Boot Camp

By the standards of a noble like Augustus, the passenger cabin of this transport ship could only be described as shabby. It was crammed with recruits from all over Korhal.

Young people from the capital, Sterling City, always carried an unmistakable air of superiority. The recruits from the ocean city of Aurora had a lingering salty smell about them, while Wolf was an industrial city built on mining, and the men who came from there were all broad-shouldered and burly...

Though he was a senator's son, Augustus received no special treatment in the military. Angus Mengsk might have had far-reaching influence in Korhal's political circles and wielded immense power, but the Confederate government would never let him meddle in military affairs. After all, Angus had spent the past few years single-handedly stoking Korhal's enthusiasm for rebellion and independence.

That meant Augustus had more reason to worry about being targeted in the military. As for blatant persecution or an attempt to kill him, the Confederate government probably wouldn't go that far—at least not yet.

These days, people were talking about Angus Mengsk's hypocrisy on every major social media platform, at gatherings of the Old Families and prominent businesspeople, and in society ladies' salons.

In public appearances and speeches, Angus railed against the corruption of the Terran Confederacy, calling on the people of Korhal to resist its brutal rule and exploitation. Behind the scenes, though, he had sent both his sons to join the Federal Marine Corps.

People thought Angus was clearly hedging his bets. He was stirring up public sentiment while hawking his company's products for enormous profits, all the while signaling his loyalty to the Confederacy and keeping an escape route open.

That was also why Angus had flown into a rage when Augustus enlisted. His two sons had no intention of becoming his heirs. Not only did they refuse to support his cause, they kept doing rebellious things that sent his blood pressure through the roof.

The fact that Arcturus Mengsk, the Mengsk Family's eldest son and heir, had not only avoided being pushed aside but was also steadily rising through the ranks showed that the Terran Confederacy was happy to use him as ammunition against his father.

Once everyone had boarded the transport, a recruiting sergeant entered the cabin and climbed the steps to the upper deck.

"Lads, at the boot camp on Turaxis II, you'll become the bravest soldiers in the entire Milky Way Galaxy."

The recruiting sergeant flashed a dazzling grin at the excited recruits.

"The glorious, magnificent barracks are waiting for you!"

"Turaxis II? Isn't that a war zone? The recruit camp should be on a planet that hasn't been attacked yet!" A recruit in reasonably decent clothes let out a shriek.

"Shut your mouth, you piece of shit..." The sergeant's expression darkened. He followed with a string of words that Augustus considered crude and vulgar, including plenty of Edge World slang he couldn't understand.

"Listen up, girls." The sergeant pointed at the freckled recruit's nose. "The generals in the chain of command all agree that combat should be part of your training."

"Once you survive long enough to retire, you can run home and cry in your mama's arms. The military wants real soldiers, not a bunch of damn cowards!"

The situation on the front lines must have been this desperate: heavy losses and too few recruits. The military had been forced to send untrained recruits into combat zones ahead of schedule to maintain control and a show of force there.

As the ship's engines roared deafeningly, Augustus strapped himself into an uncomfortable acceleration seat along with the other nervous recruits. He had to keep from slamming into the cabin wall and breaking his neck when the ship made its interstellar jump.

The last to board were two jump-engine technicians. The Peace Dove raised its boarding stairs, cargo bay, and landing gear. Four massive downward-facing thrusters along the sides and tail blazed with heat and light, lifting the Peace Dove four thousand feet into the air.

The thrusters then folded and rotated to face backward. The troop transport carrying Augustus soon became a point of light plunging into deep space.

Built at a Bennett Group spaceport, the transport was capable of deep-space travel and could carry around three thousand soldiers, along with the weapons and supplies they needed. Augustus guessed there were at least five thousand people crammed aboard now, since some unlucky souls had been strapped down in the aisle by his feet.

After a dizzying bout of weightlessness, the Peace Dove settled into a stable sub-jump orbit. Once Augustus had made sure there were no officers nearby, he struck up conversations with the recruits around him.

Augustus did a good job concealing his noble background. He was wearing the cheapest outfit in his wardrobe, but the others could still tell from his clothes that his family was well-off. His brand-name shoes alone were worth at least two hundred credits, even at prices on Sterling's black market. After being rebranded and repackaged in a slum shop, they would cost several times that.

That was enough to buy food for an ordinary slum family for two weeks. If Augustus walked around the slums—or even an ordinary residential district—in those clothes, any number of desperate people would knock him out and drag him into a dark alley. They wouldn't even leave him his underwear.

Augustus had never had any contact with the common folk and didn't yet understand any of this. Still, he spun such a convincing story that the other recruits believed every word. They were sure he was the child of a merchant family that had once been fairly wealthy but had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by the war and asset taxes.

Augustus's good looks and warm, witty manner quickly made him the center of their little group. He barely had to mention what had led him to enlist before everyone else started laying out their own reasons for joining and everything they knew.

Some had been drawn in by recruiting ads and documentaries, captivated by the idea of life in the military. One was the child of miners from an Edge World; his parents had been killed by the Kel-Morians, and he had only just reached the minimum age to enlist that year.

Another had been a street punk in the Victoria District of Sterling, scraping by on smuggling and trafficking. He enlisted because his daughter was seriously ill, and he needed the five thousand credits in Confederate enlistment pay, along with the monthly salary and soldier's benefits.

Before enlisting, the utterly unscrupulous gang leader had already written his will.

By then, Augustus had gained a rough understanding of how ordinary people in the Terran Confederacy lived. It would be an exaggeration to say they were destitute, and at least most people had the means to get by. But as the war dragged on, the Confederate government had raised various taxes, including sales tax, income tax, and other basic levies.

Corrupt officials, the Old Families who secretly controlled the Confederate worlds, and the corporate conglomerates exploited the war to line their pockets. More and more parents had to work themselves to the bone just to earn enough bread to feed their children.

The generous enlistment bonuses and the promise of glory and fortune offered by the Federal Marine Corps were another reason so many people with nowhere else to turn joined up.

After that, Augustus played a card game called Zha Jin Hua with the other recruits, a game none of them had ever heard of, and won a good deal of money from the poor fools.

Time slipped by amid Augustus's hearty laughter and the others' frustrated curses. At four in the morning local time, the Peace Dove dropped out of hyperspace and entered an orbit twice the radius of a deep-green gas giant's moon. It then descended to the starship port at a Confederate interstellar supply station on the planet's seventh moon.

Before the maintenance technicians could refill the Peace Dove's fuel tanks and repaint its wings, the "kind and considerate" captain and sergeant major allowed the recruits to spend time at the supply port's bars and restaurants—and hoped they would blow all the wages they hadn't even received yet.

Augustus returned all the money he had won. Then, using some of the sixty thousand credits his mother had given him before he left, he treated every recruit in his cabin to a feast.