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The HSAT-223 scramjet aircraft was older and considerably more uncomfortable than the SOL-343 that had brought Gath and the rest of the medics down from geosynchronous orbit. It lifted off from Homeport Ground at 1000 hours the next morning, its flying wing shape lumbering slowly into the sky under the meager power of its conventional jet turbine engines. It made a lumbering turn to the northwest and settled in for a steep climb up to altitude. Upon reaching eighteen thousand meters the burners kicked in, sucking up hydrogen fuel at a tremendous rate but also accelerating the aircraft through the sound barrier and beyond, allowing the more efficient scramjet engines to take over and bring the aircraft up to its cruising altitude of thirty-four thousand meters and its cruising speed of fifteen thousand kilometers per hour.

“Flight time to NAWM,” said the pilot, who had introduced himself as Squiff, “will be seventy-eight Earth minutes. Weather at NAWM is clear skies but hotter than purg. Forty-four degrees, with a south wind blowing at nineteen meters per second.”

NAWM stood for North American West Main, the first three words designating the geographic location of the base, the last designating the type of base. A main base was one large enough to land scramjets and to serve as a cargo and personnel hub for the secondary bases, which, in turn, served as hubs for the outposts. Gath did not know enough about Earth geography to picture exactly where NAWM was, other than it was on the large landmass north of the equator. He had been told it was in the middle of a hot, miserable desert, near the ruins of a pre-expansion city that had been famous for gambling, prostitution, and decadence. He had never heard of the city and could not even remember the name he had been told it was called. Not that it mattered much. He wasn’t going to be staying at NAWM for long. As soon as the scrammer landed he was supposed to board a smaller aircraft for another flight, this one to a place called CVS, or Central Valley Secondary, his first assignment.

The scrammer was primarily a cargo aircraft and it was being used as such on this flight. Loaded into the central portion were four large tanks of liquid hydrogen and perhaps two dozen small cargo containers full of various supplies. Fifteen removable passenger seats had been installed in each of the secondary cargo holds at the tips of the wings and each held a handful of HSF personnel who had reason to fly from Homeport Ground to NAWM on this particular day. The only other person from Gath’s graduating class on the flight with him was Flixan Rizzle, the natural blonde spaceborn who had given Doc Bookender the unsatisfactory answer to his question about the definition of vestigial. She sat on the right side, in the same cluster of travelers as Gath, but had not said much to him since they had boarded. She was too busy flirting with the two medics and three marines—all of them males—who were sitting near her. That was Rizzle for you. She never let pass an opportunity to start up one of those “we’re just friends” relationships the spaceborn were so famous for.

Gath kept the boisterous conversation tuned out for the most part. It was not hard to do. His mind was more than a little occupied by the parting from Xenia he had just endured. She had been assigned to someplace called ‘Hootchy men secondary’—as Xenia had pronounced it—which was reached by first flying to SEAM, or Southeast Asia Main. Gath didn’t know where those places were either, other than that they were on the opposite side of Earth from where he was going to be. And though their parting was painful and sad for both of them, the groundborn rules of relationship etiquette dictated that they could not acknowledge it in any way, thus making their final separation nothing more than a friendly hug and a brief promise that they would keep in touch. He wondered now if it might not be a good idea to make a vow not to get involved with any more spaceborn. Wasn’t it more trouble and pain than it was really worth?

The seat on Gath’s left was empty. Just as the scrammer tipped forward and started to descend back toward the ground, a light skinned male wearing the shirt of a medic stood up from his seat near the front of the passenger area and walked over, taking the seat next to Gath without asking for permission. Gath hid his irritation and gave a friendly nod of greeting.

The man held out his right hand to Gath. “I’m Crillson Sparrow,” he said, his accent unmistakably groundborn—from Gardenia, in the Beta Legume system, it sounded like. “People call me Crill. How you doing, brother?”

Gath became instantly less irritated. He held out his right hand in return and they shook—not the pansy knuckle bump or elbow smack of the spaceborn, but a genuine groundborn handshake. “Gatheous Stoner,” he said. “Gath.”

“I thought that was a Britannic accent I heard while we were boarding,” Crill said with a smile. “You a newbie here in the Sol?”

Gath nodded. “First day, on my way to the first assignment.”

Crill chuckled. “Ain’t that some slag?” he said. “You have no idea what you’re in for, brother. No torkin’ idea. Where they sending you?”

“CVS,” Gath said.

“The valley,” he said. “Never done any time there myself, but I’ve been to the base a few times on my way here or there. Usually stopping to get fuel in the hover or whatnot. It’s hot as tork there in the summer, so I’m told. Not as hot as at NAWM, but you don’t have to go outside at NAWM if you don’t want to—especially not in full armor with a full pack.”

“How long have you been on Earth?” Gath asked.

“In Earth time or real time?”

“Real time,” Gath said. “I haven’t quite got comprehension with the Earth time yet.”

“Four hundred and twelve days,” he said. “I did my first year at a base over on the east coast of North America called New England Secondary. The last hundred and twelve days I’ve been assigned to an outpost up north called Spokane. There’s a lot of dams on a big river up that way—wouldn’t want the poor homers clustered around Seattle to get flooded now, would we?—and we go out on escort duty with the engineers a lot.” He shrugged. “There ain’t no nice duty on Earth, but it’s about as good as it gets in this place. Minimal contact with the torkin’ homers.”

“Are they as bad as their reputation?” Gath asked.

“Worse, maybe,” Crill replied. “I seen the homers do slag to each other that is just beyond comprehension. It’s not just that they have no regard for human life; they actually celebrate killing each other. Up in New England there are about twenty thousand of them living in the ruins of an old city called Boston and they’re always fighting little wars with another bunch that live in the ruins of a place called Springfield. When the Boston homers capture some of the Springfield homers, they tie them up in a big bag and toss them in the harbor to drown. They don’t even weight ‘em down or nothing, just let them slowly flail around as the water soaks through the bag and finally kills them.”

Gath was appalled. “That is pretty barbaric,” he said.

“You ain’t ratslaggin’,” Crill said. “And when the Springfield bunch catches some of the Boston homers, they tie them to a Whoever damned stake in the middle of town, pile a bunch of wood around them, and then burn them alive.”

Gath was not sure which method was more inhumane. “Don’t we try to stop them? Doc Bookender said the marines will step in to stop them from killing each other when they can.”

“That’s the key phrase there,” Crill said. “They step in ‘when they can’. This means only when some kind of mass slaughter or large scale battle is being planned. We’re stretched pretty thin and we can’t monitor or stop everything they do. Most of the time when this slag goes on we hear about it afterward, when it’s too late to help anybody.” He shrugged. “Not sure what point there is to helping any of them anyway. They’re the most hopeless bunch of humans in existence.”

Gath raised his eyebrows a bit. He had always assumed that any groundborn serving on Earth would feel differently than the spaceborn. Groundborn, as a culture, believed very strongly in the sanctity of each individual human life. “So you don’t agree with Homeland Policy?”

Crill frowned and then shrugged. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. My parents raised me to believe in our core values and I always did before, but ... but after spending some time here ... I don’t know. I still believe every human life is sacred and that taking someone’s life or interfering in their freedom is the worst thing someone can do to another, but ... these homers just don’t care about their own lives, let alone anyone else’s. And they don’t care about their freedom either. They allow themselves to be ruled by brutal dictators who enforce virtual slavery on them. They imprison people for not believing the same things they do, for having the intelligence to question whatever irrational belief their little group is clinging to. Maybe they’re like our end-stage elderly.”

“You mean...” he let the question trail off.

“You know what I mean,” Crill said. “When our elderly get to the point where their brain is starting to break down and they’re losing their memories, their ability to care for themselves, their very soul ... then it’s okay to bring it all to an end, to fulfill their request to terminate their lives. Maybe that’s what this planet needs. Maybe all we’re doing here is keeping some poor old culture alive long past the point that the final injection should have been given.”

Gath looked at him, his eyes probing, trying to see if Crill was serious. It certainly seemed like he was.

Like the scrammer flight from Homeport Ground to NAWM, the flight from NAWM to CVS was primarily concerned with the transportation of cargo. Two small liquid hydrogen tanks and sixteen four by four by four meter cargo containers occupied the bulk of the fuselage of the ninety year old AC-125 aircraft. Gath and five brand new marines—all of whom had been aboard Traveler with him—were crowded into a small compartment just aft of the cockpit. There were no seats to sit on, no restraining straps to hold them in, no view screens to look out of, and no shitter for them to use. The door to the cockpit was closed and sealed. Conversation was possible but difficult because there was no noise insulation in this part of the aircraft and the roar of the two hydrogen burning engines was loud enough that one had to shout in order to be heard. No one had anything to say that they felt was important enough to go to the trouble.

Fortunately, the flight was short. It took about ten metric minutes for the aircraft to level off from its climb and then only another five went by before the pitch of the engines wound down a bit and they started to descend. Ten minutes after that, they heard the sound of the flaps deploying and the landing gear dropping into place. There was a thump as the wheels touched down and a roar of reverse thrust as they slowed. They had arrived.

They rolled along the ground for a few minutes, turning left once, turning right twice, and then the engines wound down completely. A large clanking noise sounded from the rear of the aircraft. It was followed by the whine of hydraulic machinery and then silence. Everyone continued to sit in their spots, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. No such someone appeared.

Five minutes went by. The door to the cockpit did not open. No announcement came from overhead speakers. Gath was not sure if there even were overhead speakers—certainly nothing had been announced over any to this point. There was an access door on the left side of their compartment, but it had not opened either and there was no latch visible with which to open it. The six of them looked at each other in confusion.

“So ... what happens now?” asked one of the marines.

“Maybe this isn’t CVS,” suggested one of the others. “Maybe this is just a cargo stop.”

“Nobody said anything about making a cargo stop,” Gath said.

“Nobody said anything about slag,” said the first marine.

Another two minutes went by. Just as Gath was about to get up and knock on the cockpit door, they heard the sound of footsteps approaching from the aft portion of the aircraft. There was another clank as the door separating their compartment from the cargo hold was unlatched. The door was pulled open to reveal a dark skinned man wearing denim cargo pants and the shirt of a marine. The stripes on his sleeve indicated he was a sergeant. The look on his face indicated he was impatient and angry.

“What the tork are you idiots doing in here?” he demanded. “Get your slaggers off of this aircraft so we can unload it!”

The marines all snapped instantly to their feet, all of them with the look of fear that came with displeasing a superior. Gath, who, as a medic, existed outside of the marine’s command structure, rose a little more slowly and was not afraid to speak his mind.

“Sorry for the inconvenience, sarge,” he said, “but no one told us we were supposed to leave the aircraft on our own.”

The sergeant looked pointedly at Gath, apparently not liking what he saw or heard. He shook his head in disgust. “A torkin’ groundie medic, huh?” he said. “Ain’t that just torkin’ wonderful.”

This immediately got Gath’s temper rolling. “Now listen to me,” he said. “I don’t particularly like being called...”

The sergeant stepped forward, his eyes burning into Gath’s. “I don’t give a tork what you like being called, groundie,” he interrupted. “You and the rest of you peons get the tork off this aircraft! We can’t unload it until you’re clear and the pilots need to be back in the air in twenty-minutes. So move! Move!”

They moved, passing one by one through the door the sergeant had come through and working their way between the hydrogen tanks and cargo boxes and the starboard wall of the fuselage. The sergeant followed behind them, extolling them quite loudly to move faster. At the rear of the aircraft a large set of double doors had been opened and a ramp led downward. Through the doors, Gath could see they were in a hanger. As he stood upon the ramp itself, he saw that the hanger contained about a dozen AVTOLs, or atmospheric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. All were of the propeller driven, tilt rotor variety. Most were AVTOL-60s, which had been the workhorses of deployed marine units during much of his parents’ and second generation foreparents’ youth, but two were AVTOL-120s, which were equally old but bigger, with four rotors instead of two, and capable of carrying three times as many personnel or twice as much cargo.

Before descending the ramp, Gath looked around for his two bags of belongings. They were no longer stacked in the long, skinny bin that was mounted along the wall. “Sergeant,” Gath said, turning to face the still yelling marine. “Where is...”

“Your slag has already been unloaded,” he barked. “You’re lucky we didn’t use it as a pisser. Now move! Move! Move!”

He moved, stepping onto the ramp and working his way down to the carbonized concrete floor of the hanger. There were five more marines clustered around an electric loading lift near the point where the ramp touched the floor. Three of them were privates, one—the only female among them—was a corporal, the other, a man who stood apart from the others and was dressed in shorts instead of cargo pants, was a gunnery sergeant.

“Look at them,” said the corporal, her voice dripping sarcasm. “Aren’t they just the cutest things? Fresh out of basic training camp.”

“With no torkin’ idea what kinda slag they got themselves into,” said one of the privates.

“Welcome to the Sol,” called out one of the other privates with an evil chuckle.

The gunnery sergeant stepped forward at this point. “Marines!” he yelled out. “Grab your slag and assemble on me! I’ll get you logged in and equipped for your little stay here!”

The new marines rushed to comply, making a beeline for the untidy heap of bags and baggage stacked on the other side of the electric lift. Gath headed over there as well, but at a slower pace. This caught the immediate attention of the gunnery sergeant.

“You!” he said, pointing his finger at Gath. “You’d better be torkin’ injured to be strolling across the hanger like a torkin civvie in an intox club! And you don’t look like you’re limping to me, kid!”

“I ... uh ... I’m not injured, gunny,” Gath said.

The gunny shook his head and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Another torkin’ groundie,” he said with disgust. “Just what we need. Move your ass, groundie! This ain’t the torkin’ golf course or the torkin’ ski resort, or whatever else it is you groundie mothertorkers do.”

Gath’s face flushed in anger again. “Now hold on a second,” he said, stepping close to the sergeant. “First of all, I don’t like being called ‘groundie’, not by a spaceborn mouth.”

The gunny’s eyes widened in surprise, and then narrowed to slits. “Oh you don’t, huh?” he said through clenched teeth.

“That’s right,” Gath said righteously. “And second of all, I’m not a marine, I’m a medic.” He tapped the star of life emblem on his breast. “See? I don’t take orders from marine sergeants or even from marine generals and I don’t ask ‘how high’ when you say jump.”

The gunny’s eyes dropped to the medic emblem and then flitted back up to Gath’s face. “A medic?” he said, his voice full of incredulousness. “For Whoever’s sake, I didn’t realize I was dealing with a medic, sir! Can you ever forgive me for speaking to you in such a manner?”

“Uh ... well...” Gath was unsure whether the gunny was being sarcastic or not.

“I do hope you won’t report this little misunderstanding to my lieutenant,” he added.

“Uh ... no, of course not,” Gath said carefully. “It’s understandable that you didn’t notice the star of life—though it is rather prominently displayed. Now if you can just tell me where the medics check in, I’ll be on my way.”

“Well ... the medics usually check in with Supervising Medic Cooler over in the clinic building.”

“Perfect,” Gath said, smiling. “And which way is that?”

“It’s over in the next building, down the stairs and through the tunnel. But, before you go, tell me, oh exalted medic of groundborn origin, do you think that maybe you might have to go outside at some point during your deployment here?”

“Outside?” Gath said. “Well ... yes. My understanding is that I’ll be spending a lot of time outside.”

“And if some homer shot you with a lead projectile moving at four hundred meters per second, would it rip into your chest, or your leg, or that oh-so-highly educated head? Or do you medics have some sort of superpower that allows you to dodge these things?”

Gath licked his lips, not liking the sergeant’s tone at all. “I ... I assume that I’ll be wearing standard armor when I go outside,” he said.

“Oh ... so you need armor then? Do you know who issues you that armor?”

“Uh ... the supervising medic?” Gath asked.

“No ... as a matter of fact, the ranking marine non-commissioned officer on duty is the one who issues deployment equipment and logs in incoming personnel and gives the area orientation briefing. And do you know who the ranking on-duty marine non-com currently is?”

“Umm ... you?” Gath asked.

The gunny took a sudden step forward, entering Gath’s personal space and grabbing him by the front of his shirt. “You’re Whoever damned torkin’ right, it’s me!” he screamed into his face. “Now get your ignorant, arrogant groundie ass over to that torkin’ pile and grab your slag right torkin’ now before you find out what it feels like to have a synthetic leather moccasin with a gunnery sergeant’s foot in it halfway up your torkin’ slaghole! Move, groundie! Torkin’ move!”

Gath was roughly shoved in the direction of the pile, which by now contained nothing but his two bags. His sheer momentum carried him into the nearer of the two bags and he stumbled over it, falling into the second one, landing with a thump of forcibly exhaled air.

“Get your ass up and grab your slag, groundie!” the gunny yelled again. “And don’t you ever think for a torkin’ second that you exist outside the chain of command. I know they tell you that ratslag in medic school but I’m here to tell you that if you go out in the field with a marine squad you better do whatever the tork you’re told to do the Whoever damned second you’re told to do it, or you’re going to torkin’ die out there! And I don’t really give a slag if you torkin’ die out there—it would be one less arrogant, torkhead groundie medic in The Fleet—but if we lose our medic then that might mean a marine will die, and I give every torkin’ slag in the whole of torkin’ human space about that, groundie. Do I make myself clear?”

Gath had finally managed to get to his feet and get his two bags into his arms. He was a bit breathless from the assault he had just endured and was flushed with embarrassment and anger. “Yes, gunny,” he huffed out.

“What?” the gunny yelled. “I didn’t quite hear you, groundie!”

“Yes, gunny!” he yelled back. “You make yourself clear!”

“Good,” the gunny said in normal, almost sedate tone of voice. “Then get in the line and let’s go get logged in.

Gath got in the line. They went and got logged in.

The briefing room was built like a holographic theater, with rows and aisles of seats situated upon a sloping floor, facing the stage area. There were enough seats to hold an entire company of marines. As such, it seemed quite empty with only seven people in it. The gunnery sergeant, who had introduced himself as Gunny Elix Korgan (“just gunny to you torkheads, though”), stood in front of the holo stage where he had used his commer to call up a large, three-dimensional relief map showing perhaps six hundred kilometers of landscape north to south and three hundred east to west. On the left of the map was the blue of an ocean labeled “Pacific” and a cluster of coastal hills that stretched north and south. On the right, also stretching north and south, was a range of snowcapped mountains labeled “Sierra Nevada”. In between those two was a long, narrow valley. Just a little north of center of that valley was a dot labeled CVS, the base they were now at.

“This is our area of responsibility, or AOR,” Korgan told them. “It is a region that used to be called northern California and in pre-collapse days it was quite heavily populated. This entire valley was dotted with large cities that were connected by a network of magna-train tracks. Over here...” He used a laser pointer to draw a circle around a large bay that stretched inland toward the valley. “ ... is the San Francisco Bay area. It was one of the most densely populated regions on the entire torkin’ planet back before the collapse and is still the most heavily populated homer region in the AOR.

“There are approximately a quarter of a million homers living—if you could call it that—in our AOR. The majority of them are ruled by a quasi-feudal monarchy that calls itself Norcal. The figurehead of this government is a person they call the CEO and he resides in the ruins of San Francisco in what used to be the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. He is, however, just that: a figurehead. The real power of the region is a secret police type of agency that purports to answer to the CEO but is really the group that makes all the ruling decisions. They call themselves the HR department, or so our cultural anthropologist tells me, and they rule by fear, intimidation, and by mandating the rather peculiar religion they have in place. This religion believes that a star called Polaris, which happens to be situated above the north pole of this planet and thus never moves in the night sky, is God and that the bright shiny light that never moves in the southeast sky is God’s son, sent to force us—they call us the overseers—to keep feeding and clothing them. Can anyone hazard a guess as to what the bright, shiny star in the southeast sky is?”

The marines looked at each other, passing around a collective shrug. After a moment, Gath spoke up. “Is it Homeport Topside?” he asked.

Korgan glared at him, his eyes daggers. “What was that, groundie?” he asked. “I could have sworn you just said something without properly addressing me.”

Gath fought the urge to roll his eyes or sigh. “Sorry,” he said. “Is it Homeport Topside, gunny?”

“Indeed it is, my groundie friend,” Korgan replied. “Homeport Topside is a large structure that reflects a lot of light and it sits in geostationary orbit. From the perspective here in the AOR, Homeport Topside appears to be an overly bright star that perpetually remains fixed in the southeast sky and perpetually sits the same height above the horizon while the other stars all stream past it from east to west each night and sometimes even disappear behind it. The homers have just enough pre-collapse verbal tradition to know that this star—they call it ‘The Watcher’—has not always been there, and that it appeared right about the same time as their collapse. Thus, it must be the son of God sent to make sure those evil overseers—us—continue to ship food and clothing and trinkets to them. The fact that the Watcher disappears for anywhere from one to three local hours in the early parts of each morning—this is when the planet is blocking the sunlight from reaching Homeport Topside—just adds to its theistic qualities. The homers think these disappearances are the Watcher sleeping, but of course if we overseers try to make a move while the Watcher is asleep, he will wake right the tork up and smite us all.”

A laugh among the assembled crowd, Gath included. It was a pretty ridiculous belief.

“In any case,” Korgan went on, “all official citizens of Norcal are required to have a tattoo of The Watcher on their right arm.”

“A ... a tattoo, gunny?” asked one of the marines.

“A tattoo,” he said. He directed his gaze to Gath again. “Groundie, I’m sure in all that extensive education you medics go through, they talked about tattoos somewhere, didn’t they?”

“Yes, gunny,” Gath said.

“Why don’t you tell Private...”

“Flippy, gunny,” the marine said.

“Private Flippy,” Korgan said with a nod. “Tell him what a tattoo is.”

“It’s a ritual, originally started on ancient Earth, in which pigment is injected into the dermal layer of the skin, permanently coloring it. They would use it to write words or draw pictures.”

“They write on their bodies?” asked one of the other marines, appalled.

“It used to be quite common among humans,” Gath said. “Strangely, the practice of tattooing kind of faded out of favor when our medical science reached the point where the tattoos could be removed without leaving a trace of them behind. A big part of the attraction of them was their permanence.”

“That’s insane,” said Private Flippy.

“The homers are not known for their sanity,” the gunny said. “And this bunch of homers in our AOR are quite fond of tattooing themselves. Everyone who lives to adolescence has the Watcher tattooed on their right arm. Males, when they are conscripted into the Norcal army at the age of nineteen local years, get the symbol of the army tattooed on their left arm. Their rank is then tattooed below that as they achieve it. When they’re discharged from the army after serving their two years, they are allowed to get the most important tattoo of all: a large representation of their flag across their upper back. They call this one the ‘ink of the territory’ and without it, a male is not allowed to marry or have children or negotiate contracts or do any of the other slag that being a fully vested adult allows.”

“So ... their tattoos are like their personnel record, right gunny?” asked one of the marines.

“Right,” he agreed. “They don’t have computers or an internet down here and most of them are illiterate. The only way they have to display their status and accomplishments is with the tattoos. They have a rather barbaric method of dealing with those who dare to display ink they have not earned. If one of the homers is caught with ‘false ink’, as they call it, members of the HR department will cut the skin containing the ink off of their body and feed it to the wild canines who live on the fringes of every settlement.”

“That is some torked up slag, gunny,” said Private Flippy.

“You ain’t ratslaggin’,” the gunny agreed. “If the homer manages to live through this treatment—and most do not, as their infection control methods are pretty primitive—he or she is banished from the territory and all holdings of his or her family are confiscated by the HR department.” He gave a sarcastic smile. “Ain’t the homers nice people? Worthy of our protection and care?”

Nobody said anything. After a moment, Korgan went on. “So the Norcal homers are the main bunch in our AOR, as I was telling you. They have their figurehead CEO over here in the ruins of San Francisco and they have what they call Veeps, which are allegedly the underlings of the CEO, in each of the larger settlements of their territory.” He turned to the relief map and started pointing places out. “Redding, Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, and Bakersfield. Each of these ruined cities house fairly large concentrations of Norcal homers and have a Veep living there. Of course the Veeps are just as much figureheads as the CEO and the HR homers, who also have a strong presence in each of these places, are who is really in control.