Recruit by David Ryker & Daniel Morgan

Author:David Ryker & Daniel Morgan [Ryker, David & Morgan, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ryker's Rogues
Published: 2018-10-15T22:00:00+00:00

13

I got off the training deck and realized that every single recruit was still in the exam. I was kicking myself that I’d managed to get myself killed so quickly. I wondered whether that thing was even trying to hit us, or if I had somehow managed to throw myself into the line of fire, protecting her from a shot that wasn’t even going to land. No, Jonas had thrown her off. It was going to take her apart. There was no doubt about that.

I sighed and stepped onto the plain white platform that I’d gotten off at four months earlier. I didn’t know that I’d ever see it again.

I hit the call button on one of the pillars and the train came unnervingly quickly. It wasn’t against any rules for recruits of the Mech Corps to head down to the lower decks; it just wasn’t the done thing. No one from above ventured down, and no one from below ventured up. Not that it really mattered anymore. Fourteen seconds didn’t seeming promising.

The train arrived and I stepped on, heading down.

My mind drifted on the way, and when it pulled up, I stepped off in a daze, unsure that I’d ever get on again.

I pressed through the corridors, and already the light seemed dimmer, the hallways a little less bright and shiny. I followed the sounds of voices and rowdiness with nowhere to be for another eleven hours.

The corridors led me toward a mess hall not dissimilar from the one up top, except this one was a lot bigger, and a lot busier. The one upstairs housed a couple hundred at most, but this one was almost the size of our training deck. The Mech Corps occupied the highest decks of the rear and middle portion of the ship. The Regular Corps occupied the bottom sections of the front section, more than five times as much as the Mechanized Corps. The rear was all hangars housing dropships, equipment, and everything else. Behind that were the engines. The front upper decks were all private quarters — the families of the officers, and the civilians. It was up there, somewhere, that Kepler had grown up, with her brothers, her father. The academy was up there too, somewhere, though getting up there was an impossibility. The ship itself was a goliath. Running circuits around the lower decks took hours. They were built in space and never ventured into gravitational fields.— They were just too large — floating space stations. They had a way of making you feel tiny.

I stood in the throng of the mess and people moved like a sea. Recruits, privates, officers. It was a melee — no one separated, none of the decorum on show above. Most of the people here were all all like me — colony kids, tubers, drifters — everyone who would be scooped up off the surface of every dustball passed.

I looked around and saw people rough-housing — pushing and jostling, laughing, joking, shovelling down food. These were my people.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.