I joined up in ‘29, just after war was declared. There were a few reasons, I guess. I was seventeen but big for my age. Older boys trying to prove something would pick on me for it. My father was a machine worker and I didn’t fancy nursing one of those robot lathes my whole life. One day this recruiting officer got me talking in the town square as I was coming home from a summer job. I’d been helping bring the strawberry harvest in at the xeno farm. My back was aching and it was stinking hot.

“Hey, big fella,” he said. “You look like you could do with a drink.” He bought me a beer in the village bar. The local boys steered clear of the officer. I liked that. He was in uniform and had a scarlet scar down his left cheek. He told me about all the out of system worlds he’d visited. He said the navy was recruiting for the Stellar Marines, who’d get the pick of the equipment. The marines had the best dress uniform in the forces. Chicks loved it, he said. One beer led to another and I woke up the next day with the Federal Sovereign in my pocket. My dad tried to get the local magistrate to get me out on account of my age but that was it.

He didn’t mention the smell and heat of a troop carrier, all canned air and sweat and stale urine, or what it’s like when you drop out of the carrier in a landing craft and into flak. The sailor boys call it refuge disposal. The drop ship they call a wheelie bin.

It was like this in the marines: you learn how to hump 80 kilos of kit 50 clicks a day. Second, the most important, how to stand at the back of the queue. Then you get on a troop carrier. At all times you are treated like a mushroom: kept in the dark and crapped on all day. So the first we knew what was happening was at 03.30 when the color sergeant blew reveille. We all knew it was Showtime. The bugler played like he was going to burst. On comes the holo. Some spook came in to stand beside General Sanders. Sanders told us it was the Dread Lord planet. It was the culmination of a long campaign and we had the honor of leading the assault. And all that. The old salts around me all sighed and you knew what they were thinking. Old Sanders claimed the navy had already taken care of things by dropping most of the local asteroid belt on the opposition. Then the spook got up and told us he had so many spies in place that the Dreads couldn’t take a dump without us knowing. Go in, scope it out, and if you see a Dread just call in fire support. Piece of cake.

Yeah, right.

One of the old salts was behind me in the queue for the drop ships. He wasn’t a bad guy. He said vets called the Dreads ‘roaches. On old Earth you had these insects that were so hard to kill, he said, people joked they’d still be around after a nuclear war.

You don’t hear anything until you hit atmosphere, and you can’t see out of the armor plating. It’s a peculiar feeling knowing the enemy’s firing from below, aiming for your asshole. The wheelie bin lurches so much you lose your breakfast. If one guy pukes it starts a chain reaction. You want to get into action just to get the stink of vomit out of throat.

You know it when you hit atmosphere. The wheelie bin vibrates harder than my dad used to shake me. There’s a roaring and the tearing sound of AA rounds exploding. Some of the guys sit there in their clamps with their eyes squeezed shut. There are always a couple of vets cracking jokes.

Anyway we landed way off zone. Who knows what happened to the guidance. Landing implies some kind of control but I almost broke my tailbone even through all the padding and armor. There was a dead ‘roach right there in front of as we dismounted and staggered like crabs for cover in the rubble. It stank. It was unbelievably hot, like you open a pizza oven and stick your head inside. The Death Lord was as big as a house and lay across the bridge and half in the river. We knew all about them from training but it’s a different thing seeing one up close. The top half was totally smashed.

The sky was almost black from all the debris kicked up by the mass drivers. They say it takes years before it settles down. Not much fun for the first colonists.

There was another ‘roach maybe fifteen clicks away blazing away into the sky. The captain got a visual through his binos and called it in. They’re hard to pick up on radar and stuff. The thing was heading away from us to the north. You wouldn’t believe how fast they move. Its shields were glowing this kind of blinding violet. It was like a small sun even through full shades.

The ‘roach must have sensed us. I don’t know how. The captain had sent my squad off to a low hill with a transmitter. He wanted me to climb to the top and try to raise brigade HQ. So we were behind the hill when some rounds came in. The next thing we knew we were all flat on our asses with our eardrums blown out. We got to the top of the hill somehow. The bridge and the wheelie bin and the dead ‘roach were gone. There was just this big glass hole around half a klick wide. The second ‘roach was pretty far away by this time. All manner of ordnance was coming down on the thing. The horizon was all lit up with it. The ‘roach seemed to just shrug it all off and kept firing into the atmosphere the whole time. It was like a pencil beam drawn with a razor up into the clouds. Over and over. The ‘roach disappeared over the horizon and then it was like watching a thunderstorm from afar.

It got kinda peaceful in the usual military FUBAR way. We hunkered down on the hilltop and blew some foxholes in the dry rock with frags. It was around 45C all the time. We had a lots of iron rations but only some canteens of water. More FUBAR. We ran out of water in the middle of the night and by the time a brigade scout found us we were dying of thirst.

We were evacuated off-world around 19.30 the next day.

I found out later the whole company aside from my squad was gone. The division took eighty-five per cent casualties, mostly dead. Apparently we won though. The Terran Alliance trumpeted it as a big victory. There was a big ceremony; you probably saw it. Me and the rest of the grunts in the squad got a campaign medal. Most of us didn’t care too much for that although we were pretty happy to be alive. Old President Casey herself gave us the gongs. She’s smaller and way older than she looks on holo. One of the grunts in my squad couldn’t take all the media hype and shot himself a couple of months later. The rest of us are just drunks.

A year later the Federation traded the ‘roach planet with the Iconian Refuge for a pile of money and some tech. The research went into building better manufacturing and farming. My dad got put out of a job and couldn’t even get work down the vineyard as the owners got themselves some fancy new robots as well. That’s irony for you.