It's one of the first lessons drilled into your head in the Academy, even the little shit excuse for one on Tauron where they find the farmer boys and take away their plows and give them pilot screens instead, broken down men and women teaching stuff they don't believe in anymore. They tell you to fly and you say 'yes, sir' and they tell you to calculate fuel and you say 'yes, sir' and they tell you to do whatever the frak your superior officer tells you to, and you say 'sir, yes, sir'.

And then they slap you across the face and tell you not to be such a stupid frak and just figure out what you have to do to survive the gods-damned odds.

He does what he's told and he says what he's supposed to all the time. When you live on the farm, your life is controlled by outside forces all the time - sun and wind and heat and rain and cold and frost and bugs and floods and dew and whatever else Demeter wants to throw at you - and you don't complain. You just put on your clothes and your boots and you do what needs to be done, and at night, you remember to wipe the mud off before you fall into bed, or Momma's gonna take a switch to your hide, and she doesn't care how big you've gotten.

He likes rules and regulations because they're the same as the farm. Follow this order and that order, and sometimes they contradict, but just do what they say. He's found that's the best way to survive, just like they tell him, because it's always someone else's word that he's following. The field was good for that, because it let him lose himself in what he was doing, didn't make him have to think. Row after row of seed or soil or picking crops just requires hands and feet to move. His mind could be anywhere, always somewhere else.

He read enough stories and histories and accounts of other places to dream what it might be like to be something more than that, and that's why he enlisted, why he got up before the sun, before his father, when the rest of them were just falling asleep and started walking and never once looked back.

And now he's here, in the stars and it's the same old routine. Press a button, flip a switch, follow an order. The sounds are different, but they're soothing in their own way. He's learned not to expect the breeze to cool the sweat from his body and instead inhales the recycled air that smells like sweat and tin. No animals dot the landscape and fill the barn at night with ghostly sounds of settling down, but he's got the shift and scratch of the rest of the people in the room, all trying to relax, to sleep, to live their lives behind the scrap of curtain fabric that passes for privacy.

He would have been dead by now at home, dead but alive, just like his father - eaten up by machines or the soil - or broken down by the work and the strain of being the next in line, being the man of the house when his father got tired of it all and just laid down and never got up. He knows that. He knew it before he left, felt the ropes tightening on his wrists and tugging him under.

This promises a different kind of death down the road, but it's the kind of death where someone might remember his name with meaning instead of it being just a ghost on some old woman's lips about the littlest Agathon boy. Maybe he'll find glory or fame or something heroic. He's not sure he wants to go down in history, but he'd like to have someone say his name like it mattered. He wants to know that when they shoot his body into space, the words they say will have an element of awe, of heroism. They'll say things about how he was there at a crucial moment, how he held the line, how he fought to the death.

But for now, he takes orders and checks the fuel and navigates and does whatever else they want him to do, whatever task they give him. Here, he's the go-to guy. It's not much of a job, he knows. He's the lowest man on the ladder, getting his fingers stepped on hard by the Raptor pilots above him, grinding their mud-covered boots against his skin and bones. He doesn't let it get to him. He just keeps climbing until there's something like daylight and something other than someone else's ass in his line of sight.

He doesn't think is such a bad thing, because out here in space he's someone different than he was at home. Here he's not someone everyone knows, not the runt of the family even after he was full grown, not the joke of the Agathon clan. Here he has a chance to be somebody, to survive and have it mean something.

So that's what he's doing right now, moving out of the Academy to his first Battlestar. He's packing his duffel and saying goodbye to his rack mate and wearing the pins that say Lieutenant. People call him Helo instead of Karl, and nobody calls him Agathon. It's different - a different kind of living and a different kind of dying and a different kind of in between - but there are rules that he lives by, rules that he's memorized. Rules that, for him, for now, are his scripture.

You follow orders and you fight and you make sure that when it all comes down, you're ready. You don't bitch and you don't moan and you don't cry in your ambrosia. You dodge bullets and you duck under the hatch. You keep moving until someone bigger and stronger and faster and better armed than you makes you stop.

You survive.

Until you don't.