They had little such downtime, though. Almost every day they were training from morning until night. Some days the canteen had little or no food for them, and even the Barracks Grog got rationed.

"Sometimes supplies can't reach the front. Things get too hot. You gotta learn to do without," their Sergeant told them.

The meds stove off the hunger pains in their bellies, but not the dull loss of energy.

Would they really get these stims if they had no food? Lukis didn't know, but he doubted it.

After one such hunger day they had their first mock-battle. The enemy were just machines that looked like men, but they moved like professional sprinters and tumblers, hard to track.

"This time only they will have harmless laser weapons. If you get a kill sound," a sharp squawk came into their helmets, "then stop and put your hands up. You've been killed."

They went out.

Lukis went all of twelve steps when he got a squawk in his ear. "Sniper, at 110 degrees," a cool computer voice told him.

He put up his hands, looking out and saw a figure highlighted. His comms were off so he couldn't even talk to the rest of the unit, warn them. He saw the sniper take aim again and again, the red words 'KILL CONFIRMED' popping above its head like it was a video game.

He looked around, and saw that probably half of the unit was dead already. Surprise and confusion took the rest before long; the machines moved to flank them, and before five minutes was up they were all dead.

"Fucking pathetic," the Sergeant said. "You're all meat, all of you. The xenos will be fucking your sisters tonight, you're a shame on humanity."

Lukis found that he did not flinch at the casual horribleness of his statements. He did not find himself believing that aliens were really coming their women, but he had to admit that he didn't really know. He had never met an alien.

"You're gonna go again. And again, until at least one of you survives the ten minute mark. If you unlikely bunch of shits manage to win - which I doubt - then you'll even eat tonight. So watch the mech boys carefully, learn their tactics, and maybe you can do it."

They fought the whole rest of the day, getting one break and half a pint of Barracks Beer.

He looked, he tried to observe. He spoke with the others, but no one had any useful ideas.

It didn't matter; the machine men beat them every single time, all day.

By the end of the day, they were so tired that they could barely move.

"That's the enemy," their Sergeant told them. "The Sapient Union are cowards by nature. They fight using machine men. They'll lube 'em up with your blood, if your performance today is any indication, and humanity is fucked."

One man raised a hand. "I thought it was just our sisters," he said. A chorus of laughs went through the crowd.

It was 09, Lukis saw. The man had always struck him as believing everything they were told, not the type to make a joke!

But the man looked exhausted, his eyes hollow. Maybe he didn't care, or he thought that this kind of joke was okay.

Lukis knew it wasn't.

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The Sergeant took out his sidearm and shot him.

He fell, a slightly surprised look on his face, while the Sergeant, red in the face, turned towards them all. "You think this is funny? How funny do you think he finds it now?" he roared. "I was gonna let you retards rest, but now you're running it ten more times! Get out there, and some of these bullets are going to be live!"

The rest of the night passed in terror. Night fell and they could barely see, even with their helmets enhancing enemy targets, the ground was just a dark blur.

Twice he thought he was going to take a real bullet, he heard real gunshots. But it must have been a coincidence, someone else taking a real round.

In their ninth run, he found one of the victims. He wasn't dead, just laying propped up against the mud, breathing hard and holding the wound on his stomach.

He'd taken off his helmet, but even with his face uncovered Lukis did not recognize him. He watched with eyes wide, the stark white of them standing out against the dark ground more than anything else.

"Medic!" Lukis screamed.

"21 is calling for a Medic," the announcing voice called. "No Medics are available. Leave the dead."

"He isn't dead!" Lukis said, the panic prompting him to go on.

"Leave the dead."

An observation drone hovered right over him. They were armed; it could shoot him at any moment if he did not obey.

He could not look back at the wounded man, and went on.

They did not take any games that night; but they came close. The machine soldiers were fast, accurate, and coordinated. They didn't throw their lives away in vain, and they often predicted their human enemies’ actions with startling accuracy.

But they had exploitable behaviors. You could give them apparent openings, and they would operate on what they could clearly see and move into a trap.

It wasn't a great advantage. But the machines weren't immortal; a good burst from their light-guns would cause them to shut down.

In the last match, Lukis and his unit managed to whittle their numbers down to just six. But they still lost. The machines feinted a forward assault with four losing two in the process, but their remaining two carefully flanked and then killed their last ten with precise shots.

The Sergeant, pissed, chewed them out for another hour and dismissed them. They had just three hours to rest before wake-up.

The next day was an instruction day. They sat and got Injection Learning all day, broken up only by the Sergeant occasionally swatting them across the back. To make sure they remembered reality, he said.

The Injection Learning was never enjoyable, but with so little sleep he found his brain started hurting very early on, and his headache only grew in intensity.

All day they learned of their enemy's tactics in an infantry fight: the pure drone warfare of the Bicet, the fast and aggressive tactics of the Dessei, the solid and defensible positions of the Sepht that slowly enveloped, and of course about the tactics of Depraved Humanity.

Their true enemy; they would have to overcome Depraved Humanity, liberate it from the Alien, and reclaim Earth. It was their solemn duty.

Which made no sense to Lukis. The one concept he had learned growing up that had seemed important to him was to live and to let others live. You did not have to mix, but you could let live. It had been the founding ideal of the Ouo Ledori . . .

But he knew what they wanted you to say, and interspersed through the hours of tactics were the political tests, making sure that you were loyal, that you were a good Glorian Soldier.

Gloria Aeternus.

The tactics of humanity did rely heavily on the machine soldiers, but they had real troops mixed in there, too. The tactics suggested ways to tell them apart, but the Union machine soldiers were very good at seeming organic in their movements - until they sprung into action. That was one of the best times to tell them apart, but since sticking your head out for too long got it shot off, and targeting drones were the enemy's second-priority target, it really didn't tell you much.

Every Glorian Soldier who kills a Depraved Human warfighter will receive a bonus of 2,000 Credits.

Every Glorian Soldier who kills a Xeno warfighter will receive a bonus of 5,000 Credits.

The words seared into his brain, and for the first time he found himself recoiling at the hideous thought of getting a bonus for committing murder.

Fear made him stop. He heard the footsteps of the Sergeant approach, and he made himself be still. Too much of a negative reaction, they might look at what it was that bothered him. And they would not like his reaction to that.

"Something bothering you?" the Sergeant asked.

"No, sir!" he barked back.

The Sergeant smacked his back with his stick, then moved on.