First To Fight (The Empire's Corps Book 11) Read online

  The marketplace was a testament to human determination to survive, somehow. Everything was on sale, from meat (probably rat, but there was no way to know) to weapons and supplies smuggled in from outside the city. In a way, it was the only truly neutral ground in the city; I was mildly surprised the soldiers hadn't set up their base just inside the market. But then, there were weapons on display. We made a show of ignoring them as we reached the end of the market and headed down the next street. It looked cleaner than the others, which surprised me. In hindsight, it should also have worried me.

  One of the wankers panicked and opened fire, a second before we walked right into the ambush. We snapped up our rifles and returned fire, putting several rounds through the windows to keep the snipers from continuing their attack, then ducked for cover and advanced, in fire teams, towards the house. It wasn't a big building, I noted absently as Joker prepared a charge to break down the door, but that wasn't reassuring. Our advantages were most pronounced in open battle, not close-quarter knife-fights. The enemy had worked hard to create a situation that maximised their advantages and minimised ours. Joker snapped the charge against the door, shouted a warning, then detonated the device. The doorway exploded inwards; I unhooked a grenade from my belt and threw it inside in one smooth motion, then followed up as soon as it detonated. Several wankers who had been lying in wait had been caught in the blast; I glanced at their bodies, then led the way through the house. Four other wankers made the mistake of running downstairs and straight into our waiting guns. We shot them down and advanced upstairs, checking the upper rooms one by one. The sniper who’d started the ambush was dead. There was no way to tell which of us had shot him.

  The brief encounter expanded as the QRF arrived, then started setting up barricades to trap the insurgents. Determined to show that we would not be pushed around, we searched through a dozen houses, killing nine insurgents and capturing three more. I knew they’d go into our detention camps, rather than those run by the army or the local government, such as it was. Hopefully, we'd actually get some valuable intelligence out of them. Oddly, I no longer felt nervous. I was doing the job I’d trained to do.

  It was nearly an hour before we heard the whimper.

  The area was firmly under control, or so we believed. The prisoners had been dumped into an armoured van, the locals were being kept out and we were merely making a final sweep for anything we might have missed. We didn’t - quite - relax, but we weren’t expecting further trouble. The wankers hadn’t expected such a vigorous response and, I thought, they were reconsidering their tactics. We were walking past an alleyway when I heard someone moaning in pain. It could have been a trap, but I couldn't simply leave it; I called it in, informing the sergeant of what we’d heard, then led the way down the alleyway. Joker followed, watching my back.

  I stopped and stared in horror as the alleyway opened into a backyard. A young girl was bent over a dustbin, her long dress raised, while Young stood behind her, unbuttoning his fly and clearly preparing to have some fun. Hobbes held her arms firmly in place, his face consumed with an unholy lust. For seconds - it felt like hours - I just stared. We’d been taught, time and time again, that molesting the locals was not only stupid, but wrong. Marines were held to a higher code of conduct and anything that smacked of mistreating anyone would draw harsh punishment. And yet Young was preparing to commit rape ...

  “Get away from her,” I snapped, levelling my rifle and aiming at his head. “Now!”

  Young turned to look at me, then gave a sickly smile. “No one will miss the bitch,” he said, as the girl’s dress fell back to cover her legs. “You can have a go too, then we can dump her body and no one will ever know.”

  Horror and disbelief were rapidly replaced by anger. I knew, all too well, just how my sister had died.

  “Keep your fucking hands where I can fucking see them,” I ordered, snapping the laser rangefinder to visual. No one uses them in combat because the beam of light is visible in anything less than bright sunlight, revealing your position to the enemy, but they’re useful for making an unmistakable threat. Beside me, Joker covered Hobbes. “You’re a fucking ...”

  I got control of my anger, then muttered a command into the intercom. People passing the buck up the chain of command was one of the reasons the Imperial Army was so screwed up, but there were some matters that could only be handled by a superior officer. Captain Bilbo and Sergeant Harris arrived within moments, escorted by an entire fire team. Young and Hobbes were cuffed, stuffed into the van and driven back to the FOB. The girl was taken with them. We were told to join the rest of the QRF for the day, then report to Captain Bilbo when we returned to the FOB. I wasn’t looking forward to the discussion I knew we were going to have, but there was no choice.

  “I understand you caught them in the middle of a rape,” the Captain said. I honestly hadn't had much time to forge an impression of him, save for dedication and determination. “Do you believe we should press charges.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I fought down the bitter wave of emotion that, somehow, I had never managed to suppress. My sister’s death had left scars I had never managed to lose. But that wasn't something I could say to him. “We have to show the locals that we’re not above the law.”

  “Indeed,” the Captain said. He keyed his intercom. “Come in!”

  I turned ... and blinked in surprise as Young, Hobbes and the girl stepped into the room. The two men were wearing their uniforms ... and so was the girl. Hers marked her out as a Field Intelligence Officer.

  Joker grabbed for the pistol at his belt. “Sir?”

  I understood, suddenly. “It was a test, wasn't it?”

  “Yes,” Captain Bilbo said. “A test. And you passed with flying colours.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I knew what he meant. We weren't training to become soldiers, any more than we were civil guardsmen or militiamen. We were training to become marines, members of the deadliest brotherhood in history. We had to live up to our own standards ... and police those amongst our ranks who failed to keep faith with those who had died, serving as marines. And if that meant enduring a test so realistic that we forgot it was a test, it had to be done. I didn’t like it, but I accepted it.

  It would have been easy to fail. We could have told ourselves that keeping faith with our comrades was more important than an innocent girl’s life and covered for them. But that wouldn't have kept faith with the corps. We’d have been binned - kicked out of training - and we would have deserved it.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  “Go back to your barracks,” the Captain ordered. “You’re on QRF tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir,” we said.

  Chapter Two

  The population of Earth, in the years before the Fall, was estimated as roughly eighty billion lives. (Just how accurate the estimate was is now impossible to tell.) It should not be surprising, therefore, that most of the population lived in the CityBlocks; towering constructions that held over a hundred thousand people apiece. Men and women were born within their CityBlocks and, unless they were lucky enough to escape, lived and died without ever leaving. It should be no great surprise that the lower levels of those blocks - the Undercity - fell into barbarism long before the Empire itself.

  -Professor Leo Caesius

  I was born in the Undercity.

  If you were born on Avalon - or anywhere, really, outside the Core Worlds - you probably won’t understand what that means. Imagine a transit barracks from Camelot, with a thousand tiny apartments for immigrants in search of employment and a new life, then scale it up until you get a rabbit warren composed of millions of apartments, each one playing host to a separate family, linked together by dim corridors and illuminated by flickering lights. Every so often, there’s a school, an entertainment complex, a government office and not much else. Now imagine another such barracks built next to the first, and then a third barracks built on top of the first two ...

  It was not a p
leasant place to live.

  Truthfully, I have no idea who fathered me. My mother, like almost everyone else in the CityBlock, had no job and no particular hope of getting one. She only survived - and survived poorly - on the regular handout of rations, as ordered by the Grand Senate. As she received extra rations per child, it was perhaps no surprise that she managed to get pregnant several times, giving birth to five healthy children. None of us grew up with a father figure, not even when my mother was cohabiting with a man. They showed no interest in us for fear of being charged with our welfare.

  I would like to claim we learned to look after each other, but the dog-eat-dog attitude of the Undercity ensured that we didn’t. Trevor, my older brother, was a bully who’d learned that the only way to avoid being bullied was to be a bully himself. He was fond of saying, as he handed out beatings, that it was for my own good. The hell of it was that he had a point. If I hadn't been struggling with him, practically from the day I could walk unaided, I would have been eaten alive by school. Linda and Dare, my younger sister and brother, learned fast too. As soon as I was too strong to bully safely, Trevor switched his attentions to them. The only one of us children who escaped his attentions was Cindy, the baby.

  In hindsight, of course, I was incredibly lucky to survive my childhood. The mortality rate in the Undercity was terrifyingly high and a child could die in so many ways. It wasn't uncommon for an ill child to be given bad medicine - someone in the assessment office missed the fact that the workers, in order to meet their quotas, had filled the capsules with powdered chalk instead of medicine - or simply to be killed by their parents or a random stranger. Or in an accident. The CityBlocks were immensely complex structures, keeping us all alive, yet by the time I was born they were already decaying. If a child went wandering in the wrong place, the child might well die.

  It only got worse when I went to school, which was mandatory for kids from five to eighteen. Attendance might have been mandatory, of course, but learning something - anything - was not actually a requirement. The teachers had no power over us, which meant they were trapped in the sealed complexes with children who had learned that they could get away with almost anything, as long as they picked their targets carefully. If you showed a hint of weakness in an Undercity school, a hint that you couldn't stand up for yourself, you were targeted. And the teachers? They had no power. They couldn't do anything.

  They tell me I’m a brave man. I’ve walked into firefights without showing a hint of hesitation, even though bullets were flying all around me. But I wouldn't willingly walk into an Undercity school and try to teach, not with the rules and regulations governing teachers and how they were supposed to relate to the kids. The merest suggestion that they’d hit a child, or spoken sharply to one, or made the grave mistake of telling them the truth, or hurting their delicate little feelings ... well, let’s just say it would destroy their lives. Teachers could be insulted, hurt or even killed by their charges and there was nothing anyone would do about it. I knew five teachers who left the school after being attacked, two of them in body bags.

  I was lucky. I was strong enough to keep myself reasonably safe, thankfully, and Trevor’s beatings had given me just enough empathy to refrain from picking on the weaker souls myself. By the time I was thirteen, I could actually read and write, which put me head and shoulders ahead of just about everyone else, and I had figured out that most of the classroom tests we were meant to do were pointless. I spent the time we were meant to be staring at a testing machine - I don’t think I need to say that most of us goofed off - either doing nothing or reading from my datapad. There wasn't much else to do.

  Matters only got worse as I matured. You can't imagine the horrors running through the schools as we grew interested in sex. Rape - in all of its horrific forms - was depressingly common, while the rapists were rarely - if ever - punished for their crimes. A smart girl would find a strong boy, someone capable of protecting her, and attach herself to him in exchange for protection. Others would hang around in gangs, trying to find strength and security in numbers. It rarely worked. There were hundreds of girls in my school on antidepressants, struggling to cope with the realities of helplessness, and countless others who chose suicide, rather than endure another moment of their hellish existence. When society starts to break down, it’s always the women who get the worst of it.

  Like everyone else, I wanted a way out, but how? My exam results were poor - I just wasn’t a good test-taker - and I didn't have much hope of getting a place at Imperial University, no matter how much they lowered the standards. Nor did I have much patience, then and now, for bullshit ... and Leo tells me that Imperial University was full of bullshit. As I turned sixteen, I knew there were only a handful of options awaiting me. I could go to the gangs and become yet another savage, I could try to raise a family to perpetuate the cycle or I could try to break out. But how?

  It was sheer luck that led me to discover the marines. One of the teachers boasted constantly about his achievements in the military, as if it would impress or intimidate the barbarians he had to teach. Perhaps it would have done, if we hadn't been raised on a diet of ultra-violent movies that were both profoundly stupid and anti-military. The idea of him clowning around like the heroes of those movies struck us as absurd; we laughed at him, of course. But I grew interested in the military. Maybe I didn't have the qualifications to go to a colony world as anything other than an indentured colonist - a slave, in other words - but military experience might just offer me a chance to make my way in the world. I started to look up online resources, glancing through the different files on offer ...

  ... And it didn't take me long to start sniffing bullshit.

  The thing you have to understand - and you probably won’t, if you were born on Avalon - is that the Empire’s military was having a horrific recruitment crisis. It wasn't getting the sheer number of new bodies it needed, no matter how much it spent on propaganda. (The idea of giving soldiers respect and a living wage probably never occurred to them.) The kindest thing civilians on Earth said about the military was that it took idiots off the streets, gave them deadly weapons and pointed them at the enemies of civilisation on other worlds. By the time I started to look for prospective opportunities, there was a sheer mountain of bullshit about what the military would do for me ... and, as I had learned in the cradle, anything that looks too good to be true probably is. It was only a reference on a datanet forum that led me to the marines.

  Their site was different. The marines promised nothing to me personally, beyond a chance to make something of myself. Their site talked about being the best of the best, about fighting enemies on distant worlds ... the more I read their blunt plain-spoken words, the more I liked it. There was no attempt to lure me in; indeed, if anything, their words were designed to repel anyone who couldn't stand the thought of seeing blood. The movies they showed me were live combat footage, not elaborate promises of keg parties and girls by the score. It looked harsh and unpleasant ... but it still looked better than the Undercity. At least I’d be able to shoot back at my enemies.

  At sixteen, I needed parental permission to enlist. My mother said no. My younger siblings needed me, she said, and my older brother might need me too. I grew frustrated and we exchanged harsh words; there was nothing to look forward to, I said, beyond finding a wife and starting a family of my own. Or, perhaps, impregnating a dozen different girls, secure in the knowledge that the state would take care of them. The argument ran backwards and forwards for hours, ending with my declaration that I could seek a special wavier from school - to signal my maturity - or simply wait until my next birthday. And, with that, I stormed out.

  Trevor caught up with me an hour later. He wasn't too pleased.

  “If you go into the military, you might die,” he pointed out, curtly. “And for what?”

  “A chance at a better life,” I said. “What do we have to look forward to here?”

  “I’ve made connections,” Trevor said. “Why
not join us?”

  I groaned. Trevor had joined the Blades, one of the thousands upon thousands of gangs who controlled the Undercity. They were nasty; they fought each other for territory, or women, or what passed for honour among them ... and, in the meantime, extorted payments from everyone unfortunate enough to live in the territory they controlled. Their primitive weapons - weapons were, of course, forbidden on Earth - should have been laughable, but their aggression and ruthlessness made them a threat to everyone. The police? Don’t make me laugh. In some places, the gangs paid off the police force; in others, the gangs were the police.

  And while Trevor might boast of his connections, I knew better. He might work his way to the top, but it was far more likely he’d end up dead in a pointless fight.

  “It’s pointless,” I said. I hated the gangsters. Everyone did, but no one had the nerve to fight them. No wonder so many young men, denied a healthy outlet for their aggression, set out to join them. “And I don’t want to lie dead in a sanitation tube.”

  Trevor smirked. “You’d prefer to lie dead on an alien world?”