Free Starfist: Blood Contact by David Sherman & Dan Cragg Page B

would give him the excuse he needed to deflect the platoon commander's wrath.
    Anybody'd understand a man's need to get laid. No, no, he told himself. Not with Charlie Bass. He'd see through it. Better just tell the truth—that he'd been sent to the 34th because his previous commander wanted to get rid of him.
    "It was a goddamn accident!" he shouted aloud to the empty street. "An accident!" he said to the frigid night. There was no response. There never was. He shook his head sadly and walked on. Eventually he caught a ride back to Camp Ellis.
    Maybe it had been an accident, but nobody else saw it that way.
    PFC Orest Kindrachuck of the gun squad was known as a man who'd eat anything. PFC Nick Rowe of the second squad's third fire team claimed to be a man who'd bet on anything. It was inevitable the two would clash. At around 04 hours the following morning—for months afterward Marines argued over the precise time of the challenge—Rowe bet Kindrachuck a large sum of money—the witnesses argued about how much afterward, and with every telling the sum grew—that he couldn't drink a schoonerful of urine. Kindrachuck took him up on it. One of Big Barb's girls—and not the prettiest—obligingly filled a schooner halfway. "Not enough!" Rowe insisted, and he filled it to the rim. While a crowd of inebriated Marines stood watching with bated breath, Kindrachuck lifted the schooner to his lips and began to chugalug the vile concoction. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as steadily he drank the schooner dry. A small golden rivulet coursed slowly down one side of his mouth but otherwise he did not spill a drop of the liquid.
    "He drank it all!" someone whispered in awe. The entire room had fallen into a deep and amazed silence. After that night Kindrachuck was known as "Chugalug Kindrachuck," but now he stood there, swaying slightly, a sickish expression on his face. Suddenly he doubled over and vomited copiously on the floor. Men shouted and staggered away from the spray.
    "You—You—didn't—say," Kindrachuck gasped when he was done, "that I had to keep it down! Pay up!" He wiped yellowish slime from the sides of his mouth with one hand. Rowe stared at the mess on the floor, chunks of half-digested steak and vegetables mixed in a beige-colored broth of urine and beer.
    "Okay!" he shouted, holding up his arms for silence. "Okay, Orie. Here's the deal. I bet you twice as much that you won't, that you can't, eat that slop with a spoon!" The room plunged again into a dead silence. Eat...? Everyone was totally horrified at the dimensions of the new bet. "Double or nothing!"
    Rowe shouted, breaking the spell. In hushed tones, as befitted deals made in the presence of such an awesome wager, Marines laid side bets.
    Kindrachuck hesitated only briefly. "Gimme a goddamn spoon!" he shouted.
    For the next month PFC Orest "Chugalug" Kindrachuck had more loose cash in his pockets than ever before in his life, and everyone in third platoon remembered that night as one of the finest they'd ever had.

CHAPTER 7
    The morning after the promotion party, a tall corporal in dress reds came out of the Company L office and walked past the company's campaign streamer staff—it may have been only his imagination, but it looked fuller than the last time he'd seen it. Had to be his imagination, the FIST had only been on two operations since he was last on Thorsfinni's World. The corporal's left chest was adorned with nearly a dozen medals, and a wound stripe decorated the lower part of his left sleeve. His expression could have been described as blank, but it had traces of an almost superhuman calmness and a touch of grimness.
    There was an unsettled quality to his eyes that could have been interpreted as suppressed fear, but was maybe just a bit of nervousness.
    The corporal walked slowly down the mirror-polished floor of the corridor, past the 2-D portraits of the chain of command on its institutional-ochre walls, and mounted the stairs to the