CHAPTER 2

"If we have no idea what we are doing, the enemy has no chance of predicting our actions!"

I had never been than higher in the city than level 394, but the closest recruiting station back then was on 2000. I had to hitch on freight haulers and cargo lifters (and one seriously fragged off cleaning droid) to get to that rarefied air. Hell, I saw natural sun for the first time in probably a decade. I wasn't impressed.

They had set up in what looked to be an abandoned (or probably commandeered) retail clothing shop. Just 4 troopers, an officer, and half a dozen droids. Just them and a line of a couple thousand other idiots waiting their turn. All of them with a million questions and absolutely no idea what they were getting into.

It took most of the day to even get into the fragging building, the line snaked more than 1000m down the road. Rumours from the front constantly trickled to the back. Things got a lot faster when they finally had one of the troopers come back and give some answers to a few of our basic questions. "Yes" they were recruiting for military service. "No" you didn't have to be a clone (although what idiots asked THAT question I never knew). "No" They were NOT accepting non-humans at this time (a sizable chunk disappeared at that). And finally, halfway into the night I made it into the station.

The officer was racked out, asleep on a folding cot behind the desk at this point and one of the protocol droids had taken over the questioning process. The first question it asked was if I was serious, which I thought was a little odd. I suppose dealing with a bunch of gungan-headed kriffers who were just there for entertainment had made it a little hacked off. But I told it I WAS serious, and only then the medical droid off to the side moved over and began with the poking and prodding. All the while the protocol fired out questions. Date of birth, planet of birth, next of kin, criminal record and on and on.

After running this gauntlet for nearly a half hour it asked if I had any questions. All I wanted to know was how much they were paying. Stars above was I an idiot. But it was enough for me, so I gave them my thumb print and they gave me a report date and a credit chit good for a one-way sky cab ride to the port. I thought that was pretty decent of them, not that it gave me a way back to the 300s. So, I called my mum to tell her what I'd done.

She was… nonplussed. To this day, I don't know what she really thought about it, even on the few occasions I took leave and came home we never really talked about it. Even so, she made a few calls and I got a ride home with a sec-force vet who drove a delivery van.

Mum was always a pretty quiet lady, but that last week it seemed like she intended to fit the next years' worth of conversation into those few final days. Mostly white noise it seemed then. I knew that she was going to miss me even though she never quite said it out loud. For myself it didn't quite seem real, half the time. Hell, going top side had seemed unimaginably far away, leaving the planet was not even in my realm of conception. I kept half expecting to wake up, find out it had all been a dream, but I guess now I'd been feeling that way since my dad passed. People kept coming to visit, friends of my father I guess. Half to say how proud dad would be, half to see, like that protocol, if I was serious. A few of my uncles, mum's brothers, even made the trek from Corellia.

The part I remember best was that they all brought food. Mom would serve some then take the tray away and deep freeze the rest. That last week seemed somehow to last forever and to be over in a heartbeat. But the day came, mom saw me to the cab stand, we hugged, she almost cried and the sky cab took me the freighter docks. And then the kriffing shit storm began.

Absolute chaos. Imagine 100000 sentients from all over the planet, from every walk of life, in every colour (that a human could be). Talking and laughing and dragging their bits and baggage about with absolutely no sense of unified purpose or supervision.

I saw old grey haired women and boys that could NOT have been over 12. I saw lady in what looked like mock senatorial robes with a platoon of droids carrying luggage. I saw gangers with virulently glowing tattoos shining in the pre-dawn light. All of Coruscant was here, and the people in charge had no fragging idea what to do.

After some digging, mostly for my own amusement, I've discovered that I was not, as I had always thought, the "first boat off of Coruscant." I was the twelfth. The recruitment drive had actually started a few months before, around the same time as 66, but like most things on Coruscant it took a while to trickle down to my level. If that was the twelfth boat I cannot imagine what pure fragging madness the previous eleven must have been like.

"Only one bag" came the shouts from troopers. Lucky I only had one, some had nothing, others like the now furiously screaming schutta with the droid entourage had upwards of a dozen and were rapidly repacking. Eventually this howling mass of humanity was lined up and shoved, in many cases kicking and screaming, into a converted mega-freighter. I don't know how long we all sat there but they fed us a few times and Tanj, the former factory worker I struck up a conversation with, had enough time to begin dating the girl to his right, get into a fight over repulsor-puck teams and then break up with her. So, all in all maybe 2 days (Tanj was kind of an idiot). This indirectly began my training in two of the most important lessons you learn as a trooper. How to hurry up and wait, and how to sleep anywhere.

Hurry up and wait is almost an art form in the legion. You'll have 5 minutes of frenzied activity followed but hours of nothing. You have to learn to let your mind wander, but still have the situational awareness to react instantly. You never know when you're going to switch from waiting to HURRY, so you have to pay attention. But not too closely, because nobody can maintain perfect focus every moment of every day. Not without going mad anyway. I suppose sleeping enters into somewhere too, when you perfect your hurry up and wait skill, you can nap while still being aware of your surroundings. It's hard to explain, it's just something you pick up eventually.

When I disembarked, I found myself on board a space station still under construction. The docking ports were all finished (thankfully) but the dining facility, the barracks and the "school house" were barely begun. We spent a good couple of weeks at this skeleton of a station getting ourselves shaken out doing what is now called "reception." There were tests, mental and physical. Immunization shots and paperwork. I spent a delightfully morbid afternoon creating a last will and testament. We slept on the floor of the gym and ate packaged rations (something I would become exceptionally familiar with over the next few decades).

Most surprising to me was the fact that I wasn't a trooper yet. I, great gungan-headed fool that I am, had signed on thinking that I was guaranteed a spot in the legion. But what I'd actually done was write a blank check to the empire to put me wherever the hell they wanted. And so they assessed our capabilities there in reception to see what branch of service and job we should go into.

Every evening over chow they'd call out the names of early placements. The ones who tested well got snatched up pretty quickly for Imperial R&D. It seemed pretty straight forward; good reflexes? Pilot school. Good brain? Maybe R&D like I said or maybe officer cadet school or grav-tech.

The bottom rung it was rumoured was simply "Navy crewman." Half of the kids that I hung around with said that if they got that job they'd just walk away. But I never saw anybody try to do that. More likely they'd take a walk out the airlock.

Some never got their name called but were just gone come morning chow. Tanj's girlfriend (they had split and got back together at least a dozen times by then) went that way, which is probably the only reason I noticed. He was in a frenzy about it obviously, and nobody had any answers. The troopers always just said "I don't ask questions" which at the time seemed a bit creepy with their matching voices and matching helmets that they never seemed to take off.

Really, I didn't see why Tanj was so hacked off about it. The girl I had been seeing got called a few days before for repulsor technician and we parted without tears. It was like that in reception, you knew your time was limited so you didn't get too attached. Another life lesson there, don't get attached; but I wouldn't really learn that lesson for almost 20 years.

Anyway, you already know what job I was going to. But it was nerve wracking for me at the time. They'd call out big lots of names, you'd get up, stand around whoever was doing the calling and after they finished THEN they'd say what job you'd got.

I was eating dinner, some kind of green noodle in a sealed bag, when I heard my name. I'd got so used to just eating and not really paying attention that when they called out "Nuffee, Jo'es" it seemed to echo around the room, and then my brain. Nobody else batted an eye till I got up, Tanj and the rest seemed a bit stunned but this wasn't the first time we lost a member of our little group. I made my way to the front of the gym (the dfac still wasn't finished) and waited. I waited a while, it was a pretty big group. I admit I was a bit anxious that, based on the size of it, we were all going to end up as navy crewmen. But we didn't, obviously, we were off to trooper "school." No desks just a hell of a lot of punishment.

So, there we stood back at the docks the next morning. Yawning and grumbling at 0400, not a trooper in sight. I remember nervously thinking that I had reported to the wrong place, despite the fact that everyone else was there too. The transports pulled up 10 minutes later and dropped ramp. Without a word the lot of us piled on. And that was the last thing I did without being told to do it first for over nine months.