As we approached Fort Arrow at the end of my fifth convoy trip, we were looking forward to three days of R&R on the base, because our vehicles would be down for regular maintenance. Private Pope leaned over to talk over the hum of the truck's electric engine. "Sergeant, you got plans for R&R tomorrow?"

When I joined the convoy unit, the initial reaction was first, the inevitable curiosity about my minor celebrity, and second, wondering how I'd fucked up enough to get assigned to convoy duty at Fort Arrow. I took the Barney jokes in good humor; I'd heard the jokes a millions times by now and had a good-natured reply ready for all of them. Our LT was skeptical about me at first, then Staff Sergeant Lombard let me handle some of the workload, take care of minor administrative stuff that wasted his time, so once people saw Lombard thought I was Ok, I was accepted, and that felt good. "No plans, why?" The weather forecast was hazy, hot and humid, chance of afternoon thunderstorms, typical near the equator this time of year.

“There’s a crashed Kristang starship a couple miles north of the base," Pope explained. "A group of us are going to check it out, if you want to come with us.”

“A starship fell out of orbit? Damn! Is there anything left of it?” I didn’t try to conceal my eagerness.

“Uh huh, I’ve seen pictures from people who’ve been there. They say it's a frigate. It’s from the battle when the Ruhar took this place from the Kristang the last time, so it’s old, and the jungle had swallowed up some of it, but the major structure is still there. The hamsters cleaned up the weapons and the reactor. UNEF discourages us from poking around there, because the Kristang are sensitive about it, but lots of people do it.”

“Yeah, I’d uh, I’d love to go.” I suppressed any thoughts about taking souvenirs, the Kristang would likely very much frown on that. "Thanks."

We made plans to head out to the downed ship early the next morning. As we were eating breakfast, Private Crockett walked over to us quickly and whispered “Hurry up, let’s get out of here. There’s an Indian general flying in to visit, he’s giving a speech right after lunch, and they want all hands here at the DFAC to give him a good crowd.”

We all groaned. No one wanted to sit in the stuffy dining facility, listening to another boring speech. We gobbled our powdered eggs and toast, grabbed peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and practically ran across the base to disappear into the jungle as soon as we could. Anyone sitting around with not enough to do was for sure going to get voluntold to fill seats in the DFAC.