Hargraves nodded. Santis looked like just about any world in the Confederation, but he knew it wasn’t. The sergeant didn’t have any pretensions as a physicist, but he was well aware of the planet’s special characteristic, the one that made it valuable, but also the thing that had prevented extensive colonization and restricted the population to a hundred or so technicians and a platoon of Marines.

Santis’s primary, Krillus, was a fairly normal sun, but it was part of a binary system, and the companion was a magnetized neutron star that bathed the system with hard x-rays in concentrations far above normal levels. That had two relevant effects on the planet. First, it caused a concentration of tritium in Santis’s ocean over a hundred times the amount found on a more normal planet. Second, it made the planet a pretty damned unhealthy place to live, at least for any extended time.

The technicians, the ones who operated the massive refinery that extracted the precious tritium from the ocean, tended to stay for longer than they probably should. But they were making twenty times what they would have in a normal job, and there was no shortage of candidates willing to accept the health risk for that kind of money. But Marines just went where they were told to go, and the meager monthly pay of a sergeant—and even a lieutenant—was hardly compensation for waiting around as your DNA was slowly damaged and mutated by radiation. And the idea of sitting by and watching comrades fight a war that would determine if your people maintained their freedom was anathema to Marines.

“Sure as shit, the high command don’t want my opinion, but I’d hate to sit here while the rest of the Marines are fighting to save the Confederation.” Hargraves looked up at Plunkett. “I don’t know big strategy or any of that stuff, Lieutenant, but I was there in the last war. I saw the enemy up close. They came to finish things, sir. No doubt about that. If their leader hadn’t died, that woulda been a fight to the finish.” He paused, looking down at the floor for a few seconds. “And now, they’re gonna come again. This one’s gonna be to the end, sir. I don’t want to fight, not against those damned FRs, not again. But it ain’t about what I want. We gotta fight, all of us. And if this is the big war, the final one…no Marine wants to sit here on the edge of nowhere getting eaten alive by rads while somebody else fights for the future.”

Plunkett sighed. “Well, Sarge, I agree with you one hundred percent. But none of it is up to you. Or up to me, for that matter. I guess we’ll just have to…”