The Outpost (13 page)

“Who should go first?” asked the Gravedigger.

“Anybody got a three-sided coin?” said Max with a grin.

“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.