Grog troops: An easy path to promotion and power for any human with a military background is to volunteer to serve as an Officer of Xeno Forces. High ran f( and its powers and privileges come quickly to volunteers for the OXFs, but at the cost of a social stigma. Mixing with nonhumans leaves OXFs in a strange netherworld, secretly despised by those they fight for and openly by those they fight against.
Though the rumors of bestial mating rituals and cannibalism are unfounded, and can usually be traced back to Freehold propaganda or melodramatic fictionalizations, there's no denying that OXF attract their share of bad apples. Men who can't win promotion or fit in elsewhere sign up for OXF training, where standards are looser and faults overlooked.
Of all the odd troops OXF have led - or tried to lead - the actions involving Big Mouths evolve the most consistently chilling accounts. Sometimes the only evidence of one of their attacks is a strong fishy odor, bloodstains, and a few bitten-off heads, hands, and feet missed after the seaside scrum and feed. Almost ungovernable, and known to turn on their OXF leaders in victory, defeat, or starvation, they are perhaps the most bloodthirsty Grogs to fight or lead.
Yet it was these dangerous oddities that David Valentine led into one of the most daring actions of his career.
* * *
Valentine stood on the steady deck of the old Japanese factory-fishing ship, renamed the Redeye Run, in its permanent Puget Sound moorings in the east passage around Vashon Island and tried not to barf.
He'd smelled rotten fish before. He'd smelled sewage before. If it was possible to mix the two and come up with a third odor worse than the two component parts, the Big Mouths had discovered it in their hovels within the hulk.
He lifted his gaze from the open cargo hatches of the ship and looked at Vashon Island with its herds of sheep. The Big Mouths, when they wanted a change from seafood and crustaceans, had the run of the flat, muddy island and its flocks, stranded there for that purpose.
"Why this heap of junk?" Valentine asked.
"Mostly because the freezers still work", Finn Troyd said. Calling him "Finnegan" was a gilt-edged invitation to a punch in the mouth, and judging from the behavior of the OXFs on the ship, that was the civilized option. "You have to hand it to the Japs - they build industrial equipment to last. We've got a big supply of frozen emergency food. The last thing you want to do is run out of rations when you're handling Big Mouths".
Valentine nodded.
"Ready to go down and meet the gang?"
"I guess I'm dressed for it". Valentine, with the titular rank of captain, didn't bother with "sir's" - no one in the OXFs did.
They both wore old woolen pants and sweaters, covered by a layer of waterproof overalls and thick green plastic boots.
"Grab your S and S and let's go, then".
By "S and S" Troyd meant shotgun and shockstick. The shockstick was almost identical to the ones Valentine had seen and used in the Southwest, save that it had a longer and heavier rubberized handle.
They went down into one of the holds. The side of the ship was punctured below the waterline. Scale and rust gave some color to the old sides, and the barnacles and whelks were making inroads into the water pooled in the bottom of the hold.
The smell was even worse down here thanks to the confined space. Valentine looked around at the staring bright red goggle eyes of the squatting and lounging Big Mouths.
They were hard to describe. Scaled like fish everywhere but the mouth and belly, they had huge triangular heads that tapered off to thin hips, where they were equipped with the long rear legs of a frog, ending in flippers and residual digits - almost useless for gripping, according to Troyd. Short arms, mostly used for climbing out of the water and pivoting on land, had webbed, gripping toes. They had blue green backs and pale, tartar-colored bellies.
The hold echoed with the sound of their breathing, as they sucked air through gill-like openings: slee-kee, slee-kee.
They liked to position themselves against an object, an underwater rock or log, with their rear legs folded. They could execute fair-sized leaps even without something to push off, but when properly "sprung" they could cover thirty yards or more in a lightning-flash hop.
Valentine watched a larger Big Mouth come up through a hole in the bottom of the ship and crowd another one out of the way with a few threatening snaps of vertically hinged jaws.
"What keeps her afloat?"
"One of each of the holds, forward and rear, is full of buoyant stuff, and the slop barges to either side are fixed permanently as camels. Marker barrels, Ping-Pong balls, flotation foam from old life jackets and airplane cushions, coconut coir, just about anything guaranteed not to sink. You could rip out the whole bottom of this ship and she wouldn't go down. At least I don't think she would".
Pools of filth rested in the shallow water lapping in the hold.
"They like it dirty down here, don't they?"
Troyd shrugged. "The shit feeds the slime. Little fish and crabs feed off the slime. Bigger fish eat the little fish. The Big Mouths eat the crabs and bigger fish, leading to more shit. It's a regular circle of life".
A Big Mouth splashed around in the filth, wiggling its rear hips and hunching its back. "Lying around, eating, and shitting, that's about all they do when they're not in training".
Valentine noted that the full-grown Big Mouths had stainless steel rings at their forehump between the eyes and in a fleshy taillike growth between the legs.
"What are the rings?" he asked.
"Front one's a towline or tether line. You'll see how those work. Rear is attached to some gonad tissue - that's a control line. About the only way you can direct them is to yank 'em by the balls. But haul too hard on the reins - they'll swing around and try to bite yours off".
Troyd let Valentine absorb that factoid and then continued: "Okay, we've seen lying around and shitting. Let's go look at the eating and training".
They took a flagged motorboat over to a sheltered bay between Maury and Vashon islands. OXE, mostly male but with a few women, stood on little floating platforms heaped with white buckets, or paddled around in sea kayaks, or were pulled about lying on floats Troyd called "boogie boards".
"Hey, Finn, can I borrow your ring?" a man called from a platform. "I'm going into the city this weekend and I could use a little flash".
Troyd laughed. "You'll have to bite it off like that whatsit in the old movie. How are they working?"
"Good. Eager. Donaldson lost one this morning, though - it attacked him. The others already ate it. They didn't get a frenzy going, probably the big breakfasts you're issuing".
"Glad to hear it". Troyd tossed a thermos of coffee to him. "Be nice and share for a change".
"We're going to have to get you a sea suit", Troyd said as they pulled away from the platform. "The water's pretty cold in the bay this time of year".
He pointed to a platform next to the shore. "That's training. You'll learn the hand signals easy enough - there's only sixteen of them. We fire flares when we want them to attack. For the BMs, that is. There's another dozen or so the handlers use to keep in touch with each other".
"What about at night?"
"Same signals, with chemical glow sticks. The BMs actually respond better at night. I think they can see the glow sticks better than they do hands.
Same thing with the flares. Just don't pull your flare pistol early - they'll see it and get all idgitated and go nuts because they think it means food".
"I need to know everything about capabilities. Especially speed in water over long distances, and on land".
"On a long haul they average, um, fifteen or twenty miles per hour. That varies depending on currents. They slow down a bit in really cold water too".
"And on land?"
"Land they move along pretty good, a fast walk. But they leave a trail like a mudslide. There's the smell and they lose scales pretty easily, so pretty much any idiot knows when some BMs have been through. When am I going to hear more?"
"What's in the buckets?"
"Positive reinforcement. The BMs go nuts for pork. Dog too, but not so much as a good fatty pig. We give them pigs' feet, snouts, heads, ears, all that stuff, when they do something right. After a successful action we'll usually roast a hog or two to treat everyone".
"I think I read somewhere that physiologically, human flesh is a lot like pig".
"They eat that too. They're always eager to go into action to get a bellyful. You've never seen creatures so eager for a fight. They don't give a damn about casualties either, just means more eating on the way home".
"Any land training going on now?" Valentine asked.
"Yeah, up by those old houses".
"Can we land this thing and take a look?"
"Sure. We'll even show you how to give a couple orders. Just watch your fingers when rewarding. Toss, don't give. These ain't a bunch of backflippin' dolphins".
* * *
Valentine spent the next six weeks training with the OXFs. They equipped him with a Chinese SG carbine, reliable enough but not
much good beyond fifty yards on autofire or a hundred shooting over open sights. They accepted him as one of their own. OXFs saw a lot of wanderers pass in, decide the work wasn't for them, and pass on again to something easier - like lumberjacking.
He answered a few questions about Catalina Island, and retreated behind the old reliable "That's classified" when probed too deeply, though most of the questions revolved around the weather and the amount of sunshine. He hemmed and hawed during a couple of equivocal probes about needing people with experience handling Big Mouths back on the island.
One of the trainers opined that the Big Mouths wouldn't do well there, as they were cool-water creatures, but another man claimed the eastern shores of Florida were thick with thriving BMs.
He spent his days cold and wet and his nights in his fish-reeking quarters on the Redeye, with his hands and arms slathered in lanolin to restore moisture and keep his skin from sliding off the bone. The creatures' odor was all-invasive, all-pervasive, and seemed to be the one thing that quieted his appetite.
As he slept he got the uncomfortable feeling someone was watching his dreams along with him.
Eventually he laid out a detailed plan for Troyd, a route into the mountains that avoided the river-watch stations. It involved a series of upriver journeys and then short overland hikes, always to the north, where a new river would be picked up for a push of a few miles more inland, then another short overland journey. By this long, counterclockwise turn, they could hit the Snoqualmie upriver from the Outlook, unguarded by dams, falls, or nets.
"The BMs can do it. It'll be hell on the men, though. That's a lot of time in some very cold water. We'll need to bring chemical heat".
"How secure is Vashon Island?" Valentine asked.
"No one hangs out there if they know what's good for them".
"Good. I'd like to use that old airfield there. It's about the right size for the target. I was poking around in it the other day to check the interior. With a little fixing here and there, block one door and put in
another, we could get the corridors right. We need to rig some lighting and get some interiors. Can you ask Silas about some drywall and some workmen?"
"Jeez, Valentine, these are BMs, not commandos".
"The less left to doubt, the better. Now, the last thing I need is a moon chart..."
While construction went on, Valentine spent his mornings on endurance swims with the Big Mouths. He practiced "driving" paired BMs behind a sea kayak, mile after mile, first up and down the coast of the sound, then up the White River.
Troyd worked out the logistics of the overland part of the raid. The BMs were used to short hauls in tractor-trailers, but the OXFs had to get them worked up to an hour or two.
Valentine agonized over the timetable with the man Troyd decided on as second-in-command, Lieutenant Burlington, another Canadian down from Vancouver. They started making test swims at night, taking forty Big Mouths up the lower end of the White, then camping on the old mudslide damage from Mount Rainier, then spending the day in a lake, then traveling overland a couple of miles more.
"What about getting them back ?"
"If they get back, they get back", Burlington said. "They're basically expendable".
That simplified matters. Valentine had a hard time feeling much sympathy for the fish-frogs. At the first sign of injury to a fellow, the others ate it. A military operation deep behind the opposing lines became a good deal more practicable if one didn't have to worry about returning the troops.
"We've got to think about our getting back. I say we go downstream on the Green River...".
On Troyd's recommendation they added a third officer to the team in case illness or injury removed Valentine or Burlington. Holly Nageezi, a tight little bundle of muscle who never seemed to feel the chill of the sound, had been an athlete for, of all things, a women's Roller Derby team. She'd been away from her quad on a night when
one of the Action Groups hit, slaughtering every neighbor and friend she had.
Bad luck struck just before the jump-off. They lost three Big Mouths from the ones trained to go into the mock Outlook, when on a trial run in, Valentine forgot and pulled his flare pistol too early as they approached. The BMs became, in Troyd's words, "idgitated", and started attacking one another when he didn't release them right away.
Valentine talked with Burlington about replacing them with Big Mouths from the pool. "Fresh ones would probably just do what all the others do. I think it would be safe to bring them".
"But these have gotten used to going a couple days without feeding. Maybe inexperienced isn't the way to go. They might lead the others astray".
In the end, after talking it over with Troyd, Valentine made the decision to go with just the twenty-seven.
Then Burlington deserted on a dark, late January night, three days before the new-moon weekend. Nobody could say how he had slipped away.
He left a note. Troyd showed it to Valentine but kept it a secret from Nageezi. Burlington had suggested that the whole operation was a one-way trip for the human handlers as well as the Grogs.
Troyd and Valentine informed Nageezi of her rise to second-in-command and she seemed oddly pleased. "Doing's easy. Having someone notice, that's difficult", she said.
They inspected the gear together at a vacant Tacoma dockside warehouse that served as their jumping-off point, and saw that their team of twenty-seven BMs had a heavy breakfast of sheep-with-hooves-removed. Valentine had his carbine, a silenced .22 automatic he'd picked up at the downtown armory, and a heavy diving knife with a built-in wire snip, sharp enough to cut the leather leads between his kayak and the Big Mouths in case of trouble. He oiled everything and placed the guns in waterproof bags.
"Nap?" Nageezi said as the hours counted down to when the
trucks would be loaded. She pulled her silenced .45 out of its holster and patted a spot next to her. "We're going to be doing it in the field".
"So get used to it now".
They nodded against each other, but it seemed to Valentine that neither really slept.
Loading the Big Mouths into their covered livestock trucks was comforting in its routine, indistinguishable from the dozens of times they'd done it on long training runs. Valentine rode in the first truck with a pair of experienced drivers, Nageezi in the second. A third truck followed, there in case of mechanical failure, carrying one more meal for the Big Mouths in the form of a heap of dead, mangy dogs. Valentine watched the soldiers in the guard truck sway along - for all the drivers and the guards knew, this was just another training run.
The weather turned nasty at the riverbank, a cold, lashing rain that turned everything dark three hours ahead of schedule. It came down hard enough that Valentine thought it would blow itself out quickly. The Big Mouths hopped into the river eagerly enough.
The drivers of the third truck, anxious at the sight of the snapping jaws, refused to toss the dogs to the waiting Big Mouths until Nageezi drew her automatic and promised the fish-frogs dog or driver.
And with that they were off.
The rain alternating with snow lightened up but never really ceased. It didn't make much difference on the longest river run, that first night. They waited out the day in a backwater of the river, with the Big Mouths either resting or probing the riverbanks for small game arid waterfowl.
The first overland trek, almost six miles, went well enough. Valentine and Nageezi hiked what felt mostly uphill on a heavy portage through the woods, following in a trail flattened by the prowling Big Mouths with fiberglass kayak, paddle, and equipment. Anything that didn't involve buckets of ice-cold water being flung in his face seemed like a treat.
He and Nageezi huddled together in the snow as they rested the
second day, eating preserved food - appallingly small portions according to Valentine's cold-sharpened appetite - the green and white mountains of the Cascades around them. They warmed their food over chemical heat and pressed close together under a thin survival blanket, recuperating.
The second night's run was a long, churning nightmare of white water as they were pulled by the strong swimming - or hopping, over some of the rapids - upstream. Nageezi had the knack of resting herself and her team in the occasional eddy better than Valentine, and by the time they went back into the water, with fresh chemical heat packs pressed to their feet and the small of their backs, he let Nageezi lead.
The rotten weather carried one advantage: It made observation from the banks almost impossible.
They waited out the third day at a lake on the Green River, with the Big Mouths philosophical about their empty bellies. They'd been trained to have a real gorge after penetrating the fake hotel built up in the airport on the third night...
For the final night's run Nageezi took amphetamines. She offered a pair of white capsules to Valentine.
"Benzedrine?"
"I'm okay", he said.
"Suit yourself", she said, popping the capsules and following them with a swig of water from a big bottle.
Valentine would have just about given a finger for a thermos of Space Needle-quality coffee. He set his kayak in the current and took up the reins from the new team with winter-chilled muscles.
"At least the weather's broke", Nageezi said, smiling. "Seattle stopped the rain".
"That's a bunch of crap", Valentine said, irritated at her chemically enhanced cheer. "They don't control the weather".
"Screw yourself", she said quietly, but Valentine's ears picked it up.
"What's that?"
"Suit yourself".
She's a Quisling. What do you care what she things?
Because, for one night, you're a Quisling too.
Valentine could live with it. He just hoped the Outlook was filled with Bears fresh from a Resource Denial operation.
The Big Mouths swam excitedly up the Green River. They could already taste the hot pork they expected to be waiting for them. Valentine marked the end of a lake on his map, and broke a chemical light. He signaled for the last portage.
Nageezi took two more bennies at the end of the portage as they slipped into the Snoqualmie, heading downstream at last. Valentine unhooked the reins from his Big Mouth team. He could paddle from here. It would warm him up.
He visualized the bodies strewn in the streets of the housing block, the fearful families in the church, and tried to summon a little of the Bear energy for the final push, but it stubbornly refused to come out of hibernation.
They rounded a bend, shot past a few boarded-up buildings heavy with snow, and there it was. The Outlook.
Valentine paddled his kayak next to hers. "Let's get a little closer". He shook a chemical light and stuck it under the water and repeated a circular signal three times; the red-eyed amphibian behemoths gathered round the kayaks.
They pulled their craft to the edge of the river, beneath a substantial lip of land, Valentine hiding the chemical light in his vest. He checked his knife, and took his guns out of their waterproof plastic sheaths.
"Feel that ring on your finger yet?" Nageezi asked. They anchored their kayaks in the shadow under the earth and rock lip. A paved river path was just on the other side of a set of white-painted warning stones.
"Not just yet. I want to hit the Outlook first".
She checked the safety on her .45, worked the slide. "If I get hit, try not to let them eat me".
"Same here", Valentine said, trying to remember not to reach for
the flare gun until all the Big Mouths were out of the water and hopping toward the entrances the way they'd been trained. He adjusted his rifle sling around his neck - the Chinese carbine had a hell of a kick and he wanted it tight against his shoulder...
She peeked over the lip of the riverbank. "You know there's a tradition in the OXFs. If a commander falls, and the second still wins a victory, all the spoils go to him. Or her".
The gun flashed toward him and fired.
Valentine lurched away as the muzzle turned toward him - over a decade of being around guns taught one to keep out of the way of barrels - but even Cat reflexes weren't faster than a bullet. At first he felt a hard thump at the bottom of his right rib cage. Then he discovered he was in the water, bobbing toward the falls, blood warming the interior of his suit.
He saw a Big Mouth turn toward him. Its jaws opened and Valentine instinctively pulled his feet away, oddly calm.
The last thing he remembered before the jaws engulfed him was Nageezi's face in the dark, as she gestured, lifting a chemical light of her own.
She was smiling.