“Do I want to go offworld?” Jesse’s eyes bulged as the idea of being an astronaut, a space soldier, sank in. “I don’t know about y’all,” he pointed to his companions, “but I plan to carpe that diem until it begs for its momma.”
Perkins had to laugh with the rest of the team. “Colter, I appreciate your enthusiasm. Let’s see if you are as happy about the idea when you’re stuck in a hamster spacesuit and they’re spinning you around a hundred RPMs in zero gee.”
“Don’t you worry none about me, Ma’am. At the state fair, I’m the guy who eats corndogs on the roller coaster while everyone else is losing their lunch.” He pointed a thumb toward Czajka. “Ski’s the guy you have to worry about.”
“Me? When did you ever see me on a roller coaster?”
“Don’t need to,” Jesse shook his head with exaggerated sadness. “Remember when we was in that Blackhawk over Dogon Dawa in Nigeria?”
“Oh for-you got sick too! That helo almost chucked upside down in that storm,” Dave explained. “If we hadn’t been strapped in, all of us would have fallen out the door.”
“All I can say is, your breakfast ended up in my boots,” Jesse grinned. “Don’t worry, Colonel,” he addressed their leader. “I’ll keep an eye on Ski if his wittle baby tummy gives him any trouble.”
“People, in all seriousness, this assignment is going to be tough. No humans have been through this training, so we don’t know whether we can even get through the program. The next four months could be rough.”
Shauna crossed her arms defiantly. No hamster was going to keep her from serving aboard a starship. “No humans ever wiped out a lizard battlegroup-”
“Or nuked an island,” Irene nudged her friend playfully.
“That too,” Shauna admitted with a sheepish grin. “Spaceborne Army, huh? I like the sound of that.” She unconsciously touched the infantry patch on her uniform, wondering what a Spaceborne Army insignia looked like. She could send the question to Nert, he would surely know. “When do we get started?”
“Eight days,” Perkins replied happily, seeing the enthusiasm of her team. “Until then, you’re all on leave, so enjoy yourselves and keep in touch.”
“Hey Ski!” Dave turned to see Pete Sanchez elbowing through the crowd toward him. The bar was packed even at mid-day, the popularity of the establishment was more a function of there still being few places in Lemuria that had a supply of alcohol, rather than the quality of the beverages served in the bar.
“Pete! Damn, good to see you,” Dave called out, pointing to a narrow space next to him at the bar. It was good to see a familiar face, as Dave had found the bar distressingly full of strangers including a lot of the former Indian military. Pete Sanchez had served in Sergeant Joe Bishop’s Embedded Observation Team at the village of Teskor, way back when UNEF first landed on Paradise. Dave had gotten into contact with Pete, after the Ruhar finished interrogating everyone who served closely with Bishop. Other than both serving with Bishop, the two originally had little in common, but soon developed a friendship during a rather raucous fishing trip up in the mountains. That fishing trip also introduced Dave to Pete’s entrepreneurial side, with that soldier bringing along portable chiller units to store the fish they caught. While Dave expected the fishing action would all be catch-and-release because neither humans nor Ruhar could eat the native life on Paradise, Pete had quickly explained why he had chosen that particular lake for the fishing trip. Years before, that lake had been part of a planned resort, so the lake was stocked with fish from the Ruhar homeworld. While plans for the resort had failed, the fish had thrived and Pete planned to catch, clean and ship out as many fish as they could catch. Pete had an arrangement with a UNEF pilot who diverted to the lake each morning and took the previous day’s catch to fly up to a Ruhar settlement in northern Lemuria. The Ruhar had a general distaste for eating animals but some made an exception for tasty fish and they paid well. Pete split the money with Dave, Jesse and three others, putting a nice chunk of money in the wallet stored on Dave’s zPhone. “You still got the fishing thing going?”
“No,” Pete shook his head. “Too many people went up there, the Ruhar put a stop to it because we were wiping out the fish population. Raj,” he caught the bartender’s eye. “Two beers for me and my friend here.”
“Thanks, man. Sorry about the fish.”
“Ah,” Pete waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve got another thing going.” He took two bottles from the bartender and handed one to Dave. “You like it?”
The bottle was not glass but it was cold, and one sip told Dave it was real beer, not the rotgut alcohol distilled out of whatever agricultural leftovers could be found. He turned the bottle around to see a smiling, straw-hat wearing hamster on the label. “Lester Cornhut’s Paradise Pale Ale,” he read the label. “Hey, I know that name from somewhere.”
Pete grinned and took a big swig of beer. “Uh huh, he is the mayor of Teskor, the village our Embedded Observation Team was stationed when we went feet dry down here with Bishop.”
“Damn, Lester Cornhut is his real name? I thought you were joking,” Dave laughed. “That hamster is brewing beer now?”
“Yeah, for me,” Pete puffed his chest with pride. “We kept in touch after UNEF pulled us out. He invested in expanding capacity of his processing plant, but with farms popping up all over the planet, prices crashed and he was looking for an opportunity. I had been brewing my own beer, so we got together. Now, part of the land around Teskor has been planted with hops and barley, and we’re adding wheat for our summer ale.”
“Shit, man, when do you have the time for all this?”
“I quit the force a month ago.”
That surprised Dave. “Wow.” He lowered his voice. “Are you sure about that?”
“Best decision I made since we landed here,” Pete declared. “Dave, I gotta ask you, are you sure about staying in the Army? I know you had fun in that wargame, but, that’s over, so what are you going to do now? If the ExForce had a real mission, I might still be wearing the uniform, but I don’t see the point to playing soldier,” he shook his head sadly and drained the last of the beer, “when the hamsters won’t let us fight.”
“We’ve gotten into fights,” Dave replied coolly, feeling offended.
“Yeah, and you guys seriously kicked ass,” Pete’s admiration was clear. “But, Ski, come on, you got into those fights on your own initiative, not because the hamsters trusted you in combat.” He waved a hand for another couple of beers. “You can’t count on stumbling into action, not when the hamsters treat us like pets. What’s next for you?”
“I don’t know,” Dave answered truthfully. Pete was correct that, with the wargame over, Perkins planned to argue for her team to have a continued role serving alongside Ruhar military units, but even she had not been optimistic. The initial enthusiasm of the Ruhar army to relearn infantry tactics with human advisors providing guidance had faded. Upper echelons of the Ruhar military were insulted by the idea they could learn anything from primitive humans, and considered the possibility of another straight-up infantry battle to be remote. Most of the human advisors had been relegated to the role of observers, and many quit after being insulted too many times by their reluctant Ruhar hosts. “The Colonel got us an assignment offworld, for a couple months. After that, I don’t know,” he admitted.
“The Colonel, yeah,” Pete nodded slowly. “Emily Perkins, right? Dave, look around, what do you see here, that you don’t usually see much of?”
“Uh,” Dave craned his neck to scan the crowd, then turned back to the bar. “We don’t get drinks much at base,” he noted, already thinking he needed to find a way to bring a case of Paradise Pale Ale back to the team.
“Forget the drinks. Women,” Pete announced quietly. “There are women here. Not just this bar, the whole area of southern Lemuria the hamsters moved us to.”
“Oh, yeah.” Women were the first thing Dave noticed when he walked into the bar. Clusters of women sitting at ta
bles, with a much larger number of men trying to catch their eyes, but not approaching unless invited. With far too many men seeking far too few women, any guy who acted like a jerk had zero chance. When Dave came into the bar, he had been surrounded by people eager to hear about his role in the wargame, the difference between Ruhar skinsuits and Kristang rigid armor, and what it was like to kick hamster ass even if it had only been a game. Dave was happy to boast about his recent adventure, but he had been disappointed that few of the women seemed interested in hearing his stories, and he had not been able to speak one-on-one with any women.
“Up at base, there are just the six of you?” Pete asked, and Dave nodded. “Last time we talked, Jesse was with Shauna, and the two pilots were hooking up?”
“It’s more serious than hooking up,” Dave was uncomfortable discussing the subject.
“Whatever. My point is, that leaves you with the Colonel as the only unattached woman on your team, and that’s never gonna happen, right? It’s great that you’re loyal to your team, and you guys have saved our asses down here twice, but you can’t count on that happening forever, you know? You need to think about yourself. Listen, Lester and I are thinking of expanding, brewing a sort of beer for the Ruhar. We’ve got the facilities now, and the human market is small, but more hamsters are arriving on this dirtball every day, and they need something to drink other than water. You’re a hard worker, you’re cool under pressure, and you’re a genuine hero to the hamsters here,” Pete lightly punched Dave’s shoulder to emphasize his point. “Make that work for you. I’m serious. The Paradise economy is growing and there are opportunities out there, but you’ve got to act quickly because some other guy is hustling for the same break. You’ll think about it?”
“Yeah,” Dave agreed while tipping back a bottle to drink, though his attention was on a table of five women who were ignoring him and all the men around him. Two of the women were visibly pregnant, a sight Dave still found startling. He knew that women having babies was a good sign, an indication that humans were optimistic about their future on Paradise. “I’ll think about it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Best behavior,” Derek whispered as he wiped a clean rag over the copilot armrests in the cockpit of their shiny new Dodo dropship, for which they had each just received their Type Rating to fly. “Best behavior,” he insisted.
“You’re worried about me?” Irene replied innocently. “I am a model of politeness.”
“Yes, sweetheart,” Derek tapped the pilot’s head, “you are the model for what not to do.”
“It won’t be my fault if this jerk-”
“This honored guest,” Derek said slowly and patiently for emphasis, as he squeezed her shoulder and made her look up at him. “Irene, I’m serious. This guy is going to bait us, insult us, make cracks about how primitive we are. We can’t take the bait.”
“That’s easy for you to say, I’ll be doing the flying.”
“That’s because the hamster asked for you, you’re the hero who flew a stolen Buzzard around with a portable drill rig and destroyed a lizard battlegroup. All I did was get shot down and carry my pilot across the countryside. Look, this guy asking for you is a form of praise. Like Colonel Perkins said, it’s an opportunity to make a good impression, but it’s also a danger that we will screw up and give the hamsters an excuse to bounce us off this mission. I am not worried one bit about your flying us up to the ship, I am concerned your mouth might get us in trouble. Take my grandmother’s advice; you can be as rude as you want, as long as you act polite. Got it?”
Irene squeezed his hand. “I’ll be on my best behavior. But after this flight, you’re taking me to the gym on that cruiser and I’m hitting the punching bag hard.”
“That’s the spirit. And don’t worry, I got your back. If this hamster is really a jerk, I’ll take him out back, beat the shit out of him.”
“If anyone gives him a beat-down, it will be me. Oh, crap, here’s the asshole now,” she announced as she plastered a smile on her face.
“You will hear a lot of noise and experience some vibration, I will be performing a ‘run up’ to test that the engines are capable of delivering max power for takeoff,” Irene explained, forcing the smile to remain rigid on her face. The dropship’s engines put out so much thrust that the ship would rocket down the runway dragging its skids along the ground, so the engines had a special ‘run up’ mode where the turbine blades flattened in their housing and churned the air without providing much thrust.
“Do what you need to, please,” the Ruhar government bureaucrat Arnu Charl put on a grin he intended the lowly human to see was false, as a sign of his discomfort having to trust a primitive creature with his life. “I am most concerned about your ability to safely operate this very sophisticated airspace craft. I know the air control system can remotely override your commands if you get us into trouble but,” he flashed another intentionally thin smile, “that would be unfortunate. Hmm, I should adjust this seat,” Charl scrunched his neck down as if he had trouble seeing out the forward window displays. “We Ruhar are, of course, much taller than the average human. I mean no insult, of course,” he added to ensure the pilot understood his intended insult.
Irene knew Derek had already adjusted the copilot seat down to fit the Ruhar who was, in fact, taller than most humans, so she ignored the hamster’s attempt to bait her and she didn’t even need to bite her lip to stifle a sharp reply. Officially, Arnu Charl was riding with them only to observe the primitive humans in action. Unofficially, everyone knew he was looking for an excuse to squash the whole idea of humans being aboard a Ruhar ship, even an old training ship. In a minute, Irene would be taking the Dodo off the ground and up into low orbit, to rendezvous with a cruiser. When she was flying, in command of the supremely powerful dropship, she could ignore anything. While she adjusted the controls to begin running up the engines at first only to seventy percent power, she could see in her peripheral vision the hamster was reaching down under the seat with both hands, with his eyes watching the engine power levels on the copilot display. She nudged the throttles forward to only twelve percent power, making sure the turbine fan blades were indeed feathered, then when she was satisfied everything was operating perfectly, she advanced the throttles slowly and smoothly toward the preset seventy percent limit. To her right, the hamster grunted as he bent down to reach the seat controls, fumbling around under the seat bottom.
“Sir, be careful!” She warned. “The ergonomic controls for the seat are on the right side, not under-NO!” Irene shouted in panic as with her left hand she hit the master switch to kill power, and her right hand reached across to grab the Ruhar’s arm. With her seat harness properly tightened, she couldn’t reach across the gap, so she was unable to prevent the disaster that followed.
The cockpit seat ejection mechanism in a Dodo was different from the arrangement on the truly huge dropship humans called a ‘Whale’, it was the same as the system aboard the small ‘Vulture’ gunships. The idiot civilian had unintentionally tugged on the ejection handle in his search for the controls to lower the already-low seat, and fortunately for him, Irene and Derek, he had not first flipped the manual switch to allow the handle to move, and anyway Irene had not yet armed the ejection system. If he had successfully engaged the ejection sequence, the system would have accepted his command rather than first wondering why in the hell some idiot wanted to eject from a perfectly good airspace craft that was still sitting on the ground. Afterward, the AI aboard the Dodo would have puzzled over why the ejection system had been engaged, but generations of Ruhar pilots had demanded full control over ejection, so the AI was not allowed to intervene. Engaging the ejection mechanism would have caused the cockpit door to slam violently closed, then the sturdy brackets that connected the cockpit to the airframe would have been burned through instantly by nanocord that flashed into plasma. With the cockpit section free of the remainder of the Dodo, it would have rocketed upward and away, climbing well clear of the do
omed ship that might be in danger of exploding. Eventually, when the onboard AI determined it was safe, the rocket thrust would cut off and a nanofiber parachute would be deployed, with the AI warping the fabric to steer the cockpit to a relatively safe landing. Irene and the Ruhar would be alive, though likely injured from the sudden jolt of the rockets firing.
Fortunately, none of that happened, because the Ruhar had not been trained how to use the ejection mechanism, because the designers of the system had idiot-proofed it as best they could, and because Irene as Pilot-In-Command had not armed the system at all. Unfortunately, there was another reason why the idiot hamster had not yanked upward on the ejection handle; his fumbling hands had found another handle that was just as dangerous.
“Derek!” Irene screamed as she watched in terror what was happening to the copilot seat. Somehow, the Ruhar had located and pulled the handle for the inflatable life raft tucked under the seat cushion, and that raft was now expanding at an impressive rate, forcing the seat upward and threatening to crush the hamster against the cockpit ceiling. Without thinking, Irene pounded her seat harness release button with her left fist and reached down into her right boot for a survival knife strapped there. With knife in hand, she began frantically sawing at the raft material, but it was a smart nanofabric and sealed itself rapidly behind the blade. In desperation, she began pushing the knife blade sideways, creating a larger rent and argon gas hissed out under high pressure, blasting her in the face and forcing her eyes almost closed. At a fearful yelp from the Ruhar who was trying and failing to release the straps holding into the seat that was now a deathtrap, she looked up into his pleading eyes. “Derek!”
“Got it got it got it got it,” the copilot replied unseen below her field of vision as the cockpit swirled with dust kicked up by the blast of argon gas coming from the inflation canister of the raft. “Ok! Stopped it!” Derek exulted as his questing fingers located the tab to deflate the raft. They had practiced how to inflate and deflate a raft in training, but that course had never covered the possibility of deflating a raft when it wasn’t yet fully deployed. The raft designers had never considered that possibility either, their well-founded assumption had been that anyone wanting a raft needed it to be inflated now, as soon as possible and that no one would ever change their freakin’ minds in the middle of the process! In fact, all Derek did was yank open a panel on the side of the raft to let the expanding inert gas out, but the canister was still releasing more of the stored argon and the raft was filling faster than gas could come out the rather small flap.
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