What we Did on Our Holidays
Where the Directors and staff enjoy some well-earned R&R with gravity and weather.

Personal log, Masumi Minogue
3208.195 (Approximately...)

It's been good to get some R&R. After three pretty fraught marine actions in as many days, I think we bloody well deserved it! So we're doing it in shifts - there's a dozen personnel left on the Osprey under the charge of Smithson for the time being, and we'll rotate through.

We got invited down to a formal(ish) reception at Blue Hope by the colony management. Bennie, myself, Leon and Tony flew the flag for IFU, and a few marines came along for the free food as well. I actually had to shop around in the colony and buy a dress; it wasn't on the list of things I packed back at Percentage, strangely enough. We even managed to get Bennie out of her boiler suit, and the sight of her in a frock and heels with a plastic rose in her teeth will be one that stays with me for a while! I see that our change of attire made a big impression on our resident paparazzo Leon 'Upskirt' MacDuff as well. That's Bennie's name for him - don't blame me... still, after the faked videos of me and Bridget Van Moisten, I think I see where she's coming from.

Anyway, there were speeches and the usual guff, and a big sit down meal. Apparently they're going to put up a statue of Melanie May and name a square after her, and there'll be a couple of streets named after Marines Stephenson and Ruiz, our other two KIAs. We ended up on a table with a couple of admin types; Julia Hennessey the Head of Colonial Development, who was kind of earnest on the subject of getting genetic diversity into the colony and wanted our DNA as breeding stock (!), and Taylor Hutchinson, the Trade Relations Executive, who was trying to persuade us that ths was a really cool place to invest and we should set up an office here and all that. There was much subtle whingeing about how we had cleaned out the colony's finances, to which I pointed out that (a) we had effectively done the job at cost price ourselves and would only get any profit out of the salvage from the captured ships, (b) they would also get some money back from the salvage
and (c) if they didn't think it was worth it they could have stuck with the pirates and just not hired us.

Still, there was some pressure for us to spend a few days planetside spending our hard-earned cash, and Taylor pointed us to a place called Shapiro Island about 1,000km north where the Blue Hope execs maintain villas. It sounded nice, and it would only be for a week or so, so even at the pretty pricey rate of 20 credits a day we ought to be able to manage it. Plus I think Hutchinson had succeeded in making me feel guilty for the colony's financial troubles. And with the prospect of another 60 days in a tin can on the way back to Percentage, any holiday is better than none.

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. Tony took some drugs and ended up tangoing with Bennie - they seemed to be hitting it off; she even talked him into a slow number at the end. I didn't see if they left together as I was pretty pissed myself by then and I was trying to fend off Hennessey from taking egg samples (don't ask). It's good to see Bennie let her hair down, and I know we're all out of uniform now, but for me the old rule about 'no fraternisation within the unit' dies hard. I could probably be colossally bitchy here and say Bennie maybe has less choice about these matters... still if a Satanist and a Christian Fundamentalist can get it together, maybe there's hope for humanity after all.

Anyway, next day it was a Flyer across to Shapiro Island for the four of us plus a couple of the others who fancied it. It *is* beautiful here. It's a big tropical island that's built on some kind of calcium carbonate-based rock somewhere between chalk and limestone which is bright white and honeycombed with caverns and the like. There are some kind of sinkholes called cenotes that supposedly all link up underwater or something. And there are some truly terrifying fish-lizards (icthy-somethings) called Taggers. Little taggers are toothy things a few cm long. Medium ones are like piranha things that will take your thumb off. And the big ones are a couple of metres and will have your leg. In between them, the giant clams and the stinging corals, Bennie was already determined not to get in the water. Frank would just love it - there are so many things to kill or be killed by!

There are two villages on the island, total population 4,000 or so. We're in the bigger one on the west side. Or was it east? The locals mostly survive on Tagger fishing. The colony wants to develop the island as a tourist destination and I think they're looking for us to give some word of mouth. There's a small Hilton-Disney hotel, but we were told it was a bit commercial and anonymous, and for the authentic experience we ought to stay at Vince's Place. And indeed it's quite nice there. There are also a couple of restaurants. 'Treetops' at the summit of the island is supposedly the best, there's also some 'Martian' steakhouse place (the authenticity of which remains to be seen), and again there's an 'authentic' fish restaurant, Magda's Place, on the beach front. There's also a really expensive tiki bar on the beach, Reeve's Bar, run by this dapper Centauran called Reeve Sims. He boasts it's the best bar on the planet. It's certainly the most expensive!

So we've landed, had an honour guard from the local police (seemed to be quite a lot for such a small place, I noticed, with some pretty good gear for local COPs) and got presented with some flowers from a little girl (our visit is something of a big deal for these people, I guess). We've settled into Vince's Place and wandered down to the beach. There's a guy called Roger 'Bluto' Blutarski who runs Tagger fishing trips, and we sat through some salty old sea stories and Leon made a date to go fishing tomorrow. We found one of his people working on a decomissioned combat robot that they use for people who are a bit leery of getting in the water with the killer lizard things. I don't like robots much, but I can see the point.

We had a drink at Reeve's Bar (at two credits a pop, one was all we felt like) and a far more reasonable and very tasty meal at Magda's. The evening went on a slight downcurve when she decided to share with us that her brother had been one of the pirates we killed. He'd 'hung out with bad company' and ended up working for them as a cook, apparently, since her family were famous colony-wide for their cooking. Bennie seemed a bit down at this, but I pointed out to her I was the one who ordered the missile strike, and he'd had a chance to surrender. He was happy enough hanging out with people who kidnapped and murdered colonists, so bollocks to him, I reckon.

Then it was back to Reeve's Bar for some more drinks. Tony had turned up by then and not only managed to score some more drugs, but had put together a list of 'entertainment options' in conjunction with Reeve that went from the expected to the downright dodgy. I mean I'm not shocked by prostitution - far from it - consenting adults in private and all that - but I was shocked at someone trying to charge 500 credits for a night. That's an octant's pay for some pour souls! We may be tourists but we weren't born yesterday. For 500 credits I'd want a night on President Potato's yacht and the personal attention of the President himself.

And then there was the hint that Reeve could get "anything we wanted, even more... extreme tastes". I got the distinct feeling that if we'd asked about under-age prostitutes or someone to torture for a night, or that we wanted to run a big game hunt for humans beings, Reeve would have been able to find someone. There's definitely a sense that there may be a dark underbelly to this paradise. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's just a feeling. There's the local mad bloke we met on the beach, muttering about bodies in the jungle. And fair enough, he's obviously mad. But that doesn't mean there *aren't* bodies in the jungle. And there are 'restricted areas' on the island, supposedly because they haven't mapped it all and they're worried about landslips and hidden sinkholes. There's Magda and her pirate brother. Maybe it's all above board, or maybe I've been spending too long with the Doc and his paranoia is rubbing off on me, but I get the feeling if
we scratched too hard we'd find that the colonists aren't a lot better than the pirates here, and the cooperation between the pirates and some elements of the colony may have gone deeper than they're willing to own up to.

And this is the thing that I don't understand about Tony (or maybe it's Centaurans in general). He's dead keen on IFU having this ethical policy, but when he's presented with hints that some kind of human trafficking may be going on, all he can do is put together a price list.

Me, I'm trying to decide how much I care. Ten days and we're out of here. We're not galactic do-gooders, and even if we were, there's no way we could change an entire colony in just a few days. There are dodgy places everywhere. I've got my bikini, sunglasses and insect repellent - I could just turn a blind eye, work on my tan, sip some cocktails, find a few local hunks to fool around with, and then get back on the shuttle and try to ignore it all. I dunno. All I know is it bothers me rather more than killing a few pirate hangers-on with stray APGW fire did.