“So you think I should run?”
Van Klomp shook his head. “Nope. I think you should join the army.”
He pointed out of the hangar door. “They’ve set up a camp just across the other side of the airfield. Ten minutes’ walk.”
“But . . . That’s a Vat-camp. I’m going to OCS.”
“The next OCS intake is in a few weeks’ time,” said Van Klomp, grimly. “You’re not going to live that long.”
“They’ll find me there anyway. I’d rather hand myself over and face my trial. They haven’t got the evidence to convict me.”
“Boeta. If they have to make that evidence, they will. The Special Branch is good at that. They’re hunting you hard. But if you walk across to that camp and join the queue . . . once you’re inside, they won’t find you. Just like they haven’t found your car. And even if they do find you, as an army volunteer, they can’t touch you.”
Van Klomp smiled beatifically. “Thanks to Special Gazette item 17 of 11/3/29, all civil legal matters are held in abeyance until the volunteer is demobilized at the end of hostilities. And service time will be considered to be in lieu of imprisonment and deducted from the sentence. As it happens, just last night I was talking to Mike Capra at the Pig and Swill. The law was introduced at the start of the war, to try and draw in more volunteers. Even though there is conscription now, it hasn’t been repealed. Mike reckons it’s a problem looking for a place to happen.”
Fitz stood up. “I’ll join up,” he said determinedly. “But I still want to clear my name. I don’t want to take the blame for something I didn’t even have the pleasure of doing.”
“First things first,” said Van Klomp. “And first is to stay alive, boeta. Now, I suggest you leave through the side door and take the long way around. There’s a fair forest of bushes just beyond the south end of the runway. I’ve been trying to get the airfield authority to trim them.” He patted Fitz on the shoulder awkwardly. “Good luck, Fitzy. Keep a low profile among the Vats. I’ll be in touch, somehow.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, standing in the queue of miserable-looking men at the gate of a barbed-wire-enclosed camp, Fitz saw a police car drive slowly over the grass to Van Klomp’s hangar. Then the clerk at the gate asked for his call-up papers.
“I’m a volunteer.”
The man shook his head. “There’s one born every minute. Name and ID number?”
* * *
By that evening Fitz was beginning to think that maybe the organ banks hadn’t been such a bad option after all. But he hadn’t had much spare time to think about Candice, either.
2
“Swing those arms! Left. Left. Left. Right, left. Keep those damned tails straight!” bellowed the officer.
With distinct lack of enthusiasm, the rats complied. “Methinks this shogging new lieutenant hath forgotten that this is not boot camp,” snarled one of the rats, indignantly.
“Silence in the ranks!” snapped the sergeant.
The lieutenant was determined to stamp his authority onto his new troops. They’d explained at OCS that an example was necessary. He’d make one. “You. You that was talking. What’s your name, Private?”
“Parts, Sah!” said Bardolph, loudly and untruthfully, to a chorus of sniggers.
The new lieutenant lacked both a sense of humor and common sense. “Sergeant. Get that rat’s number. We’ll see how funny it finds being on a charge.”
The human sergeant was not a young Shareholder fresh from OCS. He was a Vat who’d stayed alive in the trenches for some months. His expression was more than just wary. “Sah. If I might advise, sah?” he asked, uneasily, sotto voce.
The owner of the shiny new pips did not choose to be advised. To be confident enough of your authority to listen to advice from experienced NCOs was not something they’d taught this young man. “If I need your advice, I’ll ask for it, Sergeant.”
Even Deadeye raised his eyes to heaven. It was done in far more unison than the ragged marching.
“Tonight there will be a full-kit inspection! I have never seen such a sloppy, shabby, gutless lot in my life. Things are going to change around here.”