“Urj says you were a Liaison Officer.”
It takes me a moment to realize I’m being spoken to. I’m trying to determine if my Quk is wild or not.
“Yes,” I tell the brawny woman across from me. Rov is her name. Hard to keep all the new eyestalks straight. “I worked in Intelligence on Warship 2.”
“Warship 2,” someone says with something like sympathy.
I take a sip of my bitter drink.
“Lot of transfers all of a sudden,” Urj, our squad leader, says. He aims a tentacle at Rov. “You were in accounting, right?”
Rov waves in the affirmative.
“And I was in water reclamation until two weeks ago,” Bek says. We’re all waiting on him to play, but he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. He has one tentacle curled protectively around an enviable pile of credits.
“I thought you all had been together a long time,” I say. I feel less like the new guy. It makes being down thirty-five creds even harder to bear. Unless these are ship-wide rules.
“Nah, they’re throwing everyone to Gunnery for this one,” Urj says. “Heard it from Sergeant Tul. Said it’s ‘All-Tentacles’ this go-’round.”
I think back to the argument Bix and his superiors were having when I reported for duty. Seemed tense, but I figure the pressure is always greater on Warship 1. Taking the lead into battle is a heavy responsibility. Performances are judged against prior conquests, and there is a lot of open space between worlds in which to measure one another.
“So what’s this world like?” Rov asks. “If you were a Liaison Officer, you must’ve done a lot of reading up on the natives. You fluent?”
“Not for our landing sector,” I admit.
Rov looks disappointed.
“But I know quite a bit about the planet in general. From studying Sector 2.”
Urj squares his cards and rests them by his remaining credits. A chair squeaks as the player to my right settles back. All eyestalks are looking at me, and I realize these Gunners aren’t curious so much as worried. We’ve had a few All-Tentacle raids in the past. Last time, Warship 5 was lost in orbit, taking all the vats onboard with it. A replacement ship had to be called up from the trailing fleet. Until everyone could be sorted and new bodies grown, there were men and women walking around on their last sets of lives.
“They write about us a lot,” I tell my squadmates. I can see their tentacles stiffen. Except for Bek, who ties three of his limbs into knots of worry. “I don’t mean us, exactly. I mean… their culture is full of doomsday musings. Raids from space are a particularly popular trope.”
“All races are full of doomsday musings,” Bek says. He looks to the others, is trying to comfort them more than himself. “We have our own stories of all this coming to an end. It’s fear of final death.”
“This is worse than most,” I say. “I can only really speak for Sector 2, but they think on little else. They spend more of their money on warfare than any other thing. We submitted a report to the Command Committee about this a while back—”
“Must be your report that has me back in Gunner,” Rov says, her accusation flying across the table.
“And him too, don’t forget,” Bek points out, waving a tentacle at me.
“Hey, what’s wrong with Gunner?” asks Urj, who has obviously never been anything but.
“Pipe down,” someone shouts from a bunk room down the hall. Sounds like the sergeant. A hush settles, and eyestalks swivel guiltily toward the door. Someone makes a move at a pile of credits, but a tentacle slaps the thievery away.
“Tul heard from High Command that the Warships are to be kept in low atmo,” Urj says quietly. He is Squad Commander, and to report out of chain is a great sin. Somehow, the hush deepens. The game is forgotten, even the thirty-five that I’m in the hole.
“Reboot and reload?” Gha, a Gunner, asks.
Urj nods.
“What’s that mean?” Bek asks, and I am thankful. I grow tiresome of admitting my ignorance on these things.
“It means there are more of us in the vats, and those bodies may be needed as well.”
“Fast as they can grow us,” Gha says, “they’ll send us down.”
Everyone looks at me like I’m responsible for this mess. But what do I know? It’s been ages since I took a life or gave one up. There have been occasional worlds that we passed by because they were deemed too dangerous to take on. There have been worlds we conquered with a single warship. Then there are worlds like these that worry the stalks of those much higher in rank than I’ll ever be. So many types of worlds, and I’ve studied them all.
Instead of spending my free time greasing the outdated gear I’ve been assigned or going over the tactics in my squad manual, I sit in my bunk in the days before planetfall reading about Mil, my absent bunkmate. This is what I call her: my absent bunkmate. We share our bunks, hers and mine, just not at the same time. She is sexed where I used to sleep, while I suffer the dreadful slobbering snores of her old roommate, Lum. I wonder at times, woken at night by the awful noise of Lum sleeping, if the mystery of Mil’s suicides is not right there, one bunk below me.
Mil’s files are full of a vague strangeness, but nothing I can put my sucker on, either for myself or for Kur. Lots of messages are gone—the original ordering is intact, but some numbers are skipped. Reminds me of the “missing buck” play my squad inanely ascribes to.
Quite a few messages are to and from a secretary at High Command, saying that Mil’s reports are being passed along. The actual reports are not among her files, however. There is one partial report quoted, describing a missing signal of some sort. I wonder if one of our advanced scout ships has been taken out. It is from these ships that all my intel came. Does Earth have warning of our arrival? Wouldn’t be the first time. And it would explain the All-Tentacles and the consternation among the higher-ups.
I think of the long-range scans of Earth I used to study. It was evident that fighting had taken place recently and might still be going on. Not unusual on planets we raid, and this planet’s inhabitants are an especially warlike people. If they stopped that fighting and trained their guns toward us, that would be very much not-good. The problem with hitting an aggressive race isn’t just their honed skills, but their state of readiness.
Maybe I’m reading too much into Mil’s records, but with so many bodies being thrown into Gunner, it is time to consider that we are being lowered like a skink into boiling water. Maybe Mil was suggesting we bypass this planet entirely, and High Command is having none of such talk from a radio tech. Perhaps they deleted her suggestions in case she turns out to be right.
But why the suicides? It’s not just that suicides are expensive, it’s that the chances of offing oneself twice in a single cycle are low. Whatever is ailing someone is not likely to be present when they are brought back.
When my new bunkmate Lum returns from her station duties, I set the terminal aside and broach the touchy subject.
“Hey, Lum,” I say.
My bunkmate is eating a gurd. With her mouth full, she raises her stalks questioningly.
“Did you… notice anything strange about Mil before she… well, before either of her suicides?”
“Mmm,” Lum says. She swallows and starts taking off her work clothes. I haven’t been able to tell if she is coming on to me, but I knot my tentacles that she isn’t.
“Yeah,” she says. “She was very different the days before. Both times.”
“How so?” I ask.
Lum throws her clothes into the chute and steps into the crapper to run the shower. “She got real calm,” she says. Steam starts rising in the crapper. I’ve scalded myself twice showering after Lum’s lava blasts.