“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll probably find Marina at the hotel bar drowning her sorrows. Enjoy yourself. It’ll be the last time for a while. I put the return on file so you can get back here if you spend all your savings trying to impress her. You’re in room 36 of the barracks. You get up at the normal time, no matter when you get back.” I slammed the car door and it sped off.
The kid had overpacked. I had a hell of a time lugging that bag to his room. A couple of other Scouts in the barracks saw me dragging the bag and asked if I’d gotten a care package from mommy. No one offered to help. I love my fellow Scouts.
When I checked in the morning, the barracks computer said Lester had crawled in at 0200. I cut him some slack and didn’t roust him until 0530. He dragged himself down to the mess hall and started downing what passes for coffee on this planet. They brew it a lot stronger here than they do at the Academy. Lester downed enough to make him really twitchy and keep him awake for a couple of days. That probably saved his good looks.
We went on a long hike after breakfast. The doc had given me a shot in the knee so I could keep moving. I took a bang-stick to lean on and for extra defense. Lester outfitted himself. The class 3 fence around the facility should have given him a clue, but, as expected, he dressed for a warm summer’s outing.
Outside the fence, a road led, arrow-straight, to another Scout facility. We took the trails instead, winding through a land of red boulders and sparse desert vegetation. Lester, who hadn’t bothered to tuck his pants into the tops of his boots, was being eaten alive by the sand fleas. He tried to keep up a good pace while scratching and beating on his legs.
Snarky was waiting in his usual hiding place in the rocks next to a well-worn animal track. Lester had the lead. He managed to get his arm up before Snarky smacked him. That prevented Lester from getting permanent scars on his face, but his arm broke. I sat on a rock to view the melee.
Snarky is something like a cross between an ant, a bear and an alligator: over two meters tall standing on what goes for his back legs, unpleasant to look at and highly territorial. Snarky got his name from the crooked grin he gets on his mouthparts when he first sees a Scout. The grin is kind of endearing until you realize it has less to do with how pleased he is to see you than how tasty he thinks you are.
Most of his kind avoid humans, but Snarky seems to enjoy the challenge. Snarky’s been learning from his encounters with Scouts. He attacks the right side now so that the Scout can’t get to his stunner. The kid did a decent job defending himself in spite of the arm. He managed to lob a few rocks at Snarky and even launched Snarky backward using his legs. When Snarky bared his fangs, I decided to end the match, stunning him with the bang-stick. The Base commander gets pissed if you bring back a dead recruit. It takes a lot longer to patch them up.
Lester was holding the broken arm and looking green. “What the hell was that thing?”
“Local fauna.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Nobody’s gonna warn you on a new planet. If you aren’t ready, you face the consequences. Better get that bleeding stopped and set the arm before Snarky wakes up.”
“Aren’t you going to help?”
“Sure, I’ll give you all the advice you can stomach.”
Lester made it halfway back to Base (probably courtesy of the coffee) before I had to call for a transport.
I flirted with the nurses while the docs patched Lester up. My usual suave and debonair repartee wasn’t doing it that day. It may have been my recently acquired scars, but I noticed the nurses kept sneaking peeks at Lester sitting shirtless on the examining table.
On the way back to the barracks, Lester looked sullen. “Come on,” I said. “Spill it. What’s eating you?”
“What the hell kind of training was that?”
“The best kind. Half the veterans take their trainees out for a tête-à-tête with Snarky, half don’t. Of the ones who don’t, twenty-five percent lose their new partner on their first outing.”
“And the ones that do?”
“Only ten percent.”
Lester grimaced. “That’s still high.”
“Hey, I better than doubled your chances of survival. That should be worth a little pain.”
Lester cradled his arm. “I guess so.”
“You’ll remember this and be prepared for your next encounter.”
Lester moved in front of me. “So why doesn’t everyone use Snarky?”
I stood there and looked the kid in the eye, which was some trick since he was a full third of a meter taller than me and my neck was stiff with burn scars. “If a guy loses enough new recruits, he gets paired with another veteran. That raises his chances of making twenty-five missions and going home with a full pension.”
“They let their partners die?”
“There’s three ways out of this organization: dead, disabled and twenty-five. You’d be surprised what a person will do when their own skin is at stake.”
“What about you?”
“Me, I’ll let Snarky beat the crap out of you to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget. That doesn’t mean I’ve got any illusions that you’ll be with me when I celebrate my twenty-five, even though I’ve got eighteen already. I’ve lost four partners. You could easily be the fifth.” We stood by the door of Lester’s room. “Tomorrow I go to Prime for surgery. They’re supposed to get rid of the burn scars and replace the knee. That gives you a couple of weeks to train on your own. I’ve set up a bunch of simulations for you to work on while I’m gone. If you baby yourself because you’ve got a broken arm, you’ll learn nothing. Think of the arm as added realism. When we’re off on a mission, we have to keep going—broken arm or not.”
“I’ll get started on them now.”
“Tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
I left Lester at his door and went to my room to pack. I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, shaking. I hate doctors.
The Scouts have their own star system with two more-or-less habitable planets: Base and Prime. Base is hot, miserable, and nothing much grows there. Prime is cold, miserable and nothing much grows there. They send you to Prime when you need major medical attention, especially if they think you might be contagious. The hospital they sent me to was new. The last one had gotten contaminated with some alien crud, and they had to permanently quarantine the whole thing: buildings, doctors, nurses, patients and all. I was not looking forward to this.
I was the sole occupant of the shuttle that day. It blasted off Base, giving me a view of the arid landscape broken by small seas and a band of temperate climate near the poles that we weren’t allowed to visit in order to preserve the native biota. The trip lasted only an hour, and I was presented with the vista of Prime with its polar glaciers extending over two thirds of its surface, broken by a band of somewhat livable forests and tundra around the equator.
The shuttle dumped me as close to the doorstep of the hospital as safety allowed. The staff had me prepped and sedated within minutes. I was in postop before I knew what had hit me.
They did a good job. The new knee could stop a laser blast even if the rest of me couldn’t. The new skin was too pale and too smooth, but at least it moved and I wouldn’t scare the nurses anymore. They get you in and out of Prime as quickly as possible, which was fine by me.
I made one side trip before I left Prime. A couple of attendants locked me inside an isolation vehicle, tested it for leaks, and sent me on my way. The quarantine complex where Miyuki lives is on a corner of the continent, about an hour from the hospital. The portholes in her living bubble have views of the ocean—if you can call a big lake that’s covered with ice half the year an ocean. The vehicle drove into a covered garage attached to one of the quarantine buildings. The garage door closed behind me, and the air was sucked out. I didn’t like the way the vehicle’s windows creaked.
Miyuki walked up to a window close to my vehicle. I was glad that she could walk again. The blue and green veining on her skin was less than the last time I saw her.
“Hi, kiddo,” I greeted her. “How they treating you?”
Her voice was not quite lifelike over the comm system. “I’m doing a lot better. They’ve got the bugs enough under control that I can’t seriously contaminate anyone in here. I’m out of isolation.”
“That’s great. How you getting along with the rest of the inmates?”
“Half of them have accepted their life; they’re fine. The bitter ones are boring; I stay away from them. We’ve got a bridge league. I started reading the classics. Just got done with the Tale of Genji. Always meant to read it.”
“You’ve got the time now.”
She looked me over as best she could. “They did a good job putting you back together.”
“Thanks. You’re looking better too.”
She shook her head. “Not like I did.”
“You’re still beautiful.”
She glanced down. “I wish I could believe that.”
I was tongue-tied, like I always got with her.
She put a hand on the window. “You couldn’t have saved me. I was determined to be the best Scout. That was my decision. You tried your best to talk me out of it. You tried to get me to wash out. I had to be aggressive; it’s the only way a woman makes it in the Scouts. If it hadn’t been that hellhole of a planet, it would have been another. Just try to keep yourself out of here.”
I couldn’t cry because she wouldn’t.
Before I left, the garage was flooded with a gas that would peel the hull off a starship and then bathed in radiation, just in case anything had leaked from the quarantine building. I broke into a cold sweat watching the meters on the vehicle—they kept jiggling. I should make these visits remotely, but she’d been my best partner.
-2-
After a week of rehab I returned to Base. Walking back from the space dock, I ran into a few Scouts, all of whom had sage ideas on what should be surgically replaced or corrected the next time I went to Prime.
I entered the barracks as Lester was walking out, massaging the right arm. “How goes it, Lester?”
“Pretty good.” He gave me an appraising once-over. “They did good work on you.”
“Always do. They’ve put me back together about every third mission. By now they should be able to do it in the dark. How’s the arm?”
“Healing slow. I keep reinjuring it. It’s been good practice though. I never used my left arm with weapons. I’m getting fairly accurate with it.”
“Good. I take it you’ve been going through some of the simulations?”
“I’ve made it through all of them. Some more than once.”
“You’re pushing yourself.”
“I never want to go back to that pit of a mining planet I grew up on.” Lester’s right hand had clenched into a fist. He took a deep breath and opened the fingers. “Are these simulations based on recordings of your missions?”
I motioned Lester into my room and pointed to a chair. “Yeah.”
“The one with the catapult was the last mission?”
“That’s when I lost your predecessor.”
“I think I figured out how to get us out without killing any of the natives.”
“Show me.”
Lester called up his version of the simulation. His solution was ingenious. It involved having the ship hop out of range of the catapult just before they fired, while we knocked over a couple of trees to block the native’s retreat. Then the ship would hop back and pick us up while they reloaded. It might have worked.
“Nice work, Lester. I’m all for saving lives—ours especially.” I started unpacking my stuff. “We’re both gonna take a little time off to rehab, then we’ll start doing simulations together. These will be new ones; things neither of us have seen. Hopefully, they’ll get us working as a team.”
We spent about a week working out in the gym. Lester had already figured out that he needed to reduce his lifting and work on flexibility. I focused on making all the new parts function smoothly with the old ones. We did a lot of exercises in tandem to get a feel for how the other guy moved.
Once the local doc cleared us, we started on simulations. The first one was a jungle planet with aggressive trees. We tried it three times and got killed each time. One time we landed in the ocean only to find that the seaweed was as bad as the trees. Eventually we learned the simulation was based on two failed missions. Scout Command included it in case some genius figured how to approach the planet and live.
The next simulation was fairly straightforward. We had our samples and were heading back to the ship when something came out of the ground and grabbed me. Lester’s reaction was good; he blasted it. He just needed to learn how to change the settings of his gun on the fly. I would have been mildly toasted. That’s better than getting pulled underground by a whatsit, so I gave him good marks anyway.
After that they threw another jungle at us. Jungles are the pits. There’s no way to keep track of all the lifeforms. We stood in the mock airlock waiting for it to finish the decontamination cycle. “What’s your primary concern when you’re outside?”
Even through the suit visor I could tell Lester was wary. “Try not to disturb the native life.”
“Wrong: Protect the integrity of your suit. Depending on the level of a breach, you can end up in isolation.”
“They mentioned that at the Academy. The profs said they can get rid of most foreign pathogens.”
“They lied.” The kid looked at me but said nothing. “Most Scouts who have a suit breach either die or end up in permanent isolation. The reason you don’t get to take a fun day’s leave on Prime is because that’s where they house the ones who aren’t quite dead.”
“You seem to know a whole lot about it.”
“The partner before the one who nearly killed me is there.”
“Is he going to be released?”
“No, she isn’t. She’ll spend the rest of her life in an isolation dome. You don’t want to join her. Maintain suit integrity at all costs.”
“Why don’t they tell recruits the truth?”
The hatch opened. Something big stood outside. It moved an appendage toward us that looked like a vine covered with finger-length thorns. I blasted it and hit the close button. The edge of the door cut the appendage off. It was still moving toward us. Lester hit the decontaminate button and the appendage dissolved.
I started breathing again. “They don’t tell you about the isolation units for the same reason they don’t do simulations like this: it would scare you kiddies off.”
I could see Lester shaking his head through his visor. “Do we ever get a nice, peaceful dead planet?”
“Nope. Too hard to terraform. Life makes oxygen and regulates climate. Takes centuries if there isn’t already life there. Today’s colonists aren’t a patient lot.”
It took us four tries to find a relatively safe spot on the simulated planet. In real life, Lester probably would have ended up with a broken back, but we got the info on the chances of intelligence on the planet and were more or less alive at the end of the mission.
After a month of simulations, Lester was getting jumpy. The passenger liner returned. Lester took a two-day leave and went off to find Marina. I swam laps and had remote card games with Miyuki.
Lester came back looking relaxed and happy which was good because we shipped out two days later for my nineteenth mission.
-3-
The Scout ship assigned to us was fairly new. No complaints. We sat in big comfy chairs in front of a mass of displays. I took the container with two memory chips and popped the one with the destination information into the panel, hit the red button, and shut the displays off.
Lester looked puzzl
ed. “Why’d you turn the navigation displays off?”
“Computer handles everything. If it goes bad, we’re screwed; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing for us to do. I hope you didn’t spend too much time on the astrogation courses?”
“I was pretty good at them.”
“They’re worthless. It’s like knowing how your shirt is made, interesting but no practical value. You should have spent your time learning geology and exobiology. That we need to know.”
Lester nodded. “I was good at those, too.”
“Then your time at the Academy wasn’t a total waste.” I popped the second memory chip into the computer and a planetary view of our destination appeared. “Don’t be gawking at the astrogation. I want you to spend every waking hour learning what’s in this. This is everything the robot discovery ship found. We need to know it before we land. That gives us one week.”
Lester took it to heart. He had possible landing sites picked out. I reviewed his criteria. “What about the fauna?”
“All seems fairly normal. Nothing intelligent.”
“Based on what?”
“Lack of cultural artifacts.”
“What was your major at the Academy?”
“Structural engineering.”
I shook my head. “Should have known. Don’t make the mistake of equating technology and intelligence. There are species that think as well as you or I and figure everything is fine the way it naturally occurs. They manage to think big thoughts without so much as building a roof to keep the rain off.” I brought up the data on the biological samples taken by the robot explorer. “What do you make of these?” I pointed to a picture of an animal; its rounded upper portion looked like a meter-high hemisphere that was set on a larger-diameter disc. The hemisphere was rigid and the disc was flexible. The animal moved by undulating the flexible disc. Tentacles sprouted from the junction of the hemisphere and disc.