He Who Dares: Book One (The Gray Chronicals 1)

by Rob Buckman

  "Do you have a hearing impediment Cadet? Which part of ‘no’ didn't you understand, the first or last!” He leaned forward slightly as he asked the question, as if daring Mike to say anything.

  "No, sir."

  "Any more moronic questions, Cadet?"

  "No, sir." Resigned to his fate, he turned back to face Janice.

  "Now what do we do?" He asked. It was a dumb question, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  "You tell me Cadet Gray!” She seemed to be enjoying his embarrassment at having a female as a roommate.

  "Which bed is yours?” He asked, his face burning, and she nodded her head to the one furthest from the door, and the light switch.

  Mike nodded and started sorting out the pile, trying to make head or tail out of some of the items. His brain in a whirl as he tried to figure out his next brilliant move. It was bad enough being in a room with six other people and her, now they wanted him to bunk with her. He wondered for a moment if there was any truth to the rumor they’d heard about them putting something in the tea and coffee to stop all the horny young men walking around with a perpetual hard on. With her undressing in the same room, right next to him, they were going to start calling him the tripod. Mike gritted his teeth, trying to push the image of her half-dressed body out of his mind. They had not spoken much during the first six months, other than the usual comments here and there, and he knew he’d avoided her as much as possible. Now he couldn’t. Neither could he think of anything to say as a strained silence ensued until she left the room. Mike dropped onto the bed and lay back feeling a sense of relief, but it did not last long.

  "Cadet Gray! Who gave you permission to lie on that bed! Give me fifty!" PO Wilson yelled, suddenly appearing in the doorway. How he’d managed to do that with his great big size 12 boots was a mystery. Mike rolled off the bed to the floor and did fifty pushups, just as Janice came back in.

  "Having fun are we?” She whispered sweetly.

  "Cadet Fletcher! Would you like to join him?"

  "No Petty Officer Wilson."

  "Then carry on about your duties and keep your mouth shut!” Mike winced, thinking that she would probably blame him for that. She didn’t and Mike completed the pushups and jumped to his feet, seeing her laying out some books.

  "At least you’re in good physical shape,” Wilson sniffed, “you're going to need it in the next six months, carry on and don't let me catch you sitting or lying on that bed again without permission." Saying that, he turned and left, his size 12 boots thumping on the wood floor.

  "Chula fray Vinita chula!" Mike muttered under his breath, but even so, Janice heard him.

  "What! Janice looked at him in surprise.

  "Sorry, Voss." Mike answered, blushing slightly.

  "Voss? Good god you speak Voss?" She shook her head. "You are full of surprises, Cadet Gray. What did you say?"

  "A rough translation would be, ‘wonderful, freaking wonderful’." Mike murmured, hearing Janice chuckle.

  "I don't think there are half a dozen people on earth who can speak Voss."

  "Um... well, it sort of required where I come from. We do a lot of trade with them.” He lied hurriedly. Voss ship Captains or Suritans didn’t want, nor were they permitted to enter Sol system, so very few people on earth bothered learning their language. Even with the language translators, many of the nuances of the language that were so important for interaction with other species were missing.

  The rest of the day was spent familiarizing themselves with the aspects of the antiquated indoor plumbing, vocabulary and customs of the naval college and getting their different uniforms and equipment ready for evening inspection. Jan beat him by a mile. He was still trying to get everything sorted out by the time some idiot call 'Attention! Officer on deck'. He stood by the door, grinding his teeth in frustration, finding the grin on Jan's pixy face opposite did little to help his mood. The ‘officer’ turned out to be a young senior Cadet Lieutenant in his early twenties who took one look at Mike's locker and wrote him up for ten demerits.

  "I hope all these… cadets are not as bad,” he said with a sniff. Mike thought he was going to say colonials.

  After that, they raced outside and marched off to the dining hall for lunch, but instead of the chance to relax and enjoy a meal, it turned into a nightmare of protocol. The cadets were required to sit at attention, perfectly still until the Commanding Officer took his seat. He then rang a small silver bell, and gave the order to proceed. While orderlies served the meal the training staff walked back and forth eyeing the cadets.

  They critiqued their eating habits, their way of sitting, the method of holding their knife and fork, how not to use your napkin and sundry other items they found fault with. It almost reached a point where it was almost impossible to eat at all. In the end, Mike figured that there had to be a method in their madness otherwise they would not have consistently turned out so many fine officers over the years. After lunch, PO Wilson marched them to the Medical Center where, after a short lecture on personal hygiene, they lined up for more inoculations and shots of one sort or the other.

  “All those that aren’t ‘chipped’ hold up your hands.” A few didn’t know what he was talking about, and sort of half put up their hands. “For those members of this class who don’t know what ‘chipped’ mean. It is someone who had had an implant chip for data storage, such as language, medical history and other mundane matters.”

  This time fewer hands went up. Mike wasn’t one of them, as he’d had his chip implanted when he was fourteen. His contained over five different languages, half of them alien. This was interlaced with his hearing, so when someone spoke in his or her language, he heard it in standard anglic. By thinking about his response before speaking, he could repeat the correct language back. It wasn’t perfect with some of the most exotic one, such as the Breen or Voss that had lots of clicks and whistles in their speech. For most, it was adequate to converse with and in some cases prevented misunderstanding, and possible conflict between the races. He could also call up background information on the species, such as gender preferences, as some only spoke to, or only recognized the authority of another female, or the oldest person present. It did get complicated when they ran into a race with three or four genders, but that wasn’t very often. The Free traders probably had more alien contact than any other race, except the Voss, but they’d been at it longer than human’s. It was one of the secrets of their success, as trading depended on knowing the social intricacies of a particular race. Mike had learned that lesson well on his trips out-system on a Free Trader ship. From the number and different injected they pumped into them with the hypo-spray you’d think they were off to serve on some bug infested planet on the other side of the galaxy, instead of Southern England in winter. Mike grinned at the signs of distress on the faces of some of the cadet’s. The shot’s weren’t pleasant, as they made shoulders and arms ache. Mike didn’t feel a thing, and he doubted anything they’d injected into him did any good.

  People from Avalon had a unique immune system, and thanks to a little green lizard indigenous to Avalon, any bug that got into their system immediately came under attack. This served them well, considering the number of alien planets the Free Trader visited. No one on to his knowledge had ever caught so much as a cold on Avalon. Their immune system had an added benefit, longevity, but he wasn’t about to say anything to the medical staff about that. According to his medical file he was 22 years old, and looked it. In actuality, he was thirty three. Like all military organization they did what they were best at, hurry up and wait, as after passing thought the gauntlet of hypo-sprays he stood outside the doctor’s office and waited their his turn to enter.

  “Next!” A woman’s voice yelled from inside the room. Mike entered and looked around, but other than a circular imaging chamber and a white-coated individual sitting on a stool next to the monitor, the room was empty.

  “Strip and stand in the center of that disk, please.” Mike did as ordered,
hanging his clothes on a row of hooks and moving to the center of the disk.

  The ‘Doctor’ hadn’t even bothered to look as he undressed, her attention more on setting up the scanner for the next patient.

  “Name?”

  “Gray, M, Sir.” She tapped his name into the panel.

  “Stand very still until the light reaches your feet.” She sounded bored, having to repeat the same thing all morning.

  Mike knew she was in for a surprise, but there was nothing he could do to get out of being scanned. The chamber door slid shut and the scanning beam came on. Not that he could see it, just the targeting light as it traveled down his body. At some point he knew she’d react, but he couldn’t predict how. The first thing she did was sit up straight before shooting him a quick look over her shoulder.

  “What on Earth! “

  Doctor Susan White blinked a few times not sure if she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. A quick look over her shoulder assured her that someone wasn’t playing a trick on her. There was a man, a large man, standing in the imaging chamber, but not a man like any she’d seen today. What she was looking at on the screen was a ghost as no solid bone showed on her display. She tweaked the controls until she finally had a clear image.

  “Hold still a moment, I have to re-scan.” She held her breath until the unit recycled and started again.

  This time it showed his skeletal structure, but again, it wasn’t anything like she’d even seen outside a medical textbook. The man in the chamber didn’t have dense bone as such, more like cartilage than anything else. He had too many ribs, and his heart and lungs were half as large again as a normal human. His pelvis flared up at the back, giving more protection and support to his lower back before it blended in with his longer rib cage. It was the placement of his genitals that surprised her most, and a quick look told her that he didn’t have any, at least not externally. The imager showed his tucked neatly inside a sheath, giving the outward appearance of a vagina. She had to look twice to locate his testicles, finally locating them in a recess in his pelvis. It made sense for someone from a heavy gravity world, and solved the temperature problem, keeping them several degrees cooler than the body as nature intended.

  “Where are you from?” she blurted out, immediately chiding herself. The information glowed at her from the screen.

  “Avalon.” Mike confessed.

  “I see.” It explained everything.

  Hard bone in a high gravity field tended to break easily and rather than opt for denser or stronger bone, the geneticist had gone the other way, giving him, and presumably the rest of their people a lighter, more flexible skeletal structure. The hidden genitals also made sense. More protection than the average male and it overcame the pull of gravity problem. The scan complete, Mike stepped out of the chamber, knowing what was coming next.

  “Are you a Naval Officer, or a civilian?”

  “A civilian. Why?” she asked warily.

  “Then I invoke my patient – Doctor Privilege.”

  “Damn!” She muttered to herself under her breath, letting out a long sigh. He had her and she knew it. “Very well.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Mike smiled, hoping to soften his hard tone.

  “I take it that none of your fellow cadets knows about your, um, unusual, um, sexual arrangement?”

  “That’s correct, Doctor.”

  “Far be it for me to spread any more half truths and misconceptions about people from Avalon, but can I ask a question?”

  “Yes, Doctor. What it is.” For a moment, Susan felt herself get a little red. Even being a Doctor has its limits. For a moment, she was at a loss about how to ask the question even. Mike smiled to himself, knowing the question she wanted to ask before she did.

  “Under normal circumstances, my um, sexual apparatus works just the same as a normal human, it extends, much the same way as in sea mammals such as dolphins and orcas.”

  “Ohhhhh! I see!” And she did. None of the terrestrial sea mammals, such as dolphins, Orcas, whales had external sex organs, and she nodded in understanding. “I take it there are definite advantages in having it neatly tucked away like that.”

  “Several.” Mike had to grin. “A swift knee or kick to the crotch doesn’t have the same effect on me that it does on normal human males.” He laughed.

  “I can see that.”

  “Also, not having experienced the um, normal arrangement. I can say that it’s more comfortable this way in a lot of positions.” Susan thought about that for a moment. In some ways she understood, having a similar arraignment herself. Her husband did have a problem with sitting too long or tight underwear and pants. She nodded.

  “I can see that. As you have evoked your patient – Doctor Privilege, your, um, secret is safe with me, cadet.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “It would have been without you asked.” She said, giving Mike a smile as he turned to get dressed.

  “I’m sorry about that, spinal reflex.”

  “I can understand why, what with Hollywood movies about power craze super humans and all that nonsense.”

  He quickly climbed into his clothes and exited, just as she called for the next cadet. After that he passed down a line of orderlies who checked his ears, feet and sundry parts of his anatomy before giving him a clean bill of health. At last, he reached the end of the inspection line and an orderly uploaded the latest data to his chip. Any time they went to the infirmary, or visited the Doctor, all he had to do was scan the implant. It helped in an emergency where he might not be able to speak as it listed any allergic reactions of special needs. Unbeknownst to the medical staff, Mike chip was altered, but only very special equipment would detect the alteration.

  After that they then sat through three orientation lectures the rest of the day, with occasional breaks for exercises. It almost seemed like malicious intent as by this time most of Cadet’s arms had swollen and sore. Mike felt sorry for them, as it must be excruciatingly painful to move, let alone do exercises. Thankfully, their instructors released them early and after evening roll call permitted them retire for the night, but not before two hours of study. This covered knots and lashing, seamanship, basic navigation and personal hygiene to start with. Mike went through and memorized the entire book in less than an hour, thanking lady luck and his genes for having a photographic memory. At last, he retreated to the safety of his bed and stretch his lanky frame out with a sigh. Janice got one last dig in by undressing in front of him until she was completely naked, putting all her clothes away in that condition before she donned a night gown. After the first few seconds, Mike turned to face the wall, but it didn’t help. With the position of her bedside lamp, he could see the shadow play of her body on the wall, and he found it impossible not to watch, yet not daring to roll over and look at the original. The picture of her small, high breast, and slim body burned itself into his brain. Her waists looked as if he could circle it with both hands, and her honey colored hair was defiantly natural, not out of a bottle, unless she used it on her muff as well. At last, she switched her light out, wishing him a sweet 'good night'. Mike muttered to himself in consolation, doing three-dimensional calculus in his head. At last, he dropped off to sleep, wondering what hell tomorrow would bring. Janice lay in the dark, listening to his soft even breathing. After an hour she got up, tiptoeing across the room to stand and watch him, suppressing the urge to climb into his bed. Not yet, a small voice told her, not yet, so at least she got back into her own bed and dropped into a restless sleep. For both of them, it didn’t seem to last long before some fool started blowing a bugle in the hallway.

  “What on Earth is that? Jan yelled, sitting up in fright.

  "All right you lazy lot, rise and shine. Everybody outside in five minutes or less for PT." Someone bellowed.

  There seemed to be no end to their madness and for thirty minutes, they jumped around like idiots in the snow and slush, wearing nothing but a tee shirt, shorts and sneakers while the inst
ructor yelled their head off at them. After that, they rush through a shower and dressed for breakfast with its accompanying critique on personal eating habits. The one consolation was, at least the Royal Navy wasn’t stingy about the amount and quality of food they served. Thankfully, his mail finally caught up with him, and beside an avalanche of junk email, he received a long package. This contained three swords, his grandfather's naval dress sword, and he’d no longer had to worry about getting demerits for turning up on parade without one. The other was his Katana, and its mate, a short sword. These he placed in their stand that evening, kneeling and touching each to his forehead before placing them on the stand, bowing his head to speak the blessing. As he knelt, Janice walked into the room, and for a moment, she was taken aback, and about to make a comment.

  “Praying won’t get…” She stopped, seeing the swords.

  Softly she retreated out of the room, realizing this was personal. Mike hadn’t seemed to notice she was there, and rather than disturb him again, Janice turned and walked down to the rec room for a soft drink. For all his colonial roughness, there was something about this Mike Gray that intrigued her, hidden depth, a side that he kept carefully hidden from the rest of the world. For a moment, she’d seen part of it, his reverence for the sword. It wasn’t something she really understood, only from a historical sense. She recognized they were Japanese in origin, and knew something of their history. How someone from a distant planet circling and alien star would know and understand it was a mystery. Neither of them mentioned the incident, but Janice did wonder just how good he was with the Katana.