Galactic Division - Book One: Conscription: Book One Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Galactic Division - Book Two: Initiation Excerpt

  GALACTIC DIVISION - BOOK ONE: CONSCRIPTION

  J E Loddon

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition February 2017

  www.jeloddon.com

  www.twitter.com/MRJELoddon

  Cover Art by J E Loddon

  GALACTIC DIVISION - BOOK 1: CONSCRIPTION

  Copyright © 2017 J E Loddon

  All rights reserved.

  For Sam.

  Without your hard work, this wouldn’t have been possible.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “How much money have you got?”

  “Er.. What?” I replied, not fully registering the question. I’m not much of a drinker. I’ve only been old enough to drink for a year, and I’ve never really been able to afford it, anyway. So the couple of drinks I’d had were going to my head pretty quickly.

  “How much money have you got?!” Chris was looking at me expectantly. He didn’t drink much either, but it didn’t seem to be affecting him as much. He was bigger than me, to be fair. Both in height, and body weight. He’d claim it was all muscle, of course. He was a mining rig operator, though, so he had to be fairly strong.

  I pulled out my wallet. It didn’t take long to make a quick calculation. “About two hundred,” I said, “Why, have you run out?”

  “Two hundred?!” he exclaimed. “Where did you get that from?”

  I shrugged sheepishly. “I didn’t pay my rent. Figured it was worth the gamble.”

  Chris sighed, audibly. “That’s crazy,” he told me, “What are you gonna do next week if you’re still here?”

  “Well,” I began, “The way I see it, it’s a win-win situation. If I get drafted tomorrow, it’s not gonna matter what I’ve left behind. If I don’t. Well, at least I get to live, right?”

  Chris shook his head. “Sounds like a lose-lose to me,” he said sadly. He wasn’t wrong, but I’d been determined to have a good night, just in case. It might be the last time we saw each other, after all.

  “Chances are, at least one of us is going to lose the lottery,” I replied.

  “We already lost,” he said, “We were born in The Grit”.

  ‘The Grit’ was what the downtrodden inhabitants of our planet called it. From what we’d heard, it was an expression that had been around for hundreds of years, originating on a planet far from here. There were some areas of lush greenery on the planet. I’d seen pictures of them. Here though, at least, it was dirt and rock as far as you could see, peppered with habitats and machinery. I worked in a factory that made carbon sheeting, the main construction material for the habs and utility buildings.

  “I was gonna ask if you wanted a cup of the good stuff,” Chris said, “but seeing as you’re the big stack, it’s your round.”

  I bought us both a cup of the good stuff, and I savoured mine slowly. Chris became lost in thought, dwelling on tomorrow just as much as I was. I looked around the bar. I didn’t spend much time in bars, but even I knew it was unusual to see so many youngsters out drinking. Some were sat in a stupor, looking pale and grim. Others were much more lively, determined to have the night of a lifetime. For some, their final chance for some fun.

  “I spoke to Joseph the other day,” Chris said suddenly.

  “Joseph? Wow. How is he?” I asked. We’d been schooled alongside Joseph, spent a lot of time with him in our early teens. Then, he’d met a girl, and had drifted away from us. The few other close friends we’d had from that time had all gone their own ways. Chris and I were the only ones left here in Zone 14, having lived here our whole lives. I’d moved from hab to hab, whilst Chris was still living in his family home, by himself.

  “He isn’t married yet,” he said. “He’s still with Tamara, they just haven’t gotten around to it.” Joseph and Tamara had been planning to marry almost since the day they’d met. They were too young then, but there shouldn’t have been anything stopping them now. Aside from the draft…

  “How old is she?” I asked. I knew she was younger, but couldn’t remember by how much.

  “Seventeen,” he said, “two more years for her.” Everyone was entered into the draft in their nineteenth year. Around a quarter of the potential draftees would be called up, depending on how big the pool was.

  “Must be really tough for them,” I said, “I can’t imagine facing this knowing I was leaving someone behind like that.” My parents had moved zones when I was fifteen, my Mother having received a job offer she couldn’t refuse. They couldn’t afford to take me with them, though I’d have struggled to leave anyway. Chris had been my closest friend for as long as I could remember.

  Chris’s face darkened. “When I said I’d see Joseph at the draft, he shook his head. Said I wouldn’t be seeing him there,” he replied.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Wow. Seriously? He’s gonna duck?”

  Chris shrugged. “They want to stay together, always have,” he said, “I’m not really surprised.”

  “If he gets a black mark, though, he’s not gonna be able to just go back to his job. He’ll have to disappear. They both will. Not gonna be much of a life for them living in the shadows.”

  “I guess they’d rather be guaranteed a life together in poverty, than risk Joseph being shipped off-planet with no chance to even say goodbye,” Chris shot back. For some, that was the harshest part of the conscription process. If your name was drawn, you stepped straight onto the ship, leaving your family and possessions behind. No goodbyes, and no opportunity to run.

  Conversation ran out again for a while. I bought two more cups, despite it being Chris’s round. We sat in silence whilst enjoying the burning feeling of liquor rolling down our throats. It was a weird, knowing that this could be my last night on this planet. It was my home, such as it was. It wasn’t pretty, and life wasn’t exactly a joy, for me at least. It was all I knew, though. The idea of entering the unknown was a frightening prospect.

  I became aware of raised voices behind me. I turned to see a big, dark-haired guy, my age, standing forehead to forehead with another, older guy. They were shouting at each other, but I couldn’t catch what they were saying. Then, so quickly I nearly didn’t see it, another young guy smashed a glass over the head of the older guy. He dropped like a bag of sand, and the young guys started kicking him. Chairs scraped on floors, and three other older guys jumped the assailants. Two more kids, obviously with the young guys, joined in, and it had turned into a proper fight. I felt my stomach go cold. I was sitting pretty close to the action, and it looked likely to spill over. I didn’t want to get up, lest someone saw me as a target. Instead, I cowered down in my chair.

  Tomorrow, I could potentially be sent off into bloody warfare with a malevolent alien race. Here I was, cowering away from a drunken bar fight. I looked across at Chris. He was sitting tensed and uneasy, though didn’t display the pure terror that I knew must be showing on my face. I tried to loosen up a little bit. Someone would surely break them up in a minute? The damned Galactic Division were on the planet, for crying out loud, there must be someone able to stop this before somebody got killed. In the end, though, the older guys left. They were winning the fight, but didn’t want to risk arrest. The younger guys, I was guessing, were facing the draft tomorrow, and had little left to lose. Bar owners must hate the eve of the draft almost as much as the potentials…

  Once everything had quieted down, I began to relax a little, or as much as I could under the circumstances, anyway. I glanced over to see Chris giving me a worried look.

  “You know…,” he began, “There’s not a lot keeping you here. Rented hab, a job you hate. You now can’t afford to pay your rent either.”

  “Well, maybe, but it still beats flying across the galaxy just to get my head blown off,” I pointed out.

  He shook his head. “That’s not what I’m getting at”, he said. “You know, you could duck the draft. I could too, and we could go live out in the wastes?”

  ‘The Wastes’ was the colloquial term for areas outside of zonal control. Originally just places where the most destitute and homeless had built crude settlements, they’d become their own
towns, with separate economies, and some even with small elected governments, I’d heard. The powers that be had originally tried to eradicate these areas, but it hadn’t been worth the violent outbreaks that had occurred whenever government enforcers tried to enter these areas. As a result of this policy of non-intervention, it had become common practice for potential draftees to go on the run, and settle in these areas.

  “I wouldn’t last any longer in The Wastes then I will out there”, I said, pointing to the sky. “And at least up there I might get regular meals before I die.”

  Because of the general lawlessness of the out-of-zone areas, there was a much higher level of violent crime. Even in the more ‘civilised’ encampments, greed and corruption was rife. It probably was in the zones too, but here there was at least some level of formal control.

  Chris shrugged. “At least you’d have some level of control out in the wastes,” he said. “Either way, it’s a gamble, I guess.”

  I nodded. I was no mathematician, but even I knew that there was only a roughly 25% chance I’d get called up, as opposed to a 100% chance that I’d get eaten alive out in the wastes.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not planning to get called up. Neither are you. No point risking what we do have here ‘just in case’. Joseph has a reason to duck. I’m not convinced it’s a good one, but he obviously is. We’ll be fine,” I asserted. “Now, you gonna buy us some drinks or what?”

  “Do you remember,” I asked after he had returned with fresh cups, “when we tried to run away to Invalon?” A big smile immediately appeared on Chris’s mouth.

  “Do you mean the first or second time?” he asked, grinning. I thought for a few moments, confused. Then, I remembered that we had, in fact, tried it twice.

  “No, no, I meant the second time. I’d completely forgotten about the first time. How old were we the first time?” I asked him. Chris thought for a moment.

  “Nine, I think. We were supposed to be going to pick up something for your Mum. I can’t remember what it was, but your uncle or someone was giving her something. I don’t remember what it was…” We both thought for a few minutes. “What was it?” he asked. “I remember it was big, and she was concerned you wouldn’t be able to carry it.”

  “It was some sort of appliance,” I said finally, giving up on the details, “I don’t think she ever got it in the end.

  “Yeah,” he said, still distractedly trying to remember what the appliance was. “We tried to get a bus to Invalon instead. But we didn’t have enough money, so we started following the bus.” We both started laughing.

  “We lost sight of the bus in less than a minute!”, I continued, “and you said ‘Follow the dust trail, follow the dust trail!’ But there was dust everywhere!”

  “We needed to keep it in sight long enough to reach the edge of the town,” he replied, “then following the dust trail would have worked!”

  “Yeah, for about ten minutes,” I countered, “Then it would have settled, and we’d have had to just walk back into town anyway.”

  Invalon was a town about 300 miles north of our sector. It was rare for a sector to be given an official name, but Invalon was the closest town to us that actually had a chance at a future. We’d been obsessed with Invalon for as long as I could remember, since we’d heard that the streets there were lined with trees. I’d never seen a tree. Neither of us had. We had some stickle-bushes that grew pretty high, but you certainly wouldn’t want to climb one. The idea of being able to walk down the street and just climb a tree, and pull fruit off of it… well, that seemed like the greatest thing ever.

  “We definitely got further the second time,” I reminded him.

  It had been a few years after that first attempt, when we’d been about 13. It had been a far more serious attempt to get there. We’d gathered supplies together; Money, food, anything useful we could get hold of for using as trade. We hadn’t wanted to waste money on a bus, and certainly couldn’t have afforded to go more than 50 miles on one anyway. So we’d sneaked aboard a refuse truck. The truck had been empty, just passing through on its way to another town. There was a trash dump near to our sector, and trucks brought rubbish from sectors from miles around to dump there. The hope was that this truck would be going far North, giving us a good start on our journey. Unfortunately, it stopped at a sector just a mile North of ours, and was immediately filled.

  “There you are, asking people ‘What sector is this?’,” Chris was saying, “And they all thought you were insane.”

  “Then eventually, it turned into ‘Which way is North?’,” I said. “And I still couldn’t get an answer from anyone.”

  We’d eventually gotten our bearings, and after failing to find someone to give us a ride further, we’d started to hike on foot.

  “Then we got to what we thought was Zone 24, wasn’t it?” he asked. I nodded. “And we spent two hours looking for the bus station.”

  “And remember?” I said, laughing, “The whole time we’re going ‘Wow, our zone is actually pretty nice, isn’t it?’. Then that creepy old guy asked us if we wanted to eat at his place.”

  “Right, and we’re saying ‘Thanks, but we’re just looking for the bus station,” Chris added, tears of laughter starting to form.

  “’Bus station?!!’” I exclaimed, mimicking the old man’s incredulous voice. “‘There’s no bus station in the wastes!’”

  “I was so scared!” Chris said, nodding, “The pure terror of finding out we were in the wastes!”

  We’d both looked at each other, then just ran, as fast as we could. We ran back the way we’d come, not looking back. Despite the fact that our feet were blistered and bleeding from the long walk up, we must have gotten halfway back to the zone we’d just come from before we dared stop running. We’d heard such horrific stories about the dangers of the wastes. We’d probably been right to be scared, too. Two stupid kids who knew nothing about anything, in a lawless encampment full of desperate people. We were lucky that we had gotten out without a scratch.

  We hadn’t felt lucky, though, when we’d gotten home. Chris’s Mother probably hadn’t even missed him, having been too far gone mentally by that point. But my parents, well, they gave us into so much trouble. We hadn’t been allowed to go out together for a month. Chris had hung around outside my window a lot of that time, the two of us whispering through the grating. I’d envied Chris his freedom then. I knew now, though, that he had envied me, having parents that cared enough to punish me.

  To be fair, it wasn’t that his Mother hadn’t cared, exactly. She had just never recovered from the trauma of Chris’s father being killed. Chris’s Dad had joined up to the Division in the days before enforced service was a rigid policy. Both his parents had, actually. And whilst those that joined several years after them had been allowed no freedoms, Chris’s parents had put enough service in at the beginning that they were officers by the time the rules became so strict. His Dad was free to go home for leave every year, whilst his Mother, upon falling pregnant, was allowed to quit completely. She may well have been one of the last afforded this luxury.

  I don’t really remember much more about that night. I know there was more laughter, and I’m pretty sure there were some tears. We’d talked a lot about the good times we’d had. None had been so eventful as that journey North, because we’d never been able to afford to do anything, or go anywhere. That hadn’t mattered too much, though. Whatever we had done, we’d done together, and made the best of it. The idea that we might be separated was weighing heavily on both of us. I had a feeling that Chris would be OK if it did happen. Having not had a Father for most of his life, and barely really having had a Mother even before she’d disappeared, he was very independent. So much so, in fact, that when we’d tried living together in his family home, he hadn’t been able to cope. It wasn’t necessarily that I had bad habits. It was just that he liked to keep things exactly as they’d been when his parents were both still there, and I never knew the significance of this chair being here, or that plate staying in the cupboard.