Colchis Prime
Outside the City of Holy Edict
Third Recruitment and Demobilization Administration.
The building's architecture matched the tone of the planet: grand and solemn, with the austere lines of neoclassicism, but function took precedence over all ornamentation.
Beneath the towering archway, people streamed past without end.
Countless fresh faces, hopeful or bewildered, had just passed their basic screenings; recruits who had completed basic training waited for assignment. More numerous still were the travel-worn personnel being discharged or transferred, the excitement in their eyes long since replaced by something deeper.
The air held a mixture of sweat, cheap fabric, the faint ozone tang of recirculated, purified air, and a lingering stillness peculiar to paper, ink, and recruitment offices.
Oll Persson stood at the edge of the crowd, looking somewhat out of place.
He wore an ordinary set of dark gray civilian clothes that seemed slightly incongruous in these surroundings.
On him, those clothes had neither a recruit's stiffness nor an old hand's slovenliness. They simply bore the settled fit and wear of long years, like a stone polished smooth by time and weather, all its sharp edges worn away until only its substance remained.
He held a thin form bearing the Imperial Aquila and the seal of the Colchis Planetary Government, moving slowly forward with the queue. Its heading clearly read: "Auxilia Personnel Application for Cross-Sector Transfer / Demobilization / Reenlistment."
At last, it was his turn.
Behind the service window sat a middle-aged clerk in an immaculate uniform, wearing the practiced composure of someone accustomed to endless arrivals and departures. His fingers swiped rapidly across the glowing screen of a Dataslate.
Oll Persson slid the form and his Identification Tag through the opening beneath the window.
"Oll Persson... formerly attached to the 37th Infantry Regiment, Ultramar Auxilia, Sergeant..." the