Instinctively, Thumper jumped. "Yes, Sergeant!" he said, scurrying for the office. The half dozen other recruits remaining in the barracks room looked at him with a mixture of mild curiosity and relief that they weren't the ones Pitbull had decided to harass during their final hours on Mussina's World. Then they went back to their reading, their card games, or whatever they had chosen to pass their remaining time before leaving Legion boot camp forever.
Even though Thumper had already gotten his assignment for Omega Company, the sound of the drill sergeant's voice was equivalent to a jolt of high-voltage electricity. Most of the other recruits had already been loaded onto ships headed for their new assignments. But Omega Company was on some isolated planet, a place without regular traffic. As anxious as Thumper was to join his new outfit, he would have to wait for transport to be arranged. And as Pitbull had already made clear, nobody was going to go out of his way to get a single bad-news rookie to a company full of rejects and troublemakers.
"Recruit Thumper reporting, Sergeant!" said Thumper, coming to attention just inside the office door.
"Close the door and sit down, Legionnaire," said the sergeant. He spoke in a voice Thumper had never heard him use. For one thing, it would barely have been audible beyond the confines of the office. For another, it didn't carry any of the menacing inflections he was used to hearing from Pitbull-in fact, he'd called him "Legionnaire" instead of some insulting nickname. And to top it all off, Thumper had never been invited to sit in the sergeant's presence before now. Wondering just what might be wrong, Thumper took the offered seat.
"I wanted to talk to you, so's you don't get the wrong idea," said Sergeant Pitbull. He had a strange expression on his face that Thumper couldn't quite recognize. "You know, and I know, that somebody set you up to take a big fall when General Blitzkrieg came to inspect the company. And if you think about it, you probably know why it happened."
"Some of the other recruits were mad at me for running the obstacle course too fast," said Thumper, nodding. "And for trying my best at other things, when they were happy just getting by."
"That's right," said Pitbull, nodding. "I knew you were smarter than the average sophont. You were showin' 'em up, so they decided they had to make you look so bad you couldn't ever recover from it. Except they forgot one thing. Or maybe they never even knew it."
"Forgot something?" Thumper was confused, now. "What was it you think they forgot?"
"General Blitzkrieg has a ripper up his ass about Omega Company," said the sergeant. "He thinks they're total screwups. What's more, he thinks their CO, Captain Jester, is the biggest screwup of all. So when he thinks he's got another troublemaker on his hands, where does he send him? Straight to Omega, natch."
"Yes, Sergeant, I gathered as much," said Thumper.
"I don't know if there's anything I can do to wipe this incident off my record..."
"Wipe it off your record?" Pitbull guffawed. "Why'd you want to do that?" He leaned forward and lowered his voice even more. "You want to know the dead-certain truth? General Blitzkrieg has been the biggest dorknose in the Legion since before I was a recruit, and that's damn near thirty years, now. I damn near hurt myself beyond repair trying to keep from laughing when he got that bucket of slop poured all over him."
"Excuse me?" said Thumper.
"You heard me right," said Pitbull. "The funniest thing is, whoever set you up there was doing you the biggest favor he could have done. I know people in Omega, and from all they tell me, it's the best damn outfit in the Legion for a heads-up guy to be in right now. You play your cards right, and Omega just might be the best thing that ever happened to you."
"Excuse me?" Thumper said again, still not quite convinced that what he was hearing made sense.
"GREAT GHU, YOU GOT THOSE BIG-ASS EARS AND YOU STILL CAN'T HEAR DIDDLYSHIT WITH 'EM?" roared Pitbull. Thumper almost reflexively flinched at the volume. Pitbull smiled and lowered his voice again. "You know those clowns outside are tryin' to listen in on us," he said, with an actual grin. "Gotta give' em somethin' to think about."
"Er-yes, Sergeant," said Thumper, still confused.
Pitbull leaned forward, and said, in an even lower voice, "The thing I wanted to tell you is, you're damn near the best recruit I've had in ten years. You need to loosen up some, but I figure Omega will do that for you. And you need to pay more attention to getting along with your buddies-no matter how good you are as an individual, it's how you play with the team that's gonna make or break you in the Legion. You hear me?"
"Yes, Sergeant," Thumper said again, wondering if he sounded as dull to the sergeant as he did to himself.
"Good," said Pitbull, pushing his chair back from the desk. "The other thing you need to know is that we found you transport to Zenobia, which is where Omega Company is based. There's a bunch of rich civilians taking some kind of damn junket to Zenobia, and somebody convinced 'em to take on a passenger, which turns out to be you. So you'll be traveling in style, which ain't so bad after all. Don't let nobody know it-it's supposed to be punishment."
"Yes, Sergeant!" said Thumper, considerably more enthusiastically now. "When do I have to be ready to depart?"
"You have to get on the shuttle to Wayne's World, oh six-hundred tomorrow morning." Pitbull stood up, took a deep breath, and suddenly his voice took-on its normal bellow. "YOU MISS IT, I'LL KICK YOUR STINKING ASS FIVE DIFFERENT WAYS, AND THEN I'LL REALLY GO TO WORK. NOW GET THE HELL OUT OF MY SIGHT, RABBITEARS!"
"Yes, Sergeant," said Thumper, one last time, and he scuttled out the door. It was a real job to keep from grinning as he came into view of his fellow recruits, but somehow he managed it.
"If that goddamn dog wasn't an interplanetary mascot for a clean green 'vironment, knowed and beloved throughout the galaxy, I'd've shot his raggedy ass four, maybe five times, right then and there," said Double-X. He was sitting in the Desert Lounge, Zenobia Base's bar for legionnaires, with a group of his buddies, sharing a cold beer and the story of his encounters in the wilds outside the camp that day.
"Su-u-ure, I can just see the story on the tri-vee news, Space Legionnaire Kills Beloved Environmental Mascot," said Street, scoffing. "With your picture-nah, they wouldn't put somethin' that ugly on. They'd put on Barky, the Environmental Dog instead. Even shot full of holes, he be a little bit cute."
"Cute?" Double-X slapped his hand against his forehead. "He gets his choppers in your leg, you tell me about cute then. That's the bitin'est dog you ever seen-you or anybody else."
"Well, 1 thought I'd seen everything in the Legion," said Slayer. "But when 1 drove up and saw Spartacus halfway up a tree, 1 about busted open laughing. If the captain hadn't been. there, 1 bet 1 would have. 1 didn't know Sythians could climb trees."
"More like, he flew up there on his glide-board," said Street. "You're right, though-if I'd seen that, I'd have bust open laughing, too."
"I don't think is funny," said Tusk-anini. "Barky try to hurt legionnaires. Captain must stop Barky."
"You Voltons must not have any pets," said Super-Gnat, sitting on a bench next to her huge partner. She grinned, then went on, "The thing is, Barky is kind of cute. 1 mean, kids allover the Galaxy have his holo in their rooms, and they send money to save the trees because of Barky. When 1 was a kid, 1 used to think it was really blurgin' how he could sniff out pollutants..."
"When you was a kid?" said Do-Wop. "Man, that's one long-lived dog... OW!" he yelled, as Super-Gnat punched him.
"Barky's genetically engineered," said Sushi, laughing at his partner. "They didn't want to have to replace him every few years, so while they were giving him the genes to let him sniff out methane and fluorocarbons and so on, they made him long-lived, too. If 1 remember right, he'd be going on eighty years old even if he'd never started space-traveling."