First Week

The first week of rookie boot camp consisted entirely of physical conditioning and drill formations, interspersed with a small amount of individual weapons training, including the use of battlefield compasses, multispectral night-vision goggles, portable personal information processors, field medical kits, and 3D map imaging devices.

From reveille at six in the morning until they returned to the dormitories at nine-thirty at night, the boot camp schedule was packed tight. Augustus could barely find any time to rest.

After training each day, even these energetic young people were exhausted. After the first day, they could hardly muster the spirit to play cards all night or brag about themselves.

Even so, Augustus found an opening on the last night of the first training week. Although rookies in boot camp never had more than three hours of free time, Augustus still found a chance to take his squad to the military bar for a group meal.

As far as Augustus knew, among Company D's platoons, only he had consistently done this—persistently building solid, dependable friendships with every subordinate, remembering each person's character and strengths, even their insignificant personal habits.

Marine infantry regulations prohibited soldiers from getting drunk at any point during their service except while on leave, so military bars on base were forbidden from selling alcoholic drinks.

Even so, Augustus got twenty bottles of recently produced Number Eight Whiskey from the bartender, along with other liquor, at a price of one hundred and fifty credits per bottle.

That was at least five times the market price. Jim Raynor was astonished by Augustus's extravagance. Back in Shiloh, that amounted to three days' wages for an ordinary agricultural robot mechanic or a skilled worker at a vespene refinery.

Augustus's manner of speech and conduct, as well as his attitude toward money, all pointed to one conclusion—he had to be descended from some Korhal noble family, and one wealthy enough to control at least one pillar industry or hold political power.

Raynor and the others in the squad did not pry. Augustus had made it clear that he did not wish to speak of his family, so the subject was immediately dropped and no one brought it up again.

If the rookies in Augustus's squad had actually looked into the standing of the Mengsk surname on Korhal, they might have gained some idea of just how illustrious their squad leader's family was. But they did not really care.

No one here cared how rich you were or how noble your family was. On the battlefield, even a billionaire's skull would shatter with one blow from a rifle butt.

If they all lived to see the day of an honorable discharge, perhaps they could find steady work in Augustus's family business and support their families. That was all life could be. In the Terran Confederacy, where the economy was declining, order was collapsing, and people's lives were becoming ever more precarious, hoping for more would only bring profound pain.

While the others in the bar stuffed themselves with fries, fried steaks, and fragrant golden stewed potatoes, every rookie in First Squad remarked on how wonderful it was to have a rich man in the squad, all while mercilessly condemning the Marine Corps' everyday meals.

The Confederate Marine Corps' food rations had always been called "quick-heated shit." They had to provide soldiers with proteins and sugars that could be absorbed as quickly as possible, while taste and appearance were not considered at all.

At Turaxis-Prime Base, Augustus mostly ate mushy liquid food resembling mashed potatoes and sweet nutrient bars. Usually, if they wanted an extra meal, they had to pay for it themselves. Yet supplies on base were scarce, and only officers could afford fresh vegetables and meat.

However, Major Mikeby believed there was no need to improve the food standards at rookie boot camp, because the Confederacy's U-F series individual rations contained every nutrient a soldier needed. Eating those rations was supposedly even healthier and more nutritionally balanced than their normal diets.

Rookie Harnack had a cutting assessment of this: the major had definitely never eaten shit.

Because of the ban, everyone drank with restraint. Only the pastor, Benjamin, had never drunk alcohol and had no desire to try it.

For most of them, including Augustus and Raynor, it was their first time trying Number Eight Whiskey. It was a distilled liquor with an alcohol content above forty percent. On the Edge Worlds, whiskey imported from the core planets via interstellar freighters could even be considered premium liquor.

Augustus could not bribe Travis, the virtual mechanical sergeant who controlled the dormitory access system, so they still had to return to the dormitories before ten-thirty.

For a time, the atmosphere at the gathering table was lively. The rookies guzzled whiskey, beer, and cocktails while cursing the ration packs and boot camp officers. Then a rookie named Connor Ward got drunk and suddenly began to sob.

Connor Ward was an oddity in First Squad, Second Platoon. He had short light-gold hair, pale blue eyes, dark, healthy chocolate-colored skin, and a tall, powerfully built frame. He was only twenty-three, but his melancholy gaze and frequent expression of grief made him seem much older than young men like Augustus.

Ward never smiled. He barely even spoke. This clearly was not his original personality. Augustus had once noticed him silently staring at a family photo of his own.

It showed a riverbank where blue waters and lush greenery intertwined. Connor held a beautiful woman in his arms, while three blond children stood at his feet. His smile was bright and sunny, as if he were another person entirely.

A happy husband and father.

When Ward tearfully told everyone how his wife and beloved children had been killed by the Kel-Morians, the sorrow and pain conveyed by that photograph became even deeper.

In the second year of the Guild Wars, a Kel-Morian assault company attacked Rickdorf on the defenseless planet Tyrador III.

It should have been an operation intended only to destroy local military facilities, but the mining districts, vespene refineries, and even underground transportation pipeline hubs where large numbers of Civilians and workers lived and worked were all attacked.

Ward worked at one of those vespene refineries. Before the attack, his wife had warned him that they should flee their house and take shelter in the open, but he believed the Kel-Morians could never penetrate so deeply into the Confederacy's core worlds.

Moria was quite far from the Taradorn System. Before disaster struck, every man and woman had said, "The war is still far away from us."

The Kel-Morians showed no mercy. They used incendiary bombs and laser weapons, turning every factory into brilliant pillars of fire. Towers of dust, glass, and human bodies rose hundreds of feet into the sky. Bunker-buster missiles plunged deep into the mines. Hundreds and thousands of workers were killed by the shockwaves, scalded to death by searing air, then buried beneath collapsed tunnels.

At the time, the entire vespene refinery was ablaze. The fire swallowed the residential district where the workers' families lived, including Ward's wife and his two young children. Ward only had time to save his youngest daughter.

His youngest daughter did not survive either.

Kel-Morian fighters dove down and strafed unarmed Civilians. A laser beam hit Ward's two-year-old daughter, and he watched helplessly as she was torn into pieces.

Ward had a terrible tolerance for alcohol. He could not hold his liquor and got drunk easily. Perhaps he had also suppressed his pain for too long and needed an outlet. He cried for a long time, until Augustus and Raynor carried him back.

After that, Augustus decided that unless necessary, Connor was not to touch alcohol again. He would also monitor and record the suicidal tendencies Connor had already begun to display. On the battlefield, that could very well get all of them killed.