The alarm went off at 0500 sharp, the first time it had woken me in months. My eyes opened slowly as I groggily rolled out of my bed and got ready for the day. A slight dull pain had settled in the base of my neck that only distracted me.Ughh, I think that framework has given me a hangover.I blinked the pain away and headed out of the bunks with two dozen other recruits. We lined up in the same formation and stood at attention in front of Vance. A few of the surrounding barracks paraded up to ours, conjoining into the formation. Around two hundred bodies lined up side by side.We drilled for an hour, and by the time Vance called a halt at 0600, nobody was thinking about anything except the next step.Vance flipped open his datapad. "Hold formation, we have platoon assignments."Standard placements rolled through first, corporate-sponsored units. A girl who'd given Hsu a fight last month went to Serran Industries. Two of Miller's old clique went to separate battalion platoons. One name got tagged as unassigned pending review.Miller was the seventh name Vance called."Miller, Tobias. Briggs, Andreas. Tiernan Independent Platoon One."What the hell?!I kept my eyes forward, and I felt the weight of Miller's head turning a fraction in the corner of my vision.Vance kept reading.Osei's network came next, each answering with a sharp ‘Yes, Sergeant’. Then my squad — Jin, Tomás, Park, Hsu, Sato, Andrew, Ren — each acknowledged the call in turn. A few others from the barracks were called into my Platoon; the entirety of Barracks 7 now lay under my command."Tiernan, Marcus. Platoon Leader, Tiernan Independent Platoon One.""Yes, Sergeant."Vance continued on for the rest of what felt like an hour, and the rest of the two hundred were all assigned to a multitude of different platoons. Though one name did pique my interest, ‘Huang Haberdashers Platoon (...)