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children in the war zone is enough danger for one family.”

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    O n a planet many star systems away from Earth, Lieutenant Jander Mortas was experiencing something akin to blindness. The darkness surrounding him wasn’t total, and every now and then, a break in the tall trees allowed some starlight to penetrate the night woods. Even so, those spots of increased illumination were spread far apart and only turned the gloom into a murky gray.
    The terrain was quite varied, and he had to move with caution. More than once he’d fallen into unexpected dips in the ground or tripped over small boulders. That wasn’t the worst part, unfortunately, as the various creatures that lived in the forest were making his painstaking journey even more unpleasant. Roughly an hour into his trek he’d stopped suddenly at the edge of a dangerous drop-­off, and his abrupt halt had created an unexpected silence. Not far behind him, something had taken a single loud step before stopping as well.
    The ground under his boots was covered with many seasons of dead leaves and fallen branches, and so most of Mortas’s movement had been noisy. Having been made aware of the creature that was tracking him, he’d delicately negotiated the minor cliff to his front and then checked his course with a small compass. A Force shuttle had passed overhead just then, its running lights offering a merciful view of the obstacles to his front, and Mortas had stepped out quickly. Bulling forward, he’d intentionally come to a dead stop for no reason.
    The dark silence was interrupted by a single sound, the crunch of the detritus on the forest floor under a hoof or a paw. Nothing followed it. The night was warm, and he was sweating freely into his fatigues, but a chill crawled up the back of his neck as if something was watching him. Clearly he was being stalked, and he’d tried to remember the species of the planet’s indigenous wildlife. Standing there in the shadows, Mortas had realized that he knew nothing about the creatures that called the woods home even though he’d been living and training on this planet for the previous seven months.
    MC–1932, seized from the Sims decades earlier and controlled by the Human Defense Force (hence the MC designation, for Military-­Controlled) was a major base in that part of the war zone. Numerous units called it home, among them the Orphan Brigade in which Mortas was a platoon leader. Almost destroyed in combat six months before on a planet called Fractus, the brigade was slowly coming up to full strength, and so training was practically nonstop. The jaunt through the forest that had transformed him into possible prey was part of that training, an all-­night individual movement without the aid of the multipurpose infantry goggles on which Mortas had come to depend.
    The goggles could do wondrous things, and at that moment he was missing the way they let him see in the dark. His well-­worn electronic eyes were back in the office he shared with Sergeant Dak, his platoon sergeant and the author of that night’s training event. Dubbing the sightless movement through the woods “Goggle Appreciation Night,” Dak had sent the entire platoon off individually, spread out across many acres of deep woods. Their start point was only a few miles from the Orphan Brigade’s barracks, and the finish line for the walk was just short of their battalion area.
    He’d stood stock-­still for several minutes, and so had the creature somewhere off in the shadows. Or so he’d hoped. Unable to penetrate the gloom, Mortas had been forced to fight his own imagination and the images of some horrible, fang-­toothed beast with razor-­sharp claws that might be able to see in the dark and move without making a sound.
    The creature finally proved the last part wrong, crunching off into the distance on what had to be at least four paws. Breathing out a