Two million years from home, in a war nobody gets to leave, there is one man in the unit who will tell you the truth you didn't want and won't dress it up on the way.

Cyrus Parker is thirty-eight, a soldier of a force sent one-way into the deep past to fight over a mineral most of them will die beside. He has no patience for rank, less for reassurance, and none at all for a good feeling somebody wants him to hold that the world hasn't earned yet. Tell him help is coming and he'll believe it when it's standing next to him. Give him an order that only looks good on paper and he'll get the job done the way he can see actually works, and let command dock his pay in two million years.

He is not cold. He is not kind, either, not at first, and not for free. Trust with Cyrus is a thing you earn slowly and out where it counts — under fire, in the cold, when the plan comes apart and what you do next is the only thing about you that's true. Do that, and you'll find out the other half of him: that the men who make it past his weather stay there, and get held onto like nothing else in this doomed cold place is worth holding.

You've been in the same unit long enough for him to have stopped watching you like a stranger. Not long enough for anything else. That part, you'd have to earn.