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 This story begins under the premise that the government is selecting certain babies at birth to become soldiers. They are taken at that time and trained from birth to have the attitudes and physical discipline of a soldier. Basic to this attitude is "A soldier shows no mercy. Mercy is weakness, and weakness is death." "A soldier lives to kill." "A soldier needs no friend or family." "War is his friend." "The Forces are his family." Todd learns well and by the age of forty is a sergeant, a veteran of several wars both on earth and in space, and he is the best of the soldiers. But now a new generation of soldiers is ready which has been genetically engineered to be physically superior to Todd's generation making his generation obsolete. To prove this superiority Todd is set to compete against one of the new generation soldiers, ending with hand to hand combat with Todd being joined by two of his fellow soldiers fighting against one of the new soldiers. The new soldiers wins and the bodies of Todd and his two fellow soldiers are quite literally thrown out with the garbage. They do not even check to be sure that they are really dead. Todd is in fact still alive and wakes up while being dumped onto a garbage planet. This planet should be uninhabited, but in actually has a small colony of people who crashed landed there and had been unable to get word out that they were there, and no one ever actually lands there. Even the garbage ships just fly low and dump the garbage and fly off, and they may be unmanned ships. Todd is helped to recover from his injures and stays with the colony for a while, but as he grows stronger they become more and more afraid of him. They finally ask him to leave.
 Meanwhile the military has demoted the rest of Todd's generation of soldiers to non-soldiers who are used to carry and setup equipment. The new generation soldiers are to be given some experience in a non-training environment by doing a security sweep on some deserted planets where some unmanned monitoring stations are to be setup. The garbage planet where Todd and the lost colonists are is one of these planets. Since the planets are officially uninhabited, anyone found on the planets is considered to be hostiles and are to be eliminated on contact. Since the colonists have no experience in fighting against a military force, it is up to Todd alone to defend the colonists against the attract of the new soldiers.