The teardrop room had three discs, the one they’d broken through and two triangularly opposite. Things often came in threes on a whale, and triangles were a favored shape, but no one knew why. Maybe the Whalewmakers came from a world where there was danger from all sides, and they’d evolved into pyramids with eyes on the backs of their heads. Maybe they could only count to three, like Heafs.

They’d chosen to breach the disc with the plaque, hoping it meant there was something valuable on the other side. Aware there was likely another pressure differential, Sticky drew a sparkless tungsten sounding spike from his quiver and handed it to Yank.

The whole platoon went full pucker as Yank drove the spike with three powerful swings of his hundred-kilo sledge. When the metal stopped ringing, they heard air whistling through the hole. The pressure was lower on the other side.

“Might be a pore, Gunny!” Sticky said. Pores were access shafts lined with ghostskin that led out of a whale. Gunny had seen more than one Marine get sucked into one and flung into space.

As the silane was drawn out of the teardrop chamber, Gunny felt a thrumming in his soles. Unseen machinery activated. Behind them, the temporary airlock they’d vac-sheeted together billowed.

More silane pumped into the room, trying to bring it back up to pressure, though there was no clear indication where it came from. Gunny frowned. He hated problems he couldn’t see.

Yank and Heafs widened the spike puncture with crowbars, and the thrumming in the floor increased while they waited to see if anything blew. The new chamber was unlit. Two for two, chances were good this was a gelt whale.

Finally, the thrumming underfoot stopped. Either the pressure had equalized or the reservoir had bled dry. Lefty and Sipper were chucking around, shoving each other, and Gunny barked at them. The Marines stiffened into attention at once. Gunny gave them a superior nod, pleased there was still enough air pressure for sound to carry.

While they were working on widening the hole, Bonzo showed up with the cart of O2 tanks on the other side of the makeshift airlock and stacked them up inside. Gunny carefully tracked the pilot’s movements out of the corner of his eye. He could tell if a Marine was upset by the way they moved, even under two hundred kilos of radioactive armor. Bonzo seemed over it.

The platoon was only one room deep in the Whale, but it had taken a lot of time to examine the teardrop. Gunny ordered his Marines to exit the airlock in pairs, and then swap tank three when they were no longer in the presence of pyrophoric gas.

Some gunnery sergeants would try to stretch out and save the dregs, but Gunny was an obsessive reloader. The situation in a whale was always fluid. It was best to be at one hundred percent. Heafs and Yank motioned Gunny over. They’d crowbarred the hole wide enough for a Marine to get through.

Gunny peered through the breach into the new chamber, an unlit oval shaft bridged by a triangular grid. The walls were covered with glassy strands that shone under the chemlight’s beam. Gunny looked up and down the shaft, but his light wasn’t powerful enough to reach the top or bottom.

Suit lights had a hundred-meter throw, so if he wanted to see farther, he needed the big beamer. The grid bridging the shaft was made of three-sided silver bars that looked thick enough to support the weight of the platoon. There was another disc on the opposite side of the shaft.

Gunny had never seen these glass strands on any other whale. The walls were draped with thousands and thousands of transparent tubes. They had a uniform diameter of about five centimeters. It looked like they ran the whole length of the shaft in wild tangles like spaghetti dangling from a fork.

The disorder among the glass tubes gave Gunny pause. He’d been in enough whales to know whatever built them didn’t like disorganization, everything was squared away and bundled up neat. This overgrown jungle of tubes felt all wrong.

“MARINES! Stay frosty. New room designation here,” Gunny cautioned. He stepped aside to let Member and Sticky go to work.

“New one for me, too, Gunny!” Member confirmed as they scoped out the room from outside the disc. Member made a sketch as Sticky probed from the outside with his arsenal of rods and his periscope.

“New for me, Gunny!” Bonzo announced. The excitement of finding a new room designation had banished his dark mood. They lived for this.

Collectively, Bonzo, Gunny, and Member represented the largest concentration of whale experience anywhere in the known universe. Yet, every mission still managed to contain something totally new. It was practically a natural law: whales were weird. Sticky gave the thumbs up. He hadn’t found anything that would immediately kill them inside the shaft.

“Room is clear! Scout protocol. You’re up, Yank,” Gunny ordered. The platoon had a strict rotation for first Marine into a new kind of room since they so often perished. Gunny, Bonzo, and Member weren’t allowed to be in scout rotation. It was purely a numbers thing. If the pilot or gunnery sergeant died, the platoon was much more likely to wipe.

Gunny understood the reasoning, but he still didn’t like it. He hated the fussy part of himself afraid to go in and wondered if Bonzo felt the same. Gunny noticed Yank’s gauntlets trembled. The Marine tightened his grip on his hammer and steeled himself to go in.

“Aye-aye, Gunny,” Yank nodded, and he hesitated for a moment at the breach. On the back of Yank’s helm, Lt. Jeanie had painted Mjölnir in fine lines of silver Norse knotwork.

The first spark fell while Yank tapped his way towards the center of the shaft, testing each step with a rap of his hammer. The bright blue spark dropped through one of the glass tubes and shot downward, painting the walls of the shaft with a ring of light.

In the keyed-up silence, Gunny heard the whistling sound it made, like a bomb dropping in a cartoon. Just as they thought it was a one-off, another spark dropped, this one closer to the opposite disc. Gravity in this chamber was oriented so the sparks fell in the direction of the whale’s hull and away from its spine.

“Networking closet?” Bonzo wondered aloud, and they could only shrug. Member tried to time each drop with the watch built into his armguard, scratching his readings into the rutter.

“Smashy-smashy?” Yank offered, with his eyebrows arched in invitation. He gestured at a tangle of tubes with the head of his sledge.

“Naw, might blow,” Gunny reasoned, and Yank’s lip jutted with disappointment.

Now that the shaft and the teardrop room were equalized, it was anyone’s guess if they were under the combustion threshold for silane. Sticky’s sampling rods were mainly for detecting presence. They weren’t great for gauging concentration.

Yank ran through all the scouting checks. He cranked the frequency sweep klaxon, prodded things with his sledge, and whipped around a jangle cord in hopes of triggering motion-activated defenses. Nothing happened.

At the end, he hopped around the chamber like a rabbit, landing with all of his weight, but the grid held. It was a funny looking exercise, but no one laughed. They’d all seen too many scouts buy it.

“Clear, Gunny!” Yank shouted, relief plain in his voice.

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Gunny gave the sign for an advance. Two Marines remained behind on guard in the teardrop room, weapons ready. Clipper had the standard issue Immër M15s zero-G rated machine gun, which they called the Shredder. Sambone had the Bosch Ordinance Projectile System, a 75mm recoilless rifle they called the Bop Gun.

The T.A.R.D.S. had access to a large arsenal of weapons, and each Marine had his favorite. They would spend hours before each mission obsessively cleaning, checking, and rechecking their weapons.

It was actually TECCOM’s job to maintain and certify each weapon for the mission, but these inspections were just a formality. By the time the T.A.R.D.S. were finished, every barrel was spotless, every screw was tightened, every component in the arsenal was STRAC, strategically correct.

Gunny remained in the teardrop with the sentries. That was the second part of scout protocol. Either Gunny or Bonzo would remain behind until the room was fully cleared, and it was Gunny’s turn in the rotation.

After a few moments of standing with Clipper and Sambone, Gunny started to feel self-conscious that the sentries had guns out, and he didn’t.

Gunny unslung his own weapon of choice, and a wide grin stretched across his face. It was impossible to hold Bennie without feeling a surge of joy.

Bennie was a YBR73 TwinJet Heavy Flamer. Officially, the 73 model was obsolete, but no TECCOM had ever dared suggest a replacement. Newer models were shinier and less cantankerous, but nothing laid down the hurt like a TwinJet.

Stroking the barrel guard worn smooth by his gauntlets, Gunny remembered all the good times he and the flamethrower had shared. He thought about the first time he’d ever laid eyes on Bennie, the indelible moment where all those songs and movies about love at first sight suddenly made sense.

He couldn’t look away from the sensuous curves of Bennie’s serpentine injector assembly, the slight deviation of the twin barrels, which gave the wicked impression of a forked tongue. His eyes roamed over the ample, bulging fuel tanks, and the salt-and-pepper scorch marks on the muzzle that spoke of rugged experience no amount of polishing could hide.

Gunny was thunderbolted. He was overwhelmed with emotion, consumed by an all-encompassing need to possess the flamethrower.

But theirs was a forbidden love. Gunny wasn’t a Gunny back then. He was just a rook on his very first breach. Bennie belonged to another, that platoon’s gunnery sergeant. It was hopeless and maddening.

Rookie Gunny was so fixated on coveting the unobtainable weapon that he barely paid attention to his first mission. On any other whale, he probably would have gotten the platoon skulled. But it was a small whale, and it seemed like it might be a dud.

The platoon had searched five rooms with no deaths and not a single thing worth salvaging. Green with inexperience and yellow with yearning, Gunny the rook didn’t even feel afraid.

Destiny struck as a five-meter spire of jet-black metal burst through the ceiling of the fifth chamber. The platoon’s stickman was unlucky enough to be directly beneath. He died pinned to the floor, scrambling like a beetle with air spitting from his ruptured tanks. Rookie Gunny ran to help when he noticed the other Marines had frozen up and stood perfectly still.

Unsure what to do, Gunny locked up, as well. The point of the spire bloomed open like a black rose, ripping the stickman apart and flinging the pieces across the room. Gunny’s visor was suddenly speckled with blood, and he fought the urge to wipe it off.

Seven spider-like servitors dropped out of the spire and into the puddle that had been the unit’s stickman. They were roughly twenty-five centimeters in length, with gleaming brass skin and ruby red eyes. They moved, scurrying rapidly around the room, touching things with their clawed pedipalps, circling the Marines. It seemed like they were searching for something.

The platoon remained at rigid attention. They’d recognized this was a hive strike, and they assumed Thumbbutt Protocol.

At the time, there had been twenty-two recorded attacks on whales from penetrator hive ships. Invisible to radar and lidar, the hive ships looked like jet-black spaceborne bacteriophages, about five times the size of a RHATS. The hive ships emitted almost no heat and had no apparent propulsion systems.

They would simply appear out of nowhere and unerringly strike their target whale, piercing the volatile ghostskin and injecting their servitors. The hive ship would remain stuck to the whale like a barnacle until it breached, then both whale and parasite would vanish.

The Smarts were dying to know what the hive ships were, how they knew where the whales would appear, and how they could penetrate ghostskin without the whale going supernova.

Thumbbutt protocol dictated T.A.R.D.S. should stand perfectly still whenever they encountered hive servitors. The mechanical spiders usually crawled up a Marine or two, decided the T.A.R.D.S. weren’t whatever they were looking for, and then went back to infesting the whale.

Thumbbutt Protocol was the result of a series of A:B tests. B platoons were to stand still and do nothing if they encountered the hive servitors. A platoons were to attempt interaction, and if possible, bring back a sample servitor. All the A platoons died.

Green and lovelorn, Gunny the rook broke the protocol. He saw a servitor crawling up the gunnery sergeant’s leg, moving towards the flamethrower of his heart’s desiring. Rookie Gunny’s gauntlets curled into tight fists.

Only the rookie had noticed something was wrong. The servitors didn’t look like the sketches he’d seen in training, these were flatter, heavier.

Gunny stomped towards the sergeant, intent on swatting the servitor away from the flamethrower. The rest of the platoon gritted their teeth at full pucker, certain this featured rook was about to get them all skulled.

As Gunny bore down, the servitor skittered around the gunnery sergeant like a squirrel hiding on the other side of a tree. Gunny noticed it had one leg too many. The extra leg was thicker than the others, it ended in a curving point.

A stinger!

These weren’t the harmless spider drones they’d trained for. These were scorpions, warriors. Gunny the rook bellowed a warning, and the servitors attacked. The gunnery sergeant was the first to die, slumping to the floor with a stinger lanced through his heart.

The chamber filled with cries of pain from other Marines, and then, a moment later, they were drowned out by gunfire. A horde of scorpions issued from the spire, and the chamber descended into chaos.

Only one Marine had a plan. Gunny ripped the flamethrower off the dead gunnery sergeant’s back and claimed it for his own. He set to burn. Glee flickered in his eyes as droves of servitors shriveled in arcs of luminous fire. Wherever his gaze went, flame followed, and his laughter vied with the roar of the guns.

The platoon had been on the verge of breaking, but now, they rallied around this cackling aspect of flame, beating back the servitors and fighting their way to the door.

Seizing Bennie was like drawing the sword from the stone. Gunny found himself in control of both the flamethrower and the platoon, and he knew exactly what to do with both. Room by room, they fought in a pitched retreat to the RHATS, beating back a seemingly endless horde of scorpions.

Whenever a Marine flagged, Gunny was there, peeling back the horde in a gout of flame, buying them time to hustle. Gunny almost bought it a dozen times, but his fire was always faster than the drones.

When the door to the RHATS was finally sealed, and they blasted off, half the platoon had been slain. The T.A.R.D.S. who lived would follow Gunny for the rest of their lives. He was a natural.

They managed to bring back the singed husk of a servitor. It bought the platoon a week of Nod. Gunny’s field promotion stuck, and the flamethrower was undeniably his. No one dared suggest otherwise. Bennie had been with Gunny on every mission since. The flamethrower had even survived the RHATS crashing into the Morovinni.

When he began serving on the Polybius, Gunny had expected Lt. Jeanie to tut at him for his antique weapon as all the other TECCOMs had. Instead, she’d gushed with admiration for the TwinJet, pulling the weapon’s service history and telling Gunny about all the battles it had been in. That was the day Gunny decided Lt. Jeanie was a real one.

Eventually, he trusted her enough to ask what the swoopy writing on Bennie’s barrel meant. Lt. Jeanie had laughed, like little tinkling bells. She told him it was just cursive and read it for him.

The barrel said: It was a pleasure to burn.

Gunny agreed.

Blinking back to present, Gunny realized he had a flamethrower drawn in a room filled with explosive gas. Silane would surely turn his pleasure into pain. Glancing at his watch, he realized he’d been daydreaming about flamethrowers for nearly fifteen minutes.

Gunny shook his head at himself. He was as featured as Heafs. He re-slung Bennie and went to check on the progress in the shaft. As he walked over, he tapped his fingers on Bennie’s tanks reassuringly.

Soon, he promised his beloved.