Pete, Popeye and Olive: Privateer Tales Shorts, #2

By Jamie McFarlane

Pete Hoffen has spent the last year in the rainforest of the Amazon, slogging through hell and back in service to his country. When an opportunity to join the Mechanized Infantry presents itself, Pete is first in line. He knows that he's going to get shot at one way or another, but the idea of sitting in a warm and more importantly, dry mechanized suit appeals to him almost beyond reason.

While still training in the jungle, Pete's squad is called out to intervene in a skirmish in a nearby village. Of course, the Marines haven't seen fit to certify his squad with ordnance. The fact that they'll be up against a platoon of squishies doesn't convince him that's it's any better of an idea and things turn quickly to crap when they discover the squishies are protected by grav-tanks.

Pete, Popeye and Olive is a fast paced, short-story with plenty of action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fickle Dragon Publishing
• Release date: Oct 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536513950

Book preview

Introduction

Pete, Popeye and Olive is a short story that can be read in any sequence without fear of spoilers within the rest of the Privateer Tales series. The story picks up with Pete Hoffen as a private in the Marines and he's about the same age Liam is when Rookie Privateer starts.

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Now on to our story...

Training

To say I was excited at being picked to be in the Mechanized Infantry (MI) was something of an understatement. My new special squad and I had spent the better part of the last year slogging around in the hellhole the rest of the world called the Amazon. The one contributing factor to our selection into MI appeared to have been simply surviving a multitude of firefights without significant loss of irreplaceable or overly expensive body parts. It was math only the corporate-minded brass could come up with.

My excitement stemmed from the fact that MI units spent the majority of their time cocooned in fully mechanized, entirely enclosed, environmentally managed suits. Call me a whiner, but I'd spent enough time freezing my ass off in a puddle of mud and placed a high value on that last item - environmentally managed. If I was going to get shot at, at least my frakking feet would be dry.

Training in a Popeye, the name given to mech suits that I still don't understand the reference to, is something akin to learning to walk for the first time from a baby's perspective. The idea seems simple enough. Even worse, experienced operators make it look