I never wanted to be a soldier.

When I signed on for the Terran Civil Service I kind of assumed they'd take one look at me and my background and send me off to go do some pencil-pushing administrative work, probably not even outside of the solar system. I was a pencil-necked liberal arts degree-holder who had never even been in a fistfight. I would never in a million years think of myself as infantry material. Hell, when I first got the letter assigning me to the Terran Armed Expeditionary Corps I assumed they wanted me on logistics. But no, when I went back to the recruitment office to clarify, I had in fact been assigned to the infantry.

My guess is that the guys running the TCS knew a war was coming. Not the war, mind you, but a war. And whenever there's a war, you can bet that the Terrans are going to be in high demand. Apparently the Urkasa call us the "Never-Conquered", because in all of human history Earth was never truly unified under one world government, foreign or domestic. In the Urkasa's minds, this is because humans as a species are extremely good at war. I don't really know if that's true or not, and the whole point of the Terran Civil Service was to try and demonstrate that humans are good at more than just war, but that's always been how the galaxy sees us. Our first contact with the wider galaxy was a skirmish with Ikrik pirates that spilled into us invading the most powerful interstellar empire at the height of its golden age, managing to even seize a few border colonies before the empire properly responded.

And now that I think of it, it was probably the Ikriks that got the Terran bigwigs convinced that war was coming. If human history tells us anything, it's that whenever a nation starts talking about reclaiming former glories you know a territorial dispute is coming at the very least. And sure enough, that's what happened. Fifty years after regaining Ak'Ikrik and a few core territories from the Eternal Empire, the Ikrik Imperial Ascendency started saber-rattling about reclaiming old territory. One thing led to another, lines were drawn, and the Ascendency started pushing westward into Zenarii territory. The Zenarii didn't care for this very much, to say the least. But Zenarii aren't fighters, they just don't have the physique for it. They're diplomats, merchants, scientists, maybe spies at best. But fighters? Not in the slightest. That's what their allies were for.

Now again, I don't think humanity is a particularly war-like species. For us the war was a matter of fulfilling diplomatic obligations. For the Urkasa and the Kauri this was about a grudge against the Ikrik. They were both Ikrik slaves at one point in their history. This was about making sure that the empire that had enslaved them was dead and would stay that way. It was personal. For us it was just the right thing to do. But the end result was the same. A coalition was formed, fronts were drawn, and armies were mobilized. I was part of the force sent to Xektor, a world on the northeastern end of Zenarii space.

I never wanted to be a soldier. But if there was one thing Xektor taught me, it's that life doesn't care what you want.