Swapship Troopers Read online

  Quantrill set up the canopy – an arcing roof shaped like a soup can cut in half the long way – and then went to look for Jabara’s pack to finish the job. He found the big Marine still lying unconscious. Corporal Tsien was kneeling next to Jabara with a med scanner.

  “How’s he doing?” Quantrill asked.

  “Great,” Tsien answered. The corporal gestured to Jabara’s leg. His pants were ripped and bloody, but his leg looked good as new. There wasn’t so much as a scar. “I’m going to let him sleep off the Juice for another half hour or so.”

  “Nice. I’m just going to grab this.” Quantrill grabbed a strap from the load pack on the ground beside Jabara and slung it over his shoulder. “When he wakes up tell him I got it.”

  “Will do,” Tsien agreed and went back to his scanner. Quantrill lugged the heavy kit back to his tent and tossed it onto the dusty ground. He knew Jabara was a big guy, but his pack was ridiculous. The SAW ammo weighed almost as much as a full grown adult. He didn’t know how the guy managed to carry all that weight everywhere he went.

  Quantrill got out the PECS bottom panel and unfolded it on a flat patch of ground. Then he picked up the lightweight canopy, set it on top, and went around the edge attaching the water-proof seals. He was just putting the finishing touches on the shelter when the Lieutenant walked into the center of camp.

  “Everybody,” he called out to get the platoon’s attention. “You can stand down from combat readiness. We’re clear here.”

  The order was met with quiet cheers from the platoon. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” Potter exclaimed from the next tent. Quantrill flicked the latches on his helmet and tossed it aside. Then he went to work pulling off his body armor. The armor was lightweight carbon fiber, but it was still restricting and uncomfortable after a few hours. It was a relief to feel a cool breeze on his skin after being sealed inside the suit all day.

  He carefully packed his armor in the duffle bag he kept rolled up in his pack for just that purpose. Once when deployed in an uninhabited jungle, he had gone to put his chest plate back on and found a little, green lizard had crawled inside. He didn’t think the lizard was poisonous, but the idea of having the creepy little creature inside his clothes made Quantrill’s skin crawl. That was the last time he left his armor on the ground.

  He looked around at the campsite. The platoon was lounging around outside their tents. Some were talking, some were eating rations, some were plugged into their vids. Corporal Guan was cooking a pot of rice over a plasma torch. Guan walked into combat carrying a big bag of brown rice that weighed almost as much as standard issue SAW ammunition. He was always willing to share with anyone in the platoon, though. Quantrill appreciated that. You could only eat so much freeze dried synthetic protein before it got tiresome. The rice was a change of pace if nothing else.

  “Man, I am starving,” a familiar voice grumbled.

  “Jabby!” Quantrill exclaimed. Jabara was on his feet again and walking back into camp. His leg seemed to have healed perfectly. There wasn’t even a limp. “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel good,” Jabara nodded. “Great even. Just ready to eat a horse.”

  Quantrill nodded and tossed Jabara a vacuum sealed ration packet. The big Marine caught it and sat down in front of their PECS. He tore into the synthetic protein like it was filet mignon. Juice burned through calories like a fusion bomb, so Jabara would need double rations to replenish his body.

  “Don’t choke on that shit, okay?” Quantrill suggested in a wry tone. Jabara just flipped him the bird and went on stuffing the brown paste into his mouth.

  “Listen,” Jabara finally said when he had wolfed down the whole ration packet. “Thank you. Thank you for coming back for me.”

  “Nah,” Quantrill waved off the praise. “You’d have done the same for me.”

  “I mean it, you little shit,” Jabara insisted. “You saved my ass back there. Thank you.”

  “Anytime, man,” Quantrill nodded and took a swig from his canteen. “Anytime.”

  “I mean,” Jabara went on thoughtfully. “I really thought I bought it.”

  “You made a fucking down payment,” Quantrill agreed. Statistically, troopers rarely survived a Formid attack once a Bug got ahold of them. Usually the Bug killed them – at best it took a limb or two. Quantrill’s fast response helped, he knew. But really they got lucky as much as anything. It very easily could have been much worse.

  “You know,” Jabara added in a soft voice. “When that Bug had me – when it was dragging me down – you know what went through my mind?”

  “What?” Quantrill replied. “You shoulda’ walked a little fucking faster?”

  “No, I’m serious. It was a prayer. My first instinct was to pray.”

  “Aww, come on, man,” Quantrill groaned. Like everyone in the Alliance, Quantrill had attended mandatory religious education. He never really bought into the concept, though. They would talk about this Jesus character dying for his sins – then he would go home to see his mother working two jobs just to pay the rent and put food on the table. Given the choice Quantrill would have told Jesus to keep his eternal salvation – he would rather get his mother a day off and a cheeseburger.

  “No, I mean…” Jabara began but then trailed off. He looked around before continuing in a softer voice that was near a whisper. “Did you know I started out in pilot training?”

  “No shit?” Quantrill exclaimed. “I wanted to do that! Couldn’t afford OCS, though.”

  “You would have been a great pilot,” Jabara said earnestly. “Fast reflexes, level head. You could fit in small cockpits with no problem.”

  “That’s what I told them,” Quantrill agreed with a smile.

  “I was a great pilot,” Jabara said wistfully. “Top of my class. A real hotshot.”

  “What happened?”

  “My father,” Jabara told him. “There was an undercover sting at my father’s mosque. They caught him and twenty others worshipping illegally.”

  “Oh, damn,” Quantrill sighed. Religious crimes were serious business. The Alliance government was always staging big public trials for subversives. Anyone found guilty would be sent to the forced labor camps and probably never come out. Anyone found innocent usually ended up disappearing under “mysterious circumstances.”

  “Father was sent to prison,” Jabara went on. “I was brought before a Fleet Tribunal. I had to disavow my father – my own father – to avoid going to prison myself.”

  “Hey, man,” Quantrill told him. “Don’t sweat that. You had no choice.”

  “Yes,” Jabara agreed. “Even father would have told me so. But … I can’t shake the feeling that I have betrayed him … betrayed myself even. So if I am killed…”

  “Hold on! Nobody’s getting killed,” Quantrill interrupted.

  “Just in case,” Jabara insisted. “Just in case I do, I want you to tell my father. Tell him,” Jabara leaned closer and lowered his voice to a whisper, “tell him I still believe. Tell him I went down praying to Allah the way he taught me.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Quantrill groaned with unintentional irony. “Why me?”

  “I can trust you, Q,” Jabara said vehemently. “I know I can. Please? I want him to know.”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell him,” Quantrill agreed reluctantly. “But you just make sure you don’t buy a farm anyway. Then you can tell him yourself.”

  “Agreed. That’s my preference as well,” Jabara said with a chuckle. “Are you going to eat that?”

  “Have it.” Quantrill tossed Jabara the ration packet that he had been picking at and stood up. “I’m going to get some rice.”

  Quantrill walked across the camp toward Corporal Guan and his pot of steamed rice. His mind was a blur of thoughts. Jabara was a subversive! That was crazy. Quantrill wasn’t so sure the religion he was taught as a kid was the only truth in the universe. He certainly didn’t think Jabara was evil for believing something else. He was worried about his friend, though. He
hoped the big man wasn’t going to blab about his beliefs all over camp. Getting kicked out of flight school would be the least of his problems. He would hate to see a good Marine rot away in a prison cell somewhere just for thinking the wrong thing.

  “Gather around, everybody!” the Lieutenant yelled from the center of camp. The platoon of Marines immediately dropped what they were doing and hustled to stand at attention. Even Jabara put down his second protein ration and joined the line. “At ease, men,” Hardaway told them. The men stood around uneasily, attention focused on the Lieutenant who looked over the platoon silently for several minutes.

  “Morale is shit,” Hardaway announced finally. There were several nodding heads in the group. “Turns out, you men miss your families, your friends, your homes.” More nodding heads. “A bunch of jarheads are a damn poor substitute.”

  “You said it,” Potter grumbled softly to himself. There were mumbled words of agreement all along the rough circle of men.

  “In the old days, an army would conscript ‘comfort women’ to entertain the troops. Give them a little distraction, a little taste of the comforts of home,” Hardaway continued. There were a few nervous chuckles in the ranks, like schoolboys laughing at a teacher saying Uranus. “Of course, we don’t do that now.”

  Corporal Tsien was standing to the right of the Lieutenant. Hardaway reached out and Tsien put a hypospray gun into his hand. The Lieutenant casually walked along the line of troopers stopping occasionally to inject one of the men with the hypospray. First Singh, then Potter, then Hayes.

  “The Alliance government figures you men should be happy with your celibate lifestyle,” Hardaway told them. “Women would only distract you from your duty. Or some damn thing.”

  Hardaway stopped in front of Quantrill and pointed the hypospray at his arm. Quantrill lifted his sleeve and took the injection. They were always getting inoculations or medications of one kind or another. Once they joined the Marine Corps their bodies belonged to the Fleet – down to their basic chemistry. It was strange, though, that the Lieutenant wasn’t injecting everyone.

  “Fleet Command, however,” Hardaway went on, “takes a more pragmatic view. They believe a happy Marine is an effective Marine. Fleet has instituted a new initiative to improve troop morale and unit cohesion. You will be pleased to know all of you will be getting laid this evening.”

  The platoon erupted in excited commotion. There was whooping and hollering and quite a few catcalls. Quantrill didn’t join in. The whole thing didn’t make sense. He hadn’t even seen a woman since he was inducted. Women weren’t allowed in the military. They weren’t even allowed on Fleet starships as passengers.

  “How are they gonna get bitches for a whole platoon way out here?” Jabara wondered. He was scanning the sky – looking for a landing ship apparently.

  “Maybe there will just be enough for half the platoon,” Jordan suggested. “And we’ll have to share.”

  “Sloppy seconds is still better than jerking off,” Jabara replied, still scanning the sky.

  Quantrill wasn’t sure there would be any women at all. Not even Fleet Command could go against the Alliance government. Could they? Besides where would the women come from? There wasn’t an inhabited settlement for half a light-year in any direction.

  Quantrill wiped at his forehead. He was sweating like a pig! When had it gotten so hot? He was feeling light headed, too. He decided he should sit down for a moment – just to catch his breath. He lowered himself to the dusty ground. He looked around and noticed that several others were on the ground also. Singh and Potter looked like they had just run a marathon. Their faces glistened with sweat and they were breathing heavily.

  “Half the platoon has been injected with PinkVector,” the Lieutenant announced. “This is a self-replicating, gene-splicing virus that will spoof a Y-chromosome into a second X chromosome. It’s stacked with a high-octane version of Juice to speed up the process.”

  “What process?” Singh gasped. Quantrill’s mind raced. Y-chromosomes? He knew what that meant – if he could just think. He had never been a good student. There didn’t seem to be any point. Nobody he knew ever got out of the ghetto. Unless you count getting drafted into the Marines.

  Still he had learned about the Y-chromosome in biology. It had to do with genetics. It was … it was the difference between male and female genes. That meant this gene-splicing drug was going to – was that possible?

  “Turning us … into … women,” Quantrill panted. His heart was hammering behind his ribcage like it might burst out. He felt hopelessly out of breath. No matter how much air he dragged into his chest, he just couldn’t seem to get enough. It felt like he was drowning.

  His skin began to tingle, like hundreds of tiny pins poking him all over. It was a lot like the feeling of circulation returning to his foot after he had sat in one position for too long. Only this was over his entire body.

  Suddenly he doubled over with a sharp pain in his abdomen. When he looked down he saw how his t-shirt was soaked with sweat and plastered to his chest. His chest, however, was different. It was swollen, bulging out like … like breasts. As he watched, they seemed to slowly expand like balloons. Was he imagining that? Was he losing his mind? Quantrill tried to speak – to ask if anyone else was seeing what he was seeing – but he didn’t have enough air. He was slipping away. He was sinking. Then everything went black.

  Chapter 4

  The Lineup

  When Quantrill came to sometime later he was lying on his back inside his PECS tent. The familiar curving fabric canopy was right above his head. He lifted his head to try to look around but couldn’t see past the front of his t-shirt. It looked like the plain, grey shirt had been stuffed with a pair of softballs. “What the hell?” he mumbled.

  The voice that came out of his mouth was strange, too. It had the same Midwestern American twang that Quantrill heard his entire life, but the timber was softer and higher pitched. He sounded like … a girl!

  He grabbed at the collar of his t-shirt and looked inside. Sure enough, the heavy, round shapes filling his shirt were made of soft, natural flesh and were seamlessly attached to his chest. He had breasts! Huge ones!

  “Oh, my God,” he said in the soft alto voice that sounded so strange in his ears. They had turned him into a girl! He had no idea such a thing was even possible. The Alliance had forbidden genetic research a hundred years ago, but apparently Fleet scientists missed the memo.

  “Sir, Quantrill is awake!” a voice called from outside his tent. Quantrill sat up and his heavy bosoms slid forward on his chest. For a moment he thought they would slide right off and reflexively held his hands up to catch them. Instead they hovered there, hanging off the front of his body like a cantilevered porch.

  He had seen many breasts in his life and been fascinated by them like most young men. They always seemed to float like they were weightless. He was surprised to find they were quite heavy. They dragged at his shoulders and threw off his sense of balance. It felt like he had a pair of bricks in his shirt pockets.

  He stuck his head out of the tent and looked around the camp. The platoon seemed to be lounging around like any other evening on non-combat status. He saw three Marines – Jabara, Kowalski, and Shrike – playing a card game. Two more were tossing a football. In front of the next tent, Potter was sitting and eating a ration packet. Something was off about Potter, though. It was clearly the same person, but different. Quantrill looked closer. His dark hair was shaved close just like the last time Quantrill had seen him, but Potter’s jaw line was softer. His lips were plumper. He was … prettier?

  Then Potter shifted and Quantrill saw the unmistakable outline of breasts under the Marine’s baggy t-shirt. Of course! He had been turned into a girl, too. The Lieutenant said half the platoon was given the gene-splicing drug. That would mean half the platoon should now be female.

  Quantrill looked around the camp again. Sure enough, several of the Marines idling around had hints of hourglass figures
under their loose-fitting fatigues. He hadn’t seen a woman in months and suddenly camp was filled with them!

  “How are you feeling, Q?”

  “Huh?” Quantrill was startled out of his thoughts. Corporal Tsien was looking down at him expectantly. The platoon’s corpsman was holding a big bowl of white rice. “Oh, I feel pretty good,” Quantrill replied. “Just hungry as hell.”

  “That’s to be expected,” Tsien told him. He handed Quantrill the bowl of rice. “Here, eat this.”

  “Thanks.” Quantrill stood and took the rice bowl. He really did feel in top shape. He felt energized – like he had just slept three days. Even the wrist that had been bothering him since the battle that morning felt as good as new. “How long was I out?”

  “About an hour,” Tsien replied. Quantrill realized the corporal wasn’t making eye contact, which was strange. His eyes were lowered. In fact, he was focused intently on something below Quantrill’s face.

  What the fuck? Quantrill rolled his eyes. Corporal Tsien was staring straight at his tits! The whole idea made Quantrill uncomfortable. He was used to being ignored. From a poor kid in the ghetto to an undersized Marine recruit he spent his whole life being overlooked. Having someone stare at him was completely foreign. He felt a tremendous urge to cross his arms over his chest or do something – anything – to hide the conspicuous knockers he had just been issued.

  If he did that, however, he wouldn’t be able to eat. In the end, his hunger won out over his embarrassment and Quantrill shoveled several heaping forks full of rice into his mouth. He was relieved when Tsien moved on.

  Quantrill scooped up another bite of rice and looked himself over. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on an hour ago, but now they were extremely awkward and uncomfortable. His shirt stretched taut over his chest, but then hung loose and billowed around his narrow middle. Similarly his fatigue pants sagged at the waist, but squeezed him tight around his now much wider hips. It felt like he was wearing someone else’s clothes. In a sense, that’s exactly what he was doing.