Gus shrugged. “I drove a Bradley, I guess they need drivers for whatever they’ve got up there.” If the Kristang thought we needed drivers, then hopefully that meant the infantry wouldn’t be walking every place we went.

Cornpone used a piece of bread to soak up gravy from the meatloaf. "I don't know where we're going, but if it means three hots and a cot, I'm all in. Things were pretty lean this winter at home."

I didn’t know what I expected the space elevator to be, but it wasn’t what I expected. It looked most like a waiting lounge at an airport. The huge disc-shaped elevator car had four levels, with the lowest level containing the machinery. Or so I supposed, since we were only allowed on the upper three levels. Cargo pods were slung below the bottom of the car. The habitable levels were each divided into eight wedges, containing row after row of thinly-padded plastic chairs. Chairs with seat belts. The trip up to the orbital station was scheduled to take nine hours, hours enlivened only by crowding around the viewports and looking down at our receding planet’s surface. After a while, even that got old. The elevator was a no-frills contraption, designed to transport a maximum number of troops in a minimum amount of time. Comfort on the trip was not a Kristang priority. There wasn’t even a snack bar built into the elevator, so the Army had set up a portable kitchen on each level, and the food was plentiful. I had my first decent cheeseburger in a very long time, then went back for another. Jesse and I explored the place, wandering around, meeting the soldiers we’d be serving with, swapping stories, listening to contradictory rumors. Since the elevator had a capacity of five thousand humans, a good part of a full army division was aboard on our trip. We wandered by one wedge that had been set up as an impromptu officers’ mess, poking our heads in, before moving along to mix with the rest of the grunts.

After I’d downed three sodas, alcoholic beverages not being supplied by the Army, I needed to check out the bathrooms, which I had been dreading. What kind of plumbing had the Kristang provided? Either the Kristang had similar biological functions, or they had consulted human plumbers, because I need not have worried. It looked like a typical highway rest stop bathroom, only new, and cleaner. The dispensers even had soap.