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The island was deserted, but whoever had been here hadn’t been gone that long. The remains of a campfire still smoldered. Sand-colored camouflage tents whipped about from the Pelican’s exhaust. There were dummy targets set up around the scraggly bush on the edge of the Insurrectionist camp.

“I am saddened to report,” Felicia said, “that we have just missed yet another Insurrectionist camp.” There was some bitterness in her voice. Like me, she was frustrated by what she’d seen of the CMA sympathies so far. No matter how much we were Outer Colonists, we’d still been given a job and sworn an oath to be soldiers. We wanted to do our job.

An hour later, someone from the Office of Naval Intelligence arrived in a gleaming, brand-new green Pelican. It touched down in a flurry of sand. The ONI agent quickly walked about the camp remains with a disgusted look, then left.

We had a barbecue on the edge of the water that night. The sunset wavered, and the stars started to wink into place.

“They won’t be able to hold this together,” Felicia said, throwing chicken bones out into the water.

“Who won’t?” I asked.

“The UNSC. The Inner Colonies.” Felicia pointed up at the stars over the bonfire and the dripping explosions of fat from chicken still hanging from the improvised spits. “If we spread out through all those stars, what could hold us all together? At some point, distance will have its effect, and so will time, and someone will have to break away and do something different. No matter how much force they apply, they can’t stop this. Even people from within their ranks are deserting for the Outer Colonies. It’s like Rome. They kept taking these barbarians and teaching them how to fight, and then they’d end up leaving and fighting the very generals who’d taught them. We’re those barbarians!”

A small coal exploded in the fire, scattering tiny, incandescent particles into the dark, where they winked out and vanished.

Eric threw a chicken bone at Felicia. “You think too much, you damn Innie.”

Felicia laughed. “Innie? Not me, sir, I’m no Insurrectionist. I just follow orders and go where they tell me. If I weren’t here I’d be sitting in jail back in Utgard because of this girl I met in a bar one night . . .”

“. . . I mean, how was I supposed to know she was the governor’s daughter,” Eric and I chorused, finishing Felicia’s anecdote before she could even launch into it. She’d told it to us often enough.

She blushed and laughed, demanding we hand over the six-pack of beer before it got warm from sitting outside the cooler and too close to the fire.

The next day we were assigned to riot patrol in Elysium City: howling citizens throwing rocks and pavers at the Colonial Administration’s offices, shaking signs about freedom and independence, while we kept our shoulders up against the riot shields and kept them back.

“They’re really pissed off,” Felicia grunted, arms locked in mine as we shoved back against the crowd. A red-haired woman in a cocktail dress shouted obscenities at us and tried to leap over the cordon, but Eric stepped forward and shoved her back, hard enough that she fell under the mob, fortunately rescued by a pair of her friends.

It was something the police should have been doing, so it was quite clear that the UNSC didn’t want to have anything to do with us and had sent us out to do scut work. Certainly they wouldn’t be including us in any raids or counterinsurgency operations in the future.

None of the old hands in our barracks particularly minded.

Meanwhile, the demonstrations grew angrier and more dangerous with each passing day.

AFTER TWO months of riot patrol and guarding bases, or anything else the UNSC determined was simple enough for us to handle, we were growing bored and looking for diversions. We were far enough out of Elysium City that to hop a ride into where the parties were meant we had to get ahold of passes, or know someone with access to a Warthog.

So the three of us had made fast friends with Allison Stark, one of the last of the Pelican