Strong Arm Tactics (27 page)

Daivid watched as she took her coat off the rack near the door, a trendy but not foolish red fuzzy coat with a matching hat, just as cute as she was, and departed. He missed her almost as soon as she was out of sight. She was right. It had been a long time since he’d talked to a nice, intelligent girl with no secret agenda. And it had felt good to get all of that off his chest. He hadn’t felt that relaxed in years.

O O O

Daivid applied himself to his lunch. Luck of the draw among the coded but not labeled entrees meant he had selected chop suey again by accident. Fifth time in a row. He didn’t mind too much, but he was already beginning to dislike their assignment. First annoyance was the delay. The second was the Cockroaches’ insubordination. Third was the cold.

The platoon had put up with sleeping in the tents for three nights, then in the wee hours it had begun to snow very hard. When half a meter of thick, wet snow had accumulated within an hour Borden had suggested that they move into the shuttle, except for the pickets, who had to continue freezing their butts off. When a gale began to howl and cause the little ship to vibrate it made sleep difficult. Daivid had suffered worse; they all had, but they didn’t have to like it. He was going to have to come up with ways to keep the troopers’ minds occupied.

A crash interrupted his thoughts. Gire sat at the table, pointing at a MERD that lay against the wall, its contents oozing out onto the floor.

“Aliens,” he wailed. “They want to get inside my body. They know I can’t operate on myself. I would have to feel them crawling through my intestines, tearing me apart!” His hands clasped at his sides, tearing at his tunic. Meyers flew to the medic’s side and wound her arms around him.

“Calm down, honey. It’s okay.”

Boland walked over and kicked the bowl. “It’s just chop suey again. Hey, Gire, don’t get nuts. I’ll get you something else. I’m kind of sick of it myself.”

The chief flipped open the crate containing the MERDs, and started taking packages out. “Ensign, what’s the code number for the chop suey?”

“A38-41018,” Thielind replied promptly. He was sitting on the floor recoding one of the emitters for the perimeter barrier. He had suggested to Daivid that he could incorporate the local codes to keep the street cleaners away permanently.

“Oh-one-eight,” Boland muttered, flinging one of the indestructible cartons after another out of the half-empty container. “Oh-one-eight. Oh-one-eight. Lieutenant, these are all chop suey! Forty more!”

“Well, no wonder we keep getting the same thing,” Daivid said. “Supply gave us whole cases. We’re carrying over 900 MERDs. Try the one underneath.”

Boland tugged the top crate off and went through the next one. “These are all chop suey, too, sir. A hundred and twenty.”

“What?” Daivid asked, going over to help. “You’re kidding.”

The other Cockroaches who had been thinking about their next meal, too, helped uncrate all of the food supplies.

“Well, damn that fool!” Boland cursed. “
All
of it’s chop suey! What a clusterfrax. He must have hit the wrong code.”

“It’s an automatic program,” Borden commented, working on her infopad. “If it glitched, then the autorecover ought to have corrected the problem.”

“Guess our supplies were packed in between the glitch and the repair,” Lin said. “Oh, well, never mind. I asked the clerk for some extra rations.”

“Me, too,” D-45 said.

“So did I,” Mose admitted. “You never know when you’re going to be stuck even longer than the backup supplies will last. It’s happened to it more than once.”

“Good,” Daivid said, with relief. “Well, trot them out, and we’ll see what we can put together. If we have to, we’ll mix some other flavors in with the chop suey to change it a little.”

All twenty-three of them went to their personal packs. Daivid was glad not to be the only one who had asked for a few extra meals. He had learned the trick from his first commander, who had described having to hold out in a hole in the ground while waiting for extraction when his unit had gotten ambushed by the Lizards. A friendly word with the Supply clerk and a few credits or something of nominal value, like a bottle of wine or a crystal threedeeo cube was often enough to ensure one had an extra week’s worth of food. Being entirely dehydrated the MERDs added no extra weight that was perceptible to a trooper wearing powered armor.

“Okay,” Streb said, rubbing his hands together as the Cockroaches dumped their packs out on the makeshift table. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Daivid turned over his eight cartons, and began to stack them by code number. It became evident after the third one that they all had the same code number. “These are chop suey, too.”

“So are mine,” Lin said.

“All of them are,” Boland said in exasperation. “When I get my hands on that Edgerton, I’m going to make chop suey out of him!”

“Edgerton!” Daivid exclaimed. “That’s the same clerk I spoke to.”

“And me,” Adri’Leta added. “He was the one on duty when I was down there.”

“I think we’ve all had a practical joke played on us by the same man,” Daivid realized. “But why? What did he have against us?”

“That man had no imagination at all,” Jones scoffed. “He couldn’t have thought this up by himself.”

“That Lt. Bruno,” Thielind suggested, with a knowing nod. He pursed his lips. “I bet he did it.”

“That’s it,” Daivid said, feeling his temper rise. He shoved aside a pile of chop suey packs. “When I get back he and I are going to have a private discussion, posse or no posse.”

“I’ll hold your coat, sir,” Borden promised.

“I’ll act as lookout,” Meyers added.

“I’ll help you beat the crap out of him,” Streb said. The others all looked at him. “He didn’t play fair with us. Why should we give him a chance?”

“The new flavor, they said,” Injaru groaned. “We’d love it, they said.”

Boland looked at the huge pile of identical boxes in front of him. “How long did Wingle say we’d be waiting?”

“Well, it isn’t so much him, now that we’re missing the push to Benarli,” Wolfe pointed out. “We have to wait until the
Eastwood
comes back for us. Could be weeks.”

“A month of chop suey?” Ambering groaned.

“We could eat at Tennie’s,” Okumede suggested. “Their food looked good.”

“They were kind of expensive,” Somulska pointed out. “Multiply out fourteen credits a night times, call it thirty nights, and we’re out of poker money pretty quickly.”

“Could we trade with someone?” Thielind asked.

Meyers, the procurement officer, snorted. “Who’d want nine hundred identical entrees in military containers?”

“We need to put this in perspective,” Wolfe said, raising his hands to hush the grumbling. “There’s nothing wrong with the chop suey. Now that we know that’s what we’ve got to eat, then we live with it. We’ve all sure had worse meals. Meyers, will you find where the locals shop and see what you can pick up in the way of spices and sauces we can use to vary the flavor?”

“Will do, sir,” Meyers said, looking relieved.

“In the meantime, what do we do about Gire?” Lin asked, aiming a thumb at the medic, who was still staring at the mess on the floor.

“I’ll take care of it,” Daivid promised. “Doc, come over here.” He helped the corpsman over to the spilled entrée. “Those aliens don’t stand a chance against us. You figured it out—they couldn’t fool you. Their cover is broken. Their chance to infiltrate our unit is over. Now, we’ll stomp them out of existence!” And, suiting the deed to the word, he brought his foot down on the noodles and sprouts, pounding away with the sole of his boot until the threatening entrée had been reduced to a paste. “Is that better?”

Gire looked up at him with a beatific smile. “That’s it! You defeated them, lieutenant! Now, what happened to my dinner?” he demanded, looking around. “I’m hungry!”

“Good,” Daivid said, limping down the ramp to wipe his boot in the snow.

“Nice job,” Lin murmured, sitting next to Wolfe as they ate their meals and watched Gire tear through a hot-sauce-laced MERD. “Why did you think that would work?”

“I’ve got a delusional aunt,” Daivid whispered back. “My uncle has to ‘kill’ things for her once in a while. It always seems to snap her out of it.”

O O O

The food situation definitely impacted against morale. Regulations, never a long suit in the Cockroaches, began to slide day after day, in spite of Daivid’s efforts to sustain them. He continued to insist on PT every morning, to keep their reactions sharp. He and Borden suggested plans of study so the troopers could apply for qualifications when they were finally back aboard ship. The two senior officers switched off accompanying the troopers whose turn it was to go to Tennie’s in the evenings, spending upwards of six hours at a time at the bar. As for the ones left behind, fistfights began to break out about which video would be shown on the entertainment system. Everyone could see the tall shape of the Carrot Palace over the wall of the empty park in the nav tank, and cursed the dumb luck that had brought them to Dudley in the wrong season.

“Now I know what Moses thought about when he couldn’t go into the promised land,” Lin said wistfully. “By the way, I’m Jewish this week.”

“Uh, to be Jewish you have to have been confirmed,” Daivid pointed out.

“Oh, I was, years ago,” Lin said, blithely. “I go back to it once in a while. Along with Siberian shamanism it’s one of my favorite rites.” Daivid shrugged. Who was he to tell anyone what faith they could follow? Especially Lin, who was among the best at helping to keep the peace in the ranks.

“Boredom’s your worst enemy,” his CO had told them in OTS. “Keep them moving, keep them occupied, and keep them alive.”

The biggest problem was in their forced isolation. Except for Tennie’s, few of the Welcome businesses were open during the off-season. The few people they saw when they went on runs through the city seemed friendly enough, but kept their distance.

I would, too,
Daivid thought,
seeing a military unit with full packs jogging through my neighborhood.

He had Aaooorru, the tactical officer, hang around the park in which they had originally landed, to find out when it was empty, and organized a two-team exercise in unarmed combat.

“All right,” he announced to the two eleven-person teams as they jogged in place in the waist-deep snow to keep warm in their fatigues. The sky above them was gray, but Borden assured him that no extra precipitation was forecast for at least two hours. “You won’t be cold in a minute. You see that platform over there?”

He pointed to a roofed picnic area among the trees by an iced-over lake. The platform, made of plascrete and raised on pilings to make it level on the gently sloping ground, was the only thing in the park not covered with snow.

“Your objective is to capture it! One or more of your team members needs to be standing on it when I blow this whistle, and none of the opposite team! Ready? Go!”

“Come on!” Borden shrieked, high-stepping through the clinging white, her long legs threshing like pistons. “Let’s take that objective!”

“Run!” Thielind, the other captain yelled. “Who takes it first holds it!”

The others, shouting threats at one another, heaved their way towards the platform. Ewanowski, on Borden’s team, by virtue of his oversized back feet, was able to leap up onto the surface of the snow. He grabbed up Aaooorru, and flatfooted like a snow-shoer meters ahead of the next closest combatant. He tossed the corlist onto the plascrete. Aaooorru tucked his many limbs into a ball and came up on all ten, braced and ready for action.

“Come on, you suckers!” Ewanowski howled, baring his claws.

Jones, on the opposite team, had the next greatest advantage in terms of bulk combined with strength. Forcing the snow out of his path as though he was a plow, he bounded up to face Ewanowski, who let out a gleeful war cry that echoed down the glistening slopes of the park. Thielind crowded into the trench carved out by Jones, following into the fray.

Within moments, the rest of the Cockroaches were on the platform, wrestling and shouting. A whoop went up as Ambering picked Thielind up over her head and heaved him into the snow, only to be tackled by Haalten, who rolled her off after him. Daivid stood at the edge of the field, grinning. Everyone got to work off their frustrations, no one would get seriously injured, and as the park was empty at this hour, it wasn’t disturbing anybody else. The sun parted the clouds, lighting up the snow to white brilliance. He felt his spirits lifting. He could handle this situation after all.

“Lieutenant Wolfe?”

A strange voice. Wolfe spun on his heel to see three civilians, two men and a woman, slogging towards him along the slushy street.

“May we talk to you?” the woman asked. She seemed to be in late middle age, with a thread or two of white showing in her light brown hair, and a few wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

“Of course,” he said. “Would you mind if I faced this way? I need to keep an eye on my troopers.”

“Yes, well,” replied the older of the two men, stout, tall and red-faced, as they came to stand side-by-side with him, their eyes fixed on the melee. “They are why we have come to see you. Oooh.”

That was in response to Boland barrelling forward with not one, but three troopers in his mighty arms, and plowing them over the side. All of them were laughing like schoolchildren as they packed snowballs and hurled them at his retreating back.

“Unarmed combat only!” Wolfe shouted at them. “What about my troopers?” he asked his guests.

“We represent the Welcome town council,” the other man, younger and with arched black eyebrows that gave him a puzzled expression. “We are certain that you are not aware of the laws and regulations that govern our fine city.”

“I would have to admit that is true,” Wolfe replied, cringing a little as Nuu Myi and Haalten knocked Borden on her back, took her by arms and legs, and swung her off the platform. The junior lieutenant landed directly on top of Lin, who was just pulling herself out of a snowbank. The two women helped one another up, shook hands, and dove back into the fray. “I know the general rules governing a TWC community, but not specific ordinances. Are there any specific ones you want me to know about?”