Not parmesan cheese as in, a big hot bowl of spaghetti on a cold winter night, with a couple juicy meatballs on top, and you’ve been smelling that tantalizing tomato sauce simmering on the stove all day, and you’re sitting down with a slice of garlic bread and a glass of hearty red wine, and you sprinkle fresh parmesan on top, and it kind of melts into the sauce? Not that. This was parmesan cheese as in, you’re already sick with like the flu or just an epic hangover, and your stomach is already on the edge, and you smell parmesan cheese that’s been out of the fridge too long, and you know you’re going to hurl. That’s the parmesan cheese we smelled, coming from the fields.

“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.