Their work was to support the frontline troops. Before they had come here, Pirius had vaguely imagined this might mean they would be safer. As it turned out, in combat the Service Corps had to prepare the ground for advances—which, Pirius learned, often meant going forward ahead of the first line of fighting troops. After an action began, they would have to help dig and consolidate earthworks, and move back and forth bearing supplies and maintaining comm links. Sometimes, when the electromagnetic environment was particularly ferocious, they would have to run from the front line to the rear and back, bearing messages by hand.

And when the action began its terrible grinding, the Service Corps became field medics and stretcher bearers. Infantry skinsuits were designed to keep you alive as long as possible, but they were primarily fighting armor, and traumatic injuries would be beyond any suit’s capacity to stabilize. Pirius was taught how to apply the simple medicine possible through a skinsuit, such as tying off a damaged limb. And he learned how to bundle a body, locked in a rigid suit, onto open-frame stretchers, and to crawl with casualties through the earthworks back to casualty clearing stations.

So as Service Corps, they would be exposed to fire just as much as the frontline fighters, if not more so. Not that that gained them any respect from the frontliners, who seemed convinced that the Service Corps had it soft, with the first pick of rations, unlimited benefits, and protection from the battle.

There were a few other Navy exiles, like Pirius, and other undesirables in the Service Corps. But most of their number was made up of infantry troopers who had managed to survive one or two actions and grown too old, or perhaps too wounded or shocked, to fight anymore. These superannuated misfits felt misunderstood and put-upon. As they worked, they would sing their own plaintive song: We are the ASC / We work all night, we work all day / The more we work, the more we may / It makes no difference . . . Few of these gloomy veterans were older than twenty.

Eventually they were introduced to more sophisticated surface operations.

The cadets were taught to move in the open. They were organized into platoons of ten, which practiced moving together. The basic technique was to advance through lines of trenches toward an enemy position. You scrambled out of one trench, running or crawling across the asteroid dirt, and then hurled yourself into the next. The instructors used drone bots to simulate enemy fire—cadets would be “killed” by laser spots that made their suits go rigid. The inertial belts were priceless; without them the simplest kick or misstep could send you floating upward—but of course you also practiced how to keep moving forward even if your belt failed. The cadets seemed to enjoy this running around, apparently not imagining how it would be to go through this in combat conditions.