Chapter 10 – My Squad Atricious (page 4 of 10)
“A femaphrodude?” I asked. “She wasn’t a fe-man, Dahm,” I said thinking as quickly as I could with the hangover of having a new chunk of chip embedded in my still-bleeding head. “Oh, you mean his blowhole?”
If you’re going to be in the face of the extraverse at every turn, you have to learn how to spin and condescend, and I was as sharp as any, having already completed my mail order doctorate in condescension, or as it had come to be known in recent years, philosophy.
Dahm pushed the buttons to order a chair down from the rafters, installed his ass upon it, pulled a grooming grate from a pocket his jacket may not have had a moment before, and began to brush the assorted fleshes and textures of his low cut, skin tight vest. “So you say, Tek, but one man’s blowhole is another man’s blowhole.”
The silence in the command bungalow was a cacophony of the screams of mutely swiveling control stools and the noiseless pounding of large, illuminated buttons silently pressed. Little N had taken out a puzzle to pretend he was solving, Burggl was trying to bring his sleeping left arm back awake. Hiding my discomfiture I asked, “Shouldn’t this ship be making some noise?”
The ship refused to mask the din of my defeat.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, “It’s not like I gave her any money.”
Melo, more brute than brain, obtusely chimed in “you gave her 9,000, Tek,” and suddenly all eyes were on me. I didn’t much care for awkward moments, except for the variety stemming from my barrel being pointed at the face of a traitor or foreign planet’s ursine queen. It was time to change the subject.
“Blast off, Cappy, full throttle to the stars already,” I confidently re-reiterated as if I’d never iterated it before.
I wasn’t the captain of the ship, nor would I ever be. Captain was no sort of title for an intergalactic man of mysterious mischief and repute like me. I’m nothing more than a humble soldier, and one who seeks nothing more than to serve the greater good, except when the greatest good is at hand. But on the Richter scale of grandiosity, I was right at the top, so although I’d never take responsibility for a ship, I always demanded veto power over any of its actions, and that included the procedures pertaining to the off blasting from any moon, planet or the most precarious of spaceport or station.
“Yes sir, Mr. Jansen,” piped Cappy like an animatronic Lincoln mumbling “force gore” from a blown speaker box.
Discuss this chapter in the forums.
Additional discussion here for lifetime members.
| 
Email this page
Printer friendly page
