Author’s note:

This book deals with issues of developmental disability in a way intended to be humorous and uplifting. My aim is to portray the characters as heroic figures, with hopes, dreams, and feelings, even if they are Marines.

THE 37TH

Tardigrade-Augmented

RadioActive Demolition

SpEcialists

Command

1 - Gunny - Gunnery Sergeant - Gunny’s face with “DON’T CHUCK UP”

2 - Bonzo - Pilot - All red, no design

3 - Member - Mission Recorder - Elephant’s skull with “MEMENTO MORI”

Specialist

4 - Sticky - Stickman - Bundle of sticks, wreathed in flames

5 - Bango - Demoman - Nuclear blast with “PROUD OF THE CLOUD”

6 - Choppa - Axman - Big blue ox

7 -Yank - Hammerman - Mjölnir crossed with valknut insignia
8 - Winchester - Linesman - Two crossed Winchester 1886 lever-action rifles

9 - Yakov - Ladderman - Stairway 2 Heaven (Jacob’s dream by William Blake)

10 - Aziz - Lampsman - The Lighthouse of Alexandria

11 - Deuce - Backup pilot - Deuce coupe hot rod

12 - Filthy - Burner - Winged serpent flying over starfield

Riflemen

13 - Sipper - Skeleton drinking wine

14 - Plinko - Tarot Fool

15 - Clipper - Pair of scissors crossed with Desert Eagle pistol

16 - Heafs - Pork chop surrounded by aura of flame

17 - Lefty - Roaring lion

18 - Esses - “COOL S” symbol

19 - Yancy - Mad Hatter with Con Safos sign card tucked into hat band

20 - Clamps - Vice grip crushing skull

21 - Gobbo - Goblin with knife in teeth

22 - Sambone - Crossed bazookas over “THE BIG ONE”

23 - Bickles - Cowboy riding nuclear bomb

As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly

Proverbs 26:11

The admiral had seen many breaches, but he was still excited. Breaches were compelling. The anomalies were frightening and unquantifiable in a world where all else had become safe and routine.

For days, the HMASS Polybius had loomed in the emptiness
at a considerable distance, watching the Herald radiation shimmer in senseless fractals that built up like a slow and anticipatory drumroll.

The radiation levels hit Chandra, and like clockwork the Polybius’ Prime AI issued her Cassandra. All displays dipped to red, blaring a dire advisory that the mission should be immediately terminated, and they should escape the sector with all possible haste.

The crew ignored the AI’s warning. A few of the junior officers allowed grins to spoil their military bearing. There were so few opportunities to feel superior to an AI, each needed to be savored.

Every breach, the ship’s AI would warn them to flee, and every breach they would ignore her. It was satisfying, like rolling a stripe of electrical tape over an insistently blinking CHECK ENGINE light.

The Smarts were still trying to invent an AI that wasn’t terrified of Herald radiation, so far to no avail. Every sentient machine melted into a simpering coward the moment it detected even a single erg of the unknown force. Right now, the entire anomaly was no more than the output of an industrial microwave cooker, but that was changing rapidly.

The admiral watched the Herald fractals blooming on the display and wondered for the hundredth time what they meant. He stroked his beard, which was steel gray, trimmed within a millimeter of milspec.

It was a very human thing, trying to assign meaning to any phenomena that seemed ordered. The AIs claimed the fractals were arbitrary, but machines simply could not be trusted where breaches were concerned.

At the moment, the ship’s AI insisted the radiation field that had been a few piddling kilowatts an hour ago was now a screaming megamaser outputting roughly the same energy as Canis Majoris. Her reading was obviously wrong. Such an emission would have instantly incinerated the Polybius and anything else in this sector.

What AIs hated most about Herald radiation was that a sensor hadn’t been found that could directly detect it. Measurements were all made via inference from anomalies in other sensor readings, and something was absolutely wrong with the model.

Nothing made an AI crankier than something she couldn’t see and couldn’t understand. The Smarts had claimed they were on the verge of a breakthrough with their unified theory of Herald radiation for decades.

The breach had begun. A status tone played on the bridge speakers. There was a technical initialism for the sound, but it was unwieldy. Everyone simply called it The Pitch. The Pitch was a slowly sweeping audio tracker that gave them a constant indicator of the estimated herald radiation frequency.

The oscillation had been endlessly analyzed. Sometimes it was a perfect logarithmic curve. Sometimes it seemed almost random. Only one thing was certain. When the tone hit twenty-two gigahertz, something would happen.

As always, the admiral felt a momentary camaraderie with all the captains who had observed a breach. A great many of them had died for the privilege and, soon, he might be among them. Even the most stringent breach protocols had proved inadequate, time and time again. The events were predictably unpredictable.

The admiral ignored the new wave of alarms and cast his vision to the breach. He had to order the AI to keep her eyes on the anomaly as she attempted to divert all cameras.

The AI delivered an unusual second request to terminate the mission, and the admiral could see why at once. All the measurements were just meaningless lines howling off the top of their scales, it was going to be a big one.

For an instant, the admiral felt a vestigial urge to pray, but it found only the numb scar where religiosity had been amputated from his mind as a condition of assuming command. If he was about to be obliterated, it would be without illusions.

The breach expanded, and the entire bridge gasped as the largest whale any of them had ever seen materialized. The black alien hulk silently emerged from the invisible radiation field, trailing the distinctive tendrils of distortion the Smarts theorized were tears in spacetime.

Whales came in a wild assortment of shapes and sizes. The Navy had a designation for each. From the zeppelin shape and lack of any exterior lighting, this whale was a Hindi Class, most likely the largest ever recorded.

It was so large that its hull brushed against the boundaries of the breach, a novel phenomenon. The breach pulsated, trying to expand to let the whale pass through.

This whale was in trouble. The hulk’s forward motion ground to a halt, and there was a ring of dazzling white light at the breach’s edge. The admiral was aware of a ripple through his officers, each going through the same phantom prayer he had, each feeling the missing piece of themselves.

This was abnormal. In most breaches, a whale appeared, lingered in space, and then dove back into the void, vanishing without a trace. In situations where whales were prevented from diving, they tended to explode with approximately the same energy as a type Ia supernova. The similarity had vexed astronomers to no end since so many of their measurements were based on the Chandrasekhar Limit.

The Smarts thought this might mean the whales were somehow using captured white dwarfs as their power supplies. As usual, they were only speculating. No one had ever laid eyes on a whale’s powerplant and lived to report back.

The officers on the bridge were aware that no one had ever recorded a whale failing to breach. That didn’t mean it had never happened, just that it had likely killed everything for ten parsecs. The HMASS Polybius was currently stationed at the distance Breach Protocol dictated, ten light minutes.

They were all going to die.

The AI sent her third plea for retreat. The admiral had never seen an AI issue three Cassandras.

“Oh, hiss off, you coward,” the admiral ordered the AI. Every eye on the bridge was suddenly on him. He hadn’t meant to vocalize that command. The admiral realized those might be his last words, and he gazed at the breach, trying to think of something inspiring to say.

“Looks like a turd pinching off halfway and getting sucked back in,” the captain of Marines opined. No one laughed, and the COM obviously didn’t care if they did. His description was undeniably apt.

The admiral exhaled pointedly, making it abundantly clear he didn’t approve of the outburst. It was no secret he would have preferred someone more polished as his second in command, but the COM had more combat experience than the rest of the bridge combined. Some of the junior officers had none at all. They had been handpicked by the admiral for other considerations.

Together, the officers watched the great space-sphincter contract, and they waited to die. With silent, incredible violence, the breach tore the whale in half, and then vanished.

There was no supernova. The officers didn’t die. They gripped at their chests, assuring themselves they hadn’t been vaporized. They uttered thanks to nobody and furtively glanced around, checking to see if anyone had hissed themselves.

“It’s huge!” a lieutenant who didn’t know any better exclaimed. “Is that the biggest whale ever recorded?”

“Bigger,” the admiral said, deadpan.

Protocol dictated he was not allowed to grin, and they were not allowed to groan and roll their eyes. But he grinned anyway. They had survived the largest breach ever recorded. If they got out of this alive, they would be legends.

The admiral gazed at the half-eaten whale. The bite mark was still glowing white-hot. Even broken in two, it was almost twenty kilometers long.

There was a blip in the lights, and they received a notification the ship’s AI had gone insane and been rolled back to the default firmware. The admiral sighed, silently cursing the Smarts.

“Orders, Admiral?” the witless lieutenant asked. The admiral bit back a severe reprimand and ignored the idiot. Fear made men forget their places. He shot a look at the man’s CO, who gave a pained nod in return.

The officer who should have asked for orders was the Captain of Marines. But the COM gazed at the immense whale on the display, his expression inscrutable. The admiral glared at the ugly mess of scars on the back of the Marine’s neck, waiting for scopaesthesia to kick in. The COM only scratched idly at his ancient burns, still peering at the monster.

“Captain?” the admiral said, slightly too loud.

“Sir?” the COM asked, turning back to the admiral.

For a split second, the admiral could see the undisguised persiflage in the captain’s face. It was immediately replaced by military bearing so total the admiral doubted he’d even seen that hint of a grin. But it was surely there. The COM likely thought the admiral was a buffoon. He probably wanted a commander who wasn’t so…theatrical.

The admiral flashed a toothy smile and doubled down.

“Captain of Marines,” the admiral commanded, puffing up his chest and raising his voice as if he were addressing the whole crew. “Send in the T.A.R.D.S!”

“Sir! The T.A.R.D.S. refuse to deploy!”

The captain blinked at the chief petty officer, not comprehending. Tardigrade-Augmented Radioactive Demolition Specialist Marines didn’t refuse orders to get on a whale. They loved the work. They were literally made for it. It didn’t make any sense that the platoon would refuse a crack at the greatest whale of all time.

“Why in the well not?” The captain asked.

“No idea, sir! They want to talk to you!”

Somehow, the CPO had made it all the way to E8 and still addressed superiors like a shipee at recruit school. It was disconcerting. The captain was sure the man was aware it bothered people and did it intentionally.

“They should follow the chain of command. Why didn’t they go to the warrant officer?”

“Sir! They won’t talk with the warrant officer! He came to me!”

“Why not?”

“They say he’s fussy, sir!”

The captain exhaled through his nose and ran his hand over his scalp to the whorls of scar at the back of his head. His fingers were still surprised when no hair met them. He scowled at the CPO’s full head of hair, lips pursed with envy.

Enlisted men could get any cosmetic procedure they wanted, as long as their bodies remained milspec. Officers were not permitted to alter themselves. No vanity and no illusions, that was the price of command.

“He’s the biggest fussy in the fleet,” the captain said.

At that exact moment, the warrant officer was probably hissing himself in his quarters, wringing his sweaty little hands in terror that the COM would ream him out. He was a last-minute transfer from another ship when their original warrant officer suicided over a Dear John letter from a Smart way out of his league.

It was obvious the commander of the other ship had used the opportunity to hastily promote one of his lumps to get rid of him. The captain tried not to think about how common that kind of retrograde promotion was and what it said about the Navy’s command structure.

“All right. I’ll talk to them. Come with me, let’s go to the Hive.”

Even the terminally chipper CPO couldn’t quite hide his grimace.

“Sir! I’m just relaying the message from the warrant officer!” he cried out. It was as close as he could come to protesting. The chief petty officer wasn’t the one who had chucked-up, but the COM was unwilling to suffer alone.

“And I am shooting the messenger. Lead the way, Chief.”

They squeezed through a claustrophobic nightmare of tunnels that led to the hive, the habitat cylinder resting right on top of the ship’s reactor pile. Each man took a deep breath and steeled himself.

“Ready?” the CPO asked.

“Aye-aye.”

The chief petty officer opened the hatch, and the eye-watering funk hit the visiting officers like a prizefighter’s jab. The heat rolled over them, and they immediately began to sweat. It was nearly fifty degrees Celsius.

The temperature would have been higher if the Hive hadn’t expected company. The Marines liked it hot. They had not turned down their cylinder’s rotation. Perhaps they had forgotten but, more likely, their gunnery sergeant wanted to convey his displeasure. The chief clenched his jaw and fought his way forward, his body suddenly three times its normal weight.

“OFFICER ON DECK!” one of the Marines bellowed.

Both men felt every bone in their body lurch. The Tardigrade-augmented Marines had enlarged hyoid bones. They could shout a good thirty decibels louder than a regular human, and did so often.

The hive was absolute bedlam, but it swiftly fell in line. The COM clocked the end of three separate altercations, one fistfight, one wrestling match, and one that might have been a little more than just wrestling. They all disengaged within five seconds, and the T.A.R.D.S. rose to attention, snapping crisp salutes as if three Gs were nothing. The COM fought against the tunnel vision creeping up on him and returned the salute. His arm felt like it was cast from lead.

“Spinning a little fast, Gunny,” the COM remarked.

“OI! COM on deck! Lefty! Are you chucking featured? SPIN DOWN!”

“You told me to keep it up!” Lefty protested. “Said to let Commie sweat it!”

“SPIN DOWN, YOU CHUCKING RABBIT!” The gunnery sergeant barked, loud enough to make the COM’s ears ring. Anticipating what would happen next, the COM grabbed the CPO by the shoulder. The chief petty officer looked at him in confusion but, the next moment, Lefty abruptly cut the cylinder’s rotation to 1G, and both men nearly blacked out from the sudden shift.

The chief lost his legs, and the COM managed to hold him up. Tardigrade-augmented Marines had a relatively small vocabulary, and the word gradually definitely wasn’t in it.

“Thanks, Gunny,” the COM said as if he weren’t in a desperate struggle to keep from losing his dinner. When the CPO found his legs, the COM released him, feeling relieved the man hadn’t collapsed. The Marines didn’t react well to weakness.

The COM stared out at the assembled unit of T.A.R.D.S. Even after years of command, he still got a bit of the uncanny not-quite-human twinge when he reviewed his unit.

They were heavily-boned, with jutting chins and fierce cheekbones. They had big noses, which had all been broken several times from the habitual scuffling and tomfoolery that occupied every waking minute in the hive. None of them were taller than one-hundred-fifty centimeters, but every Marine in the unit outweighed the COM and the CPO combined.

There were twenty-two of them, counting their gunnery sergeant. T.A.R.D.S. Marine units had just two ranks, Marine and Gunny. In the early days, the Navy had tried to enforce normal command structure, but it never stuck. The artificial organization always collapsed and slid naturally into this configuration.

T.A.R.D.S. thought of themselves as either Gunny or Marine, and there was no need for anything else. Part of being a COM was understanding this, being able to understand their limitations and strengths.

“Sorry about Lefty. He’s a juped pigger if ever there was one.”

“Language, Gunny.”

“What? You can’t say pigger now?”

“You can’t say pigger,” the COM clarified, as he had said a hundred times before.

“What am I supposed to call someone when they’re acting like a pigger then?”

“Just call him Lefty. Everyone will get the point.”

“Oh! That’s smart. Put a pair of fits on this one, am I right?” Gunny joked to his men, cupping his pecs as they guffawed.

Implying someone would transition to a Smart always got a laugh. Gunny was bare-chested, his whole body a slab of rippling muscle. The COM dimly remembered it had something to do with inhibiting myostatin or promoting IGH, or some other thing.

Knowing what made them tick wasn’t in his purview. The Smarts could worry about that. The captain was only responsible for getting them into that whale and, hopefully, back out again.

“What’s this I hear about you won’t go, Gunny?”

“The men don’t like the look of that pinched-off turd of a whale. Looks like a real jitshow Cap.”

“Sounds like fussy talk to me, Gunny.” The COM measured the amount of insult in his tone as carefully as he might have measured the amount of HiEx in a bomb. The consequences for miscalculation could be equally catastrophic.

A chorus of angry denials sounded from the T.A.R.D.S., booming like a troop of howler monkeys. At the COM’s side, the CPO took a step back, ready to bolt through the hatch. The COM knew that was useless. There was no outrunning the T.A.R.D.S. on a ship. They were built for this.

“WE AIN’T FUSSY!” Gunny barked back.

“Then what?” the COM asked, feeling a mix of relief and satisfaction he’d hit the mark.

“We need Bonzo.”

“Bonzo’s in the brig,” the COM reminded Gunny, running his hand through the hair that wasn’t there. He didn’t like where this was going.

“Fell-in-well, can’t he come out just for this one ride?”

The COM shook his head.

“He tried to get in the reactor, Gunny.”

The moment he said reactor, he could see every head perk up. The T.A.R.D.S. were all fascinated with the ship’s reactor. In some cases, obsessed.

The captain had spent countless hours trying to get them to remember the simplest things, like the rule that one couldn’t enter the mess hall without a uniform, that a uniform always included pants, or that showering was not only polite, it was mandatory. Success had been mixed.

Yet when it came to reactors, the T.A.R.D.S. soaked up every piece of information they heard and never forgot a single thing. Every Marine in the unit could rattle off the specifications of every reactor in the fleet, and the endless arguments over which was the best frequently came to blows.

One of the COM’s greatest triumphs was when he had the idea of letting the T.A.R.D.S. stand in the corridor and observe the reactor maintenance as a reward for keeping the hive’s aroma mostly contained to their sector. The T.A.R.D.S. loved it.

They would cluster around behind the tech and ooh and ahh at every step of the utterly mundane rod-swaps and shielding integrity checks. When the technician completed the job, they would burst into applause. The chief engineer had been leery at first, but when the COM explained it was the only way to get the T.A.R.D.S. to regularly shower, he quickly upped the maintenance schedule from quarterly to weekly. The make-work was a small price to pay for the olfactory boon to the entire ship.

From the ship’s psychiatrist, the COM knew all the T.A.R.D.S. dreamed about the reactor frequently. Many had a weird Thanatos compulsion that whispered to them to climb inside of it. Much of the Psychiatrist’s work with the platoon was conditioning them not to. It was apparently impossible to stamp the urge out entirely. Any reactor on a ship with a T.A.R.D.S. unit had to be rigorously secured.

“You know the rules, Gunny. Anyone trying to get in the reactor goes in the brig and misses the next whale.”

“He was drunk! And Filthy dared him. You didn’t put Filthy in the brig.”

“I did put Filthy in the brig. Ninety days, remember?”

“Well, you let him out!”

“Filthy didn’t try to get in the reactor, though.”

“Awwww, Bonzo wouldn’t have actually got in there,” Gunny said, and he had just an awful poker face. The COM had never met a Marine who could lie worth a damn.

“He bent the ever-living jit out of the stay bar. They needed a hydraulic wrench to bend it back. He could have killed everyone on this ship, Gunny.”

“Bonzo’s the bravest, and the best pilot. We need him!” Gunny re-stated, crossing his thick arms over his chest, and jutting his bottom lip.

The COM shook his head, absolutely no. He had argued they should have put Bonzo in the airlock and blasted him into space, but the admiral hadn’t been willing. No one had been jettisoned from a Navy vessel in almost a century. The COM had argued there had never been a Marine like Bonzo, but he had lost the argument.

“Big whale out there. They tell me it’s the biggest ever,” the captain angled.

“It’s even bigger, Cap,” the chief petty officer added, taking his lead.

“Whoaaaa,” a Marine named Heafs said, standing to Gunny’s right. His mouth was agape, as usual. “Bigger than the biggest.”

“That’s not even possible, ya featured,” Lefty shot.

“I’m not featured! Commie just said it was!” Heafs protested. “Commie’s smart.”

“You’re both juped,” Gunny said. “He’s just sayin’ it’s big so we forget about Bonzo. But we need Bonzo. No Bonzo, no breach, capisce?

“Where the well did you learn capisce?” the COM asked, genuinely impressed. He’d worked with a lot of Gunnies. None had ever picked up any Italian.

Both this Gunny and Bonzo were definitely different. The T.A.R.D.S. were getting sharper every batch. The Smarts must have been tinkering with the recipe.

“Chappy taught me,” Gunny said, beaming with pride.

That was another unusual thing. Somehow, Gunny had gotten the ship’s chaplain involved in their weird little ceremonies, where they all faced in the direction of the reactor and hummed together. The COM hadn’t ever commanded a unit that had created a reactor cult before, and it was unsettling. He had the feeling even if that the God part of him hadn’t been amputated, he still wouldn’t be able to understand.

The heat was starting to wear the captain down, and he was aware of a wheezing quality of the chief petty officer’s breath. There was a solid chance the man was about to drop. Gunny’s eyes were locked on the CPO. He didn’t miss a step.

Too chucking clever.

The COM resigned himself to losing this negotiation. They needed the T.A.R.D.S. to get in the whale. No one else could do it. Gunny had picked exactly the right time to get what he wanted, staked out a position a runt hair away from outright insubordination. You couldn’t get rid of a gunny either, unless you were willing to put the whole unit in the brig. They were loyal unto death.

“OK. Bonzo goes. But if I catch anyone near the reactor again, it’s the lock, capisce?”

“The lock. Cap-peesh” all the T.A.R.D.S. repeated solemnly. Gunny grinned ear-to-ear.

“Bonzo’s back, boys!” He clapped his hands together as loud as a whip. A moment later, there was the thunk of a body hitting the deck. The CPO had passed out.

“What the chuck? Is that the admiral?”

Just about the last thing the chief expected to see in the brig was the admiral’s bare and clenching ass covering an entire wall of Bonzo’s cell.

“Yup,” Bonzo said, his eyes never leaving the display. They were watching the admiral furiously plowing the midshipman, droplets of sweat were running down his temples and flicking off the perfectly-trimmed hairs of his beard. The COM shook his head, now every time he took an order from the man, he would have to be aware that under the uniform, everything was waxed.

“Why did you generate the admiral chucking the new midshipman?”

“Not generated. This live,” Bonzo said.

“Bulljit,” the COM spat.

“Here watch. Puter, whang the alarm in the midshipman’s quarters.”

At once the lights in the room on the display flashed, the admiral glanced up, frowned, and then went back to his task, never missing a stroke. The midshipman was so enthralled he didn’t even seem to notice. The COM raised an eyebrow, it was even more impressive knowing that none of that was augmentation. That was all admiral.

“I guess that’s why he’s the admiral,” the COM said, sweeping his hand over his bald head. “How the hell did you get access to the en suite cameras?”

“I been going a little crazy in here. Puter’s been letting me snoop around. I think she’s trying to cheer me up.”

“The ship’s computer is letting you spy on the admiral to cheer you up?” The COM scoffed, it sounded even more ridiculous out loud. He was not looking forward to reporting this to TEC-COM.

“I think she’s a little crazy too Cap,” Bonzo said, a distant look in his eyes.

“She reset to default during the breach.”

“Oh! No wonder she got quiet earlier. Thought she was snubbing me. There was a breach?”

“Yup.” The captain watched Bonzo try to pretend he wasn’t dying to know.

“Whale?” Bonzo finally asked, unable to hold back.

The COM nodded, smiling.

“The boys already in it?”

COM shook his head. He watched Bonzo’s brow furrow, the pilot’s mouth moved when he was thinking hard.

“Gunny wouldn’t go without me huh?”

The COM nodded. He was impressed Bonzo had been able to work it out.

“He says he needs you, Bonzo.”

“Well, that’s a lie. They don’t need me. I just chuck everything up. I don’t want to go.”

“Horsejit. You know you want to get on that whale.”

“No, I don’t. I been thinking about it. How many T.A.R.D.S. you command, Cap?”

“There are twenty-three of you,” the COM replied, carefully.

“No, I mean, you had other platoons, right? Before us?“

“This is the thirty seventh.”

He saw Bonzo concentrating furiously, his mouth working hard.

“How many is that? Thirty-seven crews, twenty-three T.A.R.D.S. in each?” Bonzo squinted but he couldn’t get it. “Puter?”

851, the answer appeared to project in the space between them, but the COM knew it was just induced into their optic nerves.

“It’s a little more than that actually, over nine hundred. Before we settled on twenty-three, we tried larger units, fifty, sixty Marines. I had one that was a hundred.”

“Wow, a hundred T.A.R.D.S. Musta stank bad. Why’d you stop doing the big ones?”

“The big units were too big for one gunny to manage. They would just splinter and not work together, then they’d fight each other. When we tried that company of one hundred, we lost more to in-fighting than we did in the whale. Twenty-three is the magic number.”

“Well here’s my point Cap, out of them nine hundred, who’s left?”

“What do you mean, left?” the Captain asked.

“How many of them made it? How many are still alive?”

The captain paused. It wasn’t a question a Marine had ever asked him before. It was rare for one to think ahead farther than their next meal. His mind raced ahead to the airlock. If he jettisoned Bonzo now, could he save the rest of the unit? Would they mutiny if he did?

He could see himself, playing them the clip of Bonzo saying he didn’t want to go, telling them all he’d gone fussy. He just had to push the problem until after the whale, it might not even be an issue after that. If he was going to lie, why not just lie to Bonzo? Tell him they were all retired. For all Bonzo knew there was a whole planet of T.A.R.D.S. somewhere where they all retired to fight and eat nonstop. Tardhalla.

The COM met Bonzo’s gaze.

“None of them are alive Bonzo,” the captain said, his voice quiet. “We keep sending T.A.R.D.S. on missions until the whales get ‘em, then we spawn more. That’s how it is. It’s the same for me, they’ll keep sending me on breaches until one goes nova. We’re the same, you and I. They cook us up to do this, and they keep flying us until we’re gone.”

The COM waited to see how Bonzo would take it, very aware that if Bonzo snapped he would be ripped limb from limb. An image of the reactor stay bar flashed before his eyes, the two-inch pipe bent like a paperclip. But, instead, Bonzo’s eyes sought the floor.

“All gone,” he muttered solemnly. “Can you even remember them?”

“Some of them. The ones that stood out.”

“Do I stand out?”

“Yup. You and Gunny both,” the COM nodded. Bonzo’s nose twitched, and he snuffled, Cap wondered if he was about to cry. Bonzo just shut his eyes tight and took a shuddering breath.

“It’s a pretty big whale huh Cap?”

“Oh yeah, it’s bigger.”

“Bigger than what?”

“Just bigger. You want to go?”

“Chuck yeah I want to go. Who else is gonna fly?”

“Lefty, probably. Gunny’s not supposed to fly anymore, after that incident on the Morovini.”

“Lefty’s featured. Lemme outta here Cap.”

“You have to promise me first: no more chucking with the reactor Bonzo. If you do, we gotta lock you.”

“I understand,” Bonzo said with a solemn nod.

That’s the problem, the captain thought.

The ship’s official designation was RHATS, Radiation-Hardened Analog Transport Spacecraft, but most of the mechanics in the bay called it the Tardsport. Side-by-side with the other sleek spacecraft in the ship bay, the RHATS seemed almost grotesque, built just as dense and blocky as the Marines she carried. The RHATS was painted bright red, which the 37th Platoon had inexplicably decided meant good luck.

The captain had learned to always go along with anything cosmetic the T.A.R.D.S. wanted, there were often unexpected benefits. He watched the load-in from the observation window high above the ship bay. The engineers scurried all over the deck in their bright yellow radsuits.

The T.A.R.D.S. were already suited up and horsing around in the decom area. The COM could pick each out each Marine by the paintjob on his helmet. Lefty had a roaring lion, Heafs had a pork chop surrounded by an aura of flame. Filthy had a phallic serpent with angel wings flying over a starfield. Gunny’s helmet bore a cartoon of his own scowling face, with a word balloon that said “DONT CHUCK UP” in big radio-luminescent letters. That was the COM’s favorite.

Helmet heralds were an idea the COM had come up with for the 9th Platoon. The 9th had explored a gelt whale, the unofficial lingo for whales with no interior lighting. In the dark and uncertain conditions inside the alien hulk, the T.A.R.D.S. had a difficult time telling each other apart.

Attempting to solve the problem, the COM had experimented with luminescent nametags and ordered formations, but they hadn’t really worked. Even assigning each a Marine a number and painting it on their helmet had flopped. T.A.R.D.S. tended to forget how letters and numbers worked in the thick of the action.

The breakthrough had come when the Gunny of the 9th Platoon painted insulting pictographs on the back of each T.A.R.D.S.’ helmet in tritium paint. Immediately, the confusion had ended. Almost as immediately, a dozen arguments had broken out over which Marine got to be Peckerhead.

The COM had refined the idea, letting each Marine choose his own heraldry for his helmet. He’d ordered engineers to execute the actual painting. T.A.R.D.S. weren’t much for arts and crafts.

The helmet herald project had mostly been a way to kill time as the whaler coasted through the void in search of glimmers of radiation, but it turned out to be a massive success. Morale was appreciably better, and survival rate rose significantly.

Later, the COM learned the desire to keep from scuffing up their prized helmets had sharply curtailed the T.A.R.D.S.’ proclivity for headbutting things. This led to a sharp reduction in decompression deaths. Instituting the policy for every platoon after the 9th was a no-brainer.

The T.A.R.D.S. of the 37th loaded into the RHATS, buzzing with excitement. Some of the Marines waved to the COM as they climbed aboard. He waved back. Morale was everything. He never missed a load-in.

First came the eleven riflemen: Sipper, Plinko, Clipper, Heafs, Lefty, Esses, Yancy, Clamps, Gobbo, Sambone, and Bickles. Brave, not bright, each Rifleman was capable of deadly-accurate marksmanship in conditions no standard template human could survive.

Next came the nine specialists. Sticky the pole specialist, Bango the demoman, Choppa the axman, Yank the hammerman, Winchester the linesman, Yakov the ladderman, Aziz the lampsman, Filthy the burner, and Deuce the back-up pilot.

The three most critical members of the platoon loaded in last. Member, the mission recorder and Bonzo, the primary pilot. Finally, Gunny loaded in. With a wild grin, he flashed the COM a thumbs up and bounded into the hatch.

They were unlikely to ever return, most T.A.R.D.S. missions failed. Still, the captain felt a twinge of envy as watched the stevedores seal the RHATS. Just once in his life, he wanted to feel as excited as Gunny looked before a mission.

Lieutenant Jeanie was the technical officer in charge of the load-in, and he trusted her to get it right. The TECCOM LT was a favorite of the T.A.R.D.S. Not only did her squad maintain all their gear, but she was the one who painted all their helmets.

She’d been a tattoo artist before she joined the Navy, and she understood the importance of the heralds at once. She would sit for up to an hour with each Marine, discussing his particular vision. The T.A.R.D.S. adored her for it.

The captain had never seriously considered getting a tattoo before he assumed command. Now that he was forbidden to get one, of course, that was all he wanted. He sometimes daydreamed about sitting down with Lt. Jeanie, explaining what he wanted.

Of course, it wasn’t really about the tattoo. When he spoke with her, he was careful to keep his eyes on hers, to not follow the lines of ink that led down her neck. There were waivers for tattoos, but not for fraternization.

Guiding his mind away from those perilous waters, the COM looked around the bay, making certain the load-in proceeded according to regs. It would take a pretty spectacular chuck-up to disable a RHATS, but this was, after all, the Navy. Spectacular chuck-ups were their forte.

Like the Marines it carried, the RHATS was built for hardship. It was heavily shielded against Herald radiation, able to pass though the killing aura that would disable a regular spacecraft as far as .1 light minute away from a big whale.

Herald radiation wreaked havoc on electrical systems, so every control on the RHATS was manual and mechanical. There was no fly by wire, no AI guidance. The ship was propelled by a chemical rocket engine and maneuvered with manual thrusters. It was a devil to fly, but Bonzo could do it.

The captain couldn’t fly the RHATS. He’d secretly spent a week in the simulator, practicing one of the training missions. He wanted to understand what his Marines were up against. He failed miserably, even when he cheated and lowered the force feedback on the controls so they could be worked with a regular human’s strength.

Again and again, he cratered the RHATS or spun it out of control or failed to link up before he burned too much fuel to get home. Bonzo, on the other hand, was a natural, with a ninety-seven percent success rate on even the most challenging sims. His back-up pilot, Deuce, could only pull eighty-five percent on the medium difficulty.

Ever the outlier, Bonzo’s helmet had no device. It was simply painted the same candy-apple red as his ship. Bonzo and Gunny both waved at the captain as they loaded in, ready to fly where no man could go.

This was what T.A.R.D.S. Platoon was all about. They could do what men could not. A normal human couldn’t even survive strapping into one of their spacesuits. They would be crushed as a tardsuit was over 150 kilos without the air tanks and offered no assistance from servos or powered exoskeletons.

Even a hypothetical peak specimen, who could don their armor without having the breath squeezed out of them, would swiftly succumb to acute radiation poisoning. Tardsuits couldn’t rely on electrical heating, so they were studded with dozens of radioisotope heating units.

The captain watched the tug powering up, preparing to tow the RHATS. The tug would take the T.A.R.D.S. as far as the Flame Horizon, the edge of herald radiation, and the point of no return for traditional spacecraft.

Too often, it was the point of no return for the platoon, as well. Of the thirty-six previous platoons, nineteen had simply been lost on their first venture in. They’d entered the whale and never come out again.

Fifty-two-point-seventy-eight percent.

The captain would have offered a prayer, but he didn’t know how.

LEFTY! C’MERE! Gunny signed.

Bango noticed the movement of Gunny’s gauntlet and looked up from rigging the door charge. Gunny made the palm-whirling KEEP GOING sign and indicated he wanted the other Marine. Beside Bango, Lefty stood, holding a cycle saw. Gunny got his attention and bombarded him with a profane gesticulated goulash of insults and commands.

Universal Sign Language was one of the most graceful and elegant languages humanity had ever devised. Slurred through Gunny’s armored gauntlets, it was as tortured as a peacock in a cockfight. A poet would have wept, but there were no poets on this irradiated alien hulk.

Lefty had the expression that was so familiar to Gunny, the tard-squint of open-mouthed incomprehension. There were three T.A.R.D.S. in the 37th Platoon who were too featured to follow signs reliably: Lefty, Heafs, and Plinko. Those three Marines were all on door squad, as fearless as they were featured.

There were nicknames not only for each Marine, but for the groups who tended to glom together. The Lefty, Heafs, Plinko trio was called “Triple Trouble.” Gunny liked to think each had a third of a brain and, together, the triad counted as one functional Marine.

LEFTY! Gunny signed, exasperation hissing from his flared nostrils. COME LINK!

Lefty finally understood what Gunny wanted. Immediately, he dropped the cycle saw and tromped over. The two-hundred-kilo apparatus hit the deck with a thunk they could all feel race through their boots to ring in their teeth. Most whales had their own gravity, which could vary wildly in intensity and orientation, even from room to room.

The landing site they’d selected was a wide corridor that had been exposed to open space when the breach sheared Pinchy the Whale in half. Bonzo had piloted them through a jungle of twisted scrap to land in this wide chamber, which was about four hundred meters in from Pinchy’s hull. It was a stroke of good fortune they could land the RHATS inside. The hulls of whales were intensely radioactive. It could take hours to saw through them.

“LEFTY!” Gunny barked.

When he realized the Marine couldn’t hear him, he walloped Lefty on the back of his helmet. There was a plate at the back of each Marine’s helmet, specifically reinforced to withstand exactly this treatment.

Lefty threw his hands up, not understanding why he’d gotten whomped. With both hands, Gunny grabbed the Marine’s helmet and pointed Lefty’s eyes at the spot where he’d dropped the cycle saw. It had nearly fallen on top of Bango’s demolition satchel and blown them all to smithereens.

OH, JIT! Lefty signed. He knew he’d chucked-up.

LINK, Gunny demanded.

The two Marines linked trunks, and Gunny chewed Lefty out for nearly wiping out the squad. Trunks were a helmet modification that addressed one of the biggest challenges facing T.A.R.D.S. platoons: communication in vacuum without radios. They were truncated cones projecting from either side of the jawline of the tardsuit helmets.

The cones created a resonant cavity, and they had self-retracting wire spools attached to magnetic disks. When all was said and done, they were just cans-on-strings. But they worked. Trunks were peak tardtech, simple, stupid, and effective.

Gunny continued to berate Lefty. It was important to repeat himself or Lefty would forget half of it. Gunny helmets had a distinctive big nose to accommodate the triple-trunk so he could yell at three Marines at once in a vacuum.

If that wasn’t enough, they could employ telephone formation. The whole platoon would get in three lines, and every third Marine would act as a repeater and parrot what the gunnery sergeant said.

The platoon drilled in the formation often, but it was something a Marine would usually only do once on an actual mission. The most common usage was when the platoon was about to die, and the Gunny wanted to give a stirring speech. T.A.R.D.S. loved speeches.

“Biggest feature in the Navy, right here. We’re not even in the whale yet, and you want to kill the whole cod-clam platoon!” Gunny concluded while Lefty sat there, looking miserable behind his visor.

“No excuse, Gunny!”

“Squat duty for a week!” Gunny ordered. Lefty’s eyebrows rose, a week was a brutal punishment.

“Aww, Gunny. I didn’t even kill us.”

“Two weeks!” Gunny barked, and Lefty’s mouth worked in protest, but his brain finally caught up and clapped it shut. He closed his eyes and exhaled, no doubt trying not to think about how many latrines he would be scrubbing in the days to come.

“OK, shut up a second and think. How you feeling, Lefty?”

Lefty could lift the two hundred kilo cycle saw in 2G like it was a bouquet of flowers, but the command to think made him sweat. As Lefty struggled, Gunny peered at the Marine’s vacant expression like a radio astronomer scanning for signs of intelligence in the galactic background noise.

On a stellar scale of T.A.R.D.S. brilliance, if Bonzo was a luminous supergiant, and Heafs was a geriatric neutron star, Lefty was a brown dwarf, maybe a main sequence dwarf on a good day. But when it came to hunches, Lefty outshone the whole platoon. He couldn’t be sucker-punched, pranked with a trap, or bluffed in poker. He always knew. It was uncanny.

“Not so good, Gunny,” Lefty admitted “Something ain’t right.”

Gunny let that one stew for a moment. Not so good. He unclipped the trunk and signed for everyone to stop and sit on their hands.

LET ME THINK, he signed, tapping the side of his helmet. He looked around the whale, forcing the limited air in their tanks, and the climbing dosimeters on their wrists, out of his mind. Haste would get you wasted.

Gunny hunkered down with the rest of his platoon, sitting on his own gauntlets. Idle hands were deadly to Marines. They couldn’t resist chucking with things they shouldn’t.

Gunny looked out at the wide, sloping tunnel with the end blown off and exposed to space. There were wrinkly ridges rising along the sides in ribs. It was like someone had poked a finger into a block of cheese, and they walked in the cave it left behind. At the fingertip was the disc they were attempting to breach. Discs were often, but not always, the thinnest part between two chambers.

This whale was unlike any other they’d been in, which was, in a way, like every other whale they’d been in. Predictably unpredictable. Some whales were just masses of honeycombed cells so small the T.A.R.D.S. had to crawl, painstakingly cutting their way through with cycle saws and demo charges.

Others had vast hallways big enough they could have flown the Polybius through them, if only they weren’t thrumming with Herald radiation. Some interiors were full of crystalline protrusions inscribed with inscrutable glyphs. Some were smooth waves of seamless white metal they couldn’t scratch with an entire demo satchel. You never knew what kind of whale you were getting into until you cracked one open.

Gunny stood up, motioning for the other Marines to stay down.

MEMBER. WITH ME. HULL CHECK, Gunny ordered the mission recorder. Member nodded an aye-aye and headed back to the Tardsport to get his flashpan and the deck hooks. Normally, a hull check was the first thing they’d do, but flying directly into the whale had chucked-up the routine.

BONZO IN CHARGE. DON’T MOVE, Gunny signed. He didn’t usually go on hull checks, but he needed more info to decide what to do about the disc. He trusted Lefty’s hunches.

He clanked along with Member to the ragged edge of the corridor. They tried to clip in to a wild tangle of what looked like wiring, but the wire sliced right through the hook. There was no resistance.

Gunny and Member turned to face each another, eyebrows raised. One, because the weird wire could have cut through either of their hands just as easily, two, because something that could cut like that would be an incredible boon for them.

Member tapped the side of his helmet.

I will remember.

Every platoon had had a mission recorder. This Member was particularly good, the best Gunny had seen. There were a lot of exceptionals in this batch, and Gunny wondered if the Smarts were doing something different or if he’d just had a lucky draw. He kept meaning to ask the COM about it and forgetting.

Gunny was as seasoned as a gunnery sergeant could get. His first platoon on the Polybius had been the 30th, which meant he’d led seven platoons for the captain. Gunny was unusual, too. Very few Gunnies lasted more than a platoon or two.

Twice, he’d been the sole survivor. That had never happened to any other gunny, not in the whole history of the T.A.R.D.S. program. The Smarts had ordered him to retire and teach at the academy after the second near-wipe, but he’d told them to chuck off.

Gunny told the Smarts if they took him off breach missions and locked him in the academy, he would be the sole survivor of the academy, too. They chucked off.

AFTER MISSION, WE GET SAMPLE. Gunny signed, pointing at the vorpal wire. They nodded together grimly, both aware they would likely lose Marines in the attempt.

Keeping a generous distance from the tangle of snick-snack wire, they took one of the adhesive clamps Gunny had grabbed from Winchester’s kit and tethered in, then they climbed through the wreckage all the way to the exterior of the hulk.

Immediately, their eyes scanned the stars for the Wishing Ring. The Polybius was too distant for them to see the ship itself, but it had a satellite ring of bright purple and gold signal lights orbiting at a distance of five clicks. That was their way home, their guiding light.

If they made it out of the whale, Bonzo was going to point the Tardsport’s nose at the Ring, and they were all going to pray they had enough fuel to make it through the flame horizon. There was supposed to be plenty of fuel but, sometimes, gravity got chucky around whales.

GOT IT. Member signed, squinting at the hull. He pulled his head out of the sweet spot and set up the flashpan. Gunny thought he ought to take a look himself but, instead, he watched Member setting up the signaling apparatus. Scales made his skin crawl.

The hulls of whales were nearly always made of a light-drinking black material the T.A.R.D.S. called ghostskin. Other than the intense Herald radiation they emitted, whale hulls seemed featureless at first look, perfectly smooth and unremarkable. But the T.A.R.D.S. had discovered at a distance between 1033-1036 millimeters, golden patterns would appear if viewed by the naked eye. They were interlinked polygons, inlaid in the ghostskin. They would blink out of existence the moment the eye left that sweet spot.

No one knew what the golden lines meant. The Smarts couldn’t even figure out what ghostskin was made from. After a century of research, the main thing the Smarts had learned was there were a lot of investigative techniques that caused whale hull material to undergo spontaneous nuclear fusion. The Smarts who researched ghostskin were called Nebs. This was short for nebulas because they were destined to become stars.

T.A.R.D.S. called the golden hull lines scales, and they believed you could tell a lot about a whale by them. Pentagons were the best. Those were good whales the whole platoon might come back from. Squares were difficult whales. There would be something frustrating about them. Six-sided or greater polygons meant something weird would happen, and the more sides, the weirder. Triangles were bad luck, and circles were a crapshoot no one could agree on. A whale with no scales was supposed to be death. None of them had ever seen one.

Gunny had been interviewed by the Smarts many times. They told him the scales didn’t mean that, but what did they know? They had never been on a whale, could never be on one.

For a long time, the Smarts hadn’t even believed the scales were there, they wouldn’t show up on any kind of sensor or film. It wasn’t until a Smart researching a chunk of ghostskin finally got fed up and went in for a look with her own eyes that the Smarts had to admit they existed. She died of radiation poisoning within hours.

Now, entire units of Smarts tore their hair out, trying to figure out what the scales signified. It was the one piece of information they could almost always get about a mission. Whales usually didn’t kill a platoon until they tried to get inside.

Member was done setting up the flashpan. He flicked the hull and interior description back to the Polybius. For the next ten minutes, he repeated the signal again and again, flickering the chemical signal lamp back at the telescopes trained on them until the Wishing Ring blinked in receipt. Gunny watched the lamp work. He knew the code, too, as he was meant to fill in if Member died. He saw a word he didn’t understand and trunked up with Member after he packed up the flashpan.

“What’s a valknut, Member?”

“Take a peep, Gunny,” Member said, pointing at the hull.

With a grimace, Gunny found the sweet spot, feeling his chute pucker as the golden lines blinked into his vision. These scales were three interlinked triangles, surrounded by a blank area.

“Those three triangles are a valknut,” Member explained. “Viking jit.”

“How in the well do you know that?”

“Smarts made me do flashcards of all kindsa symbols till me head hurt,” Member groaned. He suffered the most at the hands of the Smarts, even more than Gunny.

“What’s it mean?” Gunny asked.

Member’s eyes rolled up, going almost white as he tried to remember. His tongue poked against his upper lip as if the thought were a seed stuck in his teeth. Finally, he dislodged it.

“Afterlife,” Member concluded, nodding his head sharply.

Gunny grimaced. He didn’t like that one bit.

“Three triangles gots to be triple trouble. Guess who I got ready to blow the door right now?”

“Dumb, dumbest, and dumberest,” Member nodded.

“It’s bad luck, Member. Don’t tell the others.”

Member nodded in agreement. He and Bonzo were the only ones Gunny trusted to keep a secret.

“We could go back,” Member offered, casting his eyes at the Wishing Ring, which still winked at them.

“Can’t go back, mission’s not done.”

“We could tell them it’s done. Like that time where we couldn’t get through the metal at all, where the old Bango blew himself up.”

“That was two Bangos ago,” Gunny corrected. Bangos were particularly fleeting, even by T.A.R.D.S. standards. “We could tell ‘em it’s all whitemetal, but the Smarts will grill everyone. Some jithead will blab, guaranteed. Let’s save that play for if we draw the deadskin skullwhale.”

Member’s eyes narrowed at the mention. No one wanted that draw. He gave a thumbs-up, and the Marines un-trunked and climbed back towards the landing site.

Member was first into the corridor, and he was about to swing back into the whale. Gunny barked for Member to halt, but he was looking the other way. Gunny dove for his cable, catching it at the last possible moment and wrenching Member back so hard it burned a shallow groove into the palm-armor of his gauntlet.

Yanked back abruptly, Member whacked his helmet against a jutting beam. He got hornet mad, clenching his fist and drawing it back to pop Gunny. But when he saw Gunny’s face, he realized it wasn’t a prank. Gunny pointed to the tangle of wire and made a chopping motion with his hand, then drew a line across his neck.

Member turned white as milk. He’d forgotten about the tangle of vorpal wire beneath them, he’d been about to swing right into it. He’d come within a second of being Dis-Member.

Gunny didn’t even need to berate him. He could see Member trembling in a full-body pucker. The mission recorder had more facts crammed in his skull than the rest of them combined, but he was still a Marine.

No one was dead when they returned to the platoon, and Gunny clapped Bonzo on the shoulder, a rare gesture of praise. If he wasn’t always outsmarting himself, Bonzo could have been a halfway decent gunny.

WHAT SCALE? Bonzo signed.

Gunny thrust his index and pinky fingers forward, and then craned his wrist back, a sign that wasn’t in any USL dictionary. Bulljit. Bonzo raised his bushy eyebrows, but he didn’t force the issue.

READY TO POP, GUNNY, Bango signed. There was a neat spiral of explosive HiEx rope adhered to the disc Gunny hoped was a door. A sixty second igniter bulb was ready to prime. This Bango worked neat, Gunny was gonna miss him.

Gunny peered at the disc, tapping the armored fingertips of his gauntlet on the jawline of his helmet. This was the most likely ingress. He’d blown vaguely similar discs on other whales with good results. Usually, discs were relatively thin and led to a series of three small chambers that were a good place to set up an airlock with quickseal and vacsheet.

But that was the thing about whales. When you started thinking you knew something, that was when you were about to chuck up really bad and get everyone deaded. Gunny clunked over to Bango and trunked up.

“She’s too pretty to blow, Bango. Take it all down.”

“Aww, what for, Gunny?”

“Something’s chucky.”

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Bango agreed, trusting Gunny’s gut. It was strange to hear Bango through the constrained frequencies of the trunk wire. He had the deepest voice in the platoon.

Don’t get attached, Gunny reminded himself.

YOU WANT SAW? Lefty signed, indicating he was ready to hook up the pedal-driven ablative disc saw. Gunny gave the thumbs down.

He pounded on the disk with the ham of his fist, ran his tongue over his teeth, then held the palm of his gauntlet against the smooth surface and whanged on the disc with his other fist. He thought about the valknut scales. An image sprang to mind, a luminous purple fireball scouring the hall like dragon’s breath.

YANK, Gunny signed, and Mad Yank’s eyes lit. He’d been waiting for this. Yank lofted the hundred-kilo sledgehammer, eager to go. Too eager! Gunny signed for him to wait, but Yank was already moving towards the door, which was still covered with explosives.

Bango waved his hands, but Yank had eyes only for his target. He wound up, ready to knock the door into orbit when Gunny’s gauntlet clamped on the neck of the sledge. Yank looked back in confusion, not understanding why his sledge wouldn’t swing.

“WAIT, YOU JUPED PIGGER!” Gunny bellowed, loud enough that a whorl of fog appeared on the inside of his visor.

Bango had his hands held over the sides of his helmet, as if covering his ears would help. Yank pivoted to face Gunny, peering back at the door in confusion, not understanding why the sergeant had stopped him.

BOMB! Gunny signed, pointing at the door, where the explosive charges were still stuck.

At last, Yank realized what he’d been about to do. His mouth dropped open, and the massive sledge slipped from his gauntlets. It hit the deck just inches from the explosives satchel with a thunk they felt through the armored soles of their boots.

Gunny rolled his eyes, and then whopped Yank at the back of his head so hard it nearly knocked him over. Gunny shook his head in exasperation. They’d all nearly died half a dozen times, and they weren’t even inside the whale yet.

STRIP IT, he signed at the door. Then he trunked up to berate Yank. Lefty would have company on squat duty if either of them survived.

They waited while Bango carefully peeled his demolition charges from the door, leaving a spiral of adhesive residue clinging to the disk. Gunny signaled for everyone to fan out.

Anything could happen when you started fooling with a whale. The disc could shatter like crystal, it might activate like a giant piston and launch Yank into deep space, or it might melt and suck him in. Everything was a gamble.

Gunny looked to Lefty, then pointed to Yank, making the thumb flipping yea-or-nay sign. Lefty replied with the thumb-pinky wobbling hang-ten. Maybe, maybe not.

HIT IT, Gunny gestured.

YOU SURE? Yank signed.

DO IT! Gunny shot back.

Yank grinned ear to ear. The belting hadn’t fazed him. He had just one driving desire in this life, to hit things with that sledgehammer as hard as he could. Yank wound up and drilled the disc dead center with a tremendous swing. There was a flash of motion and, suddenly, Yank was blasted backward, spinning so fast he was a blur.

He whirled across the corridor and crashed into the wall almost twenty meters away, and they all winced. They waited to see if he would get up. A moment later, Yank popped to his feet and gave them a thumbs up. Yank clomped back over to the platoon. He’d never lost grip on his sledge.

STICKY! ROD UP! Gunny ordered.

Sticky was a pole specialist. He wore a quiver full of sampling rods, prybars, and other long-handled tools they needed. Sticky drew a sampling rod, stripped off the protective covering, and tried to thrust it in front of the hole, but a powerful force ripped it out of his hands and sent it rocketing out of the corridor, bound to fly through deep space for all eternity.

The Marines were lucky Yank hadn’t shared the sample rod’s fate. Now they understood what was happening, the chamber on the other side was heavily pressurized.

Sticky braced with both hands and tried again. This time, he managed to hang on long enough to get a read. He illuminated the rod’s tip with the beam from the chemiluminescent lamp on his shoulder, checking the testing strips affixed to it.

SILANE, Sticky signed. All their eyebrows rose, except for Heafs, who had probably forgotten what silane was.

SiH4—not alive anymore, went the mnemonic they’d all been forced to repeat over and over.

Silane was a tremendously explosive gas. The demo charges or the cycle saw would have killed the entire platoon. Lefty tapped on the side of his helmet, grinning at everyone. There was silent applause from the platoon. Many had already forgotten Lefty had dropped the saw and nearly blown them all up just a few minutes ago.

NO SPARKS! Gunny signed emphatically. USE CROWS, MAKE HOLE BIGGER. They widened the hole with crowbars, vented the silane from the room, and prepared to enter the alien hulk.

WEIRD WHALE, Heafs sign-opined.

Gunny and Bonzo’s eyes met, no words necessary. Whales were all weird, but this one was undeniably weirder. Gunny couldn’t tell which scared him more, the exceptional strangeness, or Heafs being right about anything.

The Smarts were going to have a field day with Pinchy the Whale. The entry room was a new designation. From the force that had blasted Yank backward, Gunny assumed it would be a huge chamber, but it was only about thirty meters in diameter, heavily pressurized with silane. Gunny frowned, wondering just how high that pressure could go before the whole thing would spontaneously explode, but he dismissed it. That was for the Smarts to figure out.

The chamber was teardrop-shaped. The platoon stood in a three-meter -deep rounded depression at the center of room. There was no interior lighting so far in this whale, and the Marines relied on their chemlamps to see.

A ring of nine triangular ports was at the center of the room. They were twenty-eight centimeters to a side, covered with a cap of glasslike material. There were thick, sausage-like protrusions on the walls at even intervals, running all the way to the top of the chamber. Were they reinforcing ribs? Gunny wondered if this was some kind of airlock. Airlocks were a top priority on his search list. The Smarts desperately wanted to figure out if the Whalemakers breathed, and what they did if so.

Everything inside the teardrop was crusted over with a thin layer of what seemed like ice, but it didn’t melt when exposed to the heat from their suits. They felt it crunching underfoot with every step. Above them, at the top of the teardrop, was a triangular apparatus that looked a little like a bird’s talon.

POKE IT, Gunny signed, and Sticky was already snapping together a bunch of meter rods. He needed seven of them to poke the bottom of the talon-thing. It swung a little back and forth but didn’t ignite the silane or rain down acid on them. That was a plus.

LOCK UP, Gunny ordered, and Yank, Lefty, and Heafs quickly sealed the breach they’d entered through with an airlock kit. The clear myalite walls were slack at first, but they ballooned out. Gas still poured into the room. Gunny listened as the pressure in the room climbed. He faintly heard things from outside of his suit. Soon, the Marines were all chattering with each other. Overhead, an unseen device thrummed as it pumped gas into the room.

“Ya want the ladder, Gunny?” Yakov offered, looking up at the talon-thing, which was still swaying from Sticky’s pokes. Yakov was the strongest of them. He carried the seventy-rung extendable folding ladder that could bear the weight of two suited Marines.

Gunny considered the idea. If they could get the talon down and bring it back, maybe it would tell them what the Whalemakers breathed. It was information that might save countless Marines.

But Gunny didn’t like the look of the talon. It reminded him of something he’d seen before: a claw that would drop down on a chain and scoop things up. He pictured it grabbing hold of one of his Marines, their arms flailing helplessly as they were wrenched into the ceiling.

Gunny shut his eyes and tried to remember where he’d seen the claw. A safety briefing? A dream? Something he’d seen in a movie? He felt the answer bobbing in the distance, and he tried to reel it in, but he gave it too much slack, and it slipped away.

“Lobster harmonica,” Gunny muttered, it was all he could dredge up. He had no idea what it meant.

“What’s that, Gunny?” Yakov asked.

“Nothin’, Yakov. Naw, we can’t cut her down. Room’s filling with silane. Might spark and blow the whole chucking thing.”

Gunny looked around the room for the next door. There were two discs opposite the one they’d breached. For the thousandth time, he wished they could figure out how to open them without beating their way through.

The one to his right had nine triangular ports surrounding it. They mirrored the nine set on the floor. In an arc over the top of the disc was a plaque. Its surface was knurled with knobs and bumps, irregular enough that they might be some kind of language.

“Yakov, ladder up. Get Member up there. Member, get a rubbing first, then chuck around with it, see if mashing it does anything.”

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” the Marines agreed. Member scratched measurements into the mission rutter clipped to his suit with a heavy chain. Seeing it would be awhile, Gunny decided it was time for a lesson.

“Boys, what’s that?”

Gunny pointed at the heavy tome in Member’s hands. Member was writing in it with his scribe, a diamond point Marines could extend from the index finger of either gauntlet. Every Marine was trained to be the new Member if they were called to, though probably only Gunny and Bonzo could do anything close to a halfway decent job of it.

“That’s da rutter, Gunny,” Heafs said.

“Naw,” Gunny said, glad he could always count on Heafs to step into his setups. “That right there, that’s everything. That rutter is our whole mission, boys. We make it back with the rutter? Doesn’t matter what else you chuck up or who buys it, the mission is a success. And what happens when a mission is a success?”

“The Good Book!” Heafs said, shaking out of his confusion and clapping his gauntlets together in glee. “We get in the Good Book!”

“Right-o, Heafs, and what else?”

“A week of double rations and double grog!” Lefty exclaimed, rubbing his gauntlets together.

“And what do we get if we bring back a whopper? Somethin’ big for the Smarts?”

“We get to Nod,” Bonzo concluded, naked want in his eyes. He didn’t often participate in these little gimmicks, but Nod always caught his attention.

“You’re cod-clam right, Bonzo. Seven days of Nod, boys.”

“Is it true the Nodding ain’t as good after the first time?” Lefty asked. He’d gotten his first taste of Nod when they managed to haul the Floater back three missions previous. The Smarts had been overjoyed when the 37th presented them with a horseshoe-shaped machine that could apparently defy gravity.

“Nope. It’s better every time. Ain’t that right, Member?” Gunny raised his head at the mission recorder.

“Better every time, Gunny!” Member called back from the top of the ladder.

He was busy with a scroll of contact paper, carefully making a rubbing. That was one more thing that was special about Member. He could do two things at once without chucking one up better than anyone else in the platoon.

“Better every time,” Bonzo agreed, so quietly Gunny had to read his lips. Bonzo got all quiet and big-eyed when they talked about Nod. It reminded Gunny of the way Chappy got when he was bloggin’ about that featured carpenter that all his Italian songs were about.

“And what happens if we don’t bring back that old rutter?” Gunny continued.

“Mission’s hissed,” Heaf said, and there were boos from many of the less luminous Marines.

“No Good Book?” Gunny asked.

“Naw, we go on the Jitlist.”

“An’ what happens if you’re on the Jitlist?”

“No grog. Jit rations. No Nod.” It was easy to see Heafs had never Nodded. The word had no weight when he said it. A Marine who had tasted Nod couldn’t say it without reverence.

“What else?” Gunny pressed.

“Uhhhh…” Heafs trailed.

Gunny didn’t let up. He knew Heafs knew this one.

“We go in the…” Gunny prompted.

“Um…can’t remember, soz, Gunny.”

“If you can’t remember you go in the…” Gunny prodded. Heaf’s eyes lit with understanding, then they darted left with apprehension. He didn’t like to think about this.

“You go in the Reminder Room,” Heafs groaned, and a chorus of boos met the mention. Nobody liked to think about the Reminder Room.

“Right again, Heafs.”

The transcendence of the Nod was counterbalanced by the endless suffering of the Reminder Room. Chappy tried to convince Gunny you couldn’t have one without the other, but Gunny knew better. The Smarts were just sadists.

They liked to watch T.A.R.D.S. suffer, liked to use a bunch of big words to hurt their heads and memory machines to hurt their bodies. It made them feel big.

“Gunny was Reminded the longest, that’s why he knows so much,” Lefty ventured.

“Pfft. Naw, that ain’t how it works. The more you get reminded the more scrambled your brains get. That’s why we work so hard to save the rutter. How’s it goin’ up there, Member?”

“Konami halfway done, Gunny!”

Member poked each of the little nubs on the plaque, up twice, down twice, left right, left right, press release, press release, twist, pinch. Besides Konami, there were several other approaches the platoon would use to try and get a piece of a whale to do something: Alphabet, starting at the top and trying every element left to right; Tebahpla, which was the same thing in reverse; Weejee, where a bunch got involved, and they stacked gauntlets and hit things randomly; and Navajo, where Member would hover his hand over the surface they tried to interact with and poke it whenever his hand shook. The interaction routines weren’t part of training. Every platoon seemed to come up with their own gimmicks.

“Why you got Reminded for so long, Gunny?” Heafs asked. Heafs already knew this one, too. He was just playing dumb to hear a story. Gunny almost called him on out it, but they had more time to burn.

“It was just a little whale, ‘bout ten RHATS from tip to tail. But once we got inside her, everything was jumping. There were these flying grapes that would zip at you if you moved too fast, then BOOM! Just like a frag grenade. Our member got blown to bits early. It was all confusion, T.A.R.D.S. running around getting popped left and right while I hollered for them to hit the deck.”

“How’d you get out of it, Gunny?” Heafs asked, hanging on every word.

“You had to be perfectly still, and then throw something. The grapes would fly at it and blow themselves up. Lost half the platoon on entry, and every centimeter of that whale was murder. Five rooms in, this thing floated towards us, a ghost made of blue light. It started screaming at us, sounded like a bunch of cycle saws going at once.

“We tried to talk to it, but it just reached out and started grabbing Marines. Zap! It cut right through everything it touched, snick-snack, no blood, everything cauterized.”

“What’s cotter-ized, Gunny?”

“It’s like when you cut something with a torch. The veins melt over so they can’t bleed. I pulled my sidearm on the ghost, but the slugs went right through it and blew up this glowing column covered in squiggly lines. KABOOM! ‘Lectric started arcing everywhere. The blue ghost got zapped and, POOF, it exploded in a cloud of sparklies. Then all the discs started going haywire, opening and closing, lights flashing, everything chucked-up. The way we came was sealed off. We couldn’t get back to the RHATS.”

“How’re you still here if ya died, Gunny?” Heafs said, brow furrowed.

“Lemme finish the story, ya double feature. We had no choice but to go deeper into the whale. All kinds of jit was going wrong, flash-fires, gravity flickerin’. We found more of the blue ghosts, but they were flying around all like mad and not paying us any mind. We sneaked around, trying to find another way out, but some juped pigger tripped into one of the ghosts, and it flipped on us.”

“What’d you do?” Heafs asked, his mouth open with awe.

“I didn’t do nothing but pucker and pray. I was a hundred percent about to cash in, but my stickman Pheco saved me. He grabbed hold of a loose wire that was sparkin’ and jumping like a snake with its head chopped off. Pheco whipped the ghost with that chucker, but it didn’t poof like the other.

“It turned from blue to red, and it made this screaming noise. I never heard anything like it. It sounded madder than Lt. Jeanie if you ain’t clipped in right.”

The platoon laughed. Lieutenant Jeanie was so nice if you were squared-away. But if you chucked-up during load-in, she was a real banshee.

“So, that red ghost, it forgot all about me and set off tearing down the corridor. We followed, and it started flying at the other ghosts. When it touched them, they turned red, too. There was a battle between red and blue, and you wouldn’t believe the sound of it, boys. I heard them screaming every time I closed my eyes for months.

“Fire didn’t hurt ‘em. I gave ‘em both barrels from Bennie, but they didn’t even notice. The ghosts fought over this big purple orb, maybe three meters in diameter. Whenever a blue got too tore up, it would fly into the orb and get absorbed. Then a new blue would pop out whole.

“The reds started to lose the fight, and that was bad news for me and Pheco. So, I emptied my pistol into the orb. I clipped it with five rounds, but they bounced off it. I had one shot left, and I squared up and prayed.”

Gunny looked around his platoon. Every set of eyes was locked on him. He clapped his hands together.

“WHAM! Dead center. My shot punched right through that otterchucker, and that old orb started spinning like crazy. A bright purple beam blasted out of the bullet hole, and it cut apart everything it touched.”

“Whoooaaaa,” Heafs breathed. “Then what?”

“BOOM, depressurization. Pheco and I could barely hold on. It was a cod-clam miracle we didn’t get carved up. All the ghosts turned gray and orbited the busted orb, fading away, glaring at us like we’d done them dirty. The whale lost power and we were in zero-g.

“Turned out, the beam cut all the way through the ship, through the hull and everything. The whale was in four or five pieces, drifting apart from each other. We had to scramble out of the hull and jump from piece to piece.

“The two of us spent so long baking on the ghostskin that Pheco bought it, just cooked to death. He was a good Marine, boys. I wrote his name in the Good Book myself.

I had to fly the RHATS back solo, and I was so rad-sick I wound up crashing it into the ship bay. Nearly took out the whole works.”

“Was Lt. Jeanie OK?” Lefty asked, suddenly concerned.

“Course she was. Didn’t she just strap you in on the way over, flipjit? That was a different ship, the Morovinni. A whole bunch of humies bought it, whole sector of the ship was contaminated. I had to spend two days in decontamination. The second I wasn’t glowing, they stuck me right in the Reminder Room. I was there for ninety-five days.”

“Ninety-five!” Yank exclaimed. That was the thing about telling a story to T.A.R.D.S., they forgot so much that it was almost a new story every time. Gunny had told the platoon this one at least a dozen times.

“Why didn’t you wait for the tug, Gunny?” Lefty asked.

“I was seeing things. Thought them ghosts were chasing me. I seen some jit I can’t explain when that orb busted wide open. The Smarts were hissed we didn’t have the rutter for them.”

“So, is that it? That’s what the Whalemakers are, ghosts?” Yank asked.

“Naw, I think that whale was a one-off. It was all lit up inside. Scales were five-pointed stars inside rings, like uh, pentergrams or whatever. Never seen scales like that that since, and there ain’t no others in the record. I don’t think the Smarts believed much of what I told ‘em on account of how radsick I was.”

“They musta been hissed you wrecked the RHATS!”

“You better believe it. The Morovinni was too busted up to continue. They had to tow her back to dock. So, the first ship I ever served on, the HMASS Gant, was bigger than ten Polybiuses. This wrecker ship they brought in was humungous. It was bigger than ten Gants.

“The Smarts thought the whale was too damaged to jump back, and they wanted me to lead another mission, but I was too sick. So, they brought in another whaler, the HMASS Bostov. Bostov’s COM didn’t want to fly the mission. He even filed an official protest, but the Smarts told him to get chucked. Well, he was right. The cut-up whale went nova. There ain’t no HMASS Bostov anymore. Lucky for me, I was busy puking myself inside out on the wrecker.”

“They still let you be a Gunny after all that?” Lefty asked.

“I’m here, ain’t I?”

“But you chucked-up so bad. No rutter, crashed the RHATS, killed humies. Why didn’t they lock you?”

Gunny scowled at Lefty, wondering if he ought to whop him for insubordination. Member climbed down the ladder. Nothing had happened for all his efforts. They were going to have to bust through the disc somehow without igniting the silane. Gunny drew a deep breath.

“Lemme tell you something, Lefty. They need us. They kept me as gunny for the same reason the COM cut Bonzo loose from the brig. We deliver. Most gunnies chuck up and get deaded after less than three missions. The 37th T.A.R.D.S. have been out there and back more times than any other platoon in the whole Navy. We’re special.”

“Yeah, we’re special all right,” Bonzo said, and there was a smattering of applause from the T.A.R.D.S. who didn’t understand sarcasm. Gunny shot Bonzo a look.

“Go get some tanks, Bonzo,” Gunny ordered.

The whole unit stared. Bickles, the rookie, was supposed to be on tanks.

“Tanks ain’t my yob,” Bonzo replied, and Gunny did a double take. He tapped the stripes on his shoulder, wondering what the hell had gotten into Bonzo.

“It is now,” he said, staring Bonzo down.

Gunny wasn’t about to take that jit. In two seconds, he was about to find out just how reinforced that whop-plate really was. But Bonzo broke first. A chorus of whistles followed him as he went out the airlock to bring the tank cart.

The teardrop room had three discs, the one they’d broken through and two triangularly opposite. Things often came in threes on a whale, and triangles were a favored shape, but no one knew why. Maybe the Whalewmakers came from a world where there was danger from all sides, and they’d evolved into pyramids with eyes on the backs of their heads. Maybe they could only count to three, like Heafs.

They’d chosen to breach the disc with the plaque, hoping it meant there was something valuable on the other side. Aware there was likely another pressure differential, Sticky drew a sparkless tungsten sounding spike from his quiver and handed it to Yank.

The whole platoon went full pucker as Yank drove the spike with three powerful swings of his hundred-kilo sledge. When the metal stopped ringing, they heard air whistling through the hole. The pressure was lower on the other side.

“Might be a pore, Gunny!” Sticky said. Pores were access shafts lined with ghostskin that led out of a whale. Gunny had seen more than one Marine get sucked into one and flung into space.

As the silane was drawn out of the teardrop chamber, Gunny felt a thrumming in his soles. Unseen machinery activated. Behind them, the temporary airlock they’d vac-sheeted together billowed.

More silane pumped into the room, trying to bring it back up to pressure, though there was no clear indication where it came from. Gunny frowned. He hated problems he couldn’t see.

Yank and Heafs widened the spike puncture with crowbars, and the thrumming in the floor increased while they waited to see if anything blew. The new chamber was unlit. Two for two, chances were good this was a gelt whale.

Finally, the thrumming underfoot stopped. Either the pressure had equalized or the reservoir had bled dry. Lefty and Sipper were chucking around, shoving each other, and Gunny barked at them. The Marines stiffened into attention at once. Gunny gave them a superior nod, pleased there was still enough air pressure for sound to carry.

While they were working on widening the hole, Bonzo showed up with the cart of O2 tanks on the other side of the makeshift airlock and stacked them up inside. Gunny carefully tracked the pilot’s movements out of the corner of his eye. He could tell if a Marine was upset by the way they moved, even under two hundred kilos of radioactive armor. Bonzo seemed over it.

The platoon was only one room deep in the Whale, but it had taken a lot of time to examine the teardrop. Gunny ordered his Marines to exit the airlock in pairs, and then swap tank three when they were no longer in the presence of pyrophoric gas.

Some gunnery sergeants would try to stretch out and save the dregs, but Gunny was an obsessive reloader. The situation in a whale was always fluid. It was best to be at one hundred percent. Heafs and Yank motioned Gunny over. They’d crowbarred the hole wide enough for a Marine to get through.

Gunny peered through the breach into the new chamber, an unlit oval shaft bridged by a triangular grid. The walls were covered with glassy strands that shone under the chemlight’s beam. Gunny looked up and down the shaft, but his light wasn’t powerful enough to reach the top or bottom.

Suit lights had a hundred-meter throw, so if he wanted to see farther, he needed the big beamer. The grid bridging the shaft was made of three-sided silver bars that looked thick enough to support the weight of the platoon. There was another disc on the opposite side of the shaft.

Gunny had never seen these glass strands on any other whale. The walls were draped with thousands and thousands of transparent tubes. They had a uniform diameter of about five centimeters. It looked like they ran the whole length of the shaft in wild tangles like spaghetti dangling from a fork.

The disorder among the glass tubes gave Gunny pause. He’d been in enough whales to know whatever built them didn’t like disorganization, everything was squared away and bundled up neat. This overgrown jungle of tubes felt all wrong.

“MARINES! Stay frosty. New room designation here,” Gunny cautioned. He stepped aside to let Member and Sticky go to work.

“New one for me, too, Gunny!” Member confirmed as they scoped out the room from outside the disc. Member made a sketch as Sticky probed from the outside with his arsenal of rods and his periscope.

“New for me, Gunny!” Bonzo announced. The excitement of finding a new room designation had banished his dark mood. They lived for this.

Collectively, Bonzo, Gunny, and Member represented the largest concentration of whale experience anywhere in the known universe. Yet, every mission still managed to contain something totally new. It was practically a natural law: whales were weird. Sticky gave the thumbs up. He hadn’t found anything that would immediately kill them inside the shaft.

“Room is clear! Scout protocol. You’re up, Yank,” Gunny ordered. The platoon had a strict rotation for first Marine into a new kind of room since they so often perished. Gunny, Bonzo, and Member weren’t allowed to be in scout rotation. It was purely a numbers thing. If the pilot or gunnery sergeant died, the platoon was much more likely to wipe.

Gunny understood the reasoning, but he still didn’t like it. He hated the fussy part of himself afraid to go in and wondered if Bonzo felt the same. Gunny noticed Yank’s gauntlets trembled. The Marine tightened his grip on his hammer and steeled himself to go in.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Yank nodded, and he hesitated for a moment at the breach. On the back of Yank’s helm, Lt. Jeanie had painted Mjölnir in fine lines of silver Norse knotwork.

The first spark fell while Yank tapped his way towards the center of the shaft, testing each step with a rap of his hammer. The bright blue spark dropped through one of the glass tubes and shot downward, painting the walls of the shaft with a ring of light.

In the keyed-up silence, Gunny heard the whistling sound it made, like a bomb dropping in a cartoon. Just as they thought it was a one-off, another spark dropped, this one closer to the opposite disc. Gravity in this chamber was oriented so the sparks fell in the direction of the whale’s hull and away from its spine.

“Networking closet?” Bonzo wondered aloud, and they could only shrug. Member tried to time each drop with the watch built into his armguard, scratching his readings into the rutter.

“Smashy-smashy?” Yank offered, with his eyebrows arched in invitation. He gestured at a tangle of tubes with the head of his sledge.

“Naw, might blow,” Gunny reasoned, and Yank’s lip jutted with disappointment.

Now that the shaft and the teardrop room were equalized, it was anyone’s guess if they were under the combustion threshold for silane. Sticky’s sampling rods were mainly for detecting presence. They weren’t great for gauging concentration.

Yank ran through all the scouting checks. He cranked the frequency sweep klaxon, prodded things with his sledge, and whipped around a jangle cord in hopes of triggering motion-activated defenses. Nothing happened.

At the end, he hopped around the chamber like a rabbit, landing with all of his weight, but the grid held. It was a funny looking exercise, but no one laughed. They’d all seen too many scouts buy it.

“Clear, Gunny!” Yank shouted, relief plain in his voice.

Gunny gave the sign for an advance. Two Marines remained behind on guard in the teardrop room, weapons ready. Clipper had the standard issue Immër M15s zero-G rated machine gun, which they called the Shredder. Sambone had the Bosch Ordinance Projectile System, a 75mm recoilless rifle they called the Bop Gun.

The T.A.R.D.S. had access to a large arsenal of weapons, and each Marine had his favorite. They would spend hours before each mission obsessively cleaning, checking, and rechecking their weapons.

It was actually TECCOM’s job to maintain and certify each weapon for the mission, but these inspections were just a formality. By the time the T.A.R.D.S. were finished, every barrel was spotless, every screw was tightened, every component in the arsenal was STRAC, strategically correct.

Gunny remained in the teardrop with the sentries. That was the second part of scout protocol. Either Gunny or Bonzo would remain behind until the room was fully cleared, and it was Gunny’s turn in the rotation.

After a few moments of standing with Clipper and Sambone, Gunny started to feel self-conscious that the sentries had guns out, and he didn’t.

Gunny unslung his own weapon of choice, and a wide grin stretched across his face. It was impossible to hold Bennie without feeling a surge of joy.

Bennie was a YBR73 TwinJet Heavy Flamer. Officially, the 73 model was obsolete, but no TECCOM had ever dared suggest a replacement. Newer models were shinier and less cantankerous, but nothing laid down the hurt like a TwinJet.

Stroking the barrel guard worn smooth by his gauntlets, Gunny remembered all the good times he and the flamethrower had shared. He thought about the first time he’d ever laid eyes on Bennie, the indelible moment where all those songs and movies about love at first sight suddenly made sense.

He couldn’t look away from the sensuous curves of Bennie’s serpentine injector assembly, the slight deviation of the twin barrels, which gave the wicked impression of a forked tongue. His eyes roamed over the ample, bulging fuel tanks, and the salt-and-pepper scorch marks on the muzzle that spoke of rugged experience no amount of polishing could hide.

Gunny was thunderbolted. He was overwhelmed with emotion, consumed by an all-encompassing need to possess the flamethrower.

But theirs was a forbidden love. Gunny wasn’t a Gunny back then. He was just a rook on his very first breach. Bennie belonged to another, that platoon’s gunnery sergeant. It was hopeless and maddening.

Rookie Gunny was so fixated on coveting the unobtainable weapon that he barely paid attention to his first mission. On any other whale, he probably would have gotten the platoon skulled. But it was a small whale, and it seemed like it might be a dud.

The platoon had searched five rooms with no deaths and not a single thing worth salvaging. Green with inexperience and yellow with yearning, Gunny the rook didn’t even feel afraid.

Destiny struck as a five-meter spire of jet-black metal burst through the ceiling of the fifth chamber. The platoon’s stickman was unlucky enough to be directly beneath. He died pinned to the floor, scrambling like a beetle with air spitting from his ruptured tanks. Rookie Gunny ran to help when he noticed the other Marines had frozen up and stood perfectly still.

Unsure what to do, Gunny locked up, as well. The point of the spire bloomed open like a black rose, ripping the stickman apart and flinging the pieces across the room. Gunny’s visor was suddenly speckled with blood, and he fought the urge to wipe it off.

Seven spider-like servitors dropped out of the spire and into the puddle that had been the unit’s stickman. They were roughly twenty-five centimeters in length, with gleaming brass skin and ruby red eyes. They moved, scurrying rapidly around the room, touching things with their clawed pedipalps, circling the Marines. It seemed like they were searching for something.

The platoon remained at rigid attention. They’d recognized this was a hive strike, and they assumed Thumbbutt Protocol.

At the time, there had been twenty-two recorded attacks on whales from penetrator hive ships. Invisible to radar and lidar, the hive ships looked like jet-black spaceborne bacteriophages, about five times the size of a RHATS. The hive ships emitted almost no heat and had no apparent propulsion systems.

They would simply appear out of nowhere and unerringly strike their target whale, piercing the volatile ghostskin and injecting their servitors. The hive ship would remain stuck to the whale like a barnacle until it breached, then both whale and parasite would vanish.

The Smarts were dying to know what the hive ships were, how they knew where the whales would appear, and how they could penetrate ghostskin without the whale going supernova.

Thumbbutt protocol dictated T.A.R.D.S. should stand perfectly still whenever they encountered hive servitors. The mechanical spiders usually crawled up a Marine or two, decided the T.A.R.D.S. weren’t whatever they were looking for, and then went back to infesting the whale.

Thumbbutt Protocol was the result of a series of A:B tests. B platoons were to stand still and do nothing if they encountered the hive servitors. A platoons were to attempt interaction, and if possible, bring back a sample servitor. All the A platoons died.

Green and lovelorn, Gunny the rook broke the protocol. He saw a servitor crawling up the gunnery sergeant’s leg, moving towards the flamethrower of his heart’s desiring. Rookie Gunny’s gauntlets curled into tight fists.

Only the rookie had noticed something was wrong. The servitors didn’t look like the sketches he’d seen in training, these were flatter, heavier.

Gunny stomped towards the sergeant, intent on swatting the servitor away from the flamethrower. The rest of the platoon gritted their teeth at full pucker, certain this featured rook was about to get them all skulled.

As Gunny bore down, the servitor skittered around the gunnery sergeant like a squirrel hiding on the other side of a tree. Gunny noticed it had one leg too many. The extra leg was thicker than the others, it ended in a curving point.

A stinger!

These weren’t the harmless spider drones they’d trained for. These were scorpions, warriors. Gunny the rook bellowed a warning, and the servitors attacked. The gunnery sergeant was the first to die, slumping to the floor with a stinger lanced through his heart.

The chamber filled with cries of pain from other Marines, and then, a moment later, they were drowned out by gunfire. A horde of scorpions issued from the spire, and the chamber descended into chaos.

Only one Marine had a plan. Gunny ripped the flamethrower off the dead gunnery sergeant’s back and claimed it for his own. He set to burn. Glee flickered in his eyes as droves of servitors shriveled in arcs of luminous fire. Wherever his gaze went, flame followed, and his laughter vied with the roar of the guns.

The platoon had been on the verge of breaking, but now, they rallied around this cackling aspect of flame, beating back the servitors and fighting their way to the door.

Seizing Bennie was like drawing the sword from the stone. Gunny found himself in control of both the flamethrower and the platoon, and he knew exactly what to do with both. Room by room, they fought in a pitched retreat to the RHATS, beating back a seemingly endless horde of scorpions.

Whenever a Marine flagged, Gunny was there, peeling back the horde in a gout of flame, buying them time to hustle. Gunny almost bought it a dozen times, but his fire was always faster than the drones.

When the door to the RHATS was finally sealed, and they blasted off, half the platoon had been slain. The T.A.R.D.S. who lived would follow Gunny for the rest of their lives. He was a natural.

They managed to bring back the singed husk of a servitor. It bought the platoon a week of Nod. Gunny’s field promotion stuck, and the flamethrower was undeniably his. No one dared suggest otherwise. Bennie had been with Gunny on every mission since. The flamethrower had even survived the RHATS crashing into the Morovinni.

When he began serving on the Polybius, Gunny had expected Lt. Jeanie to tut at him for his antique weapon as all the other TECCOMs had. Instead, she’d gushed with admiration for the TwinJet, pulling the weapon’s service history and telling Gunny about all the battles it had been in. That was the day Gunny decided Lt. Jeanie was a real one.

Eventually, he trusted her enough to ask what the swoopy writing on Bennie’s barrel meant. Lt. Jeanie had laughed, like little tinkling bells. She told him it was just cursive and read it for him.

The barrel said: It was a pleasure to burn.

Gunny agreed.

Blinking back to present, Gunny realized he had a flamethrower drawn in a room filled with explosive gas. Silane would surely turn his pleasure into pain. Glancing at his watch, he realized he’d been daydreaming about flamethrowers for nearly fifteen minutes.

Gunny shook his head at himself. He was as featured as Heafs. He re-slung Bennie and went to check on the progress in the shaft. As he walked over, he tapped his fingers on Bennie’s tanks reassuringly.

Soon, he promised his beloved.

Gunny spotted the trouble right away.

“MEMBER!” Gunny shouted. “HEADS UP!”

Member clapped the rutter shut and wheeled towards the sound of Gunny’s voice. A glass strand had wormed out from the tangle of tubes lining the walls and snaked across the air above the sight line of the platoon.

Gunny didn’t like the look of the strand. The tube ended in a three-faced triangular point, and it moved with intent, questing towards the insignia on the back of Member’s helmet.

Member’s helmet herald was an elephant’s skull with thick art nouveau outlines all done in sepia hues. Beneath the skull was a golden arc of gothic letters that read: Memento Mori.

There was a spellbound look in the mission recorder’s eyes as they focused on the strand. Member was mesmerized by the serpentine motion. The tendril reared like a viper, the faces of its point peeling back three ways, like a banana. In the distance, they heard whistling.

“MEMBER! DUCK!” Gunny bellowed, seeing the mission recorder was muddled. Member hit the deck, clanging against the triangular grid. The glass tube followed him, still pointed at his helmet.

“Oh, jit!” Member cried, twisting to get out of the way. The pitch of the whistle increased. They were about to find out very soon if they were under the silane combustion threshold.

“Grab that chucker, squeeze it shut!” Gunny ordered.

Yank let his hammer drop. It dangled from the tether on his wrist. He lurched forward and grabbed the tube, trying to squeeze it shut. The strand writhed in his gauntlet, whipping its point back and forth as Yank struggled to hold on.

“Too strong, Gunny!” Yank shouted. Gunny could see his face reddening through his visor. Somehow, the fragile looking tube was stronger than the hammerman.

“Point it away from us! At the disc!”

“Aye-aye, Gunny!”

They could see Yank straining with all of his might to keep the tube pointed away from Member. Other Marines moved to help, but they were too slow. As the whistling sound increased, the tube broke Yank’s grip and struck like a cobra, too fast to follow.

The strand lifted Yank off his feet. His legs kicked as he dangled a foot above the grid. Yank gripped the tube in both hands, trying to pull it out of him, but he had nothing to brace against.

The strand punched through Yank’s visor as neatly as a hypodermic needle and penetrated his skull. Blood spattered the inside of his visor as the tube protruded from between his eyes. The whistle became a scream, and the blue light shot through the tube and flared brilliantly as it made contact with the Marine. Yank’s scream joined the whistle, and then both faded away.

Lefty tried to pull Yank free, but he was locked in. Yank had stopped struggling, but his eyes were still moving, darting towards Gunny.

“Yank! Status!” Gunny bellowed. There was a tube jammed between Yank’s eyes and silane spilling into his helmet, but Gunny had seen T.A.R.D.S. survive worse. Blood was pouring into Yank’s eyes, he was blinking them, straining to see his sergeant. His mouth gulped open.

“Guh-guh-guh-Gunny!” Yank stuttered.

“Hang on, Yank!” Gunny shouted. Three Marines tried to pull Yank free, but he was stuck fast. The strand’s three petals had unfolded inside his skull.

“I can see everything!” Yank gasped, and then he choked on silane.

His eyes rolled up, and he convulsed. The whites of his eyes suddenly burned blue, and then he was too bright to look at.

The other Marines instinctively clicked down their visor shades to block the blinding light. Blue flames spilled from the hole in Yank’s helmet, building into a howling column of cerulean that melted his faceplate and rose three meters high before sputtering out.

The glass tube retracted from his skull. The point was black with charred blood. Yank was dumped onto the grate, burned beyond recognition. It was a bad way to go.

Miraculously, the silane didn’t ignite. Everything around Yank’s body was dusted with white, snowy material. His suit was oddly deflated. When they when they turned it over, there was only his powder-coated skull inside, a triangular hole punched through his heavy brow. The weird blue flame had burned up Yank’s flesh but left his skeleton.

“Jit-eating geist,” Gunny spat.

The shaft walls were writhing and alive now. Three more strands had moved between the platoon and the breach they’d come in through. Gunny had to get his Marines out of the shaft as fast as he could.

“HEAFS! You’re Hammerman! Sticky, you’re on crow! Get us out!”

Yank’s arm hung limply through the grid. The sledge-hammer dangled at the end of its tether. Heafs undid the clip and reeled up the sledge, then he dashed for the door, nearly tripping over a strand that shot between his legs.

With five desperate strikes, Heafs punched through the disc, then he was blasted back by a rush of gas, which became a glittering white fog when it mixed with the silane. Marines crowded towards the disc as the fog billowed around them. Gunny could only hope the mixture wasn’t corrosive. Sticky was going wild with a crowbar, frantically widening the hole.

The tubes wanted Member. Three flared points stalked him. Member tried to dash towards the disc, but he missed a step, and his boot went through the grid. The strands were poised to attack, but the moment they struck, Bickles leapt in front of Member and took the hits.

Gunny rushed forward and yanked member free of the Grid, dragging him towards the disc. Bickles hung in the air, lanced by three strands at once. The whistling grew louder. Three sparks hit Bickles simultaneously, and he exploded in a tricolored column of witchfire, blue, red, and violet.

“MEMBER OUT FIRST!” Gunny ordered, shoving Member towards the disc.

The Marines picked Member up and stuffed him horizontally through the hole. As the mission recorder escaped, the strands became frantic, lashing out wildly at anything that moved. Bonzo was jettisoned through the breach next. Marines clubbed at the strands with the butts of their rifles, trying to buy others time to escape.

Gunny was the last one out. The widest Marine in the unit, Sipper, had gotten stuck in the breach ahead of him. Sipper tried to leap through feet-first and got stuck. He flailed his arms as marines tried to tug him through from the other side, it attracted the strands. A strand shot past Gunny and darted at the trapped marine, lancing through his forearm.

A spark whistled in the distance. Before it could unfold its fronds in Sipper’s arm, Gunny rushed forward and slammed into him. Sipper popped through the breach, and the bloody strand pulled free from his arm.

Gunny hastened to escape. His helmet rang like a bell as a strand hit him from behind, but he didn’t die. The whop plate had saved him.

Bless the COM who invented those! Gunny dove though the breach, millimeters ahead of a darting tube. He crashed into some featured Marine who peeped in at him, holding out a hand.

“Out of the way, chucker!” Gunny bellowed, scrambling to get distance from the lashing tubes. Several marines had shredders pointed at the breach, but the strands didn’t venture past the threshold.

He had to triage Sipper right away. The wound wasn’t bad, but there was silane in Sipper’s suit, and he was choking to death. Gunny cranked his first tank to full blast to blow out the silane, watching Sipper’s face as it turned from sickly blueberry to healthy baboon butt red. When Sipper could breathe again, Gunny hit his puncture with suitseal foam.

“Ya with us, Sipper?” Gunny asked, shaking him by the shoulders.

“How bad, Gunny?” Sipper rasped, his voice wrecked.

“Bones is broke. Gotta do your jackin’ with your left one, Sips.”

“You heard him, Lefty,” Sipper joked, clamping his other hand on the wound to keep pressure on it like Gunny showed him.

“Chuck off, rabbit,” Lefty shouted from across the teardrop.

Gunny let out a huff of relief. He didn’t have to really worry about a Marine until they stopped clowning around. Suitseal foam was packed full of coagulants and meds, so Sipper wouldn’t bleed out. But he had lost most of his first tank purging his suit. His air would run out first.

Gunny looked back at the breach. The tubes were still there, closing their trifold mouths and jabbing forward with their points. They looked hungry. Looking past them, he could see the whole shaft was alive with writhing strands. Sparks dropped three at a time in arpeggiated notes that came much faster than before. The fog was getting thick, and the sparks looked like lightning flickering in a thunderstorm.

“Guess we woke it up,” Gunny said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the thrumming of the hidden machinery underfoot.

This was another teardrop-shaped room, almost an exact copy of the first chamber. Whatever this one dumped out wasn’t silane. Everything the mist touched was frosted with glassy powder. Marines brushed it off in thin, crackling layers.

Sticky and Heafs were pretty well dusted with it. Fortunately, their visors hadn’t been fouled too badly. Sticky already a rod out to test the new air.

“No reading, Gunny!”

That raised an eyebrow. Gunny tried to remember if the rods had ever turned up nothing before.

“It’s all frosted up,” Sticky complained, trying to scrape the material off the sampling rod with his gauntlet.

“PLATOON! AGAINST THAT DISC, GO!” Gunny ordered and, at once, there was a bustle hustling to square up with their backs against the far disc.

“Why we standing here, Gunny?” Heafs asked.

“If that jit gets on your visor, it’ll blind you,” Gunny said, scowling.

Gunny hated smudges on his visor. He kept his crystal clear. The idea of trying to find a way out of the whale through a haze of weird, un-melting ice made his shoulders hunch. Whatever reservoir was feeding this room sputtered out, and the thrumming underfoot ceased.

Gunny peered back at the shaft. It had become a nightmarish maelstrom of flashing lightning and writhing tendrils lashing in a swirling fog. Gas was sucked into the breach with a mournful howl, and pebbly static hissed beneath it, like waves freezing as they lapped against a shore.

“Holy bells, we ain’t getting back through that,” Gunny said. “Seal it off, careful not to get poked.”

Heafs and Lefty locked off the breach with quickseal and vacsheet. Gunny hoped the sentry Marines in the first teardrop were smart enough to do the same. More than that, he hoped Sambone didn’t decide it was time to deploy the Bop Gun.

He could perfectly picture the Marine scowling at the weird fog and lights howling in the shaft, looking down at the bazooka in his hands, and beginning to grin.

Gunny put the thought out of his mind. Sambone was gonna do it or he wasn’t. For all Gunny knew, both sentries had been lanced and skeletonized by the blue witchfire. He turned to address the surviving Marines.

“OK, boys. First priority, we gotta get back to the RHATS. We’re on double-time now. If a Marine gets got, take his tanks,” Gunny ordered.

Gunny felt fear stealing its way into his voice, and he forced it down. The other Marines didn’t know how bad this was. The COM had a whole binder full of statistics with “THINGS NOT TO DO” printed on the front in thick black letters. Gunny had to memorize them all. One of the worst of them was getting isolated from the RHATS. Immediately, the chance of survival dropped to five percent. Five chucking percent.

“We need a natural twenty, boys,” Gunny said, and the platoon nodded solemnly.

“Lefty, which disc?” Gunny asked.

Lefty shut his eyes and thought hard. His nose twitched as he concentrated.

“Both bad,” Lefty decided.

Gunny reached for the BCS on his belt, taking it out of its special pouch. He held the Binary Choice Selector up and every eye in the platoon watched him activate it. It glittered in the chemlight on the way down.

“Tails,” Gunny said, catching the BCS and flipping it onto his gauntlet. “We go left.”

He put the coin back in its pouch, and Heafs wailed on the door. What he lacked in sledge expertise, he made up in desperation.

The sledgehammer burst through the disc with a loud pop, and air from the new chamber fizzled as it mingled with the teardrop’s atmosphere. Gunny was worried it would turn into fog like the silane, but nothing unusual happened.

He ordered two Marines to brace Heafs so there wouldn’t be a repeat of Yank getting blasted across the room, but there’d been no need. The differential was slight. Whatever was on the other side most likely breathed the same stuff as the teardrop. If they breathed at all.

After Sticky did his checks, Gunny took a gander through the hole. The new chamber was very large, bigger than the first corridor where they’d landed the RHATS. Gunny’s eyes followed a long, straight walkway of triangular grid that disappeared into darkness, too distant for his chemlamp’s hundred-meter throw.

Three meters beneath the walkway was a vast lake of opaque black fluid, rippling in continuous motion from some unseen force. The dark fluid had an unusually low specularity. It absorbed the chemlamp’s light with almost no reflection.

In marked contrast to the dull lake below, the ceiling was a shiny, seamless mirror of silvery metal. At nine-meter intervals, the mirror material melted into gleaming uvulas of chrome that supported the walkway. Gunny felt a twinge of unease. The mirror seemed like something that had been grown, not built.

Gunny’s eyes traced the curve of the arch to where it met the surface of the lake. Where the fluid lapped against the mirror metal, it left a line of tarnish. Eyeballing the slope, Gunny tried to visualize how big the corridor would be if the arch made a complete circle.

If the new chamber was a cylinder, Gunny estimated it was almost three hundred meters in diameter. What he could see from here would only be a tiny part of it, the air pocket at the top of a gigantic sewer pipe. Thinking about it gave Gunny a shriveling feeling in his guts.

Anything could be down there.

“New room designation!” Gunny barked, transmuting his fear to volume. “Crow her open, let’s go.”

A murmur of unease rippled through the unit as they widened the hole, and the lampsman scanned the tunnel with the big beamer. Gunny wasn’t the only one puckering at the sight of that writhing lake. The T.A.R.D.S. aversion to liquid wasn’t just the showers on the Polybius. Nothing good ever came of getting wet on a whale.

“High lead, high acid,” Sticky concluded, inspecting the sampling rod. He tossed it aside. It hit the rounded surface of the teardrop with a clang and rattled its way to the center of the depression. Gunny scowled, pointing at the rod. Chucking rods was a bad habit for a stickman.

“Soz, Gunny,” Sticky offered, following the scowl. Gunny considered belting him one, but the moment had passed.

“Too acidic to cross?” Gunny asked.

“Hmm…think we OK if we pass through. Maybe problem if we get stuck out there. Still no read on the atmos. Think it’s the same stuff we got in here?”

“Might be.” Gunny nodded, tapping his armored fingertips on his trunk as he pondered.

Did the two different types of gas in the two teardrops mean different species shared the same whale? What were those nine transparent triangles the bottom of each drop for? What did the talons do? Gunny pushed the questions out of his mind. Smartthink wouldn’t get them out of here.

Keep it simple, stupid.

“Yakov! You’re on scout!”

Yakov, the ladderman, had his eyes shut tight. Gunny’s words hit him like a solid whop. Yakov’s aversion to water ran deeper than most. Often, he had to be dragged kicking and spitting to his mandatory weekly hose down. Still, he swallowed and nodded. The rotation was the rotation.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Yakov agreed, starting to unclip the ladder from his back.

“Ay, Gunny! Howzabout I swaps with Yakov?” Sticky offered.

“Bells, Stick, he’s gonna have to go out there, anyway,” Gunny said, shaking his head. He didn’t want to coddle Yakov. Everyone was tired of dragging his sweaty ass to the showers every week.

“Wanna get another read from the middle of the tunnel. Lemme see if acid’s more concentrated out there. Remember, my suit’s coated.”

Sticky’s suit had an extra layer of undercoating, some kind of pearlescent dip supposed to be ungodly difficult to manufacture.

Gunny suspected it was just paint and didn’t do anything, he’d seen plenty of stickmen get disintegrated in his time. But that wasn’t the kind of info he volunteered to his Marines.

Clearly, Sticky just wanted to do Yakov a solid. At the back of Gunny’s head, a voice whispered that Yakov was more expendable than Sticky, but he hated that voice.

“Yeh, swap. Double-time though. If we can’t find a way back, we’re gonna have to go through them glass needles again.”

Sticky nodded, and the relief on Yakov’s face was visible.

“Clip him in, Winchy,” Gunny ordered, and for an obstinate moment, the linesman pretended he hadn’t heard.

Gunny whopped Winchy hard enough that he clacked helmets with Bonzo. Gunny’s lip jutted in satisfaction at the unexpected BOGO.

“Chuck’s sake, Winchester. No one cares about your stupid name.”

“I ain’t Winchy!” Winchester protested, blinking until his eyes focused.

“Double-time! Chucking around will get us all deaded! Clip in or I’ll throw you in!” Gunny pointed at the swirling black fluid. Winchy was about two seconds away from finding out how deep it really went.

Winchester stammered an apology and rushed to clip his cable spool to the donut-shaped securing ring on the back of Sticky’s suit. Lefty, Heafs, and Plinko clipped into the cable, ready to brace. Gunny gave them a thumbs up for their initiative.

“Radiance preserve me,” Sticky said, making the lowercase t sign over his chest plate. Sticky was one of Chappy’s favorites.

Yakov gave Sticky an appreciative clap on his right pauldron. They watched the back of Sticky’s helmet as he climbed out onto the walkway. His herald was a silver spiderweb radiating from a bundle of sticks wreathed in golden flames. Sticky took each step gingerly, testing to see if it would hold his weight.

“She’s solid! Feels like she can hold the whole platoon,” Sticky called back.

Gunny gave the thumbs up. If you had to say something nice about whales, at least they were built tough. When Gunny was on the sections of the Polybius that hadn’t been tard-proofed, he felt like things would bust apart if he breathed on them.

The thought stuck in Gunny as he watched Sticky doing all the scout routines in double-time. Why was it that Gunny felt more comfortable on this alien hulk than in a human ship? Right this moment, with a ninety-five percent chance they would all die, he would rather be here than on the Polybius.

Gunny had served on four different ships, The Morovinni, The Escolier, the Gant, and The Polybius. So far, the Polybius was the best of them, but Gunny had never felt welcome on any naval vessel. There was always that tinge of exasperation when the brass spoke with him, like it was such a chucking tribulation to have his unit aboard. That was another Chappy word. His featured carpenter was always caught up in some jit.

Gunny couldn’t sympathize. He much preferred the stories about the sand people wandering around, looking for their promised land and chucking anything that moved.

Sticky had made it halfway out into the corridor. He waved his sampling rod around on one of the uvula platforms. Gunny shook the daydreams away. Something bugged him, but he couldn’t quite place it.

“ACID’S GOOD!” Sticky announced.

Immediately, Gunny realized what bothered him.

“DON’T DROP IT!” Gunny bellowed, but the rod was already in the air, carelessly discarded. The sampling rod plunged into the black fluid and disappeared.

“Whoops! Sorry, Gunny!” Sticky said, raising the palms of his gauntlets in apology. Gunny held a fist to his temple in frustration.

Shoulda belted him when I had the chance. There was nothing else to be done, so Gunny made the whirling get-on-with-it sign. Sticky turned back towards the distant end of the corridor to continue scouting.

Then he vanished. An arc of darkness shot across the walkway and swallowed Sticky and his light. Winchester’s spool whirred to life. The line played out as Sticky was dragged below.

“STICKY!” Gunny shouted, his voice bouncing uselessly off the mirrored sides of the tunnel. “Pull him back!” Gunny ordered.

The four Marines in the line squad pulled hard, trying to reel Sticky in, but they were losing. Whatever pulled Sticky in was stronger than the four of them put together.

“CAN’T!” Lefty bleated, a frantic note in his voice. The line squad was getting pulled towards the breach. If they held on, they were going to get pulled in, too.

“PLATOON! GRAB ON!” Gunny shouted, rushing forward to grab Winchester.

In moments, the entire platoon mobbed Winchester, tugging him with all their might. The whole platoon was not enough, the mass was getting dragged towards the rent in the disc.

“PULL, YOU PIGGERS! SAVE STICKY!” Gunny roared. “EVERYONE! ON THREE! ONE! TWO! THREE!”

As one, the platoon heaved on the line with all of their strength. Together, they halted the slide, and they felt momentum shift in their direction. A red vignette formed at the edge of Gunny’s vision. He shut his eyes and bore down with everything he had.

PING!

The line snapped, and the whole unit flew backward, landing in a confused scrum. Gunny was on his feet first, drawing his pistol. Whatever got Sticky was strong.

“Riflemen! Lampsman!” Gunny shouted.

The four riflemen took up firing positions at the breach with their shredders. Two took a knee, and two stood overhead on either side. Between them, Aziz, the lampsman, searched the mirrored tunnel with his big beamer.

There was nothing left of Sticky but a dark patch on the walkway, beaded with black droplets. For several moments, the platoon breathed heavy, ready for something monstrous to come roaring down the pipe at them. But there was nothing.

“Seal it,” Gunny ordered, his voice heavy.

At once, two Marines covered the breach with vacsheet and quickseal. Losing the unit’s stickman was another entry in the “THINGS NOT TO DO” binder. Gunny’s brow was furrowed. The calculations were getting dire.

“Shoulda been me,” Yakov said, his face twisted up with grief.

“Sack up or it will be,” Gunny said, pitiless. Shoulda hit him!

Now, Sticky was gone. Gunny had a furious desire to order an attack, just start hucking jit into the muck until whatever that thing was revealed itself, and then burn it down. His palms itched for Bennie.

But ordering an attack would likely wipe the platoon. Gunny told himself if they couldn’t find another way, air low, they could come back and fight. Member was hunched over the snapped line, taking a sample of the black fluid.

“Bonzo, Member, c’mere. Trunk up.”

The three Marines formed a triangle huddle, each trunking to his left so they could conference without shouting through their helmets.

“I’m thinking we gotta retreat through the needle room,” Gunny said, hating the idea even as he said it.

“We’re only four rooms in. I don’t think we got enough, Gunny. We’ll be Reminded,” Member said, grimacing.

“Rather be Reminded than ruptured,” Bonzo said, and Gunny chuffed in agreement.

“We can try the other disc in the first room, maybe find something in there. I figure we may lose one or two to the needles, but whatever’s got Sticky could skull us all.”

“Agreed. Chuckin’ thing almost dragged the whole platoon down. Surprised Winchy didn’t give up the spool,” Bonzo said.

“He’s stubborn as bells. OK, here’s my problem with goin’ back. We’re gonna get all fogged if we go through the shaft again. It’ll smeg up our visors. Can you fly back if your visor’s fouled?”

“Pft, naw. Was too tricky getting in. If I can’t see, we all die.”

“Think Deuce can fly us back?” Gunny angled. Deuce was the back-up pilot. He sat in the cockpit of the RHATS, probably wishing he was with the unit.

Gunny had been stuck in that hotseat before. It was agonizing to know the others were in the whale, having fun, getting in fights, and doing jit that could easily get the whole works blown to bits, the RHATS included. But somebody had to do it.

“Fifty-fifty he craters us trying to get out of the whale. It was a tight squeeze, Gunny.”

“I shoulda left you on sentry then.”

Bonzo shrugged. There were a lot of things they should have done.

“Got an idear, Gunny,” Member chimed in. “Why don’t we just stick some vacsheet to our helmets when we go through? Then we just peel it off on the other side. If it gets skeeted up, no problemo.”

“That’s chuckin’ genius, Member. OK, let’s backtrack. Maybe we’ll get lucky and nobody gets speared.”

They de-trunked, and Gunny went for another look at the sealed-over entrance to the shaft full of tubes. The whole interior of the makeshift airlock was crusted with snowy residue. Muted blue light from the sparks still flickered through intermittently.

“Peel that open, careful not to get the fog on your visor. Be ready to seal it back if it’s spitting fog,” Gunny ordered Plinko, who was closest. Plinko’s bushy eyebrows bobbed as he processed the order.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” he said. The vacsheet peeled away, but the buildup remained, a glassy bubble so thick it was nearly opaque.

“She’s froze up, Gunny,” Plinko complained.

“Crow it.”

Plinko laid into the bubble with his crowbar, but his strikes just bounced off.

“Tough jit.”

“Hammerman,” Gunny called. “That’s you, Heafs,” he clarified when nothing happened.

“Oh! Right, soz, Gunny. I forgot.”

Heafs wound up and cracked the bubble as hard as he could. His first swing did nothing, and the second one glanced off. But Heafs didn’t relent. It took fifteen strikes to crack the bubble, and then the next three shattered it into shards. A little huff of the plastic fog swirled around, frosting the hammer. More blue light flickered.

“Oh, you double-pigger,” Gunny groaned.

The shaft looked like it had frozen over completely. The fog had hardened into a glassy material that felt completely solid when Gunny hammered a fist against it. Half a meter in, he could see the points of three glass tubes, frozen like bugs in amber. Past that, it got too distorted to make anything out.

“Hit it, Heafs,” Gunny ordered.

Twenty strikes later, Heafs’ face was plum-red. He’d gotten nothing but a few crusty white scratches in the surface.

“It’s tough, Gunny! Solid as a rock.”

“Get a torch on it,” Gunny said. “Filthy!”

Filthy was already crowding Heafs, eager for a chance to break out his torches.They all puckered as he sparked up but there was no explosion. He tried everything in his arsenal, acetylene, tri-gas, pure oxy. None of it worked. The torches only left a charred residue that wiped right off.

“This is some serious jit,” Gunny said.

He was going to order Member to take a sample, but the mission recorder was already hunched over with a tag bag. If only they had some of that vorpal wire.

“OK, let’s pop the other disc,” Gunny said, feeling time beating down on them. He glanced at his clock and his dosimeter. “Hit the other disc,” he ordered Heafs, who was stared vacantly at the hammer in his hands. “Bonzo, stand aside.”

“Wait, Gunny,” Bonzo cautioned. “She’s hot.”

“How hot?” Gunny asked, already marching over.

“Too hot. No tellin’ exactly. Sticky had the uh…thermos-meter.”

Gunny blinked. Was that what it was called? He set his gauntlet over the disc, then yanked it back and whipped it in the air. Hotter than they could take. Potentially, there was a fire on the other side.

“Was it that hot before?” Gunny asked.

“Nope!” Plinko replied. He’d been the one who cased it.

“Chuckaduck. Might be a fire. No telling what’s broke in this chucked-up whale.”

Gunny turned to face the platoon, grinning. He was going to get his fight after all.

“MARINES! AIR CHECK!”

“Seventy-five minutes, Gunny,” Bonzo announced from behind him, eying the gauge on his tanks. All around, each Marine reported another. No one was below seventy. Gunny was usually the lowest because he shouted more. His eyes fell on Sipper, no one had got to him yet.

“What’s Sipper got?”

“Sixty,” Plinko announced, frowning hard.

“Gunny! Offering up my tanks now so they stretch further!” Sipper said, sounding too chuckin’ chipper as he offered to sacrifice himself.

“Denied. Boys, we’re sealed off. Gotta go through that sewer, try to find another way back to the RHATS. Whatever got Sticky, we kill it or it kills us. Strap up, we’re going in hot. Riflemen at the fore and van!”

Esess, Yancy, Clamps, and Gobbo hoisted their shredders, itching to fight. All around the room, Marines drew their sidearms.

Bonzo’s were the flashiest. He had a pair of thirteen-millimeter Schlack Compensators. Lt. Jeanie had electroplated them firetruck red and trimmed the accents in rose gold.

Bonzo went akimbo, his right pistol loaded with Plutonium ArPen Slugs, the left with Weasel-Popper HiEx rounds.

“Finally,” Bonzo said, smiling with all his teeth.

The Navy had been trying to hammer prudence into Gunny’s platoon since the day they hatched. Tardigrade Augmented Marines grew at a hyper-accelerated rate, attaining physical maturity in just four years. The fastest growth took place in year four, where a Marine would triple in mass.

This was by design. A standard template human could not hope to physically control a full grown T.A.R.D.S. Most of the Marines’ earliest memories were of being disciplined. For the first three years of their lives, drill sergeants hammered them every moment of the day, trying to beat their innate volatility into a usable form. By year four, most of the untrainable had been locked. All the sergeants could do was pray they wouldn’t run amok. Most didn’t.

After basic came three years of technical training, with extra years for specialists. Pilots, stickmen, gunnies, and members took even longer.

In all those years of continual training, there was one constant repeated in every lesson, shouted at them every single day of their short lives. Two words a Marine would hear more times than any others.

SLOW DOWN.

Walk, don’t run. Listen, don’t shout. Be patient, don’t punch. Haste will get you wasted.

For years, the Navy ground on them unrelentingly. Those who did not comply were openly culled. Every Marine had seen at least one of his broodmates get airlocked before he was a year old. The drill sergeants made them watch. No one ever forgot.

The cameras zoomed in on their brothers, in perfect focus as the defectives convulsed and boiled away. All the ones who couldn’t stop running, couldn’t stop fighting, couldn’t listen, they were all fed into the void. Joining them were the ones too stupid to train, who couldn’t take the radiation or the constant pounding, the ones who mutated, the ones who were defiant.

They were all gone, and the Marines of the 37th platoon were what was left. Once they got into a whale, all the training made sense. Everything was dangerous. Something as innocuous as dropping a used rod could get you skulled.

Haste really would get you wasted. A single mistake could wipe the whole squad. The training was brutal and cruel, but it had to be done. As veterans, they could accept that.

But for all the years of beating prudence into them, it never really took. Every Marine smiled as they clambered over the walkway like apes, rail in one hand and weapon in the other.

Aziz had the big beamer pointed at the ceiling, and the mirrored surface illuminated the whole tunnel. With every step, they were primed for an attack. If the monster tried to take another Marine, it was going to eat a hundred bullets in less than a second.

They made it to the other side of the walkway, and Heafs waited for an order, the sledge in his mitts.

“SMASH AND GO FAST!” Gunny howled. This was their true nature. It couldn’t be beaten out of them. No more careful readings, their stickman gone. Heafs wailed on the disk with the sledge, loud bell-like notes reverberating up the shining corridor.

When he stopped, the vibrations went on for longer than they should, ringing through their feet and humming in their bones. A low and ominous drone came through the door, but there was no progress breaking through it.

Gunny fought the urge to take the hammer out of Heafs’ hands and show him how it was done. His eyes darted around the platoon and found other hands clenching, ready for action. Only one Marine was not fixated on the door. Yakov stared back the way they’d come. His gauntlet traced a t over his chest.

“Let’s go, Yakov,” Gunny said, clapping the Marine on his shoulder plate.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Yakov replied, blinking to clear his vision. He stared back once more, and Gunny was afraid he’d have to wop him, but then Yakov pointed at the other end of the tube.

“Oh, jit!” Yakov’s cry was punctuated by a ringing strike of the sledge. An orange glow was visible through the breach disc they’d entered the corridor through. It grew brighter as they watched.

“FIRE!” Gunny bellowed loud enough to send a jolt through the entire platoon. “Heafs! We need that door open!”

Choppa, the axman, had joined Heafs. The two of them wailed on the door, but this disc was made of some brassy material that would not give.

“She won’t go, Gunny!” Heafs cried.

“Bango! Go! Blow the door!”

Hot air wheezed through the breach at the other end of the tunnel like a punctured lung. The fire was in the teardrop now, magenta sparks flying out of the room and hissing into the black gunk. One small mercy, the fluid didn’t ignite. Gunny watched, grinding his teeth as he tried to think of a plan.

“Black don’t burn. Maybe the fire won’t come through. Might burn through that plugged shaft, and we can get out!”

“Shaft’s fulla silane, Gunny,” Member reminded him.

“Oh, chuck,” Gunny gulped.

“Ready to pop, Gunny!” Bango had the charges rigged in a ring around the door. The bulb timer was in his hand, ready for Gunny’s order.

“Blast shields up! Form up at the center of the walkway! It’s gonna spray debris. Watch out for the monster that got Sticky!”

The Marines retreated to the center of the walkway and clustered behind the chrome pillar, flipping up their blast shields to protect their visors. Ahead of them, the fire raged, then a thump like a giant drum sounded from the teardrop, something had blown. Beneath their feet, a shockwave raced through the black fluid.

“BLOW IT!” Gunny ordered. Bango pulled the bulb’s tab and ran. Bulb fuses had a lot of variance. It was best to get away fast.

“BACKS TO THE BLAST! COVER AND HOLD ON!” Gunny reminded everyone, glancing around the unit to make sure the other Marines had their shields up.

Gunny put his head down and prepared to flip up his own shield. Through the grid, he noticed the black fluid had stopped its ceaseless movement. A hard skin, like a sheen of ice, had formed on the surface, he could see the shockwave’s progress in crescents that radiated out from the teardrop room.

At a crescent’s edge, Gunny saw a hint of something dark and eel-like probing from beneath. A shudder began between his shoulders. Gunny hated snakes. His hand was on his sidearm when the door charge exploded behind them like a huge hand had whopped the whole platoon at once.

Gunny’s ears rang as he rose to his feet, pistol in hand, shaking his head to try and clear the shellshock. He hadn’t gotten his shield up. He was lucky his visor hadn’t popped.

Now, the whole surface of the tunnel was rigid. Gunny could see spiky protrusions where the second shockwave met the echo of the first. Twisted bits of the brass disc littered the surface. Gunny scanned for the eel-thing but didn’t see it.

“READY CHECK!” Gunny shouted. His voice seemed tiny and far away. A hissing sound came through the tinnitus. For a moment, Gunny wondered if it was the snake. Instead, he saw it was a punctured tank.

“CHOPPA! You’re hit!” Gunny shouted, grabbing the Marine.

“I’M OK, GUNNY!” Choppa shouted back, but he wasn’t at all. A shard of the brass disc had punched through his center tank. It looked bad.

“I’LL TRIAGE! PLATOON! ADVANCE! FIRING POSITIONS AT THE DOOR!”

The Marines filed around Choppa, headed for the door they’d blasted.

“Can you stand, Choppa?” Gunny asked.

“No legs,” Choppa said, sounding strong but looking scared. “Press it.”

Gunny didn’t want to do it, but down the pipe, the blaze grew stronger. There was danger below and danger ahead. Choppa saw Gunny hesitate and gripped his forearm.

“We’ll meet again, Gunny. See you inside. Semper Lucet!” Choppa held out his ax.

“Semper Lucet. See ya, Choppa.”

Gunny took the ax. He flipped the protective cover on the emergency flush button on Choppa’s tank assembly. Gunny pressed the big yellow F that killed Choppa, then he disconnected Choppa’s tank three, planning to give it to Sipper.

Choppa convulsed. It was strange the way his upper body thrashed but the lower was just limp. He wound down quickly. Gunny gave him a final rap on the back of his helmet and left him to die. The odds were good Gunny would join him within the hour.

Gunny scooped up Choppa’s tank and made his way across the walkway. Beneath his feet there was activity seething beneath the solid crust. Whatever was down there was hissed. The remaining members of the platoon were clustered around the door, and Gunny’s heart sank. The charges hadn’t blown completely through.

There was a curling ring of warped metal all around the door, large enough for a Marine to get through, but embedded in it was an untouched grid of reinforcing bars. Now, he could see why Heafs couldn’t dent this. The disc was almost forty centimeters thick. The reinforcing bars were completely impervious to everything they tried, torch, saw, acid. Member furiously jotted it all down in the rutter.

“Something movin’ in there, Gunny!” Aziz cried, beaming his light around the enormous chamber.

Gunny peered in. He could make out three towering brass statues of starfish. They stood on two arms, and their third was raised high. The trio leaned together to form a pyramid. Each tapering arm forked into three more, and each sub-arm had three fingers.

The statue made an eerie ringing sound, like a polyphonic tuning fork. The walls of the chamber were all shining copper, riven with the knurled lines of the language they’d seen on the plaque in the teardrop room.

“Looks religious,” Bonzo said. “Ain’t there supposed to be three of that carpenter guy?”

“Yeah, ‘cept one’s a haint. Father, son, an’ ghost. Ain’t none of ‘em got three arms,” Lefty judged, his lower lip sliding from side to side as he considered it.

“A ghost could have three arms. They’re made outta erectoplasm,” Heafs countered.

“Ectoplasm,” Gunny corrected. “If you two keep yammerin’, you’ll get a chance to see the carpenter yourselves. What was in there?”

“Seen a bunch of shadows, moving weird, kinda cartwheelin’. Looked like a bunch snakes tied together. They melted away when we was lookin’. Spooky jit, Gunny.”

“Chuck. I hate snakes.”

“I know you do, Gunny. Ya mind if I hold that ax?” Lefty’s eyes were locked on Choppa’s fire ax, gleaming with want.

Gunny had to admit, it was a good lookin’ ax. A solid drop-forged slab of the absolute toughest alloy the humies could make. It had taken Lt. Jeanie a lot of time to figure out how to inscribe it the way Choppa wanted. Along the cheek of the ax she’d painstakingly etched its name: MIGHTY SIS.

“She’s all yours, Lefty.” Gunny passed the ax over, and Lefty beamed like he’d been awarded the Navy Cross.

The blissful look reminded Gunny of Bennie, and he caressed the flamethrower, catching a piece of that joy. Gunny looked down the pipe. The orange glow from the teardrop room grew brighter all the time, like a sunrise in a movie. It was time.

“PLATOON! Telephone formation!”

Gunny wanted to be sure anyone whose hearing had been damaged in the blast heard him over the ringing from the statue room. Gunny trunked with Member, Bonzo, and Lefty, and each of them trunked with the Marine at their left. Soon, they were ready for Gunny’s speech.

“Boys, we’ve truly done it this time. There’s bars at our back, fire at the fore, and we’re sitting here on top of a giant toilet pipe full of monster snakes.”

“Yep. It’s Thursday,” Bonzo cracked, and the whole unit guffawed. Gunny let the laughter die before he went on.

“I couldn’t tell you this before ‘cause your heads would get too swole to fit through the hammer-holes. But you Marines are real ones. The 37th is the best platoon I ever led. It’s been an honor. If there is another side, I hope I see you all there, even you, Heafs.”

There was another round of laughter, chased with notes of melancholy, little sniffles caught in the trunkline. Gunny could see a tear shake loose from Lefty’s eye as his bottom lip worked furiously from side to side.

“Alright, enough blogging. I got just one question for ya. How’d you like to get ahold of that chucker that ate Sticky?”

It wasn’t even a question. The unit roared with approval.

“Let’s go fishing.” Gunny grinned. He unslung the flamethrower.

Gunny had never seen a living fish or a natural body of water. In fact, he’d never seen a single natural thing except the stars themselves. Gunny had been hatched on a ship, he would die on a whale, and his feet would never touch the ground.

Why did that bother him now, when it never had before? It had to be something about the ritual of fishing. Baiting the line, casting it, waiting for a bite. Some embedded ancestral memory told Gunny the whole platoon should be drinking grog and relaxing beneath a brilliant blue sky instead of a vast cylindrical mirror. They should all be shooting the jit instead of the monster that killed Sticky.

But they were T.A.R.D.S., not Terrans. Their fishing rod was Yakov’s extendable ladder, their line was Winchy’s cable, and their bait was Choppa.

Triple Trouble held up the extendable ladder, jiggling it so that Choppa’s limp legs drummed against the skin that had hardened over the lake of gunk. No one objected to using Choppa as bait. He would have loved this.

The rest of the platoon was lined up along the edge of the walkway in a firing squad. Bonzo stood with his dual Compensators ready, his eyes were dark and intent. Yancy aimed his shredder beneath Choppa’s feet. Gunny held Bennie, beautiful Bennie, eager to burn.

“Wish’t Sambone were here. Bop Gun would blow that black bustard to bits!” Sipper chirped, wielding his J&J autoshotty one-handed with his good arm. Gunny squinted at Sipper, wondering if he could actually fire the J&J without the gun getting away from him. The drum-fed shotgun could cough teflon-coated uranium faster than Sipper could blink. But Gunny shrugged the thought away. They were done for, Sipper deserved to go down firing.

With a heavy WHUMP, a shadow darker than the translucent black crust rammed the fault line beneath Choppa. Three times it tried to bust through, and then there was silence.

“He can’t get through Gunny! Should I ‘nade it?” Bango asked, sweeping a hand down the bandolier of specialized grenades he was always looking for an excuse to deploy. But Gunny’s ears were still ringing from the door charge.

“Naw, you’ll scare it off. Let me give it a love tap. Trips! Lift Choppa high so I don’t roast him.”

Triple Trouble reeled in the line, and Gunny took aim. Gunny racked the ignitor and squeezed the trigger. Bennie made an anticipatory hissing sound, like the flamer was sucking in air through its teeth in preparation to chew its target out.

Then the TwinJet roared, two gouts of beautiful liquid fire licked out and struck the frozen surface. The chemical fire ate through the crust and kept burning, a plume of oily black smoke rose from the pool of flame. From all around him Gunny heard Marines oohing at the lightshow. It was a pleasure to burn.

Gunny didn’t know what was in the tanks that kept Bennie’s breath burning bright, but he knew it was nearly impossible to put the TwinJet’s fire out until everything that could be burned had been consumed. As Gunny was hosing flame at the lake of gunk, he realized if the strange fluid ignited, there was a pretty good chance he would incinerate the whole platoon, maybe blow the whole cod clam whale. Again, Gunny shrugged. He’d rather go out with a bang.

The flamer did its work. Soon there was a smoldering ring of fire eating its way outward, and they could see black liquid slopping at the edges.

“Dangle ‘im! Let’s go!” Gunny commanded, and they dunked Choppa’s body up and down, bobbing him in the dark fluid. The whole platoon was at ready to riddle the monster with slugs, bullets, chemical fire, every kind of hurt at their disposal. But nothing took the bait.

“Bennie scared ‘im off, Gunny!” Lefty crowed.

“Chucker’s fussy,” Gunny said. He hadn’t counted on the monster being afraid of fire. Gunny was racking his brain, trying to think of a way to lure the tendril-beast out. His Marines deserved to go out shooting.

The weird magenta flame from the teardrop room was getting brighter, they were running out of time. From the other end of the pipe, there was a thundering drone from the starfish room, like a drumroll performed on an enormous gong.

Gunny fought to clear his mind. His thoughts were jumbled with fussy-fear and squirming rage, mired in a lonely fog of inevitable death. When he was blank, Gunny listened. Somewhere in the distance, a filament of memory glowed.

Awoooooggaaaaaaaa

Gunny’s face lit up.

“Hey, Bango, remember when we watched The Enemy Below?”

“Naw, Gunny, I was slept,” Bango made an excuse without thought. His fingers ran over his bandolier, his eyes fixated on the hole.

Gunny shook his head. They’d seen the movie at least five times. T.A.R.D.S. loved anything that had big machines and lots of explosions. A movie with submarines, tanks, or mecha would get played over and over.

“Think Bango. Remember them drums they were rolling off the destroyer, tryna blow up that U-boat?”

“Oh, yeah, them deck charges. Gadooosh!”

“Depth charges,” Gunny corrected. “Howzabout we rigs one up?”

“Ain’t got no barrels though,” Bango griped.

“Chuckin’ improvise!” Gunny ordered.

Bango’s left eye shut, his tongue ran under his lips. He peered down at the hole, calculating.

“We could stuff Choppa’s suit with HiEx then drop him in with a fuse going. Gunk’s gonna dampen the blast plenty though. Might not be enough to skull the beast. How deep you figure this pipe goes?”

“I’m guessing 300 meters. How big a bang can you give that?”

“Oh wells. That’s deep. Two bars of hex are the biggest I’m s’posed to light off at once, Gunny. Only did that once in Bango school, half a klick away still thought my teeth were gonna shatter. Two’s the biggest they say to ever light, ayup…” Bango trailed away, rolling his eyes up and to the right.

“Supposin’ I said bigger?” Gunny questioned. “I got my backup bar, so do Bonzo and Member.”

Bango’s eyes were suddenly blazing with interest. He’d been waiting his whole life to hear those words.

“Trunk up Gunny,” Bango’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial rumble as he offered his trunk. Gunny was surprised, but too intrigued to refuse.

“Hokay, this here’s meant to be a secret for Bangos only. Don’t tell nobody never,” Bango said.

“You got it Bango,” Gunny promised, certain he could keep it a secret for another hour until they were all dead.

“So, each of youse three, pilot, mission recorder, gunnery sergeant, you all get issued a different flavor of HiEx. Wrappers are different colors cause there’s different stuff in ‘em. By themselves, they’re pretty much just regular hex. But if ya know how to mix ‘em, everything is different. It’s the big one, Gunny.”

“How big?”

“Dunno. Reaction ain’t linear. Might pop the whole whale,” Bango cautioned with a dreamy sigh. He relished the thought.

“No chuckin’ way,” Gunny protested.

“Wanna see?” Bango leaned in with a grin.

“Bells yeah I do. Make it so, Bango.”

Bango de-trunked from Gunny, pulled three silver-foiled bars of HiEx out of his satchel. The wrappers always reminded Gunny of chocolate. With his thumb, forefinger, and pinky, Bango indicated Gunny, Bonzo, and Member at once, then he flexed his fingers, beckoning. It felt a little like he was casting a spell.

“Cough up your HiEx bars, boys. Bango’s workin’ some magic here.”

Dutifully, they opened the protective cases on their belts and surrendered the backup HiEx each carried for when Bango inevitably got skulled.

Bonzo’s wrapper was gold, Gunny’s was metallic blue, Member’s was a shiny purple. For a dumb moment, Gunny wondered why they gave him blue. He would have preferred purple or gold.

Bango shuffled away from the unit, peeling off the wrappers with his back to the others, trying to keep what he was doing a secret. But Gunny could watch his reflection on the ceiling. The HiEx bars were the same colors as their wrappers. Bango deftly stretched them out like taffy, braiding them together into a colorful cord that might be a noose for all of them. When Bango was through, he propped Choppa up and wound the cord around his helmet like a crown. Grinning, Bango even formed the top line into crenelated little points.

Gunny eyeballed the halo of hurt, getting a last look at the big blue ox painted on the back of Choppa’s helmet. He was glad they were all gonna go at once so he didn’t have to miss anyone else.

Gunny ordered the Triple Trouble Marines to assist Bango with winching Choppa into the hole, then ordered the rest of the unit to retreat to the platform near the half-blasted disc.

“Unit! Shelter against the busted door! Steer clear of the jaggy part. This one’s gonna hurt! Blast shields up!”

Gunny ought to have ordered blast formation, with the gunnery sergeant, mission recorder, and pilot in the center of the huddle, and the expendable riflemen at the outside. He didn’t give the order. He was through with that jit. It was his call, and he would take the fall. Gunny took his place on the outer edge of the huddle.

Looking down the mirrored tunnel at the four Marines working by the impromptu ladder-crane, Gunny felt an itching sensation he was forgetting something. It was a bad time to get that feeling.

“Ready, Gunny?” Bango called out, barely audible over the roar of the flame.

“WAIT!” Gunny shouted. He’d figured out what bugged him. He spun towards the linesman.

“Winchester! Clip everyone in, tether to the bars on that door, double-time! Add enough slack so those four can clip in, too. When Choppa blows, we’re gonna get swamped.”

“Right-o, Gunny,” Winchy blurted, and then he was in a flurry of running line, hooking the platoon’s donut rings to the bars of the door.

“READY, GUNNY?”

“GIVE IT ONE-FIFTY, BANGO! RUN OVER HERE AFTER AND CLIP IN!”

There was a flurry of activity out on the walkway. Bango primed the bomb crown with three bulb fuses, and then the ladder squad winched the dead Marine over the melted hole. Heafs let the cable go and Choppa dropped, disappearing in a blop of gunk.

The four Marines dashed up the walkway like madmen, boots clomping as Gunny counted down from a hundred and fifty. They clipped in and got into the huddle. At thirty count, Gunny gave the order.

“BLAST SHIELDS UP! EYES SHUT!”

Awoooga!

The explosion took Gunny in a roar of pure white hurt and, at once, he was enlightened. No thought was possible. Gunny’s body and his gear were just a medium for the transmission of Bango’s epiphany. They’d been smote by the hammer of God herself, front row seats at a re-enactment of the Big Bang.

Inconceivably, Gunny survived. Pain had infiltrated every millimeter of his body. Every atom had been jarred out of place and re-assembled wrong. Gunny kept blinking but couldn’t fully wake. The fug was unshakable. He couldn’t see anything, and he was afraid he’d been blinded.

Gunny felt the platform beneath him swaying and reasoned the whole whale must be reeling from the titanic explosion. Then he remembered his blast shield was up. Gunny lowered it and, miraculously, he could see again, just in time to get clobbered by a wave of thick black fluid. The whole platoon rolled in the gunk like driftwood in the surf.

Gunny felt the wave crashing over him, but he couldn’t hear it. The silence was total, and Gunny thought it might be permanent. T.A.R.D.S. ears could take a pounding, but everything had a limit. He knew if his hearing didn’t start to come back within fifteen minutes or so, it wasn’t ever coming back.

Shaking his head, Gunny struggled to rise from the gunk, which was now as thick as pudding. His last-second idea to secure the Marines to the bars of the half-exploded disc had saved the 37th from getting swept into the sea of darkness.

When he could string two thoughts together, Gunny scanned his Marines for signs of life, heartened by the number he saw attempting to rise.

What a beating they’d taken!

Their eyes were dark red, with burst vessels, their movements halting. They winced with every motion. The whole platoon was one big bruise, inside and out. But most were alive. One by one, they gave Gunny the thumbs up.

Gunny returned the gesture to each Marine, still not quite convinced he’d really made it. No one should have survived that, yet here they were. Bango had a look of utter bliss on his face. He kept signing “Six Bars!”

By some weird trick of physics, it was the three Marines at the center of the huddle that bought it. Yancy and Esess were skulled and motionless. Aziz’s eyes were open, and he still breathed, but he’d brushed too close to nirvana and was never coming back.

The big beamer was still locked in his grip. As the waves sloshed over him, the light glittered crazily from the mirrored ceiling. The silvery surface had fractured at the epicenter. There was a vast spiderweb of fractures catching the light and twisting it into a million rays. The platoon was in the strangest discotheque in the universe.

“Lefty, take the beamer,” Gunny tried to order. He couldn’t hear his own voice, and Lefty looked loopy, probably still half-scrambled. Gunny did it himself, finding it surprisingly difficult to wrench the beamer free from Aziz’ grasp. A lampsman unto the very end.

With the big beamer, Gunny scanned the tunnel. The magenta fire in the teardrop room had been snuffed. The waves were dying, and the crust wasn’t reforming. The intensity of the blast had fricasseed the hardened crust into a sea of black gelatin. It was some kinda multi-phase plasmic something-or-other.

Weird jit.

Gunny wanted to order Member to take a sample. He scanned the platoon, but he found their faces were so beat up it was difficult to tell them apart. Finally, he spotted the elephant skull herald. Member was battered but alert. For a moment, Gunny was relieved the mission recorder hadn’t been mindwiped, but then he remembered they were still trapped and running out of air.

The explosion had snuffed the fire, but it had also completely destroyed the walkway that bridged the lake. The edge attached to their platform had been warped into a crazy, twisted spiral and sheared off three paces out. Again, Gunny blinked at the force they’d somehow withstood.

Reaction ain’t linear.

Gunny looked out at the black lake. If they hadn’t blasted the crust into goo, they could have walked across it. But now, it was liquid. There was no chance they could swim in their armor. They were stranded here, with no way across and no way to get through the door at their backs.

Gunny scanned the corridor, racking his brains for a solution. Could they drive spikes into the ceiling and swing across somehow? He doubted they could make it out that way before they ran out of air. He wondered how long they had left, but his watch had stopped. If there was no way out, it was better not to know.

The waves had died, and the sea of gunk was tranquil again. A small island rose a few meters from the jagged edge of the ruined walkway. Gunny turned the beamer on it.

The floater was a three-armed starfish-like creature. Each of its tapering arms branched into three more, and then each sub-arm had three pointed fingers. Its skin was mottled, granite-like material walled in by raised lines of dark red webbing. At intersections, the webbing rose into brilliant crimson spines.

Three Marines already had their shredders trained on the starfish. Lefty had Choppa’s ax drawn. Gunny handed off the beamer, and then unslung Bennie, whispering a mute thanks his beloved TwinJet was unhurt.

As they watched, the starfish’s brilliant red spines purpled. Color bled out of its webbing. The starfish darkened until it was completely black, and then a spasm shot through its arms, and it went rigid. Gunny didn’t need a xenobiologist to know it was dying.

GOT ‘EM, Gunny signed, but the other Marines looked skeptical. This dead starfish looked smaller than the thing that got Sticky. It was only about three meters in diameter. Could it really have taken out a Marine in armor?

In the distance, Gunny heard the welcome preamble of tinnitus. He wasn’t deaf after all. If not for the imminent suffocation, things were looking up. Every Marine who could stand glared at the starfish, clenching their weapons. It didn’t feel like enough.

But then another island rose, and another after that. Then there were a dozen starfish floating, then two dozen. They popped up all over the corridor of gunk until there must have been hundreds of them.

“Whoops,” Gunny said. His voice seemed very far away, but he heard it. He turned to Bango, who had still had the same starstruck expression.

SIX BARS! Bango signed, his hands trembling with excitement.

Skulling a thousand xenos wasn’t how Gunny had meant to end his career. For a moment, there was an unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach. He assumed it was guilt, but it kept growing.

An ominous vibration began beneath their feet. The high ringing in the distance built into a low, droning roar. The sea of dead starfish was on the move, building into a clockwise spin. A burbling rumble from the center of the corridor burbled into the most impressive belch any of them had ever heard, and a whirlpool formed.

“CLIP BACK IN!” Gunny shouted, and then he swapped to sign language when he saw how few could hear him.

The Marines hastened to secure themselves to Winchester’s line. The vast chamber was draining too fast for it to be gravity alone. The low burbling roar of the gyre was suddenly silenced as the air was sucked out of the chamber. The vacuum wrenched at the platoon, but Winchy’s line held.

The Marines waited until the rumbling abated, and then scrambled to unclip themselves and peer over the edge.

Lefty shone the big beamer down on the city they’d destroyed. Gunny felt his knees get weak looking down at the three-hundred-meter drop, but he couldn’t look away.

Gunny had assumed this corridor was just a big pipe full of jit. But, beneath the surface, there had once been a massive honeycomb of structures. All the way down, they could see interrupted tubes that looked like they had once webbed the entire chamber. In places, they swelled into dipyramids and tetrahedrons. Everything was made of the same silvery metal as the tunnel walls.

Once, this must have all been a seamless mirror, but now, every surface was smashed into a googolplexian nightmare of reflections. As Lefty scanned the ruins with the big beamer, Gunny struggled to visualize what the city would have looked like if they hadn’t blown it to bits. He couldn’t. It was just too complicated for his mind to hold.

The edges of the tubes were ragged and twisted from the incredible violence of Bango’s epiphany. Gunny had an eye out for any sort of power or gas lines, but there was nothing, no sign of any tech. Was this an aquarium? Were the starfish food for the whalers? Pets?

Whatever they were, they were tough. There were still thousands of them clinging to the shattered tubes. One by one, they turned black and lost their grip, falling into the ruins below in a continual rain of the dead.

Gunny spotted a few mottled orbs caught in crooks of wreckage. For a moment, he wondered if they were a different kind of lifeform, but as he looked closer, he realized they were clusters of three or more Starfish twisted into balls. Were they hugging? Mating?

Whatever they were doing, it was only buying them a little time. They were fading to black just like the others.

There was burst of motion below, and a tube fell and struck a dipyramid. It burst open, and a torrent of black fluid shot out, spitting three starfish against the chamber wall. Gunny watched the beings thrashing as they plummeted to the bottom.

Rough go.

Gunny surveyed his platoon. He saw nothing but unease at the destruction they’d wrought. But air was running out. There was no time to wallow if they didn’t want to suffocate, too.

Gunny waved for attention, and then pointed to the drain hole that had emptied the chamber.

OPEN SPACE! THERE MUST BE A PORE! WE CLIMB DOWN.

The unit huddled at the lip of the platform like a flock of armored penguins, uneasily eyeing the drop. It was a long way down at two gravities, and the nearest structure seemed impossibly far away.

Gunny puckered just as hard as the others. T.A.R.D.S. weren’t good with heights. He wondered how in bells they were going to get down there. The closest tube was almost five meters away.

CHUCK IT, Bonzo signed. HOOK ME UP, WINCHY!

Winchester clipped his spool to Bonzo’s donut, and a cluster of marines grabbed hold of the linesman to anchor him while Lefty shined the beamer to illuminate the closest tube.

Bonzo got a running start and dashed to the edge of the platform, taking a flying leap at the illuminated bullseye. He came up almost a meter short. It was a hell of a leap, but there was no way.

The unit reeled him in, but Gunny stopped them.

TWO METERS MORE LINE, Gunny signed. Then he caught Bonzo’s attention.

SWING! Gunny signed, and he got a thumbs up back.

They swung Bonzo back and forth until he could clamp his mitts onto the edge of the tube and pull himself up. He motioned for more line, Gunny couldn’t understand why, but then Bonzo hopped off the other edge, and Gunny realized it was so his weight could be an anchor for others to slide down. Marines pursed their lips in silent whistles at the daring move.

Bonzo’s the bravest.

SLIDE DOWN! DOUBLE-TIME! Gunny signed.

One by one the Marines were sliding down the line to the tube. Gunny, Winchy, and Lefty were the last on the platform. Lefty was struggling to fasten Choppa’s ax to his back. He didn’t have the right clip for it.

Gunny thought about ordering Lefty to leave the ax behind, but he knew Lefty wouldn’t comply. Instead, Gunny bent over Aziz, waving his hand over the Marine’s face, but there was no sign of comprehension.

“Semper Lucet, Aziz,” Gunny prayed. He disconnected Aziz’s tank three and passed it to Winchy. Then he flipped the blast shield up and pressed flush, extinguishing the lampsman.

LEFTY, STOP. Gunny ordered, and he could see Lefty clutching the ax, ready to protest. Instead, Gunny first swapped his tank three with Yancy’s, then he used a gob of suitseal foam to stick the ax to Lefty’s back. Finally, Gunny took Esess’ last tank for himself, swapping his third tank. Lefty slid down the line as Gunny braced Winchester.

CAN YOU HOLD ON YOUR OWN? Gunny signed, and Winchester gave a thumbs up. Gunny slid down the line to the tube below, and it was only Winchy left on the first platform.

JUMP DOWN! SWING! Gunny signed.

Winchy was frozen on the platform, willing himself to leap down, but he couldn’t do it.

CAN’T, GUNNY, Winchy signed frantically, almost in tears.

IS CABLE BRAKE ON? Gunny signed.

AYE-AYE, GUNNY, Winchy signed back.

Gunny nodded and yanked the cable hard, pulling Winchy off the platform. For a split second, they could see Winchy’s mouth open in a silent scream, then he dropped and swung beneath them, narrowly missing hitting the next tube.

The Unit braced to take his weight. Below them, Winchy swung his fists in the air, hissing mad. There was no time to waste. They swung him to the next tube and began the process again.

Bar by bar, they leapfrogged their way down the pipe like they were climbing through a giant jungle gym. The going got harder, gravity increasing as they made their way down the tube. Midway was almost 3G, Bonzo could barely make the leaps now.

WE SLIDE, Gunny signed now that the edge sloped down.

They slid along the wall to the next tube. Gunny kept an eye out for suits getting shredded by the fractured surface, but the tough fibers of their armor held so far.

The platoon made good time. It seemed almost possible they could make it out of the pore. Gunny didn’t want to think about the difficulty of then finding their way back to the RHATS, or the radiation they’d soak out on the ghostskin. He had room in his head for only one disaster at a time.

The pore that had drained the chamber was ahead, surrounded by wreckage. It looked like a pyramid had covered it once, but the structure had been so thoroughly destroyed that only the feet remained.

Gunny wondered if Choppa had landed right on the point before he blew. The bottom of the pipe was a ravaged graveyard of shards, carpeted with thousands of dead starfish.

Gravity had risen to almost 4G. The Marines felt it with every step.

They hit us first, Gunny tried to tell himself, but it was too big a stretch. It wasn’t like the 37th had RSVP’d for this visit. They were scavengers. Gunny hoped the enneapods weren’t intelligent, and rationalized they were all doomed, anyway. Pinchy was too damaged to dive, and when it was time to breach, the whale would go nova for sure.

At the lip of the pore, the T.A.R.D.S. rappelled down the pipe, Gunny watched the uncanny moment where the Marines passed the airlock’s threshold, and the four crushing Gs of gravity just vanished. If only the Smarts could figure out how that worked. Gunny felt a tug at his arm. Member wanted his attention.

GUNNY, LOOK!

Member pointed out a note of color among the silver shards and the dead black starfish. On an arm pinned beneath the rubble, there were three smaller starfish embedded in the skin. The little starfish still had coloration, even though the webbing of the arm had gone dark.

STILL ALIVE, Gunny signed. SMARTS WANT. LEFTY! CHOP!

Lefty tried to hack off the arm, but the ax couldn’t get a good bite. It was like trying to chop down a steel beam.

BONZO, HOLD! Gunny signed.

Bonzo pulled the starfish limb taut so Lefty could get a better shot at it with the ax. Together, they managed to sever the limb. For a moment, their eyebrows raised at their good fortune.

Bringing back a living xeno was Nod for sure.

I’LL STICK ARM TO YOU, Gunny signed to Lefty.

Gunny reached for his suitseal foam when he saw movement. Something huge loomed behind Lefty.

DUCK! Gunny signed, but Lefty was confused, trying to process two ideas simultaneously. The tendril struck the side of Lefty’s helmet and flung him nearly ten meters. Lefty crashed into the sharp edge of a jutting tube, and it sliced him in two.

“LEFTY!” Gunny shouted into his helmet. His mind was paralyzed with horror, but his hands knew what to do. Gunny unslung Bennie and racked the igniter.

At Gunny’s side, Bonzo drew his Compensators and opened fire. In spite of its size, the starfish was quick, hard to draw a bead on. It lashed out at Member. A strike from one of its trifurcated arms smashed a section of metal tube to flinders. Capping each of its limbs was a teardrop of silvery metal that came to a talon point.

At once, Gunny knew this was the monster that had taken Sticky. The big starfish was five meters in diameter, its limbs as thick as gunny was tall. The big starfish was hissed, and it had every right to be. It wanted Member.

The mission recorder emptied his sidearm into the center mass of the starfish, but his bullets couldn’t penetrate. They ricocheted everywhere.

Gunny let Bennie roar. The TwinJet worked in vacuum, though its effect was considerably reduced. As the starfish raised a tendril high for a killing blow, Gunny nailed its underside with a gout of chemical fire. Instantly, the starfish was engulfed in flames, and it bought Member a split second to roll out of the way.

The force of the strike sent shrapnel flying, and a jet of blood shot from Member’s suit. He’d been pierced. Gunny never let up on the trigger. He hosed the starfish with fire until Bennie ran dry.

Seemingly blinded, the starfish whipped its limbs around like a dervish, destroying everything it touched. Member clutched the breach in his suit, trying to scramble out of its path. Getting close to that monster was suicide, but Gunny didn’t think.

He rushed in, ducking under a swing from a flaming tendril that would have beheaded him, and hitting Member with a gob of suit seal foam. Member had an ugly three-inch gash in his breastplate, but the foam sealed it up.

A tendril slammed against the ground just centimeters from Gunny and dragged the talon across it. Watching the talon carve through the mirror metal like soft cheese, Gunny made the connection. Nine arms, nine talons, nine triangular holes in the floor of the teardrop airlock. The starfish breathed through their hands. The talons were its space suit.

SHOOT THE CLAWS, Gunny signed at Bonzo, trying to catch the pilot’s attention as he reloaded.

Gunny tapped his own hand, then pointed at the starfish. He saw Bonzo nod in understanding. Then there was a flash of motion at the corner of Gunny’s eye, and everything went black.

For a confused moment, Gunny wondered how the chamber had flooded again so quickly. He was floating, and somewhere behind him, a huge bell rang. Instead of waking him up, the bell lulled him to sleep. All the climbing, shouting, and torching of the day had finally caught up with him. He drifted, thinking if he could just catch a few winks, he could save Member afterward.

Save Member!

Gunny’s eyes shot opened, and he gasped. His vision was blurry, and there were brown flashes in his peripheral. Gunny knew the symptoms well. He was nearly out of air. One of his tanks had been ruptured.

Gunny rose dizzily and lurched forward with his hands balled into fists, as if he could box with the monster starfish. Bonzo danced backward, firing as the smoldering beast advanced on him. Member picked up shards of mirror and hurled them, trying to distract it.

The big starfish moved slower now. It was badly burned, and Gunny could see ropes of black fluid seeping from a crevice between two of its limbs.

Gunny tripped over something. His lungs were on fire, and he was sure he couldn’t get up again but, somehow, he did it. His hands groped at the bar he’d tripped over, and his fingers closed around Choppa’s ax.

MIGHTY SIS, the inscription read.

Gunny grinned. His vision cleared, locking onto that seeping orifice.

One shot, one swing!

With his last gasp of breath, Gunny dashed forward and swung Choppa’s ax as hard as he could. He felt it bite deep and hung on, riding it down as the starfish collapsed. Everything moved so slowly. His eyes were closing. The last thing he saw was Bonzo’s Compensators flashing, then blissful darkness.

Too soon, Gunny was wrenched out of his rest. Fresh, wonderful air poured into his lungs. He felt Member compressing his chest through his armor. The mission recorder’s worried expression turned to joy as Gunny sputtered to life. Behind him, the monster starfish was pure black. The metal talons had been shot full of fourteen-millimeter holes.

“How?” Gunny stammered, wondering how he was breathing. There were no oxygen tanks left.

He saw Bonzo standing over him, a slight bluish tinge to his face.

“Semper Lucet, Gunny,” Bonzo said. Gunny couldn’t hear him speak, but he knew the pilot so well, his mind filled in the sound of his voice.

Bonzo saluted, then reached behind his neck, flicked the safety, and hit his own suit flush button. He slumped to the ground and was gone.

Gunny stood up, immediately feeling the ringing pain of his concussion. He’d had many, but this one felt like it might be the worst ever. It hurt to think, but he couldn’t rest. He motioned for Member to trunk up.

“He gave me his last chuckin’ tank?” Gunny wheezed, aghast.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Member replied. His voice was low and solemn.

“Why the chuck did you let him do that?”

“Couldn’t stop him, Gunny!”

“He’s the pilot! How are we supposed to fly out of this? Lefty’s gone, too.”

“Can you fly it, Gunny?”

“Double pigger, I can’t even see straight. C’mon, let’s get out of here before we run outta air.”

“Can you walk?”

“I’ll have to.”

Gunny de-trunked and scooped up Bonzo’s Compensators and tucked them into his belt. Then he slung Bennie on his back. There were tiny fireworks exploding in his head with every step, but he knew it would be better once they got into zero-G.

Member scrawled a sketch of the scene in the Rutter as Gunny collected himself, then he strapped the severed limb to his back. The little starfish were still alive somehow.

As they climbed down the pore, Gunny had to take a last look back at Bonzo. The light caught his visor in a funny way, made it look like he was smiling.

Gunny got out of there double-time.

Epilogue

“You want a what?” the captain stammered, looking flustered.

“Geist, Commie, I thought I was the half-deaf one. I said we want a vacation,” Gunny said, crossing his arms over his bare chest. With the bandages wound around his head like a turban, he reminded the COM of a genie.

“That’s what I’m not getting, Gunny. What do you mean a vacation? We can’t give you more than a week of Nod, you’ll die.”

“Naw, we Nodded plenty. What we want is a vay-cay-shun. 37th scored big on this mission. We brought back the black gunk, the glass snow, them starfish babies, all kinds great jit. Smarts must be squirtin’.”

“Language, Gunny,” the captain cautioned. His cheeks burned at the thought of Gunny saying that in front of a Smart. It would probably get the whole Polybius sent to sensitivity reeducation.

“Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. I mean, I don’t hear ya. My hearing won’t be a hundo for what, three weeks minimum?”

“That’s what the doc says.”

“And I can’t go on missions if I can’t hear good.”

“Well…you could with a waiver. I’d rather you didn’t, though.”

“You need ears on a whale. Ain’t just me. ‘Bout half the platoon can’t hear jit right now. Bango really went all out.”

“Six bars,” the COM said, shaking his head in amazement. The captain knew a lot about explosives. Gunny had always wondered if that was how he got all scarred up.

“We lost Sticky, Choppa, Yank, Yancy, Esses, Aziz, Lefty, an’ Bonzo. That’s a third of the platoon.”

“More than a third. Thirty-four-point-seventy-eight percent, Gunny.”

“Lefty was in there. He was always short a couple percent. Call it a third. The point is, we want a vacation.”

“Tardigrade Marines don’t get vacations.”

“Well, why not?”

The COM had to stop and think about it.

“I don’t know. Maybe none of them ever asked. T.A.R.D.S. just want to get on whales.”

“Well, I’m asking. Pretty please. My unit has earned some cod-clam R&R.”

“There’s no way I can get the admiral to go for it.” The COM turned up his palms, trying to say it was out of his hands. Gunny stared him down. He wasn’t fooled.

“We can take this boat, Commie,” Gunny said, almost too quiet to be heard.

The chief froze. Of course, they could. Even with most of them dead, and many recovering from serious injuries, the T.A.R.D.S. could absolutely take control of the Polybius.

“Are you threatening to mutiny?” The captain asked, stiffening. Even though he knew they would lose the battle horribly, he couldn’t let the statement go unchecked.

“Pshaw. ‘Course not, Commie. Just sayin’, between you and me, I think the boys have had about enough whalin’ for a bit. We want to do somethin’ different. Give us a month! Lt. Jeanie says we’re due for an overhaul on the Rook Drive, anyhow.”

The COM scowled. Of course, Lt. Jeanie was one of the conspirators. He wondered if she would even side with the humans in a mutiny.

“Where would you even go? You’ve never been off a ship in your life Gunny.”

“We wanna go fishing!” Gunny demanded.

The COM couldn’t help but laugh.

“Real fishing! On water, not black gunk! No guns! With a boat that floats. Make sure it’s tough enough for T.A.R.D.S. Plenty of Grog! And I want a captain hat!”

“The admiral’s gonna have my ass,” the COM said, shaking his head ruefully.

“Watch out, Commie, I hear he’s got a whopper,” Gunny cracked.

The COM’s smile faded. He knew where Gunny had come by that piece of information. He put a hand on Gunny’s shoulder, half-expecting the Marine to bat it away, but he didn’t.

“He was a good pilot, Gunny. Best I’ve ever seen.”

“He was the best of us. The bravest, the smartest, the fastest. But in the end, he was dumber than Heafs. I miss him.” Gunny sniffed. “I miss all of ‘em. Get us our chuckin’ vacation, Commie.”

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” the captain agreed. He returned Gunny’s salute.

THE END.

GLOSSARY

Breach – Emergence of a (Whale) into deep space, accompanied by a pulse of (Herald Radiation)

Cassandra – Warning given by a ship’s AI to abort a (Breach) mission, typically ignored

Chuck – Fornicate

Dive – (Whale) vanishing into space, following a (Breach)

Ghostskin – Black, highly radioactive outer hull of a (whale)

Good Book, The – Record of Marines who succeeded their missions

Gunny – Gunnery Sergeant

Herald Radiation – Ill-understood form of radiation that accompanies (Whales). Deadly to most lifeforms and causes sophisticated electronics to fail

Featured – Especially (Juped)

Fussy – Cowardly or overly picky

HiEx – High explosive

Hiss – Anger, urination

Jit - Faeces

Jitlist, The – Record of all Marines who have failed a mission

Juped – Stupid, foolish

Lefty – (see Pigger)

Lock – Execution via airlock

Member – Mission Recorder

Nod – State of drug-induced euphoria given as a reward

Pigger – (See Lefty)

Quickseal – Fast-drying adhesive sealant

Reminded – Interrogated

Rutter – Highly durable book carried by the (Member) of a platoon to record the mission

RHATS – Radiation-Hardened Analog Transport Spacecraft

Scales – Golden markings appearing on (Ghostskin) which some believe indicate the relative level of danger on a whale

Shredder – Standard issue recoilless automatic rifle

Smarts – Members of the scientific caste

Soz – Sorry

Squat Duty – Latrine cleaning duty

Standard Template Humans – Humans whose genome has not been altered for a specialized task

T.A.R.D.S – Tardigrade-Augmented Radioactive Demolition Specialist Marines

Tardsport - (See RHATS)

Tardsuit – Heavy and durable spacesuit heated by radioisotope nodules

Trunk – Resonant cavity on helmets with a wire attached to a magnetic disc. When connected allows two Marines to converse without shouting

Vacsheet – Transparent myalite film used for the creation of temporary airlocks

Valknut – Germanic symbol consisting of three interlocked rings associated with bondage and death

Wishing Ring – A ring of signal lights a (RHATS) pilot uses to find their way back to their carrier ship

Whale – Mysterious alien hulks that appear in deep space and then vanish after a variable period of time

Whop Plate – Reinforced plate on the back of (Tardsuit) helmets

Copyright © 2023 by Zak Zyz

Trade Paperback ISBN: 9798647755674

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the copyright holder. Based on a true story.

Cover and Interior Design by Zak Zyz

Interior art by Ryan Hydt

Edited by Tim Marquitz

Special thanks to the participants of the livestreamed edit!

Spathi-Wa, Stratum, SkipDonahughUK, Rhian, Negi, Jrra, Adjective Noun, Kid Icarus, and SuperHurra