The excitement stayed with the group as they created the camp for the night. The increased skill levels meant that the utility crews no longer stopped work when Swarm were spotted approaching the newly forming walls. Instead the third of recruits who were watching over picked them off with their rifles as the others continued. They left the defences the same as the night before, the only change being the creation of a small watchtower jutting out of the northeastern corner designed by Mouse.

"Isn't it beautiful." Asked Mouse as he climbed the steps of Crust that took them up to a platform the height of the rest of the wall. Here there was arise in the wall another four feet that acted as a parapet fully on two sides and half of the remaining sides.

"This is good Mouse, the elevated shooting position gives a better range." Elias looked around the view. "It does cut the cross cover options a little." They moved back down and Elias tried to look past the tower from the midpoint of the northern wall.

"Yeah, but not if we moved the whole wall out another metre. The only reason it's out of line is the need to leave the path inside the camp." Mouse replied. "Its a pity this is the last night out on the Crust. Well, hopefully the last night." Mouse tapped his head to make sure he wasn't jinxing anything.

"I was wondering why you don't see more camps made out of Crust? It's been surprisingly effective." Said Elias.

"I think so too, but it's too valuable. If we had a processor we could crush all this down and probably find one or two minor shards. Sell that and use metal sheeting, concrete or barbed wire to make the same structure you'll save money." Mouse looked over the tower. "It is pretty though, and easy to build with."

"Wait, that's two hundred credits." Said Elias. "Why don't we have a way of extracting that yet?"

"Have you been keeping a view on the kitty?" Slim chuckled as she came up to join in the conversation. She brushed her black, shoulder length hair back from her ear as she approached. "We have over a thousand credits in Swarm parts salvaged already. Plus three minor shards we have recovered from them directly."

"What, but how?" He was shocked by the amount, how had they collected that much?

"You're not working for a company anymore Elias, you run one." Slim said. "That means you can sell directly to the market, not just collect for a salvage fee. Going rate is twenty credits for a limb with regen potential. That's normally two limbs per Swarm and we have killed over fifty so far. But you're right that if we had a processor we could have been using it to clear Crust each evening and probably have another five or six minor shards by now. What you have to remember is that most companies would have lost two to three recruits on a trip like this by now. That's a net loss of several thousand credits."

Elias considered all this information as he looked at the Crust in a new light. Up until this trip he had only had to consider credits in the hundreds or thousands. They had already spent over a hundred thousand to get this far when you remembered those numbers it put the others back in perspective. His brain moved forward to the ziggurat, there would be over a hundred Swarm there, that was thousands of credits that could be salvaged. To him as an individual it was big money but it was a drop in the ocean to the company.

"Money to one side." Said Slim. "More valuable is what you're doing with the recruits. I've been watching the training and without a single loss you have activated twenty-one skills. We will probably have a couple more by tomorrow morning. In terms of efficacy, that is brilliant. The morale is also high despite the fact you took three day old recruits and got them to face a group of Swarm in a close encounter. You realise they are actually excited about tomorrow?"

"Excited?" Asked Elias. "I'm not. It's not going to be fun."

"I know but this is what they signed up for." Slim replied. "Then they would have heard the other stories, about high death numbers and high risk. They expected to be chucked straight into a life or death mission where they might not survive and if they did it might only be through luck. Some of them took the sign-up credits to help out family and loved ones at home. There's only a few that sign up truly naive of the way recruits are treated in the colonies. It's only a few days and already they recognise that this is different and most commanders don't work this way."

This was even more new information for Elias to think through. He had been one of those naive recruits when he signed on. Ready to take on the world and drawn in by the adverts showing rugged battle worn veterans mowing down hordes of Swarm. It had been a shock when he arrived and things were so different his jaded view of exploitation not changing through the years. Odd to think that most of those coming knew they were being exploited and had accepted the value of their lives. Was two thousand credits really enough for the poorest in society that the offer would substantially change things for their loved ones?

He hadn't processed how he felt about this. That the recruits knew he should be harder on them and riskier with their lives and that they were grateful he wasn't. He thought how this made things easier in a way, they would follow his commands better and this actually reduced some of the risk to them. He always understood that the mutual trust between officer and soldiers was a good thing, but he was surprised that he had managed to form the beginning of this so quickly. Perhaps things would go as well as the simulation tomorrow, if they were lucky perhaps it would go better.