Dark and Ace took a table by a window through which the Earth's curvature could be seen beneath them, away from most of the drunken noise of the party. Suspended in the darkness over the planet was another orbital station much like this one. The Officers' Training and Enlisted Men's Training Stations were identical in appearance and separated by only a small distance. They knew the enlisted men would be having their own graduation party over there, could almost hear the grunts' ecstatic cries of "get busy living or get busy dying" - something of a motto among the navy's enlisted - through the near-perfect vacuum. The officers tended to have a more enlightened view. They were soldiers and they had a job to do. War could break out at any moment with some unknown enemy and they would be sent out to face death, capture or crippling injury with no notice at all.
This was all melodrama, of course. There hadn't been
Add Media
Style