Most of the seven new platoon members were cadets, unblooded, fresh from the training grounds. Reunited cadre siblings greeted each other noisily. The survivors of Factory Rock moved in this new crowd as if they had suddenly grown old, Pirius thought. The energy of the youngsters was infectious, and the mood quickly lifted back to something like the brash noisiness it had been before. Soon it was as if the action on the Rock had never happened, as if it had all been some hideous nightmare.

But in the quietest hours of the night, when the rats sang, you could still hear weeping.

Tili Three was changed. She was nothing like the bright, happy kid who had spent her life in intimacy with her lost sisters; now, left alone, she grew hollow-eyed and gaunt.

Pirius longed to comfort her, but he didn’t know how. He told himself that if not for his own actions, Tili Three might well have lost her life as well. Why, then, did he feel so unreasonably guilty? And how could he feel so anguished about the loss of two privates, when, if you added up all the losses around the Front, ten billion died every year? It made no sense, and yet it hurt even so.

In the end, paralyzed by his own grief and uncertainty, he left her alone.

This Burden Must Pass had been on Factory Rock, but his platoon had been far from the main action and had suffered only one casualty, nonlethal. He had been through all this before.

And, just as the dropship orderly had said to Pirius, Burden told him it was always like this. “They chop up the platoons and push us together, so we’re all crowded in just like before. Soon you don’t see the big hollow spaces, the rows of empty bunks. You forget. You can’t help it.” He spoke around mouthfuls of the treat food.

“It’s not the same, though,” Pirius said. “Not once you’ve been out there. It can’t be.”

“Don’t talk about it,” Burden said warningly. “You’re safe in here, in the barracks. It’s as if what happens out there isn’t real—or isn’t unless you talk about it. If you do that, you see, you let it in, all that horror.” His face worked briefly, and Pirius wondered what else he was leaving unsaid.

“I don’t understand you, Burden. You’ve been in the field six times now. Six times. If none of this matters, if the Doctrines are a joke to you—why put your life on the line over and over?”

“No matter what I believe, what choice is there? If you go forward, you’ll most likely get shot. If you go backward, if you refuse, you’ll be court-martialed and sentenced, and shot anyhow. So what are you supposed to do? You go forward, because the only thing you can shoot at in this war is a Xeelee. At least going forward you’ve a chance. That’s all there is, really.” That was as much as he would say.