Bark Night of the Soul

"You can be so much more."

"Take it off. Rip open your heart and show Me the parts you're frightened to show them."

"The needy ones."

"The foolish ones."

"The sexy ones."

"The ones thay obey Me and Me alone."

"Have you done it? That vacant, loving stare seems to say so."

She didn't need eyes, though. A pointer lives and dies by her nose. Powerful mass-spectrometer equipped sensors swept the battlefield, offering data in smell rather than sight.

There. Iron and burnt oil, with a whiff of ammonia. Enemy scout mech. Easy lunch.

She froze and leaned forward in her seat, every nerve straining to kill as her naval-grade railgun hummed to life.

Lock-on achieved.

It would jump. They always jumped. She'd load up a depleted-uranium grapeshot round.

Movement pattern model R-Square at 80%.

This would be a clean kill.

A husky voice chimed in on her intercom.

"Steady,"

"Steady,"

The scent pattern lurched upward. Automated sensors tracked the target as the pointer put on the final adjustments.

"Pull."

The pointer hound lurched forward with the mech's recoil, a burst antigravity field saving her from an intimate, terminal encounter with the inside of the windshield.

She recovered in short order, though, waiting for the sensors in the ammunition to report back.

Straining at her harness, drool dripping from her eager lips, she envisioned ripping the poor pilot out of its metal shell, of tearing it limb from limb, of experiencing the blood-bile-fat smell of an adrenaline spiked pilot spilling its lifeblood upon her enormous metal fangs.

The wait dragged on, interminable, the fall of the enemy mech playing in slow motion across her palate.

At long last her handler gave her the command she'd been waiting for. One simple word, to make all of this worth it.

They stepped into the empty mess hall, where tables and benches cast long shadows in the dim, red light of the exit sign. Step by barefoot step, they skulked their way over the ocean of cool linoleum, darting under tables when they heard the heavy footsteps of a guard down the hall.

They imagined what would happen if the guard found them, dragged them kicking and howling back home. They'd probably find themselves thrown out to the mess hall for lunch the next day, naked and "on the menu" to satisfy the hungry looks in the troops' eyes.

Soon they reached their quarry: clambering through the serving window into the kitchen, they ran to the freezer, grabbed one of the precious, precious tubs of ice cream reserved for officers, and gorged themselves with whatever utensils they could find.

A court martial would be too good for them if the cooks filed a report. Handler would deal with them personally. Being used by the troops was one thing; being used by the hounds was something else entirely. A nervous shiver ran down the younger hound's back -- or maybe that was just the dessert.

Slowly, they padded out of the kitchen, across the mess hall, and through the labyrinthine halls of the base. Despite a few close calls, they made it back to their quarters without detection. As they nestled into the pile of other hounds on the floor, one whispered to the other, "Damn, I thought She'd catch is for sure this time."

The atmosphere is marginal, the sunlight poorer than anticipated thanks to an undetected ring system, the soil as impoverished as her ancestors were back on the old planet.

Inside the towering, pot-bellied mech, she sits under purplish grow lights surrounded by a thousand small plants. Plants that, like her foremothers, crossed space and time to get here the old-fashioned, sublight way.

A part of her wonders if the old planet still supports life at all, if these precious seedlings are the last of their kinds. It is for that reason she takes each heavy step with care, that her cargo stays sealed in an impegnebale fortress of steel.

There, though. The sensors pick up a spot. Direct sun, shielded from wind by a cliff on the north side, soil with unusually high phosphate levels. Perfect to begin something new.

She aims a shoulder-mount grenade launcher upward and, with a hollow "pop," sends a human-sized capsule skyward. It bursts open at its apex, then the clusters it releases burst again. Lichens, spores, microbes, a pick-me-up to wake up the soil that her grandmother had originally inoculated a century ago.

She would have been so proud to know her granddaughter got to see this day.

She piloted her mech to a small patch of red, sandy clay and knelt down. Turning to her left, she thumbed through her library of seedlings, picked a few strong-looking ones, and placed them in the miniature airlock. Two small manipulators with the size and dexterity of human arms carved a few small holes in the clay, reached in, and grabbed the fragile green shoots. Like laying an infant to sleep, she did something no human on her generation ship had done for two millenia.

A few scrapes of soil. A spritz of water. And a word, something between a command and a prayer:

"Earthy?" "Spicy?" So is everybody else. Give me the words to describe how her scent differs from every other human being's. Give me the semantic footholds I need to train my nose to her bouquet.

Don't cheap out. Sure, the cook has the names of ingredients, the perfumer flowers, the sommelier everything from smoke to cat piss. Those are chainsaws to the nose's exquisite sensitivity. I demand a scalpel.