all dressed and lined up in front of our lockers. If Sergeant Gau is pleased at all with the fact that we’re ready five minutes ahead of time, he doesn’t show it. There’s a window set into the wall of the senior drill instructor’s office, and I can see that he’s fully aware of the platoon all lined up and waiting for inspection, but he doesn’t come out of the office again until the clock at the head of the room says 04:55.
We march off to breakfast. It’s only our third meal in the military, but the tables that were thrown together by coincidence on the first day are already coalescing into firm little groups. Our table of six has reconvened at every meal so far. There’s me, and my bunk mate Halley. There’s Ricci, the thin kid with the acne-scarred face and the silly chin beard, and Hamilton, an athletic-looking girl with long, blond hair. Then there’s Cunningham, who is covered in tattoos, and who was wearing a buzz cut long before she decided to join up. Lastly, there’s Garcia, a dark-eyed guy who never speaks unless you ask him a direct question. Halley is from Vancouver, Ricci from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and Hamilton is from Utah. Cunningham signed up in some forsaken farm town in Tennessee, and Garcia merely shakes his head when you ask him about his hometown.
“What branch would you pick if you could?” Ricci asks us over scrambled eggs and toast.
“Shit,” Halley laughs. “I’ll be glad if I make it through Basic. They can post me into any branch they want.”
“Come on,” Ricci prods. “Everybody has a preference.”
Halley shovels another forkful of eggs into her mouth and shrugs before answering.
“I don’t know, honestly. They’ll decide what we’re good for at the end of Basic. I wouldn’t mind something to drive or fly, though. Marine drop ship pilot, maybe, or armor crewman.”
“What about you?” I ask Ricci.
“I want Navy,” he says. “Coasting around in a starship. Not having to run around and get shot at. I’ll do anything, seriously. Mop decks, clean toilets, whatever.”
“You’ll end up in the Marines,” Halley tells him. “Or worse, they’ll put you into the Army.”
Our knowledge of the military branches is mostly limited to a number of self-contradictory shows on the networks, and the promotional vids they played for us at the recruiting office when they were convinced that they couldn’t talk us out of joining up.
The Navy owns the heavy gear, the starships that jump between the Colonies and provide the heavy firepower in territorial disputes, and the Marines are the boots on the ground in the Colonies. The Navy is considered a choice assignment, with the candidates for fleet service going to Fleet School on Luna right after boot camp. With close to five hundred colonized worlds to garrison and defend, the Marines have the most slots available, so that’s where most of us are likely to end up.
The Territorial Army is for anyone who doesn’t make the cut for the other two branches. Those are the grunts who keep civil order in the NAC on Earth itself, who slog it out with any of a hundred other nation-states. Army grunts don’t get to travel in spaceships and defend colonies; they are the garbage haulers of the Armed Forces. The TA has to deal with the armies of all the belligerents on Earth, including the ones too poor or backward for colonial expansion. The TA is also the government’s main tool to deal with violent strife in the NAC itself. It’s dangerous to jump onto a new planet or defend a new colony settlement against an invasion of Sino-Russian marines, but it’s a whole different level of danger to have your drop ship land you in the middle of a Public Residence Cluster in civil unrest, with five million people around you in various states of agitation and discontent.
“If they try to stick me in the Army, I’ll just walk away from the whole thing,” Ricci says.
“Are you serious?” Cunningham asks. “After making it through Basic?”
“Hell, yeah,” he replies. “I didn’t join to get my head blown off. It’s Navy or nothing. Push comes to shove, I’ve had three months of real food, right?”
“What about you?” Halley asks me as we take our trays over to the collection racks at the end of breakfast time. “What do you want to be when you get out of Basic?”