THE PLANET SHILOH, THE CONFEDERACY OF MAN

The early morning sun was a blinding ball of fire in the sky, and the hot air shimmered as it rose off the long queue of fuel trucks that snaked the curve and disappeared over the rise beyond. Jim Raynor, squinting behind a pair of mirrorshades, brought the tanker to a stop, switched off the ignition, and leaned back. During the hour he’d already spent in the line, he’d memorized every scuff and speck of dirt on the back end of the truck in front of him.

Through the open window of the truck’s cab, Raynor scanned the familiar landscape. The gently rolling farmland was parched, and had been for more than a month, with the hottest weather still ahead. After a brief interlude, winter would fall like a hammer and the land would be covered with a thick layer of white. “She blows hot, and she blows cold,” Raynor’s father liked to say. “But Shiloh is a bitch either way.”

The tedious grind had been difficult for the restless eighteen-year-old to get used to, but he had suffered through the first few weeks of the vespene gas ration with no complaints. His parents had enough to worry about already.

The ongoing Guild Wars had diverted resources away from the planet and, according to his father, most of the other worlds, too. As a result, farmers like Jim’s parents had to deal with fuel rationing, city residents had to cope with food shortages, and everybody had to pay higher taxes. But they all did what they had to do, knowing their sacrifice would afford them protection against the Kel-Morian Combine.

Sitting on the console next to him, Raynor’s fone chimed and Tom Omer’s face appeared. The other boy was at the wheel of his father’s flatbed truck three rigs back. “Check it out,” Omer said, as his image disappeared and a hologram blossomed over the pas senger seat. It consisted of floating puzzle pieces, at least a hundred of them, which, if assembled correctly, would create a 3-D picture. A picture that Omer had pulled up from somewhere and ordered his fone to chop, mix, and deliver. “Your time starts now,” Omer said. “Go!”

The puzzle pieces were small. None were more than an inch across and they came in all sorts of sizes and shapes. But Raynor thought he recognized some of the colors and reached out to “pick” and “place” them with quick jabs of his right index finger. He made some errors, but was quick to correct them, and it wasn’t long before an image of Anna Harper in her cheerleading uniform began to piece together.

“Nice,” Raynor said approvingly.

“More than nice. She’s my future wife,” Omer replied. “Too bad she doesn’t know I exist.”

“Eh, you’re not missing anything. Anna doesn’t really have any substance.”

“Substance?” Omer called out. “You know what, Jim? Only you would say something like that. Anyway, you finished in forty-six seconds. Not bad for a motorhead… . What you got for me?”

Raynor flipped through a bunch of pictures in the fone’s memory and chuckled when he found one of Omer dressed in a clown suit taken back in sixth grade. “This pic is so hot, you’ll forget all about Anna,” he said, smiling. Raynor ran the image through the fone’s dicer app, and sent it off. “I’ll give you half an hour, and you’ll need every second of it.” There was silence as Omer went to work.

Raynor returned his attention to the road, but his mind was adrift. Upper school graduation was looming, and he had been thinking more and more about his future. He had spent his entire life on the farm, and even though their land wasn’t the best, it was going to be his someday—provided his parents weren’t forced to sell it to pay their increasingly high taxes.

Raynor figured that if he worked hard to help his family pull through, and the Confederacy won the wars, things would improve and he’d be able to focus on his own goals for a while, whatever they turned out to be. This gas shortage certainly wasn’t helping matters—his family’s fuel allotment wasn’t enough for their machines to yield a profitable harvest, so the outlook was grim.

The hollow coughs of a hundred truck ignitions firing in quick succession broke both the silence and Raynor’s train of thought. He turned the key, the engine started, and he put the tanker in gear. Then, having allowed the rig to roll forward for a hundred feet or so, it was time to stop again. He turned the engine off to conserve fuel and waited.

“Real funny,” Omer said, as he finished the puzzle. “I think I’ll hack your fone and delete that file.”

Raynor laughed. “I’d better make a backup then. You never know when a little blackmail might come in handy.”

“Hey, Jim, you still here?” a voice rang out over the speaker mounted above Raynor’s head.

Jim reached for the mic. “Hey, Frank. Yeah, I got a while to go yet.”

Frank Carver was Jim’s teammate on Centerville’s demolition team, a high-octane sport played in the less refined parts of the Koprulu sector that was much like the demolition derbies their ancestors had participated in. Vehicles were built and raced with the dual purpose of winning and destroying opponents’ vehicles. Since the wars started, the game had petered out due to a shortage of fuel and other materials.

“Yeah, me too—it seems even slower than usual today. You going into town tonight?” Frank asked.

“Nope, I can’t,” Raynor replied, “we gotta get the wheat in.”

Omer’s voice crackled through the frequency. “The harvest will be over by the time you get through this line.”

Raynor saw a puff of black vapor as the truck in front of him started up.

“Hey, Omer,” a young man’s voice popped onto the feed, “I hear you’re actually joining the Marine Corps, for real. I had no idea there was a fourth string in the military! Congrats, brother!”

A chorus of guffaws rang out as the trucks shuddered off again.

“Very funny,” Omer said. “When I come back for the victory parade, you’ll be kissing my boots for saving your sorry little asses!”

Raynor laughed, but his smile quickly faded. Despite everything his family had been through, the wars had still seemed so distant. But ever since Raynor’s classmates had begun enlisting, it had started to hit home for him. He’d heard the stories around town; many soldiers never made it home from combat. But Tom was right—he could come back a hero in the end, and Jim would still be driving his half-broken-down robo-harvester, dreaming of a break from the monotony of life. There had been moments during the past few weeks when Raynor actually envied the kid.

Raynor reached up to wipe the sweat from his face; his hand brushed past a new growth of stubble on his cheek! He craned his neck to see his reflection in the side mirror. For years Raynor had wanted to grow a beard like his father’s, and now it was finally coming in. He twisted his face in one direction, then the other, examining his tanned, youthful face, when the sudden roar of a powerful engine blasted him out of his thoughts.