Eric Flint - Rats, Bats and Vats

"Cognac is brandy, you pleb," said Nym, looking curiously at the strange thing on the toothpick.

Fal grabbed for the platter. "Gimme. Gimmeee! Food and drink at once!"

"Too late, Pistol got there first." Nym chewed the toothpick. By the looks of it, he had decided that the stick tasted better than that pickled fishy-roll.

The odd food had even mellowed Eamon. "Just watch out for those little black balls he's put on those round biscuits. Chip's admitted 'twas just buckshot softened in fish oil, indade."

"What about the big ones in that bowl? Some kind of droppings?" inquired Pistol, reaching happily for them.

Siobhan swooped down and took a spiral of smoked oyster and gherkin slivers. "Black olives," she said, distastefully. "Beware, I tell you. There are pips in them. Nearly broke my teeth on one."

"Besides, what kind of fruit is salty?" demanded Phylla. Suspiciously: "I think Chip was having us on."

"S'like t'ose snake eggs." The plumpest bat belched and pointed a wing.

"Pickled quail's eggs, O'Niel," said Chip, grinning over his wineglass.

O'Niel condemned them with a lordly flap. "T'ay taste just like the eggs in boot camp."

Melene laughed "The ones we used to bounce?"

"Myself, I like those little bits of fish with green bits in the middle." Doll burped in an unladylike fashion and swilled back some of the Director's Reserve '03 Cabernet.

"Which do you mean?" inquired Doc. "The ones with the crunchy green-bits or the dark red ones with the wrinkledy bits of stuff in the middle." He inspected the one of each in each paw, squinting through his spectacles.

"The crunchy ones. What did you call it, Chip? Oh yeah. Roll-ups."

"Are you sure you're not supposed to smoke them?" asked Fal. "And the other fishy ones? Tried those?"

Doll swilled back some more wine, dripping it down her chin. "Nah. I thought they was bad. I mean, going green in the middle. I was just being polite and not saying so."

Chip chuckled. "It's an anchovy rolled around a caper, you ass."

"That wrinkled green thing is not a caper!" Doll leaped on the table, and pirouetted clumsily. "Thish ish a caper!" Fortunately Chip caught her before she could land on the snack platter.

"Bah, drunken rat revelers!" Eamon's temper was rising. "They can think no further than the ends of their long noses. Wasters and drunks!"

Phylla fixed him with a slightly glazed eye. "You know what, Eamon? You're right."

The big bat was taken aback. "I did not expect…"

"And you know what else?" She winked at him.

"Er… what?" asked the bat, in the cautious fashion of one who has just received praise from very unexpected quarters.

"You're really dead sexy when you're angry." She hefted the bottle. "What do you shay we shlip off and get totally rat-assed together?" Another thought crossed her ratty-soft-cyber mind. "Or what 'bout flying? Never tried that. Fly 'nited." She giggled and slumped forward onto the table.

Eamon hung on the trellis wires, gaping. Bronstein and Siobhan were definitely laughing at him.

He was not a bat that took kindly to being laughed at.

Eric Flint

Rats, Bats amp; Vats

Chapter 12:

A little something.

THE MAGH' SCRAPER tried to do its task as far away as possible from the Expediter. The Magh' apparently found the chemical exudate from the Overphyle hard to bear.

The Expediter lowered herself into the saline recliner. The scraper continued ineffectually. Strange. The Expediter had to admit that it was odd that chemical intolerance was all that had kept the Overphyle from being dinner to the savage wild Magh', back in that primitive scorpiary. Thus one of the most fruitful partnerships in space had nearly floundered. There were many billions more Magh'-even these lowly Magh'tce, now. And the Overphyle had found the Magh' very profitable… to farm.

Still, this new species was proving a tougher carapace to crack than had been anticipated at first. The opposite of the Magh' in many respects. Individually, the Magh' were almost mindless. As a collective scorpiary-mind they were… a bit uppity. Not too uppity. The Overphyle took great care to remind them just who the masters were.

Now the humans, on the other hand, could be relatively sharp and incorrigibly disobedient as individuals, and yet were as stupid-if not more stupid, than individual Magh' when they attempted to act together. What did they call it? Mob intelligence. An interesting datum. A contradiction in terms. A shame the humans were unreliable. They were better chelate-scrapers than this purpose-bred Magh'. But implants would fix that, if the Overphyle decided any were worth keeping.

Appetite stirred in the Expediter. Changing sex involved considerable energy expenditure. Well. Chemical exudates might have stopped the Magh' eating the Overphyle… darts leapt from her tubes and ripped into the joints-space of the scraper's chela. Nothing stopped the Overphyle eating Magh'.

The creature twitched briefly and was still. Overphyle toxins were singularly effective on Magh'. The onset of paralysis was rapid. That was good. The digested protein always tasted better when the animal wasn't entirely dead. The Expediter retracted the barbs, pulled the harpoons back, then humped out of the recliner, dripping. She clambered over the victim. The victim was too stupid to understand more than pain, but the group-mind would know that a tiny piece of itself was being ingested. Know, and feel, and remember just who the master was.

The seven-sided mouthparts spiraled open. The Expediter poured her inverted stomach out of her mouth… and in through the harpoon hole into the faintly twitching victim, oozing her stomach into the narrow gap. Then, in the delicious half-digested soup inside the Magh' shell she began to secrete more enzymes, and feed. The Expediter felt herself relaxing. So what if the Magh' made poor chelate-scrapers? It was good to be back among proper subjects. And there was nothing like the feeling of a good meal outside your stomach to make you feel truly at home.

Eric Flint

Rats, Bats amp; Vats

Chapter 13:

They also serve who only jump and wait.

THE TELEPHONE JANGLED Conrad Fitzhugh's concentration. Preparing this report and these analyses was a thankless, fruitless task. Conrad still tried to turn in something he could be proud of, even if that mindless jerk Carrot-up would probably refuse to read it. Conrad had had no formal training for this. Before the war he'd been nothing but a relatively spoiled son of a Shareholder, with a penchant for danger-sports. Yes, his parents were unusual, in that Conrad's father's fortune owed far more to business acumen than to the modest size of his shareholding. But otherwise Conrad had not been that atypical. Now he wished he knew more about data analysis. The phone rang again. He ignored it.

Dammit. There's something going on here. Sector Delta 355…

The phone rang again.

"Answer it, Simms."

There was no reply, except another ring of the telephone. Fitzhugh remembered that Corporal Simms was out at satellite tracking, collecting pictures. Sat-trac refused to send it electronically. He was alone in the dank office. Even Ariel was out foraging somewhere. She couldn't sit still for too long. Irritated, Fitz snatched the instrument from the cradle.

"Intelligence," he snapped.

A gargantuan laugh came down the line. "Were you on the job, my boykie, that you took such a long time to answer?" The voice could have done a fair double as a foghorn.

Fitz's frown slipped. A smile actually began to ease through. "Bobby, you dumb bastard. You haven't bounced yet?"

"So long as I don't let you pack my 'chute again, I'll be all right," rumbled Major Robert Van Klomp of the 1st HAR Airborne. "Listen, boeta, I've got a big favor to ask. If I have to do one more damn `display-jump' I'm going to go mad and bite somebody's balls off. I begged and kissed ass to get this unit formed. Sure, I've only got one-fifth of the men I was promised, but I've trained them into a halfway decent strike group. Maybe they've even got a bit more backbone than a bowl of herrings."