Europa Strike

“Why don’t you like girls, Luck?” Kelly Owenson said. “Real ones, I mean?”

“I like girls fine!”

What he didn’t like talking about was the fact that virtual relationships just didn’t fucking hurt as much as the real ones. Damn, Becka. Get out of my head….

He took another swallow of the drink BA had mixed for him—a pineapply something that was quite good. What had she called it?

Sergeant Sherman Nodell was weaving a bit in his seat, despite the fact that he outmassed Lucky by a good twenty kilos, and he didn’t seem interested in discussing Lucky’s sex life. “Just give me another one of those…things you were talkin’ about a little bit ago,” he said. He was being very careful how he enunciated his words.

The nine of them, all members of First and Second Platoons, Bravo Company, were sitting at a folding table in the barracks squad bay. The huge and otherwise bare room which had once been an aircraft hangar was decorated with green-painted concrete floor, steel storage lockers, a display case near the entrance with trophies and battalion honors, and a wall-sized flatscreen on one bulkhead that was displaying the Marine Corps emblem at the moment. Normally, they all would have been out tonight, hitting the bars and sensies in Lompoc, but the 1st Marine Space Expeditionary Force had been restricted to the base ever since word had come down of the early deployment to Europa.

Staff Sergeant Campanelli had come to the rescue, though. She’d been a bartender as a civilian—“in a former life,” as she liked to call it—and she occasionally hauled out a small, portable bar-in-a-suitcase that was her prized possession and entertained the others in the platoon with some of her strange and wonderful concoctions. Mixing drinks in a nondesignated area probably violated half a dozen different regs, but she hadn’t been caught yet. There were rumors to the effect that she had been caught, once, but gotten off in exchange for a bottle of scotch.

Her full name was Brenda Allyn Campanelli, so inevitably she’d picked up the handle “BA,” for Bad Ass, even though she claimed her ass was very good. No one in the platoon claimed personal knowledge of that fact, however, though there’d been a great deal of speculation.

“So…what’ll it be, big boy?” she asked Nodell, taunting him.

He leered. “I wanna blow job!”

“Coming right up! But you’ve got to take it the right way!”

“And what way would that be?”

“I’ll show you.”

She began mixing drinks in two shot glasses, half amaretto, half Kahlúa, topped with a generous squirt of whipped cream from a dispenser in the freezer section of her portable bar. “Okay, we really need a low table for this.”

“How about a chair?” Lucky volunteered.

“That’ll do.” She put the drinks on the chair’s seat, then got down on her knees. “You’ve got to do this right!”

Holding her hands behind her back, she bent forward and took one of the loaded shot glasses in her mouth. The other Marines cheered, clapped, and chanted “Go! Go! Go!” as she tipped her head and the glass up and back, draining the liquid and most of the whipped cream into her throat. Snapping her head forward, she returned the empty shot glass to the chair, licked the excess whipped cream from her lips, and held up her hands as the Marines cheered and stomped on the deck.

“And that is how you do a blow job!” she told Nodell.

“All right!” Dave cried, applauding. “You know, we ought to call you ‘BJ,’ not ‘BA’!”

“Hey, I like that! Just don’t go gettin’ any ideas!”

“I always have ideas, Staff Sergeant!”

“Your turn!” Corporal Lissa Cartwright told Nodell.

“Aw, that’s a sissy drink!” he began, but the others began chanting at him.

“Do it! Do it! Do it!”

At last, he awkwardly dropped to his knees, bent over the remaining glass, and took it in his mouth. He didn’t tip his head fast enough, though, and a lot of it ended up dribbling down his chin, together with a small avalanche of whipped cream. He started choking and gagging, and Lucky and Corporal Duane Niemeyer began pounding him on the back.

“Gah!” he said, rising from the floor. “That’s still a sissy drink! I only drink…I only drink…uh…a man’s drink!”

“And what would that be?” BA asked him.

“Hell, just about anything that pours. One at a time or all together, I can take it! I just don’t do sissy drinks.”

“Is that so?” She studied him. “You ever tried a cement mixer?”

“Nah. What is that, another sissy—”

“A man’s drink,” she told him. “With a name like ‘cement mixer,’ what would you expect?”

“Now that sounds more like it! What’s in it?”

“Here, I think I have the ingredients. Yup. You do this in two stages.” Deftly, she poured out two shot glasses, one with lime grenadine, the other with Bailey’s Irish Creme. She handed him the Bailey’s. “Here. Take this…but don’t swallow. Hold it in your mouth.”

He tossed the shot back.

“Now,” she told him, “take this in your mouth and swish it around with the other.”

Lucky had seen this gag pulled before. The lime juice curdled the Bailey’s, turning it to the consistency of cottage cheese. It didn’t taste bad—sort of like sweet tarts, in fact—but the sensation of having that stuff congeal in your mouth out of nowhere generated the most wonderful expressions of disbelief, shock, and dawning I’ve-been-had horror imaginable.

Nodell was just starting to work at it when the far door opened and Major Warhurst walked in.

“Attention on deck!” Dave cried. There was a swift rattling and shuffling as shot glasses and bottles somehow vanished into BJ’s porta-bar, which closed and locked and made it to the floor as the rest of them stood up.

Warhurst didn’t seem to notice—likely a deliberate oversight on his part—but he seemed fascinated by the expression on Nodell’s face. “Carry—” he started to say, and then stopped. “Nodell? Are you okay?”

“Um…mmm-mmm…mmm!” He was working his jaws furiously, trying to swallow the mess in his mouth without parting his lips.

“That’s ‘Mmm-mmm, sir,’ Nodell. What have you got in your mouth?”

Lucky stood at attention, wondering what was going to go down. V-berg wasn’t dry, but the only drinking allowed was at the various designated watering holes, the enlisted bars and NCO clubs and such. They could all be in a world of shit if Major Warhurst decided to be a prick.

With several more vigorous workings of his jaw, Nodell managed to get the congealed mess chewed and swallowed. “Uh, sorry, sir. You caught me with my mouth full.”

“Of what?”

“Uh…my girlfriend sent me some cookies.”

Warhurst glanced at the suspiciously empty table—no wrappings, no crumbs. “I see.” He sniffed. “Lime cookies? Smells good! I don’t suppose you have any for your CO.”

“Uh, sorry, sir. That was the last one!”

“Very well. Carry on, then!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Almost taps, people. You’d better break this up. We start weapons training early tomorrow. M-580, stripping, cleaning, and troubleshooting. You’ll need clear heads.” He gave Nodell a hard look. “All of you!”