"I think we have as good a plan as we'll get." I told Giraud as we both ate a Hooah! energy bar. The waiting, with the Dodo coasting away from Paradise, hoping to get picked up by an enemy warship, was wearing on everyone's nerves.

Giraud gave an exaggerated shrug. "Plans are a start, no more."

"No plan survives contact with the enemy, right? Von Moltke said that." I'd learned that from the Army somewhere along the way.

Giraud wrinkled his nose. "Von Moltke learned that from Napoleon. Napoleon emphasized having flexible capabilities and exploiting opportunities on the battlefield, instead of trying to stick to detailed plans." He pointed to Skippy. "No plan made by UNEF could have anticipated this opportunity."

There was no place for privacy aboard the Dodo, except for the single zero gee bathroom that was in steady use. When Skippy pinged me that he wanted to talk, semi privately, I went forward to the cramped cockpit, to float behind the righthand seat. "What is it, Skippy?"

He replied into my earpiece. "Just wanted to say something nice, for a change, and I don't want to be overheard, because that will ruin my street cred."

Street cred? Where the hell was Skippy getting his notions about human culture? "Oh, sure." I didn't know what else to say.

"Your species is remarkably adaptable. The ability to accept new information, new concepts, to not run away screaming or become paralyzed when confronted with shocking changes, is unfortunately too rare among intelligent species. I expected there to be trouble when you revealed the truth about me and our mission, but your people accepted the new situation admirably quickly."

"Huh." Skippy wasn't taking into account that our crew were soldiers. Soldiers get new crap thrown at them in the middle of a mission all the time. One time in Nigeria, I was in a Blackhawk skimming the treetops at 0330, headed to raid a camp of bad guys, when our lieutenant gets a call ten minutes out from the landing zone. The bad guys reached a deal and they were suddenly on our side, our mission then was to protect our new buddies from a force of other bad guys who were sneaking through the jungle to kill them. Apparently the first group of bad guys had been declared traitors by the other ignorant whackos, because they weren't as fanatically crazy as the craziest of whackos. So we landed and set up a perimeter to protect guys we'd been shooting at the day before. Of course, the whole thing had really been a tribal dispute, and both sides tried to ambush us. After we evaced, we had to call in the Air Force to resolve the situation diplomatically with napalm, cluster bombs and fuel-air explosives. When things change, even radically, you look at your buddies, shake your head, shrug, and adapt. That's what you do, as soldiers. Civilians get upset when the menu changes at Applebees.