Fabienne Gschwind - The Fallen Heroine

I was relieved. I would do well on a science exam and so I nodded in agreement. "Then you've also heard about Mendel and his peas." Immediately I affirmed, remembering the lessons on heredity and breeding.

"Wonderful, then you must have had sex education in school?"

Her icy blue eyes stared at me. I was embarrassed and felt myself blushing.

"Very well, then fill this up and get it to Doctor Selger." I looked at the plastic box she held out to me. I think my face contorted into an incredulous grimace.

"... W ... w ... what?", I then brought out.

"Lad, don't make such a fuss. You're a clever fellow, aren't you? It will be obvious to you, won't it, that the gene that allows us to smell Repros is incredibly valuable. But ReS sailors usually die before they get around to fathering children. So sooner or later, the gene would die out. Once a month, sailors donate their sperm and female sailors are forced to donate egg cells."

I fell silent as Tartelette held out a retro porn magazine to me, and the little tin with my name on it.

"You know how to do it, right?"

I think that made my face fully blush, because I felt the burn all over. Hesitantly, I nodded. "Very well, then fill up the little tin!"

"Now?"

She hefted the rolled-up magazine over my head.

“No! Tonight, on your own time! You're not getting paid to have fun here!" With that, she turned around laughing.

I didn't dare go back outside, because now I wouldn't survive a joke from Gabin or Thibault.

After what felt like an hour, I thought I was no longer blushing and stuck my head outside. Emily had just returned and a police officer was walking purposefully to Tartelette's office.

"Hey ReS!", it was the friendly policeman, Gerhard, our contact man to the police barracks. Because we shared the building with the cops. "We're going to play a round of zapper shooting later, want to join us? We could use some teammates. There's cake afterwards too!" he tried to bait Tartelette, but she was a willing participant from the start.

"We'll join in, it's good target practice. Will you bring us some game zappers ... we don't have any."

Logically, our normal zappers were much more powerful than the ones the police used. Gerhard nodded and disappeared again while Doctor Segler stowed the blood tubes and said goodbye.

"Emily are you playing?"

"No, mon Capitaine. I don't want to shoot anyone, I think that's stupid."

I dared to slip quickly into the room, for at the moment no one was paying any attention to me. It was good that everyone was distracted and Tamara was staring at Emily relentlessly.

There was a crack as Thibault came into the room with his exoskeleton just behind me. He had overheard the conversation and reared up behind Emily. "When the captain says you raise the sails, you don't argue, you do it, sailor!" Tartelette laughed and everyone joined in.

By the way, the fuss about sailors and ships was not far-fetched, because the ReS was not under the army in France, but under the navy for completely illogical reasons. I had learned that yesterday from Thibault.

After everyone had calmed down enough, Emily looked up.

"I'll do it if you order me to," she clarified, and Tartelette looked at her icily. Thibault had told me that both women regularly engaged in catfights, and I wondered if this was it. But after Emily lowered her eyes, Tartelette eased away from her.

Fortunately, no alarm came and we played round after round with the cops. To my great regret, there were only three female officers in the crew of twenty. Of those, two were maybe barely thirty, so way too old, the other already had a boyfriend... So I would have to look elsewhere for a girlfriend....

The police commander was satisfied with my shooting performance and praised me: "The boy is really good. Hey kid, aren't you going to join us?"

"No way, Colonel, Matthis is mine!" my captain countered immediately and I became quite blissful that she was using my name for the first time.

Finally, there had to be a wrestling match. A new policeman was persuaded to compete against Tamara. Although Commander Arlette was known as a fearsome fighter, this did not impress the big, strong commissar. He was confident of victory and threw himself at the smaller Tamara. I grinned as my commander unceremoniously took him down and forced his arm into a police hold until he gave up. Unbelievable how many tricks she knew!

Everyone hooted and laughed. What fun! And I asked Tamara to teach me to fight that well, too. "About 30 years of experience and daily training," she told me her secret. "Just do what I tell you, kid, and you'll learn everything."

I resolved to do just that, to emulate Tamara as best I could.

I dreamed in the night of Tartelette as queen and Thibault as king, while I was general of a rat repro army, trying to save a sinking boat with Gabin. Afterwards, a repro came at me with a stiff step and opened his jaw unnaturally wide. I fired, but my zapper didn't work. Then its teeth dug into my throat. Zombie! Yes, that's what they called the people who became repros. Because they corresponded exactly to the cliché of the mythical revenants.

In the morning at the shooting training I ran for the first time a simulation with zombies - or politically correct said: genetically reprogrammed humans - and I killed all of them without any problems.

That put my mind at ease.

Finally, Gabin called for me. We were about to leave to train at a larger shooting range. I got into the vehicle with the others. Tamara had a laceration on her forehead that she didn't have yesterday.

Gabin asked her if she had done another wrestling match. Our commander shook her head:

"Didn't happen until after."

Yves, the one driver, turned to us and grinned:

"Well, was it a bar fight or the bouncer robot at the 'Bar Rouge' again?"

He collected a painful slap from Tartelette.

"We have kids on board. So don't talk nonsense." She smiled at me and then said, "It was quite harmless, a little ballet accident with my dance partner when we were practicing a 'pas de deux.' I slipped out of the gentleman's hands while doing an arabesque."

I was now really wondering who was taking the piss out of me. I could imagine a thrashing Tartelette in a barroom brawl much more easily than wearing a white tutu while dancing ballet. I must have looked really confused and everyone was laughing.

"We have a shooting range?", I finally asked after we had been driving in silence for minutes.

"Yeah just past Chatelion Plage," Emily said, checking some aggregate on her combat armor, "usually we go shooting and then swimming and ..." - "And then eat waffles," Gabin completed the program.

"STOP!" screeched Tartelette all at once. The driver slammed on his brakes in shock and Tartelette sprinted out of the vehicle. "Repros?", I asked, startled.

"No, Pineau," came the reply from Emily, who was examining another piece of her equipment. "Tartelette would never freak out like that over repros ... she only does that when she sees something edible."

And sure enough, after a few minutes, Tartelette returned with several bottles of Pineau. This is a local specialty alcohol, something in between cognac and red wine. It makes you drunk as hell, because it contains a lot of alcohol, is sweet, and you drink it ice cold. So you don't even notice the high percentage and cup too much of it too quickly....

Finally we arrived and unpacked the equipment for the shooting exercises. But there came another alarm: a repro cat in the middle of a village on Île de Ré.

Yes, if it's an outside operation, cows in a pasture for example, you can take your time. But when the critters are already running through the villages, things get dicey. The driver hit the gas. He had all the other automatic vehicles shooed aside by the control center. So he could speed through without any traffic problems.