“I swear to god boy, you better get up off that ground before I kick your dick into a split tail.”

Mulligan reluctantly got up from the beautiful snow angel he’d been making, careful not to ruin it.

“I gave you a direct order and I come back here to find you making snow angels?” the Sargent bellowed.

“I finished,” Mulligan answered.

“You finished? How the hell did you finish digging a 30m tunnel with a hand laser in the time it takes to milk the prostate of a god damn space monkey?”

“I just cranked the power on the laser too happy, sir.”

“What do you mean, happy? You weren’t supposed to turn it up past 5.5. Are you telling me you disobeyed an order?”

“Is that what that was? I just thought it was the Nazi setting, sir.”

“Nazi setting?”

Mulligan just waved him off. “Doesn’t matter. The new meds they have me on make me a bit dyslexic.

Mulligan presented his gun, showing where he had scraped off the numbers around a 180 degree dial and replaced them with; a sad face, an apathetic one and a happy face. The dial was turned to the happy face.

The Sargent turned to another soldier who, until that point, had been quietly standing in the background trying not to be noticed.

“Rauzchek, you just let him do this?”

“I didn’t let him do shit, sir. I tried to tell him not to turn it up that far, but it became apparent that I just needed to stay out of his way if I wanted to live past the day.”

The sergeant took a moment, peering down the tunnel. “Did you go in there?”

“Fuck, no I didn’t,” He blurted out before catching himself and adding, “sir.”

The Sargent sighed, “Well let’s go check it out.”

Rauzchek looked down the tunnel, which seemed far too steep. “How do we get down there?”

Mulligan threw himself down the shaft, His arms and legs sprawled open as he landed, before tucking himself into a torpedo.

“I’m a penguin.” His words disappearing down the ice tunnel with him.

The Sargent looked over at Rauzchek, who nodded in reply. “He has an exit on the other end and was making laps up until he got bored and started making snow angels.”

The Sargent gave a curt nod back and then motioned with his arm, “After you.”

Rauzchek almost said no thank you before realizing it wasn’t a request. He came over and sat at the precipice of the luge, preparing himself to enter the black abyss. A foot to the back was all the time he got.

The Sargent waited the appropriate amount of time for the bodies to build up at the bottom before descending himself. He didn’t have the time to enjoy the nuances of the craftsmanship of the slide like Mulligan would have liked. The Sargent was too busy looking for obstructions that might split him in two. Each twist and turn was a new adventure awaiting him of possible death and dismemberment. When he thudded to the bottom, he barely felt the impact of what was sure to leave a bruise.

“Sorry about the landing. I was going to keep going, but I hit that rock. Weird, right? Hitting a rock in the middle of an ice planet. What are the odds?”

Rauzchek spoke up, adrenaline fueling his nerve. For some reason, that was completely understandable. Mulligan made him uncomfortable. “Did you think an ice planet was made of solid ice?”

“Well, yeah,” Mulligan said, looking at him as if he had never heard a more idiotic question in his whole life. Of course an ice planet was made of solid ice. They weren’t going to make them out of yogurt.

“You do realize that ice planets are just regular planets covered in ice, right?”

Mulligan squinted his eyes at him. He wasn’t sure, but sometimes with all the meds he was on, it was hard to tell the retard in the room. He was pretty sure it was this guy.

While they had been debating astronomy, the sergeant had been inspecting the circular chamber that Mulligan had carved out of the ice, its rough arching ceiling reaching almost twenty-feet. He soon found himself standing in front of an image carved into the wall with the lovingness and tenderness of a three-year-old with a broken crayon. He found it mesmerizing.

“Do you like it?” Mulligan didn’t wait for a response. “It’s the Kool-Aid Man. I had to turn the laser to sad face, which is funny, because this drawing makes me nothing but happy.”

The sergeant continued to peer at the Bulbous drawing. He had no fucking idea who the Kool-aid Man was. Hell, if he was going to be honest with himself, he wasn’t sure what a Nazi was either. All he knew is that Mulligan was one of the top General’s son, whether General Hizo wanted anybody to know it or not, and that meant Mulligan was damn near indestructible when it came to getting kicked out of the military.

At that moment, his comm burst to life, drowning out Mulligan’s ramblings. They had new orders. An armada of alien ships had posted themselves inside the atmosphere of a human occupied planet. Currently, they hadn’t done anything but fly back and forth, but reports said they were a possibility of a threat. He looked over at Mulligan, who was talking about the finer nuances of this imaginary Kool-aid Man. He clenched his eyes so tight they threatened to rupture. He was going to have to take this dumbass-son-of-a-bitch into battle. There was no doubt about it. This turd-monkey was going to get him killed.