Chapter 7: d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis

Caleb and his three companions returned to the Harrad Colony on Pern. They were still too young to understand the difference between paladins and musketeers, but they would. Michael and Jubal would see to that. As they grew, they played, explored and learned.

From age three on, Caleb and his mates grew and gelled into a team. Thanks to the snap-on tools concept, there was little that an unaugmented child could do that Caleb couldn’t. When roaming his yard, then the nearby fields, then wherever, he snapped on treads to replace the wheels he used indoors.

Pern was home, but Pern was wild, unknown, and unpredictable. The plains surrounding the new colony held a plethora of new and interesting animals and plants. There were grazers, predators, small animals and large, occupying every environmental niche. When they were outside their home, Caleb and his mates wore both stingers and Browning Buckmark .22 pistols replicated from Mama Hannah’s favorite. Jubal, riding along, had a stinger that he could aim, but Caleb had to pull the trigger or one of the Musketeers had to yell “fire!”

They were never completely alone. Their Praetorian Guard was always near and frequently a participant in their adventures.

Caleb’s life was full of achievements and firsts. Early on, he was a reader, a planner, and a doer. Partly because he needed very little sleep, his vocabulary and his knowledge far outstripped that of children several times his age, and frequently, many adults’. The anticipated genius was emerging, and he, with his three companions, graduated from the children’s versions of Alexandre Dumas to the adult, unabridged versions. He, in fact, was comparing the original French version of The Three Musketeers to a recent English language translation.

He and his mates began to think of themselves as a team – as Musketeers. They were heroic figures bound to fight the Sa’arm and help save humanity and their allies, the Tuull. The four Musketeers acquired the Tuull’s disdain for the Darjee and considered the Darjee to be analogs of the Cardinal’s Guards in their favorite book. Thus, they ‘knew’ the Confederacy would prevail despite the Darjee, not because of them...

Caleb’s mental development was complemented by his unique physical ‘education.’ When he was five, Momma Dora and Uncle Jubal began teaching him how to program and use nanites to regulate his body. By the time he was six, he could adjust his adrenaline, ensure his blood sugar was at the correct level for a given activity, and make sure impurities were washed from his blood. Testosterone – yep, he could control that as well.

Externally, he had his snap-on attachments for almost any task. No, not that. That still had to be done by his original equipment.

The Musketeers spent time with their Tuull contemporaries on Rukbat and Tuull, and broadened their team identity to include them. At first, the human contingent was confused by the Tuull inability to consider attacking or harming a sapient being. Physical capabilities differed, but that was true within the human group, too. The humans adapted – the Tuull adapted.

Frequently, strategy games replaced overt ‘war’ games. Chess, Checkers, and Go stretched their minds; miniature golf, hide and seek, and – oddly enough – target shooting fostered more subtle physical abilities. They bonded, but then, that was the intent.

Soon after his sixth birthday, Caleb and his Musketeers became the first humans on Pern to acquire a non-Earth type pet. Yet again, they were working their way through Dumas’ Three Musketeers, and their play of the day was the breakfast on the summit of the Saint-Gervais bastion. They had roamed well over three miles from the colony’s nearest building and were enjoying their picnic. The three oldest had dismounted from the powered tricycles they had demanded in order to match Caleb’s mobility.

Caleb’s Praetorians had been assigned the unwelcome role of the attacking Rochellais forces and were ‘massing’ on the other side of another hillock located between the two groups.

Out of a clear, cloudless, robin’s-egg-blue sky, lightning struck a point on the top of the Praetorian’s hillock, and the breeze, blowing in the Musketeers’ direction, whipped up a wall of flame in the wheat-like plants. The Musketeers mounted their ‘steeds’, but the growing width of the flames made escape to the sides unlikely. Caleb turned to the side, used his right hand to crush an attachment, then shot high voltages through bare wires to spark a fire as he rolled to his right parallel to the flames. After about fifty yards, he stopped and returned about half way to his starting point.

There he called to his companions, “By the time the big blaze gets here, most of the fuel will have burned away by the fire I just started. If we follow the burned area and keep away from the edges, it will be hot, but the main fire should pass on both sides of us. Let’s move slowly and keep our breathing shallow.”

He was right. The blackened ashes were still hot enough to damage the rubber tires on their vehicles, but not enough to more than singe the humans riding higher. The principal danger seemed to be the fire’s sucking oxygen from the air around them. Luckily, the wind pushing the original fire swept to them, and as the blaze hit Caleb’s impromptu firebreak and died, the flow of air continued and brought the much-needed oxygen.

A predator cub-kit-whatever survived the ‘grass’ fire but lost its dam and siblings to the fast moving blaze. The quartet came upon it when examining the devastation after the fire had passed, and the area had cooled further. They heard a mewl from under the corpse of a dead beagle-sized adult. The Praetorians arrived to find the Musketeers pulling the presumed parent away, where they found the kit surrounded by its dead siblings, the various bodies having protected it.

Undertaking its survival, Caleb named the fanged, rabbit-like, highly unattractive creature, ‘Buffy.’ https://www.flickr.com/photos/goob712/2912952811. He carried Buffy and its dead parent and siblings back to the colony’s veterinary center, where the alerted Mama Maureen met him and used her ranching experience to teach Caleb how to feed, wean, and raise an orphaned animal. From the dead mother’s sunken teats, milk was drawn and replicated. Needing little sleep, Caleb was usually awake and near when Buffy stirred, needing to be fed.

Buffy could tolerate the smell of humans, and anyway, Caleb’s shell usually had almost no human odor. The little animal became his constant companion and learned, for Caleb’s sake, to join the Musketeers in their adventures, antics, and explorations. As luck would have it, Buffy thought that doggies smelled good, kitties, not so much. The feelings went both ways, and it was dogs that often roamed the field with the companions.

The colony’s animal scientists named Buffy’s species ‘DopeyJoes’ after Heinlein’s Stobor in Tunnel In The Sky, and wanted to cage him/her/it for study. Wasn’t going to happen! They had the bodies of Buffy’s parent and siblings, and that was the line drawn, in blood if necessary.

Buffy grew to be a fierce hunter. He frequently gifted his – yep, Buffy was a ‘he’ – adopted family, and consequently the animal scientists, with all manners of vermin and other up to medium-sized fauna. After much fawning and petting from the Musketeers, he learned to deliver his captives alive and relatively unharmed.

As she had done with the family’s cats and dogs, Dora fitted him with an implant. She taught him not to mark his territory, at least indoors, but neither she nor anyone was able to break Buffy from eating the family’s shoes.

Caleb spent the better part of his seventh year with the Tuull, accompanied by the Musketeers, Buffy, now-sponsor Lisa Marie, and one of Lisa Marie’s concubines. With her chaperonage of the quartet and her role as F’Lpper, she was fast becoming one of the foremost human experts, authorities on the Tuull.