He could refuse. He could claim I didn’t sign up for . . . whatever is about to happen . But by the letter of the law, he actually had. He had, shortly before checking out of the hospital, or whatever it was, in Cyberabad, taken an oath and volunteered for a mission whose exact details were undisclosed. Which was almost always the case in the military, right? Soldiers didn’t know where they were going, what they’d be asked to do. Even the officers probably didn’t know until circumstances unfolded. Still, he had—very naively, as he now saw—kind of assumed it would be more like the fighting at the LAC. More of him deciding where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do next, and less of blindly following unexplained orders.