Hallo to what few people are still reading this crap, I am alive but schools has started up again so I've been having to speed most of my time writing papers and reading text books. In the interests of hopefully keeping some momentum and moving forward I've decided to see if I can't produce shorter chapters more often. So instead of the older 2 to 3,000 word ones this one is like 800 something and my target will be like 1000 which I can often manage to get done in one sitting when I have some time. I suppose we'll see how it works, but there's a high probability I won't be able to keep myself to this and will end up going back to highly sporadic big chapters again as I'm want to do.
Anyway on with the crap, this time we'll be checking back in what the other half of our cast is up too.
Red Base, Time... way to damn early in the morning.
"Alright so I bet you're all wondering why I called you up here so early!" Sarge announced with his usual enthusiasm to his assembled team despite the insanely early hour. The group of half asleep and grumpy men was assembled in the bases kitchen at there superiors behest, most of have rather still been in bed.
"Not really, but I'm sure it's stupid." Grif mumbled under his breath into his coffee.
"You got something to say maggot?" Sarge turned to glare at him.
"Oh no, I can just barely contain my excitement over what wondrous announcement it is you're about to make!" Grif replied sarcastically.
Sarge seemed about to go after him before Simmons quickly intervened. "Sir ignore the moron, we should get on with business... " So I can hopefully go back to bed. He added mentally.
"Good point Simmons; we can't allow one malcontent idiot to derail our operations!" Sarge agreed after a moment's consideration, and though Grif seemed less then pleased with these remarks he remained silent under a glare from Simmons. "On that note I have good news!"
"Well that'd be a nice change of pace." Grif was once more unable to contain his sarcasm. Nothing good or nice every happened to them unless horrible baggage was attached, nothing.
"After intensive study me and Lopez think we can rebuild the matter translocater, and then by reversing the polarity send us back!" That was an unusually positive start, but where was the "but" there was always a "but"… "But in order to do so we'll need at least five pounds of highly enriched plutonium."
"Wait that thing had plutonium in it?!" Simmons boggled.
"Of course, translocating matters takes so much energy the only suitable power source was a nuclear core!" Sarge replied as if that ought to be obvious.
"Isn't that stuff radioactive?!" Grif added alarmed.
"Extremely so!" Sarge affirmed.
"And didn't that machine BURN AND EXPLODE!?" Simmons noted also extremely unsettled by this revelation.
"Wait doesn't that mean now we could be radioactive, that can't be good!" Donut blanched as he too put together the pieces.
"Now, now calm down just because something is radioactive doesn't mean it's deadly! After all even sunshine is radiation! In fact I even have this chart I made up in case this came up!" " Sarge admonished them in an unusually logical manner. He quickly produced the aforementioned document and pinned it up to wall behind them. "Now as you can see I've marked out some common radiation sources here in order to compare their overall output in terms of 'sunshine units'." And quickly descended back into his usual insanity.
The chart ranged from "bad sunburn" at the bottom up to "Supernova" at the top. Besides each source was a smiling yellow cartoon sun being orbited by radiation warning symbols with a number underneath it. "Now as you can see by this chart we were only exposed to about 10,000 sunshine units and at such a mild dosage level the increase in the risk of horrible death by cancer is rather modest and any such death is likely to take years to manifest. So based on this we can clearly see that the radiation dosage we've received will not be a factor in our current mission!"
"Umm sir what about those of us that would prefer not to die of cancer at all?" Donut queried curious.
"Tough cookies! You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, or being exposed to potentially fatal radiation as the case maybe." Sarge responded sternly silencing any further discussion of the topic. "Now that we have that out of the way let's move on to more good news! Using my newly built radiation scanner I've managed to detect what I believe to be a cache of plutonium only a few miles away!"
"Well that's improbably convenient." Simmons noted flatly.
"But, more bad news!" Sarge continued on. "It seems this deposit is up on that giant inhospitable looking and erriy mountain."
"Figures." Grif sighed.
"Umm Sir if I recall correctly plutonium only occurs in large concentrations as a result of refining so wouldn't that tend to imply someone refined it, and further that they might not just want to give us a bunch of their deadly fissile material for free?" Simmons pointed out a fairly obvious issue.
"I'm sure if we ask them nicely and explain it's for scientific purposes they'll be happy to help." Sarge seemed unfazed.
"And if they're not?" Simmons pressed the issue as it was rather critical.
"Well…" Sarge racked his shotguns slide.
"So we just try and steal it then?" Simmons sighed.
"Don't be so negative we won't be stealing, we'll be encouraging them to let us borrow some!" Sarge replied dismissively.
"So we can flee back to another planet and never return what we took." Simmons noted pointedly.
"Borrowing in a way so you never have to give what you took back is the best kind of borrowing!" Sarge announced jovially.
"We're so going to start some kind of war…" Simmons sighed wearily.