Puntimats were well known within the Confederacy. The females were nearly four feet tall and slender, with large mammaries, thighs, and glutes, with soft bluish fur coating the majority of their bodies, conical ears lifted up from their heads and large expressive eyes. Roughly 7.4% of the Confederate military was made up of Puntimat females. A large disparity compared to their representation in the Confederacy's population, most of whom were career enlisted rather than officers. They were known for their soft voices, patience, empathy, and caring.
That, and working the conex brothels, making the brothel themselves if one had not been established. Barracks bunnies were usually depicted as a Puntimat in society dia Rule-34.
Nobody was startled to see a Puntimat female in the Confederate military, any more than they were startled to see a Rigellian female.
A male? Now that was a different story.
Due to a quirk of biology there was less than one male for every two hundred and fifty females. They were delicate appearing, slender of body, with very short soft fur, and shorter than the female at three to three and a half feet (roughly a ter and spare change in inches) tall.
Not too long ago in their history, n were fought over in battles to the death.
Males were gentle and caring, they emitted a pheromone that cald females down. They were often referred to as being the analog to the Rigellian Ducks. Small, gentle, quiet, living lives of comfort and ease.
Puntimat society emulated Pubvian societal norms when it ca to the males. Covered head to toe, usually wearing an environntal suit with a mask, lest a female be driven into a hormonal frenzy at the sight.
It was strange to see one in the wild.
It was weirder to see one outside of Luleervee Pri, the Puntimat howorld.
It was downright fucking unheard of to see one in the Confederate military. The number could be counted on one hand.
Lermat Mwillik was strange even for male.
He was short, at just shy of a ter by two inches. He was wiry, like he was made up of wire and leather covered by plush carpet. His eyes held a hard glint of amusent at the Malevolent Universe.
He had also passed Confederate Marine training.
And every special warfare class he was ever offered.
It would surprise nobody who knew him that he had greeted the return of TerraSol with imdiately trying to sign up for schools only available in the Sol System. That he had been chosen for the mission surprised none of his compatriots, leadership, or bunk-mates.
After all, if you were going to chose soone for sothing that looked like a suicide mission you should probably choose the guy whose training suggested that the person in question thought suicide missions just might be survivable and would probably be a whole lot of fun.
Lance Corporal Lermat Mwillik was just that Puntimat.
In dia he would be portrayed as nervous or excited, or perhaps afraid of the upcoming mission.
He was not afraid when he painted bright red eyebrows on his forehead, a red shallow but wide V over the bridge of his nose, and three chevrons on each cheek with a red camo paintstick. He was perfectly at ease as he ran the self-tests on every piece of bioware and cyberware the Confederate Marine Corps had implanted in his body. He went through each of his weapons, each piece of gear with cold thodical precision. Multiple ti he replaced parts or even entire pieces of equipnt.
The armorer did not argue with him when he turned in so of the small precision milled parts of his weapons.
The armorer respected LC Mwillik.
Moving to the mat-trans had no fear for LC Mwillik.
It would burn his brain.
Too many 'drops' from a mat-trans would regale him to 'the Idiots' out by a Hellspace rip that asured over a light year.
He would go mad.
His brain would be shattered.
Again, dia would show him as frightened or overly wary.
He stared at the hexagonal chamber for a long mont, looking at the cre colored armor glass that was shot through with threads of crimson and erald and sapphire. He admired the beauty. He had read that the manufacture of the armored glass walls had to be precise, and the manufacturing thod, due to impurities, created a different type of glass.
In ancient tis, they had been forged in secret deep in the secret war forges of the Hamburger Kingdom, then in the fires of Betrayed rcury's Wrath Foundries, and now they could only be purchased from the Idiots.
The glass was beautiful.
He took a single deep breath, knowing it would be the last breath of ship's air from the Willy until he returned from his mission. He put the rebreather in his mouth, sealed the flexible face mask, and entered the mat-trans chamber.
He knelt down in the recovery position and then thumbed the injector.
His brain went still.
The mat-trans moved him from one pad to the next.
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Popular dia showed teleportation as disintegrating the original and building a copy sowhere else. Other dia showed the mat-trans as tearing apart the person at a molecular level and sohow moving the sub-atomic particles elsewhere to be put together.
All of it was wrong. It was why scientific investigation of the mat-trans dead ended every ti.
It moved the person, the physical, the objects, intact to the destination.
There was no disintegration.
No tearing molecules apart.
It moved everything on the pad, intact, to the next. It knocked them out and moved them.
But the nightmares.
The nightmares could drive soone mad.
However, without being knocked out...
...the living died.
The door shut.
It began to hum.
LC Mwillik took no chances and thumbed the button to inject the drug into his system that would stop all brain activity and turn off his bioware and cyberware. No nerve impulses but what was needed to keep his body alive for ten seconds.
The drugs that had stopped his brain from firing except for the brainstem and deep autonomous reflex areas oxidized in his bloodstream. His heart stopped just as it would have made a beat. Organs ceased operation, hung up just as they started an operation, their receptors full of initiation chemicals.
The mat-trans cycled.
At three seconds the pad moved him to the target pad.
For five seconds he was exposed to eternity. Exposed to all of ti and space, standing, briefly, where it had no aning.
His brain recorded nothing and nothing touched his soul.
At nine seconds he was on the receiving pad.
At ten seconds he was fully arrived.
He blinked, his brain unlocking and allowing him to think and form mories again.
Lance Corporal Mwillik was up and moving before the quantum fog had dissipated. He thumbed the signal device three tis, letting control know he was fully intact and carrying out the mission. He then thumbed the button on the case, checking the readout. It responded with a set of "Zzzz" and then an alpha-nuric code that LC Mwillik knew ant the DS was still in stasis.
The smile on Mwillik's face, hidden by his black flex-armor mask was because the Digital Sentience would be able to brag that it had gone through the mat-trans without being driven insane or dying after the mission.
The block that the DS was inside of stopped all molecular and sub-molecular activity for whatever was inside the heavy insulation sleeve. That piece of gear was Marine Raider gear, hidden behind walls of junk and rusted crap that the Raiders usually used.
Once in a while, there was good stuff hidden in the pile of cast-offs from the other services.
LC Mwillik stopped in front of the large door. He could feel the weight from it. He knew, from classes during Raider training that it didn't matter where the door was. Shipboard, facility, a shack in the woods, the door would be multi-ton vanadium-titanium steel alloy that sohow had an inverted matter layer of unstable inverted molecules and atoms, making the door virtually indestructible.
It would require a code and other authorization to open, most of them unique according to the door.
But Mwillik was a initiate to secrets.
Pulling a thin can of temporary paint that would evaporate after a short period of ti, he quickly drew a complex pattern on the floor, with lines and runes moving to the door. It took long monts but Mwillik knew better than to hurry.
He finished it with a drop of a Marine-Chow TastyTreat?? in the middle of the circle.
There was a puff of smoke, even in the vacuum.
A strange creature stood in the circle. It looked it over with large, bulging eyes. It started chewing on its barbed tail thoughtfully before bending down and picking up the TastyTreat. It nibbled at it.
"TriTip Buffalo Steak. Nice," the creature said in perfect vacuum. It turned to the door then back to Mwillik. Mwillik felt his palm burn and knew the code to the door had been temporarily burned into his flesh.
The creature vanished.
Mwillik held his hand out to the door and recited the prayer in ancient Terran.
"Open you stupid piece of shit you low budget hunk of crap you made by the lowest bidder crap pile," he intoned.
The door slid open silently.
Mwillik moved into the dark interior of the warship. His goggles made everything as bright as day, using cast-off sub-atomic particles to provide a near-pure visual of the walls. He could see dead and unused cabling as well as other infrastructure elents.
The door closed behind him, but that was the past.
Raiders didn't look back. Raiders were sharks, and sharks didn't have necks. You know who had necks? Sheep. And you know what happened to sheep? They got their throats cut.
There was graffiti on the walls. Not the entertaining and fun TerraSol graffiti involving sexual organs, military humor, and other topics.
There were two types of graffiti.
Standard Ornislarp and what was considered High Ornislarp.
One was basically stating that the door couldn't be opened no matter what was brought to bear. That the chamber or perhaps only the door was on virtually every ship and seed to contain its own power source. The contents on the other side of the door were unknown. Blowing open the chamber seed to require weapons powerful enough to destroy the starship at the sa ti.
It was written in what was known as "Eat Speech" by High Ornislarp.
High Ornislarp had no words for ally and the like.
Only "Eater" and "Eaten/To be eaten
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