Chapter 1
Jim Turhan couldn’t quite remember why he’d started his nighttime habit of strolling around his cadet training lab on Mossera 4. He rarely saw another living creature, human or otherwise. No one wandering through empty xeno-botany classrooms or huddled in front of a holo-comm, homesick and lonely. Even when he looped outside into the crop supply planet’s dim twilight, Jim was alone.
Jim had no doubt the rotating groups of ConSpace recruits got homesick all the time. Most were so young, humans still in their teens, aliens in the same awkward, confusing life stage. None of them were from the neighborhood or within a month’s travel. Even with great clusters of stars close enough to leach darkness from the night sky, the Mossera System was as far from habitable worlds as you could
