Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC

As always

For Captain Tamara Long, USAF

Born: May 12, 1979

Died: 23 March 2003, Afghanistan

You fly with the angels now.

* * *

And to my wife, Miriam, for putting up with me talking about this nonstop during the birthday party she’d spent weeks organizing.

Foreword

A few years back a new author by the name of Larry Correia started writing with Baen. I heard about him quickly. Many of my readers were talking nonstop about his Monster Hunter International series. I sort of ignored it. I used to be a compulsive reader. These days, for various reasons, I don’t read much. I don’t want to steal good lines, which I’ve done accidentally from time to time. I find most reading less interesting than I did before becoming a full-time author. Very few people (some of the top Baen writers excepted) write well enough to keep me engaged. I can think of and write stories better than ninety percent of the published stuff out there. The last point being that the part of me that used to need to be filled with “story” is these days mostly filled with my “story.” It’s what I
do
. Just say I read a lot more nonfiction than fiction these days.

But I was in one of those moods and someone suggested, again,
Monster Hunter International
. Larry had kindly given me a book as a freebie so I picked it up, went “Huh, let’s hope it’s any good…”

And put it down the next day and went and found the other four. And binge-read for a week. (They’re thick books compared to this one.) And really enjoyed myself. And liked the universe. What’s not to like about big guns fighting big monsters with lots of big booms?

As the main character says in a later book: “Who
doesn’t
carry a light antitank weapon in their trunk?” That’s the kind of character I think we can all get our heads around.

And as is my wont, as long-term readers know, my brain went far afield. What was it like back in the eighties for Monster Hunters? What were the similarities? What were the differences? Lot less tech for one thing…Hmmm…And then I crawled into a hole of caffeine, sleep deprivation and nicotine and…

At a certain point, I
had
to write it. As with earlier “new” universes, it was an imperative need. I had other things I should write. This was screaming at me: “WRITE ME! WRITE ME!”

I had no idea if Larry or my publisher, Toni Weisskopf, would approve. Generally Toni will publish my grocery list. I make Baen a fair shekel on my weakest series. (Which, by the way, is probably the competing Special Circumstances series.) Would they be okay with it?

Toni loved the universe and was ecstatic to hear I wanted to write in it. More money! (
Ka-ching!
) More good stories! (Toni’s both a professional businesswoman with a bottom line to make and a long-term fan of SF/F. She likes both.)

Larry used to be an
accountant
. This was making money for almost no work. And he had read my stuff and trusted I’d write it well. His only gripe was that I churned out two books in
less than a month
(what part of “WRITE ME! WRITE ME!” was unclear?) and now he had to make sure they were both compatible to the universe. If I kept up at this rate, which I won’t, he’d be doing nothing but editing for the rest of his life! And he had miniatures to paint!

Hope you enjoy.

—John Ringo

This was all kind of a surprise to me, but when a really successful writer comes along and says, “I’d love to write something set in your world. I’ve already written a couple books of a spin-off series; want to publish them?” You say yes.

It is tough to let somebody else play in your sandbox, but I checked it out. Happily,
Grunge
was a good book, and I had a lot of fun reading it. But there was still a whole lot of world-building John didn’t know about, and couldn’t have known, because I’d not revealed it anywhere yet (and as the regular MH fans have seen, I plan this stuff out far in advance). While reading the original manuscript, I inserted about two hundred comments about how the Monster Hunter universe worked, what had
really
happened in the past, what bits of lore would or would not fit, technical bits, and that sort of thing. He said, “why don’t you just change all that?” And that’s when this project turned into a collaboration.

I’m a writer, not an editor (seriously, much respect to editors, that’s a tough job) and it took me longer to edit this than it took John to write it, so his idea of “almost no work” differs a little from mine. But I tried hard to change as little as possible to keep everything in line with the rest of the MHI universe and still remain true to John’s original story in his original voice. Though there were a few bits that…well, I’ll just say, my kids read these books, John. Those scenes can live on as apocrypha.

I hope you guys like it.

—Larry Correia

PROLOGUE

“Oh, that’s a lot of spiders,” Phil muttered as the Ma Deuce opened up.

We’d expected a lot of spiders. Given the number of missing “homeless” (you’re not supposed to call them bums anymore) there had to be a major nest. Hell, we were expecting a shelob. What we hadn’t expected was a tidal wave. The long, broad corridor was packed with a mass of writhing eight-limbed, eight-eyed, furry, horrible, fang-dripping, brown, couch-sized-body arachnids that covered not just the floors but the walls and the ceilings.

I opened up with my Uzi, killing as fast as I could fire and reload. I had my shotgun slung in case it got to close work, which it looked like it would, and a Barrett M82 at my feet if that became necessary.

It was nearly a hundred yards to the curve and it seemed like that wave covered the distance in an instant. Six of us were firing, seven if you counted Roy feeding rounds into the Ma Deuce, and it just was not stopping them. We really should have set up the Pig as well. They were falling off the ceilings and walls and dropping on the floor but there was just a never-ending tide of the damned things. A bunch of the wounded were shaking off the fire and the aftereffects of ethanol poisoning and clambering back to their furry feet.

“Blow the claymores!” Roy screamed as the wave passed the last claymore position. If too many got inside the final protective line…Well, you don’t recover from most giant spider bites. They’ll just stun you with their venom, so they can take you back to their nest and drink you later. But the flesh dissolving enzyme they use to turn you into drinkable chow gets mixed into the paralytic agent. So you just dissolve slower. If you’re lucky you might just lose an arm or a leg if they get you there. If you’re lucky. Anywhere on the torso it’s just a long, slow, agonizing process of doctors trying very hard and failing to save your life as you scream in agony and beg them to just kill you. Which they won’t, the bastards.

“Not till the shelob’s on the trap,” Brad said, calmly.

As if summoning the damned thing, the shelob came around the corner.

I knew I had to concentrate on the closing offspring but the shelob sort of caught everyone’s attention. At that point as a Monster Hunter, I thought not much could shake me but I’ll admit I sort of peed myself a little bit. We’d gotten all this stuff—claymores, C4, Ma Deuce, hundreds of fifty-cal rounds and a shitload of other guns and ammo—to the firing point by Jesse backing a U-Haul truck down the brick-lined, arched tunnel high and wide enough it wasn’t even a real bother. We’d driven our cars down the old maintenance tunnel for the now defunct Portland cistern that was the presumed nest of the shelob and her offspring. You couldn’t quite get a tractor trailer down the tunnel, but it was close.

The shelob was slithering down the tunnel with its legs squashed to either side of its elephant-sized body and sort of flattened out to fit.

It was that fricking big. All hair and spidery eyes and poison-dripping fangs long enough to use as daggers if you had the courage and could, you know, manage to kill it.

“Fuck me!” Louis screamed, redirecting all the Ma Deuce fire at the enormous arachnid.

“Blow it!” Roy screamed. “For God’s sake!”

“Wait for it,” Brad said, still calm. He was laying down fire with an M16 and I wondered if maybe I should have gone with that Mattel crap for once. Rifle rounds, even little 5.56 ones, would have been nice about now. “Waaait…”

The shelob finally slithered past the bright yellow paint on the walls that marked the trap. She was about to get a C4 enema while claymores shredded her loathsome offspring and ended the threat to Portland’s underground.

We’d spent hours setting up the trap. Just back from the yellow lines on the walls was a pile of C4. C4 was one and a half times the same power as TNT. It was enough to toss a semi-truck into the air. It was going to shred the shelob, guaranteed. The firing circuit led to that pile of cataclysm, then spread out. Multiple lines of det cord led to two hundred claymore directional mines in a multipoint daisy chain. They were securely anchored to the floors and walls and many of them were angled up, anticipating our unwanted visitors on the ceiling. And it wasn’t a single daisy chain. There were lines between sets, extra lines within sets. Nothing was going to stop each and every one going off. We were totally ready.

“NOW!” Brad bellowed.

“Bye bye, you arachnid prick,” Phil said, hitting the contact for the electronic line on the detonator. He hit it again. “Detonation fail! Going Chemical!”

All of our fire, or possibly the thousands of arachnid legs, had somehow cut the wire leading to the electronic detonator on the C4. But Phillip Jimenez was a former Army engineer and knew all about redundancy to firing circuits in combat. Besides the electrical circuit, there was a “chemical” circuit consisting of a fuse igniter which led to a short fuse, then another section of det cord. Slightly slower than electrical but sure enough guaranteed.

The fuse igniter only took a second to hit the detonator but a second was a long time with hundreds of fucking spiders headed towards your position. Not to mention big momma. By the time it hit I’d switched to my Winchester pump and was belting out twelve gauge on spiders that were getting close enough the falling ones were a hazard.

The cord detonated with a
crack
that could be heard even over our fire. But the trap failed to detonate. Again.

“Detonation fail!”
Phil bellowed. Again.

“What the fuck do we do now?” Roy screamed. He’d switched to his pump, covering Louis while twitching, writhing spiders poured off the ceiling like a shit-brown waterfall.

You might be wondering how I got myself in this particular predicament.

My name (which I hate) is Oliver Chadwick Gardenier. My friends call me Chad or Iron Hand.

This is my job. I’m a Monster Hunter.

Note

Recently my buddy Albert has been trying to organize the archives. It’s a pretty big job, but he seems to like it. It would probably be easier if we didn’t keep trashing the place. The other day Albert found this old stack of memoirs that had fallen behind a shelf, and judging from the dust and damage, they’d been lost there since the fire set during the Christmas Party. When Albert saw that I was mentioned, he brought them to me to read.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I didn’t know that Chad had written any of this down.

Reading this brought back a lot of memories.

What can I say about Chad? He was tough. You couldn’t find anybody braver. But mostly he was smart to a fault, and sometimes too clever for his own good. He was cocky, but he earned it. Some of the things in these memoirs…Most of the things in here I wasn’t around for, and for the rest, well, Chad could be a bit prone to exaggeration, an unreliable narrator I guess you could call it. But he really was gifted, and by that, I mean like
really
gifted. The monster languages he talks about? That’s legit. He’s still the only person we’ve had who managed to learn those. The fights and some of the stunts he pulled? He really was that nuts. Now, with the ladies? I’ll say we had a bit of a philosophical difference about his outlook on life and leave it at that.

These memoirs are a great find. We can learn a lot from the Hunters that came before us, and man, Chad was involved in some
crazy
stuff.

Chad was one of the best Hunters we ever had. He’s not just another silver plaque on the wall. He was my friend.

Milo Ivan Anderson

Monster Hunter International

Cazador, Alabama