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"Sergeant Martine," Jake waved to the stocky black sergeant, "from 1st Group is an excellent commo tech and general fixit man. Sergeant First Class Richards," he gestured to the staff sergeant with the van Dyke who had been chatting up the female marine, "is an extremely experienced canker mechanic." The sergeant gave a grimace at the old-fashioned term.
"Sergeant Ellsworthy," Jake continued, gesturing at the female marine, "comes to us from Marine Sniper School. Gentlemen, and I do not jest this time, do not get on this young lady's bad side; she's even deadlier than she is pretty. Now, you all are probably wondering, `Yeah, sure, why me and what the fuck?' . . ."
" 'Scuse me, Sergeant Major," the female marine said in a little girl's voice, nearly a whisper, "but did you know there's some sort of thing perched on the wall behind your chair?" She had a thick southern accent; the words flowed like honey.
The talk stopped as six sets of trained eyes started sca
"Yeah," said the SEAL, "I see it now you mention it. Looks like a octopus."
"No," said Mueller. "More like a camouflaged frog. What the hell is it? It looks real." He leaned forward, curiosity written all over his face.
"It's real," said Ellsworthy. "It moved one of its eyes."
"So," Tung rumbled, "what the fuck is it, and how the hell'd it get in here?"
"I don' know," said Trapp, a knife mysteriously appearing in the SEAL's hand, "but iss' one frog's about to be gigged."
"Hold it," said Mosovich, "it's friendly. Himmit Rigas, you weren't supposed to attend this meeting."
"First meetings are always so revealing," said the Himmit, shifting from the color of the wall to its natural gray-purple then back. It appeared to be agitated.
The group of special operations perso
"Siddown Sergeant Martine, it's harmless," snapped Mosovich.
"Da-da-da-hell! Wha-wha-isit?" Martine stammered. His stutter was as well known as his ability with code.
"ET sure as hell," stated Mueller, examining Rigas with interest, no sign of fear or horror on his face at all. He turned to Mosovich with a quizzical expression. "Alien, right?"
"It's part of the reason for this briefing. It was supposed to wait to be introduced, dammit!" Mosovich snapped.
"Where'd it go?" whispered Ellsworthy. "I only took my eyes off it for a second." She began a centimeter by centimeter scan of the wall.
"I don't know," said Mueller, snapping his head back around, "it just disappeared."
"Shit-fire," said Trapp, knife flipping agitatedly, "where is the lil' toad?"
"Calm down," said Mosovich, "it won't reappear until it's comfortable. It's a Himmit. You want to know, shut the hell up and listen. . . ." Slowly they regained their sense of discipline and turned their attention back to the sergeant major, not without some covert glances at the walls.
"We've been tasked by SOCOM to do a deep penetration of an enemy planet. Yeah, `an enemy what?,' right? Okay, here's the background."
He covered the high points about the contact from the Federation and the approaching Posleen threat.
"The bottom line is that we don't have enough information about the Posleen. Intelligence is one of the keystones of military operations and it's one we ain't got. The Himmits are like ghosts, they've been all over the Posleen planets, snoopin' and poopin'. But the problem with them is that they won't go into places that they might come into contact, which means that they haven't been able to do close recon, and they don't look for the sort of things we do. Last but not least, sorry Rigas," he nodded towards where he supposed the camouflaged alien lurked, "higher, which in this case means the President, wants an independent evaluation. Right now all of our information is based on intelligence fed to us from the Darhel and Himmits. The Pres. wants human eyes on the problem, and we're the eyes."
Jake consulted his notes and hoped that his selected professionally paranoid individuals were listening; he could almost taste the unease in the air. They mostly seemed to be scoping out the walls trying to find the invisible Himmit. Having been through the same exercise several times, he was fairly sure they would fail. Ellsworthy had surprised him again by spotting the alien at all.
"Our mission is to proceed with Himmit Rigas to a Posleen-held continent on one of the planets that is about to get our close personal human attention in the form of the First MarDiv and sundry other units. There we will conduct order of battle and doctrine intelligence gathering on the Posleen. We will ramp up here on Earth, spend about four months on a ship and then perform a covert insertion.
"If we insert undetected we'll be able to use the Himmit ship for extraction and movement. If not, we can wait until another Himmit ship is scheduled for pickup four months after landing. If we miss that pickup we are SOL folks; the next boat is the expeditionary force and it ain't expected for a couple of years." He paused and considered the rough notes he and Ersin had sketched out. They were not in detail; with a team like this one you solicited input as the training and preparation proceeded.
"A couple of notes. We'll be loading heavy. The food on the planet will not be edible but we'll have personal processors to convert the plant and animal matter if we have to forage." He smiled at the various grimaces on the team members' faces. Every one of them at one time or another had dealt with "foraging" on the run, and it was not a pleasant experience. Ellsworthy wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something awful. "If we can work from the Himmit stealth ship as a base it won't come to that."
"Nonetheless, on each insertion we'll have to carry certain items that the science types tell us are unconvertible like vitamins and specific amino acid combinations along with our converters. And although those don't sound very heavy, they are when you're carrying a five months' supply. Second, we don't want to have any contact at all if possible, but we're not going to plan that way. You're all big boys and girls, so decide what you want to pack as we prepare. Think heavy: an M-16 will not cut the mustard with these things.
"That's it for now, we'll be meeting tomorrow morning to start training and issue. See Ersin for billeting and training schedule." With that he simply stood up and walked out of the room. They could stay and try to figure out if the frog was still watching.
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