"It was years before we found the place. When we did so, the CDF troops razed the Salong colony to the ground and barbecued the Salong colony leader in a cookout. Needless to say we've been fighting the baby-eating sons of bitches ever since.

"You can see where I'm going with this," Oglethorpe said. "Assuming you know the good guys from the bad guys will get you killed. You can't afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace."

Another time Oglethorpe asked us to guess what the one advantage was that Earth-based soldiers had over CDF soldiers. "It's certainly not physical conditioning or weaponry," he said, "since we're clearly ahead on both those counts. No, the advantage soldiers have on Earth is that they know who their opponents are going to be, and also, within a certain range, how the battle will be conducted—with what sort of troops, types of weapons, and range of goals. Because of this, battle experience in one war or engagement can be directly applicable to another, even if the causes for the war or the goals for the battle are entirely different.

"The CDF has no such advantage. For example, take a recent battle with the Efg." Oglethorpe tapped on one of the displays to reveal a whalelike creature with massive side tentacles that branched into rudimentary hands. "The guys are up to forty meters long and have a technology that allows them to polymerize water. We'd lose water ships when the water around them turned into a quicksand-like sludge that pulled them down, taking their crews with them. How does the experience of fighting one of these guys translate into experience that can be applied to, say, the Finwe,"—the other screen flipped on, revealing a reptilian charmer—"who are small desert dwellers who prefer long-distance biological attacks?

"The answer is that it really can't. And yet CDF soldiers go from one sort of battle to the other all the time. This is one reason why the mortality rate in the CDF is so high—every battle is new, and every combat situation, in the experience of the individual soldier at least, is unique. If there's one thing you bring out of these little chats of ours, it's this: Any ideas you have about how war is waged had better be thrown out the window. Your training here will open your eyes to some of what you'll encounter out there, but remember that as infantry, you'll often be the first point of contact with new hostile races, whose methods and motives are unknown and sometimes unknowable. You have to think fast, and not assume what's worked before will work now. That's a quick way to be dead."

One time, a recruit asked Oglethorpe why CDF soldiers should even care about the colonists or the colonies. "We're having it drilled into our heads that we're not even really human anymore," she said. "And if that's the case, why should we feel any attachment to the colonists? They're only human, after all. Why not breed CDF soldiers as the next step in human evolution and give ourselves a leg up?"

"Don't think you're the first one to ask that question," Oglethorpe said, and this got a general chuckle. "The short answer is that we can't. All the genetic and mechanical fiddling that gets done to CDF soldiers renders them genetically sterile. Because of common genetic material used in the template of each of you, there are far too many lethal recessives to allow any fertilization process to get very far. And there's too much nonhuman material to allow successful crossbreeding with normal humans. CDF soldiers are an amazing bit of engineering, but as an evolutionary path, they're a dead end. This is one reason why none of you should be too smug. You can run a mile in three minutes, but you can't make a baby.

"In a larger sense, however, there's no need. The next step of evolution is already happening. Just like the Earth, most of the colonies are isolated from each other. Nearly all people born on a colony stay there their entire lives. Humans also adapt to their new homes; it's already beginning culturally. Some of the oldest of the colony planets are beginning to show linguistic and cultural drift from their cultures and languages back on Earth. In ten thousand years there will be genetic drift as well. Given enough time, there will be as many different human species as there are colony planets. Diversity is the key to survival.

"Metaphysically, maybe you should feel attached to the colonies because, having been changed yourself, you appreciate the human potential to become something that will survive in the universe. More directly, you should care because the colonies represent the future of the human race, and changed or not, you're still far closer to human than any other intelligent species out there.

"But ultimately, you should care because you're old enough to know that you should. That's one of the reasons the CDF selects old people to become soldiers, you know—it's not just because you're all retired and a drag on the economy. It's also because you've lived long enough to know that there's more to life than your own life. Most of you have raised families and have children and grandchildren and understand the value of doing something beyond your own selfish goals. Even if you never become colonists yourselves, you still recognize that human colonies are good for the human race, and worth fighting for. It's hard to drill that concept into the brain of a nineteen-year-old. But you know from experience. In this universe, experience counts."

We drilled. We shot. We learned. We kept going. We didn't sleep much.

In week six, I replaced Sarah O'Connell as squad leader. E squad consistently fell behind in team exercises and that was costing the 63rd Platoon in intra-platoon competitions. Every time a trophy went to another platoon, Ruiz would grind his teeth and take it out on me. Sarah accepted it with good grace. "It's not exactly like herding kindergarteners, unfortunately," is what she had to say. Alan took her place and whipped the squad into shape. Week seven found the 63rd shooting a trophy right out from under the 58th; ironically, it was Sarah, who turned out to be a hell of a shot, who took us over the top.

In week eight, I stopped talking to my BrainPal. Asshole had studied me long enough to understand my brain patterns and began seemingly anticipating my needs. I first noticed it during a simulated live-fire exercise, when my MP-35 switched from rifle rounds to guided missile rounds, tracked, fired and hit two long-range targets, and then switched again to a flamethrower just in time to fry a nasty six-foot bug that popped out of some nearby rocks. When I realized I hadn't vocalized any of the commands, I felt a creepy vibe wash over me. After another few days, I noticed I became annoyed whenever I would actually have to ask Asshole for something. How quickly the creepy becomes commonplace.

In week nine, I, Alan and Martin Garabedian had to provide a little administrative discipline to one of Martin's recruits, who had decided that he wanted Martin's squad leader job and was not above attempting a little sabotage to get it. The recruit had been a moderately famous pop star in his past life and was used to getting his way through whatever means necessary. He was crafty enough to enlist some squadmates into the conspiracy, but unfortunately for him, was not smart enough to realize that as his squad leader, Martin had access to the notes he was passing. Martin came to me; I suggested that there was no reason to involve Ruiz or the other instructors in what could easily be resolved by ourselves.

If anyone noticed a base hovercraft briefly going AWOL later that night, they didn't say anything. Likewise if anyone saw a recruit dangling from it upside down as it passed dangerously close to some trees, the recruit held to the hovercraft only by a pair of hands on each ankle. Certainly no one claimed to hear either the recruit's desperate screaming, or Martin's critical and none-too-favorable examination of the former pop star's most famous album. Master Sergeant Ruiz did note to me at breakfast the next morning that I was looking a little windblown; I replied that it may have been the brisk thirty-klick jog he had us run prior to the meal.