Chapter 4

My sleep was a troubled one, images of tigers and monsters haunted my dreams, Raz had crossed the line, her playful pranks had become serious threats, and the scars on my chest stung as a reminder. When I woke, Raz was stretching, her lean body catching my eye again. I felt a surge of guilty arousal, had she been serious about “fucking me”? Would she have gone through with it? What would that have felt like? I squirmed uncomfortably as I imagined her heavy, toned body moving on top of me. She was right, although I would never admit it to her, I had never had a girlfriend, I had grown up on a farm in a rural area with no other children or neighbors to interact with, and my life since had been focused on the single-minded goal of becoming a marine, leaving little room for relationships. She seemed to be able to smell it on me. I banished such thoughts from my mind, and got dressed. Raz ignored me as I left the room and went to the mess hall for breakfast. My friends inquired as to why I looked unrested, and I simply told them that me and Raz had had a fight the night before, but had come to an understanding, which they seemed to accept. Even when they had backup, nobody was especially eager to go toe to toe with her.

As I chewed some bacon strips, I saw Raz enter the room. I tensed up, keeping one eye on her as she moved over to the glass counter and picked up some slab of nondescript meat, slapping it down wetly onto her metal tray. She looked around the room, saw me, and came over to my table. She sidled up next to me and slammed her tray down, almost making my human neighbor jump out of his skin. He wolfed down one last fried egg then made an excuse and left. Raz was hunched down over the human sized table, not quite comically oversized but clearly too large for it to be comfortable for her. She took a chunk of meat in a claw and began to gnaw on it.

“Raz? Why aren’t you sitting with the other Borealans?” I looked over to their table and they were eating in a group, they had not acknowledged her presence.

“I lost standing, they won’t accept me.”

I nodded understanding, they certainly seemed to be ignoring her, not one ear was rotated in our direction.

“So why are you sitting next to me?”

“I don’t know anyone else.” She mumbled through her meat.

I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her, as much of a nightmare as she was, she had completely failed to socialize and had no friends at all now that the Borealans were giving her the cold shoulder. She certainly didn’t deserve to have any friends, but she looked like a sad child sitting there hunched over the table.

“That’s not what friendship means.” I chided. She glanced at me, juice dripping from her chin.

“Why’s that?”

“Friendship isn’t when people are afraid of you, when they stop being afraid of you they stop being your friends, right?”

She didn’t respond, and continued to chew her steak, or whatever it was.

“Well, a friend is somebody who likes you for who you are, remember when the Krell defended me? He wasn’t doing that because he was afraid of me, or because I had higher social standing than him, he did it because I was kind to him and he wanted to protect me.”

Raz picked a piece of meat from between her teeth with a clawed finger.

“So if you want to start making friends among the other species, you have to start being nice to other people, they aren’t Borealans, they won’t respond to intimidation or appeals to standing, that will only make them angry. Are you even listening to me?”

She stopped chewing for a moment and looked at me.

“Yes...”

“Ok then, well, try being nice to people, make way for them when they pass you in a corridor, be polite, maybe try to learn some alien games so you can socialize, humans love playing, it’s practically all we do.”

“Borealans play games too.”

“Ok, good, that’s somewhere to start.”

She went back to her breakfast, occasionally glancing up at the other Borealans, was that expression resentment? Longing? I couldn’t tell. I had underestimated how hard being excommunicated from her pack had hit her, she was sulking, miserable, I might feel the same way if I had suddenly found myself alone in an alien environment, and social bonds seemed central to the Borealan cultural experience. Again I felt a pang of undeserved pity, but the stinging in my chest made me think twice.

After breakfast we did some obstacle course drills in the gym, Vasiliev insisted that we be in peak physical condition at all times, and the course was grueling. The physiological differences between the species meant that different performances were expected from each, and there were multiple routes to choose from, the Krell, being far too large and heavy to lift themselves off the ground, instead elected to surge through the mud and concrete pipes on the floor of the course, the humans vaulted and climbed over the nets and logs, while the more agile Borealans deftly leaped between them using their powerful legs. Despite Raz’s disgraced position, she was still clearly the strongest and fastest of her species and maintained the best time among them, snarling angrily at a Borealan who had attempted to get by her, she was still fiercely competitive and seemed to have hyped up the aggression to new levels. Next was swimming, something that all of the species enjoyed. The Krell used their powerful tails to swim through the pool like scaly torpedoes and could stay underwater for minutes at a time, while the Borealans lurked near the surface under manes of wet hair, lazily drifting and occasionally engaging in mock attacks, surging from the water with surprising speed to bat at eachother. The humans did lengths up and down the free lanes of the Olympic pool, treating it more as a serious workout than recreation.

When everyone had completed the required activities and showered, we had some free time in which to eat and relax before we started study later in the afternoon, now the work was truly beginning and we would be learning about enemy tactics, physiology, weapons and spacecraft.

As the group left the gym and made their way to the barracks, Raz grabbed my arm and pulled me aside.

“Teach me about the guns.” She demanded.

“You want me to teach you how to use the XMR platform?”

She nodded vigorously.

“I can ask Vasiliev for clearance to visit the firing range, I’ll go find him, he should still be in the gym.”

We were able to get permission to visit the other quadrant where the firing range was housed, and we took an automated cart that dropped us off at the door. There were only a couple of other marines there testing out some weapons configurations, or perhaps just trying to stay sharp, and we moved to the far end where we wouldn’t be interrupted.

“So how far did you and the other Borealans get when you stayed late to train with Vasiliev?” I asked, hefting her unwieldy XMR and examining the mess she had made of it.

“He made us drill with them over and over, it made us angry, he wouldn’t tell us how best to configure the guns because he said if we didn’t understand what we were doing wrong, it wouldn’t solve our problems.”

I nodded, it made sense. They had to learn through experience, or they would not be able to modify their weapons on the fly, which was the whole point of the XMR platform.

“Ok, why don’t you show me what you can do?”

Raz growled and snarled unhappily as her gun bounced and kicked, her most accurate shot merely grazed the edge of the target, and I suspected that was accidental. Her frustration was not helping, she had probably trained with Borealan guns from an early age and become quite proficient, and this sudden shift to an entirely unfamiliar weapons system had invalidated all of that work. I took the gun from her, and laid it on the table.

“So you’re doing several things wrong here. This isn’t like a Borealan gun, the recoil doesn’t come from a bullet being fired out of a barrel, there’s no gunpowder, no explosion, the kinetic energy is coming from the dampeners on the rail, see these springs here?”

I pointed to two twin coils on either side of the rail gun’s barrel, she leaned in to see more closely, and nodded.

“When the tungsten slug leaves the barrel, the whole assembly rocks back on these springs, and they dampen the recoil, so that kick is coming from lower down the barrel than you’re used to, and the recoil is more horizontal than vertical, see? Your barrel is too heavy, you’re trying to make a long rifle, right?”

Raz nodded, attentive.

“Well, see how thick this barrel is? This is an M.G barrel, it’s thick and heavy because it needs to dissipate heat from rapid firing, it looks big and scary but it’s designed to be used with a bipod, you won’t be able to hit anything trying to use such a heavy barrel on a rifle, it will jump all over the place.”

I wandered over to the back of the room and sifted through the attachment crates, and after a few moments came back with the part I wanted. I held up the long, ribbed barrel so Raz could see it.

“This is what you want, this is thinner, but see how the barrel is long and ribbed? Those ribs are electromagnets, if you clip that onto the front of the standard rail gun barrel it will extend the electromagnetic array, more magnets means faster muzzle velocity, which means the bullet travels faster over a longer range and hits harder. But if we have more electromagnets, what else do we need?”

Raz looked thoughtful for a moment, her eyes scanning the crates.

“A bigger battery?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed, and she looked pleased. “More electromagnets means they will drain the electrical charge on the battery faster, so we need a bigger one. Want to go find us one that will fit?”

She nodded, and made her way over to the crates, digging through them for a few minutes. She came back with the correct battery pack, and clipped it to the side of the frame.

“Now lift it up and give it a try.”

She hefted the rifle, sporting its new attachments, and aimed it. Her eyes widened.

“That feels better!” She said, looking down at me. “You weren’t lying monkey, you really know all about this stuff, huh?”

I blushed, Raz had never complimented me before, and I’d never seen her appreciative of anyone or anything. I snapped out of it and went to retrieve a box of scopes.

“Ok, let’s find what kind of range best suits you.”

We spent about two hours training with the gun until I was satisfied that Raz understood how to make good use of the platform, she had gone from being unable to so much as glance a target, to hitting targets dead center in the head on follow up shots. She had eventually conceded that the XMR platform was more accurate than the Borealan slug throwers, and was now eager to play with her new toy. She had settled on a truly massive long rifle that almost looked like a spear, the bayonet affixed to the muzzle furthering the illusion. Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure she didn’t intend to use the damn thing as a spear...

Raz had a spring in her step as we walked back to the mess hall, she had overcome a setback that had genuinely seemed to undermine her self-confidence, and she would now be placed clearly at the head of the pack when it came to marksmanship and XMR familiarization.

“Hey, Stanley.”

I stopped walking and looked up at her.

“Earlier today, you were talking about friends, right? You said that if someone only does what you want because they’re scared of you, it means they aren’t your friend?”

“Yes I believe I said something like that.”

“Are you scared of me?”

She sounded unhappy, what had brought on this sudden change of attitude?

“Well, considering that you brutalized me last night, yes I’m scared of you. I’m not a Borealan Raz, I’m too fragile for you to treat me that way, you might have really hurt me.”

“That’s just how we do things on Borealis, you were supposed to submit but you didn’t, and now I think maybe humans just don’t understand when they’re supposed to submit and when they’re not. You kept challenging me and I felt like I had to force you to recognize my dominance.”

I crossed my arms and watched her carefully, this sounded more like a justification than an apology, but it might be the closest thing to one I’d get out of someone like Raz.

“All of the other Borealans who I thought were my friends, they were my pack, my family, they all turned their backs on me, when my father sent me away to training the last words he said to me were “Don’t disappoint the clan”. Now I think maybe Borealans don’t have friends, what we call a friend is just someone lower in the social hierarchy who does what we want because they fear retribution. Even when I tried to dominate you, and I hurt you and frightened you, you still wanted to help me, you still wanted to be my friend. I didn’t understand why.”