“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.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
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.