“I’m going to take us out of orbit. You could stand to get lunch somewhere with some sunshine, and this afternoon we hit the books.” said Peggy as she undocked from the station.

  “I should report in too, if possible. Maybe Lt. Anderson could have a working lunch or something?”

  “I’ll dial her phone for you. Tell her we are headed for Andrews.”

  “Anderson” Peggy piped the audio through the cabin speakers.

  “Ensign Trainor, Ma’am.”

  “Ah! My reports say you have had an eventful few days.”

  “It’s hard to believe that I have only been aboard… like, fifty hours.”

  “How are you holding up?” Anderson asked.

  “It’s pretty intense. I’m calling to see if I could report in, and maybe do lunch?”

  “The Lt. Commander is going to want to be there for this. Where are you?”

  “Peggy is telling me we are headed for Andrews.”

  “Ok, I’ll have a car waiting, we’ll meet halfway.”

  The call abruptly disconnected. Casey got up to head back to her cabin.

  “Let me get changed. I can’t meet my boss in public wearing this.” She indicated her ship suit.

  “We should be down in about fifteen minutes. I have been talking to Andrews for thirty minutes, and once I started referring to myself by my real name and title I started making progress. I am also having fun with making the officious bureaucrats managing the ATC there try to say it for stonewalling me.”

  Casey pulled her uniform out of the locker where it was hung up.

  “This doesn’t even look like I need to iron it.”

  “I have the remotes managing your uniforms while you are otherwise occupied. We have too much stuff to do for you to be wasting time touching up your clothes. It’s why ship suits are unadorned and the standard work wear.”

  “Well that and the risk of lack of breathable air.” Casey agreed and started dressing.

  “OK, we are on the ground.” Informed Peggy after several minutes. “There is a sedan approaching with a Second Class Petty Officer driving.” Casey took the main ramp down in the cargo hold, and Peggy left the ramp down.

  “Peggy?”

  “I am keeping the landing gear up, and all other hatches are closed. The tower was left with instructions that no one was to approach, but they irritated me enough that I am looking forward to catching someone misbehaving.”

  “Well, have fun with that I guess.” shrugged Casey as she headed for the car. The Petty officer opened the rear passenger door for her with a salute. Casey read his name as she returned it.

  “Respectfully ma’am, when they said to go pick up a vip from the alien space ship, I wasn’t expecting it to be an Ensign.” he said as she got within easy speaking range.

  “Earlier this week I probably would have agreed with you, P.O. Childers. It’s been a very strange week.” Casey got in the car. The Petty officer got behind the wheel and drove towards the exit from the flight line.

  “Do you know where you are going?”

  “Yes ma’am. The restaurant is about 13 minutes from here. Probably picked that one because they have good steak.”

  Casey rode along in relative quiet, and was surprised when the P.O. pulled up in front of the restaurant and got out to open her door.

  “Thank you, P.O. Will you be alright?”

  “Yes ma’am. I’ll order something online and they will run it out to me here in the parking lot.”

  When Casey walked into the restaurant, the hostess saw her uniform and promptly led her to the table where MacNeal and Anderson were sitting.

  “How is the new job treating you, Ensign?” Asked MacNeal.

  “Put your com on the table, and then you can remove the earbud.” Prompted Peggy.

  “Most of what I have seen has left me without the capacity to adequately describe it, sir.” Casey pulled the comm out of her pocket and then put her earbud in its case. She looked over the menu.

  “I’m afraid the cat may be out of the bag very soon.” warned MacNeal. “Cell phone video from JFK is blurry and inconclusive, but someone got you dead to rights in that fancy space suit while you were talking to those pilots at Patrick, and it’s only a matter of time before someone figures out who you are.”

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  “Then my life gets to be like a Doris Day movie “ Casey shrugged. “At least no one can hunt down my parents for interviews.”

  “Why is that?” Asked Peggy, much to the surprise of MacNeal and Anderson.

  “They are buried at Arlington.” Informed Anderson delicately.

  “Ah, sorry Casey.”

  “It’s alright. It was years ago now for both of them.” deflected Casey.

  They were interrupted by the waiter, and placed their orders.

  “So what do we call your people if we can’t pronounce the actual name?” Anderson asked the communicator on the table.

  “I imagine your scientists will study the taxonomy and evolution and come up with something more formal later, but yesterday Casey called us squidies and surprisingly that is going somewhat viral out in the hive fleet.”

  “Am I a space alien E-Girl, Peggy? Have you been streaming?”

  “Not among the general population, but in academic circles you’re doing numbers.” Joked Peggy.

  “Gods forfend!” Exclaimed a stricken Casey, much to MacNeal and Anderson’s amusement. The four were interrupted again by drinks arriving. Once the waiter left again, MacNeal had more questions.

  “What do you all eat?”

  “I have no aversion to telling you, but it is generally considered a social faux pas to discuss diet with new species during a meal. Are you insisting?”

  “No, I suppose not “

  “I will say that we are obligate carnivores, although for a few thousand years our diets have been composed of nutritionally balanced blends from synthetic sources.”

  The food arrived, and the group paused again. Casey set in to her chicken salad, and gave a brief overview of the last few days while she ate. When she was done, Peggy had a request.

  “Please pass along to your superiors that we will be ready to transport your selection for the Fleet structuring committee to his or her new office in orbit tomorrow. Deliberations on process will be chaired by one of the Queen’s Attendants, and she will want to begin promptly.”

  “It would be at the least embarrassing to be late, yes.” nodded MacNeal.

  “On the topic of being late, we have a briefing soon.” reminded Anderson.

  “I’ll head back to the ship. Thanks for seeing me.” informed Casey.

  “Keep filing your reports, but call anytime.” directed MacNeal. Casey paid her bill and put her earbuds back in as she headed back out to the car.

  *Ready to go, P.O.?”

  “Yes Ma’am. Back to Andrews?”

  “Yes, it’s time to get back to work.”. The petty officer started the drive back.

  “I’ve trapped a mouse.” Peggy told her on the way.

  “I was afraid of that. In the event that it was someone with less brains than bravado, you have my embarrassed apologies on behalf of my species. In the event it was some kind of intelligence operation, we will get to the bottom of it.”

  “Oh, I think it is funny. I have notified the tower to send security. They are waiting outside for you to get back.” Peggy gloated.

  “I don’t suppose you have lights and sirens on this thing, P.O.?”

  “No ma’am. Also by the time I could get an escort we would be there anyway.”

  It was another twenty five minutes to get back to the flight line due to increased traffic and security at the gate. She was met by a team headed up by an Air Force Technical Sergeant. She saluted in passing, but waved them back with a brisk chop as she stomped her way up the ramp.

  There was a lower enlisted crumpled to the floor near the starboard side hatch. Casey could see he was breathing hard.

  “He sprained an ankle hitting the deck, but he is fine. I am only hitting him with gravity higher than 1.25 when he forgets that he shouldn’t try to move.”

  Casey squatted a few feet from the pile of person on the floor so she didn't also get caught in the increased gravity.

  “What’s your name, Airman?”

  “Airman Douglas Michaels.”

  “Airman Michaels, why are you on board? Were you not warned off by your command?”. He remained silent.

  “Your phone there on the deck tells me you are either posting to YouTube for cred, or hoping to find something to sell to some intelligence agency. Either outcome would be pointless and stupid. Nothing on board is classified, and everything here was designed and built for human hands. Every university on the planet has the specs, once we learn enough math to understand them.”

  She stood and stretched.

  “And you could get a bus ride to the new space station if you wanted a tour.” Turning on her heel, she headed back down the ramp.

  “Please scrape dude off my deck. He’ll need a visit to medical, but I don’t care what you do with him after.” The security team left with the Airman in handcuffs. Casey retired back aboard to change clothes again.

  Once she was back in her ship suit, Peggy brought her to the couch in the center cabin. She appeared on the main screen in a chibi cephalopod form, and showed bullet points on the screen with her.

  “Ok, so once the nano builds out the implants, they will help you parse and translate what is said around you, but you will still need to know how the language works to speak it.”

  “The upside is that sentence structure is of little importance, because every species does it differently, typically multiple different ways regionally. Galactic Standard is built around diagraming your sentences as you speak them.”

  “That sounds wordy.”

  “Yes, and that’s the down side. Spoken Galactic Standard is a hexadecimal conversion of Written Galactic Standard, so to say it waxes poetic is a monumental understatement.“

  “So how do people not get stuck just talking to each other?” The idea of all that wasted time made Casey’s brain itch.

  “First, keep it simple and get to the point. Second, understand who you are speaking to. Standard is a bridge, but speaking the subject’s language is almost always faster, if you can do it. And sometimes people do talk to each other all day. There is no accounting for taste, and some people thrive on saying little while speaking much.”

  Casey worked diligently at diagraming her sentences and basic vocabulary for several hours before taking a break for dinner.

  “Is my nose bleeding? I feel like my nose and ears are bleeding “ Since the only cooking appliances on the ship were a glorified air fryer and a microwave and the only foodstuffs were either shelf stable or kept well frozen, she was having pizza.

  “You are fine, and doing quite well actually. As a side note, your memory is making it difficult to use your progress as a data point for development of our training programs.”

  “Sorry for winning the neurological lottery?”

  “No, you’re fine. We can work with this.”

  “I mean, I’m pretty standard otherwise. I would rate me at a D.C. seven, and while I am fit and trained well I am not going to be taking on some dragon prince like a y.a. novel heroine.”

  “I didn’t figure you for a book nerd.”

  “I’m not. My roomie at the Academy was the racy fantasy novel connoisseur.”

  The oven made a chiming noise. Casey poked at the pizza in the ritual diagnostic fashion that such foods are traditionally assigned before cutting it into smaller parts.

  “This brand is pretty good.” She observed after taking a bite.

  “So what are your hobbies?” Peggy asked.

  “I’m into the maker spaces. It’s why I got a degree in mechanical engineering.”

  “So why is it that the one room in the ship you haven’t set foot in is the tool room?”

  “The what?”

  Casey dropped her pizza and scrambled back to the cargo hold. Rushing through the starboard side door out of the hold she saw that the walls were lined with drawers and lockers, and a fabricator fully two meters on a side dominated the space.

  “I think I just came.”