Free Kraken Mare by Jason Cordova, Christopher L. Smith Page B

levels a quiet place for someone who preferred solitude. Someone like me.
    Gerry had been right when he warned me on my first day at the station: finding any true alone time was difficult at the best of times, especially if one did not want to spend all of their free time confined in their private quarters. The security manager had been prescient and always seemed to speak with a solid voice of experience. The more I got to know him, the more I respected him. He was a solid boss, which is just about what anyone could ask.
    The really nice thing about afterhours on the station was the dim lighting. In order to attract the kraken, the station lights were set to a hue which we really couldn't see. It was just enough, though, to cause some of the other guards' eyes to search around the room, unconsciously moving to avoid the light but simultaneously being attracted to it. More than a few of my fellow guards wore contacts to help block out the shifting light. I was one of the fortunate who weren't bothered by the changing-light spectrum.
    To conserve power, most of the lights on the levels where there weren't any living quarters went to half-power at night. Save for vital levels of the station, at least. Central stayed at full power throughout the night, but the lights in the prisoner cells were dimmed to levels low enough to allow them to sleep. They didn't seem as bothered by the light-spectrum variations as my fellow guards were. Or if they were bothered, they never complained, though they did bitch about everything else.
    It was weird. Despite escorting the prisoners down to Research on the rare occasion at the beginning or end of my shift, I knew very little about them. Sure, a few were quite chatty and tried to strike up a conversation, but mostly their talks consisted of insults or provocative comments. It's amazing just how creative someone can get with their veiled threats when confined to a small room for most of the day. Some of them were so depraved that I had to wonder just how they made it past the psychological evaluations all military personnel were required to endure before their enlistment began.
    The only one I felt that I had any grasp of was Emery Holomisa, which was funny because he hardly spoke at all. Out of all of the prisoners we held, he never insulted us, never talked back and never tried to argue his way out of the mobile restraints we used while escorting them to and from Research. He just wanted to do his duty and be left alone, something that I both understood and was able to appreciate. I had been the same way once while the shrinks were trying to mess around with my head, though he had much better patience than I had ever been.
    Part of the reason that I'd done well at sniper school—other than a near-supernatural ability to hit a target from just about any distance—was my preference to work with as few people as possible. In high school, I'd hung out with friends and was never considered anti-social. Not one of the cool kids, sure. But I had enough friends that it never occurred to me that I might want something else. It was something I hadn't known about myself until sniper school, when I'd been paired up with a spotter and send out on the Survival Course for six weeks.
    Sniper training has evolved over the past hundred years. Marine Force Recon snipers used to only deal with regular recon training. With the advent of space travel and colonization of alien worlds, we had to deepen our training and techniques, to try and find that balance between specialization and generalization. It became tougher to be a Marine, and even more difficult to make it through Recon training. To do this, lots of training regiments were created to weed out the weak. One of those was simply known as the Survival Course.
    Some mad scientist/bored Gunnery Sergeant with too much time on his or her hands had come up with the idea that Marine Force Recon training had to be tougher than everything else in the history of