Our interviewee in USRE light infantry uniform, holding an anti-drone rifle and accompanied by a biomechanical jinn floater.

I belong to the most formidable military force in human history. The army of the United Socialist Republics of Earth accounts for five million active personnel, half that in reserves, and more than twenty thousand armoured vehicles. It is the second largest employer in human space, right after the Office of Infrastructure. It also happens to be more or less useless.

Our collective memory hardly recalls the last open conflict on Earth that wasn’t a skirmish alongside the AUSCOM border – I do, but only because our instructors in Kandahar mentioned it in the geopolitics course. It was the Tibetan War, fifteen decades ago, when Chinese and Indian reservists exchanged artillery fire over the Himalayas, prompting a diplomatic crisis between the USRE and Laniakea. Sixty soldiers died. And that’s it. The High Fleet sees some action, yes, from patrols over Mars to convoy escorts in Smyrnia-Silesia, but the Earth itself, by and large, is a peaceful planet. Yet, there is a broad consensus in the USRE to maintain the army ready and well funded. I’ve heard a myriad of arguments in our favour: that we are the world’s largest crisis response organisation (this is true), that we perpetuate the balance of power on Earth (this is not true: it is the High Fleet that does), that we keep the memory of the Low Age alive (and?), that we may serve in a final confrontation with AUSCOM (I wish it was exact, but the war would be over by the time I’m shoved in a transport). I’m not sure I subscribe to any of these.

I am an orphan. My parents died in a shuttle crash during the hypercane of 2586, and the Office of Public Health raised me, like the five to six million kids who, every year, lose everything to the still-ongoing climate devastation of our homeworld. I was discouraged from pursuing a martial career: wards of the state are considered a liability in a frontline role. We are seen as potential fanatics – folk whose sole moral compass is the nation, whose soul was stitched back together with the stars-and-wheat, who would have been perfect for the suicidal spearhead assaults of the late Low Age but do not fit a modern military. Yet, I persisted, and to this day I am not sure why. Movies and pulps like to portray the army as a place where one can find a new family – that may be true for some, but I do not consider the soldiers around me as anything but colleagues. Perhaps I sought stability? This is a hard question, you know! It just feels right. On a moral level. I am in my lane, here.

The first place you see after your enrolment is Kandahar. The city is not the giant encampment it once was – in a good way. Paradeison gardens replaced the bunkers, background radiation is almost nominal, and the statues of the warlords were dismantled (except for Kaj Mahev’s, of course, may he ride eternal). This is where they tell you The Story. The great anabasis – when the armies of the United Socialist Republics gathered under the great atomic walls of Kandahar, with six thousand tanks and as many dreams, and convened to straddle west, the fist of ecosocialism turned towards the blood-soaked battlements of Fortress Europe. This is our founding myth, and we treat it as such. The anabasis wasn’t heroic. It was a long, gruelling slog, through the mountains and blasted deserts and dying cities. There were many defeats, and we are told of the pain, of the dysentery, of the treacheries, of doubts and unanswered prayers. This is the point. This is the moral bedrock of our army: we are not these people anymore. We are not here to endlessly reenact the offensives of the Low Age. The Time of the Blue Sword is over, two centuries have passed, and in the blueshifted light of the interstellar age, we should never expect to wage war again.

I’ve been serving for eight years. I began as a paratrooper; I’m now a coast guard, Sixth Division of the People’s Infantry, serving near the Mediterranean Reclamation zone. I can’t say I’m overworked. Like most USRE citizens, I only toil for six months a year, and a typical tour of duty lasts for about two months. I begin my service in early February and return to civilian life by late August. Central command rotates us between three theatres: crisis response, tactical training and exotic weapons testing.

I consider crisis response the most useful aspect of my job; in fact, it provides me with a purpose I couldn’t find anywhere else. Light infantry gets you assigned to three potential roles – firefighting, hypercane response or epidemic management. To give you an idea of how important crisis response is for us, consider that about one USRE soldier out of three will ever get rifle training beyond the basics, but each one of us knows how to handle third-degree burns, administer first aid on open fractures or cordon off a zoonotic area. I specialised in firefighting. That’s where most paratroopers go. My service lines up with the norther hemisphere fire season, depending on the year, our assignments may begin as early as late March. We operate in tandem with local firefighters: they bring first-hand experience and knowledge of the land, while we bring logistics and numbers. We have been preventing megafires from devouring the world for two hundred years straight, and the whole affair is an extremely well-oiled machine. The average delay between an official call for assistance from a member republic to the airborne insertion of our vanguard firefighting elements is under three hours. During the megafire of ’06 in Portugal, I even took part in an orbital drop over the fire line as it closed in on Lisbon. We dived right in like stratosoldiers, and we saved the city. The flames engulfed me; I lost three fingers and an eye. If you wondered, yes, that’s why I have heterochromia; my right eye is an algae symbiont. I often dream of infernos; when I wake up, I smell ash and soot in the wind.

Tactical training is where they ferry us after a fire. This is where we cordon off a big chunk of desert or countryside to keep the army sharp with live-fire exercises and large-scale manoeuvres. These exercises are always a bit arbitrary because we haven’t fought a real war in a century and a half, and have no intention of doing so, but they possess a certain solemnity. They serve to remind us of two fundamental facts: we yield deadly weapons (I once almost lost my good eye to laser rifle diffractions) and we are, indeed, a real military. This is where I think of myself as a soldier truly, hunkering down into a trench as machine gun fire rakes the treeline above me, though lately I’ve been doing less and less basic infanteering, as command thinks I’m too old and experienced to go mud-hugging all day. Last year, they assigned me to an aggressor unit, and I spent three weeks riding horses behind enemy lines and teaching recruits the value of watching doors and corners in close quarters combat. Can’t say I made a lot of friends, but it was a nice change of pace. Sometimes, Laniakean officers come survey us as we play with tanks and planes. Ours do the same. It’s a ritual of sorts.

Exotic weapons testing is where command ships me when I’m too tired to go firefighting and exercises have come to a close. The tactical baseline of the USRE military is large-scale mechanised warfare. This is what we train for and this is how we vanquished Fortress Europe, and we could be satisfied with a mere iteration of a concept we’ve mastered ages ago – we could keep pumping out slightly better models of tanks, artillery, air superiority fighters, combat helicopters and drones until the end of time. We do, however, have a lot of money, and no supply of unhinged engineers – I suppose this is what happens when you reach our scale, . Wt’s a few billion thrown at a random program where they study the weaponisation of dolphins? That’s how I regularly find myself in remote testing facilities, generally in the Dacht-e Lut desert, far from prying eyes and innocent bystanders – taking notes as oddly shaped tanks fire coloured particle beams through the troposphere. While not physically demanding – I get ferried around the complexes in a quaint little truck – these postings tend to be mind-numbingly boring. Everyone wants to do weapon testing until they realise that you spend half your time driving around a desert, looking for the still-burning debris of a failed transatmospheric drone model. Last year, I had fun, though. Command assigned me to a blue-skinned woman who studied acausal weapons that hit the target before you open fire. The blue lady gave me her prototype rifle, I pulled the trigger and nothing happened: she told me someone probably died because of me, a few centuries ago and that I shouldn't feel bad because it had already occured and was a constant of the light-cone.

I wonder if I’ll see her again this year, this strange little cog of our grand army of the people.

Illustration from Steven Sander's Symbiosis Creative Commons artbook, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 unported licence.