Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Dave agreed.

  “I expect we are all going to be ass-dragging exhausted every night anyway,” Perkins added. “The Ruhar have told me they do not intend to coddle us in training, so we need to keep up with a genetically superior species, aboard a ship with equipment that is all new to us, and second-nature to them. We will be like your grandparents,” she winked, “trying to use smartphones.”

  “Oh, forget it,” Dave groaned, and everyone laughed. That broke the tension.

  Perkins reinforced the lighter mood by wagging a finger at Dave. “I’m warning you right now, Czajka. If you snore, I’m going to smother you with a pillow.”

  “Don’t you worry, Ma’am,” Dave found himself actually grinning despite the still-awkward circumstances. “You should worry about Shauna. Jesse here snores like a chainsaw.”

  “Hey!” Jesse shook a fist at Dave. “Only when I’ve got a cold or something.”

  “Right, like you had a cold the whole time we shared that hut in the jungle?”

  “Ah, I was allergic to that ugly couch, maybe.”

  At the first opportunity for privacy, Jesse pulled Dave aside. “Ski? Hey man, you gonna be OK?”

  “Like I got a choice? I’ll be sleeping in my camo uni pants and a T-shirt, I guess,” he said unhappily. He thought that wearing thick, baggy pants and a shirt were the best way to make bunking together less awkward for Colonel Perkins. Maybe he could suggest they leave their cabin door open. Then he got a pensive look on his face. “The Colonel’s right, though. Out here, we might as well throw some of the old rules out the window. I mean, not just aboard this ship. Us being military on Paradise,” he touched the American flag patch on his uniform top, “it’s kinda crazy, you know? What does it mean for us to be US Army, when we’re cut off from the US of A, maybe forever?”

  “I don’t know,” Jesse admitted. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Like, if we weren’t doing something important up here, I might have turned in my stripes by now, you know?”

  “Really?” That surprised Dave. Jesse had intended to make the military a career from the day he signed up. Bishop had been open about wanting to get out of the Army and use the money for college, although at the time of Columbus Day, he still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. And Dave? Dave wasn’t sure whether he wanted to stay in or not. His time in Nigeria, where one random group after another shot at him or planted improvised bombs, and the politicians back home could not define what the mission was supposed to be or even when or if the mission would end, had for a time soured Dave on the Army. Then came Columbus Day, and it had no longer mattered what Dave’s plans were.

  “Yeah, man,” Jesse’s eyes darted over to where Shauna was unpacking her gear in the cabin they would share. “Big things are happening on Paradise, even for us humans. People are getting out and setting up farms, setting up businesses, starting a new life, you know? We’re up here showing the flag and making sure the hamsters don’t forget all we did for them, but I’m getting worried that by the time we are old news and UNEF dissolves, other people will have grabbed all the good opportunities. We got to think about the future, Ski, and I don’t just mean tomorrow.”

  “Has Shauna talked to you about the future?”

  “Hell, no, man,” Jesse whispered harshly. “I haven’t said a word about it, I don’t want to scare her away.” With human women vastly outnumbered by men on Paradise, traditional gender courtship had been flipped on its head, with women being reluctant to get rushed into a commitment, and men eager to hold onto relationships. On Paradise, it was only foolish men who said those three little words ‘I Love You’ first, to avoid sounding clingy and scaring away a woman. “Shauna always wanted to be infantry and now she’s got it,” he shook his head. “She’s not going to be tempted by the idea of us putting down roots on a farmstead in the middle of nowhere, not when she’s got shiny Ruhar toys to play with.”

  “Good luck to you, ’Pone,” Dave held out a fist and Jesse bumped it.

  “Hey, don’t worry, man. You’ll find a girl soon. You’re famous!”

  “Fame don’t mean much these days,” Dave frowned. “And we’re stuck on this bucket for months, I am sure as hell not finding a girl out here.”

  Emily Perkins lay down to sleep on the bottom bunk, wearing pants and a T-shirt. At first, she had kept her bra on, but ten minutes of discomfort made her decide to quietly wriggle around under the sheet and extract the bra out through one arm of her shirt, a maneuver she knew always amazed men. Another adjustment was needed; with pants on her feet were too hot, so she kicked her feet out from under the sheet. At last, she was physically comfortable enough to fall asleep, and she certainly was tired enough from the long and eventful day, but her mind was racing despite her effort to concentrate only on breathing slowly. After a frustrating ten minutes of thoughts bouncing around in her head like the ball in an old pinball machine, she felt herself drifting off.

  Thus, she was extremely annoyed when a squeaking noise from outside the cabin intruded on her attempt to sleep. She tried flopping the pillow over her head to block out the sound, but it was no good.

  Finally, Perkins couldn’t take it any longer. The cabin’s control pad was high on the wall, near the top bunk. “Czajka, you awake?”

  “Uh, what?” Dave pretended to be far more groggy than he was. His plan had been to lay awake, breathing deeply and evenly to pretend he was asleep, until he was sure Perkins had dropped off into dreamland. Only then could he hope that if he did snore, he didn’t keep his commanding officer awake.

  “Can you hit the door controls, close the damned thing?”

  “Is that squeaking sound keeping you awake too? I can see if there’s something caught in an air vent,” he suggested.

  “Czajka,” she sighed and it turned into a yawn. “That sound isn’t coming from the ship.”

  “Oh,” Dave rose up on one elbow. “Oh.” He could feel his face growing beet red in the darkness. And, of course, right as he fumbled for the door controls in the unfamiliar alien cabin, the squeaking sounds grew closer together and louder until even the sleepiest of minds could not mistake the source of the sound. Mercifully, he found the button and the door slid closed. “Sorry about that, Ma’am.”

  “Why is it your fault?”

  “Ma’am, in Nigeria, we got into some tough spots, Jesse and I saved each other’s lives more than once. Bishop, too. If I hadn’t saved Cornpone back then,” he let his voice trail off in a soft chuckle.

  “I appreciate the thought, Czajka, but what makes you think that noise has to be from Colter and Jarrett?”

  “Oh, uh. Sorry, Ma’am.” He had not considered that Captains Striebich and Bonsu might be celebrating their first night aboard the ship.

  “Stop saying you’re sorry, Czajka. Let’s catch some shut-eye, we have a busy day tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Should I, uh,” he looked at the now-closed cabin door, faintly illuminated by the light of the communications panel. “Should I go crash on the couch?”

  “Thanks for the offer, but that’s against regs.”

  “The ship’s not underway,” Dave stated, unsure of himself. “We’re still attached to the resupply platform.”

  “The Paradise system is still a Threat Grade Three combat zone. Regs state anyone intending to be on a sleep cycle must be in a certified acceleration couch, in case the ship needs to move quickly. You’re anxious to get out of here? Why, do I snore?”

  “No, Ma’am. It’s just,” he didn’t bother to finish.

  “This is awkward for me, too, Czajka. We’ll be bunking together for months, might as well get used to it now.”

  “I suppose.” He almost added an ‘I’m sorry’ but overrode his mouth before he could say anything. “Good night.”

  “Good night, soldier.”

  No sooner had Dave let himself settle down into the bed, when a different sound caught his ear. Not a sound, exactly, more like a vibration coming through the w
all. A rhythmic thumping, slowly getting louder and faster.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” Perkins exploded in frustration, then laughed.

  “That’s not Jesse,” Dave found himself laughing along with the colonel. If the thumping was coming through the wall, then it had to be from the adjacent cabin shared by Irene and Derek.

  “All I can say is, those two had damned well better be rested in the morning,” Perkins complained with disgust, then she couldn’t help laughing, and she and Dave began laughing uncontrollably together. The thumping reached a crescendo and after five or six hard banging sounds, stopped.

  “Thank God for that,” Perkins gasped when she was able to stop laughing enough to catch her breath.

  “If they go for Round Two, I’m knocking on their door,” Dave said half-seriously.

  “Let’s hope they don’t,” she agreed, and it struck her then there was a major disadvantage to having the ship’s crew quarters being reconfigurable. Instead of sturdy, fixed bulkheads, the moveable partitions were thin and flimsy. Somehow, in the morning, she needed to discreetly let the two other women know just how sound transmitted through the cabin walls. Unless they already knew. How could they not, she asked herself, as she answered her own question. Because, each of the couples were busy and not listening to any sounds around them. “Again, good night, Czajka.”

  Dave felt certain there was no way he would get any sleep that night. He was in a cabin, less than two meters away from a woman, a woman in a bed. Perkins was a Lieutenant Colonel and his commanding officer and, like him, she was wearing long pants and a T-shirt, but he could not stop himself from imagining what she was like under those unflattering Army-issue clothes. Blood was pounding in his ears from the excitement of having heard one and possibly two couples in amorous celebrations. He tried to think of anything else to keep his mind and other body parts from focusing on the woman sleeping or not sleeping almost close enough to touch, and found his thoughts wandering back to Earth, to his grandparents’ summer cottage on a lake in the countryside west of Milwaukee. He found his mind drifting back to lazy summer days at the lake, swimming and canoeing and fishing and cookouts and riding his bicycle over to visit friends. Blessedly, he began to lose focus, and as the exhausting day caught up with him, he soon fell asleep.

  Perkins had set an alarm on her zPhone so she could get up earlier than Czajka, and minimize the awkwardness of waking up close to each other. Czajka must have set an alarm even earlier than hers, because she was awakened by the sound of the cabin door sliding open. “You’re up?”

  “Yes, Ma-” he put a hand over his mouth to stifle a shuddering yawn. “Ma’am. Hitting the shower, I’ll be back soon.”

  She could barely see him in the light of the status panel. For a reason she could not explain, and couldn’t attribute only to the fog of her just-awakened brain, she asked “How did you sleep?” Immediately, she cringed at the question that seemed much too intimate.

  “Um, good. I think my mattress is set too soft, I’ll, uh, change it tonight,” Dave did not know why he was dragging out the conversation when all he wanted was to get out of the cramped cabin as fast as he could. “Be back soon,” his words made him cringe, so he sped across the common area to the washroom and shut the door behind him, then slapped his forehead in dismay. He had not brought any clean clothes with him, so after a quick shower, he would be putting yesterday’s clothes back on. Fortunately, uniform pants and shirts all looked the same, so he could change in the cabin later, while Perkins took her turn in the washroom.

  “Did I wake you last night?” Perkins asked Irene and Shauna quietly.

  “No, Ma’am, why?” Irene asked innocently while lacing her boots in the common area.

  “I got up in the middle of the night, tripped on my boots and fell against the wall. These walls,” she rapped her knuckles on a partition, “are thin, and they transmit sound.”

  “Oh, ah, no,” Irene stared intently at her boots, unable to look Perkins in the eye, and with the corner of one eye she saw Shauna was also suddenly focused on her own footwear. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “No harm done, then,” Perkins tried to inject levity into her tone. “I’ll tuck my boots under the bunk tonight,” she announced, satisfied the two women had gotten her message.

  Breakfast for the humans had been a quick meal of granola bars made in Lemuria, and a sort of herbal tea, with the herbs also grown in Lemuria. “Better than most MREs I’ve choked down over the years,” Dave mumbled quietly over a mouthful of granola that was tough enough to chew that he had to wash it down with the tea. The human diet on Paradise was still limited and too-often bland, as UNEF had not brought plants to grow many commonly-used spices. One thing they did have was peppers and Jesse enjoyed a fiery chili sauce, but he got tired of it after a while. The Ruhar had been experimenting to see whether some of their spices could safely be ingested by humans, even though Ruhar food did not provide any nutrition, their spices might serve to make the bland human diet more palatable.

  “I hope you still feel that way when we’ve been eating this every freakin’ morning,” Jesse whispered.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Pone! Cornpone! Hey, Jesse!” Dave called out louder and louder to catch his comrade’s attention.

  “Kinda busy here,” Jesse snapped back, concentrating on the view in his visor. He was running back images and data of the last zero-Gee combat assault exercise, in which a pair of Ruhar cadets soundly spanked Jesse, Dave, Shauna and Perkins. Worse than the shame of losing badly was the taunting from the hamster cadets, and Jesse was determined to figure out where the humans had gone wrong, so the next exercise wasn’t so one-sided. He had already watched the actual exercise, with the ship’s training AI pointing out all the mistakes made by the four humans. Now he was intently watching a re-run of the exercise as the AI suggested it should have been conducted. “Talk to you-”

  “Now, ‘Pone,” Dave declared as he tore the visor upward, cutting off the exercise. “Game time is over, the battlegroup got a call for real action.”

  “No shit?” Jesse asked excitedly, any annoyance he felt forgotten. “We’re gonna see action?”

  When Jesse got back to the Mavericks’ shared quarters, he was disappointed to see Dave and Shauna sitting in front of the bulkhead display. “We’re gonna watch from here? I want to see for real, not on some display,” Jesse tapped the display with disgust. “Ski? You with me?”

  Before Dave could answer, Shauna put hands on her hips. “Is this like on Paradise, when the two of you froze your asses off on the ice to watch that maser cannon test fire?”

  “She may be right, ’Pone,” Dave said with an uncertain look on his face.

  “Come on,” Jesse was not going to be dissuaded. “You telling me you both don’t want to see a whole group of starships maneuvering away and jumping into action? There must be some place on this tub we can watch through a viewport? What about that porthole dome thing where the flight control crew monitors dropship retrievals? There won’t be any flight operations now, right?”

  “We shouldn’t go anywhere without clearing it with Colonel Perkins first,” Shauna objected.

  Jesse noted she had said ‘we’ rather than ‘you’ to the idea of watching the fleet jumping away. “Ok, Ok, I’ll contact her,” he pulled a zPhone off his belt.

  “We’ve seen ships come onto and off star carrier docking platforms plenty of times before,” Dave noted. They had observed that activity while outside their ship in zero-Gee combat training during the five weeks they had been aboard the ship. “And jumps, too,” he remembered, recalling when their training had been halted temporarily so they could turn away from a starship jumping away behind them. Ordinarily, ships would not jump anywhere near a person free-floating outside a ship, but as combat ops might include that happening, their training had to include what spaceborne troops should do if they were outside in a spacesuit, and a nearby ship needed to jump. Nearby was a relative term, because the gamm
a radiation from a jump could kill anyone in a spacesuit within three thousand kilometers, even with the suit’s radiation shielding fully engaged. Dave remembered being frightened when he felt a tingling sensation after his suit’s sensors picked up the gamma ray burst of an outbound jump, and he had almost panicked in fear the Ruhar-made suit had failed to account for the differences of human physiology. Within seconds, he realized the tingling was only the suit’s anti-radiation shield powering down after the gamma rays passed by, but he did have a moment of gut-wrenching fear. He didn’t want to feel that fear again. “Oh, hey, Jesse,” Dave held up a finger before Jesse could press the Send button on his zPhone. “Maybe those viewports aren’t protected against gamma rays, you know?”

  “I’ll ask about it,” Jesse assured his friend as he sent the message then checked the reply. “Huh. Damn it. Colonel said, no, she doesn’t want us wandering around the ship.”

  “That’s fair,” Shauna patted Jesse’s shoulder. “Dave’s right, we don’t know if it’s safe to watch a jump through those viewports.”

  “We could have asked,” Jesse stuck out his lip in an exaggerated pout.

  “Oh, my poor man,” Shauna played along.

  “Damn, are you trying for sympathy sex, Jesse?” Dave asked with disgust.

  “Depends,” Jesse flashed a grin at Shauna. “Would that work?”

  “We’ll see,” she bit his earlobe, then pushed him away as he tried to grab her ass. “You want to see this action, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” all Jesse could think of right then was Shauna. Whatever he was going to say next was drowned out by the blaring of an alarm, and an automated announcement familiar enough that none of the three humans needed their zPhone translators. Prepare for maneuvering, the announcement stated. “Hot damn!” Jesse punched a fist above his head. “Are we going into action?”

  The answer, to Jesse’s great disappointment, was a resounding NO. While they waited, the team’s two pilots came into the shared quarters, having been chased away from flight training while the ship prepared to maneuver for real. The Ruh Tostella did power up and detach from the star carrier’s docking platform, and did fire its normal-space engines to get clear of the star carrier before that vessel jumped away to drop off the second part of the Ruhar Task force. But the Toaster simply hung dead in space, while the giant Jeraptha ship created a powerful jump field and disappeared in a flash of gamma rays, taking the other Ruhar warships with it. “That’s it, then?” Jesse clenched his fists. “We’re just gonna wait here while the rest of the task force goes into action?”