“Parmesan- goddamn, it smells like Sanchez’ feet!” Chen said disgustedly.

“My feet? You ever smell your own?”

“I wash my feet!”

“Once a year, maybe.”

“All right, pipe down, you two.” I ordered. “Maybe it’s a chemical they spray on their crops, and it’ll go away. Or we’ll get used to it, and not even notice it anymore.”

“Shit.” Chen spat. “I been bunkin’ with Sanchez for weeks, and I ain’t got used to his stinky feet yet. If this whole planets smells like that, this is gonna to be a long deployment.”

The rest of our platoon was already there, they’d set up a base in tents around a barn, the hamster town was half a kilometer to the east. I got my fireteam sorted out, and the first sergeant of the platoon told me to report to Lieutenant Charles in a tent.

I saluted smartly. “Sergeant Bishop, reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Bishop, I expected your team this morning.” He gave me a casual salute back, he seemed to be distracted. Establishing a platoon base on an alien planet had to give a guy headaches.

“Charlie Foxtrot loading the dropships at Alpha sir, the Kristang put us on the wrong starship. We're all here now, sir, Sergeant Agnelli is getting us squared away”

"Yeah, UNEF is scattered all over this planet. You made it here, that's what matters." He pointed to a map laid out on a table, a real map, printed on some sort of plastic. It showed about a tenth of the main continent, the part where we were right then. It was mostly farmland, flat farmland, with some low ridges running north-south, rivers and lakes here and there. The seacoast was off to the west, the space elevator base station somewhere off the map to the southeast. “We’re here in this region,” he circled a finger around a gray shaded area, “the Ruhar call it, some damned thing,” he pointed to the markings, which were in Ruhar script, “but we’re calling it Butt-scratch-istan.”

“Buttscratchistan?” I laughed.

He smiled. “The region to the north of us is Back-scratch-istan, so, to the south here must be Buttscratch, right? Your fireteam will occupy a village about a hundred kilometers west of here,” he pointed to a tiny dot on the map. “The hamsters there are all farmers, population around two fifty if you count the surrounding farmsteads. There’s a school, barns, a grain storage building, some houses, and that’s about it.”

One fireteam of four soldiers against over two hundred hamsters? I didn’t like those odds. A fireteam didn’t usually operate alone, two fireteams belonged to a squad, with a staff sergeant in charge. “Sir, how is one fireteam supposed to keep control of that many hamsters?”

“You’re not. This is an experiment,” he grimaced, “a bright idea from Division. We have company-size quick reaction teams scattered around, with Buzzards and Chickens, backed up by Kristang firepower in orbit,” he glanced at the ceiling of the tent. “There’s plenty of firepower available if we need it, what Division wants is to avoid needing it.”