Interview with a Dirtbag
Chapter 27 - Crystal Method (Slugfest)
Days, for Michael, tended to revolve around his meals. Breakfast was a priority, in as much as it needed to happen before he got to work. It could be hot. It could be cold. Breakfast could even be a cold tuna salad sandwich. Lunch was whatever was convenient as long as it included caffeine. So when he started having lunch on base, he thought he was pretty easy going but was proven wrong.
Most lunches on base happened to consist of crab. Whether crab was the main portion or as a portion of a side or even just cooked in a pan with a crab in it or relatively used soon after. Even Michael could appreciate the cost of this main ingredient for the base, but hey, he wasn’t paying. However, one day he was handed a compostable purple tray with some sort of snail on it.
“Special treat!” The Shil’vati who worked in the cafeteria clicked her tongue at Michael as he stood motionless in line.
“No shit,” was all Michael could muster. He looked up from the steaming cyst of slime on his tray to his coworkers ahead of him. They visibly drooled as they looked at their trays. He shook his head as he made his way to a table.
He was never the kind to find a new table to sit at in the lunchroom. Those people always seemed fake to him. No. He had his spot with his Pack. His pack surrounded him. They protected him. They knew him. But the sight of them scarfing down their lunch was enough to turn his stomach.
He did see in his brief sweep of the chow that Joph’rena happened to be eating at the same time. She was sitting alone on one side of the cafeteria. She had unbuttoned the top of her purple camouflage ACU jacket and was stuffing a napkin into it. Michael stopped to hopefully make eye contact with anyone else he might have known and been willing to eat with, which was a mistake because now he could smell the snail. It was buttery and reminded him of mushrooms from his avoided meals past.
Michael held the tray as far away from him as he could while he made a bee line directly to Joph’rena’s table. This happened to offend and surprise Joph’rena just about as much as it surprised Michael that he was doing it.
His purple earthenware tray thudded dully on her violet laminate plywood lunch table. “Hi.” Michael forced a smile and sat across from Joph’rena.
“‘Hi’ yourself, Mikey.” Joph’rena chided.
Michael huffed at her calling him “Mikey” again. This, again, was a mistake as it permitted more of the snail meal to enter his airway. Keep it together, Michael, he thought to himself, none of your goals can be achieved without her. Might as well try to make his future efforts easier now.
Michael squished his eyes closed quickly before taking a quiet deep breath and started to make his case. “Pardon my intrusion, but I need your help.” he said flatly.
Joph’rena pursed her lips, twisted her tusk and leaned back, “My help? Oh me oh my, how can I help you?”
“Look, I understand that if I want to get anything done I have to work with you.” Michael slid his tray away from himself and toward Joph’rena. As much as she didn’t want to express how tempted she was by this offer, her pupils dilated. He shrugged and held the tray a bit higher and closer to her, “So why don’t I at least try to mend some fences and build bridges and all that?”
“What do you need?” Joph’rena snapped as if to show her resolution against temptation.
“I need a lot of things, but the thing that I’d like to see if we could talk about it or find someone who would know; I mean you are in Intelligence, right?”
“Perhaps.” Joph’rena pressed her fingertips together and sat up straight. Her eyes screwed up into a squint.
“I have no concept of what it takes to keep up with an entire Imperium, but would it take too much time or resources to talk to someone about a thought I had about armor?”
“Armor? Ha. Yes, what do you know about armor?”
“I know almost nothing. But I do know that those lasers you have are a terror.”
Joph’rena smirked with pride. There was a smacking sound on a table adjacent to them.
Michael continued his questioning, “What kind of defense does anyone have out there against them?”
Joph’rena could have answered “That’s Classified.” and Michael would have accepted it. However, she was already plotting on having a second succulent snail for lunch; so instead she gave him a shot, “Not too much. What are you thinking? Maybe layers of heat-sensitive foam and metal that might expand faster than the laser could cut?”
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“That..seems incredibly specific.” It was Michael’s turn to scoff, “No, I meant more like using some kind of crystals.”
“Why?” Joph’rena folded her hands together with her thumbs up.
“Could a mirror reflect a laser? That doesn’t seem like it would be effective; you’d have to be pretty good at geometry to use a mirror as a defense against a laser, I would think.” Michael’s eyes searched Joph’rena’s for verification. She gave it to him by shrugging in half affirmation. He continued, “So then could crystals break up the light and dissipate their effectiveness?”
“I don’t know. That’s not my department.” Joph’rena put her hand on Michael’s tray, as if to claim her victory. There was another smacking sound at a table behind him. There was an accompanying slurping sound that repulsed him further.
Michael hooked his fingers into the tray, the compostable material bowed the tray in on itself. “Then who could I talk to about it?”
Joph’rena mumbled lowly so that only Michael could hear her. “I can make a call. Have you thought about designs, dimensions, costs, etc.?”
“Nope.” Michael popped out quickly.
“Didn’t think so. I’ll talk to a few more people and get back to you.” She gave the tray steady pressure. “Good enough?”
Michael couldn’t let the plate go fast enough. He did so in such a way that the tray’s contents sloshed messily toward Joph’rena. Some of it slapped the top of her hand. She steadied the tray and then licked the snail juice off of her hand. It might have been seductive if Michael weren’t completely disgusted.
“Ok cool.” Michael drummed his fingers from pinky to pointer against the wood tabletop. “I’m going to go back to work. Thanks for the opportunity.”
“Sure thing, Mikey.” Joph’rena replied distractedly. Another coworker had approached her table with their eyes on her second serving. She growled defensively.
Michael thought hard about his next statement before speaking it aloud, “Joph’rena, what’s your deal?” He heard a round of smacking and slurping surrounding their table one after the other.
Joph’rena’s mouth was open wide, watering with anticipation of two of those slugs, and shrugged, “What do you think my deal is?”
Michael cited his reasoning, “Why the fuck did you come into the office and make Linnet cry like that? For one thing, these meetings, I assumed, were to be in private. For another, why would you make things worse?”
“I didn’t make anything worse. Linnet was going to blow a fuse anyway. I just amplified what was going on inside her head.”
“You know that, so then why? It seems counterproductive to cause divisions on base.”
“I don’t have to answer you.” Michael tried to not pay attention to the increasingly wet noises around their table.
“You don’t,” Michael admitted. He took off his glasses to rub his eyes before saying, “It seems like our jobs are opposed sometimes.”
“How so?” Joph’rena asked furtively.
“I feel like I’m trying to talk to folks and get them together and you go around upsetting the apple cart.”
Joph’rena looked longingly at the slug on her tray. It seemed to move to get away. To Michael’s amazement, Joph’rena opened her mouth to reveal her tongue. And more tongue. And more still. Michael wasn’t used to the Shil’vati just whipping it out like that. He’d been hearing wet sloppy noises all around them, but he’d tried not to pay attention. But now he saw what it was. She deftly struck out at it with her tongue. Her tongue slapped down on the slug then wrapped around it and rasped it into two pieces. The smaller of the two, she scooped into her mouth. Her eyes rolled back in her head in ecstasy. After her slow exhale, her eyes returned only to train themselves onto Michael, “Sometimes, what you think is helpful, is detrimental. Bringing people together could be burying the shrapnel deeper into the flesh.”
“You mean,” Michael looked at the tray where he thought the slug had moved to get away; instead, he noticed that the slime of the slug had disintegrated a part of the tray’s surface. “You mean you think that there’s a weak spot on base? Something here that shouldn’t be here?”
“As I’m sure you’ve heard from the members of your pack, we are familiar with rebellion. Cracks from the inside. There are,” she paused to knife her eyes at other lunch goers who seemed to lean a little closer to her and her second tray of slug, “occasional disruptions to order. As is part of being an Imperium that absorbs societies that are ‘other’ from itself. It’s a natural part of growing pains.” She casually dipped her long tongue to her prey. Michael tried to ignore the squelching sounds she made as she split it again.
Michael leaned in, “Is that a broad statement of concern or do you have suspects?”
“I suspect everyone. Everyone who could endanger our operations. No one is above scrutiny.”
Hmm, we have a mole, Michael stated to himself. And she doesn’t know who it is. He closed his eyes to not witness Joph’rena’s consumption of the rest of the slug. His brain did enough work to make him picture it as he heard the slurp and pop of what he assumed were its eyes going into her mouth last.
He sighed, trying to be patient with himself in offering this, “You know, if I’d been given some more guidance or maybe a heads up about this, I could be more helpful maybe.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not your job. But maybe yes, maybe you should consider yourself my underling.”
“That’s not what I’ll call myself.”
“Then, that you work for me.”
“But I don’t work for you.”
“If you work for the good of the Imperium, you work for me.” She squared up to her second tray, stacking it on top of the now empty first one. Michael could see slime squish out of the edges when the pressure of the second tray was put on top of the first. It made the kind of mess that would make a blood splatter expert squeal. The impressive spray covered Michael’s hands on the table and part of his shirt.
“Okay,” he said as he recoiled, “How about you give me something to go on and I’ll try to make good on it.”
“Sure thing, Mikey.”
Michael groaned internally and stepped away from the table to go wash and change and hope he could be granted some wisdom to separate what he could change from what he couldn’t.