The suck.
“Legs and RA, wannabes,” the instructor had ranted at them, not seeming to mind the ice-cold sheets of rain pouring down across them in the mud puddles they hunkered in, waiting for someone to figure out where in the hell they were. “People like to say ‘this sucks’ whenever something’s bad. ‘This sucks,’ they whine. Helps ’em to get it off their chest. Helps to acknowledge the situation and how bad it is. Then drive on. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that if you’re a leg, wannabes.”
Rechs remembered that night vividly.
“But Rangers… we don’t say ‘this sucks.’ We say… ‘Man, I wish this would suck more!’”
Rechs remembered laughing tiredly to himself. Getting it. Understanding in that moment that it made perfect sense. The more something sucked, the less the enemy expected you to hit them there. The higher the cliff. The more inaccessible the fortress. The more frozen the nuclear winter. If it sucked for the enemy then they thought that suck was a kind of safety blanket they could wrap themselves in. Hide behind.
Meanwhile, the instructor had gone on talking. “Imagine this when it sucks, wannabes. Imagine you’re rowing across a frozen Christmas morning ready to slit some throats. And all those throats are drunk from the night before and sleeping in their little cozy-wozy mummy bags. They think they’re safe. Who in the hell would go out on Christmas morning, in the dead of winter, cross an icy river, and come get them? No one. Why? Because it sucks. So embrace that, wannabes. Embrace the suck. Because when you do, then you’ll cross that river. And it’s much easier to slit throats when they aren’t expecting to be slit. Much easier to march all night and be somewhere the enemy doesn’t expect you to be. Then it’s all surprise, losers.”
All surprise and then game over.
The same as Rechs had taught his legionnaires to do.
Had that happened?
Rechs wondered as he began to once more pull himself through the sludge. He had a vague memory of rowing across an ice-swollen river. But that had been for something long after Earth and the end of all that. Something on another planet. Something important.
His HUD showed him he had twenty more meters to pull through to reach the target building’s plumbing line.
He would use the suck. The suck was good. The suck would help him to get that leej home. And whoever else. Yes, he would surprise them, being where the enemy didn’t expect him to be.
Hand over hand, he pulled himself through the suck.
44
G232 left the docking bay along with the little Nubarian gunnery bot, and they made their way up toward the admin center. At the main lift the little Nubarian bot peeled off and began rolling toward a separate lift.
“Well,” said G232 tentatively as they parted company, “goodbye then. And good luck. Remember… you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Though why a bot would want to catch flies escapes me. Still, the maxim probably has some merit with regard to your task for Master Rechs. So. Try not to… mess things up.”
The Nubarian bot beeped and whooped that it knew what it was doing and for the admin bot to butt out of its “mission” for the ongoing “operation.”
When it was gone, the admin bot muttered to itself that the little psychopath was going to get them all deactivated one day. “Even Master… er… Captain Rechs.”
G232 continued on its way toward Docking Admin, where the bot found that human marines and alien ship captains seemed to demand most of the attention from the harried staff struggling to maintain traffic into the no-fly-zone quarantined world.
Thankfully there was a special administrative bot assigned to handle ships’ bots needing to do business with traffic control.
Unfortunately it was an old Utarri Systems Management bot.
“I’m here on business from my master to have the dock seal quarantine lifted from our berth.”
“Ochoru staggatti tanaga ra?” intoned the bass-voiced bot perched near the docking help desk like an upside-down mechanical spider, one massive eye hanging from the ceiling. The electronic eye constantly blinked and shuddered, attempting to watch everything at once.
These old Utarri models were always weird and problematic. As were their makers. Brilliant cultists who’d ultimately shed biologic existence for download inside their sleeping dream servers buried deep in tech tombs beneath the frozen glaciers of their dying world.
The Utarri bots had been left to run what was left of that world, and they reflected their creators’ enigmatic personalities in their programming. But they were also plentiful and could be bought secondhand for extremely low prices, which was probably how this model had wound up in Detron working in a government docking bay.
“Ochoru staggatti tanaga ra?” prompted the bot again.
“No!” shrieked G232 indignantly.
“Nontaki?”
“I’m sure. Can we get on with the business I’ve been sent to conduct?”
“Suggati wah! Ochuro dos monta dota gahatti?”
“Finally.”
“Ustu checsome su!”
“Of course you were checking. Now about our hangar seals?”
“Rohstokka tu dadda daey donka dey?”
“Yes. The crew of our freighter is sick with no signs of getting better. Our captain thinks it’s best to depart this world and head to one with specialized medical and quarantine facilities. So we’d like to depart as soon as possible. If the dock master would be so kind as to release the seal and allow our freighter to clear dock, we would consider that a favor, as well as a boon to the biological crew’s life span.”
“Ooshoggi fluearik pith pith?”
“Oh yes. It’s quite horrible. Projectile bowel movements are just the start among our biologic crewmembers. If this is indeed Ringo Fever then they will all die. As will this world…”
And here was where G232 had quite a stroke of brilliance. Unplanned. It was something the bot would enthusiastically relate to Master Rechs once their stay on this planet was done. G232 would use its understanding of the Utarri bot model’s paranoia to accomplish the task Master Rechs had given it.
“And of course,” began G232 intimately, articulating forward into the Utarri
