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Lock n' Load
"Second Lieutenant Van Damme, come in here please"
The weedy second lieutenant slunk his way into my office and stood poorly to attention in front of my desk. Discipline in my new posting was a joke and the various clerks and assistants seemed to have all been bred from bipedal weasels, not a single guts'n-glory man amongst them it seemed.
"Second Lieutenant Van Damme, why am I here?"
There were several blinks and the start of a stutter before I cut him off.
"Second Lieutenant, I have served on the front line of more field operations and missions than I care to remember. I've butchered my way through six colonial campaigns, engaged in squad-action sabotage behind enemy lines and kicked seven shades of ET butt across this galaxy and the next. So why do I find myself in this posting?"
Van Damme removed his glasses and opened his mouth like a carp, perhaps believing that I had finished.
"I don't believe for one second that I was demoted for the friendly fire incident involving our chitinous allies from Sk'rill'pojin. If anything I was given a backroom commendation for fragging the traitorous little insects before they could turn on us. And yet I wind up here."
The second lieutenant shifted on the spot, resigned to being a mere passenger on this verbal meander.
"You're the exact sort of weedy sprog I'd expect to find here and I imagine that the mundane duties you perform mean that you have an active imagination whereas I have none whatsoever; just a terribly butch commanding presence and a gung-ho bloodthirsty frag'em-all attitude. Why do you imagine I'm here?"
Van Damme blinked behind his glasses once more and I could actually see his creative brain engage behind the eyes which began almost to sparkle with activity.
"Well Sir... everyone knows you're a man of action, not words. You're the sort of man who is sent in to negotiate with thermofrag grenades instead of compromises and you usually manage to do so with only one female survivor left in tow. Perhaps your presence here has something to do with the ultra-secret bio-weapons laboratory hidden away in the tunnels beneath the admin complex?"
Suddenly things were starting to make sense. I pushed a button on my desk, opening a communications channel to the Master-At-Arms.
"Master-At-Arms Lundgren, what's our weapons status?"
"Well stocked Sir! Exceptionally well stocked in fact. So much so that I've had to shift several ammunition and resupply lockers to tactical advantage points throughout the base along with random medpacks and body armor."
Yes indeed. Everything now made perfect sense. I pushed another button to the Deck Officer.
"Deck Officer Willis, send a lightly armed and poorly trained squad of your cockiest marines down into the secret bio weapons laboratory beneath the administrative complex. Flashlights and grenades are strictly forbidden, and if you have a squad radio with a broken antenna or battery on the fritz give them that and send them on their way. Contact me if anything goes wrong or you get a bad feeling about the endeavor."
By the end of the day I expected to be up to my neck in glorious mutant corpses bred from the failed experiments the crazy egg-heads were performing beneath the planet's core. Just the way I liked it; this wasn't a punishment from the brass, this was a reward.
Oct.31.2006