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.

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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 he 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.