Chapter 4: With Friends Like These

My sleep was a troubled one, visions of stalking tigers and ravenous monsters haunted my dreams. Raz had crossed the line, her playful teasing had become serious threats, and the fresh scars on my chest stung as a reminder. When I awoke, Raz was stretching, her lean body and graceful movements drawing my eye once again.

I felt a surge of guilty arousal as I watched her from the corner of my eye, pretending that I was still asleep. Had she been serious about ‘fucking me’? Would she have gone through with it if I hadn’t managed to weasel my way out of the situation? What would that have felt like?

I squirmed uncomfortably as I imagined her heavy, toned body moving atop mine, a sheen of sweat making her skin glisten as her sumptuous breasts bounced free of their support and her-

Damn it, I needed to keep my head on straight. This was exactly what she wanted. Although I would never admit it to Raz, she had been right. I had never had a girlfriend. My childhood and adolescence had been spent on a farm in a rural area, with no neighbors for miles around. I had joined the Navy as soon as I had come of age, and my life since had been focused on the single-minded goal of becoming a Marine, leaving little room for relationships. The alien seemed to be able to smell it on me...

I banished such thoughts from my mind, sliding out of bed and starting to get dressed. I glanced down at my chest, examining the red trails that Raz had left in my skin, tracing them with my fingers. They had closed up already, but they still burned, and they’d definitely leave a prominent mark. It was as though she had wanted to carve her name into me, she wanted me to think of her whenever I felt a twinge or saw my reflection in the mirror. The medics could probably remove them, but what story would I tell them? That I had fallen chest-first onto a garden rake?

Raz ignored me as I left the room and made my way to the mess hall, where I grabbed a tray and filled it with with a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon. I joined my friends around their table, and they inquired as to why I looked so unrested. I simply told them that Raz and I had had a fight the night before, which wasn’t entirely untrue, and that we had come to an understanding. They seemed to accept that, changing the subject. Even when they had backup, nobody was especially eager to go toe to toe with the surly alien.

As I chewed on a strip of bacon, I saw Raz enter the mess. I tensed up, keeping one eye on her as she moved over to the glass counter, picking up a slab of nondescript meat and slapping it down wetly onto her tray. She glanced around the room for a moment, then locked onto me, stalking 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 to leave, getting away from the alien as quickly as possible.

There was no hope of her sitting on the human-sized bench, and so she sat down cross-legged on the floor beside me, putting her tall frame at about the appropriate height. She reached over and picked up what looked like a piece of raw steak in her claws, beginning to gnaw on it as the rest of the table’s occupants slowly slipped away.

“Raz?” I asked, shooting her a questioning look. “Why aren’t you sitting with the other Borealans?”

I glanced over at their preferred table, where the aliens were eating as a group. They hadn’t even acknowledged Raz’s presence. They seemed to be ignoring her, not a solitary ear was pointed in our direction.

“I lost standing, remember? They won’t accept me.”

“So ... why are you sitting next to ‘me’?”

She muttered something under her breath that I couldn’t quite hear, and I asked her to speak up.

“I don’t know anyone else,” she mumbled, “I don’t have any other friends.”

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 outside of her pack. She had no friends at all now that the other Borealans were giving her the cold shoulder. She certainly didn’t deserve to have any friends, but she looked so miserable as she hunched over the table, taking a bite out of her meat and chewing it forlornly.

“That’s not what friendship is, you know,” I chided. She glanced over at me, red juice dripping from her chin.

“Why’s that?”

“Friendship isn’t when people are afraid of you. When they stop being afraid of you, then they stop associating with you altogether, right?” Raz didn’t respond, so I pressed on. “A friend is somebody who likes you for who you are, not because of what you can do for them, or because they’re scared of what ‘you’ll’ do to ‘them’. Remember when that Krell defended me back in the recreation center?”

That got a reaction out of her, and she scowled, taking another bite out of her steak.

“Yeah, I remember,” she muttered.

“Well, he wasn’t doing that because he was afraid of me, or because I had higher standing than him. He did it because I was kind to him and he wanted to protect me.” I watched as she picked a piece of meat from between her teeth with one of her pointed claws, unsure of whether she was even paying attention. “If you want to start making friends among the other species, then you’re going to have to start being nicer to people. They aren’t Borealans, they won’t respond to intimidation or appeals to social standing, that will only make them angry. Hey, are you even listening to me?”

She stopped chewing for a moment and glanced over at me.

“Yes...”

“Okay then. Well, like I said, try being nicer to people. Make way for them when they pass you in a corridor rather than expecting other people to move for you. Be polite, don’t insult people, don’t make fun of them. Maybe try to learn some human games so that you can break the ice and start socializing with people. Humans love playing, it’s practically all we do.”

“Borealans play games too,” she added.

“Alright, good! That’s somewhere to start, at least. I can teach you to play cards or pool, you only have to ask...”

She went back to her breakfast, occasionally glancing up at the other Borealans as she chewed. Was that expression resentment? Longing? It was hard to tell. I had underestimated how hard being excommunicated from her pack had hit her, she was sulking, despondent. I might feel the same way if I had suddenly found myself alone in an unfamiliar environment, with no support structure of any kind. Social bonds seemed to be central to Borealan life, perhaps she was like a wolf without a pack now.

Again, I felt a pang of undeserved pity, but the stinging in my chest made me think twice.

After breakfast, we headed to the gym. The Staff Sergeants insisted that we be in peak physical condition at all times, and they wanted to get us back on a strict exercise regimen. After spending months on cramped starships and far lesser space stations with little opportunity to exercise, some of the recruits had gotten a little soft around the middle. They had given us a manual in basic training that included exercises that could be performed even in the confines of a tiny cabin during space travel, and I was pretty sure that a lot of the techniques had been developed in prison, but few people had kept up with the regimen without the careful supervision of the Drill Sergeants.

We had toured the building a couple of days prior, and I was once again impressed to see an Olympic-sized swimming pool housed in a space station, but we had overlooked the exercise equipment during our last visit. The room was massive, sporting all kinds of machines. There was everything from treadmills to climbing ropes. Best of all, rather than heading to the showers after working up a sweat, you could take a dip in the pool instead. It was only a short walk away.

Vasiliev had the human recruits begin on treadmills and pullup bars, while some of the trainees elected to swim lengths instead. Cardio was the most important thing to focus on right now, we were there to stay in shape, not to work on our Mr. World routine.

The Krell dove into the pool, swimming around like giant, scaly torpedoes. They were so agile under the water, in stark contrast to how sluggish and plodding they were on land, pushing themselves along with their powerful tails. They could hold their breaths for impressive amounts of time, sinking low to the bottom of the surprisingly deep pool. It was actually a little deeper than one might expect, catering to the needs of the aliens, no doubt.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the Krell even needed to exercise, they were inhumanly strong and resilient simply by virtue of existing.

I had expected to see the Borealans taking to the pool too, they seemed to have an affinity for water. But instead, they headed toward the more elaborate weight training machines. They loaded weights onto barbells, slotting themselves into appropriately scaled-up hammer strength machines and abdominal benches.

Curious, I elected to move a little closer, running on a nearby treadmill so that I could observe them. Why were they lifting weights rather than doing cardio? Why was that more important for them?

Just like in the mess hall, Raz was standing conspicuously apart from her former pack. She trained with dumbbells that looked large and heavy enough that they could probably have served as barbells for a human.

We had stripped off our uniforms, most of the recruits wearing some combination of tank tops and exercise shorts, or leggings for the women. Raz was down to her tight shorts and her tube top again, putting everything on display, and the other Borealans were similarly dressed. They didn’t seem to care about modesty very much, and I was momentarily transfixed by the buffet of impressive female physiques before me, glad that most of my blood was flowing to my legs rather than to other places...

The aliens were lifting an incredible amount of weight, their strength was superhuman, and yet something was off about them. They almost looked like they were moving around in low gravity. Despite being very fit by human standards, each one of them sporting a set of abs that could have been used as a washboard and thighs that looked like they could squat a truck, none of them really had the physique of a professional bodybuilder. Sure they had biceps as large as my head, but when I scaled the aliens down to normal proportions in my mind, it just didn’t add up. Maybe their muscles were somehow more efficient than ours?

“Wondering why they’re not doing cardio like the rest of you?”

I stumbled on the treadmill, almost falling as I noticed Vasiliev standing beside me.

“Didn’t see you there, sir,” I panted. “Yeah, what are they doing?”

“Borealis has thirty percent higher gravity than Earth standard. If they don’t keep up with their resistance training, they’ll start to shed muscle mass pretty quickly.”

“That explains a lot,” I replied, watching Raz as she lifted a set of weights that looked as large as a pair of manhole covers. Maybe that was why she was so developed, the crushing gravity of her home planet meant that just walking around was probably a form of resistance training. She wasn’t a gym rat, her body had been sculpted by nature, not by exercise machines.

Vasiliev leaned over the controls of the treadmill, turning up the speed, and I began to jog faster.

“Keep it up, recruit.”

“Yes sir,” I panted, sweat beginning to dampen my tank top.

The Staff Sergeant moved off to supervise some of the other trainees, and I continued to run as I kept an eye on Raz. She was still working on the dumbbells, her perspiration soaking her tube top and making it cling to her figure, droplets of it following the contours of her abdominal muscles as they bulged from beneath her skin.

My breathing became heavier, my shoes impacting the treadmill as I struggled to keep up with the speed that Vasiliev had set. Maybe I was more out of practice than I had realized...

After a little while, Raz seemed done with her sets, replacing the dumbbells on their rack and rolling her shoulders. She walked over to another machine, a set of dipping bars this time, but one of the other aliens beat her to the punch. The Borealan wrapped her furry hands around the padded bars, beginning to raise herself off the deck, lifting her body weight up and down.

Raz was undeterred, marching toward the machine and loosing a sound that resembled a cat getting its tail caught in a door. The other alien stopped what she was doing, dropping to the deck and turning to face her.

I wondered why Raz didn’t just move on to any one of the other machines, there were plenty of unoccupied dipping bars. It seemed as though she wanted this particular one, however. She bared her teeth as the two aliens faced off, their ears flattening against their heads, their tails whipping back and forth behind them.

Raz was an inch taller than her opponent, and the other Borealan seemed less sure of herself, backing off a little as she advanced. Just when I was beginning to wonder if a very literal catfight was about to break out, the rest of the pack came to the rescue. They crowded around the Borealan, hissing and spitting at Raz, who gave as good as she got. I was amazed that their relationship had deteriorated to this point after such a short amount of time.

The noise was starting to attract the attention of the Staff Sergeant now. How would he break up a fight between the aliens? Before he saw fit to intervene, however, Raz backed down. She gave her former pack one last growl, then moved off to one of the other machines. Knowing nothing about Borealan social interaction, it was hard to guess what had just happened. Raz had said that she was the most dominant, so might the mere act of allowing the other alien to use the machine that she had set her sights on be construed as a sign of weakness?

Even so, I couldn’t imagine how she would win back the respect of her pack by hissing at them...

When everyone had completed their workout routines, we headed to the showers to wash off the sweat that we had worked up. Vasiliev had worked us pretty hard, and as tired as I was, it felt good to get back into the old routine.

The showers were co-ed, as were most facilities on the station, but Raz mercifully elected to shower a good distance away from me. I was used to being around women who were nude, or in various states of undress, it was unavoidable in the Navy. There just wasn’t the room, nor the time, to give everyone complete privacy. But Raz and her ilk were different, they were just so ... impressive, that it became a distraction.

Once we were dry and dressed, Vasiliev gave us time to wind down, and to get some food in us before we started our studies later that day. Now the real work was beginning, we would be learning about the enemy. Their physiology, their tactics, their technology.

As the group left the gym and began to make their way back to the barracks, Raz took my arm roughly and pulled me aside.

“Teach me about guns,” she whispered, once she was sure that the others were out of earshot. She seemed embarrassed to even make the request of me.

“You want me to teach you how to use the XMR platform?” I asked, and she nodded vigorously. “Alright, I can ask Vasiliev for clearance to visit the firing range. I’ll go find him, he was still in the gym last I saw.”

We were granted permission to visit the firing range, and when we arrived, we found it mostly deserted. It was lunchtime, after all, most of the personnel would have been eating. There were two Marines occupying a couple of booths, however. They weren’t wearing their black combat armor, but I was more than familiar enough with rank insignias to recognize them. They were testing out weapon configurations, or perhaps just trying to stay sharp. Raz and I moved to the far end of the range where we wouldn’t disturb them.

“So, how far did you and the other Borealans get when you stayed behind to train with Vasiliev?” I asked. She had already fetched her abominable XMR, and she handed it to me, letting me examine the mess that she had made of it.

“He made us drill with them over and over,” she complained. “He wouldn’t tell us how best to configure the guns, he said that if we didn’t understand what we were doing wrong, it wouldn’t do us any good.”

“Yeah, that would be like giving you a cheat sheet with the answers to a quiz,” I replied as I turned the heavy weapon over in my hands. “The trick isn’t having the correct answer, it’s understanding how to arrive there.” The aliens had to learn through experience, or they wouldn’t be able to modify their weapons on the fly, which was the whole basis of the platform. “Okay,” I said, handing the weapon back to her. “Why don’t you show me what you can do?”

She snatched the rifle from me, perhaps taking my suggestion more as a challenge, walking up to one of the booths and shouldering the weapon. She growled and snarled with frustration as her XMR bounced and kicked. Her most accurate shot merely grazed the edge of the paper target, and I suspected that was accidental. Her anger wasn’t doing her any favors, she looked to be one step away from breaking the gun over her knee. She had probably trained with Borealan rifles from an early age, becoming quite proficient, I had no reason to doubt that what she said was true. But this sudden shift to an entirely unfamiliar weapon system had invalidated all of that practice, erased all of the muscle memory that she had built up.

I called her back over and had her place the weapon down on a nearby table.

“So, you’re doing several things wrong here,” I began as I pointed to the different components. “This isn’t like a Borealan gun. I’m assuming that you use powder weapons, breech-loaders, right?”

“Yes,” she replied, blowing an errant lock of her orange hair out of her face. “We use brass casings filled with gunpowder.”

“Alright, well when you fire a bullet down a barrel, not all of that energy is directed forward. Some of it is directed backward, which creates recoil, right? With an XMR, the recoil doesn’t come from the bullet leaving the barrel, it comes from the opposing magnetic force. The slug is fired using magnetic repulsion. You ever play around with magnets? You know when you turn them in opposite directions, and they push each other away? That’s repulsion. When the tungsten slug leaves the rail in the receiver, before it gets captured by the magnetic coils in the barrel, it rocks back on dampeners. That means that the recoil is coming from further back than you’re probably used to.”

I reached down and removed her barrel, checking that it was cool enough to touch first, not wanting to burn my hand. I lay the heavy piece of metal on the table, gesturing to it as I continued.

“See how thick this barrel is? This is a barrel intended for light machine guns. It’s thick and heavy because it needs to dissipate a lot of heat from sustained firing. It looks big and scary, but it’s designed to be used by a Krell, or on a frame equipped with a bipod. You won’t be able to hit the broad side of the barn if you’re trying to use this on a rifle, it will jump all over the place.”

I wandered over to the back of the room, sifting through the selection of attachments on the shelves and in the crates. After a minute of searching, I returned with the part that I wanted, setting a long barrel down on the table.

“This is what you want for a long rifle, which is what I’m assuming you were trying to make. Something that’s similar to the Borealan variety, right?”

Raz nodded again, paying more attention now. She may have finally realized that I really did know what I was talking about.

“This barrel is lighter, but it has a denser concentration of magnetic coils. This one isn’t designed for sustained fire, it’s designed to fire a single shot with very high muzzle velocity. That means that the projectile will leave the barrel traveling faster, it’ll go further, and it will hit harder. But if we have more electromagnets, what else do we need?”

The Borealan considered for a moment, her tail waving back and forth.