“One of the shows on CNN, I think,” Eric said, chuckling. “That was when the whole ‘degree in international relations from the Sorbonne’ really started to stick in people’s minds. Before that one, he was low on the ladder of invitations. After that one, everybody was clamoring to get him on.”
“ ‘In the modern world, a conscriptive and confiscatory condition between nations is unmanageable and unacceptable. The only choice is cooperation, willingness and enthusiasm. If humanity cannot raise such willingness, if we are so nihilist as to have forgotten honor, duty and sacrifice, then we are condemned by the universe to oblivion and deserve no less.’ Damn, it sounded like he was running for office. And he’d get elected in a landslide. He really thundered that last bit.”
“I actually saw a ‘Powell for President’ bumper sticker,” Eric said, grinning.
“So did I, sir,” First Sergeant Powell said grumpily, as he stumped into Admin. He was in regular duty uniform.
“No PT this morning, First Sergeant?” the CO asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m scheduled for a local morning TV show, sir,” Powell growled. “I hope to be back by 0900 formation. And I told PIO that given our mission schedule this was the last one I’m doing.”
“Gunny Juda can take it,” the CO said. “But he’s beginning to complain about your paperwork.”
“I’m not beginning to complain, sir,” Juda said as he walked in with Gunnery Sergeant Mitchell. “I’ve been complaining. Welcome back, Top, Lieutenant.”
“The Delian League, First Sergeant?” Gunny Mitchell said, grinning. “I mean, you spent a good three minutes just explaining that!”
“I blame the fact that I had to on poor public schools,” Powell replied. “And good day to you, too, Gunnery Sergeant. I ought to drop you for push-ups for simply mentioning the Mongolian cluster grapp that was last week. And I’d sincerely appreciate it if we could simply forget the whole thing happened.”
“How can we?” Juda said, gesturing at the monitors in the room. “Forget posing for the camera, Third’s been trying to get in the best one-liners. Wilson noticed that the guys who were getting good coverage were the ones that had the sharpest retorts. It’s getting brutal in the barracks, let me tell you.”
“Right!” the first sergeant snapped. “Sir, permission to revise the training schedule!”
“What day?” the CO asked, grinning. “And why?”
“Today,” Top said. “And tomorrow. Starting at the 0900 formation. Uniform changed to field gear and combat ruck load.”
“Oh, hot diggity,” Eric said. “You’re talking a good, old-fashioned, Powell Pounding, aren’t you, Top?”
“We’ll need to scare up an ambulance,” Powell said, with relish. “And a truck for the wounded. It’s about time the company remembered who was boss.”
“That would be me,” the CO said. “But I’m in general agreement and can’t think of anything that can’t be moved around on the training schedule. Mandatory for the officers, by the way. Lieutenant Bergstresser, I hope you know where your combat gear is.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Eric said, grinning. “Hey, Top, can I call cadence and set the pace?”
“We may switch off, Two-Gun,” Powell replied. “If you remember how to march.”
“Military decorum, First Sergeant,” the CO said, still smiling.
“In that case: We may switch off, Sir Two-Gun.”
Miriam sat at her computer console in the linguist’s office of the Blade II, nearly motionless, staring blankly at the computer screen. The only lighting in the room came from the crack in the office door, and the dim blue-green from the monitor cast an eerily dancing silhouette of her slight figure against the bulkhead behind her. The only sound in the office was the tap tap tapping of the keyboard keys and a faint whistling of air rushing through the air conditioning vent. Her hands typed frantically, filling the open Word document in front of her with what might seem like techno-babble to the average reader, but on occasion the techno-babble had proven to be useful information to get them out of tight spots. So, Miriam had started writing it down, just in case.
“…as the scalar field consists of two stable neutral oscillations and two charged oscillations three of which can be described as massless and unphysical bosons while the fourth is the manifestation of the massive unstable particle with no spin or intrinsic angular momentum. A one-loop evolution diagram of the first order correction to this mass shows that it strongly couples to top quark fields and therefore typically evolves to top anti-top pairs. The addition of intrinsic properties to the massive boson creates a stable gauge entity from which metric structure can be manipulated…”
Miriam hated to admit it to herself but being away from the Blade during the past few months had left her with a feeling that something had been missing. She realized upon her return that it was the voice from the ship. At first she had hated the voice as it had nearly driven her nuts. But it was becoming sort of an old friend to fill void periods of time where she usually got bored.
Sometime during the last mission Miriam had begun hearing gibberish voices in her head. At first she had thought it was a faulty implant, but her reluctance to let the ship’s sawbones crack open her skull forced her to keep quiet about it. After all, most of the crew already thought she was bat-shit crazy; hearing voices would only have put the purple icing on the fruitcake.
As time passed the voice finally went from gibberish to English techno-babble. Miriam soon realized that the techno-babble was indeed information that was somehow pertinent to the functioning of the Blade’s alien drive system. Somehow, and for some reason, the little black box had chosen to dump user information into her mind. The information was about as useful, for the most part, as Chinese stereo instructions to someone who only speaks French and has never seen a stereo. Fortunately, in Miriam’s case she spoke both languages and quite enjoyed music and every now and then she understood what the voice was telling her.
“…it is inconsistent for the mechanism between symmetry breaking aspects to be unitary as…”
“Hi, Miriam,” Bill said, sticking his head in the linguist’s office. “I was wondering, did you happen to get anywhere with… ?”
“Shhh!” Miriam said as she tapped one last set of keystrokes. The voice stopped.
“Miriam?” Weaver blinked his eyes to adjust to the darkened room. “Uh, you know, my grandma used to tell me not to sit too close to the TV with all the lights out or I’d go blind…” His voice trailed off as he realized Miriam wasn’t paying attention. Or more like she was paying attention only in the way she did when she translated for someone.
“Sorry, Bill. I didn’t want to lose my train of thought.” She clicked the minimize box on the document she was typing.
“Uh huh.” Bill nodded. “If now’s a bad time…”
“And I was expecting to see you. We have manuals for all the Hexosehr systems,” Miriam said. “They’re not stupid enough to have given us the equipment and no repair manuals. It was mostly what I was doing on the way back, translating them all. I mean, they’d been autotranslated but that left a lot of ambiguity. What we don’t have, I just discovered, is all the parts and tools we’re supposed to have for them. They’re all listed, they’re in the required parts and tools inventory, we had them when we got back but now they’re missing!”