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.
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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.