Tempered, page 3
part #1 of Space Chef Series
The chef in front of me shuddered.
“My personal equipment travels with me everywhere and that day I gave it to the ship’s chef. Instead of training like I wanted to, I cooked. After two months of my cooking the captain caved. He didn’t want to see another burger again. Did we rough it even with my equipment? You bet we did, but it made all the difference. So after that experience I carry extra. Everything here is for you and your crew, courtesy of BuShips and me. It won’t count against your budget or the ship’s in any way.” Carefully, I helped the staff unload knife kits, robo-chefs, and other special machines. “Some of this stuff you should have received when you were in spacedock, but for the captain it was a choice between helping you and adding the latest in command and control equipment. I’m not a fan of the Navy’s purchasing system and accountability, but it comes from the Confed Council so what can we do?”
The Confed Council were the rulers of our section of space.
Throwing off the yoke of Earth more than a thousand years ago, it was created by the colonies that survived the battles. Much like the American Civil War, ours was one of freedom. Freedom from taxes, slavery, and totalitarianism. Earth Firsters controlled the government then and only cared for themselves. We, the colonies, were just sources of income and materials to them. Second or even third-class citizens. Organizing in secret, our ancestors built a fleet and fought them, for years.
The Council and our current infrastructure came from those battles. Planets cut off from Earth formed their own cultures and rules. Tying them all together took skill not found among the military. Taking a page from ancient Earth history, the victorious revolutionaries formed a government similar to the ancient Romans. They had the Senate, the Consuls, and the Assemblies. It was a way to decentralize power, keeping it out of the hands of the few. At least in theory. The Confederation Council were our Consuls. Each planet in the system had a single representative to govern the whole. Our version of the Senate were the Families. Powerful groups of former settlers that controlled much of the industry. Regular citizens made up the Assemblies. Each quadrant had one. Citizens were either voted in or selected by lots to serve. It was supposed to be for only a year, but it wasn’t.
Turds Suck
Plasma bolts shot into the sky like bolts of lightning. It was all I could do not I knew I was dreaming, and that’s the thing; this fucking dream came to me more nights than not, but even as I watched it all happen exactly as it actually had that day, I couldn’t wake myself the hell out of the dream to save my life. The bolts impacted Five’s shuttle, utterly destroying it and killing my friends.
Boom!
The falling fusion reactor went up in a secondary explosion before it hit the ground.
“What the fuck was that? I thought the Turds said the natives were primitives?” I shouted into my open mic. The ship we’d come in on only had two shuttles.
“They said a lot of things, Casey. It seems the Polywogs are the survivors from this ship’s crash. Us digging here is the whole reason they’re attacking,” Three explained. “Typical science division crap.”
“Figures. What level of tech, do you know?” I asked him. Three’s real name was Shade. No last name to speak of, it wasn’t in his file. Unlike most of us in Special Forces, Shade had come to us from Naval Intelligence. I suspected he’d been part of their infiltration corps, but he’d never said. Not that I asked! That sort of info was blacker than black. Just the fact that I knew about it could land me in the brig.
“Advanced. Above out level is what I can say. The Turds are very excited, they mentioned us trying to acquire one of the guns if possible,” Three stated. “Casey, I don’t think I can get away and hide from the Turds. You told me to watch them carefully. What they’ve found here is too important for the Confederation to lose.”
“Ignore them Shade, grab your guns and bug out. We’re just the escort. They can’t give us orders that will stick. You know it and I know it. Overwhelming force isn’t something we deal with. If we can stay ahead of them, the shuttle will come for us. Count on it!” I yelled at him. My team was down by two already. Losing Shade wouldn’t be good.
“No can do, boss lady. My other bosses won’t agree to that, and you know it. Anything that can take down a shuttle with one shot is worth getting, regardless of the cost,” Shade replied. I could hear the stress in his voice.
“Goddammit no! Shade, we can come back. We’ll let the navy glass the planet first, though. That shit is underground, it’ll survive. Nothing is worth all our lives!” I yelled, ignoring OPSEC and other rules.
“I beg to differ. Hold on a moment, Casey…” I could hear Shade breathing but everything else was drowned out by the Polywogs.
“Shade, what’s happening over there?” I shouted. There were background noises I didn’t understand.
“Polywogs. Assessments were wrong Casey, they aren’t primitives… when you see them, tell them they were wrong,” Shade replied. He was always, even in battle, calm, cool, and collected as a rule. This time I could hear the panic in his voice and it scared me. “Make them pay Casey. Make them pay.”
“Bail out, Shade,” I muttered but I knew it was too late. Along with the noise I took for the natives, were the distinctive sounds of battle. Confed battle rifles have a very recognizable whine when they are firing nonstop. Even knowing he was beyond hearing me, I sent him a DMC message. “I promise.”
Flashback is over, right?
“Whuff!” All my senses snapped to attention as my body jerked awake. Always the same damned dream. Over and over, the same bit. Shade didn’t make it, but none of the Turds did, either. He deserved so much more and a much better death procession than a bunch of greedy scientists. Even Four, real name Buck, took out more Polywogs than Shade did. Damn my subconscious for not showing me THAT memory.
Closing my eyes again, I said a silent prayer to the Consciousness of Space. Some called her the Goddess of Space as well. Gods and Goddesses were considered old hat by most humans though. Once as a people we went out into the great beyond, that is. What is a God on Earth, compared to the vastness of space?
My boys were revenged. That memory wasn’t a nightmare in the least. It was fact.
Now, on board the Washington, I was enjoying a cabin that befitted an officer. Unlike some of the ships I’ve served on, this cabin actually had room for the bed and a desk. Just having room to stretch out without sticking your finger in someone else’s ear was a luxury. Think more sardine cans than barracks.
Rolling out of my bunk, I staggered to the desk, grabbing the stool so I wouldn’t fall. The desk was adjustable, not the stool. Like boats on the water, spaceships moved in all directions. Unsecured items were known to fly around the room during harsh maneuvers. Pulling myself up, I tapped the screen to bring my computer to life. ShipNet was active on all workspaces, but monitored. As a member of BuShips, I could bypass the security using my access codes, but it would tell whomever was watching that I had a secret to tell. That would defeat the whole purpose of me being here. So, I used my regular account but with a twist.
“Dear Mom…” I started my letter. Going around normal procedure, the Admiral and I had a coded system set up. Saying the normal things a starsailor would say told him all was right in the world. If I talked about family or my bosses, he knew to dig deeper into the message. Certain phrases and how I repeated them meant specific things. If I wrote “learned a new job,” that told him the staff here was messed up beyond all belief and I either needed a new chef assigned or I’d be training them. “Met the Captain or smiled at by an officer,” would put them on alert. Something was rotten in Denmark, and my assignment was now like my old job in the Navy. In ten years, there’d been only a couple of those sorts. Loyalty oaths meant something in the Confederation.
This message was of the former, not the latter. Things were good so far. As one of the Navy’s premier ships, the Washington was supposed to have a top-notch crew. It had way too many mouths to feed for bad food. I was expecting this to be an easy assignment for once.
Pausing, I looked left for a moment. The dreams had stopped bothering me for a while. Or so I thought. Ten years was a long time to not forget stuff after all.
“Stupid, dredging this all up. You know better than this, Casey,” I muttered. I had been evaluated very carefully after joining BuShips. They wanted to be absolutely sure I didn’t have PTSD or some kind of psychosis after escaping that near death sentence on the Polywog’s planet. My introduction to the Admiral was a bit explosive to say the least. “Heh, boom indeed.” Fingering one of the buttons on my uniform I remembered that day on the station. I’d thought to go out in a blaze of glory… But they stopped me halfway. The bastards.
Finding a military uniform is far easier than to do than most civilians would believe. So is infiltrating the primary military station belonging to the Bureau of Ships, or BuShips as we like to call it. But I need to back up a bit, that’s the end, not the beginning.
Rescue came for me, eventually. All my boys were dead, and I was alone on the planet. Fighting free of the Polywog perimeter cost me everything and everyone that I loved. Training and pure unadulterated stubbornness brought me out alive. Memories of slick, bloody Polywog bodies would haunt my dreams forever. If they weren’t shooting at you, they were charging in wave after wave of suicide attacks. The high-pitched screams even now echo through my brain.
Ammo lasts only so long before it’s down to knives and trench tools. I’d like to say I slipped away in the turmoil, but that’s not the truth. Four, the team’s overwatch sniper, took out the leaders first, along with those armed with plasma rifles. Their loss triggered a madness neither of us expected or wished for. It was the screaming that started the charge. It was a sort of whining like a lost child, except tinged with cat-in-a-blender sounds. Horrible.
We held the high ground but were encircled almost immediately. It was only by triggering all our demo at once that we finally broke free. But even that didn’t save Four. Surviving four years in service didn’t prepare him for falling on his ass down a rocky hilltop only to be torn to pieces by pissed off yellow-skinned aliens that looked like bowling pins with arms. Four generations of military are what he always talked about. Four generations of honor and duty within the Confederacy. With a name like Ringo he almost expected to die, though. The honored Four did.
The ship, orbiting around what I was calling Polywog Alpha responded to my distress call a full three days after the destruction of the shuttlecraft. Three days in which almost a full ream of messages flowed back and forth between them, RMF-2, and General fucking Gryb. Tricky Dick was doing his damnedest to screw us during the entire process. The Turd stealth ship claimed they ‘lost’ our bugout frequencies and were unable to contact us. It took using my DMC in a method proscribed by the navy to contact the ship. And wasn’t that so much fun to do.
“...don’t care what regs say. Override the frequency and punch through!” I argued with my own AI. Every Confederation soldier had some form of artificial intelligence built into their DMC. Only officers and those who were able to bribe the fleet medic who programmed the system had something more than an artificial stupid in their head. I’d had an uncle in the service who’d given me both the heads up and funds to acquire something better, if illegal. “An edge” is what he’d called it. If I were to ever be promoted above enlisted, heaven forbid that, then I’d be given a nanobot injection to boost the existing system. Keeping the grunts down was what they really wanted, though. As a master sergeant I needed every edge I could get. Having that boost now was the only reason I was even attempting to boost my signal. A regular system might fry a grunt’s brain in the process.
“External power must be added to my operating system to facilitate that,” the AI responded to my yell.
“How? This isn’t some 2D viddie, my brain doesn’t have someplace I can just jack into and go,” I replied, referencing some of the ancient Earth programs I remember from my childhood on the public video nets.
“Understood. Do you wish instructions or not?” the AI asked.
While mine was smarter than the average, it could be pretty dumb sometimes. “Yes? I don’t want to sit on this alien infested rock any longer than usual. How do I do it?”
“Take a standard power source and hold it to your mouth. Carefully swipe your tongue over both power studs at the same time. The resulting power surge will allow me a 3.25 second surge of amplified power. Which should be enough to direct a burst transmission at the stealth ship,” my AI replied.
I could feel my mouth drop open at that. “Let me get this straight. You want me to shock myself, frying my brain?”
“If this is to work, yes. Your uniform and implants should ground you sufficiently. There is a reason this procedure is against regulations,” the AI explained. “Be advised the internal connections that make this possible can only take one or two jolts before being rendered inoperable.”
“And what happens then?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Negative brain function. There is an 85.7 percent chance my system will lose the ability to draw resources from your body. Without them I will cease to function within six hours,” it replied.
“Is it possible for my body to operate without your assistance?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“No. Cerebral connections are too interconnected now. Even if you were to survive my loss, the implants in your body lockdown all motor functions. ‘Human paperweight’ is the term listed on the procedure specifics.”
“Well, that sucks. Since we only have one freaking chance at it, you better make it a good one then! Should I lick the cone of death now or wait a bit?” I asked sarcastically.
“The ship should be at optimum apogee in two hours. I would advise waiting until then,” the AI instructed.
“Great. One suck and blow ‘til death. Not the way I wanted to go out. Not even a fun way.” Digging into my tattered pack, I pulled out the nonfunctional communication array and a standard navy torch. Both took similar powerpacks. Holding each in my hand, I tried to gauge width and circumference. “Heh. If I die doing this, I sure hope the thing falls out of my mouth first.” It would be some kind of poetic justice to not only get screwed by the navy but killed by an electronic prick in the process!
Obviously, I survived, and the ship reluctantly picked me up. Leave it to the Turds to want to preserve their find, and with the sort of operations we were sent on, any intel is good intel. Returning me to Confed space was another story, though. The General, in his infinite wisdom and chronic cover your ass syndrome, had me and my team declared MIA and dead. The sugar-frosted-fucktard.
Semper Knife mutherfuckers. That was my response to them even as the crewmembers tossed me out of the ship at Chandlers Retreat. Good luck and fuck off was what they called out to me. So much for loyalty and esprit de corps. Too much shit to call real. As Spec Ops, we expect some screwage, but not to this sort of extreme.
Chandler’s Retreat was even more of a hellhole than the Nerdbase I called home. It was located on the edge of Confed space, tucked into a dilapidated orbit around a planet called Pluto. Why someone would name this place after a dumb looking dog was beyond me. Sol system, the birthplace of humankind, was a blasted and worked out system. Repeated wars beyond memory destroyed the inner planets. What was left was mined out of existence by the Corporations. According to my AI, Pluto used to have five moons. Even they were consumed by the mineral-greedy companies. Only the former mining station remained, and it was overrun with pirates and lowlifes. Just my luck.
Are You Talking to Me?
“Fuck you and the ship you rode in on. So much for interagency gratitude. You tell that fucktard you call a general I’m coming for him and every, single, one of you freaking stealth-humping bastards!” Waving my arms and shouting at the closed airlock door probably didn’t paint all that great a picture to the locals as I might’ve wanted, but the crew on the stealth ship really pissed me off. First, they interrogated me, kept me locked up in the brig the entire time, and then instead of putting me out of my misery like they were ordered, they dumped me on this piece of junk. Fucking General Gryb, that prick would get what’s coming to him if it took my very last breath. Then I’d get those bozos on that ship as dessert.
Turning away from the door I gave the locals a frown. What now? At least they left me my weapons. I gave the duffle a kick. The heavy bag at my feet rattled at me. I knelt and popped it open.
“Mutherfuckers…” I cursed under my breath. As promised, they’d left me all my guns and gear except they’d disassembled it down to bare bones. Modern guns weren’t supposed to be broken down this much. Not without a clean room, at the very least. Fuckers.
It looked about the same as just about every station I’d ever been on. I took in the grime, dirt, and angry-looking spot welds. Even at half gravity, the place looked like a shithole.
“Since when does the navy deliver? You’re a nice piece of sweet meat, missy. What’cha doing in a way out place like this?” It was a loud, obnoxious voice and it came from directly behind me.
Without answering or even looking behind, I started grabbing the easiest parts within reach.
“I’m talking to you, little lady! Me and the boys would like a word or three with you. Maybe something a bit more, right boys?” He was answered by a couple of chuckles.
Assembling weapons is something every grunt in the world practices in their sleep. POGs, not so much. People other than grunts use weapons. Grunts like me absorb them. It was child’s play to put one of my pistols together in a matter of seconds. It took less time than that to spin around in confrontation.
Stalking a defenseless woman is one thing. Having one pop up armed is something completely different.
“Hey, hey, hey! Watch where you’re pointing that thing.”
