“Lieutenant Wolfe! There’s no need to dance about it. You’ll get your own assignment.”
Harawe’s voice brought him sharply back to reality. He felt his cheeks burn as the other officers chortled to themselves. Daivid shrugged. Couldn’t blame a guy for dreaming.
“Taith,” Harawe turned to an itterim sitting at the end of the briefing table. “Your force and Cosimi’s,” he nodded to a human male with short-cropped blue hair, “are going to be dropped off on Belmont Station. You are relieving two units who are due for leave. You’ll carry on with resettling the refugees who are returning, now that the eruptions have ceased. You won’t find it onerous. It’s mostly traffic control at this point.”
“Ossum,” Itterim Taith enunciated, with a click. Belmont boasted a T-class world with gravity .85 that of Earth. Daivid had friends who had gone there on vacation. The dramatically rocky terrain was a climber’s dream, and the lighter gravity meant their muscles could take them that much farther. He listened as Cleitis doled out assignment after assignment, each sounding worthy as well as exciting. He tried to hold out hope for a mission with similar promise of glory, but every one of the commanders around him had far more experience than he did. Nor did their units suffer from the reputation of being the worst in the Space Service. His heart had sunk deep into his boots by the time the XO turned to him, last and least.
“As for you, Lieutenant Wolfe,” Cleitis began, a saccharinely sweet smile on his face, “we’ve got a nice, easy little mission for you. It’s a cream puff. I am informed by your CO that you have only been in command of X-Ray Company for about twenty days now. This will be a mild breaking-in exercise for you.”
“Aye, sir?” Daivid asked, suddenly wary. This was when they told him that the Cockroaches were being sent into the heart of a high-radiation zone to extract the 1% remaining useful ore from the bottom of a seventeen-kilometer-deep shaft. He hoped he’d have a chance to send one last missive to his mother before his skin began to peel off in strips.
“Yes, my boy. You’re going to thank CenCom for this from the bottom of your green little heart. Your unit has been especially chosen for the job because of your … low profile. You are tasked with going into a small town on a well-to-do world in a non-combat zone and retrieve a single piece of technology and the data to run it. Then you will be extracted. Three days, start to finish. The Eastwood will drop you, hang off world in concealment in the heliopause, then come and get you and your objective. Is that clear? Even your unit should find that hard to screw up.”
“Aye, sir,” Daivid replied, puzzled. Where was the part about mortal danger? Where were the enemy forces? “I’ll need maps and briefings on the site, and the intel on the unfriendlies.” He started to extend his infopad toward the XO, when Harawe held up a hand.
“He hasn’t got anything for you, Wolfe,” the captain said, with bleak satisfaction. “I do. Here’s your target information. Enjoy.”
He dropped a sheet of plastic on Daivid’s desk. As soon as it hit the surface, the video data printed into the plastic gathered enough static electricity to activate. A miniature Ferris wheel erected itself and began to turn. Roller coasters lined the perimeter. In the center a crenelated keep of bright orange towered over all. Tiny figures in astonishingly colorful detail joined hands and danced around the brochure’s perimeter. Tinny voices broke into song. The other officers stared at it, then at the captain, then at Daivid, who was gawking at the images with his mouth open. The officers present all protested at once.
“He gets to go to Wingle World?” Taith squawked, his mandibles opened wide in outrage.
“Sir, does CenCom know about this unit’s reputation?” Varos broke in. “I … this … couldn’t this be considered a mismatch of mission and, er, resources.”
“Hey, we’ll do it,” Cosimi said. “X-Ray can go rappel down cliff-faces. We’ll take the amusement park.”
Heedless of the heated protests around him Daivid gazed in pleased astonishment at the animation. Wingle World! He hadn’t been there since he was nine years old, over half his lifetime ago. Wow. He had always been a big fan of the Bizarro Twins, a couple of happy-go-lucky wolves or foxes or something of wild canine descent with purple fur who were always getting into amusing trouble. During games of make-believe he had tried in vain to convince one or another of his sisters to be the other Bizarro Twin so that they could act out the capers he saw on threedeeo animations. It had been a happy day when his father had packed off his four children in the care of an army of minions to go for a jaunt to Wingle World. They had been there almost a month, staying in the on-site luxury hotel, dining on room service or having special meals with the characters (who were threedeeo animations, people dressed up in anthropomorphic-animal costumes or AEROs, Animated Electronic RObots, a Wingle trademark), watching shows and parades and fireworks displays. He had been the envy of his schoolmates when he had returned. He knew he was grinning like an idiot, but he couldn’t help himself. Wingle World!
His classmates had nothing on the rest of the unit commanders aboard the Eastwood when it came to envy and resentment. Pulling himself back to the present, he glanced around at his fellows. With few exceptions, they all wore glares or puzzled frowns. If they’d been school children he might have been looking for a fight behind the gym after the bell rang. He admitted to some puzzlement himself.
“Sir,” he said, clearing his throat, “could this be right? This is a courier job, not a military mission. We’re a scout force. Do you really need us to do something this … easy?”
Cleitis frowned, but Harawe nodded. “Fair question. We’d send a courier, but this piece of hardware is of interest to many more than Central Command. We can’t look too obvious going in for it, because we don’t want to attract too much attention.”
Daivid raised a finger tentatively. “Er, isn’t a whole platoon of uniformed troopers going to look a trifle obvious and attract that attention?”
“Service personnel visit Wingle World all the time, lieutenant,” Cleitis said, impatiently. “Special discount for the armed forces. If any of those other interests show up, Central Command wants the escort to be capable of defending the item until the ship can return to orbit. A small force with a reputation like yours,” he cleared his throat meaningfully, “is intended to be an extra piece of misdirection. You’ll just look as if you’re on a weekend pass. No one will figure you’re there to protect a sensitive piece of hardware.”
“But, sir …”
Harawe spun to glare at him. “Are you questioning Central Command’s judgment, lieutenant?”
“No, sir,” Daivid said, with a sigh, trying not to look as pleased as he felt. “Just trying to clarify our assignment.”
“Clarification: you’re tasked with getting one single item. You drop outside of town. Don’t damage anything. Don’t draw attention to yourselves. You walk in, get the item, walk out, and wait for retrieval in three days. Got it? And be inconspicuous. That’s the most important thing. Your group showed itself to be resourceful during our battle with the Surgies. Keep your eyes open.”
“Aye, sir.”
Commander Iry stood up, and pinned him with her eye. “This is an easy one, son. Be grateful. Do it right, get back here without incident, and your unit will be a part of the big push in the Benarli cluster.”
“Aye, ma’am.” Daivid did a little mental math. “Er, Commander, if we have any time to spare after we secure our objective, may we use it as personal leave?”
Iry let out a bark of laughter. “If there’s any extra time, you can do whatever you want, as long as it isn’t going to get you killed or thrown in the local slammer. If your troopers get arrested, you’ll wait for retrieval until after the mission to Benarli. Now, shut up and let us get on with his briefing.”
“Aye, aye, Commander.” Daivid had to take that as the final word. Iry reminded him a little of his mother. Not in any physical sense: Iry was a square, hard-assed woman who had come out of the commando units and Dai
vid’s mother was willowy, elegant and cultivated an air of gentle delicacy, but both she and Daivid’s mother had seen thousands of young people in their diverse professions hung out to dry over the years, and had occasionally done the hanging themselves.
The dissatisfaction among the other officers grew palpably, but Daivid didn’t hear a word. He found himself reading over the brochure again, losing track of the rest of the assignments the XO was handing out while he reveled in the moment. Wingle World!
O O O
“Hey, Wolfe,” Bruno hailed him from the doorway as the meeting broke up. “Come on back to the mess with us. We ought to drink to your unit’s good fortune.”
Lt. Rindel seconded it. “Yeah. Come and tell us what’s this secret that gives X-Ray the inside edge on this mission. I’d heard they were a bunch of screwups.” Not very surreptitiously, Bruno elbowed his jackal hard in the ribs. “Hey!”
Sensing a covert wedgie in his future, Daivid excused himself. “Thanks, guys, maybe later. I’ve got to go brief my noncoms and get an order of battle running.”
A few of the other junior officers gave him a gesture that showed they didn’t begrudge him his good fortune. Wilbury gave him a wry grin, but accompanied it with a thumbs-up. Daivid mentally noted the names of others he would have to watch out for for a few days. After that, everyone would be too involved in the job at hand to take time for petty grievances, though he would be the first to admit that it wasn’t uncommon for payback to come around years after the initial event. All he could do was handle the assignment with efficiency, and deal with consequences later.
And what an assignment!
Daivid all but fled back toward his company’s day room. He couldn’t wait to tell the good news. For once, X-Ray platoon wasn’t being given the scut assignment. No garbage, no hazardous materials, no inadequate numbers against overwhelming odds. Three days! They’d have plenty of time to pick up the item—Cleitis said it was small—then spend the rest of the time just enjoying themselves before lifting the shuttle to rendezvous with the Eastwood. He glanced up at the nearest screen and read the chrono. It was just before shift change. He spoke into his wrist-mounted communication link. “Lt. Borden, Ensign Thielind, Chief Lin, Chief Boland and Chief D-45, please report.”
“Here.” “Here, sir.” “Aye.” “Yes, lieutenant.”
“Yo, what it is, lieutenant?” Boland had a taste for archaic expressions. This one dated from a Terran period in between the seasons of courtly verbalizations and the precise compuspeak that heralded humankind’s first space colonization efforts.
“We’ve got our assignment,” Daivid said, hardly able to contain the gloating in his voice. “Meet me in the day room.”
To his surprise by the time he had arrived there, the entire platoon had assembled in the brilliantly lit chamber, some of them still clutching cleaning tools and wearing their coveralls, facemasks and boot covers. Of course, the enlisted troopers would have been with their squad leaders in the bowels of the ship. They were all curious where they were going. A normal unit would have stayed on station, waiting to be informed by their immediate superiors, but the Cockroaches were not a normal unit. Daivid was concerned that they might be coming to think of him as a chum, not a commander, a mindset that could prove fatal in a battle scenario. He decided not to make an issue of it then—in spite of the overpowering aroma of sewage. He was too wired.
“Sir?” asked Master Chief Lin, as Daivid hesitated on the threshold.
He came in waving the brochure. “It’s a pickup and delivery mission,” he said, knowing his eyes were glowing. “We are to make an insertion into a civilian location. Three days. Easy in, easy out.”
“What’s the location?”
“Dudley,” Daivid gloated. “The item’s in Wingle World. We have three days. Once we achieve our objective, the rest of the time’s our own. They want to remove the Eastwood from sight while we’re there, to avoid attracting attention. The XO assured me it would be a minimum of three days.” He deployed the brochure, and the Ferris wheel rose in a welter of music. The Cockroaches stared at it.
“Wow!” Streb crowed. “Wingle World!”
“I spent my fifteenth birthday there!” Meyers exclaimed, her face pink with pleasure.
“I did my master’s dissertation on its economics,” Borden said, looking as excited as she ever did.
“I always wanted to go,” Lin said. “It’s nice of the Space Service to send us.”
“The other officers are all jealous as hell,” Daivid said, enjoying the looks on his troopers’ faces.
“What’s the catch?” Mose asked.
Everyone stopped talking. Daivid opened his mouth, then closed it. The poet was right. It did sound too juicy.
“C’mon,” the wiry trooper said, tilting his head skeptically to one side. “Mama didn’t raise no fools, and I am pretty sure yours didn’t either, for all you’re as green as an emerald. What’s the hangup? There has to be one. Never in a million years would they hand something like this to us if it wasn’t a clusterfrax. Something’s tricky about this. What is it?”
“I have no idea,” Daivid had to admit, plopping himself down at the poker table. “I called you all here for your input, and it sounds like I need it. Let’s sit down and figure this one out.”
Daivid transmitted the briefing to all the units’ infopads, and they started scrutinizing the brochure.
“Atmosphere is pretty normal,” Lin said, reading through the meteorology reports encrypted in the ‘travel agent’ information section. “The planet’s got a four-season year, like Earth, except that it’s longer. Bigger orbit, but bigger sun, therefore closer in proportion. As a result, the part of Dudley where the park is situated has only about a one-month winter, but they get real snow.”
“Gravity’ll be nice,” Ambering said. “It’s .97 of Earth’s, or just a little lighter than Treadmill. It’ll be easy on the feet. Maybe that’s why people enjoy going there. Muscles have less to haul around, so humans get a little extra spring in their step.”
“Meaarow is a heavy world,” Ewanowski pointed out. “I remember the first time I hit Earth grav in a ship. My buddies and I were bouncing all over the place. Now I hate going back, because my grandmother can jump farther than I can.” He slapped his muscular thigh with a clawed hand. “It’d be a nice place to visit, but if I stayed too long I could never go home again.”
“Oxygen mix is 1.025% higher than fleet standard,” Borden added. “There are other trace elements, but the air remains pretty well scrubbed. I have read papers on the environmental strides that the Wingles have put into place. The park recycles not only its own water, but that of the region for eighty kilometers in every direction, right up to the mountain ridges that surround the plain. Very impressive. I hope I can take a little time to ask the park engineers how they handle disposal of the effluent.”
“What did you say about winter?” Mose interrupted, holding up a finger for attention.
“I said it’s pretty short,” Lin said, highlighting the section for everyone to read. “About a month.”
“Have you ever known anyone who was there when it snowed?”
“Well …” Everyone thought about that for a moment.
“No, huh? Because no one ever is. Wingle World is closed during Dudley’s winter, the whole month of Fimbul, local calendar.”
Daivid pulled his infopad closer and stared down at the listing. “When is Fimbul, on the TWC calendar?”
Mose looked him solemnly in the eye. “It starts in about thirteen days.”
“The whole damned park is going to be closed when we’re there?” Boland asked.
“Slag, that figures,” Ewanowski hissed, showing his fangs. “We’re gonna spend three days slogging around in the snow looking at stuff that doesn’t work. No midway games. No shows. No girls. Dammit.”
Mose crossed his arms. “I told you nothing is as easy as it sounds in the Space Service.”
Daivid felt as though he�
�d been hit over the head with a tank. The assignment had sounded so good. But it was time to face reality. “Okay, Cockroaches, would you rather be envied or laughed at?”
“Envied, to be sure,” Jones said, collecting nods from the others. “We’re almost always laughed at.”
“Fine. Then no word of this little piece of information goes beyond the walls of this day room. Got it? We can take slag if they think we’re getting something good, but we have a whole battle to fight alongside these units at Benarli. We can confess that the park was closed when we’re back on board with Harawe’s gizmo in hand, mission accomplished.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Lin eyed him with respect. “You’re smarter than you look.”
“Sometimes it’s useful for appearances to be deceiving,” Daivid pointed out. “We’ll catch less crap if they don’t know what’s really in store for us.”
O O O
“You hear about them Cockroaches?” Supply clerk Milton Edgerton asked Bruno, slapping the lieutenant familiarly on the arm when he stopped into the main office. Not only was the quartermaster’s office an important hub for the spacers’ equipment, but a central clearing house of ship gossip. Bruno had been known to drop in frequently to hear the latest or to start a rumor of his own. While he didn’t rise to the level of the powerful lieutenant’s circle of friends, Edgerton was an important link in his circle of power, and worth cultivating, for that reason. For his own part, Bruno despised the pot-bellied spacer. Regretfully, Edgerton was not a short-timer, having at least twelve years left on his thirty, and had openly vowed to make them all, but he was useful. Bruno intended to keep him on board the Eastwood until he became too much of a pain in the ass to tolerate. Then, a quiet word in the ear here and there on circuits to which Edgerton did not have access, then no more hearty whacks or breathy wheezes that left speckles of nicotine pow stain on Bruno’s pristine uniforms.
“I heard about them,” Bruno said peevishly. “I can’t believe it. Anyone with sense would have assigned a courier from the ranks of the Eastwood’s crew. Why should they have taken on this bunch of dirtballers to do something any one of us spacers could do, and do better?”
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