"Somebody said the military have medical technology that would easily heal us all in an instant. Why don´t they use it?" Ariel said. Ethan chuckled.
"Because we´re not soldiers yet. They´re not using their expensive high tech on us lowlifes." It came off with quite a bit of bitterness, even if he hadn´t meant to. But being beat up like this was just the final straw. After being told he wouldn´t be accepted, even if he did well today, he´d nevertheless done his best. And tomorrow they´d do the rounds, where, according to Jeremy Tanner, who seemed to know what he was talking about, Ethan would be rejected by every single recruiter. What a day…
8.
Ethan felt even worse than the day before, his bruising reaching new levels of pain. The medics had given him painkillers before, but Ethan had put them aside. Now he grumbled and took one pill, swallowed it with some water and laid back on his bed. Most of the others were still asleep, something that quickly changed when the lights flickered on and a familiar voice shouted.
"Get up kids, time to face the truth. God, it stinks in here! Oh yeah, it´s the stink of rejection!" Good old Sergeant Cheery, Ethan thought. He got to his feet, having been dressed already, and looked over at Julian, who was stumbling out of bed, struggling to get his clothes back on because of his broken fingers. Ariel, in the bunk opposite from Ethan, had even more of a hard time. While Ethan had been lucky yesterday, and only had a few sore muscles to complain about, Ariel only had one good eye, while the other was effectively shut by the swelling.
"Remind me again, why did we come here?" she grumbled. Ethan shook his head, but didn´t reply. He had enough with his own low mood.
They went to get some breakfast, then went to find the recruiters.
All recruitment into the armed forces took place in the same building that they had taken the tests. The first and second floors were used for the various testing areas, while the sleeping quarters were located on the fourth and fifth floors. On the sixth floor were the lounge and mess hall, while recruiters took up the seventh floor. They had been given the general layout on the first day, and now the friends went to the elevator which would take them up to the seventh floor, the one place they hadn´t set foot yet.
The first thing they saw when they exited the elevator was the registration booth.
"Over here, people," a corporal said. "Make sure you have your infopads ready for registration. You will have to be registered to be allowed to speak to the recruiters."
Ethan stepped forward and gave his infopad to the corporal, who tapped at the screen.
"Mister... Ethan Wang. There, go ahead," he said. Ethan took the infopad and waved for the others. The corporal noticed him again, and frowned.
"Move along, Mr. Wang. Recruitment is done on an individual basis. You´ll see your friends later." Ethan nodded, and turned away.
The first booth was the most prestigious, by far, and the recruiters, all five of them, looked like they were cut out from the recruitment posters. All were above average height, athletic, with the same buzz cut. The men were clean shaven and the women wore their hair in tight ponytails. The uniforms were smart, black with silver details, and their symbol was a rocket engulfed in flames. This was the Aerospace Corps, or the AC as it was usually referred to. Ethan looked at the posters, depicting everything from Earth-based airplanes and drones, to space-based assets such as rockets, satellites, space stations and space troopers with advanced plasma guns.
"The AC is the elite, the best of the best," one of the recruiters said to those gathered around. "Not many have what it takes, but if you do, this is the service you´ll want to join."
Ethan waited as several candidates showed off their infopads. Every single one of them was turned away. Ethan remembered Jeremy Tanner´s words, but the man had been half-crazy, hadn´t he? Did he really want to try out for the Aerospace Corps? That was another question he couldn´t answer. He looked around at the other recruiting booths, but something drew him back to the AC booth. He hadn´t really thought of what kind of service he wanted to apply for. But if someone claimed to be the best, perhaps they were? And if he was going to fight, wouldn´t it make sense to get the best training there was? Nervously, he stepped up to a dark-skinned recruiter and offered up his infopad. The recruiter took it, and tapped on it.
"Mr. Wang, so you want to join the Aerospace Corps?" he chuckled. Ethan nodded, not sure how to answer. The recruiter looked up from the infopad. His eyes narrowed and Ethan knew the answer before he spoke.
"Sorry Mr. Wang, we have no use for someone like you."
9.
An hour later, Ethan met the others in the lounge area. He found a vacant chair and looked at the others. He could tell from Ariel´s slumped stance and Julian´s sullen expression that none of them had had any luck either. They sat around a low table, like so many others, wondering what to do next.
"Rejects," Ariel spat. Nobody protested. "Goddamned rejects."
"Being rejected by the AC, that´s one thing. I get that. They´re elite, and they only take a small number anyhow." Julian said, musing. "But the Navy and the goddamned Army? I bet they need thousands of new recruits every year. I wonder what we did wrong." Nobody could answer, and Ethan had been thinking the same things.
"Wanna get out of here?" he said. Ariel nodded, but before they even got up, one of the test administrators, the one who had met them the first day, came over.
"You might want to check out the basement," she said.
"The basement?" Ethan said, frowning.
"That´s where the auxiliary services are recruiting. Support troops, like facility management, cleaning, cooking, warehousing, accounting. Test administrators." She smiled. "Everything the armed forces need to run that isn´t actually combat related. It´s nobody´s first choice, I get it, but they do take recruits all the time. Might be worth a shot." She moved on.
"Well, what do you think?" Ethan said to the others. Ariel shrugged.
"Why the hell not." They got up and walked to the elevator.
When they stepped out of the elevator, they entered a large area that looked more like a warehouse than anything. The basement was darker than the floors above and the air felt stuffy. Ethan wondered if they had got off on the right level, but a sign above the elevator confirmed that this was the lowermost level. Near the elevator, a door marked with a hand-written sign that read "Staff Only" stood ajar. Ethan walked over to it, and peered inside.
"Who´s there?" a voice said. Then he heard shuffling feet, and a moment later, a familiar face stood before him.
"So, there you are," Jeremy Tanner said and closed the door behind him. He looked Ariel and Julian up and down.
"Hmm, we´ll see about your friends."
"What´s going on?" Ariel said.
"You´ll see," Jeremy Tanner said, with a faraway expression. "Move along that way, past the auxiliaries. At the end you´ll find the Legion´s man. You might want to hear what he has to say." Then he continued to trail off like he had when Ethan first met him. "He doesn´t take just anyone, oh no, just like the Aerospace Corps. But he´s Legion. Legion is different, oh yes, very different. Different, different, different. Go on now, tell him Jerry sent you. He knows you´re coming, oh yes, he knows. Spoke to him you know, told him you´re coming, told him you´re coming today. He´s expecting you, waiting for you. Don´t make him wait, Legion´s always busy, always busy, some planet or another, oh yes. He paused.
"What are you guys doing still standing here? Get moving now, go on."
10.
They quickly passed several booths of recruiters before they reached the booth Tanner had sent them to. A dark-skinned man in his early forties sat by a table, reading a book. Short haired and clean shaven, he wore a nondescript uniform, with the letters “SD” in black on his shoulder. He was also wearing old-fashioned reading glasses. A curious thing, since no one used glasses anymore, except people too poor to have their eyesight fixed, or those too stubborn. The man got up, removed his glasses and had a good look at th
em.
"I bet you´re Mr. Wang," he said, pointing at Ethan. Then he looked at the others. "And you must be Ariel and Julian." All three nodded in confirmation.
"I´m Senior Decurion Ford of the Ghost Legion," he said simply as they handed over their infopads. He checked them out without a word, before he put them all on the table and picked up his own device.
"So they all rejected you, did they?" he said after a while. Ethan found the man´s half-smile didn´t provoke him as he would have expected.
"Yes sir," Ethan replied. The senior decurion, whatever that meant, smiled and put down his device.
"We might be able to take all three of you. I assume you´d want to serve together, if possible?"
"They said it never happens," Ethan began, but stopped when Ford shook his head.
"Of course it happens. If you´d been selected into the army, you´d most likely serve in the same platoon, at least during Boot Camp. After that, it would depend on your specializations, but you´d most likely be placed in the same brigade, and if you all became, say, infantrymen, you´d likely be placed in the same battalion. It usually depends on when you sign up." He paused.
"Sir, would it be possible for you to tell us more about this Ghost Legion? I have to admit, I´ve never heard of it before," Ethan said.
"You´ll learn all there is if you sign up. If not, sorry, but almost everything we do is classified." he picked up his device again. "I can tell you this though: the Ghost Legion always gets the most dangerous missions, the ones that doesn´t officially exist, or the ones where the odds of survival are so low that they don´t want to send their precious Aerospace Corps. Surprisingly though, the Ghost Legion has existed for more than ten years, and quite a few of us are still alive and kicking. Mostly because of our training, our weapons and our superior tactics."
"Did you fight in the war?" Ariel asked. The man just smiled.
"Not at first. But once every able-bodied man and woman were drafted, I was sucked into the Army. After the war, I spent a few years trying to make it in civilian life, until one day I decided to rejoin the Forces. Got rejected, just like you guys. Seemed they didn´t have any use for a grunt like me anymore. One of the recruiters though, took me aside and told me they were putting together a special unit comprising of combat veterans that would stay outside the official Armed Forces system. For special occasions." he grinned. "Long story short, I signed up on the spot and got sent off the same day. A few weeks later, I saw combat again."
"Wow... I assume we´d be given training though, before-" Ariel said
"Of course. You guys are all green, and one thing we don´t need in the Legion is cannon fodder."
"Good to know," Ethan commented drily.
"Look," Ariel said, "this Jeremy Tanner fellow, does he work for the Legion as well?" Ford grinned.
"Jerry, well, in a way. He´s on government payroll now, but he does have ties to the Legion. I´m sorry, but that´s all I can say." He looked at his infopad again.
"Alright then, I can put you all in the same unit for Basic, but you´ll have to decide quickly, since your ride leaves tonight. So, what´s it gonna be?" he said. Ethan and Ariel looked at each other. They had wanted to sign up, but none of them had expected to have to leave this quickly. They had a few weeks left of school, and now they wouldn´t even have time to go home first.
"I´m in," Julian said loudly, surprising them all. They turned toward him, and Senior Decurion Ford extended his hand. Julian took it.
"Nothing left for me here anyway." Ethan thought he heard a hint of bitterness in his voice. Understandably so, he thought. But Ethan did have his mother, and Ariel had her family.
"Can we call our families first?" she asked.
"Sure. You´ve got about two hours to do whatever you´d like, as long as you´re back here at six-thirty sharp."
Ethan looked at Ariel, who seemed to be thinking hard. Then she gave him a quick nod. Ethan extended his hand to the senior decurion.
"We´re in as well."
11.
They returned two hours later. None of them said much. Speaking to his mother had been heart-breaking. She knew he was at the recruitment office, but like him, she hadn´t expected him to leave this soon. Her words still rang in his head, and he couldn´t shake it.
"What if you get... What if something happens to you? What if I never see..." Ethan knew exactly what she thought. What if he never saw her again; what if he never returned? What if a mother never saw her son again, not even having said goodbye properly?
"That was horrible," Ariel said simply, and Ethan couldn´t agree more.
"Alright kids, here´s the final paperwork," Senior Decurion Ford said, infopads laid out in front of them, indicating with his finger where they should put their thumbs to sign. They all did, and Ford took the infopads back, plugged them into some kind of docking system and locked up the booth.
"Welcome to the Ghost Legion. You are now officially recruits. If you´re worried about rank, don´t be. It´s easy. Simple rule of thumb: anyone not a recruit is your superior, and you should adhere to anything they say. You´ll learn the rest soon enough. Now, follow me."
The senior decurion led them through the double doors next to the booth and they entered a long tunnel lit only with what must’ve been emergency lighting. None of them said anything as they followed his brisk steps through the darkness. They emerged into a big cavern, and Ethan immediately noticed there were some kind of tracks laid from one end to the other, which disappeared into a tunnel on either side.
"Are we leaving by train, sir?" he asked.
"Sort of. We´ll be picked up by a maglev in a few minutes, that´ll take us to the spaceport."
Spaceport! Were they going off to space? So soon? What about basic training? Ethan began to wonder if he had made a big mistake by signing up, but then he noticed the grin on the senior decurion´s face.
"Don´t worry, recruit, it´s just a LEO plane; a short flight up into low Earth orbit, before we dive back down again. Basic training isn´t anywhere close, so we´ll go the hard and fast way."
Ethan had never been to space, or on a LEO plane. Thinking about it made him both excited and queasy at the same time. When the maglev train arrived though, a few minutes later, he forgot all about it. The train was like nothing he had seen before, with nice cushioned seats, huge panorama windows along the sides, and once it began moving, it was smooth as silk.
"Whoa," Julian said, "This is something else. Why don´t all trains run like this?"
"Well, just this track and the trains that use it cost more than all the other lines together, for one thing," Senior Decurion Ford said. "There are just five of these in North America. So enjoy the ride — it´s your last little piece of luxury you´ll see for a while."
The train exited the tunnel, having run beneath the city until they were well outside of it, and Ethan gasped.
The train ran at least twenty meters above ground, floating above its magnetic tracks and the view of the landscape outside was breathtaking. Lush green hills as far as they could see, a lake glittering in the sunlight, livestock grazing in the distance and the city was nowhere to be seen. Ethan had been outside the city a few times on vacation and once on a school excursion, but he had never seen the countryside like this. No words could describe the beauty and Senior Decurion Ford chuckled at their loss for words.
"Yeah, it´s beautiful, isn´t it? Remember this, for this is what you´ll be fighting for."
12.
The journey took them an hour and as soon as the doors opened, Senior Decurion Ford led them out onto the platform.
"Well, this is as far as I go. Just enter the building over there and present your infopads, and they´ll put you on the next flight to basic training. Good luck to you all!"
He jumped back on the train and the three of them stood there alone.
"Well, what are we waiting for?" Ariel said. "Let´s go."
They walked over to the station building and found a counter.
/> "Fresh meat for the grinder, eh?" a grayish man said as they handed over their infopads.
"What have we here then... Ghost Legion recruits, well, well, well..." he mumbled, shaking his head. A prosthetic hand returned the infopads and he waved them toward an exit.
"Gate 39, that´s all the way over there. You will board Flight 876. It leaves in fifty minutes. You have time, but you should get your asses there ASAP. And... best of luck guys."
Ethan thanked him and turned. Then they walked to the gate. It took them half an hour and when they got there, a stern corporal directed them onward.
"Carry on right through here, and you´d better hurry up. Preflight´s in just five minutes."
They entered what looked like a regular plane on the inside, except that there were no windows. Then they were directed to their seats, just in time for the preflight security instructions.
Ethan strapped in and tried to pay attention, but realized his mind was wandering. He was about to go into space for the first time, about to leave his relatively cushy life back home, about to enter military service in the Ghost Legion, an outfit he´d never heard of before. He noticed a soldier walking along the rows, checking every passenger closely. He stopped next to Ethan.
"You need to tighten that," the soldier said, and pulled at his hip belt. Then he pulled out two straps Ethan hadn´t noticed, clicked them into the same lock and tightened them.
"Now you´re ready. Imagine weightless recruits flying around in here; did you even listen to the instructions?" he said, more to himself than to Ethan, and, without waiting for an answer, he took Ethan´s infopad and put it in a seat pocket in front of him.
"There. Enjoy the flight," he said, and moved to the next confused passenger. He caught Julian´s grin, and grinned back.
"What, it´s not like you´d ever flown one of these before, is it?" Ethan said. Julian grinned even wider.
"Well, in fact, I did. Last summer, when we took that vacation to Australia, we took a LEO plane..." he didn´t say anything else, and Ethan noticed his look changed. No wonder. Julian´s family were rich last summer, and his dad was a successful businessman. Now his dad was in jail and the family had lost everything.
Ghost Legion Page 3
