The concept of a “military base” isn’t unfamiliar to me. While Palladium, my previous employer, never sent me to research the food of lounges and MREs, the installations are inescapable. Here’s a little statistic for you: on Earth, the average distance between any urban zone and a military base is roughly 12 minutes by air, at least in the part of the world where I grew up. It’s a product of the entrenching actions that occurred during the ecological crises of our planet’s history. When I was completing a series of articles on food trucks, they often spoke of hauling their kitchens a couple dozen miles to the nearest base. Most outposts will reserve a parking lot for them, the personnel on station eager for some variety, for some reprieve from meals visited by the ungentle touch of government accountants and logisticians. The thing is, some trucks are so trusted that they can skip right through security checks, a practice that, in the past, has allowed contraband into supposedly secure facilities. If a meal is good enough, it can serve as a key to hearts and minds.
But those bases are always snuggled away in some brittle ash forest, some dust choked desert, entombed beneath city streets, or embedded into a mountainside. Everpresent, but out of sight. Nobody wants to look at frag wire and combat vehicles. Nobody wants to remember the sound of rifle fire echoing through city streets. But the bases remain.
When I arrived at Henry’s Crossing, pedaling up an unpaved road on my bicycle, struggling to haul both myself and a duffel bag through the mud, I realized the base was characterized by a war. Not against Therevatti’s guerilla movements, as you might expect. No, what I saw was drones trailing chemical streamers, gas plumes the color of crushed wasps. The tendrils just beyond the walls, where the gas fell, were milky, blotched black, curled as if burning in ghost fire. The walls were high and humming, bluing the air with electrical current that turned the rain to ghosts where the droplets fell, only to rise again from the facility in clouds of steam. Electric floodlights rent cold rainbows through them with their beams, and I did not feel cheered.
Sick as the jungle here was, its foliage carried a momentum that the Crossing never knew. Its vines coiled wherever they could find purchase, at times broad as a man’s shoulders, at times wreathed in more climbers than I had ever seen. Some plants bore raised striations, grooves of hardened bark that winked dully in the light, as if spun from native iron. When the first gate, a chainlink affair mounted on rollers, slid aside to allow me to enter, I saw countless withered rings of vine hanging from the grid like lover’s lockets.
Green Eyes met me outside the gate and I took the opportunity to ask him about it.
“Oh, that?” he said, looking out across the walls and the fences, at the jungle seething in the storm outside. He shrugged, servos whispering at his shoulders. “I’m not the groundskeeper or anything, you’d need to talk to a combat engineer. If we can handle bike bombs and snipers, some vines aren’t going to do much to slow us down, believe me.”
As we entered, I couldn’t shake a photo I’d seen. A photo from my own home of California. An old military base, constructed during the climate crises, once proudly overlooking the bay, sinking into the sea. Having survived a war, bombings, and Saints knows how many riots. Felled by wind, waves, and the changing times.
He beckoned me forward, towards the entryway, where a pair of serpent-like cleaner bots polished muddy boot stains off the poured concrete floor, bathed in warm LEDs.
“Let’s get you out of the rain. As awesome as it would be, I can’t exactly get you a suit,” he said, referring to his own powered armor. “Hey! Maybe we can have you try a helmet on, yeah? Haha, c’mon in.” He turned to head inside.
“Hold on a moment!” I said, and Green Eyes stopped halfway. My footsteps echoed in the space around me, in a corridor so wide, it could fit four people in powered armor shoulder to shoulder. The rain sluiced off the roof, down the doorway, and drizzled down half his helmet. One lens focused to keep pace with the other two.
I zipped open a side pocket of my duffel bag and after a bit of fishing around, threw him a small sealed container. He caught it, barely even looking, hand leaping up reflexively. It was impressive, and I said as much.
“What’s this?” Green Eyes asked.
“Side project,” I said, “I had some free time between research and writing and podcasting to slap something local together,” Green Eyes was shaking the container, eyeing the inch and a half thick bar of jam filled cookie wrap. The interior was a vibrant ruby red--which kept the rugged storage drive I baked into it safely out of sight. It was, thankfully, extremely heat tolerant. Dain had me test it maybe a dozen times to make sure the data wasn’t corrupted after being inside an oven.
“A cookie?” Green Eyes asked.
“Yeah, it’s experimental,” I said, catching up with the mercenary in the halls. “I don’t have a lot of people whose tastebuds I trust around here, so…”
“Oh, lucky me then,” Green Eyes said. He kept his voice light, but I could see a frenetic energy in his hands, in his feet.
“There isn’t much,” I said, “so if you want to share you might have to be careful how you divide-”
“Aw man, Oscar, that’s a sweet thought but,” a compartment at Green Eyes’ armored hip folded open, revealing a padded black interior. He slid the plastic container into it, and the white armor segments folded back up, swallowing it like a mechanical maw.
“Nobody else is getting a fucking bite of this, man. This is so solar, thank you.”
“Yeah,” I said, still eying the nearly seamless section of armor where the container vanished. That was… going to make this whole thing a lot more complicated. I was hoping he was going to put the cookie in a refrigerator, where I could get at it later.
“Not a problem, least I can do for a fan. Just make sure you don’t eat it before dinner? It’s got things in it that might make you lose your appetite for the main course,” I gave Green Eyes a shrug.
“Hey, no problem, looked like more of a dessert anyway,” Green Eyes said.
I followed Green Eyes deeper into the facility. Towards the main security hub of Henry’s Crossing. Where the air was dry, the floors hard, and the dinner guests knew how to kill.
I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.
“You’re not going in there,” Dain said to me. “Said” might be too gentle of a term. His voice came out in a boom, his bearded face leaned in towards mine. “I’m not hearing this, I’m not sending a fruit picker to run a mission for the cause.”
We were gathered in that same branch cavern where Dain and Polity had met before--a chamber where someone had apparently assembled tables and chairs on site. Certainly they weren’t brought whole through the elbow scraping squeeze the three of us had to navigate. I was seated, trying and failing to find a comfortable way to sit in my chair. All edges, that thing.
“Oscar,” Polity said, across from me, a huff of exhausted bewilderment in their voice, “I know what you’re trying to do and it’s fucking idiotic.”
The only one standing, Dain had leaned in, looked me up and down. Cold hate lit in his words, “and what, exactly, are you trying to do, spacer?” His eyes narrowed, and I found myself backing away, “someone you want to meet up with?” Dain questioned, “got a handler back in the Cross that you’re trying to crawl back to? Kaii TraIfoi?” His large hands, speckled white from chemical burns, reached for my shirt but I leapt from my chair to evade him. I had been expecting this.
Polity raised their voice, “Saints be fucking lost, Dain, he’s not a spy! Grac Au Mao needs someone to die for the cause, so he’s trying to fight me for the pleasure!” Polity threw a withering glance my way, “tell me I’m wrong, Yasui,” they said.
Dain’s open hand curled into a fist, but he let it hang at his side. He raked his opposite hand through his beard, “Polity, we keep having this conversation--we don’t need someone to die, we just… wait… if they’re expecting hm, if he’s doing this for your sake…”
“Piece of shit,” Polity said to Dain, “you piece of fucking shit,” Dain stepped towards them, lips pulling apart.
“Stop this!” I cut in, “all I need to do is plug in a drive, right?” My voice echoed through the cavern, but Dain’s privacy meant very little to me at the moment, “I don’t need any technical expertise or experience fighting a jungle war to do that.” I looked to Polity, whose eyes were wide and just a bit tearful, “if somebody catches me where I shouldn’t be, I can just pretend to be an idiot. Can you say the same for them, Dain?” I gestured at Polity, “What would happen if someone, if anyone, catches someone like them where they shouldn’t be?”
Dain considered, his fist relaxing at his side. I had to follow through--claim the silence.
“Send me. You know I’m not doing this for the revolution, but maybe you can finally believe me when I say that being a spacer doesn’t mean I love Brightsail either.”
Dain looked to Polity, at their furious glare. But when he turned to me, there was the faintest glimmer of softness in his eyes.
“I’m starting to think we’ve never met, spacer,” Dain said, voice so low it failed to echo off the limestone walls. “But I’m starting to understand.” He gave one last hard look at Polity before he began sliding from the branch cavern, back to the atrium.
“Question the decision all you’d like, kidja, but given the choice, I’d rather send him. And that’s final.”
Dain left. I had managed to convince him, but when Polity sank their face into their hands, when they started weeping, it didn’t feel like much of a victory.
A week later, at Henry’s Crossing, I was directed by a few mercenaries, as bored as they were armed, to step through a scanning array built into the surrounding structure. A gimbaled arch that, as I approached, snapped to life, whirling into a half dome with dozens of small cameras. I looked to Green Eyes.
“Sorry Oscar, I know it looks kind of freaky the first time, but it’s just like the security ships you pass through during commercial Railtravel. Our equipment and theirs is the same,” he said.
“Is this… entirely necessarily?” I asked, aware of how suspicious my lumpen, rattling bag must have appeared. Green Eyes sighed, looked to his similarly suited mercenary friends, distinguishable from each other only by patches, scuff marks, and nearly illegible serial markers. They were quiet for a short time, speaking to each other on a private channel, I assume. When Green Eyes spoke again, it sounded as if we were both going to the same dreadful exam.
“Yeah, yeah it is, we gotta all keep eachother safe, alright? Head on through, it doesn’t even take a minute,” He waved his hand towards the aperture, “go on.”
I walked in, and the dome of armatures closed in around me. Green bands of light moved up my body, but unlike all other arrays I’d traveled through, there was a deep bassy hum that shook the fibers of my clothing. Made the water on my jacket hop.
“Huh,” One of the operators said, voice a hiss through her anonymizer. I turned to try to see her, but the whirl of the scanner blocked my view.
And then, in a little over a minute, the entire process was over. The array folded back into an arch, which I passed through without incident. Thankfully, nobody pointed a single firearm at me.
“You won’t be able to bring anything through their scanners anyway,” Polity had said to me a week ago, during preparations, “new arrivals probably get full body t-rayed, millimeter radared-- the whole nine yards,” they focused on a stubbornly useless line of code, not meeting my eyes, “besides, Grac Au Mao doesn’t have the kind of equipment that can beat that.”
In the present, at the checkpoint, the scanners spun back to their standby positions. I scratched at the scab on my neck where Grac Au Mao had removed my subdermal chip.
“There we go,” Green Eyes caught up with me, having strolled through the operation chamber where his compatriots were. “I told everyone you were chill, but ah, we’re all jumpy from work and the droxy.” He leaned in to whisper at my shoulder, “between you and me, a bunch of the guys here are being real bitches about this whole thing.”
I offered Green Eyes my best smile, “Hey, I don’t take any offense,” I said, “in my experience, everyone is choosy about exactly who makes their food. Anyone can shake hands, but trust starts in the kitchen.”
Listeners, I stole that line from a co-worker, my former senior Adam Matchay. He’d fire off lines like these nearly thirty times a day, and all the junior employees bristled at them, but nobody alive could write a hook like Adam Matchay.
“The kitchen, huh, right on, right on,” Green Eyes said as we walked shoulder to shoulder. His voice had a familiar dreamy quality, the kind I used to get when speaking to professional writers at conventions, desperately hoping to burn their advice into my brain, where it might do me some good later at the editing desk.
We were approaching a four way intersection. Small signs made of permanent marker and masking tape. The signs on the left were marked “kitchen, shovel lounge”, and “castle o’ dreams,” and on the right was “communications, shitter” and the unexpectedly direct, “nerd hole.”
“Do you write, Green Eyes?” I asked as he guided us left at the four way, each wall decorated with Brightsail Colonial adverts, shimmering on armored screens. My favorite showed a mercenary in full battle dress arm wrestling what I assumed was intended to be a Therevatti native. The Therevattin was suited in the orange and yellow vest of a construction worker. He had a tribal tattoo around a sizable bicep, in a style I had never personally seen on anyone local to the planet. Both smiled perfect white smiles to the camera, shooting a thumbs up with their free hands. The caption below read: “It’s a colony, not a competition!” Someone had laboriously carved “pissrocks” into the laminate.
“Do I write?” Green Eyes said, “Nah. I mean… sorta, but like...” he trailed off, then pointed to the room ahead of us, “cool, cool, here’s the lounge.” He gestured to a pair of thin double doors that stood unsecured, porthole windows at head height.
“It’s probably not your speed, Oscar, but,” there was a hiss as he twisted his head to the side, then the helmet slid up and over freckled cheeks, “I hope you’ll have a good time during your visit. These fuckers are lucky to have you, haha, despite how prickly they’ve been to me.”
Green Eyes stood, with a rise of brown hair that stood in stark contrast to the shaved sides. He was older than expected, maybe twenty-four, which I hadn’t guessed. A softjack patch, no larger than a quarter, formed a rounded crescent near his left ear. Probably for wireless interface between his nervous system and his powered armor. And yes, listeners, his eyes really were an alarming shade of green, like sea glass in sunlight. His smile struck me hard, dazzled my eyes. If Green Eyes went around without a helmet, the man wouldn’t need to carry his carbine. He could just break out that smile and Brightsail would have won the war.
“What?” Green Eyes said, as I stood there like an idiot, “You uh, trying to scan my face--to make a 3D print? What’s going on Oscar?”
“Just uh, lost in thought I guess,” I said.
He motioned down the hallway, to another door farther down the hall, past the restrooms, “I’m going to hop out of my armor,” he rapped his knuckles against his chest with another whine of servos. “I’ll catch up with you after, won’t take long!”
I waited for him to disappear into that door, noting where it was in the building. He still had my storage drive, after all, locked away in the interior of his armor. Just when I was thinking on how best to slip away, he emerged again, armor gone, now wearing khaki shorts and a tank top.
“Okay, that’s better,” Green Eyes said, “let’s go on in.”
The lounge was a room filled with mercenaries, talking in small groups at tables, picking at half eaten mealkits. A woman was shaking drops of oil onto a whetstone, talking mostly to herself as a few other mercenaries rolled their eyes. She was surrounded by a collection of knives I could only describe as enthusiastic. Across the room there were a handful of others, seated on couches, four watching some sort of Victorian era period drama, the others playing a two man fighting game that starred a handsome snake man and some kind of shaolin satyr. Both groups were nearly shouting at each other, demanding either party turn down their display’s volume.
And I realized, all at once, that this was the first time in months I had ever seen a mercenary’s face.
They didn’t wear their tri-optic, insect-like helmets back at the Blue Zone. Instead, the mercenaries I saw wore only curaisses and lighter helmets that hid the eyes but left the mouth exposed. Yet, I had never really focused on them, or been close enough to make out fine detail. Well, there were a few other times, but remember that back then I was being held hostage by a psychotic foodie and voluntary insomniac named Mr. Ungerson.
Green Eyes stepped around me shaking his head, taking note that I was staring off into space.
“Hey, look alive, Oscar! Because I’m going to play hype man for you!”
Green Eyes cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted over the general din of the lounge, his voice bounding off each wall and drawing every gathered mercenary’s attention from their individual tasks.
“Introoooduuuucing, from the big yellow cancer maker, he’s written about everything from junk food to chefs with attitude, riding the rails all the way to Le Straud, cooking especially for us lucky pricks n’ pusses, it’s former foodcritic, current food journalist and podcasting sensation,” here, Green Eyes stepped to the side to throw his arms out, framing my skinny body in the doorway. I gave what I hoped was my best signing smile. It came out as a wobbly grin, like a drunken joke.
“Oscar Yasui!” Green Eyes cried out. The room was quiet, then sounded with a grim dusting of sarcastic applause. A Victorian cinephile with dark shadows under his eyes called out, “shove it up your ass, Green Eyes,” my companion pointed at his own eyes, then at the mercenary, saying “oh, you’ll get yours, Stumpy.”
“What does he do?” said the woman merc from behind her pile of knives.
“What? What does that mean? He cooks!” Green Eyes said.
“Yeah, okay sure, he cooks, what does the bony fucker cook? Filet mignon?”
“Of course he cooks filet mignon, Jam!” Green Eyes looked to me and I raised my hands and shook my head. I’d only ever tried to make filet mignon once in my life--it didn’t go well.
“But like, not today! Because…” Green Eyes pinched his thumb and forefinger against his nose, “because he doesn’t want to.”
“Oh,” said the mercenary named Jam, “that sucks. Kind of wanted to use my blades,” and her attention returned to her knives.
“Yeah, we know Jam.” He gave me an apologetic shrug, “Well, I guess this is why I’m in private warfare and not public speaking. C’mon--I’ll show you to the kitchen.”
Here, the countertops were organized, clean polished stainless alloy and scrubbed plastic. Cheap, but maintained with, well, military efficiency. In a lot of restaurants, commercial kitchens, you’ll see an emphasis on cutting board space, or small stovetops relative to the scale of the kitchen. Because there, it’s all about bespoke prepwork. A dozen trained chefs tackling nearly twice that number of dishes, dashing back and forth in a delicate dance of ingredients, cookware, and anxiety driven anger.
But this was a bulk kitchen. A buffet kitchen. A military kitchen, sure, but that doesn’t mean everything was covered in military greebles and tarp, no, no, no. Instead, you’d see massive wet caskets, four and a half meters wide, one and a half meters deep, built like high walled troughs, capable of producing enough soup to bathe in. There were rows of ovens, toasters, enclosed and automated cutting stations, with everything rigged to a belt assembly that kept items flowing from one task to the next. Automation was tucked into transparent compartments in every direction. Arms folded up into the ceiling above the cutting stations, curled round corners, soft bodied robotics lay deflated round table legs, like slain wyrms.
So much of it was untouched. Covered in light dust, or plastic sheeting. Yeah, I know I said there weren’t any tarps, but there were a couple, and they were only for storage purposes, so you come to Therevatti and sue me for lying, listeners. Might be um, that might be a little hard to do these days.
“Do you use this space much?” I asked.
“Yeah, plenty, ”whenever I asked a question, Green Eyes would always take a moment to consider before answering, as if he was fighting to give his full attention. A detail that had escaped me before, what with him wearing a helmet at all times.
“But…” I gestured around the kitchen, “I’m sorry, they train you how to operate all of this? You’re not only mercenaries, but line cooks too?” I gave him a grin, and Green Eyes shook his head laughing.
“Oh, uh” he pointed, “nah, we just cook for ourselves, like, sometimes each other if we’re sweeties. We use this monster like a dorm kitchen, man,” he rapped his knuckles on a cold stovetop to emphasize his point, “all this is built for the grunts.”
I looked out across the space, at machines that could feed a Railship, at modules that could, given enough time and eggs, physically bury a town in omelets. And the mercenaries didn’t use any of it.
“Uh,” Green Eyes began, gesturing with his hands, “sorry for all the jargon, but a grunt is-”
“Regular Army, right?” I asked, “the Sol Levy, space marines and the like.”
“Yeah!” Green Eyes said, flashing another smile, “hey, good guess Oscar. Or maybe it wasn’t a guess, I don’t know, didn’t think you’d give much of a shit about any of this sort of thing, no offense.”
I looked over the kitchen again with fresh eyes, did a little mental calculus. With proper technicians and support staff, with an inload of fresh or preserved ingredients, Henry’s Crossing could potentially feed and stage… hundreds? Thousands? Certainly more than what Brightsail Colonial had chosen to field so far. If that kind of army were to arrive, they could blanket the entire region in manpower.
Green Eyes leaned in, concern on his features, “you good, Oscar? Are you…” He trailed off, panned his view across the kitchen, “...feeling kind of overwhelmed?”
I breathed in and exhaled. Offered Green Eyes a small thumbs up, “you guessed it. I’ve just never cooked for this caliber of client before.”
Green Eyes barked a laugh, his shoulders dropped. I hadn’t realized how tense he felt. “Oh wow, don’t sweat it, Oscar, you don’t have to worry about us, we’re not freaks or rich pigs, man, we’re just like, we’re just a bunch of gunsluts, honest,” he pointed a finger through the reinforced slot window between the lounge and the kitchen. “Nobody gives a shit as long as the food tastes alright, and if anybody flacks your fissure I’ll bounce their head off a table. It’s all good.”
He returned my thumbs up, and… the tension I had felt, the tension of lying, of being an infiltrator surrounded by, as Green Eyes had put it, “gunsluts,” well that feeling eased up, just a little. But as the fear faded, I could feel the first tentative tickles of guilt creep into my heart. I had to fight that. Green Eyes didn’t have a problem nearly drowning Shah in 2 centimeters of water, after all.
“Thank you, Green Eyes,” I said, “Get ready, because you’re not going to forget this meal anytime soon.”
“Of course I’m not!” he whooped, “you’re Oscar fucking Yasui, and tonight we’re eating something besides mealkits and d**** food!”
I sucked a bit of spit down the wrong pipe then, and found myself coughing. My guilt disappeared. Green Eyes slapped my back, laughing. “Ah, whoa there, yeah the environmental control unit keeps it pretty dry in here.”
“You get used to it.”
A few minutes later, I had unpacked my duffel bag and arranged my ingredients atop the counter. A lifetime of adjacency to the profession of event planner had given me the wherewithal to request that Green Eyes provide me with the usual list. How many ingredients did I need? Food allergies, meal preferences, a vote I had deliberately skewed towards what I intended to make anyway, y’know, the usual. The response that Green Eyes returned to me with startling promptness, was that everyone didn’t care as long as the food was good, didn’t break the bank, since the mercs were footing the bill, and reminded everyone of home. I didn’t even have to sweat poisoning any of the guests! According to Green Eyes,
“Eh, worst case somebody gets the shits.”
Easy enough. But I wasn’t a bulk kitchen specialist, or a food service equipment technician. I was a podcaster playing spy to save my best friend. And besides, since I was doing all the shopping, I couldn’t exactly rent a truck to bring in a cargo container of produce.
What I unpacked instead, was two gallons of peanut oil, a dozen pounds of lovely swiss cheeses--hard and soft, six cloves of hothouse garlic, an assortment of fruit and vegetables, local bread from the bakery, some meat, some wine, and of course, a pound of synthetic chocolate.
Any guesses as to what I was making? If you guessed fondue, then you’re correct. Fondue is a funny kind of dish, where you dip hunks of bread or vegetables or fruit into some very good cheese. Or chocolate, if you’re feeling like skipping straight to dessert. There’s hot oil for meats, so you get fresh cuts or chunks and get to fry them yourself. I always found it funny because it’s clung to an inexplicable air of whimsy, this ongoing habit of surfacing until the public gets bored or irritated with having to prepare their own food after it’s already been served. Polity calls it “the manic pixie dream girl of food.”
For all this, it is a utilitarian dish in origin. A way to clear out old ingredients from the pantry, a way to make a meal from disparate parts. I mean it was peasant food, before we started adding expensive cheeses, like gruyère. As for cooking it, just combine a thickening agent, like posegel or amalg with melted cheese, chopped garlic, and wine. Mix it together over heat, allowing the flavors to get to know each other, and… that’s it! The rest is up to you and your guests. You can even treat it like freestyle jazz, changing ingredients on the fly. A different cheese here, a different bread there. For example: when no one was looking I grabbed some canola oil from the mercenary stock and mixed it together with the peanut oil I had already brought.
I mean, I had to get to that cookie somehow, right?
Since the process was so simple, I just let the oil and bread sit, and fridged the rest of the ingredients. Green Eyes and I found a seat at a table the mercenaries had barely dented, and we shared a drink until it was time to get cooking.
“Why’d you become a mercenary?” I asked, as he settled in. Green Eyes gave a little nervous laugh, then he reached over the table to a small dispenser. He pressed a button on it’s white control panel, and a small tab slid out, guided by a soft “paff” of air. He balanced the tab, pale robin's egg blue, on two fingers before placing it on the surface of his tongue
He gave me a nod, speaking around the tab as it dissolved on his tongue, thinner than film. “Ah, just getting even, patrol stims are a real hard burn when they stack on your kidneys,” he took a deep breath, nostrils flaring, and when he opened his eyes, his pupils were ever so slightly larger.
“Okay, you were saying… mercenary, right? Why I wanted to be a merc?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I mean uh, I didn’t. Not really,” he took another deep breath and exhaled like he was testing the chill of a mint. A more familiar kind of “Losadi.” Green Eyes continued:
“Back when I was Solar Army I wanted to work in a breach unit. Like, ship-to-ship close range boarding actions. I got the marksman and psyche scores for it, I got my zeegee cert, more than beat par on the killhouse times,” he gave me a look, “I’m not rambling, right? You… you know what this stuff means?”
“I do, actually, it comes up a lot in the books and movies I enjoy,” I said. I wasn’t lying. To explain what he was saying, understand that Green Eyes was a good shot, he was tough, and very dedicated. Especially since breach units post higher than average casualties if an interplanetary stop and search goes wrong.
“Cool, alright. Well, a bunk opened up on the SV Stettbacher and I hopped on immediately. Got situated, stayed there for… a year? Year and a half? Met Viking,” he gestured across the room to where a young man with rough stubble and surprisingly deep lines in his face sat. Viking had hair the color of spun gold, and a resting expression of such violence, I wondered if he used it to devarnish furniture.
“And then?” I asked.
“Well, nothing,” Green Eyes laughed, “Nothing happened. Made breach team at fucking nineteen and didn’t push a single airlock, didn’t crack a single hold. Just ran patrol and sat in an acceleration couch long enough to grow a cyst in my ass.”
The drugs, from patrol and from the small tab he had taken, had relaxed him without dulling his response. In some ways, he seemed more focused than he’d ever been. Or maybe seeing his face focused made me pay attention more to his mood than his jitters.
“I left like a day after New Years, tried to find somewhere in settled space where I could see some action, have all my training mean more than numbers,” he leaned in, “you know how many chicks like to hear a comparison of your precision shooting versus your reflex shooting? I know they’re out there but damn if I’ve never met one face to face.”
“What were the numbers,” I cut in, “if you don’t mind me asking? From your tests?” Polity had mentioned, “if you don’t have equipment, you’ll probably have people, and people have codes. Talk to ‘em, but… try be careful, alright?” I kept my eyes on Green Eyes, readied my mnemonics.
“Huh?” he said, “89 on precision, 99 on reflex, 92 at the killship sim.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah, uh, right,” Green Eyes raised an eyebrow, then shook his head, “see, this is what I mean, it generally isn’t a conversation starter with anybody outside the industry. Viking left around the same time as I did, and he recommended I go to Orestin Professional Defense,” he took a quick sip of water, “back when it was called uh, something else. They saw my numbers, saw where I served, tripled my signing bonus and comped my powered armor. We’re on contract with Brightsail, that’s us here.”
“Do you like it?” I asked, “being a mercenary?” I asked.
Green Eyes considered, before he spoke.
“Ah, yeah. Yeah. The bi********, they don’t know piss from rain, and they could stand to live up to the briefing file of a ‘global revolution,’ but I think Brightsail’s gonna build this place up eventually. Some of us, well, a lot of us, we’re just hoping things will heat up a couple degrees before the contract expires and we have to go guard a server farm somewhere. I dunno, some people like a quiet contract, I guess that’s just not me.”
That phrase made me pause a bit. Polity had said as much about the mercenaries when begging Dain not to send them. My stomach churned around his affability, his matter of fact way of discussing his profession. I didn’t want my discomfort to show, so I settled on digging my toes against the concrete floor.
“But yeah,” Green Eyes said, smiling wide, “being a mercenary is great. The pay is good, food’s free, medical, vision, dental, cybernetic or limb replacement plans, more leeway in your weapon of choice, and like, I get to see what it’s like out there in the colonies. Turns out it’s muddy and rainy and every other person you talk to has an opinion about how to run a planet. But no, I love being a mercenary--happy I went private.”
“I guess you already know why I’m in podcasting,” I said. To my surprise, Green Eyes halted, frowned, then reached for another tab of whatever that dispenser was popping out. Muscle relaxants, maybe?
“Yeah. I know. That ‘Ungerson” freak or whatever. Fuckin’ admin. They’re all like that, if it makes you feel better,”
I thought about why that would possibly make me feel better. The mental picture of an unseen legion of Ungersons made me want to take a one way Railtrip into that unknown between the stars. Green Eyes spoke up again.
“Hey uh, why were you hanging with him, back at Silverfish? Thought you hated the guy, you sure got every reason.”
I froze. Didn’t know what to say. Did Green Eyes know about the bounty on my head?
“I… I was…” I stammered. “You saw us there?”
“Yeah,” Green Eyes said, “You change people’s names, but Ogata’s what, a six foot nine augmented bodybuilder? He’s got chrome hands, man?”
“Thing about being private sec,” Green Eyes said, after taking another long sip of his water, “is that we’re encouraged to have a lot more um… initiative. Than the regular army. It’s a corporate thing.”
He tapped the side of his helmet.
“We have facial scanners, built right into the helmet. And they’re uh…” He coughed once, “well they have a pretty good buffer connection on most days of the week.”
“I see,” did Green Eyes know about the bounty on my head? I panicked, for a moment, but then realized something:
“You never turned me in,” I said, “you had every chance, and you never did,” Green Eyes bounced his head from side to side, considering. A few mercenaries looked over at us, distantly judging our relationship.
“Nah,” he said, simply. “Duke’s a fuckin’ scumbag is what he is. Rich slug digesting a meal his grandfather ate a century ago? Eugh, hate the rich.”
“Huh,” I said, having a think.
“Yeah.” Green Eyes said, finishing his water. And then it was dinner time.
Grating, chopping, sending ingredients to simmer and melt away in their pots. Mixing and combining, the sweet musk of cheese and garlic, bubbling happily. Peanut oil a riot of tiny bubbles, its smell a ribbon of aldehydes put to heat, a promise of fried foods and greasy satiation. You can hide a lot of other smells beneath peanut oil, it’s flexible like that. There was the sound of knives singing through vegetables, the crush-shush of metal splitting fruit.
Mercenaries were slowing down, drifting away from their tasks, taking what my father used to call “seagull swoops.” These passes by the kitchen, never entering it, never engaging, just hovering around to gauge that shrinking margin between ingredient and entree.
I came out with pots and pots of garlic strewn cheese, of rumbling oil fit for a medieval siege, and a small container of liquid chocolate. The mercenaries descended on the pots like they were charging a barricaded enemy. There was no crowding or pushing. The first merc to reach the serving table grabbed a fork and passed them out to each of her companions, another merc grabbed napkins and began arranging them on the table. There wasn’t much rabble, just a gentle call and response.
I tried my hand at being something of a master of ceremonies, a host of hosts. Spinning bread in cheese like an artist with a brush, making up games for any mercenary that lost their meat in the oil. I babbled trivia, to some small amusement. Maybe they thought it was interesting. Maybe they saw my nerves. But not a single attendee left that table without understanding the local tradition of clearing the pantry, the efforts of the Swiss Cheese Union in spreading the dish globally, and the origins of the “gruyere” cheese variety. I kept my eyes on everyone as they ate, evaluating their opinions, their reactions. Green Eyes most of all. As everyone relaxed into their pots and plates, all I could focus on was the fluttering sensation in my chest, fighting to balance my hopes and my fears. I found as I spoke, I had to spend more and more time keeping my lips moist.
After we settled down from the meal, Jam suggested we push the couches together, and with final consent from Stumpy, the resident “old man” of the room, we managed to arrange the furniture into a rough approximation of a theater. We put on Freightland, which from what little I saw, was a film consisting of thirty-five percent action, and sixty-five percent… trains? I have no idea, listeners. If you like Freightland and think I didn’t give it a fair shake, leave a comment for me on the buffer. It improves my engagement numbers.
Twenty minutes in, Green Eyes had his first cramp. I know because I was watching him more than the movie. He took a sharp pull of air through his teeth, adjusted his posture, then relaxed. It was only two minutes after that before he winched again.
“You good, Green Eyes?” Jam asked. He waved her off.
But ten minutes later, Green Eyes clutched at his side, and leaned over to me.
“Oscar,” Green Eyes hissed. Other mercenaries were starting to exchange looks. “Oscar, I think uh, haha, I think that there was canola in that.
“What?” I said, feigning shock, “but the label said peanut oil!”
“I know, I know,” Green Eyes said, “you were careful, you were real careful, but, agh, maybe they consolidated their mmf, stock or something, fuck! This sucks, man! I’m gonna…” He stood and went for the door, “I’m gonna be right back,” he left, hunched over his abdomen. It hurt to watch him go, even after all the slurs and jackboot attitude, he did feed Polity and I through the hard times. Well, I guess he didn’t know he was feeding Polity. I don’t think he’d hesitate to collect the bounty on their head. Spiking the peanut oil with canola didn’t leave me feeling entirely giddy.
“This?” Stumpy said, beside me, eyes shining with a distant wisdom, “This, this is why you just eat bag food. Don’t get sick on bag food.”
“What?” Jam said, peeking out from behind the couch, “What about when you ate coconut shrimp and puked out your spine for two days?”
“Irrelevant!” Stumpy shouted, “those were expired!”
In the ensuing argument about what proportion of meal kits constituted “too many meal kits in a diet,” I excused myself, feigning stomach cramps of my own. Nobody seemed to notice me as I left. Maybe it was the cover story, or maybe food really was a kind of key. I stepped out of the swinging doors of the mess, then ducked and bent in the opposite direction. Off to the sleeping quarters or, more specifically, to the storage section. I slipped a pair of rubber gloves I had pocketed from the kitchen. Snitch fingers, Polity had warned.
As I skirted my way down the hallway, past the bathroom where Green Eyes had begun to make some pretty pitiable groans, I found myself face to face with a few ceiling mounted security cameras. They would log my movements, optically, thermally, maybe even in ultraviolet. Polity said that while they wouldn’t sound an alarm just from me moving, any footage could be easily queried and analyzed with a security specialist backed by an interior intelligence. If I got the drive where it needed to go, that wouldn’t be a problem. But now, as I ducked into crew storage? Now there was no going back.
I eased through a pair of heavy, automatically sliding doors. They were unlocked, despite the security of the rest of the base. Maybe the security checkpoint out front left everyone overconfident? The doors chimed as I passed and I froze, but nobody arrived to check on me. Green Eyes was busy with an induced gastrointestinal hell, and everyone else was, from the sound of it, listening to six trains trying to hate-fuck eachother in a war zone.
The storage bay was a towering carousel of lockers similar to what I had seen in the evidence room of Lea te Suldan’s security office, but large enough to store, well, an army’s worth of equipment in great rotating wheels of compartments. And just like the kitchen, really only a few of the units were actually in use. There were an entire regiments of lockers, each with an electronic keypad attached, as well as almost man height, transparent cases of armored glass. It was like Earnest’s little greenhouse pod writ large. A small repeating label at their midsection identified them as the same manufacturer of my Chorus 12S. Small universe we live in, go figure.
I approached the unit with Green Eyes’ callsign taped on the front, feeling three different cameras tracking my movements. Aware that each passing second, someone might realize that Freightland was a terrible movie and march back to their locker to grab a portable or a book or a love letter from a Sol Sweetheart. Keypad lock, no biometrics, no card. The keypad glowed a soft blue as I approached, my features reflected back at me, ballooning my proportions, creating a clownish mimic.
Before I left for the mission, I asked Polity why there wouldn’t be double, or triple layers of security. They answered, “Well, there might be. There isn’t any way of knowing. But in my experience, every additional layer of security is another cost point, another thing for soldiers to carry or remember. Brightsail contractors don’t use implanted signal chips either, so we’re clear on that. Like, you said that they had cranial implants, right? Those things are hell to link to each and every locker or door or whatever in the facility, it can cause systems cascades if a person so much as hiccups. So, they’ll probably just be a good ‘ol keypad between you and whatever you’re trying to get your hands on. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
“How?” I had asked. Polity showed me.
At Henry’s Crossing, I raised a shaky finger and pushed the key for “one” exactly six times.
The keypad pulsed, blue to a warning red. Wrong answer. I did not exhale. Polity had mentioned that these rigs allowed five inputs before locking, transmitting a priority warning message, and sounding an audible alarm. But the movie wouldn’t last forever.
Next, 123456. Another red flash.
“You usually won’t even need any kind of kit, milk run, mostly,” Polity had said with a forced grin.
If it wasn’t some braindead sequence, it had to be something memorable, that Green Eyes thought about all the time.
The numbers. From his tests. A sign of his hard work, but also exactly six numbers that decided his entire career path, from breacher to mercenary. I plugged them in.
Another red flash. Nope. I spent a moment with my finger poised above the pad, throwing glances over my shoulder, jumping at ghosts of footsteps, manufactured by my anxious ears.
Then… then I had another idea. It was all Green Eyes ever talked about, right? The entire reason he brought me here was for my cooking skills. Maybe I hadn’t even begun to consider how much of a superfan Green Eyes was.
I closed my eyes, let my fingers drift over the keypad. Felt the gentle depression of each number in sequence, click, click, click, clack.
The date the very first episode of Gastronaut released.
Red flash. I doubled over myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. My second to last attempt wasted on pure narcissism. The keypad flickered from red, but instead of a dim blue, it was now burning a cautionary, solar yellow. Last chance.
I had tried to squeeze him for numbers during our conversation, just like Polity had recommended, but I was kidding myself. You can’t just look someone, even someone who trusts you, in the eye and say, “what’s your mother’s birthday? If you had a favorite set of six digits, what would they be? I’m doing research for Gastronaut about the tastiest numbers, what numbers make you salivate?”
I focused on his words. What was important enough to make a code. What defined him? Did I even know? It could have been a birthday. I could give up, let the keypad reset over the next hour or so, give myself a few extra chances, but the window would be gone. The movie would end, the locker would stay closed, and I’d return not as a spy, but as an unpaid chef for Grac Au Mao’s enemies. Or the mercenaries would catch and arrest me.
What would happen to Polity and I then?
I thought fast, but without direction. I stared at the keypad like it was a blank page on an empty script. The grooves in my brain filled with mental static, with head noise, with self loathing.
Idiot. No primal voice or mushroom delusion to lead me out this time. I rose, and left for the hallway. If I could find Green Eyes, maybe I could talk to him through the stall door. Get a date out of him. Though, most likely I would only succeed in outing myself as an infiltrator to the one mercenary that didn’t immediately sell me out for the Duke’s bounty. Maybe Green Eyes would be sympathetic?
No. No, I saw how he treated Shah. No way. He liked me. Maybe he even had values. But he said it himself. He was proud of the work he did.
The thought sparked off my brain, touched off an inferno of a realization. I raced back for the keypad, as quietly as I could. I had a date. The day he left the breach team behind. The day he joined up with his mercenary company. It was… the day after new years, so… January second. And the year… he was 19 when he joined… he said he was in the breach team for a year and a half… I took my own birth year and compared our ages…
And I held my breath and punched in the sequence. 010231.
The keypad remained a cautionary yellow--and I felt like my stomach was going to implode into a black hole of gruyere.
Then it flickered green, luminous, vibrant, beautiful green. Greener than Green Eyes’ namesake. I got out of my own head--finally took a breath of that stale, dehumidified air. It felt like the longest I’d been dry in ages, at least since I came to rainy Therevatti.
The pod rotated inside its casing, exposing the power armor with a gentle gasp as air rushed to fill the vacuum inside. My rubber gloves squenked gently against the suit’s cuiss. I slipped my hand up and over the ceramic alloy rim and unzipped the interior pocket.
There it was--the fruit bar I had made for Green Eyes. Untouched. I removed it from its container, holding the pastry between my bright yellow gloves. I applied a little pressure, bent it until the crumb broke and the jam within parted--parted to reveal a storage drive, packed with code Polity and a team of guerilla programmers had been slaving over for weeks.
“Just get it into the server terminal, spacer,” Dain had said, “slip it into a port, leave it there for a minute or two, and then get rid of it. That’s all we need from you two. After that? We’ll be square. You can go wherever you want on or off planet, at least as far as Grac Au Mao is concerned.”
The flash drive was silver gray and… sticky, listeners. Sticky with jam from the local frichi berry, triple reduced with plenty of added sugar. I replaced the cookie in its container, and set it back where I found it inside the leg of his power armor.
Out into the hall, past the restroom, where Green Eyes was quieter, but still going through it. I ducked past the lounge, where I heard two actors shouting at each other. Whatever they were saying was drowned out by the sound of forty trains whirling in a cyclone of bassy gunfire. I picked up the pace, convinced the movie had reached its climax.
As a quick aside, it actually hadn’t. For um, research purposes, I checked out Freightland afterwards and that was just the mid-movie set piece. Somehow, the writers managed to escalate even further from that point, uh, but I hope everyone understands my confusion in the moment. Back to it.
Through the intersection, following the masking tape signs, towards the… the nerd hole. There was no door, just an open doorway revealing a room full of equipment and hardware I couldn’t begin to guess the purpose of. Stacks of equipment that blinked and whirred, cables that snaked from all directions, with small armatures that, with every minute, would adjust the position of one jack or another. A constellation of tiny lights, like frozen fireflies. They don’t teach you how to distinguish between towers of machinery in creative writing 301, listeners, maybe the five hundred series courses do, I don’t know, I never made it there.
I crossed in, plugged the drive into a likely port on what I thought was the main terminal, and waited. Counted, actually, under my breath. The only sign on the screen that I was having an effect, was a small sailing ship next to the text: “Loading drivers for Jingle Silverbell-LTY Portable Music Player.”
Then, a short time later, the phrase: “download complete!” flashed across the screen. I pulled the drive, and made for the door.
…and exited to find, of all people, Viking looking down the corridor. He stood in the light, leaning out of the lounge, head turned in the opposite direction. If he saw me skulking in the halls, if he found half an excuse… I was certain he would wring my neck, listeners.
Polity had told me that their trick to being sneaky was moving with speed and confidence. “Don’t let anyone see you blink,” they had said just before I left on the mission, “pick a direction, and move, any idiot can do it. Even you, Yasui.” It was our last conversation before I left, and they kept fussing with the cookie, trying to peer through the container, through the jam, at the drive beneath. To make sure that nobody else could find it. A funny scene, them glaring at a snack.
Viking was just one person between me and safety in the Cross. I was exposed, but if I made for the intersection, long strides to the four-way, where the corner would obscure me from Viking’s line of sight, I’d be home free.
“You!” Viking said, turning his head and seeing me instantly, “what are you doing over there?!”
I stopped dead in my tracks. Viking stepped towards me, pointed finger leading the charge. Where Ungerson was all long bones and manicured skin, Viking was shaped like frozen meat forced into a man mold. He looked almost flayed at the best of times, but anger bulged muscles where I once believed no muscles existed.
He moved at a fast walk, but though I backed away from him, he was on me in two blinks. One hand seizing my throat, the other reaching low at his hip, fingers folding around the outline of a sidearm, concealed holster over his obliques.
“I knew it, I knew Green Eyes was being too sweet on you for his own good. Where exactly are you coming from? What have you done, fucker?” His eyes burned beneath his gold flyaways, his tongue darted out, licked a scrap of meat that had been speared on his sharp, blonde stubble. A shadow crossed his face, and the gun came free of its holster, primed with a soft kah-chak.
“You rat fuck,” Viking shouted in my face. I could smell the garlic from the fondue, “you poisoned us, didn’t you? Didn’t you?! Who sent you?”
“I was…” I choked out, beneath his grip, too strangled to be frightened, “...looking for a bathroom.” His claw grip crushed down even harder on my throat, and my airway disappeared entirely.
“What kind of rock for brains moron would buy that shit, skinny?” Viking mocked, “bathroom’s behind me, it’s got a sign on the door. You’re way past it.” Viking gestured to the bathroom entrance with his weapon. A moment later, the door creaked open.
A weak, voice, trembling from fatigue, came echoing through the gap, “viking, why are you yelling, man? What is this?”
Viking didn’t take his eyes off me while he answered. He only moved his head to the side, so as to be better heard through the door, “we’ve been had. Caught your writer friend snooping around the Cross, saw him coming from the direction of communications, of the server room!” for a moment, Viking looked through me, calculating, his grip loosening on my neck just a hair, enough for me to gulp at a thin trickle of oxygen. When I breathed, I sounded like a broken flute.
“Hey…” Green Eyes said from the bathroom, “What’s that noise? Are you…” The door swung open, and I saw him, pale faced, forehead covered with a sheen of sicksweat. He was shivering, and his fatigue and shaking made him look five pounds lighter, gaunt around the cheeks. Still, Green Eyes had enough left in him to be furious.
“Viking! Viking, let him go, you crazy son of a bitch!”
Viking kept his grip, but relaxed his hand, whirling to face his comrade. I began coughing with a violence that rocked my entire back. “Green Eyes, would you shake yourself out of this for one second? He poisoned you! I know he poisoned you!”
Green Eyes staggered forward, one arm clutching his abdomen like he was concerned it would burst. But even through what must have been considerable pain, he grabbed at Viking’s arm, aiming for the one that carried his weapon. Viking evaded Green Eyes’ grip without difficulty, but released me. I fell back, retching, moving behind Green Eyes.
Viking’s mouth was twitching, he worked his lips like he was trying to speak. But his eyes weren’t wild. They were strained, sure, but something was dawning in them. Still, he kept his gun in hand, end to the floor.
“No way, no way this is going down like this, no way,” Viking murmured, with an incongruous calm. Inflamed as my throat was, I felt I had to cut in, other mercenaries were approaching, and I had to get some kind of story out there.
“I heard Green Eyes was having trouble in the bathroom, I… I just didn’t want to disturb him in there. I didn’t want to embarrass him. So I was hoping that I could find another restroom in the base,” I said.
“See?” Green Eyes turned to Viking, “there’s always--always an explanation,” A scowl crept across Green Eyes face, and Viking’s lips formed a line of contemp in response. “You need to start fucking thinking, man,” Green Eyes said, “you need to stop crashing through everything like a truck and actually use your brain!” Green Eyes gestured to me, “what, we’re going to throw away a tourist, the people we’re paid to protect because you don’t like ‘em? Because you’ve got a hunch?!”
“Green Eyes, I’ve had your back for three years. I’ve put up with this… this romanticism, basically since I met you. Don’t turn your back on us, man. Not for this puke.”
“Get out of here, Viking,” Green Eyes straightened his back, voice dismissive, “drop your stim dose a couple notches. Don’t make me write you up for this freak out.”
Viking looked to Green Eyes, looked to the other mercenaries, then finally looked to me. The hatred ran off his features, the awful tension in his neck abated. He holstered his sidearm.
“Nah, no need, boss. Enjoy playing tour guide. I’m done with this. I’m done with you,” He looked at the mercenaries again, “all of you.” And he walked away.
Green Eyes watched him leave, then whirled to me. He wanted to know if I was okay. I wasn’t, not really, but I didn’t tell him that.
“Oscar, I’m sorry about Viking. I’m sorry about this evening. I think you better head out. I’ll have someone escort you from the base,” he offered a sad smile, “thanks for coming, though. We’ve both gotten food poisoning from a celebrity though, right? So (laughs) now we’ve got that in common.”
A few of the mercenaries looked to each other. Jam visibly winced at what Green Eyes said, shaking her head.
“Thank you, Green Eyes,” I said, “but… I still need to use the bathroom.”
“Oh, ha,” Green Eyes laughed, without a speck of humor. “Well, should be free, for now. Take care, Oscar.”
I flushed the drive, then was escorted from the building. The mercenaries hurried me from the T-ray checkpoint in total silence. One of them complimented the fondue I made on the way out, but otherwise, we didn’t share pleasantries. The gate rolled shut, with me on the other side of it. Out of the Cross. I lifted my chin and felt the rain patter down on my aching throat, feeling the warm water on the bruises Viking’s fingers had left behind. I didn’t know why they trusted me instead of him. Maybe he had done this before and it was his third strike. Maybe it was because of the fondue, because I cooked for them. Part of me hopes it was, because that would mean that I had some measure of control over that evening. That I was a one man food truck, taking the wheel. That it… that it wasn’t just blind luck.
But that was it. I lifted my bike from where it leaned on the fence.
And then, I was out.
For Gastronaut, I’m Oscar Yasui, signing off.