Marines of the Imperium: Fragment 1
“So, there I was with these humans, naked ape things with back problems…”
“Give it a rest, sergeant,” objected the lieutenant. “Don’t fill the rooks’ heads with your nonsense. Again. And I’ll thank you to refer to them properly as Terrans.” He left the room, hooves clicking on the deck, knowing he would be disobeyed but moderately curious as to how the trainees would take to the information. It was all perfectly accurate, as he knew full well. He had written the script, though the sergeant’s improvisations gave it much-needed color. Of all the races encountered in the Imperium, the Terrans were the only ones intentionally kept to themselves as much as possible. This rule held for all things save the service, as all citizens were equally eligible and required to serve. It was their madness that made them dangerous as well as useful and the lieutenant had no great resources to spare for rooks getting hurt or killed. So it paid to weed out the ones in advance who were too curious about their fellow citizens.
Back in the ward room, the sergeant huffed from his third mouth and continued with the first as if nothing had occurred.
“So, these humans. Terrestrial world, lots of water, something like two-thirds covers it. But they can’t breathe the water. But they go out in it and on it all the same. They get it in their lungs, or any fluid, really, and it kills them. They’re rather select on what they can breathe. Just the air. And most of that’s nitrogen, which they don’t even really need.”
The amphibian students from Gllrp shifted to an embarrassed shade of orange. The lone Margulian, to whom nitrogen atmospheres above 4% were certain death, gagged.
“And then there’s the acid rain. Stuff eats up buildings and they go play in it. Just keep putting up new buildings. And that’s when the weather’s nice. Big storms called hurricanes can reach 350 kph and radii topping 900 km. Little storms called tornadoes are pencils in comparison but can reach almost 500 kph. Hells, there are tiny tornadoes caused just by the heat variations in the atmosphere that whip around the deserts and savannahs and animals ignore them.”
The Beltanes objected to all this as absurd. Such would destroy even land-based life forms and would have made their home world’s evolutionary history impossible given the aerial nature of their species.
“Just you wait, kids. You’ll meet storm fliers. They get in little aeroprop fuselages with external mechanical engines and go into the centers of these things where it’s all worst. But it gets better. Note I said they have deserts. They do. Deserts cover almost one-third of the land surface, hot and cold alike. Somehow they manage to cross these deserts on foot or on four-footed beasts, leading vast herds of grazing animals. I don’t know how they do it, but they make a living at it. And then the cold deserts. Wow! One whole continent is nothing but that.”
“Not much. It’s a bit hard for them. Temperatures get down to -90°C and winds can be as much as 330 kph.”
“Of course they did! Lots of them. They kept sending more. Took four local centuries to get some of the bodies back.”
“OK, now you’re either lying or they’re insane. How’d they get citizenship again?”
“Not lying, I swear by my mother’s pouch.” One did not do well to doubt such an oath from a Quorg, not least from an experienced fighter like the sergeant. Citizens had died for less with their killers exonerated in Imperium courts. The students mostly subsided but a Horvath had a question.
“You said they also have hot deserts, though. How hot?”
“Something a bit above 55°C. They manage. Sweaty as all hells, though. And the smell! Ugh. For a species with no pheromones, they sure do manage to stink. Something about epidermal bacteria.”
“Then how do they communicate for mating?” The Xorgby’s translator device, usually a calm, even-toned rendering of the scents it emitted, somehow managed to sound disgusted.
“They call it romance. They go to exotic locations like volcanoes and avalanche zones and have fun and ask one another to get married.” The students were agog. “You heard me right. They go to volcanoes, love seeing the fireworks, they say. There’s even this one city on their home world that was plastered over by one and it’s a tourist attraction these days. Then the avalanche zones. Lots of snow and such. They get on these little flat poles and go whipping down mountainsides, sometimes flying up into the air and smashing back down. Great fun, they say. Nothing but gravity power to make it all work. I can show you quadvideo of them, ‘skiing’ they call it, with billions of tonnes of snow flying after them like it was nothing. I didn’t believe it ‘til I saw it in person.”
“So how did they become citizens? Did their world government get some kind of exemption?”
“World government? Ha! They’ve got something like two hundred local governments, squabbling with one another, sometimes using nuclear weapons, sometimes worse stuff. Once they got bored with being killed by their planet and the animals, they got really good at doing it to one another.”
“Are they mad!? Surely the Imperium would quarantine such a world if not obliterate it.”
“They are mad by our standards but perfectly functional by theirs. It lets them survive. And they’re not just on one world. By the time we reached them, they’d colonized every scrap of rock in their home system and a dozen neighbors. Yes, each colony has its own government, too. Something they call ‘revolution.’ I’m told it’s nasty business.”
“So how’d they get in?” Nargis-hei were notorious pacifists. The two present were only here as part of the drafting quota necessary for Imperium membership and were engineers rather than fighters.
“We need them. Those bastards can survive anything. And, if they don’t on the first go, they figure it out on the second or the second hundredth. They don’t stop. If we hadn’t let them in, military projections had them beating the Imperium within a century. Today, they’re part of us but we still keep them at arm’s length. The Gllrp cream that lets you folks visit dry worlds? They modified their sunscreen for it. Yeah, they get nasty burns and even cancer from their own star. The Xorgby translator? Them, too. Seems their lack of pheromones made them spend centuries at figuring out scents, natural and artificial, to cover their stink. Their air scrubbers keep the nitrogen low in our ships so Margulians can breathe. They don’t need the nitrogen; lungs can’t even process it. They get enough in food. It’s just how their planet worked out. The chiller the Horvath cabins have was them, too. Something about chilling the carcasses of slaughtered beasts as they shipped them across oceans to be eaten elsewhere. Gross, yeah, but it is what it is. They still do it, too, so don’t accept any dinner invitations. The Beltane wing struts for high winds? Look up wing-suits and hang gliders when you get a chance. And you Nargis-hei, what do your parents do?”
One answered promptly, “My father has a respectable position as a lawyer for the Imperium’s criminal defense division.”
“Then you owe them something, too. We got the idea of both common law and a right to a defense from them. It was that or keep losing to them in the combat arenas in one-on-one combat. Only the Zobnians stood a chance against them and they always ended up psychologically scarred. The emotions were so intense the big lunks’ telepathy circuits fried. They even killed a few Quorgi, I’m told. They civilized us by being better warriors a few hundred years back.”
“Why are you telling us all this? Why are schoolchildren kept ignorant if these people are so amazing and so dangerous?” the other Nargis-hei demanded.
“Because you’re going to be working with them. And because, if you think about it, ignorance makes sense. These madmen saved us in a real way and made a genuinely galactic Imperium possible with their ability to survive anywhere, or at least to give it a few dozen tries. And all that tech? They just gave it to us. Didn’t barter or anything. They saw a need among our people and they said, ‘We have an idea.’ That’s usually a scary thing from them but they helped most of the time if you weren’t too cautious or curious about how they got the idea in the first place.
“They also integrated the service. Before about four hundred years ago, each ship was its own thing with its own crew, segregated out by species. It made the plumbing a nightmare but they’re excellent plumbers. Some have a god called Mah-ree-oh; he’s a plumber. I don’t have to tell you about the civil wars the old way made possible. Not no more, folks.”
“When do we meet one?” the Gllrp, who had most managed to regain a skin tone indicative of composure, asked.
A door off to the side opened and an unfamiliar form walked out, with medium-dark skin showing only at face and hands, the rest being covered in a singlesuit and shoes. A tuft of some material grew from the top of its head in a shade of orange-red that would be obscene on almost any other species in the Imperium.
“Funny you should ask. Kids, this is Henrietta. It’s a female, I think. And she’s your new boss. Don’t let her talk you into anything stupid. She’s the one who took me skiing.”
“Sgt. Causrt, that’s a base canard and you know it. You asked me what it was all about and then insisted.” Turning to the trainees, “I’m Lt. Henrietta Montez. I trust everyone’s had their shots? Good. You’ll need more,” began the Terran female. “We’re discovering new diseases all the time. The newest nasty little bug seems to be something dredged up from the tundra permafrost global warming thawed out. It’s unicellular, sort of, the egg heads are still arguing about it, and digs into host cells and takes them over to make more. Really hard for the immune system to recognize when it spends 90% of its time inside the host’s own parts. Fevers have been recorded up to 43°C. Not fun. Kinda leaves you scrambled if you’re lucky.”
“This is something on the base world we’re heading to?” asked one of the Marines.
“Oh, no. It’s from my home world, Earth, or Terra in the Imperium almanacs. Billions of little bits of nastiness and most of them don’t care if you’re local or not. Some of them are worse for you guys; deadly while giving us a minor case of sniffles. Don’t even ask about the megaviruses. Those things are bigger than some cells. And some of them have integrated themselves into our cellular structure, our very DNA, over evolutionary time scales. There’s really no way to tell when one will pop out and start offing you folks. Luckily, we’ve got practice at making vaccines or at least treating symptoms. We have a pandemic two or three times a century. Over a billion died in the last one on thirteen worlds before we figured it out. That one popped up from a cave a volcano opened up for the first time in a million years or so. I’d be glad to tell you more, but shots first. Come on. You folks have about a hundred thousand things that can kill you that I wouldn’t notice.”
The trainees were not looking forward to this experience.
