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.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“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.