“Today marks the tenth day since the surprise crashdown ended the long anticipated international military expo hosted by the North American Union,” said an intrepid news anchor displaying on the monitor hanging over the dropship passenger cabin.

“At just over two thousand dead and four hundred thousand wounded, the final casualty report far, far undershoots the initial projections for a crashdown directly striking an urban center,” the co-anchor, a spunky young woman, went on. “All the more surprising given the sheer number of people from across the world attending the expo. Most notably of all: not a single person was eaten.”

“NAU officials deny allegations that early warnings of the impending crashdown were disregarded or suppressed, stating: ‘the cluster of space debris was too small to detect through conventional means.’”

“As you know, eyewitnesses report a pilot unaffiliated with the NAU on the scene. Sources claim they are singlehandedly responsible for regaining control of the situation until military forces arrived. However, conflicting accounts place the active pilot in several places around the city simultaneously. The Corps has yet to release a statement, but first responders recently leaked that this individual identified by the callsign ‘Raven’ over the radio.”

“What is a ‘raven?’” asked a Chinese cadet in a green uniform, one of many seated in the dropship’s passenger cabin.

“It’s a kind of dark bird, like a crow,” answered a cadet in tan with a mild English accent. “Small, intelligent, omens of death in most cultures.”

“That’s a legit callsign,” said the cadet next to him, another wearing tan. “Bird kicked me in the balls once, now I’ve got ‘Buster’ printed on my dog tags.”

“You shouldn’t have said anything. You’re stuck with that name now, ‘Buster.’”

Zatch smirked. That’s how it usually worked, slip up once or someone makes a pun on your name and suddenly you’ve earned a moniker you’ll take to your grave. Zatch earned himself a nickname as far back as middle school which stuck so hard it made its way onto the dog tags he now kept tucked out of sight beneath his collar. There was the odd occasion a callsign reflected a respectable aspect of its owner, and many come to celebrate theirs but as far as Zatch was concerned, enrolling in Echo was the ideal opportunity to clean his slate.

He sat at the end of the cabin, one of three cadets in blue uniforms in a sea of tan, green, and brown numbering forty total enrollees. The other blues weren’t familiar to him, only sharing their allegiance to the NAU, a territory spanning most of the Americas and parts of Africa. He thought he recognized one from the expo, and a brace on his leg supported his presence there, but they were just as foreign to him as anyone else on the dropship.

Zatch drummed on the brace replacing his cast and couldn’t help thinking of the abruptness of his departure. His poor parents just got their boy back from a brush with death only for him to jump right back in the fire. It was preferable in Zatch’s mind than waiting until the next quarter to ship out. Time would only dull his mind or even disenchant him from the idea.

This was the best outcome. No waiting, no pussyfooting around, from one crisis to the next before the action had time to numb in his memory. One stem treatment before leaving and another in a week expedited the mending of his bones so he wouldn’t have to wait until the next season to enroll. He could have circumvented the recovery process entirely and rendered his arm utterly indestructible by undergoing an ossification procedure, but his family lacked the money. Stem treatment wasn’t nearly as painful, but the rapid mending made his bones itch. As unreachable a discomfort as it was, he tapped on the brace holding his radius and ulna in alignment and found some relief in the vibration of the tubes feeding nutrient rich enzymes to his cells.

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“You were at the expo, weren’t you?” asked a brown uniformed cadet with a Russian accent sitting across from Zatch.

“What gave it away?” Zatch congenially asked.

“You look tired.”

“I’ve been on and off flights for two days.”

“Not that kind of tired. The kind that makes you look older than your years.”

“Is that your way of telling me I look old?” Zatch asked, prodding at a potential insult where he knew none existed.

“You look like the youngest cadet on the dropship. But you also look like you’ve seen more than the rest of us put together.”

“I don’t know about that, but it feels that way sometimes.”

“You’re lucky. More people should have died– not to sound insensitive, but there’s no reason anyone should have survived.”

“If luck had anything to do with it, I’d have stayed home.” Zatch didn’t intend to sound abrasive, but his exhaustion and anxiety seeped into his voice. Only after the Russian withdrew to a previous conversation did he realize how much he would have appreciated the distraction.

There was one cadet more out of place than Zatch, tucked into the deepest recesses of the cabin who didn’t socialize with her peers. She had the allure of a loaded gun, sleek yet dangerous with an icy and unfeeling gaze as if unpacking every possible way to kill whoever looked at her. Or so Zatch imagined was going on behind those cold eyes. The black of her uniform was unfamiliar. No one could name the country’s colors and the cadets nearby were uneasy about it, especially the cadets from the East Asian Confederacy since she seemed to share an ethnic resemblance with a few of them.

Speculation would get him nowhere and only serve to make him more nervous, so Zatch withdrew into his music for the rest of the flight.

Rising from the murky, grey ocean was a horizon spanning cliff, dark tan with earth too young for the sun to have bleached. Unimaginably tall and growing in perspective as the dropship drew in close to the docking station built where the steeply inclined face met water.

The disembarking cadets were encouraged to walk off the jetlag from the flight before immediately boarding an industrial lift to the top of the cliff. Some cargo and forklifts had to go up first anyways.

The top of the cliff greeted them with a disorienting perpetually downward sloping expanse of darkened sand and salt. Sheer drop offs broke up the moon-like surface every few dozen klicks or so into levels of concentric disks riddled with fissures funneling into some point beyond the horizon. It was a soul consuming abyss without the comfort of an edge to peer over.

Trucks were waiting to taxi the cadets to a base built at the top of the first drop off. This was Echo, a space age facility port to oblivion. The sun’s glare was not easy to acclimate toward, but the fresh off the dropship cadets could make out the primary building groups. The dorms, the academy, the training field, and the hangars. The hangars were spread out and hosted dust trails where more experienced cadets performed drills in heavy equipment. There were dedicated landing pads and industrial lifts on the far side of the facility to facilitate descent, along with long range guns pointed into the expanse.

No sooner had the cadets unloaded then they were called to attention. There was a bit of a scramble between the various national disciplines to fall into formation, but the moment the call was repeated, everyone froze.

The cadets standing at the entrance were as diverse as the new recruits, but each of them wore the same bright crimson uniform. They had patches denoting their nationality, but they were merely decorations next to the badges proving their authority. Two corps officers stood among them, easily identifiable by their age and the much darker maroon they wore despite the heat. Their vulture gaze raked over the recruits, as if predicting the exact manner of their coming untimely demise.

The cadet at the center stepped forward. His nationality was indecipherable, his accent unplaceable. “Welcome to Echo Base. I am your cadet chief, Dominic Hagans. I don’t care what political pretense led you to stand here today, you are not here because you are the best, you are not here because your country expects it, you are here because you are going to spend the rest of your lives killing locusts or enabling someone else in the killing of locusts. Graduate, and that will be a very long time. The corps is the first line of defense. First boots on the ground, first blood drawn, last man standing. If you crack under pressure, if you freeze in the face of terror, if you cannot handle the responsibility of delaying human extinction which assuredly rests on all of our shoulders, I suggest you get back on those trucks.”

For the long pause that followed, not a single cadet flinched.

“Excellent. Your instructors will do everything in their power to prove you wrong. Dismissed.”