"Yeah," Jeff grunted, since some reply seemed necessary.
"Over eighteen then?"
He nodded.
"Where you heading?" the leader repeated. "You didn't come all the way into our turf like this with only the two of you looking for a fight. And you ain't here sellin' dust either. So what the fuck you doing out here? Didn't you know that we was gonna find you?"
"We knew," Jeff told him. "We ain't here to make trouble. We're heading for 104th and Stevens."
The leader nodded. "The MPG recruiting center," he said. "You going to sign up?"
"Yeah," Jeff confirmed.
The leader looked over at Matt. "You too?"
"Yeah," Matt grunted as well.
He nodded again, his face remaining without expression or nuance. He turned to his people. "Let 'em through," he said. "They're going to sign up."
There was no argument, no hesitation. They simply stood aside.
"Get your asses on down there," the leader told them. "You have safe passage through our turf for that. We catch you anywhere except between here and there though, you're dead meat. Got it?"
"Got it," Jeff told them.
Their bodies flooded with nervous adrenaline, they started walking once again. They didn't look back. They were harassed no further on their trip.
The recruitment center had been hastily set up the night before in the lobby of a commercial building that catered to the welfare class retail industry. It was home to the welfare food mart, the welfare clothing store, welfare intoxicant shops, and many other stores that accepted government subsidy dollars. Like any such building there were thousands of square meters of vacant space. It was in the remains of a former rent-to-own establishment that had been closed the year before for lack of sufficient profit margin that the MPG had brought in desks, computer terminals, and recruitment specialists. A squad of infantry had also been brought in as a security measure.
Jeff and Matt did not get near the recruitment center or even the building itself for quite some time however. A line of people stretched from the main lobby doors for three blocks in both directions. There were males and females alike, most between the ages of eighteen and thirty years old, all of them wearing welfare clothing, most sporting gang tattoos on their arms. They stood patiently in groups of two and three and four, many smoking cigarettes, a few even sipping from Fruity bottles. Amazingly enough many of the former gang members were from rival gangs, some of the rivalries as bitter and long-lasting as that between the Capitalists and the Thrusters. They stood shoulder to shoulder in many places with no apparent conflict or strife. Some even seemed to be conversing.
"Goddamn that's a lot of fuckin' people," Jeff said as they approached the tail end of it. "How long is this shit gonna take?"
"Quite a while it looks like," Matt said. "Come on, let's get in line."
They got in line. It was a slow moving one and it took them nearly three hours before the building was even in sight. At last they made it to the front and were brought before a desk where a weary looking sergeant in standard indoor garb asked for their identification. They provided it for him and he ran their names through his computer.
"You boys have been in a little trouble in your lives now, haven't you?" he asked lightly, with the air of one who had already asked that more than a thousand times that day.
"Just the normal shit for the hood," Jeff responded. "Is that gonna keep us from signing up?"
The sergeant smiled a little bit. "If we eliminated everyone around here because they had a criminal record we wouldn't have anyone at all." He scrolled up and down through the screen for a moment. "Let's see what we got here... possession of dust, assault and battery, carrying a concealed weapon, possession of stolen property, possession of illegal chemicals. That's all the usual stuff all right. No murder convictions, no sexual crimes, no assaults against peace officers. Those are the big eliminating factors. Have either one of you ever worked before?"
"Naw," Jeff said. "Ain't too many jobs around here."
Matt shook his head in the negative as well.
"No job training skills or anything like that?"
Again they both answered in the negative.
"Ok then," the sergeant said. "If you two will head on upstairs for me you'll find corporal Jennings who will set you up on a computer to take the ASVAB test."
"The az-vab?" Jeff asked. "What the fuck's that?"
"Armed services vocational assessment battery," the sergeant explained. "It's an exam that tells us what your strengths and weaknesses are so we can determine what assignment would best suit you."
"Shee-it," Jeff said toughly, "just give me a fuckin' gun and point me to the fuckin' Earthlings."
"Well, we like you spirit," the sergeant responded. "But we still have to give you the test. So if you'll just head upstairs for me."
They headed upstairs. Once there they found another two-hour wait until a computer terminal was free.
The test itself took only an hour. The first section consisted of a series of multiple choice questions in such subjects as math, English, reading comprehension, spatial relations, and general knowledge. They both answered everything to the best of their abilities and then were automatically moved onto the second section, which was a standard psychological examination. The questions here were widely varied and many of them bordered on the bizarre but — in accordance with the instructions at the beginning — both did their best to answer truthfully instead of in a smart-ass manner, which was what their gang instincts cried out for.
Both finished at roughly the same time. The computer screens they were using thanked them for their participation in the process and gave them appointments with recruiters. Matt's was in six days at the very recruiting center that they were now sitting in. It included a free two-way pass for the public transportation system. Jeff's appointment however, was a little different. It was in two days at the MPG deployment center itself.
"Why do you think we have different appointment places?" Jeff asked as they headed back through Thruster territory to the train station. "And why would they send you back here why they send me all the way over to the other side of the city? That don't make no fuckin sense."
"Maybe it has something to do with that test we took," Matt suggested with a shrug. "They said it was for placement."
"Shit," he said, "if they try and make me clean out biosuits or something like that I'm fuckin walkin. That's not what I signed up for."
"Maybe they want to put you in tanks or something," Jeff suggested.
"I'd go for that," he replied, lighting a cigarette. "I ain't gonna clean out no fuckin biosuits though. They better not even ask me that shit."
Meanwhile, at the MPG deployment center, Lisa Wong was on duty behind her computer terminal in the administration part of the building. Her leg was healing up nicely from the shrapnel injury she'd received in the firefight at the main gate to EMB but she still had a bulky bandage wrapped around it, a bandage she wore with a certain amount of pride. She had been wounded in battle! In an actual, knockdown, drag-out battle with WestHem marines! After that the accounting and inventory tasks she was performing — even though the demand for them had quadrupled in the last week — were now unimaginably dull. She stared at her screen listlessly, looking at rows and columns that listed where combat equipment was stored and at what rate it was being used, vowing that she would not fight the war by doing this.
She looked at her watch, seeing that it was 1510, twenty minutes before her scheduled appointment with Captain Jennifer Stanley, the commanding officer of the accounting and receiving department. The appointment had been made the previous day, shortly after the vote count had been announced, in response to an email that had been distributed to all MPG members from General Jackson himself. The memo had stated that all MPG members requesting either removal from the MPG on grounds of non-support of the revolt or reassignment within it to move into or out of combat branches should contact their respective commanding officer. Lisa, obviously, was going with the latter option. Since Governor Whiting had banished the sexual barrier for combat branches, she sure as hell wanted in on it.