Red Letter Days/Chapter One

Chapter One: September Sun


 * ''Epsilon Indi System
 * ''UN colony: Second Base
 * ''Pvt. 1st class Michael Schaeffer
 * ''En route to 65th Marine Regiment, 4th battalion, Bravo Company.

The warthog was bumpy, it made Schaeffer's stomach turn and twist inside of his gut; he was used to the nice urban sprawl of Skopje with her nicely paved roads and highways, Second Base only had two decently sized cities and he was no where near either of them. He licked the finger of his glove from pure instinct and flipped the page. He had picked up Lovers in the Sunset in the bookstore on base before he shipped and he was finding the deep characters and drama interesting.

A few other marines were in the back seat of the vehicle with him, most minding their own business while two privates laughed with each other, they had all been transferred to some unit or another that was in need of a replacement. The insurrection hadn't been prevalent on Second Base since almost twenty years after its founding in 2488 but it had recently began to spike with various rebels retreating from destroyed strongholds on neighboring planets.

Still, the casualty rate on Second Base was still amazingly minuscule for the number of men stationed there, the colony was simply too useless for either the UNSC or the rebels to have any plans with it. There weren't enough minerals to make decent sized factories without importing goods, there were no anomalies so no science stations, the people weren't very loyal to the UNSC so it wasn't a good area for large scale military facilities.

The only export of the colony was wheat and farmboy characters for crappy movies back on Earth; though Harvest led the export in that.

The warthog jumped again and he nearly dropped his book from the pothole, the road was concrete but it had not been worked on for years and had obviously been ignored by maintance crews. The only things to the sides of it were the rugged outdoors, rocks and a distant forest. On a far off mountain range, he saw a few skyscrapers from the colonies capital city; but they were nothing like the colossal megastructures that filled Skopje, they only served to give him a sense of home sickness.