A Soldier's Permission to Die

CHAPTER 4

Chapter 4

24 hours later I found myself outside the bunkhouse again munching down on another slab of hamburger flavored substance when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the mail truck coming up the pathway to the quad. It jumbled and jostled back and forth like an old time wheeler. He was early. Usually the mail doesn't come until after we had already left for the afternoon drills.

“Hey hey....we got mail!” Yelled Kellen, emerging from the entrance to the tent. He walked up to the driver who already had the bundle for our squad tethered and ready to go. Kellen began to reach out his hand, but the driver just tossed the bundle out the window onto the dirt at Kellen's feet.

“Hey, how about handing it to me like normal human being, asshole!” yelled Kellen as the truck began to hover off. The driver didn't reply, nor did he care apparently.

Kellen reached down and picked up the bundle.

“Give me that. It's paper not food, lard-ass.” said Jasper.

“Really...I could have sworn all the food here WAS made of paper.” said Kellen sarcastically.

Yet another one of the nice little antiquities of life at camp...no electronic mail. In reality, not a whole lot of electronic anything for the most part. The number one goal of life in training camp is to acclimate us to live in the wild with only limited technology. And there was a good reason for that too.

The simple fact is, most of the planetary systems served by the Foreign Services Corps don't yet have substantial populations on them. No population means no major industry. And no major industry means no technology, except for whatever you can fit into the ship over there, which for the majority of vessels is honestly not a whole lot.

In fact, most of the planets out there are what we call “Fail Balls”, worlds not suitable for human life without the help of an enclosed artificial environment, which is usually just a few small bases at best. These could be planets with temperature extremes, without a natural electro-magnetic shield, or even without water. It might have a poison atmosphere, or no atmosphere at all-anything that pretty much stopped you from walking outside without a space suit on.

Other planets however have more promise, and are in the early stages of habitable development-namely air, water, temperate climate and so forth. For those planets that are fortunate enough to already have some of the basic elements for life in place, the last step toward habitation is not as impossible as you might think. They just need a little “Tweaking”. That's where the FSC comes in.

By and large, the majority of the work done by the Corps is terra-forming: Making environments suitable and conducive for human life. Usually these are adjustments to the atmosphere, water, land, breeding animals, dispersing plant life on a mass scale, and so forth. The primary goal of the Corps is developing a planet well enough to be able to sustain life independently without Earth's help. I guess the main idea being, before you can ruin a planet's environment with civilization and industry, you have to create one first.

One of the strange oddities about this whole process was that, while we have so far been able to successfully colonize life onto these other worlds multiple times, none of them were found to actually have their own lifeforms before we got there. No matter how predisposed the planet already was towards habitation we have yet to discover any alien life elsewhere in the universe. This has puzzled scientists for decades, and there's still no good reason as to why. Perhaps we really are alone out there, but in the meanwhile, the Corps is doing it's best to change that.

Then there is the secondary role of the FSC; to act as a military unit...a sort of “French Foreign Legion” that polices the outer planet's colonies in their infancy until they can develop to the point where they can take over the job on their own. This means boots on the ground. 90 percent of us however will never see any combat. The fact is, there are very few planets that are far enough along in the development process to arrive at the stage where they have to worry about things like cities, nations, population control, and wars. And as of right now in 2109, there were no wars.