“Well, that almost makes up for what I did, then.”
“What did you do?” Frexle said.
“You can tell us,” Geezer added.
Jezden sighed and walked around the room, reopening all of the panels that Frexle had previously closed. Geezer found this humorous, but at the same time liked the fact that it would give Frexle something to do during their next brainstorming session.
“I thought I was boning Gravity,” Jezden said just over a whisper, “but it turned out to be Moon.”
“What?” said Frexle. “You were boning someone’s moo…”
“He means Lieutenant Moon, Frex,” Geezer interrupted before turning back to Jezden. “You know that Gravity is no more, Jezden.”
“Not true, man,” Jezden defended himself. “She did a striptease when we were rescuing Parfait.”
“Oh, yeah. I heard about that.”
“It turns out that Moon can channel Gravity just enough to make it seem real, but it’s really ... him.”
“So?” said Geezer.
“So ... ew, man.”
“Why do you care if it’s a male personality or a female personality?” asked Geezer. “Moon still looks like an attractive woman, right?”
“Yeah,” replied Jezden. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“I guess I just don’t understand the way your mind works.”
“Sorry, Chief,” Frexle said after a moment a silence, “but I’m with Jezden on this one. I mean, I don’t care one way or another what a person’s personal interest is, but I understand his point of view.”
“Thanks, man.”
“That said, I don’t mind Moon’s situation at all.” Frexle then squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and added, “Actually, if you’re okay with it, I’d like to ask him out.”
Jezden grimaced.
“Dude, ew.”
JOLLY JOKERS
Sandoo peeked through the crack of the uniforms room door to find that the coast was clear. He waved Ridly to follow and they walked out to search for the captain, Grog, and Vlak.
Coming on this mission was against protocol, since he was supposed to stay on the ship in the event that anything had happened to Captain Harr, and chances were that the captain was going to give Sandoo quite an earful when he found out. But wasn’t Captain Harr always the one who told Sandoo that he had to take more risks? In fact, the human said it all the time. Unfortunately, that didn’t help Sandoo’s chips to run any smoother.
Besides, these were extenuating circumstances. Staying with the ship wouldn’t do anyone any good if they didn’t get out of this fantasy. And who better to know a way to do that than Captain Harr.
“What’s the plan, sir?” Ridly asked Sandoo as she stepped alongside of him.
“To break them out.”
“Right. I mean the detailed plan.”
Sandoo kept his gaze forward. “I don’t have one.”
“I …” Ridly paused and looked at Sandoo, blinked a couple of times as if she were processing things, and then said, “I have to say that I’m somewhat surprised, sir.”
“Me, too.”
“You there,” said a guard who was approaching them. He was roughly Sandoo’s height, but unless he was an android, Sandoo would be able to stop the man in a heartbeat. “You two look suspicious. Are you up to no good?”
“We are not,” Sandoo answered. From his perspective what they were up to was, in fact, good.
“Haha,” the guard said after a few moments of studying them over. “Just kidding with ya. Have a good one.”
Ridly and Sandoo just looked at each other with questioning faces.
“What the hell was that all about?” she asked.
Sandoo could only assume it had something to do with this odd fantasy that they were a part of. That made him consider the fact that the people on this station could very well be just as powerful as he and Ridly. He would have to be careful.
Just then, another guard yelled out at them.
“Halt,” the woman said, and then she pulled forth a weapon. “Up against the wall.”
Ridly glanced over at Sandoo as if asking what they should do. Sandoo sent her a quick message about his thoughts regarding the strength of these holographic people. She grimaced and moved to put her back against the wall.
That’s when the guard laughed uproariously and said, “Wow, really got you two.” She wiped her eyes as she put the weapon back in its holster. “You must be new around here. Love doing that to the new recruits.”
“Why do you think we’re new?” Sandoo asked, hoping to avoid further issues like this.
“Mostly the fact that you’ve got all those stripes and jinglies on your uniforms,” the guard answered.
Ridly looked down at her outfit.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Shows that you’re both fresh out of camp,” the guard answered with a shrug. “Easy targets, ya know?”
“Quite humorous.”
“Watch your backs,” the guard said as she gave one more giggle and then walked away.
“This is very disturbing,” said Ridly as they resumed their walk.
“Indeed.”
They passed by a number of other soldiers and guards, all of which were giving them funny looks. It was clear that these people hazed new arrivals mercilessly.
Sandoo pulled Ridly into an opening down the wall and they began removing all of the medals and such. They needed to look like veterans or this would never work.
“It’s obvious that the more flashy a soldier is, the less experienced. This is different than what we’re used to, but the captain always says that we have to try to blend in during these situations.”
“Agreed.”
They left a few medals in place, but for the most part they were barren of flash.
“I must admit that I have an urge to say, ‘dammit,’” admitted Sandoo.
“I have the urge to kick some of these guards in their jinglies,” Ridly grumbled.
“Let’s get to the detention area.”
Nobody bothered them as they continued their walk. Obviously, being overdressed in this army was a bad thing. Another thing that Sandoo had noticed was that everyone here had a tendency to bob their heads as they walked. He and Ridly had started mimicking that action, too.
It worked in their favor as they’d made it all the way to the detention center without further fuss.
Sandoo sent a message to Ridly explaining that he would do the talking as they approached the guard.
“Here to break out the prisoners?” the guard asked directly.
“Ha,” said Sandoo, forcing himself to smile. It wasn’t a common routine in his program, but he was a quick study, and it was obvious that it was time to play along with all of these jolly jokers. “We sure are. Planning to crash through the doors and sweep them away.”
The guard pulled out his baton. “You’re under arrest, then.”
“Good one,” Sandoo said with a wink.
“Yeah,” Ridly said with a fake yawn. “A real knee-slapper.”
The guard reached out with his baton with lightning speed, touching both Ridly and Sandoo with it on their shoulders.
Sandoo felt his vision blur for a moment. Then he began to blink rapidly as the world began to shift from standard images to zeroes and ones. Finally, it all went black.
CAN'T GET THROUGH
Harr had been returned to his cell to find that Sandoo and Ridly had joined Grog and Vlak.
The androids were both unconscious. Well, technically, they were shut down. Harr could only hope that they weren’t permanently so.
“Damn,” he said as he lifted Sandoo’s eyelid. “Vlak, can you get a connection to Geezer through your comm?”
“Nope.”
“Grog?”
“Same.”
“Is there some protocol for this where we can use a special code to break through that firewall if Geezer blocks things?”
“Nope.”
�
�Nope,” affirmed Grog. “At least not according to the teachings we got from the Feeder.”
“Shouldn’t there be?” Harr said as he sat down on the floor.
“Yep,” said Vlak.
“Yep,” Grog concurred again. “At least according to the teachings we got from the Feeder.”
Obviously each new situation that the crew was placed in brought new challenges, but some forethought would be nice. Geezer had touted being a part of the military since before Harr was born. Shouldn’t he have seen enough action to know that things like this came up all the time?
Hell, even in cadet training back on Segnal Harr had to undergo planning phases for each of his missions and there were most certainly commonalities between them all. One would imagine that the ability to communicate would be paramount.
To be fair, though, he hadn’t considered it would be flubbed up either. Of course—according to Segnal Space Marine Corps officer training anyway—he shouldn’t have to be the one to think of these things. Then again, if Sandoo were awake, he would have pointed out that Captain Harr shouldn’t be sitting in this cell at all. Harr should be sitting on the bridge of The Reluctant waiting for progress reports while the rest of the crew handled the dangerous work.
Just as Harr’s thought concluded, both Ridly and Sandoo sat straight up and began looking around.
Harr had never seen them go through their boot sequence before. He’d seen Geezer go through his a few times, which was disturbing enough, but watching androids do it was unpalatable to the extreme.
They looked human, but their movements were robotic to the point that they made Geezer’s movements look smooth. They were both twitching and jerking their heads left and right. Their eyes were blinking so rapidly that Harr could see a use for drying paint from the air pressure alone.
“Boot sequence 117171771,” Sandoo said. It started as a digital voice, but then slowly changed over to his normal one. “Attention! Salute! Drop and give me twenty! Hooyah!”
Ridly followed soon after, her voice going through the same shift. “Boot sequence 938811.3. Software design. Paradigm shift. At the end of the day. Hooyah!”
Their motions began to smooth out until they finally appeared fully human again.
Sandoo glanced over at Harr, stood up, and saluted smartly.
“At ease, Commander,” Harr said, recognizing that Sandoo was still in the throes of a reboot.
“Sorry, sir. What happened?”
“You were captured.”
“Damn,” Ridly spat. “They played us.”
“Seems so,” agreed Sandoo sadly.
“Are either of you able to communicate with Geezer?” asked Harr.
Sandoo shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Seriously?” said Harr in disbelief.
“Yes, sir.”
Harr pinched the bridge of his nose. It was one thing to have it happen when he, Grog, and Vlak came over, but to happen a second time?
“You did come here to break us out, right?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” confirmed Sandoo.
“If you had been successful, what would you have done next?”
“We would have contacted Geezer and ...” Sandoo started and then abruptly stopped. “Oh, yes, I see where you’re going with this. Obviously, Geezer’s latest invention could use a little work.”
He waited for them to take action on their own. The problem had been presented, but they were all just standing there as if waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
This was one of the problems working with androids. They weren’t always self-starters. Ridly was more than Sandoo, but even she wasn’t responding as normal. Again, probably something to do with her just going through a reboot.
He couldn’t quite expect a strong response from Grog and Vlak since they were both cavemen, but … No, that wasn’t fair. Not to the rest of the crew and certainly not to them. They were both members of Platoon F now, and they had to pull their own weight just like everyone else. One thing Captain Harr would not do is cater to the lowest common denominator. That thought gave him pause seeing that he did it all the time with Jezden. But the memory of what the android had managed to accomplish on Kallian made him a worthy exception. Maybe a better way to put it was that Jezden came up, well, big when needed. Point was that Harr had seen the entirety of Segnal grow dumber over the years because the education system had employed that method of teaching.
Finally, he dropped his hand, looked at them all and said, “Work on it!”
COLA-AND-KIELBASA-MAROON
Geezer had gotten Inkblot on a video conference via an encrypted channel.
“I have everything in place,” Inkblot was saying, “except for the coordinates to everyone on the crew. They have to be back in the ship for this to work.”
“Well, I guess we’ll just need to beam them back here, then.”
Frexle raised a finger. “What if they’re in the middle of a discussion with someone and Veli is watching? That’ll be a dead giveaway. Also, knowing the Lord Overseer as I do, I’m certain that he’s already tagged everyone in this fantasy. I’m surprised he hasn’t blown us up already due to the fact that he can’t hear our discussions.”
“True,” mused Geezer. “We need to get a hold of the captain and tell him what we’re doing, but we have to do it in such a way that Veli doesn’t know about it.” He set to changing the frequency on the output to match the one that he’d configured for Harr and the rest of the away team. “There,” he said, “that should do it.”
“We’ll see,” Frexle said hopefully.
Geezer pressed the button and then realized that he hadn’t opened a hole in the firewall for communications with the away team. He worked furiously on the keyboard after moving so that Frexle couldn’t see what he was doing. No point in letting his newly acquired subordinate learn about his flaws so soon. Finally, he saw the connection go green.
“Yo, Honcho, you there?”
“Eez albogt tem,” came an angry-sounding reply.
“That’s weird,” Geezer said, looking at the dials.
“What?”
“Not sure,” Geezer answered. “It’s some strange language that I’ve never heard the captain use before. You’d think our Universal Translators would suss it out, but I don’t know what’s going on there.”
“Can I hear?” Frexle asked.
Geezer put it on speaker.
“Can he hear me?” Geezer nodded at him. “Kahuna, this is Frexle. We have an idea.”
“Dooz eht oon clod ree melvung ahnkreepchoon?” Harr replied cryptically.
“That is weird,” said Frexle with a surprised look. “You’d think that my Universal Translator would be able to sort it out better than yours even.”
Lieutenant Moon walked in to the room a moment later.
He looked as uncomfortable as Jezden had looked earlier. They seemed to be avoiding each other, which meant when one of them was on the bridge, the other one ended up down in engineering.
Didn’t they have their own rooms? Geezer thought.
“Lone Tiger,” Frexle said patiently, “we can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“Ezz belcaws dee segnail eez ahnkreepchood!”
“Honestly have no clue what he’s saying,” said Geezer.
“Me either.”
Moon stepped up to the table and said, “He thaid that you can’t underthtand him becauthe the thignal ith encrypted.”
“Edzachary!”
Geezer looked at Moon. “You can understand that?”
“I gueth tho,” Moon answered with a shrug.
“Fux eht!”
“Woah, Big Cat,” Geezer said, taken aback by Harr’s words. “Watch the language. You’re not the type to speak like that.”
“He thaid, ‘Fixth it.’”
“Oh! Right. One sec.”
Geezer clicked through the various settings and found that he’d only decrypted the channel with Harr’s communicator in one direction. He qui
ckly rectified the problem and looked at the data feed to verify that the signal was now pure. At this point, he wondered if Frexle thought that he was a complete boob. To be fair, Geezer often thought that about his own bosses, so maybe this was just the way of things.
“How’s that?” asked Geezer.
“Can you understand me?” said Harr.
“Can now, Chief.”
“We really need to work on some protocols, Geezer.”
“Yep, but we can do that later. We’ve got bigger problems, Prime.”
“I’m not surprised,” Harr said with a sigh.
“Yeah, it turns out that …” Geezer paused. “Actually, I think I’ll let Inkblot explain.”
“Inkblot?”
“Might want to keep it down, Chief,” Geezer warned. “The walls might have ears.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Veli,” said Frexle.
“Ve …” he started but then stopped. If Inkblot is involved in this, and Frexle brings up the name “Veli,” then something weird was definitely going on. What that was, Harr didn’t know just yet, but it was obvious that Geezer and Frexle did know, and that was enough for Harr to be on his guard. “Are you saying that, uh, Veal Picatta can hear me speaking now.”
“Seems like we still have some garble on the line, Prime. Sounded like you said ‘Veal Picatta.’”
“I did,” Harr replied, now employing a whisper instead of his full voice. “I’m purposefully being vague.”
“Good thinking, Hotdog Bun,” Frexle said quickly. “We can’t tip our hand too soon with, uh Veal Picatta.”
“You don’t have to use nicknames, Frex,” Geezer stated. “Nobody can hear what we’re saying except for Honcho. He’s speaking like that because he might be under surveillance.”
“Exactly,” said Harr. “Now, what’s the deal, Fructose?”
“Fructose?”
“Don’t want to use your real name,” the captain whispered in response. “Wait a second. Ridly and Sandoo, why don’t you two have a conversation with Grog and Vlak about things, eh?”
“Why?” Geezer heard Grog say.
“So I can speak more freely here, that’s why.” The captain grunted a second later and resumed his whisper. “Okay, hopefully them talking will allow me to speak to you guys without too much hassle. Still, I’m going to try and keep things vague.”
Platoon F: Quadology: Missions 6, 7, 8, and 9 (Platoon F eBook Bundle 2) Page 50