Chapter 3

God Damn It!!! When we got back to the base, we found the door locked and the password had been changed. Why the hell would somebody do that? I rang the "doorbell" to get somebody to unlock the door for us, but after repeated tries over a span of 10 minutes, I had run out of patience. I didn't know what was going on, but I planned to fix this shit right away.

I was one of the few people who knew the override key to get the door to open no matter what the password had been changed to. Five seconds after I had punched in the override code, the door slid open, and I had my shotgun ready to blast the shit out of whoever might be playing games with our lives!

There were Cpl. Sharon Bixby and Pvt. James Potter standing in the doorway with their shotguns aimed at us. "What the fuck do you two shitheads think you are doing by blocking entry to the only safe house on this planet? I ought to turn you over to the enemy just to even up the stupidity on both sides. If we had been chased by the enemy or by dangerous animals, we could both be dead by now. Okay, Cpl Bixby, soon to be Pvt. Bixby, if she doesn't have a good answer, what do you have to say in your defense? And it had better be good!"

"Come on, Andy, don't be..."

"That's Sgt. Higgins, to you, Pvt. Bixby, and don't you forget it. As of now, I am CO (Commanding Officer) of this base until somebody of higher rank shows up. Show some respect or get your cunt back to the swamp. You can see how long the enemy puts up with your stupidity. Now, answer my question!"

"Very well, Sgt. Higgins, Jimmy, that is, Pvt. Potter and I were in the shower when we first heard your signal. We jerked on some clothes and picked up our weapons before we rushed to the door. I was just about to ask who you were when you managed to override the door lock."

"Okay, that's enough for now on that subject. Which one of you geniuses changed the password so that we were locked outside?"

Sharon said, "I guess that was me, Sgt. Higgins. I didn't know how to do it, but Pvt. Potter said that he did, so I ordered him to make the change."

"Okay, Potter, that lets you off the hook, temporarily. Pvt. Bixby, what caused you to change the password. You must have known that there were other humans active on this planet. Why did you attempt to lock them out of the safety of the base?"

Sharon started to cry. "Dammit, I don't know, exactly. I was scared to death and I was afraid that the enemy would get the password by torturing one of our people. If they did, they could get in, and I did not think that we could save ourselves from them."

"Okay, Pvt. Bixby, that sounds like the truth. At this point, you are now permanently Pvt. Bixby. I don't know about Potter, but I think that Pvt. Hamilton would be scared to death to take orders from you. You can earn your rank back, Pvt. Bixby, but you are going to have to work for it, and not just with your cunt!

"Pvt. Potter, how much electronics do you know? Do you think that you can repair our FTL radio. I sent a message to Earth several days ago, and I have not received a reply. Please see what you can do to get it back into operation."

"Sure, Sgt. Higgins, I can fix it if we have the proper parts. There are some things that a higher echelon is responsible for, but I can still fix the radio if the parts are in stock."

"Great, get started on it right away, and tell me in an hour what the status is. We need to report the situation to Earth as soon as possible."

In less than an hour, Potter was back with a report on the FTL radio. "There is nothing wrong with the radio, itself. The problem is in the antenna mount on the roof. The instruments show that there is a short in the feedline at the antenna mount on the roof. The only way to find the exact problem and to fix it is to go out there and physically take a look. I guess that's what you want me to do, Sarge."

"Yeah, that looks like our only practical solution, but you won't go out by yourself. The rest of us will go along to provide covering fire if you need it. How soon can you be ready?"

"It will take me about half an hour to gather up everything so that I can be sure of making only one trip out there. I'll let you know when I've got everything together."

"Okay, but how do you feel about Bixby? Do you trust her to cover you?"

"Yeah, she's okay as long as she doesn't have to make decisions. Honest, Sarge, how did she ever make corporal?"

"I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that it was from fucking the right officers. Okay, if you trust her, I'll send her up on the roof with you while Hamilton and I cover you from the ground. Go now and collect your stuff. We want to be damned sure that the job is finished before dark."

Potter is a good man who knows his specialty. He was ready in about 25 minutes, and the rest of us gathered up our weapons to make the trip outside. I led the way outside with Bixby behind me, next was Potter, and Hamilton was drag. We made quick work of getting to the ladder, and Bixby went up first with orders to sing out if she saw anything unusual.

Potter was behind her, carrying a hefty load of tools and parts. I didn't know much about what he was hauling to the roof, but I had to trust him to know what he needed. He had a combat radio with him so that he could tell me anything I needed to know.

"Sarge, I found the trouble. Some local varmint had chewed off most of the insulation around the connector to the antenna. I can replace that mess in a few minutes. The cable is fine, and it doesn't need changing. I have some goop to spread around to repel any more varmints, so everything should be in fine shape by 1800 hours tonight. Over."

"Okay, Potter, but let me know if anything unexpected comes up. Higgins, out."

Potter was just starting back down the ladder when Bixby screamed a warning. Something the size of an overgrown sea gull was diving at Potter's head from the rear. Bixby's stock went up a bit in my book when she let off a round of buckshot at the "bird" and managed to knock it out of the air. At least, she did her job and did not panic, though that scream may have had a little panic hidden in its depths.

The bird dropped to the ground practically at my feet, and I had my first look at what we came to call a "gull" for lack of anything else to name it. Yes, the damned thing had brown feathers and scales where it did not have feathers. I asked Sue to bag it and to take it back inside. I wanted to know if it was a suitable source of food when our stuff from Earth ran low. Our instruments could tell us that without any of us taking a chance on getting sick from eating the wrong thing.

We trooped back inside the base and Sue tossed the gull into the analyzer. She did not even have to remove the feathers or the skin: the analyzer could do that. The machine was quick and came back with a report in the advertised 18 minutes. The strange thing was that we did not get a simple yes/no answer. Instead, the analyzer asked us for a check of our blood. Well, that was unusual, but we had never had any trouble with the analyzer before, so we went along with the request.

This time, the word came back for us to supply a sample of human blood and not the samples of local blood that we had submitted. Oh, my God! What did that mean? That sent us all to the medical lab to have our blood analyzed. Twenty minutes later, we were all stunned to read the report that the blood analyzer projected that our blood was an amalgam of human blood and local blood. Sue, who was a nurse-technician took a sample of blood from each of us and ran a full analysis on it.

To make a long and probably boring story short, what she found was that our genome had fused with the local genome to make us a hybrid of human and the local creatures. The fine print was that we were no longer dependent on those special vitamin pills. Our bodies could now make the missing vitamins from local food. That was a tremendous relief, but a scary revelation at the same time. Sue postulated that we had eaten enough of the local food for the transformation to take place, but she was not prepared to speculate beyond that. Whatever else it was, we all thought that it was good news.