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I SIGNED up for the Colonial Military the hour I turned eighteen. January 3, 2524. Smartest thing I’d done up to that point. Flipped off my father, who’d stood by a giant JOTUN trundling across a flat, golden plain of wheat, and then I rode a flatbed full of corn all the way into town. Sure, the JOTUNs did the real manual labor: plowing, planting, monitoring, harvesting. But we still ended up among the crops now and again, despite the automated work the giant, one hundred-foot lawn mower-like machines did.

“It’s just dirt,” I’d told a friend about my decision to leave. “And I’m sick and tired of grubbing about in it. I can’t believe my parents left a real world to travel all the way out here to dig dirt.”

The farming life was not my destiny. I’d known that since the day I first looked up at the stars while riding on the back of one of the giant, automated JOTUNs, a long piece of straw dangling out the side of my mouth.

No. I was going to see worlds. Pack a gun. The next time I came back home to Harvest, I wanted to watch the girls bat their eyes at a man in uniform. Not a farm boy with dirt under his nails. I wanted to be a hard-as-nails tough-ass Marine.

I walked around Utgard for the last time, strolling along the banks of the Mimir River. I lit up a Sweet William cigar by the floodlit, well-landscaped grounds of the Colonial Parliament’s long walls. I blew what cash I had on me on drink after drink at bars scattered all up and down the Mimir until I could barely walk.

Then at sunrise, without a wink of sleep, I walked into a small recruiting office where a vaguely bored-looking desk sergeant looked me over and handed me some paperwork. After I painfully worked my way through it, he stood up and shook my hand. “Welcome to the Colonial Military, son,” he said.

By that evening I was still not a tough-ass Marine, but a tired, hungover recruit without any hair, dressed in an ill-fitting uniform, throwing up my guts in a dirt field while a drill sergeant yelled at me. I was now Private First Class Gage Yevgenny.

I want to say I learned how to kill a man with my pinky, or how to use a sniper rifle to kill a fly on a log of shit from a thousand yards, but all I really learned was that I didn’t like scrabbling around in the mud with live rounds going off over my head.

But I made it through anyway.

Unlike the UNSC, the CMA boot camp lasted just a couple weeks. Enough to teach you how to use your weapon, salute, march, and drive a Warthog before they booted you right on out of there.

It wasn’t that much more advanced than spending a week shooting gophers in the fields, or so I thought at the time.

Unlike some of my fellow recruits, I at least knew how to point and shoot. As a result, I was promoted to lance corporal and got to tell a few other soldiers what to do.

That I liked.

But it still didn’t prepare me for the things I was about to see.

I MET Felicia Sanderson and Eric Santiago at the Utgard spaceport. Felicia grew up right here in Utgard, on Harvest; Eric had come in from Madrigal. With our duffels at our feet, we waited as patiently as we could in line with civilian passengers. We’d developed some grudging respect for one another during boot camp, enough that they felt comfortable airing complaints about Colonial Military life around me.

“I still can’t believe we’re forced to fly civilian to Eridanus,” Felicia groused.

“We could go AWOL,” Eric said.

I shook my head. “Where? The liner doesn’t stop anywhere remotely interesting between here and the Eridanus System.”

“I’m just saying, it’s odd.” Eric picked his duffel up as the line moved.

“How could command let the UNSC grab all our ships?” Felicia had been complaining about this latest development for a solid week. Harvest was a newer colony, and most of the settlers had come from other Outer Colonies. Felicia and her family didn’t hold a lot of love for the UNSC, or the Earth-controlled Colonial Administration. Her family hadn’t set foot on Earth in generations.

It was, I had