He leaned forward, as if he were going to whisper a secret. “And we pay in cash,” he added. “Your salary can be paid each month, or it can be banked with the Imperial Bank, rather than the Bank of Avalon. You won’t have to pay off any debt-mongers if you don’t want to.”
A rustle ran through the crowd. He had just told them that they could earn their salary…and keep it, keep all of it. Very few of the city’s population had gone into debt willingly, but they had inherited their debt from their parents. Young men like Michael had had no hope, until now. He looked up at the Marines, watching calmly in their uniforms, and wondered if he could join them. Did he have whatever it took to be one of them?
Yes, he told himself. It was an opportunity that would never come again.
“It won’t be easy,” the Marine said. “It will be the hardest thing many of you will have ever done, but it is worth it. We will allow any of you a chance to come and prove yourself.”
Michael watched as the Marines jumped down and walked off, taking the dead bodies with them. The gallows they left behind, probably for the next group of captured bandits. He walked away, shaking his head; he’d seen death before, but watching an execution was something new. A thought struck him and he broke into a run as he ran towards the centre of town. If the word spread as fast as he expected, the entire city would be trying to sign up.
He reached the Imperial Office – a prefabricated building just north of Government House – and was unsurprised to discover that seventeen people had beaten him to it. Eleven of them were young men like himself, who had grown up on the streets; the remainder were young women, including two who had probably been forced into prostitution to feed themselves. It wasn’t uncommon in Camelot, not when prostitutes – too – were paid in cash. The women would have faced the same debt problem as Michael did when they tried to hold normal jobs. As prostitutes, the only person taking a cut of their income would be their pimp.
The queue stretched around the block by the time the doors opened, allowing three of the prospective recruits to enter at a time. Michael waited as patiently as he could for his turn, following a young woman who looked as if she had barely entered her teens into the Imperial Office. A smiling man wearing a uniform he didn’t recognise showed him into a private room, where he came face-to-face with a scarred man who scowled at him.
“So,” he thundered. “You want to join up, do you?”
Michael nodded, too terrified to speak.
“Take this,” the man said, passing Michael a small egg-sized device that he held in his hand. “Understand; the first time you lie to me, I’ll boot you out and you can forget about joining anything more worthwhile than the sanitation department. Now…”
He fired off a long list of questions at Michael, who stumbled as he tried to answer them. Some made sense, asking about his family and his father’s name, others made no sense at all. Why did the Marines want to know about his political leanings? What political leanings did he have anyway? It wasn't as if he’d ever be able to pay off his debt and claim the franchise. He found himself growing more and more impatient with the list of questions, and then it dawned on him that the questions were a test in themselves. The Marines wanted to know how patient he was.
“Good enough,” the recruiter growled, finally. He didn’t sound happy, which made him unusual in Michael’s experience. Most recruiters wanted as many young bodies as they could get, although he’d never met a military recruiter before. Perhaps there were limits to how many men and women the Marines could recruit. “Do you understand that you will be going into an area where heavy discipline is the norm, where you might be injured in training and where you will be expected to obey all orders, without hesitation?”
“Yes, sir,” Michael said. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” the recruiter said. “You just think you understand.”
Michael said nothing.
“Be at the spaceport in three days, with this card,” the recruiter said, holding out a piece of cardboard. Michael was somehow unsurprised to see his picture on the card. “Time and date are on the card. If you don’t show up then, don’t bother to show up at all. And, if you get your ass shot off, don’t blame me.”
Michael stared down at the card and then nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
…Increasingly, the young men and women of the Empire – those born to the Middle and High Classes, at least – are concentrating on living for the now and not thinking about the future. They sense, however dimly, that the Empire has no future.
- Professor Leo Caesius, The Waning Years of Empire (banned).
They heard the music long before they rounded the corner, a thumping beat that spoke of dancing and forgetfulness. Jasmine felt the beat reaching out to her as the four Marines strode down the street, glancing from side to side. The middle-class zone of Camelot was a study in contrasts; in the day, it was all staid and respectable, but in the night the party began. Lighted shops offered everything from pornography to drugs, while hookers waited at lampposts, accosting men and offering their services. The young and desperate thronged through the streets, taking little note of the Marines as they sought the next high, or something else that could make them forget their troubles for a night.
“It sounds like a party,” Blake said, cheerfully. Jasmine, who would have quite happily remained in barracks for the night, scowled inwardly. They might have been on leave, but platoon comrades never left each other alone – unless one of them got lucky, of course. Blake and Joe might want to look for suitable partners – and Koenraad had come along for the ride – but Jasmine didn't share their enthusiasm. A night of guiltless sex with someone who had no idea of what she did for a living didn’t appeal. “Shall we go gatecrash?”
“It could be fun,” Joe agreed, with a wink. “You want to bet on who comes home with the most panties?”
“After those bastards in 1st Platoon showed them that game, maybe not,” Blake said, with a leer of his own. One of the less endearing Marine traditions was picking up a girl each night, or maybe two or three a night, and stealing her panties afterwards to prove that they had scored. Jasmine privately thought that it was a silly tradition and had said so, more than once. “They were boasting about how Camelot girls were easy.”
“They probably want a handsome Marine to marry them and get them out of the slum,” Koenraad said, unexpectedly. He looked up at their bemused glances. “So I study local politics. You want to make something of it?”
Jasmine shook her head. Marines were expected to have hobbies in their spare time, even though it was the shared belief of every Marine that spare time was a delusion invented by a particularly sadistic drill sergeant. Koenraad had spent his time earning a degree in sociology from the University of Earth, although they had refused to grant him a doctorate as his work was hardly ‘non-judgemental and sensitive.’ A Marine who had spent his time in various hellholes being shot at by the natives – normally after the Empire’s vast army of bureaucrats had gotten something wrong and seriously hacked off said natives – would have a very different view of their culture than a high-browed academic who’d never spent a day of his life off Earth.
“All the better for us,” Blake declared, as they passed a line of street toughs. Jasmine braced herself, expecting a fist-fight, but the toughs somehow picked up on their true nature – even though the civilian clothes they were wearing – and wisely backed off. There might have been nine of them, but the Marines would have handed them their heads, even without weapons. “We can have all the pussy we want and no one will say boo to us.”
Jasmine rolled her eyes. “Do you ever think about anything apart from women?”
Blake pretended to consider it. “No,” he said, finally. “I guess I’m a naughty Blake. Mama Coleman would not be impressed.”
Joe chuckled. “Remember,” he said, in a passable impression of Sergeant Young, “a soldier who won’t fuck won’t fig
ht.”
“And a soldier who fucks when he should be fighting won’t be fucking for much longer,” Jasmine said, in a rather less passable impression of her first Drill Sergeant. The fornication excuse for being late back to barracks worked once; after that, it was punishment duties for any repeat offender. “Just remember to pay them in local coins.”
“I am offended at your suggestion that I might have to pay them,” Blake countered, archly. “Why, there are women who pay me to have sex with them.”
Koenraad laughed. “If that is true, Blake, why are you still here?”
“Because without me, you’d all be dead by now,” Blake said. He snorted dryly. “Who has the local cash anyway?”
Joe reached into his pocket and brought out a roll of paper notes, produced at the Bank of Avalon. Jasmine hadn't been impressed when she’d first seen them. Any halfway competent forger could have produced millions of counterfeit banknotes and used them to wreck an already-unstable currency. They were, in theory, equal to the Imperial Credit and could be exchanged one-for-one, but the Bank of Avalon had tried to overcharge the first Marines who had attempted to exchange their money.
It had been Joe who had come up with the solution. He’d taken an inventory of the songs and tunes the platoon had brought with them from Earth, and then sold them to distributors in Camelot, giving them advance access to the currently-fashionable music from Earth. Jasmine disliked the howling racket that was the height of fashion on Earth – it sounded like an army of cats howling at the moon while being savaged by wild dogs, in her considered estimation – but it had brought the platoon plenty of local money. By the time the official releases reached Avalon, the music would already be old and forgotten.
“There’s enough here to wipe your bottom after eating in the mess,” Joe said, as he passed out bundles of notes. Jasmine took hers and stowed it in her inside pocket. “I’m not sure what else it will buy here. It won’t be long before they start producing million-credit banknotes.”
“Probably,” Koenraad agreed. “They’re in the middle of an inflation spiral right now and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.”
“Hey,” Blake said, as they turned another corner and saw the party. “We don’t want to know about economics and maths and boring shit like that. We want to go to a party!”
He slapped Jasmine on the shoulder. “And you can play the game too,” he said. “We’ll let you bring home underpants instead of panties and see who wins.”
“Get fucked,” Jasmine said, dryly.
“I intend to,” Blake countered. He smiled at her. “Come on; live a little. It might be fun.”
“I seem to recall that we end up being thrown out of places; that or being chased back to barracks by the wasps,” Jasmine said. “If we have to spend the next week cleaning toilets, I’m going to do something awful to you. Something so unspeakably awful that I haven’t even thought of it yet.”
Blake chuckled and ambled towards the party, followed by the other three. The party seemed to have started in one large hall and spread rapidly into several others. There were hundreds of young men and women dancing in the first hall, while others pushed in and out as they grew tired of the music. Jasmine rubbed the back of her temples as the noise grew louder. She’d been in powered combat armour under fire and that hadn’t been anything like so much of a racket. The rate of ear trauma on Avalon, she decided, had to be quite high.
A topless girl danced past with her breasts bobbling as she moved. From the dazed look in her eye, Jasmine guessed that she was on some kind of stimulant, probably something grown illegally in the countryside and shipped into the city. Her hard nipples seemed to mock everyone as she moved from boy to boy, kissing each of them before moving on to the next. From the laughter that followed her, Jasmine had the very clear impression that she wasn’t operating entirely of her own volition.
Sparkle dust, probably, she thought. Sparkle Dust was banned on almost every world in the Empire, with good reason. Properly prepared, it acted as a mild hypnotic, allowing someone who took it to enter a state where they would follow almost any suggestion they were given. The girl had probably taken it on a dare – or it had been slipped into her drink – and someone had suggested that she act the wanton for the night. She was going to be very embarrassed in the morning.
“I knew we'd have fun,” Blake said, as they pushed their way towards a makeshift bar. It looked as if it was going to topple over at any second, although that hadn’t stopped people from covering it with barrels and glass bottles of drinks. Avalon might nor produce much in the way of produce, but it was generally agreed that it produced excellent beer, although there was little point in exporting it to other star systems. It wasn't cost-effective. “I should have worn my uniform. That always brings in the girls.”
He leaned across the counter and smiled at the barmaid, a girl who looked as if she had seen too much in her young life. She couldn't be much younger than Jasmine herself, but her eyes were those of an old woman. “Four beers please,” he said, waving the wad of cash under her nose. “We’re thirsty and starving.”
“We take Imperial Credits only,” the barmaid said, tiredly. Blake leaned over and glared at her. Jasmine sighed inwardly, even though she knew that the barmaid deserved it. It was illegal – if good business – to refuse payment in local currency. “All right. I’ll pour you four beers.”
“And pour one for yourself as well,” Blake said, affably. He passed across some of his banknotes. “Please don’t try to short-change me. I’ll never live it down.”
Jasmine smiled inwardly at the barmaid’s expression. The woman didn't know it, but one of the many secrets implanted into the Marines was an implant that prevented them from becoming drunk, or even mildly inebriated. A pleasant buzz was the most they could expect from their drinks, even if they drank twenty pints each. She took a long pull at her glass and sighed in delight. The beer was cold and surprisingly good. She’d had drinks on Earth that should have been poured back into the horse.
“I’m going over there,” Blake said, pointing towards a table where several girls sat, giggling as they watched the Marines. “Come on; you might find one that’s into girls.”
Jasmine surveyed the girls and frowned. If what they wore was high fashion on Avalon, it proved that bad taste was truly universal. “I dread to imagine,” she said, primly. “You go have fun. I’m going to sit here and watch the crowd.”
“You don’t have to stay here, honey,” the barmaid said. “There are other places you can go.”
Jasmine shook her head as the crowd swallowed up Blake and Joe. Koenraad had vanished off somewhere, perhaps chasing a pretty girl. Blake and Joe might enjoy being in a party, but Jasmine felt out of place. Her strict upbringing hadn’t prepared her for such debauchery and her experience in the Marines meant nothing to the young fools on the dance floor. They would never understand what it was like to crawl through the mud, trying to sneak up on an enemy position, or the costs of her career. Her father had understood, the day she’d told him that she was leaving to go to Boot Camp, but few others outside the Marines knew or cared. They were the only real family she had.
An hour passed slowly as the dancing swirled around her. The music never seemed to stop – she suspected that it was produced by a computer, rather than a human band – and dancers joined or left at will. She caught sight of Joe, locked in an embrace with a pretty girl, and Blake, being...serviced by a girl in public, and recoiled, even though no one else seemed to care. It reminded her of the last days on Han before everything had gone to hell. No one might have said it out loud, but Avalon was a dying world.
She was turning sharply before her mind caught up with what she had seen. There was a girl, over at a table, surrounded by three tough-looking guys. Jasmine locked her eyes on them and realised in a sudden burst of horror that she knew the girl. Mandy Caesius’s red hair was almost impossible to mistake.
Silly bitch, Jasmine thought, angrily. The Profess
or and his family might have finally obtained housing in the richer section of town, but his silly spoilt daughter still had to get her kicks somehow, even if it meant coming right into the seedy area of town without an escort. Jasmine had privately wondered if the Professor had hoped that she’d play Mandy’s older sister, but there just hadn’t been the time. Captain Stalker wouldn't have bothered to pussyfoot around the issue; if he’d wanted Jasmine to baby-sit the girl, he would have issued orders and left it to her to carry them out.
The Empire’s Corps: Book 01 - The Empire's Corps Page 23