The Teragoid Incident

11. Use Sugar

Perez sat at the table in the minuscule mess on the SAR tug with his boss, Sevrinofsky. It'd been a long time since they'd eaten together. "So, do we wait here, or go back to the ship, do you think," as they lingered together over a cup of coffee.

"I think we need to wait at least 18 hours," said Sevrinofsky.

"They should have 4 more Cobras though, and we need them. You said a squadron was 6 Cobras, so we have one squadron. Doesn't seem like enough," said Perez.

They'd cleaned up the bugs outside the ship and ran patrols as the ship exited the flatzone, and circling around the relay for several hours before heading south to dock with the new fighter docking system they all put together. Perez went first and flew up to the rack that held the tank and slid it backwards into the cradle connected to the tank rack. They'd put about twenty cradles for Cobras on the old steel lattice. He popped the canopy on the little ship and climbed out. There were two snap on retractable cables on each arm of the cradle to attach to hooks on the ship. He'd had Reagan leave one tank on the rack and fill it with pure H2, rather than water, for refueling the cells, with hoses and an external fill. It hadn't taken that long to refit it in.

After hooking up his ship, he waited as the others docked and hooked them up one by one, then checked them out for damage. After making sure they were fine, he went in through the SAR airlock and joined the rest of the pilots for some food and a cup of coffee.

"What about Mei Lu? Did you hear anything, I heard she got hurt somehow," asked Perez

"The story goes that she was doing errands for Kosnar and somehow missed the alert. She's the Logroom Yeoman, but she's a YN2 in Ops, not Engineering. Cohen might have been in the suit when he gave the order to be in a suit or behind a shield and just assumed everyone got it. We'll track down what happened and try to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Wamamere is Exec right now, so don't worry about that," said Sevrinofsky.

"Hulk saved her, right," said Perez.

"Is that what you call you him? 'cause his name is Banner? Cute," said Sevrinofsky, "Yeah, so, after Muschivk broke up the rumble outside Aft SickBay, Banner got them all inside and Krunich calmed down. Krunich stabilized Mei Lu and put her arm on ice. I think Tunney went down after they cleared the ship and brought them both back up to Main Medical and Tunney is working on the arm right now. That was my last update. My guess is that she'll get a lovely couple of weeks in medical, and her arm will be good as new. I'm gonna put Banner in for a medal."

Sevrinofsky talked in this rapid-fire way that dispensed all the facts in the minimum amount of time. Perez thought it was cute. Perez said, "I believe the next attack will be a real one. The last couple have been sort of haphazard. My guess is they are going to invade our nest and steal our grubs. We need to get everyone into shielded, armored suits. Maybe not full up combat armor like ours, but some kind of defensible suit. An unarmored person is just food to them. I bet they think we are grubs, and the armored folks are adults."

"Um, what?" said Sevrinofsky.

"Trying to think like a colony bug. They don't talk to other bugs, they steal their food and either leave the nest alive or destroy it and take over," said Perez, "I don't think they feel any social attachment to their fellows either."

"And what does that get us," asked Sevrinofsky.

"Just musing. Wondering if there is any way to predict their actions. Thinking about hitting back," said Perez.

"We don't have enough Cobras either, but I can't really leave the relay unprotected, and don't feel comfortable with units here without a docking unit to recover them," said Sevrinofsky.