“You do that.” I gave her a smile. “Carry on.” I was proud of myself that I didn’t turn to watch her shapely behind as she walked away. This could be a very long trip.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN    RAID

Giraud pinged me, he needed to talk about the plan to raid the asteroid base. I found him, along with Sergeant Thomson, in a cargo bay near the gym. Skippy told me he'd been working with Giraud on an assault plan, and I let Giraud work without unhelpful interference from me.

"Good morning, sir." Sergeant Thomson said in his charming British accent.

"Good morning," I replied, still tasting the sludge I'd had for breakfast. That morning, I'd tried mixing the unsuccessful apple-cinnamon sludge with a chocolate sludge that wasn't too bad, the result was something I was happy to gulp down as quickly as possible so I didn’t have to taste it. There was an unspoken competition among the crew to find good flavor combinations, which were then posted on our internal zPhone network. My experiment that morning was going into the 'Fail' column. "Lieutenant, I see you've been busy?"

"Yes, sir." Giraud nodded. When he'd signed up for the mission, I'd gotten the impression that he regarded me as a bit of a lucky fool, someone who had the keys to the future but didn't know how to use them, and needing professional soldiers like Giraud to make the important decisions. He probably still had a less than stellar impression of my tactical planning skills, but there was a grudging respect for the way I'd handled the overall mission so far. My idea to get rid of our Kristang problem, by jumping their starships into a planet, had impressed a lot of people. That, and the fact that the mission had been resoundingly successful so far, and gone exactly as I'd promised. We'd escaped from paradise, captured a Kristang frigate and a Thuranin star carrier, and were now jumping toward a wormhole. Success encourages confidence. I needed to keep the successes coming. "The plan to raid the asteroid requires the element of surprise; we need to move quickly once the dropships are in the landing bay. That means the assault team can't wait for the bay doors to cycle closed and the bay to repressurize, they must exit the dropships and gain access to the base interior before the Kristang can react. To do that, they need space suits."

Giraud gestured to a rack that held two space suits, a small suit that looked lightweight, and a larger suit that was bulky and heavily armored. "This Thuranin suit," he pointed to the small one, "won't fit even our shortest crew member. Skippy told me there is no way to expand the size of these suits, this ship's fabrication facilities don't have the capacity to produce the materials."