The Anti-Tank Rifleman

Jack is seventeen, and he lives with his mother on a farmstead in a depressed district. Their life is simple and monotonous. There is no work anywhere nearby—what saves them is only the fact that the area where they live used to be the site of a major atomic war, and now the few inhabitants of the wastelands are busy extracting and reselling two-hundred-year-old military trophies. There are no prospects here for a young man, and Jack, like many other local boys, dreams of only one thing—to enlist in one of the corporate armies fighting for the rich mineral resources of the planets.