Doom
Fleet: The Boot Camp Years
Sitting in the launch bay of the battleship orbiting the rebellious planet below, privates Cossack and Yaklitz were in the midst of killing time while they awaited their orders. Their unit, comprised of mostly relatively new recruits except for a select few senior officers, had been called into battle but as one of the backup units. The planet below was a recent acquisition into the empire, but there was a rebellion brewing on the surface and several units including theirs had been called in to squash it. Their force captain, Yurak, had been involved in the original conquest of the planet although Doom’s fleet commander had of course led the expedition. Several admirals and force captains had been along on the managing subdivisions of the deployed fleet, and Yurak had decided to bring his unit of new recruits—that being theirs—along this time as backup. Although the unit had been in battle before, and had done well, there were more senior units present and it was only natural that they were going to get any glory first, and that their ship would only be put in the thick of things if the battle went badly.
As a result, Cossack and Yaklitz were incredibly bored, but they had decided to pretend to look busy doing weapons inventory in case anyone came by. Lieutenant Vardash was actively wandering the ship every now and then to make sure his men were being productive despite the fact that there was little to be done other than basic ship navigation. He did that for two reasons, the first being that such a show of efficiency was sure to impress his favorite force captain, and the second being that Vardash was simply a power-hungry jerk that liked to see other people work while he gave orders, and he loved to give particularly unpleasant and/or demeaning orders to those did not show him all due respect. Unfortunately, both Cossack and Yaklitz felt Vardash was due very little and thought he was a weasly suck-up, and as a result they frequently received said orders.
Neither Vardash nor Yurak, who mercifully seemed to be staying on the bridge at the moment, had come by the weapons bay recently, and Cossack and Yaklitz had spent the better part of the past two hours playing cards on a crate full of bomb casings and emptying bottles of beer they had found in another of the storage crates. The beer had been marked for the soldiers’ consumption anyway, as it was unofficial custom in Doom’s fleet to drink to victory once a battle was won. They had overstocked the ship anyway, and they had a feeling the battle would soon be won anyhow, so they saw no harm in breaking in early. It would not be the first time either went on active duty with a buzz, and it would not be the last. Half the time, Vardash could not tell the difference anyway. He’d accused them of making “asinine drunken remarks” at times they had been legitimately sober and just making fun of him.
The card game of choice being played by the two privates was a variation of a drinking bet game commonly known as “asshole” although they frequently named it after whoever happened to fit the title. That day their game of “Vardash” had played mostly in Cossack’s favor, and poor Yaklitz was draining the beers and earning the title at a rapid clip. Finally he reached a point where he conceded defeat, chugged his last beer, and kicked back in a reclining position against the box.
Cossack laughed in smug victory, swallowing from his own bottle as if it were water. “What’s the matter, ‘Vardash,’ can’t you take the heat? Aren’t you man enough?”
“Of course I’m not,” Yaklitz snorted, “I’m Vardash.” He put his hand on his hip in a dramatic imitation of their lieutenant’s prissy demeanor and enunciated the name in the same nasal tone he spoke with.
Snickering, Cossack glanced at a portal across the bay, showing the landscape of the rebelling planet below. “I tell ya, they just got to set him loose down there for a few hours and they’ll surrender with no problem.”
Yaklitz joined his bunkmate in his snickers. “Send him? All you need to send is his picture, and that’ll scare them into submission.”
Amused by that notion, Cossack picked up an empty beer bottle. “Yeah, we can stick it in this, put it down one of the bomb chutes, and deploy it to the surface.”
“I dare you to do that. Both Yurak and Vardash would combust if you fired a weapon against orders.”
Cossack raised an eyebrow, as he found dares hard to ignore, especially entertaining ones. “It’s not technically against orders. A beer bottle isn’t a bomb. It’s not even an explosive.”
“Fine then,” Yaklitz challenged, “Go on and do it.”
“I would if I had a picture of Vardash,” Cossack boasted with a shrug, and finished off the last of his beer. “Right in this bottle.”
Taking a quick visual survey of the area, Yaklitz spied a pad of paper on a clipboard by the door that led to the main corridor of the ship. He got up and picked them up, and then with a mischievous smirk extended them to Cossack. “So draw one.”
“Sorry, I’m no arteest,” Cossack said, wrinkling his nose in a dramatic fashion. “And even if I was, it’d take a lot of talent to draw something that ugly.”
“What’s so hard about it? All you need is a big bald blob with pointy ears making a kissy face at Yurak,” the other officer retorted, and tossed the clipboard on the crate right in front of the other soldier. “Or were you just bullshitting about shooting the beer bottle?”
Unable to resist the direct challenge, Cossack picked up the notepad. “I’m not full of it, Yaklitz. I leave that up to you.” He tore off a scrap of blank paper from the pad and scribbled a rotund stick-and-circle figure with its hands on its hips. He then decorated it with a pissy face and added the caption “Vardash wants your ass for the glory of Doom!” From over his shoulder Yaklitz dissolved into snorts of laughter while Cossack stuffed the drawing into a bottle, and then got up and walked over to the bomb chute.
“By all means, deploy,” Yaklitz urged, his grin widening.
Cossack mirrored his bunkmate’s mischievous look, and then hit the button. “Beers away!” A second later there was the sound of a swish and then a bang indicating that it had been shot out, and both Cossack and Yaklitz let out loud beer-inspired laughs.
“That was great,” Cossack said, and picked up the pad. “We should send another one!”
“What should that one say?”
Cossack paused thoughtfully. “Hmmm… well, we need to send something properly intimidating, to let them know that King Zarkon’s fleet doesn’t mess around.”
“The picture of Vardash ought to do that. He’s heavy artillery,” Yaklitz quipped.
“Yeah, but we need something else…”
“I got it!” declared Yaklitz. He took the pad from Cossack and scribbled in big letters, “You’re fucked!”
“Short and blunt, but it does get the point across,” Cossack noted, and stuffed it into a bottle which he then dropped into the chute and fired off.
Yaklitz went and picked up a few more beer bottles. “This is better than the card game! We should’ve thought of this earlier. Think of all the important messages of impending doom we could have sent to the rebels planetside.”
“Clearly we’ve lost a lot of time,” Cossack said in a mock serious tone. “We’d better get cracking and get caught up.”
“You got it, Private! We wouldn’t want to be accused of slacking on duty, would we?”
Cossack broke into a wide and impish grin. “We certainly wouldn’t. After all that would surely upset our lieutenant.”
Yaklitz nodded. “Yeah, because Vardash sucks.”
“You should write that one down too. We might as well warn them of that if we wind up landing, so they know to just give up when they see him.”
Laughing and playing along, Yaklitz obediently wrote in big letters “Vardash sucks” and added a good ten exclamation points to it for effect. He examined his work for a moment. “You think we should leave it at that? I mean, what if they want detailed reasons as to why he sucks?”
“That’d take an entire report,” Cossack snorted, and then smirked. “But we can put in three short words what Vardash does.”
“Oh?”
With a grin Cossack took the pen and notepad from Yaklitz, tore off the page, and wrote on the opposite side, “Force Captain Yurak.” When Cossack turned to show Yaklitz his summary, immediately both privates dissolved into fits of uncontrolled beer-buzz laughter, newly inspired to write many more messages for the rebellious planet below.
* * *
Cossack’s prediction of what would upset their lieutenant was indeed true, although what had Vardash tweaked at the moment was not the lack productive activity coming from the weapons bay but rather the sudden and unauthorized activity coming from it. From where he stood officiously on the bridge just before he had found out, at the side of the command chair occupied by Force Captain Yurak, things had been going quite smoothly and he had just finished reporting nothing but good things from his most recent walkthrough to his superior.
Though Yurak was pleased that the new recruits had the situation well in hand and that they had performed competently in their orders thus far, he was feeling restless, and he tapped fingertip against the console impatiently. Efficiency was important and had its place, but a battle in which his orders were to hang back and wait was a dull one to command. His hopes shot up that something was happening when one of the consoles on the bridge—mostly quiet due to their idle status—sounded with an electronic buzzer. “What’s going on?” he barked out sharply to the private at the station.
The young soldier frowned. “It’s a confirmation, sir,” he said, clearly puzzled. “It was a feedback message from the weapons bay verifying that the chutes are in active use.”
Yurak was on his feet in an instant, his natural eye narrowed as he faced the private down. “What? Is it a malfunction?”
“It had better be,” Vardash said with a huffy and warning glare to all of those on the bridge subordinate to him, and went over to the station to see for himself. Shoving the private stationed there out of the way when he reached it, his face twisted into an irritated scowl as soon as he read the readout on the console. “It says something was manually deployed from the weapons bay.”
“Are you telling me that someone disobeyed my direct order to not engage in battle?” Yurak asked incredulously, livid at the mere thought.
“It—it might have been a malfunction, sir,” a private at another station suggested hopefully after bringing up some data on the screen. Like the rest of the unit, he knew that when the force captain got that angry tone in his voice, they were all in for hell, either from him directly or his pet suck-up. “The databanks aren’t registering any automatic deployment from munitions storage. If something was fired, it wasn’t from the stock arsenal.”
“But you said it manually deployed,” Vardash argued, glaring at the private who initially made the report.
That soldier nodded. “That’s what it said, sir.”
“Then, you idiot, if you knew anything about the design of these ships, you would know that unless the panel itself had a short, the system wouldn’t register a manual deployment unless someone had been screwing with the controls directly.” The lieutenant sighed in condescension. “You were all trained in the basic systems operation of these ships last week. You should know this.”
“Yes sir,” he said with a resigned sigh.
“Who is stationed at or near the weapons bay?” Yurak demanded.
The soldiers on the bridge exchanged looks, while Vardash stepped back from the console to give the answer. “On my last walkthrough, sir, the only ones I saw down there were Privates Cossack and Yaklitz.”
The instant he heard the names of the unit’s primary troublemaker and his partner in crime, Yurak’s critical glare turned to a disgusted one. “And what the hell were those two idiots supposed to be doing there?”
“Inventory, sir,” Vardash replied, equally irritated that the two thorns in his side of the unit were once again making him look bad in front of Yurak. “They volunteered for the duty.”
Yurak eyed the lieutenant dubiously. “They volunteered to do inventory?”
“Yes, sir,” Vardash confirmed with a nod, and then added, “And I let them go ahead and do because I figured even those two buffoons wouldn’t manage to screw that up. I’d rather have them down there than up here on the bridge.”
“Even though Cossack has the best targeting ratio in the unit?” one of the privates murmured to the soldier stationed beside him.
“Maybe he was afraid he’d shoot him instead,” the other one responded back in a whisper, and snickered under his breath. “Again.” Upon hearing the addition, the other private also had to hold back a chuckle, remembering the incident at the shooting range some weeks back.
Fortunately for them Vardash did not hear what they said, only that they were whispering something that they seemed to find amusing. He whirled around prissily and glared at them. “I don’t know what you two find so funny about a member of our unit disobeying not only our force captain’s but also an admiral’s direct orders to stay out of battle until told otherwise, but I assure you that if we’re reprimanded for this, it will be no laughing matter for any of you.” He then turned back toward Yurak and flashed him a contrite look. “Sir, I’ll go down to the weapons bay and rectify this personally right away.”
“No,” Yurak replied sternly, his hand falling to the hilt of his laser sword. “I’ll take care of this nonsense myself.”
“But sir, there’s no need to trouble yourself over those idiots. I’ll discipline them for you and whip them into shape,” Vardash assured him in his whiny sycophantic tone.
Yurak shook his head. “Not this time. If there’s one thing I don’t stand for, it’s my orders being ignored, and I intend to make that crystal clear.” He strode purposefully toward corridors that led into the bowels of the ship. “Vardash, you have command of the bridge until I return.” With that the force captain disappeared through the door.
Although Vardash had been hoping that Yurak would give him the go-ahead to hunt down and make a harsh example out of Cossack and Yaklitz for the unit and most especially for Yurak, his disappointment fizzled quickly when he realized that for at least a short while, he was in full command of a battleship. Sure, it was an idle battleship on call, but for the time being he was still the head honcho, the big man in charge, and he liked that. A self-satisfied smile spread across his features, baring his fangs as he settled into the cushy leather seat formerly occupied by his force captain. “All right worms, enough standing around with stupid looks on your faces! Back to your posts, now! And hustle,” he added in an exceptionally officious and prissy tone with an equally flamboyant hand gesture to go with it.
“I think we were better off with Yurak breathing down our necks,” one of the privates muttered to another stationed beside him as they returned their attention to the consoles. His companion gave a subtle nod of silent agreement and proceeded to initiate an informational scan.
* * *
Down in the weapons bay the mood was much lighter. By that time Cossack and Yaklitz had written out several more amusing notes and were in the process of stuffing them into bottles for the next phase of what they were now calling Operation Beer Bomb.
Yaklitz had just sent another bottle down the chute for deployment when the door from the corridor that led to the upper levels swished open and Force Captain Yurak stomped in. There was no hiding the guilty scene from their superior’s discerning eyes, for his cybernetic sighting had targeted them almost immediately and there would be no explaining away what he saw as a misunderstanding. Yaklitz still had his hand on the deployment button, while Cossack held a note-filled bottle just beside the chute waiting for it to pop back open.
Yurak took long and swift strides toward them, his gauntleted right arm pointed angrily at the chute. “What in the name of the gods do you fools think we’re doing?” he demanded, his voice deep and angry with a growling undertone to it that indicated if they were wise, they would not give him a runaround.
Unfortunately Cossack the one-day-to-be-Terrible was not known for being wise without the word “ass” attached to it, and as he and Yaklitz both straightened to a proper military salute of an officer so much higher than them in rank, he answered, “We’re turning the tide of battle to Doom’s favor, sir!”
Furious at the confirmation that they were going against his orders, Yurak drew his laser sword and pointed it at them. “You are under orders to do nothing until told otherwise! How dare you countermand me by firing a weapon without authorization?” he roared, and then added, “You have exactly ten seconds to explain before I put the two of you on a long stay in medical—if you’re lucky.”
“We didn’t fire any weapons, sir,” Yaklitz informed him, eyeing the sword with mild alarm. Both he and Cossack knew Yurak and his reputation well enough to know that he did not bluff or make idle threats, and given their rank, they were quite expendable.
Yurak’s natural eye narrowed as he stared down the pair of privates. “Do you expect me to believe that? The systems on the bridge verified that something was deployed and furthermore, I caught you doing it. Continue to lie to me and you won’t need medical.” His tone was deadly serious.
“We aren’t lying, sir,” Cossack spoke up. “We didn’t fire any weapons. We just fired these.” He held up a beer bottle.
“What?” Yurak’s face contorted into an expression of utter disbelief at the inanity of the notion.
Cossack and Yaklitz both nodded. “Beer bottles aren’t considered a weapon by military standards, are they sir? I mean, they aren’t explosive—unless you throw ‘em hard enough, but that’s not an explosion, more of a shattering really—”
Yurak cut off Cossack’s babbling by lowering his sword and staring at him. “Shut up, Private.”
Cossack frowned. “Shutting up, sir.”
“Now,” Yurak said, and snatched the beer bottle from Cossack’s hand. “Explain to me exactly what you were doing in firing these out the chute, if not deploying weapons against direct orders.”
Yaklitz smiled sheepishly. “Putting out the trash, sir?”
“We know how you and Vardash like to run a clean ship,” Cossack added.
Yurak was not nearly as amused at the comments of the two wisecracking privates as they were by themselves, and he crushed the neck of the beer bottle in his gauntleted hand. Keeping a firm hold on it, he then shook the glass shards out and noticed the paper inside it. “I won’t ask what asinine line of thinking or lack thereof led you to believe that you were entitled to the galley and bar supplies while you were on active duty, but I’ll let Vardash discipline you for that since it came out of his expense report,” the force captain said icily. “But I will ask one last time what you were doing and why before I let my sword do the talking for me. Am I making myself clear?” He glanced down at the rumpled paper in the crushed bottle in his hands and pulled it out. “What are these?”
“Messages in bottles, sir,” Yaklitz answered honestly.
“Since we’re under orders not to engage the enemy, we figured a psychological assault would wear down their spirit planetside,” Cossack added in an inspired moment of pure bullshit that he was quite proud of with how well it flowed as he spoke it.
“A psychological assault?” the incredulous Yurak repeated.
Following Cossack’s lead, Yaklitz nodded. “We’re sending them messages letting them know how futile it is to resist the forces of Doom and mighty King Zarkon, sir.”
Upon hearing that explanation Yurak pondered for a moment whether they were telling the truth or not. Only a complete fool would come up with such a bold lie after being warned at sword point about doing so, but then again, the same brand of fool could legitimately come up with a plan as idiotic as the one they described. He decided to call their bluff by reading the paper in the bottle. “‘Bend over for the might of Doom!” he read out loud, and eyed them questioningly.
Both Cossack and Yaklitz nodded silently.
Frowning, Yurak crumpled the paper in his hands as he realized his idiot subordinates were telling the truth. “I believe the proper terminology for such a message would be ‘Bow down before the might of Doom,’ Privates. But considering you’re both drunken fools and at least one of you was born in a toad pond, I guess poor grammar is to be expected.” He sighed in disgust as he noticed the stack of folded notes they had written out, torn off, and piled up on the crate beside the beer bottles. “How many of these did you intend to send?”
“As many as we had vessels for, sir?” Cossack replied.
Yurak answered him with a growl and set the broken bottle in his hands down to pick up a few more of them. He opened the first and read it. It had a badly scrawled drawing of a butt with the caption in Yaklitz’s writing “Kiss Doom’s ass.” “How clever,” he sneered in obvious sarcasm, and picked up another one.
That one was in Cossack’s writing, and read, “You are all our slaves! Submit or be crushed, unless you’re hot, then you can be in my harem!” Yurak made another disgusted noise and tossed it aside. He went to open the next one when a note in Cossack’s writing caught the sharp mechanical vision of his cybernetic eye, a note that had his name on it.
Immediately he picked it up. “A message for me?” His voice had the note of patience worn dangerously thin.
Yaklitz gulped. “Uh, yes sir,” he muttered, knowing better than to argue with the stern force captain.
Seeing nothing but his name on the front of the paper, he turned it over only to see Yaklitz’s bold declaration of his and Cossack’s opinion of their lieutenant. “Vardash sucks,” Yurak read aloud. An expression somewhere between bemused and exasperated crept across his harsh features. “Is this some half-witted attempt at a report?”
“Just some information we thought you might want to be aware of, sir,” Cossack said far more glibly than he probably should have.
Yurak crushed the paper instantly in his metal gauntlet. “Your report has been given all due consideration.” He glanced at the pile. “Dare I ask what else you fools have been littering the planet’s orbit with?” He picked up another note.
As Yurak bent over to retrieve another note, Yaklitz whispered to Cossack low enough so that Yurak couldn’t hear, “Man, am I glad he read that backwards!”
Cossack nodded a fervent agreement, while Yurak read the next folded paper.
Overhearing something, Yurak’s large ears twitched back in the direction of the two privates and he turned around with the note in his hands. “What was that?”
“Nothing, sir,” they echoed in unison.
“Nothing?” The force captain eyed his two subordinates with a warning glare.
“We were just wondering which note you picked up,” Yaklitz volunteered.
With a frown Yurak looked down at the note in his hands. It had no text, only crudely drawn stick figures of what was presumably a Doomite soldier kicking another shorter stick figure in the ass. “And what is this?” he asked in a sarcastic tone, holding up the paper in front of the two of them. “Some new form of military code?”
Cossack nodded. “Exactly, sir! We’re traversing the language barrier with highly specialized pictorial code!”
He was not amused by the private’s explanation. “Looks more like it’s written in ‘moron’ to me.”
“Actually that’s a dialect of moron known as Yaklitzian—” Cossack said, but cut himself off mid-sentence. It was not because of the protesting and indignant look that Yaklitz shot his way, but to stare in surprise at his superior. “Sir, did you just crack a joke?” he asked incredulously, and then added after a moment, “Yeah, I think you did!” Cossack grinned impishly. “I’m very proud of you, sir! I didn’t know you had it in you!”
Yurak however failed to see any humor at all in Cossack’s statement and snarled at him in utter disgust and contempt, crumpling the paper in his hands and dropping it onto the floor as he regarded him. “You two will clean up this mess in here now, and that is an order,” he stated in a warning and very no-nonsense tone, looking from one private to the other. “And when a superior next checks in down here, there had better not be so much as one scrap of paper or one beer bottle in sight.”
“Yes, sir,” the duo of privates replied, straightening obediently. Although they remained at attention, the slightest ghosts of their previous smiles remained as they both had the same thought. They could easily get rid of it all those notes and bottles—right down the chute!
To their dismay, Yurak realized the same thing a moment later, and before he
left, he added, “And in disposing of this mess you will use the trash,” he
emphasized, pointing at a bin on the far end of the weapons bay with a metal
finger. “Not that,” he gestured to the
weapons chute, “nor any of the others in this bay. In fact, if I find out there was even one
more unauthorized deployment from any chute on this ship… you will regret
it. Painfully.” His gaze stared them both down harshly. “Am I making myself clear, Privates?”
Cossack and Yaklitz nodded again as they stood at attention. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” With that he turned and left.
“So much for his sense of humor,” Yaklitz muttered with a sigh as he picked up a beer bottle.
Reaching for the last beer he had been working on, Cossack took a final swig and then tossed it across the room toward the trash bin where it landed with a loud bang and subsequent shatter against the metallic lining. “Yeah, should’ve known that one was a fluke.”
Yaklitz meanwhile crumpled some of the papers up into a ball and also played across-the-bay basketball. He missed. “Ah well,” he said, picking up some more paper to try again, “It could’ve been worse. At least it wasn’t Vardash.”
“Good point. I guess we got lucky,” Cossack agreed.
Meanwhile, Yurak silently made his way back to the
bridge. Joke indeed, he thought
snidely. We’ll see how who’s laughing
when I tell Lieutenant Vardash that the beer they drank is being docked from
his pay so he takes it out of their hides.
Yes, he mused as a cruel smile spread across his features, I
think that will be quite the joke to remember.
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