So it turns out that the protagonist's slave conscript status is

[conuly]

non-heritable and ends at the age of 35 (if he lives that long, which looks increasingly unlikely), at which point he'll be sent back home. Doesn't sound like he's getting a pension or anything like adequate mental health care, either before or after (cheaping out on mental health care sounds like a really bad way to get a good fighting army, but what do I know?), and since everybody he grew up with in the slave conscript army is now dead I think it's safe to say that the war is not going well and his last-second escape was a brilliant idea all around... but all the same, "forced term indenture" might be a more accurate term. It's a trivial nicety, but I'm gonna stick with it.

Also, we're finally told that in his particular case his indenture/enslavement/conscription is halfway between a tax and a tribute that his planet pays to the mafia evil empire in exchange for being left alone. It's theoretically a lottery system, but in reality the child soldiers are made up of orphans, delinquents, and kids whose families just don't care about them that much. You have no idea how relieved I was to have cleared that up! Wondering about the specific circumstances was taking up entirely too much brainspace. I don't know how my brain decides what to fixate on when reading, but that was evidently it.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

in reality the child soldiers are made up of orphans, delinquents, and kids whose families just don't care about them that much.

Which, with reference to the previous post and comments, does make you wonder why the Evil Empire doesn’t control its soldiers with “look, we’re giving you a better life than you would have had/we’re your family now” brainwashing rather than the “bwa-ha-ha we put a bomb in you and will detonate it if you desert” angle, which as you said isn’t really likely to motivate them to do a good job, even if it stops them actually trying to flee.

[conuly]

Seriously, you'd think they'd play that up a bit more. But no, apparently as kids they got hit when they didn't use correct table manners.

[ioplokon]

Interesting. This is actually more or less how the French army worked in the ancien régime.

[conuly]

I don't care how common it is, it's still ridiculous. (So is all slavery. Talk about a penny-wise, pound-foolish method of running a business!)

[ioplokon]

Yes, obviously. I just meant that there are historical precedents for this situation that would probably have been helpful for the author to more clearly convey what was going on?

[moon_custafer]

I long since reached the conclusion that villains in fiction are far more concerned with evil-for-its-own-sake than they are with pragmatism, no matter how much they may boast about efficiency and the cold equations. More recently, I’ve come to believe this is also true of many real-life villains.