session. I learned the ranks and was told that anyone I met was either a higher rank or had more seniority than I had.

There were eight ranks in the Militia and they weren’t really divided like military ranks were. It was possible for you to work your way up all the way from recruit/trainee to chief Militia officer. None of the ranks were the same as a military rank. We had our own form of military discipline, but the governor wanted no confusion on anyone’s part that we weren’t part of the Confederacy military.

The ranks, starting at the bottom and working up, were:

Recruit/trainee, usually part of a class of recruits undergoing training.

Comrade, what most of us would be now and forever. Usually, comrades were part of a cadre of four to sixteen. The term comrade was also the generic term for a Militia member. Kind of like the term ‘soldier’ in the Army. From the end of training and always thereafter, we would be comrades.