Phule Me Twice by Robert Asprin & Peter J. Heck

By dinner time, the troops had sat down together in the new mess hall to a hot meal. Of course, Sergeant Escrima ad complained vociferously about the primitive facilities he had to work with and the shortage of fresh ingredients-that last would be remedied as soon as they could find local sources of supply-but Rembrandt thought the food was every bit as tasty as what the cooks had turned out in a state-of-the-art hotel kitchen. And if anyone else ad noticed a decline in quality, she hadn’t heard them say so. That was probably just as well, given the mess sergeant’s hair-trigger temper and homicidal fury.

The other camp buildings had gone up quickly, too, and there was a second well already drilled in the center of the compound. Chocolate Harry had put up a supply depot as soon as the living quarters were done, and all the company’s motorized equipment and electronics were now safely under cover. The company had only a general idea what kind of weather this planet offered, but unless a tornado sprang up out of nowhere, the equipment could probably survive it.

Meanwhile, the troops had established a secure perimeter and systematically begun to extend their control into the countryside beyond it. Electronic surveillance equipment had been put in place, and they were ready to tap into the natives’ military intelligence satellite network as soon as the captain had gotten passwords from the government Rembrandt hoped those would come through soon; they were secure against anything local, but to do the job they had been sent for, the company needed to now what was brewing beyond their line of sight or on the planet’s other continents.