Since the odds were long that a bad thing would happen, I was not worried. Well, no more than usual. I snuck a couple of additional air bottles and some combat rats onboard, finding places behind the wall plates that were empty enough to hold them. I also added some computing power, borrowing an officer’s [...]

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There are gradients of bad things. Some make you say “Oh, shit!” Some cause you to exclaim “Oh, fuck!” And, then there are those times when the shit is rolling down hill so fast you don’t have time to speak.
The sole official duty of a Space Academy cadet was to be the “buoy boy”. That’s [...]

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Whenever I did something unbelievably stupid, as young men often do, my dad would ask me “Did you take a stupid pill this morning, son?”
When I was discharged, after eighteen years in the Terran Marines, to accept an appointment to the Space Academy, I heard his voice. Two years from retirement and I bailed.
I was [...]

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Hey, there, fellas. How about buying a vet a drink?
Tell ya what. I’ll trade you a story for that drink.
Well, how about one about the Battle of the Grape Arbor?
Laugh all ya want, boys. Some of us did make it out. That’s why I’m in this chair, ya know.
Thank ya kindly. Let me wet my [...]

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Fortitude McBride was the archtypical gunnery sergeant. A Marine’s Marine. If you cut him, he’d bleed green.
He’d joined the Space Marines to escape the backwater colonial planet he’d been raised on. His parents were members of a tiny Christian sect that named their sons after virtues. Not even his friends called him Fortitude. Fort, for [...]

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