The Outpost

by Mike Resnick

  “I just happen to have one,” volunteered O’Grady.

  “Why I am not surprised?” muttered Max.

  O’Grady produced the coin. “Okay,” he said, holding it up so everyone could see it. “This is heads, this is tails, and this is fists.”

  “Fists?”

  O’Grady shrugged. “I had to call it something.” He tossed it in the air. “Call it.”

  All three men called fists. It came up tails.

  “Looks like you’ll have to tell the story,” said Baker.

  “No, but I’ll choose the order. Nicodemus Mayflower, you go first.”

  “Why him?” demanded Max.

  “Because the Gravedigger is polite enough to wait, and I’m tired of listening to you,” said O’Grady.

  Max considered that for a moment, then nodded his head thoughtfully. “Okay, that’s a valid reason.”

  The General Who Hated His Private

  I guess it was called the Pelopennesian War (began Mayflower) because the enemy was a race that called themselves the Pelopennes.

  I worked for ComPelForCom HQ (that’s Commonwealth Pelopenne Forces Command Headquarters) back then. In fact, I was General Bigelow’s driver, pilot, orderly, and all-around gofer.

  Bigelow was an imposing-looking man, and never moreso than when he was in full dress uniform. He had enough medals to go from his chest to his ankle, and his biggest problem was figuring which ones to wear and which to leave in his trunk.

  The war on Pelopenne V was to be General Bigelow’s farewell to organized butchery. He’d been sent in with a force of a few thousand and told to pacify the natives. It was after fully half his men went over to the enemy that he realized he had a little problem.

  “What the hell is going on?” he used to complain to me. “Men never desert! Would you desert if I sent you to the front line?”

  “I don’t think I would, sir,” I would reply. “But I didn’t think anyone else would, either.”

  Then he’d rant and rave for another half hour or so, open a bottle, and drink himself to sleep—and in the morning we’d have lost another twenty or thirty men to the enemy.

  Finally he decided that a unique situation—and this certainly qualified—demanded a unique solution, so he sent for Hurricane Smith. Even then Hurricane was wanted on about half a hundred worlds and had a huge price on his head, but General Bigelow agreed to pardon him for all his outstanding crimes if he’d come to Pelopenne V and help clear up the situation. Hurricane considered the offer, asked for a quarter of a million credits in addition to the pardon, and enlisted when the General agreed to his terms.

  Bigelow wanted to make him a colonel, but Hurricane hated officers, and insisted on being a private. The General sent for him the second he touched down, and Hurricane showed up wearing his usual outfit, which was made from the furs of various alien polar animals.

  “Why are you out of uniform?” demanded the General.

  “I’m in uniform,” said Hurricane.

  “I want you in a military uniform.”

  “You hired Hurricane Smith. This is what I wear; it’s my trademark.”

  “Not when you’re in my army, it isn’t.”

  Hurricane turned and headed toward the door. “Nice knowing you, and good luck with your war.”.”

  There were six armed soldiers guarding the door, but no one made a move to stop him. After all, he was Hurricane Smith.

  “Wait!” yelled Bigelow.

  Hurricane turned to face him.

  “All right,” said Bigelow with a sigh. “Wear whatever you want.”

  “Thanks,” said Hurricane. “I will.”

  “First thing tomorrow morning, I want you to move to the front.”

  “And start blowing away aliens. I know.”

  “No,” said the General. “I want you to find out why my men are deserting and going over to the enemy.”

  Hurricane shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he said. “But if it was me, I’d kill all the bad guys first.”

  “Just do as you’re ordered,” snapped the General.

  Hurricane nodded and started walking to the door again.

  “Just a minute, Private,” said Bigelow. …

  “What now?”

  “You’re supposed to salute.”

  “I don’t do that,” said Hurricane. “It’s a silly custom.” He walked out of the office.

  “This may not have been the brightest decision I ever made,” Bigelow said to me. “I don’t think I like that man very much.”

  “He’s supposed to be one of the best at what he does, sir,” I said.

  “What he does is plunder and rob and kill.”

  “This is the army. He should fit in just fine, sir.”

  We didn’t see him again for two days. Most of us concluded that he’d developed a serious distaste for military life and had left the planet, though a small minority thought he’d joined all our men who’d gone over to the Pelopennes. Then, just after sunrise on the third day, he wandered into headquarters.

  “I found out why all your men have been deserting,” he announced. “Other than the obvious reason, that is.”

  “The obvious reason?” repeated Bigelow.

  “They don’t like you very much,” said Hurricane. “Can’t say that I blame them,” he added thoughtfully. “But the real reason is a little more complicated.” He paused. “Have you ever actually seen a Pelopenne?”

  “I’ve seen holographic representations of them. Big, ugly insectoid beings.”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?” demanded Bigelow.

  “They’re shape-changers.”

  “Even so, how can they terrify my men into deserting?” asked the General. “After all, how fearsome can they make themselves appear?”

  “They don’t appear fearsome at all.”

  “Then what shape do they take?”

  “Ripe naked women. Ripe, passionate naked women. Ripe, lonely, passionate naked women. Except near the 6th Battalion, which is composed entirely of women. To them they appear as wealthy, elegantly-dressed, sophisticated gentlemen who drink vodka martinis and love to dance the rhumba.”

  “But surely once our men and women have … ah … experienced them, they realized they’ve been duped by the enemy and have given away their precious honor to hideous, disgusting, insectoid aliens.”

  “Well, the way I found out what we were up against was to go off with one of the Pelopennes,” answered Hurricane.

  The General failed to repress a shudder of revulsion. “And?”

  Hurricane contemplated his answer for a moment. “I have to admit that as women go, she wasn’t especially memorable,” he said thoughtfully. Then he smiled. “But for a twelve-legged four-eyed insect, she was a knockout.”

  “You are as disgusting as she is!” thundered the General.

  “Watch your tongue when you speak about my fianceé,” said Hurricane ominously.

  “Get out!”!” screamed Bigelow. “I don’t want to hear any more of this!”

  “One word of warning,” said Hurricane. “There are more human soldiers on their side than on ours. If you don’t leave Pelopenne V soon, I think they’ll probably mount an attack.”

  “This is outrageous and disgusting!”

  “You think so?” asked Hurricane mildly. “Wait until they cut your belly open and deposit a few thousand eggs. Now, that’s outrageous and disgusting.”

  “How can you run off with such a creature?” demanded Bigelow.

  “Beauty is only skin deep,” said Hurricane Smith, as he walked to the door for the last time. He paused and turned to the General. “But ugly goes all the way down to the soul.”

  I got to thinking about what Hurricane had said, and when word reached me that ***Lance Sterling*** was looking for recruits, I borrowed a ship one night and took off to join him. Never did see a Pelopenne. Saw the General a few hundred times, which in retrospect was more than enough for any war.

  “I
got there after Hurricane Smith left,” said Max.

  “And I showed up after Max,” said the Gravedigger. “So he should tell his story next.”

  “Makes sense,” agreed Max. He took a swallow of his drink. “Things had gotten a lot worse when I arrived on the scene.”

  “Was General Bigelow still there?” asked Catastrophe Baker.

  “Sure. It was his last campaign, and he wasn’t leaving until he wiped out the Pelopennes—those that he could distinguish from naked ladies, that is.”

  “Must have been a mighty interesting job—differentiating the one from the other,” offered Baker.

  “Me and God could have doped it out,” said the Reverend Billy Karma with absolute and enthusiastic certainty.

  “The mind positively boggles with the various tests one could devise,” added Little Mike Picasso.

  “The General didn’t have your aesthetic sensibilities,” said Max. “He sent all the women home, waited until they were all off the planet, and then shot anything that even remotely resembled a woman.”

  “Efficient,” admitted Little Mike. “I’ll give him that.”

  “Wasteful,” said Baker.

  “So how did the war end?” asked the Bard, scribbling furiously.

  “Not exactly the way you’d expect,” answered Three-Gun Max.

  “So are you going to tell us or not?” persisted the Bard.

  “Try and stop him,” said Baker.

  The Private Who Hated His General

  By the time I hired on (said Max), morale was about as low as it could get. There were nearly as many Pelopennes as ever, but all the women had been sent home, and most of the men who hadn’t gone over to the other side were pretty badly shot up.

  General Bigelow was getting desperate, so he put out the word that he was looking for mercenaries.

  “He must have been desperate if he was willing to hire you!” guffawed Sitting Horse.

  “You think I can’t kill my share of aliens?” asked Max ominously.

  “Oh, we figure you can slaughter non-humans with the best of them,” said Crazy Bull. “We just don’t see you responding to military discipline.”

  I’d have surprised you (continued Max). I stayed sober. I didn’t sneak no shape-changing alien ladies into the barracks no matter how good they looked. I remembered to salute most of the time. I even made my bunk up every now and then. I hate officers, so I insisted on being a private, even though I was getting paid more than anyone except the General.

  Problem was, General Bigelow could have used forty or fifty more like me, or a couple of dozen Hurricane Smiths. Word had gotten out about the war—first, that it was going badly, and even worse, that he’d sent all the women away—and even though he was offering top dollar, he couldn’t begin to replace the men he was losing every day.

  Finally, he hit on the notion of flying bombing missions over the Pelopenne lines, so that none of us came into direct contact with those alien women. ’Course, their lines were so spread out, and in such a constant state of flux, that we mostly just dropped our payloads and hoped for the best.

  It didn’t take them long to realize that we weren’t going to meet them face-to-face on the battlefield, so they moved up their long-range molecular imploders and started turning our airships into soup. Before long word had even reached New Vegas, and they started offering odds on how many of us would return from each day’s mission. The first week, the odds were four-to-one that any of us would survive, but by the second week it was only five-to-two, and the third week it was six-to-five pick ’em.

  Now, if you only had to complete one mission before you got mustered out, you could live with those final odds—or at least you could on six days out of eleven. But when that sonuvabitch Bigelow had you flying two missions a day, you had to figure your number was up by the morning of the second day.

  “Shit!” muttered O’Grady. “The best odds I could ever get on you guys were three-to-five against!”

  “You bet on us?” asked Max.

  “With odds like that?” said O’Grady. “No way. They were blowing you out of the sky like there was no tomorrow. Like any smart gambler, I went with the run.”

  Can’t say I blame you (said Max). Hell, if I’d been able to put a little money down on the Pelopennes, I’d have done it in a flash. Believe me, none of us looked forward to running—or flying—the gauntlet of all those imploders every morning and evening. We begged the general to come up with some other strategy, but he didn’t have any ground troops left, and he refused to either surrender or declare a victory and get the hell out, so we kept flying missions.

  By the beginning of the fourth week, I was the only pilot still on active duty. All the others were dead or wounded. He’d started with 406 airships and an equal number of pilots, and now all he had left was 42 ships and one pilot (me), the rest having joined the enemy or been melted away, mostly the latter. So I went up to General Bigelow and suggested that maybe it was about time for a different strategy, since this one sure as hell wasn’t working.

  But he was under pressure to win the war, and no one was sending him any men or supplies, and all he had left was me and a couple of platoons that he was afraid to send against the enemy, since the enemy had this habit of looking awful friendly at close quarters.

  Well, I wasn’t happy about it, but he offered to double my pay, so I agreed to fly one more mission.

  I barely made it back to base, and just as I was having a beer in the officer’s club, Bigelow came up to me and told me he wanted me to go right back up.

  “Meaning no disrespect, General Bigelow sir,” I said, “but you can go fuck yourself.”

  “You’re all I’ve got!” he snapped. “I will not have it go on my record that I lost my final battle.”

  “There’s the airship,” I said, pointing out the window. “Go fight it yourself.”

  “I’m a general,” he said. “I don’t sully my hands with the actual fighting. That’s what I have you for.”

  “You ain’t got me,” I said. “I resign. Use some other poor bastard.”

  “They’ve all deserted.”

  “Every last one of them?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “You mean I’ve been dropping bombs on our own men?” I demanded.

  “They’re not our own men anymore! They've gone over to the enemy.”

  I couldn’t say I blamed them. After all, the enemy probably fed them better, and based on what I’d heard of Hurricane Smith and his lady love, they sure kept ‘em warmer at nights.

  Well, we haggled back and forth for the better part of the afternoon. I kept saying that I wasn’t going to play target for the Pelopennes anymore, and that I also didn’t feel right dropping bombs on my friends, and he kept saying that he wasn’t about to surrender or sue for peace, and that anyone who was shacked up with a lady insect, no matter what she looked like on the outside, wasn’t any friend of mine.

  Finally, the sun started setting without anything being settled, and it didn’t look like anything would get settled, and then the General pulled out his burner and pointed it between my eyes and explained that if I flew one last mission there was a chance, however slight, that I might survive it, whereas if I refused one more time, there was absolutely no chance that I’d survive a laser blast at a distance of six inches, which was a very telling argument.

  “All right,” I said. “But only if you’ll agree that this is the very last one.”

  “I agree,” he said. “And to prove it, we’ll load your airship with every explosive that remains on the base.”

  We spent the next few minutes arguing over how much of a bonus he was going to pay me if I made it back alive, and since I didn’t trust him any farther than I can spit with my mouth closed, I made him transfer the funds to my account back on Binder X before I finally got up and walked over to the airfield.

  “You mind if I choose my own target?” I asked, as I was climbing into the airship.

  “Be my guest
,” he said. “Just remember to dump your entire payload and let’s bring this noble struggle to a satisfying conclusion.”

  “Roger and out,” I said, closing the hatch behind me.

  I took off, climbed to about five thousand feet, and looked off toward the enemy lines out on the horizon.

  And then I got to doing some serious thinking. I didn’t have anything against the Pelopennes, and neither did all the Men who’d gone over to them. Now, maybe if I’d known a Pelopenne I might have felt different, but I didn’t. On the other hand, I knew General Bigelow.

  So I flew back over the base, dropped my payload, and brought the struggle to a satisfying conclusion.

  Well, satisfying to everyone except General Bigelow, anyway.

  “That can’t be right,” said Big Red.

  “Why the hell not?” demanded Three-Gun Max. “Every word was God’s own truth, except for a couple of poetic flourishes here and there.”

  “I mean, if you ended the war, what the hell was Gravedigger Gaines doing there?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” said Max, who seemed to have lost all interest in the Pelopennesian War now that his story was done.

  Big Red turned to the Gravedigger. “Well?”

  The Sergeant Who Hated Everyone

  I wasn’t there to fight a war (said Gaines). I was a bounty hunter, not a soldier.

  I’d spent the better part of a year looking for Mad Jesse Wilkins. He’d killed more than three dozen men back in the Monarchy, as well as a fair number of women, children, dogs, cats, and alien pets. He lit out for the Frontier when he found out that I was on his trail. I just missed him by a day on Roosevelt III, and I was no more than half an hour behind him when he made his escape from Far London.

  He headed toward the Albion Cluster, changed his identity and signed on as a sergeant in the Pelopennesian War—a neat little riff on the notion of the coward hiding out in the middle of a battlefield.

  By the time I got there the war was over. There was nothing but a huge crater where the human headquarters and landing field had been—