Sneaky told the next part of his story today. In the galley. This part of the story makes me remember when he told Yoiv that he isn't a hero. Greg, you know better than to lie.

  [The remainder of the page is occupied by a sketch of Greg in a comically oversized chair with an easy smile on his lips, a steaming mug in one hand and a light behind his eyes. Standing behind him, is another Greg, garbed in what Trandi imagines to be a military uniform he'd wear with a rifle as long as he is tall and a very large scope. The face of the sitting Greg is soft, rounded with large eyes while the stoic standing Greg has a face made up of harsh angles, and his eyes seem like pinpricks.]

  Log: 6000001.0.08, Personal, Captain Yormdrill

  Gregory surprised me while he was helping me change some seals in the hydroponics bay. He was ready to continue the story, and would be willing to talk in the galley. He said it wasn't so frightful as the earlier parts, but still necessary to understand. I get the feeling that he isn't just telling his story, or even his side of the story, even. I suspect that he wants, or perhaps needs, to lay out his choices to us. To explain himself and the way that he is. There is a quiet desperation to these looks backward. I think I shall have to get him a present, something that shows I know and accept the kind of man he is.

  He took a long, inexplicably sober, pull from his steaming mug of ridiculously strong tea and began, "So the general, we called him Chest, but I don't know if that was actually his name or not. Anyway, General Chest was as good as his word. He got us training. It started, unnecessarily with boot camp. That's the basic level training for us. Anyway, it's normal to cycle recruits through boot camp two or three times, and there's even a commendation for being passed on your first try. It's because you're learning a lot, how to function under constant stress, how to grab sack time whenever possible, how to chow down on a timer, how to work together and carry your weight on a team, how to speak Republican Battle Cant, how to use Contextual Hand Signals, and of course, how to fight. How to kill.

  "Problem was we had already learned all that on account of how we were all still alive after what happened to Ignitia. If anybody wants to find out, ask Pops or Mom. I trust them to know who should or shouldn't hear that story. I warn you, it's not a fun story.

  "Anyway, we breezed right on through boot camp first time through, and a lot of us had aptitude for various specializations. Which would have meant that we'd have to split up to go to the various specialist schools. Except General Chest put us through as many specialist schools as he could get away with. I ended up training to commit and repel boarding actions, field artillery, spot artillery, run crew served line of sight guns, emergency medical treatments, written intelligence gathering, auditory intelligence gathering, assault power armor operation, robot fireteam command, demolitions and sabotage, extraplanetary evasion and survival, and my actual military occupational specialization, Advance Stealth Drop Surveillance Scout."

  "Drop?" Trandi interrupted, "Like from an aircraft?"

  "From orbit. No, seriously, they load me up in a stealth drop pod and fire me on a trajectory that will result in a slow entry terminal orbit. Yeah, I'm insane to climb in. Everyone agrees with you. After all, unlike the rest of the drop pods, I rely entirely on the stealth technology built into the pod to not get shot out of the sky. Oh, yeah. The assault force uses orbital drop insertion too. You look just a little disturbed, but you want to know the scary thing? Ninety seven percent of drop infantry gets boots on the dirt alive. We have yet to lose an advance scout that way. Yeah, we're scary. And maybe just a little crazy.

  "Anyway, so we train, train, train, train for about two years. We even went to silent drill school, which was surprisingly useful. I got the feeling that the other boots were disturbed by us, but it's not like I was out to make friends. It was about then we decided that we were skilled enough to be deployed, and it was pretty obvious that General Chest was keeping us in training to keep us away from the front. Except now we were even more skilled and motivated to take a piece back from the grubs like we did for those refugees.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  "Pete talked to him. Privately, so I don't know what he said, but it got us moving. We got assigned to a ship, the Wendy, that was crewed by around forty percent refugees. That ship, she was beautiful. I mean, she was a warship, a frigate bristling with weapons and the forward launch tubes and all that, but she was beautiful to us. Beautiful to me. A sizeable amount of the... their nickname doesn't translate well, but their job was to fight on ships, the shipboard for short. The shipboard thought they could just make us miserable enough to quit and settle down in the foster care system. It was a protracted war of escellating pranks. Eventually the ship's captain and General Chest had to put a stop to it before the injuries and damage to the ship got worse. We declared victory and so did they, but by the end of it they quit trying to brush us off.

  "That was on the way to my first drop. Double New Los Angeles. We promise it's not terrible this time, was their slogan for some reason. I'm not a history guy. I just remember some of the salty shipboards laughing about it. I was on the ground for two weeks before my brothers. I learned what the brood mothers are then. They make the spreaders. I started eliminating them as they presented themselves. But, it was my job to scout out a good landing zone, so that the assault boys could establish a beachhead that we'd use as our main evacuation point. Also, to find as many concentrations of survivors as possible. And also to sow as much chaos among the enemy by eliminating targets of opportunity.

  "I did that with my mid-range overwatch rifle, and my long range antimaterial rifle, the sights on either of which are great for getting a close look at quite a lot from several... I didn't learn your measuring system. Well, from a very far way out anyway. Then there were the directional listening arrays, and the hardened transmission system. All of which I had to lug by muscle power because more electronics means more hardening against detection which means more space taken up which means I'm easier to see. So no translation implant for me either. Can't connect to the local network and immediately give away my position just to understand what the local language is.

  "Then my brothers dropped, we secured the beachhead, and we started freeing or relieving survivors. General Chest was right. We were far, far more effective with real military hardware and support. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to barely rescue maybe two thousand, we rolled over the grub resistance and evacuated over half a million. It wasn't the last time we did that, it just sticks in my mind because it was the first.

  "Planet after planet, drop after drop, we stomped all over the grubs and evacuated every last living civilian in our zones of operation, and went to assist other units as opportunities arose. Which is how I got my stupid nickname."

  "And what nickname is that?" Yaemdrill asked.

  "Oh come on, it's not important," he replied.

  "It's probably something like 'adorable doom,'" someone, I don't know who said.

  Gregory sighed and said, "They called me the report. 'Because the only way you know he saved you is the report of his rifle.'" Gregory expressed his displeasure by putting on a mocking voice as he said the reason for his nickname before continuing more seriously, "I told you it was stupid. Anyway, they were all brothers, even if they weren't on Ignitia or Nairobi with us. I didn't let anything touch my brothers. I didn't miss.

  "Seven years and we got what we wanted, to take back a little from the grubs. To keep as many people as possible safe from them. I got to watch over my brothers rescuing millions of survivors, and I never once in that time allowed a single enemy to touch one of them. I didn't miss. I had heroes to protect. It's getting late, I'll have to tell the rest later."

  The small crowd broke up with obvious disappointment, and we went back to quarters for dinner. I've decided to tell Yoivdrill about this part of the story.

  Journal Entry: 30. Date: 1/5/3. Name: Greg George

  No nightmare. Anti-nightmare stick is out of reach. Interesting.

  Still no sign of "REVENGE when we LEAST EXPECT" from Uncle. Either he didn't mean it, or he's having trouble thinking of something funny.

  Today seemed like a pretty chill day, so I decided to tell the only part of the story that isn't depressing as fuck. The part where we stomped the grubs with the full force of the Republic behind us. Hell yeah. Mom kept giving me worried glances for some reason.

  She made me this awesome xenos steak after I told that bit, and I tried to reassure her that I'm okay. She just patted my head and said she knows. She's just proud to have a son like me. Okay so first of all it's completely unfair of her to compliment me like that out of the blue. Second it's unfair that I DON'T HAVE A GOOD ENOUGH COUNTERATTACK!

  Thanks Mom. I appreciate it.

  I don't want to tell the next part. I don't want to, but I need them to understand. I hope they're not too disappointed.