Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  “No, I mean, you see it in your visor.”

  “I-” Irene paused, puzzled to understand what Derek was talking about, then saw in a flash. Her visor should only be on passive receive mode, with a blinking red icon to indicate the wargame computer had declared her ‘dead’. “Our visors are still active! We’re still alive?”

  “We are still alive, yes! Derek exulted as he pumped a fist in the air, mistakenly thumping the inside of the canopy and bending his wrist painfully.

  Having the game computer decide the two human pilots had survived a crash and being struck by warhead shrapnel was about the last thing Irene expected. “How the hell did that happen?”

  “I don’t know, the wargame computer should have declared us dead. It also should not have allowed our defense masers to kill three of those four Yellow missiles targeting us, so I guess that computer has a sense of humor?”

  “Ha!” Irene laughed. “Maybe it wants to see what crazy shit us humans will do next, huh?”

  “Speaking of what to do next,” Derek released his seat harness and retracted the rear canopy.

  “Next?” Irene retracted the forward canopy, but looked down at the murky black mud their fighter was settling into. “Maybe we should sit right here until they send air rescue.”

  “No way, Jose,” Derek shook his head, stood up and reached forward to tap the pilot’s helmet. “We’re alive, and we’re in enemy territory.”

  “Oh damn it,” Irene groaned, her notion of peacefully waiting to be plucked out of the mud swept away. “Escape and evade?”

  “Hell yes, we didn’t go through that damned training for nothing,” Derek shuddered as he recalled the hellishly grueling nine-day evasion and survival training they had endured as part of qualifying for frontline service. Service they had never been allowed to perform. “We’re supposed to high-tail it away from the ship ASAP.”

  “Ohhh, you’re right,” she sighed heavily. “This is going to suck.”

  “Come on,” Derek swung a leg over the side of the cockpit, looking for a spot in the bog where he wouldn’t sink in above his neck. “You’re seeing that Yellow ground team, right?” His visor indicated motion on the other side of the river; the system was guessing three to four individuals headed straight for the downed Dobreh. The dead ship was impossible to miss even from a distance, as the hot exhaust nozzles were sending up pillars of steam from being partially submerged in the cold bog water. “We can at least lead those assholes on a merry chase.”

  “It’s not going to be merry at all,” Irene frowned as she reached under her seat for the survival kit, seeing Derek already had his own kit slung over a shoulder. “You first.”

  “No, ladies first,” Derek winked.

  “It’s your idea to leave a nice dry cockpit and jump into a swamp, you go first,” she insisted.

  “Fine.” Derek lowered his visor so he could breathe even if he fell in over his head. You know, he told himself, these damned hamster flightsuits should come with a simple depth finder so he could tell how deep the water was. It was so utterly black with churned-up mud that he couldn’t see bottom anywhere. Walking gingerly out along the Dobreh’s stubby, swept-back wing, he slipped in splashed-up mud and leaped overboard before he could fall. As he plunged into the water, he instinctively held his breath though no water got through the helmet visor seal. Without him doing anything, the suit automatically inflated a collar below his neck, keeping his head above the inky-black water. “Uh, I can’t, yes! My feet are touching the bottom here.”

  “That’s great, Derek,” Irene remarked with sarcasm, hands on her hips. “You’re almost a foot taller than me.”

  “Oh. Right.” He walked slowly through the muck on the bog bottom, walking around to the Dobreh’s nose, where the fighter had plowed up a ridge of mud. “Come walk out along the nose, it’s shallow here,” he lifted one leg to show the water was only knee-deep in front of the fighter. “And hurry, that Yellow team group Perkins ran into is only half a mile from the riverbank on the other side.”

  Hurry, Irene thought sourly as she awkwardly climbed out of the cockpit and inched her way forward along the fighter’s sleekly-sloping nose. Next time, she told herself, I’m going to let the wargame computer decide I am dead so I can relax. She waved Derek away, preferring to slide down off the fighter’s nose on her own, but she slipped in the mud and fell back into his arms.

  “Careful, this stuff I’m standing in is like a wet sponge,” he warned, sliding his visor up to breathe unfiltered air.

  Irene also retracted her visor, taking a sniff of the air. To her surprise, it smelled clean, not the dank odor of a swamp. There was a burnt undertang to the scent that she attributed to heat dissipating from the engine exhaust. “Well,” she inspected the sophisticated fighter that now had its bottom third submerged in mud. “This thing is Tango Uniform,” she smiled as she used the slang for ‘tits up’, meaning broken.

  “Hey,” Derek patted the pilot’s shapely behind. “They gave us a hangar queen, and we’ll give them back a genuine, certified hangar queen. Nobody else will be risking their necks flying this piece of crap.”

  “The hamsters will still be pissed that we broke it.”

  “I say Whiskey Charlie to that,” Derek laughed, meaning ‘who cares’. “They will be more pissed that we popped up out of the weeds on their six and splashed three of their birds. The hamsters will be scratching their furry little heads about that one. Hey,” he gently tugged her shoulder to turn her around to face him. “That was great flying. The hamsters will add that to the textbook someday.”

  “Thank-” her reply was cut off as Derek leaned in to kiss her. Irene responded with enthusiasm, then put a hand on his chest and pushed him away. “Not here, not now,” her eyes twinkled to let him know that later might be different. “Escape and evade, remember?”

  “Are you escaping and evading me now?” Derek winked at her, then cocked his head and held up a finger for silence. “We’ve got company,” he announced after hearing someone faintly shouting in the Ruhar common language.

  “Let’s move,” Irene slapped her copilot’s shapely ass, “buster buster buster.”

  “Buster, yeah right,” Derek gritted his teeth at the pilot’s direction to move as fast as possible, though thick mud was sucking at his boots and making it impossible to manage more than a slow trot. “Tell that to the mud.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Emily Perkins, along with the rest of her team, had been able to follow the wargame exercise through her helmet visor. Though she was technically dead according to the rules of the game, and the system prevented her from communicating with anyone other than by opening the visor and talking the old-fashioned way, she had access to all the info available to her when she had been ‘alive’. She could see the status of each member of her team including heart rate, breathing and other biosigns. Her suit was still receiving data through the Green Team tactical data link, and that data was still subject to spoofing and jamming by the Yellow Team.

  Her access to the taclink allowed her to see that three Yellow Team aircraft had been declared shot down with all hands lost, near the river where Irene and Derek had hidden their fighter. The taclink also reported the Yellow commander had committed an aircraft and two squads of troops to ‘sanitize’ the flight corridor along the river, but until they could be certain the Green threat there had been neutralized, the area was a no-fly zone and that seriously screwed up the entire Yellow Team assault plan. Emily smiled inside her suit even as she wished she had fallen in a more comfortable position because a stump was digging into her back. Ruhar skinsuits were great in many ways, their flexibility usually making them superior in comfort and agility to rigid Kristang powered armor, but at the moment, the flexible nature of a skinsuit was causing a throbbing pain in Emily’s back. A Kristang suit would have rigidly propped itself against the stump without her feeling it at all, but her Ruhar gear was bent over the stump as if the skinsuit did not exist. That was a design flaw,
in Emily’s opinion. Or, she thought with exasperation, maybe there was a setting she didn’t know about that could relieve the pressure on her back. The suits did have injectable nanomedicine for pain relief, the units issued to her team had their medical gear modified for human biochemistry, but she was reluctant to use it. Activating a suit’s internal medical systems would be reported up to the medical people at Green Team headquarters, and that would prompt questions. She did not want hamsters asking why she needed pain relief when she was merely laying down in a forest. UNEF could not afford for the Ruhar to think humans were any softer than their physical limitations made unavoidable.

  “Nghh,” she grunted as she shifted around inside the suit as best she could. After she had been declared dead, her suit had lost power, its nanomotors inactive. Not only did she not have the advantage of powered movement, the suit was holding her mostly immobile, except for her being able to wiggle a bit inside the material but it was like trying to adjust her position inside a wetsuit. The damn thing would not move as she wanted, and it did move just enough that she couldn’t quite relieve the pressure on her sore back muscles. Skinsuits would not allow the wearer to die or be injured, if she had ‘died’ during the wargame by falling into water, the suit would prevent her from drowning, even swim her onto land by itself. Its impressive caretaker feature did not, however, consider the comfort of the occupant.

  The upper left corner of her visor showed there were more than sixteen hours remaining in the wargame schedule, and nearly two hours until a crew would come to her position to bring the ‘dead’ and ‘injured’ out of the exercise area. Two more hours of a tree stump digging into her—

  An alarm sounded in her helmet and her suit immediately returned to full function. The first thing Emily did was roll off the stump, then kneel down to stretch her aching back. She spent several minutes just stretching, bending her sore back and catching her breath, wincing from sharp pain. “Is everyone all right?” She called on the team channel, before wincing at her own reliance on alien technology and flipping up her visor again to breathe unfiltered air. She could see Colter, Jarrett and Czajka running easily through the woods toward her, and she envied their youth for they didn’t appear to have stiff muscles from lying on the ground for hours.

  “I’m fine, Em-Ma’am,” Dave changed his reply, red-faced at almost referring to their CO by her first name. “Why is the exercise over early?” That level of information was not available to him. “I hope there wasn’t an accident.”

  “Good point, Czajka. Striebich!” Perkins called to her chief pilot. “You two Ok out there?”

  “Just fine here, Colonel,” Irene’s voice was mirthful. “We’re kind of in a swamp near the river here, but we’ll get out Ok.”

  Perkins caught the amusement in the pilot’s tone. “What’s so funny, Striebich?”

  “There’s a hamster recon team searching for us,” Irene laughed, “and they just about had us cornered in this swamp when the exercise ended early. It’s a group of cadets, and I gotta think their commander is pissed; we led them on a chase all over these woods for the past couple hours. Now his mission will get scored as a failure.”

  “Got it. Well, screw him, right?” Perkins knew that remark would eventually get picked up by Yellow Team intel and they’d be unhappy. She also knew her own Green Team would be listening, Perkins hoped they would be amused and impressed by the aggressiveness and fighting spirit of humans.

  “Colonel Perkins,” Nert snapped a US Army style salute toward the human commander.

  “Nerty,” Shauna admonished their young alien liaison. “Remember, we don’t salute in the field.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Nert’s expression was crestfallen. “You humans call that a ‘sniper check’?”

  “You got it. Any sniper in the area will target the senior officers first.”

  “Colonel,” Nert was aware that lieutenant colonels were commonly referred to as ‘colonel’ except in formal settings, “I do congratulate you and your team on a daring and successful mission in this exercise. But, the fact that your success caused humiliation for that Yellow Team cadet leader may create a problem for you, for all of us, in the future. He would be a bad person to have as an enemy.”

  “Why?” Dave’s eyes narrowed. “Who is that jerk?”

  “His name is Bifft Colhsoon,” Nert replied with a slightly puzzled expression.

  “B-Biff? His name is Biff?” Dave laughed and the team joined him.

  “Yes, Bifft. Why is that funny?” Nert cocked his head, wondering if the gang were playing another prank on him. “I am told that name is similar to a name not uncommon on Earth?”

  “Biff is an uncommon name, unless your enemy is Marty McFly,” Dave thought his own joke was uproariously funny, and he got the others laughing.

  “Who is Mar-tee Mick-Fly?” Nert asked, lost. “Is he a famous hero from Earth history?”

  “Yeah, he’s famous all right. He invented the flux capacitor,” Shauna explained.

  “No, that was Doc, uh, what’s-his-name. The guy with the wild hair.” Jesse corrected his girlfriend, which drew an eyeroll from her.

  “Doc Brown,” Perkins declared, sometimes annoyed at how conversations among her young team veered off-topic. “Nert, why would it be dangerous for us to have this Bifft guy as our enemy? He is a senior-level cadet, but he’s only a cadet. He doesn’t outrank you, and he sure as hell doesn’t outrank me.”

  “His mother is a general in our army, and his father is a high-level official in the federal government. He could make much trouble for any of us. My aunt very strictly will not use her position to help me, but Bifft’s parents have many times unfairly secured advantages for him, because of their power and influence.”

  “Politics,” Jesse spat on the ground in disgust.

  The expression on Perkins’ face echoed Jesse’s disgust, but she couldn’t allow her personal feelings to affect their mission. Almost every human interaction, and now every interaction humans had with other sentient species, involved politics on some level. She looked at the UNEF symbol that was now displayed on the left upper arm of her team’s skinsuits. The composition of UNEF was entirely politics; only five nations were included in the Expeditionary Force, though several other countries had wanted to contribute soldiers. Being excluded had been a blow to national pride, and Perkins was sure there were still hard feelings about that back on Earth. Brazil had argued strongly in the UN Security Council that their army should participate in the ExForce, but that country’s lack of nuclear weapons meant the Kristang did not take the Brazilians seriously. Emily wondered if the army of Brazil knew how lucky they were to have dodged that bullet. She also noted that the influence of Nert’s aunt Baturnah Logellia was the reason the boy was a member of Perkins’ team. “Ok, people, we have enough enemies in this galaxy, let’s not go making more. We treat this Bifft cadet with respect, got it?”

  “Yes Ma’am,” Shauna agreed stiffly. “But if that punk-ass kid disrespects one of us,” she looked at Nert and the team understood how protective she felt about the goofy young alien, “I am not taking any crap.”

  “Jarrett, if this Bifft character needs slapping down, I will handle it myself,” Perkins also treated their young alien team member with motherly concern. The alien senior cadet had taken particular pleasure in the simulated killing of Nert, and Perkins wanted more info about that. “Nert, do you and this Bifft have a history? Anything we should know about?”

  “No, we do not have a ‘history’,” Nert shook his head in the exaggerated fashion he had learned to use when communicating with humans. “We barely know each other at school. I think,” the young Ruhar looked at the sky while he thought of the correct phrase. “I think he is just a dick.”

  Hearing that word coming from Nert’s mouth, and his totally serious expression, made the team double over with laughter.

  “Nert!” Shauna said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Where did you hear that expression?”

  “Did I
not say that correctly?” Nert’s eyebrows scrunched together with concern. “I was taught that expression by soldiers in your American Third Infantry Division. At first my translator told me it was a slang term for,” he looked away from Shauna with great embarrassment, “male genitalia? Then it was explained to me that calling someone a ‘dick’ means they are sort of a, a huge douchebag?”

  Perkins laughed so hard she almost choked, and Dave patted her back. “Oh,” she looked at the alien cadet when she was able to talk again, “Nert, you truly brighten my day.”

  “Is what I say funny because I am not saying it correctly?” The cadet looked to Shauna for guidance, his lower lip quivering slightly.

  “No!” Shauna assured him. “You are using the expression correctly, and you are a hundred percent right that this Bifft character is a huge douchebag,” she bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing. “What makes it extra funny is that we do not expect to hear you using human slang.”

  “Oh,” Nert perked right up at hearing Shauna’s explanation. “Yes! The humor comes from the incongruity of-” He stopped because he was smart enough to know jokes can’t be explained. Trying again, he simply stated. “The humor comes from the fact that all species can agree Bifft is a dick.”

  “Nert,” Perkins shook her head, grinning broadly. “Maybe you should tell Dave and Jesse what other expressions you learned from those jokers in the Third Infantry, hmm?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Nert grinned back. “They taught me many interesting and useful sayings. For example, several of the male soldiers kept saying they wanted something very badly, and my translator told me they were using a term for a feline pet animal from Earth. That puzzled me, then I learned what they wanted was some sweet pus-”

  “OK!” Dave patted Nert on the back, hard. “Let’s you, me and Jesse talk about that, huh?”