"Mest!" The driver barked abruptly. "If this stop's yours, get off!"

The deep, rumbling engines of the wasteland barge suddenly began to quieten, the huge mass of the vehicle creaking as the metal plates of its body ground against each other. In the back of the vehicle, its human cargo, pressed uncomfortably together under flickering, dirt-spattered lights, suddenly lurched forwards.

As shoulders, backs and bellies bashed against each other, a cacophony of vicious curses and swears arose and filled the air.

Everyone in the barge had a certain look about them. First of all, they were far shorter and broader than you would expect from most humans - the tallest barely above five-foot-six inches. Their limbs were bulging and stocky in appearance, their heads and necks thick and round.

They were Tartarusans. And while most of them remained inside the barge, one of them pushed his way to the exit, completely uncaring and ignoring of all the comments thrown his way.

Comments like 'cunt', 'bastard' and 'little shit'.

The entrance then opened, and Liam John 'L.J' Ferro stepped down from the wasteland barge, his feet landing on the grey-brown dirt of his homeworld with a dry crunch. He was bedecked in heavy clothing from neck to foot, including a baggy enviro-suit, complete with a hooded rebreather, grim-slathered boots and thick gloves. A heavy backpack was slung over one shoulder, swaying lazily as he walked. His rebreather was dangling behind his head from where he had pulled it off, salty droplets of sweat dripping from his eyebrows and nose.

The air around him was swelteringly hot, its dry, searing touch as welcome as a knife up the cockhole. Extending all in every direction was a hellishly desolate wasteland of barren, sandy dirt and metallic blades of rock, stabbing out of the ground like chunks of sharpened flint. Beneath a murky green sky smeared with black clouds, grains of earth were picked up and send skidding along the ground by the searing winds that swept across the landscape.

This wasn't a nice, gentle breeze, but a staunching, parching dirge of air that burned your throat if you inhaled it - just like all the air on this fucking planet.

Right ahead of him was a small valley, with a dirt track descending past two outcrops of glinting rock. Nestled in the area of sunken ground was a scuzzy collection of derelict warehouses and transport hubs. Mag-rails ran off in every direction, the pillars of slab metal supported their construction and held them high off the ground stained with lines of dirt and faint speckles of rust. The drone of trains on the rails was nowhere to be heard, replaced only by the shriek of the wind and the rattle of the chain-link electric fences that surrounded the train lines on all sides to keep vandals away. The rails were made of metal, while all the other structures, flat-rooved and boxy with barely any windows, and all formed out of the same thick brown concrete. It was the colour of shit, and it stank like it too.

This was Mest, the 'capital' of the planet of Tartarus. But everyone who was actually stuck living on this mess of a planet knew what Mest really just was - a port.

Things came and went, and that was all. Basic necessities like food, clothing, weapons and the occasional luxury was what came in, and vast stockpiles of raw materials were carted off in exchange. Taken to the other planets of the Human Union of Worlds to be processed, purified and turned into fuel, ships and weapons for the government's war machine that was off fighting the Sirthon dozens of light years away.

Those minerals were dug up by the planet's other major import - criminals.

Crooks and scumbags from all across the Union were brought here in droves. Murderers, rapists, paedophiles, drug lords, serial killers and all other sorts of low-lives were transported here en-masse by the Union government. Here they would toil away their sentences in the shafts and quarries that were cut into Tartarus' surface like scars into some poor dipshit's face.

Thankfully, they were an import that came free. And whether they lived to see the ends of their sentences was anyone's guess, but the locals didn't care.

Not all of the inhabitants of Tartarus were of the criminal variety. Just most of them. The others either lived and worked in the prisons, keeping their 'guests' under control, or dwelt in the barren outlands doing their own mining work and growing the fungus crops that grew in the agri-caves under most Tartarusan settlements.

Ferro had come from just such a place - the town of Deadspine. And now he was in Mest with only one goal in mind.

Pulling his backpack from his shoulders, Ferro unfastened the buckle-openings and looked inside. A faint glimmer of gladness flared up inside his heart when he saw that it was still there - a piece of clean white paper, studded with lines of text and tick boxes that had been filled in. Thankfully, no cocksucker had swiped it, or pulled it out of his bag just to spite him.

The paper was his application form. His goal was simple - join the Union Army and go off to fight in the Sirthon War.

Like all planets in the Union, Tartarus was subject to conscription. But not everyone was drafted en masse into military service here. Trained guards were still needed to man the prisons, to keep what passed for law and order out here, so they wouldn't be going anywhere. Meanwhile, many Tartarusans were considered unfit for military service, and far out here on the edges of the galaxy, conscription was rarely ever enforced.

However, if you wanted, you could still volunteer. And that was just what Ferro intended to do.

Re-locking his bag, he hefted it back onto his shoulders and started striding down into Mest.

Nothing moved but the wind as he trudged into the city, the only sounds the wind and wrinkling of his enviro-suit. Other than that, there was fuck-all. No workers, no bystanders and no wildlife - not that there was any on this planet in the first place.

Ferro heard that since the war's end, criminal shipments to Tartarus had slowed. And without criminals, there was no work to do here. So it was pretty damn likely that everyone was just lazing around in their homes, taking their best chance to avoid the poison storms that swept in from time to time.

"Probably scratchin' their asses and jerkin' off." Ferro commented to himself. "Hopefully not in that order." 

Ferro talked about people behind their backs a lot - purely for his own amusement. And even if they heard him, he wasn't one to care.

Turning around a corner as he continued to run his mouth to nobody, Ferro then saw what he had come for. Amidst all the brown buildings was a structure that stood out like a sore thumb - mostly because it didn't look like a shit-mound.

The Union Military Recruitment Centre. A boxy building of deep grey with a pointed roof, surrounded on all sides by a chain-link fence and protected by two guard towers. A heavy airlock door formed the only entrance, attended to by a single guard, with no windows anywhere to be found on the building since they'd just get stained constantly.

Without even breaking his stride, Ferro marched straight for the airlock. As he approached it, he pulled his application form back out of his bag and lifted it up to the guard standing outside. Said guard was clearly an off-worlder, for he stood at normal human height, his face hidden behind a gas mask and full-body protection suit with a rifle gripped in his gloves. Without a word, the guard signalled for the airlock to open, and Ferro stepped inside.

An automated voice told the Tartarusan to stand still as the rumbling sound of the external airlock door shutting echoed from behind him. Then, the acrid scent of aerosol disinfectants and cleaning chemicals hissed and shrieked into the room, making Ferro's nose twitch.

The air on Tartarus was mostly breathable - aside from the poison storms. But off-worlders preferred not to breath the same air as those who wound up on this penal planet.

Normally Ferro would react the way he usually did - with begrudging acceptance. If he was going to get out of this shit-show, he would have to get used to licking the boots of the other types of humans scattered all around the galaxy.

As he stood there, though, he met his own gaze in the polished metal box that encased him on all sides. And when he saw himself, the cynicism and distaste he held for everything faded for just a moment, the writhing mass of bitterness weakening for the merest second.

Ferro was still only a teenager, but his face looked that of an aging adult man. Wrinkled and weathered skin, studded with zits and red-pink patches of acne, made up his squat, pudgy face. Sparse stubble protruded from his skin in various places around his mouth, including a ragged wisp of a moustache clinging to his upper lip. He was thin for a Tartarusan, but still had the characteristics of growing up on a high-gravity planet. Five-foot-two, his neck was thick and round, his shoulders bulging at the tops of his big-boned arms and his barrel-body complete with a wide ribcage and stout, stubby legs. His eyes, deep-sunken into their sockets, regarded himself with a look of vicious distaste.

He didn't want to believe he looked like this. But he did.

He hated what this fucking world had done to him. After watching his entire life waste away at him for years, not to mention sitting in a crowded, stuffy and sweltering back end of a wasteland barge for four damn hours, Ferro looked the worst he had ever been in his life. Sweat plastered his pallid and swarthy skin, the wrinkled sack of biomatter stretched over his body having a slight grey tint thanks to the minerals in Tartarus' atmosphere. He looked fat, even without his baggy clothing on, his bulbous belly protruding out from under the slabs of muscle that hugged his ribcage. And his hair, pale brown in colour, was already starting to grey on both his face and his scalp. Strands of the stuff were turning wiry and withered, with more of the colour seeming to have drained away each time he looked in the mirror.

Tartarus drained the life out of a man in more ways than one. And Ferro wanted out.

He would not be stuck on this floating ball of spacebound shit for a second longer than he had to.

No. Matter. What.